All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's your favorite podcast. It's your podcaster's favorite podcast. It's the All-In Podcast, episode 279, with me, Friedberg, Sachs, Chamath. You know the squad. You know the squad. We're here. It's the summer and we're ready to rock and roll. We got a power docket. We got a rocket docket. Palantir and NVIDIA have announced a sovereign AI partnership. Where have we heard that term before? Palantir is going to use Nvidia's NeMoTron— NeMoTron, like the Pixar film— open models to build a custom frontier-quality model to serve the US government. Palantir is calling this new platform Sovereign AI Operating System. US government agencies will own the hardware, the data, and the model weights. Palantir also shared a viral tweet manifesto laying out the concept. Data retention is your treasure. Transfer it at your own peril. Transferring that data hands over access to your pre-existing winning plays and yields the means of production for new ones. CEO Alex Karp went on CNBC to announce the partnership in a classic Karp Robin Williams-style monologue. Here's a clip from his 20-minute interview where he, where he basically went after the frontier models like Anthropic.
Play the clip.
Our clients are just— to say they're unhappy with the frontier labs is to say I'm welcome at the Berkeley faculty. It's like there's just a level of discomfort and loss of trust. Sam and Dario, there's nothing more fun than debating Dario in private. So this is— I'm not throwing shade at them, but something has gone completely wrong. And the basic view among enterprises in this country is, I'm going to chillax and waste my time with tokens. I'm going to get no value and they're going to get my IP. When the Department of War goes to you and says, I need this application, do they get to control the weights to do it, or do you get to control the weights? Are we really going to outsource the battlefield of this country to the consensus view in Silicon Valley? That is effing insane.
All right, and so some folks, uh, refer to this as a televised nervous breakdown. We here at All In call that Alex Karp on a Tuesday. And we talked about this, Chamath, uh, Sachs, Friedberg, we talked about this a whole bunch back in February. I coined the term intelligence sovereignty here. Here's your victory fap. Do I want to give all of the secrets in our organization, every piece of intellectual property to Sam Altman, who's gotta make a billion dollars a year to keep up with his spend, right? He's going to build every application. I've been talking about AI sovereignty here for a bit, just in terms of how much more cost effective it is and how you're not training other people's AIs with your knowledge and your insights. This is why it's super important that open source, open source agents and local hardware be able to run these models and that consumers and companies learn how to roll their own language models. The intelligence sovereignty is different than privacy. Privacy is, oh, you can't see my photos, you can't peek into my Notes app and what I wrote there in my journal. Intelligent sovereignty is you can't tell me what to think.
You can't use your AI to analyze my photos, to analyze my emails, to analyze my messages and tell me how to interpret the world. That's actually gonna be the next key piece here. All right, and, uh, Sachs, you are in your long post era. Another long post this week. From you on this very topic. And obviously, as, uh, AI czar there for the first half of the Trump administration, you, uh, been very involved and very close to this. I would love to hear inside. I'd love to hear your take on this in your long post, over 300 words. You can follow x.com/DavidSacks. But also, like, the palace intrigue here and what this means in terms of the relationship with the government, which we're going to get into in our second story.
Well, look, Jake, I gotta give you some credit there. The first part of your take was spot on. After that, it was kind of diminishing returns. I'm not sure why we had to listen to the next 30 seconds of it, but anyway, uh, it started off really strong. But let's go back to the supposed crash out by Karp on CNBC. It was nothing of the sort. It was all these legacy media types making that claim, and that's the first clue that he's actually saying something insightful and maybe kind of brilliant. And I think the thing that he said that I hadn't really thought about in quite those terms is he started talking about AI safety in the enterprise and what that really looks like. And what he said is that what technical customers want is control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha, meaning their proprietary knowledge. They want to know they own the means of production, he said, and it's not being transferred to someone else. And what he's referring to there is that these enterprises are at risk of transferring their knowledge, their know-how, their trade secrets, their customer data to these model providers who might eventually decide to compete with them.
Like you said, J Cal, and you can see that enterprises are waking up to this threat and they're not happy about it. And I think Karp is exactly right about that. Now, I think this is a really interesting take on AI safety because what safety means for an enterprise is again that they get to control their own data, their model weights, their compute. So a frontier lab can't hoover up their proprietary knowledge, their alpha, and turn it into their next product. And if you don't think that can happen, just look at what happened to Figma. So according to the information, Anthropic quote unquote blindsided its then business partner with the launch of Claude Design. So this was a new vertical app that Anthropic launched to compete in the design category. And Figma's founder said that Anthropic had not been completely honest with them. Anthropic's chief product officer had actually even served on Figma's board and didn't resign until 3 days before the launch of Claude Design. So obviously Figma again felt blindsided by this., and you can see the resulting impact on their stock price. Figma's stock has fallen something like 50% this year while Anthropic's valuation has surged.
This is not an isolated example. Anthropic has also launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, Claude Financial, and of course Claude Code. And every single one of these vertical apps expanded into categories that was previously served by companies building on top of Anthropic's own models. And really, if you want to go back to when Anthropic's revenue explosion began, it was with the launch of Claude Code. And how did they know to launch that product? Because they saw that Cursor was doing extremely well. Cursor was one of their biggest customers. They created the coding assistant first. They created that category. And Anthropic said, oh, like, why don't we vertically integrate? So in other words, they're watching where the value is being created on top of their models. Then they're moving in directly. And this is a formula that I think is very Microsoft-like. You could say it's very Google-like. They want to dominate the model layer. You could call that the operating system, and then use that position, that monopolistic position, to capture the most lucrative verticals. So if you want to think about like the Microsoft example, they had the Windows monopoly and then systematically they went and dominated every lucrative category of business software.
It started with spreadsheets and word processing, and then eventually it went to the browser, so forth and so on. If you wanna look at Google, they basically had a monopoly or dominant position in search. And if you go back to the early days of Google, the search results kicked you offsite. And in fact, they really pride themselves on how quickly they could send you offsite. But gradually over time, they used that traffic to tell themselves where to build properties. And today, fewer than half of searches kick you offsite. You stay on Google properties. And I think Something similar is happening with Anthropic here. The pattern is clear. They are going to use their dominant position in the model to then grab more and more territory in any interesting and lucrative vertical. So again, back to Alex Karp's point, if you're an enterprise customer or a developer, why in the world would you ever want to share any proprietary data with them? You are mortgaging your future. You are sealing your fate. You are going to lead to disaster for your company. Just one last point, then I'll turn it over to J. Cal. Is that Dario, at the same time that they pursue this business strategy, has been arguing that open source models are dangerous and need to be restricted.
Well, dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data. It's dangerous to his business model because his business model requires that customers don't have a lot of choice at the model layer. And what Karp is pointing out here is that if you want to have true AI safety, As an enterprise, you have to retain the ability to choose at the model layer who gets to see and use your alpha.
Yeah, this is, uh, well said. I think you, you, you picked that carcass to the bone a bit, but Chamath, you're actually doing specific examples of this, uh, at 80.90. You've been testing, uh, some of the open source models. I saw you share that on Twitter X, so maybe you could give us a little feedback on what you've learned as, uh, the CEO of 80.90 and your firsthand experience now with using open source for the first time in the last couple of weeks for this specific use case in enterprises?
When you start a company, I mean, you guys all know this, you're not starting it for the moment that exists today. You're almost trying to forecast if such and such a set of things happen, then here is the scene that gets created because it takes time to build something and it takes time to get enough reps to know what you're doing in your go-to-market. This for me was the moment that I thought would arrive, which is the point where everybody wakes up and realizes, wait, hold on a second. Two things are true. The first is that my business is complicated. I want AI to be able to accelerate it, but I wanna be able to protect myself in doing so. And then the second is I want the flexibility where there's an independent third-party control plane that I use to get all these benefits, so that I don't leak and seed my advantages away. And I think Alex is an incredible, smart, brilliant guy, and he completely nailed it. And I think he called out on its face the huge risk of this. So let me just give you this narrative in 3 tweets. The first one is, I read this really interesting study from BCG, and what they looked at was the return on capital employed, or ROCE.
Of various businesses. And this is what's incredible. The cost of capital has now, with long-term rates, moved back to what its long-run average is, which is around 8 to 11%. What that means is like, that is the actual cost that you would borrow money at effectively. The problem is that half of large US companies now cannot deliver returns that exceed that. That is a really big problem. And then second, there's a further problem, which is that persistently low returns, so in the, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%, is about 1 in 7 companies all around the world. Okay, so why is this important to note? It means that being in business is complicated. It's hard. Not everything works all the time. There's a bunch of underperforming businesses. There's a bunch of underperforming segments. So in that lens, when you think about what Sachs said, which is you have this company that comes to you and says, I have a magic box, and all you have to do is tell me everything you're doing, and this magic box will make everything better. But then all of a sudden, from the shadows, the magic box says, you know what, I've decided to compete with you.
That is a huge risk. And now that you've seen enough examples of it, I think you have to figure out a different way to do it. So then you go to the next, tweet that I saw, which I thought was interesting. And this is a woman who's an ex-Meta PM. And what she essentially says is like, hey, hold on a second. There is this assumption that you can't use an open source model because it's all Chinese. And what she says was, well, even if it's 100x cheaper? And their response is, no, because we care about safety and security. And her perspective is, don't you understand that you can actually host open source models with your own GPUs in US data centers? That doesn't share any data back to anybody. And instead, what you're accidentally or purposefully doing is giving away all your data to a couple of frontier labs rather than owning it privately yourself. And 100x, it turns out, is a really big number to pay to do all of that by accident. And that's what Alex Karp is saying. He's like, why would anybody do this when there are alternatives? And so the third post that I'll talk about is something that we did.
So we took our Software Factory, which is an agnostic third-party control plane, and we just wanted to see. And we ran it on a very typical enterprise task, which is you have an old piece of code, you want to migrate it, and you want to maintain it in a new framework so that it's easier and more flexible. Pretty straightforward task. And so we ran it, and we ran an experiment where we did Claude by itself, then we did us plus Claude, and then we ran it on the best frontier open-source model, and then us plus that model. And the data's crazy. So when you use our harness with Claude, it was simultaneously 1.4x cheaper and 1.5x faster than just using MPropic Opus-48 alone. But if you wrap the open-source model with our software factory, it was 16.4x cheaper. Now, it was 3 times slower, but, you know, you're talking about a couple of extra hours to save 16.4x.
So on that one, the slowness, Chamath, is that slowness because of the hardware being served up by Claude, or is it—
this is all using OpenRouter? No, this was all using OpenRouter on a very traditional hardware stack. So look, I think the reality is, could that be optimized even further? Absolutely. But my point is, if you take Saks's points and then if you take Alex Karp's point and just this actual data, there is a very legitimate question, which is if you are a reasonable company, why are you not finding an independent way to access this intelligence in a way that doesn't leak your edge away? To do so at this point now is kind of becoming derelict and irresponsible. Back then, you could be experimenting because you didn't know any better. But now when you know all of these data points, To continue to make the same decision, I think, is really insanely dumb.
All right. Dave Friedberg, you are also a CEO of the surging Ohalo, and you have a lot of proprietary data. Let me ask you point blank. Do you trust your data to the frontier model companies, or are you doing what there seems to be consensus here, protecting your data, protecting the crown jewels, so to speak, and using open source? Are you experimenting with it? And just yes or no, do you trust the frontier models with Ohalo's data?
So I'll tell you, there's been an effort by Anthropic to go around and sign up life sciences companies to contributing to a new life sciences-focused model. That effort has been, they're approaching these large companies with large proprietary datasets and saying, hey, if you share your data, we will give you early access, some sort of proprietary value, sign this NDA. And you can participate with us. And I think nearly everyone I've spoken with has woken up to the fact that they are basically trying to commoditize everyone's business. Because fundamentally, if all of the tens of billions of dollars you as a life sciences company have invested in experiments and product development, and you've generated all of this proprietary data along the way, that data is a true asset of your organization. It's an asset that you've spent billions of dollars developing, and by handing it over to a model company to then combine with other people's data, you are effectively commoditizing the asset that you have, the one kind of core differentiation that you have. And so everyone is largely saying no. The way I see this evolving is very much in line with what Alex Karp suggested on CNBC.
If you go back a couple of years, I think we all assumed there was going to be this large hub large spoke model for AI model development and deployment, meaning there would be these very large clusters. These large clusters would be ultimately capital advantaged. So those who had the most capital, which is why everyone's raised tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, would be able to train models. And then there would be these large spokes, these large clusters for deploying those models with inference. So everyone's using the NeoClouds and the hyperscalers and whatnot. To run models, and then maybe they've got their own proprietary data layer that sits in front of that. But I think what everyone's realizing is they're better off developing their own weights and their own models using either an open source basis, or there might be some intermediary business model that evolves, meaning there will end up being several large hubs that do all of the core foundational model development, then smaller hubs, meaning like clusters for training. That enterprises will use to train and develop their own proprietary advantaged models using their own data. And then there will be these much more distributed spokes because I think everyone's also realizing the value of on-prem by putting a set of servers and building a cluster in your own data center or even in your own enterprise, you know, IT closet.
You can run a lot of the workflows that you're using AI for, for your enterprise locally. And so I think the model is shifting where we're going from large hubs, large spokes to large hubs, medium hubs, and then a distributed spoke model where there will still be, you know, NeoClouds and hyperscalers that are being used for inference, but people will also have their own inference instances that they're going to run for their own enterprise setting. And everyone I think is walking this path and they're going to walk this path over the next couple of months because they're realizing quite quickly that in order to compete in a world of commoditizing knowledge and commoditizing capabilities, you have to leverage the core differentiating assets that you have, which means you have to build your own models and you will likely end up having to run your own inference with your own proprietary models.
Yeah, and to just give a, a little bit of texture to how that's going to look, if you follow the Microsoft example, which we've talked about here before, Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect were their partners, they were replaced, With Excel, they were replaced obviously with Microsoft Word. You don't even know those other two, WordPerfect, WordStar, Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc. That's exactly what they have to do. And they have no choice but to do that now because they have a trillion-dollar market cap. They must win the application layer. And Sam Altman went to Y Combinator and he said, we'll give you $2 million worth of free tokens. And I came out and I said, listen, there's nothing personal against Sam. Sam's a very aggressive dealmaker and he wants to get access to those startups because he knows, having run Y Combinator, that if he can get their innovations, those founders' latest thoughts about what's around the corner, he can incorporate them into the platform. There is no free pizza. There's no free beer. When somebody like Sam Altman comes to you and says, "Here's some free tokens," your alarm should go up. Zuckerberg did the same thing. He said, "Hey, I'm going to give people a bunch of access.
I'm going to give them money." Come to the Facebook platform. Nobody who went to bed with Microsoft in the '80s, Facebook in the 2000s, or Sam Altman now in the 2020s did not wake up with their throat slit. This is a message to founders. If you partner with any of these people, they will slit your throat and take your business wholesale. There is nothing to discuss here. Don't trust them. Use your own models.
Period. Full stop. I think it's less Sam and OpenAI, to be honest. The diversity of OpenAI in terms of its revenue streams and specifically its consumer business may actually be its savior. In a relative value basis right now, OpenAI equity I think is more reasonably priced than Anthropic equity. And the reason is not because of the quality of the models or the teams, because they're both excellent teams. But the reason is that OpenAI can fall back on a really healthy consumer business.
Sure.
The difficulty that Anthropic is going to face is that I think what Sachs said is true, that they have lost this fundamental trust about being able to stay within their sandbox. And if you consistently demonstrate this tendency to learn and then to try to disrupt your host organism, eventually you get pigeonholed, and you get cornered, and people find ways to work around it. Look, I sent that text that I had about the— or that post that I had about our testing of our harness on these Chinese models to somebody well-known in the industry. And he says, look, if you also add some post-training with all of the telemetry that you're going to get from the harness itself, he's like, I suspect you'll find that it gets as good as Mythos. And I thought, well, if that's true, then why don't I just take GLM, control it entirely soup to nuts, on my own hardware inside of the United States with only US citizens that can touch it. It just seems like the brain-dead obvious thing to do, and it's much, much cheaper.
Yeah, and 100% correct. I will say, if you're going to do this, you'll eventually wind up rolling your own LLM. I mentioned a company, Abacus, goabacus.co, that we seeded in our accelerator. What they're doing now for Hippocle client people is they're actually giving you this Go One box. They're literally saying, we're gonna make your own model for you. So once you start this, you, you start with, you know, Claude and use their wrapper and everything, or OpenAI's, then you move on to the next step. The next step is I'm gonna use an open source model, use my own, try to find a harness, et cetera. Where you will eventually wind up is you're gonna fork these models, you're gonna build your own. That is the end state on-prem, on your own hardware. Don't trust anybody because there's too much at stake. You cannot risk your entire business. You might as well be part of the vanguard and start investing here. You're gonna slow down to speed up is what's gonna happen. Whether you're using 8090, Abacus, or any of these other solutions or rolling your own, you must have AI sovereignty, you must have intelligence sovereignty, or you're just giving your business over to your competitors.
The only company, the only company at scale that's ever respected the developer community in this way is Apple. Apple took a very strategic approach to wanting to build an App Store business, to wanting to support developers, and they explicitly told people, if you make something super obvious that you can build in a week or two, it eventually might wind up in our basic collection of apps. The Stock app in your iPhone, the Notepad app in your iPhone, those apps are incredibly basic. But if you looked at, you know, Robinhood's, uh, or Google Finance, and then you looked at something like, say, Evernote back in the day, which was an advanced note-taker, It took 10 years for Notepad to add the features that Evernote had 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago. They specifically slowed their apps down to make them simple for users and not fuck with their ecosystem because they want to take the 30% tax. That's your choice here. There is no 30% tax here when it comes to Anthropic. There is no 30% tax equivalent with OpenAI.
The thing with Apple is that Apple was renting distribution. This is not renting distribution. This is where you're renting intelligence and judgment. And so the problem that a company has is you can't rent the same— and this is why your point is actually right. I think it's for a different reason. You can't rent intelligence from the same place that rents it to your competitor.
Correct.
You just can't. You can't. It's just stupid.
It will overflow. It will go over the wall.
It becomes the lowest common denominator problem where you and your competitors now look exactly the same. Why would you do that? And again, if you go back to that, that thing that BCG identified, so many companies are already teetering on a very difficult position where they cannot generate returns on their invested equity. And so why would you then go and pay all this money so that you end up with the same answer as your competitor?
You can't do it.
It's just not a—
it's not a choice. And Sachs, part of what's going on here is the deflationary nature of technology. Every single one of these tools is getting cheaper. Tokens are getting cheaper, Sachs. And if you look at NVIDIA's role in all of this, they have something called NeMoTron. You can try it if you use Perplexity. You just pick the dropdown menu. It has deep thinking. You will not be able to tell the difference between Jensen Huang's open source LLM, Sachs, and Claude for 95% of your searches. I guarantee you. Now, why, why, why has Nvidia and Jensen downplayed their open source model until this moment? Why would he do that? Why would he never bring it up in the all interview? Never bring it up because his top customers were very concerned, from what I understand, about the fact that they had made so much project progress on their open source model. But suddenly, after OpenAI announced their jalapeño chips, after Anthropic started, uh, making chips, after AMD did successful, uh, projects with both of these companies, after Elon said he's going to do his own fab. NVIDIA's taking the gloves off, David. They are going to own the whole stack.
They are going to be talking about open source a whole bunch. So maybe you could talk a little bit about NVIDIA and their role in this as the open source, at-scale, full-stack provider. You get the hardware from them, And you're going to get a model that's competitive with OpenAI's for free. And all you have to do is use one of their hosting companies, CoreWeave, whoever's buying NVIDIA's Colossus, et cetera. What are your thoughts on NVIDIA suddenly being willing to talk about their open source projects today?
Well, look, I think part of it is they needed time to make the offering compelling. And they're up against some pretty great AI labs, and I think some of it is just Hey, it takes time to train up these models. Now, one question is, why is it that NVIDIA and Palantir are partnering? Like, what makes them natural partners? And I want to just explain that. If you want to think about the AI stack for a minute, at the most basic level, there's 3 layers to the stack. It's basically the chips, it's the models, and then it's the applications. Well, right now we have in the middle layer, at the model layer of the stack, you've got 2 dominant companies. You've got Anthropic. Anthropic and OpenAI, we know that Anthropic's around $60-something billion of ARR. OpenAI is at $40-something billion of ARR. As far as we know, no one else is really generating meaningful revenue at the model layer. So we already have, let's say, an emerging duopoly situation. We have Anthropic pushing for a regulatory capture agenda that would probably enshrine that duopoly situation at a regulatory level because they're pushing for a safety agenda where Dario explicitly says that these other models are not safe, you shouldn't have access to them.
So you've kind of got that situation. You got the market producing duopoly, you got the government now potentially leaning not to bust up the duopoly, but maybe to enforce it. So that's sort of the emerging situation at the model layer. And so if you're an application at the top of the stack like Palantir, or you're a chip company at the bottom of the stack, that's the last thing you want. You want a competitive model layer. Why?
Yes.
Because if you're an application, you don't wanna be beholden to one model provider, right? You want to have a choice. And if you're an enterprise, you want to have a choice because you don't wanna have to give up all of your proprietary knowledge. And if you're a chip company, you, you don't want a monopsony buyer situation where there's only one or two companies who can buy your chips. And by the way, they're producing their own. You want to have as diverse and healthy an ecosystem as possible where there's lots of potential buyers for your chips. And if enterprises are rolling their own using open models, that's kind of an ideal situation because now there's like a long tail of buyers. So I think really the whole ecosystem in a way, the chip companies, developers, applications, enterprises, everybody has an incentive for a competitive layer of the stack at the model layer.
100%.
Really the only companies who don't are Anthropic and OpenAI because obviously they want to dominate, they want to be a duopoly. And my view is, look, if you earn a monopoly or duopoly in our system, we don't ban monopolies in the United States. We ban anti-competitive tactics. But if you lawfully achieve monopoly through amazing performance, we don't, you know, nationalize you or make you illegal. And I think that's fine. However, the government, in my view, should do nothing to make monopoly or duopoly more likely. They should make it harder for these companies to engage in monopoly tactics. And they should do everything they can to keep the model layer competitive because competition is what brings out the best and it's good for the ecosystem and it ensures our civil liberties and consumer choice.
So, and it's gonna be amazing for pricing, Sacks.
Yeah.
If you think about what this competition's about to do, and you've been very vocal about this in your time in Washington, DC, we want to have a level playing field. We wanna see massive competition. I'll give you your flowers and your lei. You did a great job of now setting the table for this in 2026 and 2027 going forward by letting people compete. The cost of tokens, Freeberg, is going to go down 90% a year for the next 3 years. You're going to be able to buy 1,000 times as many tokens that are more intelligent because you're going to have free options. The price will be free or close to free for many of these, and that could be incredibly disruptive. Yes, Dave. Yeah.
And I think people are going to, again, deploy their own hardware against it. I think there's going to be a buying frenzy in the enterprise, not just with the NeoClouds and the hyperscalers. I think the, the enterprise is going to be a buyer. And when that happens, you do the simple math and you don't want to have a dependency on server availability and cloud downtime. And you don't want to put these models on some third-party cloud and you want to do stuff that's very cheap. Like a lot of people are running, I mean, you guys do this, you're running day-to-day workflows for your enterprise and you realize, hey, I could run these workflows on an open source model on a machine in my office. And we don't need to be sending this stuff back to some fancy, scalable cloud service provider.
You're right. The industry spent so many years convincing everybody to flip to the cloud. And the realization may be that all this, this idea of shared infrastructure may not be the best idea in a world of intelligence.
And this is what I mean by like a distributed spoke model, because I do think it's not going to be all or none. I think you're going to end up being like 70-20-10 in how you're going to allocate your resources for model inference and running models. You're going to probably be 70% in some big cloud. Maybe you'll do 20% local, 10% you'll try other clouds. You know, you'll kind of mix stuff up, but I don't think you're going to end up doing things the way you've been doing them historically. You'll, you'll very quickly realize that it's okay. To waste tokens. It's okay to let your employees make stupid apps that last for a couple weeks but burn through billions of tokens if it's running on your own hardware. Then all you're paying for is the electricity in your office or in your, your, you know, your IT department.
Well, this is what I've been talking about here for like a year. Everyone's realized that it's locking out. Yeah.
Like, I'm totally fine, you know, uh, for my kids to eat sugar if I don't have to deal with them, you know? Like, go ahead.
Have you guys noticed that, like, in the last 3 days, we've now seen other people trying to get their own lock-in? Microsoft just announced a $2.5 billion investment to stand up an FDE org. Amazon is spending a billion dollars.
Forward deployed engineers, for the people in the audience, forward deployed engineers. Yeah.
Tesla has one. OpenAI has one.
Yeah. And when they come knocking, Chamath, they're knocking like, hey, can I send my engineers to study your business and put it into my model? I mean, people are going to be slamming the door on these. It's like getting a Jehovah's Witness at your door. Like, no, I don't want I want to be part of your cult. I want to own this. And that's what I've been saying. Just let me make one quick point and I'll hand it to you for a break. This is what I've been saying with when I was going on my OpenClaw, which now is like Ermes and some other products. Everybody in your organization's gonna have a Mac Studio or a Dell with a massive amount of RAM, and you're gonna spend $10,000, $20,000 per employee on local compute so that they can token max to a retard maxing level. Who cares what they do on their local computer? Who cares? Let them rip, and then you're gonna give them a laptop that connects to it and it syncs so you can control it. It's literally gonna be a server per individual in your company. That's the way to model this in your brain.
Everybody has their own language model that they're crafting 100% of the time as they work, and it's all local so you don't have data leaks. Go ahead, Freeberg, I'll give you the final word.
I mean, I think one of the things that this reveals quite clearly is that there is no buttered slippery slide to job loss. I think everyone is realizing that, you know, I was wondering where you were going with that, buttering it up. So is Tremont. But I think, you know, the idea that everyone had in their head 2 years ago, the narrative that was formed and everyone clutched onto— and by the way, you will not see the media reverse on this narrative. I've realized the importance here when, when media— if you're a reporter or you're a journalist and you come up with some story that says something that's happening or is going to happen or has happened or is about the future, you destroy your own credibility if the narrative shifts. You cannot ever let go of the narrative. And I think this is one of the things that, that we can kind of acknowledge is going on with this job loss narrative problem, is that even as all the data comes out, as all of the reconfiguring of how enterprises are using AI, As it's revealing to all of them that they're actually not just gonna cut costs, but they're gonna grow revenue and it's gonna be a kind of clunky way of getting there.
And it's not gonna happen overnight. It's not the slippery slope to job loss, to nihilism. Everyone's gonna kind of wake up and be like, wait, this reality that we all thought we were living in, it's not really the reality that we are living in. We're living in a reality where AI is clunky. It takes some putting together. It's a little more complicated than we thought. It's definitely gonna deliver value, but it's not about just turning off all the jobs and letting the genius AI solve all my enterprise problems and scale me into infinity without humans. And I think that that's a big kind of narrative shift. And you will not see the media accept that their narrative is wrong because as soon as they have to acknowledge that they were wrong in what they were saying about job loss and all the other senators and people that are proclaiming job loss, job loss, job loss. By the way, the reason they're making that proclamation is so that they can step in and control AI. And they can drive their systems of socialism, which is what they're all looking to deploy. Yeah, 100%.
Totally.
But if they had to come in and say, look, the data doesn't map to the narrative, their credibility's destroyed. So they'll double down on it and they'll double down on it. And I'm telling everyone that's listening, look at the fucking data. There is no job loss with AI. It is an absolute scam to tell the world that AI is taking away jobs and destroying jobs and the world is shifting. It is clunky. It is valuable. It is going to take some time, and it is going to create far more jobs than it is destroying.
We're a bunch of monkeys. We've been given this new tool. We're going to solve more problems with the new tool. There will be job displacement, and the problem is people do not understand the nuance between these two terms. Certain jobs will be retired, and they're going to be retired at a faster rate than you can imagine, but other jobs will happen. And you pointed this out, Chamath. Hey, it's the, it's the most— I don't know if you did it here or on your personal channel on YouTube, but you know, it's the most empowering tool ever. If you have—
Jason, what jobs are getting replaced?
I'm just saying, just place, just place.
But you're saying some of them are going to go away faster than you can see. What are those jobs that are going to go away faster than you can see? Because I'm just— I'm still not seeing the categories.
Totally. Customer support jobs. Those are going to go away very quickly.
Where?
Where?
You're just making shit up because it's not actually happening.
I see it in enterprises all the time.
Where do you see it? Show me the customer support enterprise shutdown that's happening? Just show it to me. Is it in the room with us right now? Like, where is it?
I will literally, you know, I'll, I'll do that research and I'll give it to you.
I'll give you some research.
Hold on.
Can I, can I provide some research? We had this debate before.
He asked me a question. Just let me finish my answer and then you can take it. You asked me the question. Customer service jobs are going to go away because consumers prefer to talk to the AI, and it's perfect at that. Entry-level jobs around data entry, around business process outsourcing, those are going to go away. So will driving cabs and those kind of jobs. Those ones are obvious low-hanging fruit, just like we had the typing pool and messengers and other products go away when we had word processors on every desk. Those jobs will be displaced 100%, and those jobs will be in the millions.
We're on year 20 of cab drivers going away, dude. Like, when Uber came out, everyone said all the driving jobs were going to go away, it's all over.
Well, no, no, Waymo is stuck at 3,000, Tesla's stuck at like 30 cars, but that's all going to change in the very near future.
So everything you're saying is perspective. This is my point. You are still being prospective in the future with everything you're saying. And every point that we turn, every time we turn a page, it's like, wait, this isn't happening.
Is everyone self-driving?
Is real?
Is that your premise? Is that self-driving is not going to get rid of cab drivers? Is that your premise?
I think it's real, but I like, like, okay, I think it's real for sure.
Do you think it will get rid of cab drivers? You're arguing as if like I'm wrong here, but I think you agree with me that we're going away.
I get in the car every day and my car drives me and I get on my phone and I do work.
Okay. But do you think cabs in cities are not going to be self-driving? Do you think Zipline's not going to deliver?
You're doing the Martin Bailey thing again, J-Cal.
It's not Martin Bailey. I see this from my investments. I have a company, Autolane, that is doing this right now.
But just go to customer support again because you've been saying—
yeah, I literally— we've had this debate verbatim.
And displacement, not job loss, is my only point.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What Freeberg is pointing out is that whenever anyone pushes back on the fact that you don't have any data to support this in the present, you say you're talking about the future. Okay, fine. It's a prediction. You know, there's no data to support it in the present. That's fine. You're saying it's gonna happen in the future.
No, no, I'll give you the data point.
Oh, you will?
You can dismiss it if I want. I will. Yes. If you talk to Uber and Waymo in the cities where Waymo is present and has gotten past a couple hundred cars, they've stopped recruiting drivers. Drivers are either static or going down in those markets. So that is absolute evidence that this is happening and the rollout is gonna be fast and furious. So it is not a future prediction. You can talk to the CEO of Waymo, you can talk to the CEO of Lyft and Uber and they will tell you this explicitly.
That's cold marketing, Jim. Waymo has marketing.
You interviewed Dara and he said jobs were increasing at Uber.
Yeah, 'cause they're delivering more. Like those, because productivity's going up with delivery, productivity goes up. So it means people drive more.
100% lying.
I'm not, no. The last time we interviewed Dara.
You're being disingenuous.
On stage, set jobs for—
in markets where Waymo is, in markets where Waymo is, you're, you're— there might be other markets where things are growing because they don't allow self-driving or they haven't gotten there yet. In markets where Waymo has hit critical mass, the number of human drivers is going down. That's just a fact. And they're literally stop recruiting.
Some narrow, arbitrarily defined subset of their jobs you're pointing to flatness. Meanwhile, Dara told us that hiring costs of the company has gone up in the face of these trends.
No, no, you're wrong. Okay. Anyway, we, we'll agree to disagree here.
Why don't we give you some actual data? Can I provide us this study? So Ramp and Revelio Labs just released a new study in the past week.
Yeah, that was great.
And it was an actual study of over 21,000 firms in the US and they looked at their payroll data combined with their spending on AI. And what they saw is that firms that spent the most on AI actually grew the fastest., and they tended to grow their headcount roughly 10% in the 2 years following the adoption of AI. And entry-level headcount rose even faster. It grew at 12%. So all this stuff about how entry-level headcount's gonna get wiped out, not true. The more firms adopted AI, the more hiring they did. At least that was a correlation. Obviously they can't prove causation, but that was the correlation. And then companies that were not high-intensity adopters of AI, they were either didn't adopt or they were low-intensity adopters, they just saw flatness in their headcount. So no one is really showing a trend here of job loss. What they're showing is that the more you adopt AI, those companies also tend to grow headcount. So I, you know, there's just no data to support this idea that in the present AI is causing job loss.
Job displacement will happen. Jobs will increase because of AI, sovereignty will increase, and people will make more money. Corporations will be more, will have more earnings, but there will be jobs being retired. And I think if you look at translators, if you look at telephone operators, if you look at bill collectors, if you look at Waymo drivers, these very simple tasks are being automated. How do I know that? Because I invest in startups that are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. To replace these jobs with AI. We had the pilot, uh, we, we had people building the perfect pilot, the perfect driver, the perfect customer support rep. That is the point of AI. Every single sales pitch of these AI companies is to retire these jobs that are not great jobs. There is no way in God's green earth, right, that humans will be at Amazon sorting packages. There's not— it's not going to happen. All those factory jobs are being replaced. Elon has explicitly Building Optimus for this purpose. And when I say it's future, I have always contended it's future, Sachs. You cannot use your silly debate techniques—
He just went back and said it was present.
—to say that I'm using some crazy thing. It is happening as we speak. We're soaking in it. This is the transition period.
What I'll tell you is that in every environment in which 80/90 operates, every customer, I don't think we've seen layoffs. Not a single one.
Yeah, in this, in this ramp card study, They said, quote, "Gains emerge gradually and are broad across roles, including engineering, sales, administration, and customer service." So they're not seeing like one category of jobs getting wiped out. By the way, it could happen in the future. I mean, none of us can say for sure what's gonna happen in the future, but if you're looking for data in the present, we're not seeing it yet.
I think there's gonna be a strong human alpha. You know, like when vending machines came along, it's not like bartenders went away. Like, I like going to a bar, talking to the bartender, and they make a great drink. And those bartenders make better money today than they did 20 years ago. I don't— and, and maybe the vending machine replacement model isn't the right one in that case, but I, I think that there's a lot of value in human interaction that's gonna get a premium in the future because as more stuff gets automated, I want to have an actual driver when I go to Las Vegas. I don't want to go. In a Waymo. I want to have a great driver in a nice car that takes me to the dinners, drives me around. New York City, same thing. I don't want to go on a Waymo per se. I want to have, you know, people that can do things that could otherwise be automated and I'll pay a huge premium. I could sit in a frigging massage chair. Why do I go pay someone $200 for an hour massage? You know, I think there's, there's an aspect to the alpha of humans.
We could cut that one. But, uh, but I do think there's a premium to humans., and I don't think that, um, and I actually think— there's a premium to humans. No, the counter-narrative discussion— J Cal, this is really important. I think that the counter-narrative to automation generally is that we're going to realize the importance of human interaction and humans in the loop, and we're going to pay a premium for it.
Well, do you remember like a year ago?
That's why I don't, I don't believe, I don't believe in AGI and the singularity happening next year. I'm just not there.
Do you remember like a year ago when Klarna said they're gonna replace their whole customer service department with AI and they did such a lot.
Yeah, they went fully.
They did a lot of hype. It was peak aura farming. Totally. And lo and behold, they flipped the decision back after a year. They said that from a brand perspective, a company perspective, it's just so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human if you want it.
Human in the loop will be the premium and we will all realize in the next year and a half the importance of human in the loop. Even in the context of AI and automation working, human in the loop is gonna be more valuable. And then you're gonna pay a premium for human in the loop.
There's so many CEOs who want to tap into the media's hype cycle. This is the thing is that whenever the media gets ahold of one of these narratives, there's so many CEOs who are not like Karp, right? Who just are not original and they don't really have anything important to say. So the only way for them to get publicity is to glom onto that press cycle. And try to use it, and then they'll chime in with, you know, how they're going to do crazy things like eliminate their whole customer support department. And then lo and behold, it turns out just to be total, totally fake.
I think the Ramp data is directionally accurate. In our experience, I would say the same thing. I think people that use AI tend to grow faster. They tend to hire more.
They tend to make more money. 100%. Yeah, 100%.
By the way, I actually agree with you.
I'm in 100% agreement on that.
From a career standpoint, I would not want to be a level 1 customer support rep because I do think that like if all you're doing is like answering forgotten password requests, that's not a great place to be. However, those jobs were basically outsourced to the Philippines and places like that a long time ago. I mean, most enterprises are not doing kind of that level 0, level 1 customer support in the US. They do have customer support centers, but they're doing like level 2, level 3. They're doing the escalations, the higher value stuff. That's gonna be a lot harder to replace with AI. Totally. I do kind of worry about, well, what happens in some of these other countries that are doing the super entry-level stuff? Because that's right. I think that is— so they'll have massive job loss.
But I don't know if it'll be massive in the US.
That's where the risk is. I mean, frankly, it's not in the US.
This is, um, so maybe we're getting to some consensus here. Job displacement versus job loss. Here is Brett Adcock sharing what they're doing at Figure. They had an 8-hour challenge to have this, uh, robot they're building sort packages, and they did it for 200 hours. That's today. This is the least good it will ever be. This is the worst it's going to ever be. These things are getting really good. I spent time with Elon. I've looked at Optimus. I can tell you Optimus is better than what Figure is doing. What Optimus is going to do when Bezos and Andy Jassy unleash Optimus inside of the Amazon factories is it's going to get rid of every— let me state this very clearly— every single package sorting, every single package delivery will not be done by humans in 10 years. And it's starting today. Just like the idea that you would put together some of this consumer electronic stuff in factories with humans has gone away over time. And other countries— I think you're making a very good point here, Sachs— are going to experience it first. In America, knowledge workers, the entrepreneurial spirit. I think we're gonna see a Cambrian explosion in startups, which means we are gonna be the ones who benefit from it.
But if you're looking at those other countries, they'll see it acutely first. We're just gonna see it here with drivers. And that's 5, 10 million people like we saw it with cashiers. The idea of going to a cashier at a fast food restaurant, which I know you guys don't go to all that often, or a Starbucks, the idea that you would interact with a cashier has been going away slowly because it's just consumers don't even want it. We'll agree to disagree here to a certain extent. Maybe we may—
No, look, I went to McDonald's, I went to McDonald's recently and I ordered from one of those monitors. Zero. What did you order?
You filet-o-fish guy? I'm a filet-o-fish guy.
What'd you get? What's your Big Mac? I like a Big Mac.
You like a Big Mac? What about you, Sax?
What's your order? What's your—
did you get a McFlurry?
Yeah, I got a thing called a Homegrown Burger, which was some new— I think it was kind of like more like an In-N-Out type burger situation they were testing.
Smash Patty? Yeah, it was good.
Any good? Anyway, my point is just the automation. Obviously they didn't have a cashier there already, but there's zero robots involved. Similarly there's already a lot of automation going on in those Amazon warehouses. I don't know if you've ever been to like a FedEx packaging or routing depot. It's all conveyor belts and, you know, yeah, robots pushing it and directing. But it's not, it's not humanoid robots. There's already tons and tons of automation at these places.
The last, but this last mile part is the one I think that is going to shock people when you have an Optimus walking the Tesla self-driving car and then they walk it to your porch, ring your doorbell, and knock on your door and put it on your front step porch. That's where this is going to get super interesting.
I think it's going to lead to a boom because think about like just something like building a house, okay? Oh yeah, you know how long it takes to build a house? It takes years.
3 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, multiple years.
Now China, one day. There you go.
But imagine if you have like a, a, like a construction crew and I don't know, it's like 20 humans and 50 robots or something. The humans have to tell the robots what to do. I don't have any— supervisors. I think it's gonna take a long, long time for the robots to be able to do that super high skill work, but they can be given tasks and then they can do more. So maybe it only takes a year to build a house instead of 2 or 3, and that's the solution to our housing crisis.
100%. All right, listen, in a related story, by Commandant Howard Lutnick's decree, subject Dario Amadei. Will be permitted to bring his powerful new model, Fable 5, to market for the glory of the realm and at the pleasure of His Majesty Lord Trump. Remember, 2 weeks ago, the US government put export restrictions on Fable and Mythos and the Iliad and the Odyssey and whatever else they're doing over there at Anthropic. And Anthropic expanding Mythos to 50 unauthorized entities, according to sources. That included SK Telecom, which allegedly perhaps maybe has Ties to China. On June 30th, Howie in the Commerce Department— that's my guy, Howard Lutnick, my favorite in the administration. No disrespect to you, Sachs. Um, he lifted controls on Fable 5. Mythos 5 was restored to U.S. customers this past week, June 26th. Many suspected this would happen because Anthropic replaced Dario as their lead negotiator. Here's the palace intrigue I was referencing earlier. Co-founder Tom Brown, whoever that is, took the spot. And appears to be getting along better with the Trump Organization. For example, he proactively genuflected— show the tweet— to Lutnick's tweet announcing the export restrictions had been lifted. Tom Brown: Thanks for your partnership on this, Secretary, explanation point.
Look at that smile. Tom Brown coming in to save the day. In a postmortem blog post, Anthropic said the jailbreak that triggered the shutdown was not unique to Claude. Remember, Andy Jassy reported to the Commerce Department what was going on with this. Okay, Sachs, former AISR, what's going on? Give us the palace intrigue, please.
Well, look, the export control letter was taken down after 2 weeks. I think that this was a highly unusual circumstance and it was brought about by 3 things, 3 conditions, and you really needed all 3 in order for this to happen. Number 1, you had Dario running around for months saying that he had created a cyber weapon. He almost boasted about it. It was Mythos. Okay, so that was number one. Number two is you have a trusted partner of Anthropic, which is Amazon, which did its testing of Fable, which was Mythos with guardrails, and they reported that the guardrails failed. So therefore Fable was, according to Dario, a cyber weapon. So that was important fact number two. And then fact number three is that when confronted with this information, Dario basically refused to roll back Fable until the jailbreak could be fixed, or at least that's what he communicated to the administration and that's what the administration heard. So I think if you change any one of those three facts, this would've ended up not causing the government to basically send that, that letter to Anthropic. I think if Dario hadn't primed officials to see Mythos as a cyber weapon.
Wouldn't have happened if their trusted partner Amazon hadn't reported the jailbreak. Wouldn't have happened. And if Dario hadn't refused to take action when he did, then this wouldn't have happened. I think this was sort of a unique circumstance. I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of people are reading a lot into this letter. I know that foreign companies or foreign actors or allies and partners of the US are wondering, Does this mean that our ability to access US technologies can be limited? I don't think it does. I think that the administration reacted with the tools at its disposal, and I think that what the president cares about is what he's always said, which is he wants to be pro-innovation, he wants to be pro-export, he wants to be pro-infrastructure, he wants to support American companies in the AI race. And I don't think people should overextrapolate based on what just happened over the past few weeks. I think it was highly particular to this fact pattern.
A lot of discussion of exports. Let's talk about imports for a reason. It seems to me that importing Chinese models when we in fact have open source models here from NVIDIA and other players, why have you not, or during your time, did you not advise or talk about here blocking access to import? We will not allow the importation of Huawei products into the United States. Or self-driving technology from China. Why are we allowing open source models? Why don't we put out an edict? And why didn't you suggest that when you were the czar of AI? Why didn't we stop KIMI and Deepseek from coming into this country in order to drive our open source technology and to keep the leakage from those models, Sachs? Well, if you— And is that a concern of yours?
Well, number one is that once a model is open sourced, it stops being Chinese in a way, right? Because you can now take that model, you can fork it, you can create your own version, you run it in an American data center on your own hardware. There's no packets going back to China, there's no data leakage going back to China. In some sense, they've made a contribution to the open source community, and then people can take it from there. Now, should you still exercise caution? Absolutely, because you have to make sure that the model is safe, it doesn't contain backdoors. I mean, this is a relatively new surface area for cybersecurity. So look, you should obviously be cautious, but the bottom line is that when an American company takes an open source model and converts it and runs it itself, it is now theirs.
But it builds consensus around that model and makes that model stronger by more people participating in it, which was your argument for allowing people to get on the hardware stack. Well, the Yeah.
Well, but then that, I think that leads me to argument number 2, which is if you were to do something like ban open source in the United States, you'll put the United States on an island. The rest of the world is not gonna follow suit. The rest of the world wants to use open models because of the advantages they offer. They're cheaper, they're more customizable, they offer more control. And again, they stop being Chinese models once you can take them and adapt them and run them on your own hardware. So the rest of the world's not going to stop using these models just because we do. And what we will do then is subject American enterprises to a token tax. You're going to end up paying for closed models in the US that charge more.
No, no, but there's NVIDIA. We have open source models now. NVIDIA has theirs, for example. There are other ones. So if there are open source models here that are equally competitive, would you then support an import control so that more people in America put their effort into American open source models?
Well, one of the things I've been saying for— And Google.
As well as open source models, obviously.
One of the things I've been saying for over a year is that we need more strong offerings in open source from the United States. So I hope we win the open category of models just like I do the closed. I mean, I hope America wins the AI race in both open and closed models. I don't really want anyone being forced to use models they don't want. But look, if American models, open models are better than Chinese open models, they will win and people will want to adopt them. So if what you're saying is true, that our open models are better or getting better or going to pass the Chinese ones. Leave that to the market to decide. And just one last point on this is, you know, I'm not against limiting the import of certain Chinese products in the US. For example, I don't think we allow Chinese connected cars. We don't. I think we should think twice about whether we allow, you know, Chinese robots into the US. I mean, we block drones. Yeah, we wouldn't want to have like a, like a fifth column of, you know, of backdoor Chinese robots or something in the US potentially.
I'm just brainstorming here. Okay. So I'm not against limiting certain things, but we should understand that when we do that, we are inviting retaliation by them as well. And we are in a trade relationship with them. We still need things from them. We still need rare earths, things like that. One day we won't. Hopefully. I do think we should try to be as independent and autonomous as possible, but while we do, we have to think very carefully about the larger trade relationship. Yeah.
Banned the import of Chinese drones. It's a signature part of the legislation. So, um, all right, it's a little housekeeping here. All In Summit is coming back September 13th, 14th, and 15th. 5th year of the summit, keep raising the bar, man. If you knew the speakers that I knew that Freeberg's lined up, your brain would explode. This year the nights are as good as the days because let's face it, Freeberg likes to party. He's been known to have a cocktail or two. We're doing the biggest poker tournament we've ever done at the summit this year. Gaming will happen. At the welcome party, and we're gonna have a full casino night at an exclusive mansion in LA. Ooh la la. Applications open now, allin.com. Don't miss our biggest event of the year. I think we have $12 trillion in market cap books so far. It's probably going to double. Okay, next topic. Topic number 3: it's a hot SCOTUS summer. The justices released 11 decisions in the final few days of the term. Let's discuss the top 3 right now: birthright citizenship, Case was Trump versus Barbara. On the first day of his second term, Trump, as you know, signed an EO ending automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants or those on temporary visas.
Uh, this is codified, I guess, in the 14th Amendment. Court struck it down 6-3, maybe 5-4. There's some nuance here. 255,000 children are born every year to non-citizen parents. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority, joined by all three liberal members. The court is still a bit Polarized citizenship then and now was the right to have rights. We keep that promise today, according to Chief Justice's majority. Kavanaugh carved out a lane for Congress to tighten up on birthright citizenship that's still consistent with the 14th Amendment. As you know, the administration has been pointing out, and you watch Fox News, you've heard this a million times. If you watch CNN and not All In, you're gonna maybe have heard of this once or twice, birth tourism. A Chinese national, Dong Wan Li, pled guilty in 2019 to a scheme to help pregnant Chinese women enter the U.S. under false pretenses so their babies would be granted U.S. citizenship. She pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and one count of visa fraud. So we handled that through the legal system. She served 10 months in prison. Trump's response to the loss, quote, Congress should start today to work on ending birthright citizenship, they will have my complete and total support.
For Trump, feels like a loss for Trump objectively, but he's gonna keep fighting this one. Close decision, uh, if you ask Stephen Miller. He doesn't like immigrants like you three dudes, but I would let all three of you in again. That's not his position. Okay, well, you can explain it. I know he doesn't like immigrants.
Legal immigrants. We're legal immigrants. Yes. Well, but you understand the difference, right?
Well, birthright would also be illegal according to the Constitution.
Yeah, but that's the whole point, is it doesn't really make sense that, let's say, an illegal immigrant runs across the border, is like 9 months pregnant, plops out a baby, and all of a sudden they're an American citizen. How does that make sense?
Uh, what about somebody who's been here for 20 years, Sacks, worked really hard, they're illegal, and they have a baby? Should they be kicked out and that baby not be a citizen? You're— let's say it's somebody's nanny, somebody's gardener. We have 20 million, 30 million illegal immigrants we've let into this country. We waved them in across many different Republican and Democratic terms over the last 30 years. What do you say to that person who has a baby? Should they be deported?
Should they be given citizenship? Well, look, the question here is what the Constitution says, and my view is that the original purpose and understanding of the 14th Amendment was to make sure that the children of freed slaves would have citizenship rights. That was the purpose of it. That was obvious. And I don't think it speaks to the situations you're talking about. And Congress should just make the law about those situations. But now Congress cannot make the law because the Supreme Court has ruled that citizenship is determined by birthright.
So in that case, my question was somebody who's been here 20 years as an illegal immigrant.
Yeah, I'm saying Congress should decide that.
I'm asking you your personal opinion.
Should they get citizenship? Look, that's— You're talking about an edge case. It's complicated. But the point is that we all know why the 14th Amendment was ratified. It was to protect freed slaves, obviously. And now we're in territory that's like very different. But the Supreme Court has decided that if you're born here for any reason whatsoever, even if you're an illegal, even if you weren't supposed to be in the country, now your children are American citizens. By the way, I don't think any country in the world has this policy. It's kind of a crazy policy. So I agree with Stephen Miller about— I'm not sure it's an edge case.
I think, I think the majority case is people who've been here illegally for, for decades. And I think the edge case, the one you proposed, is the edge case, like a pregnant woman running across the border. Let Congress decide that.
I don't think the Constitution ever spoke.
What's your personal opinion on this, Jamal? Should the person who's been here for 10, 20 years, paid their taxes, but they're illegal and they have a child, should that child be a citizen or not? What's Jamal's personal opinion here?
I haven't thought about this.
Great. Okay, it's, uh, I mean, that's the key to the, uh, I think what we're talking about here. Freeberg, do you have—
no, no, no, no, because there, Jake, there's a big difference between making something constitutional and then doing it via a law of Congress. And what the Supreme Court has said here is that Congress does not get to make the decision. The majority of the American people don't get to make the decision. The Constitution requires a certain point of view And there's no way to change that without a constitutional amendment, which will never happen. So we're kind of now stuck with this position.
Well, if you read the language— and someone posted this, this was the debate that when the 14th Amendment was being debated, Senator Jacob Howard— I'll give credit to Geiger Capital for pointing this out— there's a transcript of the debate that took place, and it says, um, every person born within the limits of the United States and subject to their jurisdiction is by virtue of natural law, national law, a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. Because if you go to the history, in 1868, there was this Dred Scott decision which denied citizenship to the children of slaves. And the intention at the time was to ensure citizenship for newly freed slaves and their descendants. That was the original intention of the 14th Amendment at the time. So this goes back to the great debate that happens at the Supreme Court all the time, which is the textual or the intentional reading of the Constitution or its amendments.
The textual reading is you look strictly at the words, the plain literal meaning of those words. And then the intentional reading is what was intended at the time by the framers of the Constitution. Or the amendment that may be the subject of the debate. And so I think that's ultimately what this comes down to. If you think about the intention at the time, it was really built around free slaves. There wasn't a consideration at that time of having this massive movement of immigration that was taking place, or that has taken place since. That wasn't even in the kind of realm of consciousness or consideration when this amendment was being passed. So the intentionalism kind of argument would be, hey, wait a second, you know, this wasn't really what they intended, but the textual representation is what it is. And that's what the ruling kind of led to in this particular case. My personal opinion, if you're asking it— yes, I'm trying to get personal opinions here. Yeah, I do think birthright citizenship, um, should be endowed to the children of, uh, legal residents of the United States, whether they're a citizen or not. So yeah, I think that's critical.
So if you're a visitor, if you get on an airplane and fly here for a weekend on a vacation, and you have a visa, or you have, you know, temporary visitor status to come— or you're an ambassador. Yeah. Or you have a temporary visitor status to come to the United States to visit. You are not a resident of the United States, so your children should not become citizens of the United States unless you're a resident. And remember, we don't just have like citizens and non-citizens. We also have resident status in this country. And a resident status is a green card. I mean, for years I was on a green card. 3 of us were immigrants. We all went through this process. Once you get resident status, you're now a permanent resident of the United States. You haven't been given citizenship rights yet, but if you have a child, I think it's reasonable for your child to have citizenship rights if you're a legal resident rather than a legal visitor or illegal visitor to the United States. That would be my personal assessment. I, you know, it would be great for that to be the law, but Obviously this is now kind of, you know, gone.
You explained that really well. I didn't even know all of this. I'm, I'm on your side. I agree. Yeah, I mean, I, I agree.
Makes sense. You're saying in addition people shouldn't be able to do the tourism thing, we should handle that. Um, I do think we should have an exception here for people who have been non-criminals who are here illegally because we as America, Republicans especially, uh, during the time when they were pro-free trade NAFTA and really waved in a large percentage of the immigrants who are here. Obviously Biden did that as well. I think we have a moral obligation to those people since we waved them in and we waved them in to work at our businesses because we wanted to pay under minimum wage to them. Those people suffered here in our country to take those jobs, to make us richer, to make our country richer. We have a moral and ethical obligation to them and to their children. We should give them a path to citizenship. Unless they're criminals, and their children should be Americans since they came here to live the American dream, whether it was illegal or not. We waved them in. That was our mistake. And now that we've closed the border, we should make amends to those 20 million people. That's my personal opinion.
Right.
I don't think we have— what you need more time to think about it.
And Sachs, what's your thought? Well, my, my point is we're all just making arguments about what the law should be. And these are the kinds of arguments that Congress should be making and deliberating over. And these are the edge cases, these are the nuances that should be handled in a citizenship law. And what the Supreme Court has done here is remove that space for Congress to legislate. And I think Congress needs that space because there are these edge cases, and instead it's interpreted the 14th Amendment in a way that I don't think is consistent with why it was ratified in the first place. And Freeburg is fully right about, about Dred Scott, which was One of the most awful, probably the most awful Supreme Court ruling of all time. It came out in 1857, and it ruled that Black people, whether enslaved or free, were not US citizens, and therefore they had no right to sue in federal courts. And the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, wrote the decision. I mean, it was extremely racist. He wrote that Black people had, quote, "no rights which the white man was bound to respect.", and that decision furthermore ruled that Congress cannot ban slavery in the new Western territories, which meant that it struck down the Missouri Compromise, which was the law that had kept the peace between the free and slave states for decades.
Right. And that is one of the direct things that then triggered the Civil War 3 years later. So it was this historically bad decision that I guess then the 14th Amendment tried to correct by saying that no. Freed slaves and their children would be—
Totally different context than someone visiting from China for the weekend and having a baby. Yeah, which we obviously—
that one is an easy one to adjudicate. Chamath, I'm curious, feels like as a society we have now, because of the closure of the border, give Trump a lot of credit for that. It was easily done, which means it could have been done at any time by Biden, and that created a big rift in our society. That we're still working through. The other rift that was created over the past year, we've had many debates here about ICE and what some people, including myself, believe was a brutal way to deport people and a cruel way to deport people. Some people might disagree with my opinion, but it seems like Trump stood down on that and calmed it down, I think, because it was so unpopular, just according to the metrics that we saw from Pew and other studies. What do you think the path forward is now? The ICE aggressiveness has stopped. The border has been shut. We seem to be in a sort of holding pattern here, which I think was very wise by Trump to do that, put us— calm the situation down. I would have liked to see him calm it down a little earlier.
What do you think the go-forward should be if we go look at '27, '28, '29? Do you think— obviously we all want legal immigration, but what do you think we should be aspiring to do as a country now that the issue has seemingly is not boiling over? What are your, what are your thoughts, Jamal? Have you given it any thought?
I think that Western countries are losing their cultural representation that makes them unique. And I think that that's very bad. When my parents went to Canada and then stayed, I think part of what they were doing, whether they knew it or not, was making an explicit decision to be Canadian first which— who happened to be of Sri Lankan origin. When I came to the United States, I was making an explicit decision to become an American, and then my Canadian and then my Sri Lankan ancestry was second and third respectively. I think if you cede your immigration, you're ceding your culture, and I think that people have a responsibility to keep the values of what made that country unique in the first place. And you don't need to look too far because you can look across the pond and you can look at the UK and you can look at Germany and you can look at France. And you have to ask yourself, is the cultural deviation from where they were— has it been better or worse for those countries? And I think in general it has been worse. So I think people should want to come here to be a part of the American ideal, the American culture.
And so I think you have to have a rational immigration policy that has compassion but ultimately favors this idea that you can't come here to build your own version of your previous country here.
So assimilation is part and parcel of a functioning immigration system. I strongly agree. Freeberg, how should we should go forward as Americans? We know Europe has had an issue with, or the populists there, I think, are in agreement that they may have gone too far in terms of unmitigated massive amounts of immigration, specifically amongst groups that maybe are explicitly not wanting to assimilate. What's your thoughts on what America should do going forward? Do you believe we should be—
Yeah, it's a great question and I think there's an easy answer. Going back to my makers versus takers point, If the primary motivation for an individual to come to this country is to be given benefits, to be given payments, to be given social services, to be given support, I think that that person should be denied immigration. If the primary motivation for the individual to come to the United States is to work, to progress themselves, to become a maker, to create things, to work in such a way that they can generate income, save capital, buy things, advance their family's position, because they are denied those rights due to the tyranny of the place that they're coming from, then they should be granted immigration status to come to this country and contribute. Because at the end of the day, what people may not like to hear, which is the truth, is that every single one of those people is actually net positive in growing our economy. And everyone thinks it's a zero-sum game with respect to jobs in the United States, and we shouldn't let people into this country that create jobs. But the fundamental truth is that anyone that is productive, meaning they create more value than they take in, grows the economy and more jobs get created.
And overall, we all benefit from having those individuals here in this country. Well, I would say I'm all about, I'm all about discerning immigration, not on the lines of some cultural, like, definition, but really around that simple framing of, are you going to create social support services or are you going to work, and if you're gonna work—
Are you a train or a game? Very simple, elegantly put, Freeberg.
And by the way, if, if, if, if you are gonna work, you are going to culturally assimilate because that is what the United States is based on. Yeah. Which is productivity, work hard, create things, and have individual agency, have the ability to progress yourself in this world, in this society. And if you take advantage of that opportunity, you're gonna love the American ideals that this country was founded upon. And there are ways to do that, Freeberg.
You can look at people's desire to learn the language and understand the political system and culture here. If you said at the border, speaking fluent English, understanding our systems here, you know, and doing some learning before you come here, that would give you more points in a point-based system. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, most of the great functioning democracies in the world have point-based systems. And part of that point-based system could be you're provisional here,, and you get a visa for a certain amount of time provided you don't commit crimes, you don't tap the welfare system and entitlement system, and you do create jobs. We'll take an unlimited number of Elon Musks, David Friedbergs, David Sachs, and Chamath Palihapitiyas in my America as a 7th, 8th generation American. And speaking for the people who've been here the longest, we'll take an unlimited number of the besties I just mentioned. We should recruit them actively. We should be trying to increase the population of the United States with those people. Every single person, Sachs, we take that's a high performer like yourself from another country like South Africa, Sri Lanka, or pick the country, every time we recruit one of those people, that gives us a gain.
It also, in a super hyper-competitive world, is a loss for China, for Iran, for wherever we can recruit the best and brightest who want to assimilate. Sachs, I'll let you have the final input here. What, when you are, um, JD Vance's chief of staff in, uh, in, uh, 3 years, what will your advice to JD be? And how will you frame this during the election cycle? How will you win my vote as a moderate chief of staff? David Sachs.
No, that's, that's not going to happen. But it's 100% going to happen.
I talked to you.
Well, I can give you, I mean, I can give you the actual polling data. So first of all, I think it's broadly popular in America to seal the border and not allow illegal immigration. Jay Carlisle, you're even on board with that, obviously. Now, the only people who really aren't are these DSA types who want open borders. They want to abolish ICE. They want mass amnesty. They are lunatics. Now, communist lunatics. If you look at deportations, about a third of US adults say all immigrants in the US who are here illegally should be deported, and then half say some should be. So 32% are in favor of deporting all illegals, and 51% are in favor of deporting some. And almost everybody in that group says that anyone who's committed a violent crime should be deported. And then 16%, which is the DSA group, says none should be deported. So deportations are popular provided that the illegals have committed violent crimes and have done other things that people think should be unacceptable. But you're right, only 32% believe that every single one should be deported. That's from Pew. Now, I guess I agree with Freeberg's point about the incentives.
I mean, if you're coming here to get on welfare programs, forget about it. I mean, we should only allow people in if they're here to work and be successful and are not And that, like, would you say a gain, not a drain? Yeah. And even in the days of Ellis Island, you can have it where the US was very accepting of immigrants. One-third of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island actually returned home. 2% were not allowed entry due to health or criminal problems, but a third actually went back. And that was because there was no social welfare. And if you didn't make it in the United States, you would leave. And now anyone can walk across the border, they download an app, and they get $5,000 a month in welfare. And during the Biden administration, they were getting luxury hotel rooms and buses and flights all over the country. It was insane. So I mean, we got to stop that. If you do get in, there should be some sort of moratorium on any kind of social program for, you know, maybe while you have a visa.
Did I just come up with that? I mean, it seems like the simplest thing you could ever do is just say you cannot tax You cannot tax the welfare system. You cannot tax Social Security benefits, which I don't think you can right now. You just can't tax anything. You can't take anything from the system for the 5 years you're here, period, full stop, the end. And if that's okay with you, then come. And if you produce jobs and you create X amount of economic activity, let's say you create $10 million worth of economic activity. When you hit $10 million in economic activity, you are pushed to the front of the line and we review your case on a one-off basis. If you hit $5 million, you go next. And that would be actually like, let's put some goalposts there. Let's set some targets. Hey, you come to the country, you're an Iranian Persian, amazing entrepreneur. You're a developer, you're an AI developer from Ukraine. You want to come here with your team? Great. What amount of money can you raise on your way in the door? You've got $6 million in venture funding. Great. You go to the front of the fucking line.
Let's go. Let's take these great entrepreneurs and creators and builders. Let's sweep the table with them now that we've calmed down this rhetoric around immigration and shut the border, which was a key piece of doing that. Uh, all right, let's keep moving here.
TSA has calmed it down. They still want to go back.
They're lunatics.
These fucking commies, fucking honestly, you know, the Democrat Party.
I mean, let's talk about California, shall we, J-Cal? I mean, yes, yes, hold on a second.
I mean, if they take over the Democratic Party, then I guess I'm a Republican.
Colorado, they 15-term congresswoman, 30 years, just lost to a DSA. So it's not just New York, it's not just because of Zohran Mamdani. The DSA is very popular now. Socialism is going to win in any blue city.
This is a quick way to— I mean, to Ro Khanna and Rahm Emanuel, and to— well, I mean, Ro Khanna is a lost cause, but to Rahm Emanuel, to Shapiro to anybody.
I don't think Rokhanna— why does he say Rokhanna is a lost cause? I've been telling you for a long time that you may disagree with what Rokhanna is doing and saying, but it's popular in the Democratic Party. I think he's got his finger on the pulse. Well, he wants to win.
I get it, but I think you have to— the quick win, the quick hit, the quick bump of the fentanyl or methamphetamine of communism and socialism to get you a couple ratings point is not worth it long term. You will not win. You're gonna lose every moderate, every swing voter, every adult in the room is not voting for a fucking socialist communist lunacy. We'll see. They're gonna implode the Democratic Party. All right, we'll leave off the other SCOTUS, hot SCOTUS summer for another time. Let's talk about Gavin with the good hair Newsom. He says he just balanced the California budget. Newsom announced $351 billion in balanced zero deficit budget through 2028. Over to you, Friedberg, from your bunker, the last California stand in the Friedberg— I'm gonna call it—
I'm gonna call this, this the State of California.
The state, the state of California, the lower scale.
That's right, the state of California, the state of the states. And there are 5— the state of the state. And there are 5 chapters to this: the ballooning costs, the accounting tricks, the revenue dependency problem, and now the big exodus and spiraling that's happening, and the looming unaccounted liabilities. These are the problems that California is facing as Gavin puts his bow on his final budget, calls it balanced, and walks away while the house burns. California's state budget ballooned from $215 billion a year in 2019, 6 years ago, to $355 billion today. So a 65% jump in the state budget. And there were a number of these kind of accounting tricks that took place to try and make it look like it's a balanced budget this year. But there's revenue and there's spending. When they call it a balanced budget, that's not the way we all talk about it in the business world, where you have like a P&L, you have revenue and expenses. They have revenue and expenses, and the expenses exceed the revenue. And that little difference, they do a bunch of borrowing against, and then they call it a balanced budget. So all that they've done—
they were able to raise enough debt to cover there a hole? Exactly.
So there's somewhere between, uh, $20 and $40 billion of debt that they have a legal ability to just pencil away, and that is now a liability that the state has that the taxpayers are all going to have to pay at some point. That allows them to, quote, balance the budget this year. And I'm not going to get into all the details of what went into this budget, all the money that's being spent— it's crazy. But I think that's what's worth taking note of, is the revenue dependency the state has. As you all know, The top tax rate in California is 14.4% today. Personal income tax is $142 billion of the state's revenue. Okay? That is $211 billion of revenue the state generates. $142 billion of it comes from personal income tax. The top 1%, 150,000 people pay $70 billion, pay half of that tax of that income. So $70 billion of the state's $210 billion income comes from just the top 1% of payers, 150,000 people who are already paying the highest tax rate in the country. The top 1,000 people in the state of California pay roughly $22 billion a year, so more than, you know, 11% of the state's income.
The corporate tax is one of the highest in the country at 8.9%, $43 billion. So it's cheaper to move out of state. If you look at some of the other states, Florida 5.5%, Texas— Tennessee's 6.5%, and Texas is zero. So now if you kind of look at what's happening, there's a massive exodus underway. The corporate exodus because of the high tax rates. Since 2019, at least 15 Fortune 500 companies have moved out of California, moved their headquarters out, not to mention all the local franchises and everything that moved out. 2,100 companies that are mid or large size have moved out of California since 2019. At least 5% of California jobs have been lost as these companies have moved out of the state. And this is the more important and crazy statistic. No one pays attention to this, but we are seeing an average annual exodus of 1 to 1.5% of personal income, meaning the AGI, the adjusted gross income. So people that earn money, about 1 to 1.5% of that income is leaving the state every year right now. That might not sound like a lot, but after 10 years you've seen 15% of the state's income leave.
And obviously with the new billionaire tax that's being proposed, We're going to see an acceleration as the numbers come out for 2025. There's, as we all know, personal friends that have left the state in '25 and many more that'll leave in '26, including our friend David Sachs. So there is a spiraling of a loss of revenue while there is a ballooning in costs. And this is fundamental to the spiraling problem that's occurring. So now in order to try and make more money, the state has to go further down. They can't just go to the corporates and the high net worth earners. They're now going to the average Californian. So they're increasing sales tax rates this year by creating a new sales tax on software. So if you buy Microsoft Word or you pay for your Gmail subscription or even your ChatGPT account, you have to pay an 8% sales tax on that this year. They're estimating that that sales tax is a brand new one. It'll generate about $1 billion a year in incremental revenue for the state. They're also creating a new tax on healthcare insurance that corporates are going to have to pay that's ultimately going to pass down to the individual.
That's going to create another $2 billion a year in taxes on health insurance. The final thing that they did, which we all know about, is they made the temporary top income tax bracket permanent. So, you know, it was only meant to be a temporary to bridge a major budget deficit problem back in 2012, 13.3%, and that became permanent. And now it's increased to 14.4%. So this is the spiraling that takes place. The costs are ballooning. The revenue is leaving, and now there's a scrambling underway in the state of California to try and make up this difference, and they're still falling short. In the out years, 2028, '29, the projection is $40 billion a year in budget deficits every year. Now looming over the state of California is the fact that there is this insane unaccounted debt problem. California already has $1.4 trillion in public debt. The state has $500 billion, and the local governments have another, call it $800 billion. The state has a reported $664 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. That number, by many estimates, is closer to $1.5 trillion. And then there's a retiree healthcare obligation deficit of $175 billion. You add this all up, there's somewhere around $1.5 to $2 trillion of incremental liabilities that the state has to come up with.
And remember, all of those pension liabilities, that trillion-dollar-plus of pension liabilities, sit senior to the bonds of the state of California because of something that's known as the California rule. So the state has this looming kind of cliff ahead of it, and there's already this spiraling problem where they're increasing costs because of the demands of the unions and the cost of living and so on. And there's an exodus of corporations and high-net-worth individuals that pay the taxes. So I would argue that Governor Newsom did not exactly put a bow tie on the budget and create a balanced budget and leave California in a great state as he is wrapping up his final term and his final budget here in the state. But in fact, I think that this state, which as I've said in the past, threatens to bring down the union, is on the brink of defaults that are going to be so significant that if the federal government was called in to bail them out, because the state cannot declare bankruptcy legally, that all of the red states and all of the other taxpayers in the United States will say, why the hell should I pay federal taxes to bail out California?
And I think that's what the story will be over the next decade with the state. So you predict the fiscal condition—
AOC and Mondame, president, vice president, AOC. Mondame can't be VP. He wasn't born here.
I do predict. Yeah. So I predict AOC will be president. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of dispersion in what could happen here. But I would say AOC would be my front runner based on the movement for the extraordinary cost of living in the United States right now. Largely because of government spending. Yep. The fact that people are seeing this wealth disparity, those two things are going to continue to drive socialist movement over the next 24 months. And if AOC comes in and they bail out California and they federalize California's liabilities, you're going to see parts of this union, the red states, as they're called, the Texas of the world, that are going to say, why should we be part of this union anymore? We don't want to pay for all of these liabilities that these blue states have accrued and that we are now being asked to bail out. And that is where I think you face a crisis of the union in the years ahead.
Okay, Sachs, Texas.
And I think California's the first.
Yeah, yeah, in this scenario, I mean, it's pretty far-fetched, but it's not far-fetched that you would, you would need a federal bailout to get California out of this in the next couple of years. And the government needs a bailout itself with the massive, uh, we're going to add $2-3 trillion a year for the next couple years.
So, go ahead, Chamath. Yeah, there's something that's going to happen. I think that Freeberg is right up until the point of the federal absorption. I think what'll happen is that you will wipe out the California pensions and you'll wipe out the pension obligations and you'll do some sort of negotiated settlement. And I think that's where you're going to have a wholesale replacement of the California Constitution. You'll have a complete redistricting. I think you will have a complete red wave in the state, and you will disassemble and dismantle everything that caused California to be so poorly run that got them to this place. So I agree with David. All of the issues that he painted are— it's unbelievable. By the way, there's an incredible tweet. I think her name is Joanna Ives, maybe Nick, you can find it, but she compared the last 8 years of DeSantis versus JB Pritzker. And I asked my team, hey, can you create a table that actually adds Newsom to the list so that you can do the 3-person comparison? Because it's quite staggering how broken these blue states have become and how they continue to try to spend their way out of what is being shown is just general incompetence.
They're not good at managing. They're not good at running things. They're not good at delivering results. And unfortunately, until they feel the brunt of what mismanagement actually means, which is that all the people that have paid into this system sadly and unfortunately and avoidably will be the ones that get punished, we will unfortunately not learn in California. Find this tweet and read it, and you would just be shocked at how unbelievably good DeSantis has been in running Florida and how unbelievably tragically bad J.B. Pritzker is, and then just ask your favorite AI, compare California on the spectrum of Florida versus Illinois, and what you'll find is California is even worse than Illinois in most of those comparisons.
Sacks, you want to, uh, give us the last word here?
Yeah, I mean, I guess my decision to go to Texas is looking better and better. Yes. I mean, I said when this, when this BTA thing, the so-called Billionaire Tax Act, was proposed and everyone was saying that's a very low probability this happens, I was like, I don't really see why it would be low probability. I think it's going to get on the ballot. All you have to do is collect a certain number of signatures. It's not that hard. And then once it's on the ballot, I don't see why it wouldn't pass. And everyone's like, no, no, no, Gavin Newsom has assured us that he'll kill it. He'll make some backroom deal, get rid of it. And on the day, the final day where BTA was going to be dropped from the ballot or not, Newsom came out with a video on X where he basically endorsed more taxes on billionaires. And this was right after the DSA candidates won in New York. So he sees the writing on the wall. He's not going to come out publicly.
By the way, the problem with the billionaire tax is that if it does get passed, and it isn't obviated by the 3 other ballot initiatives that actually negate it, you're going to have 200 or 300 individual lawsuits that will take a decade to meander through the courts. And ultimately, I think a lot of people have standing here, and I just wonder what will they have proven at that point, because it'll be a decade later, it'll be 2036, and the California government will have had to spend billions of dollars on legal fees. To fight all these billionaires, all to end up losing at the Supreme Court anyways.
By then they'll probably have like a federal wealth tax or something like that.
The tragedy is that California at various points in recent history has had a surplus because of the massive tax base from Silicon Valley. They could have managed this. Their incompetence, their selfishness, and their corruption is what has caused this. They could have If any state could have balanced its budget, it is California because of our massive tax receipts.
There needs to be a hard landing. I really hope it doesn't result in the wipeout of these pensions. I think the pensioners should be extremely upset with California Democratic politics.
Look, this idea that somehow things get bad enough where you get a red wave in super blue California and everything gets magically fixed, not gonna happen. What's gonna happen is a blue state's gonna get bluer. And that's right, socialism. The remedy for more and more socialism is going to be to intensify the socialism, and there's going to be a giant final confiscation.
Then we're going to deal with the California bankruptcy in the next 10 years. And it is unfortunately— no, and it will unfortunately result in a complete restructuring of those debt and obligations. And this is where I think you're going to wipe out a lot of these things that people are guaranteeing. I don't think you're going to see these pensions honored.
If you just look at the budget per person, places like Texas and Florida spend about $5,000 per citizen on services. If you divide the budget by the population and then you look at New York City, it's close to $13,000. You look at California, close to $9,000. You simply do not get 2 or 2.5 times or 2.X times the value living in those states in terms of services.
No, the problems are worse. And its competence.
Yes, it's worse problems. And it really— the more you look to that state government to solve your problems, the more problems you will have. In Texas, if you got a way—
it also just seems these blue states attract these derelict incompetent people.
I mean, grifters. Explain.
They're so incompetent.
My God, this has to do with that competence. And it also is the populace being self-reliant. If you live in Texas, no, when you get your ranch They say, hey, here's your ranch. And then it's up to you to figure out, hey, who's going to pick up my garbage? And, oh, do I want a well? Do I want to use the city water? What's my energy situation going to be? And people make these kind of thoughtful decisions with us. They don't look to the state for every single handout or handholding. There's a ruggedness and a rugged individualism and self-reliance that makes the state not have to Tax everybody to 54, 60, 65%. I guarantee you, Friedberg and Chamath, you will be paying 60 to 65% tax if you stay in California. And I tell you, New York, it's at 54 right now. I guarantee you it breaks 60 by the— or it will be proposed to break 50. We'll see if they stop it by the end of Mondame's reign in my hometown.
Look, let me, let me tell you what leftism is, okay? It's basically just people trying to string together words to justify taking your money. Okay? And they'll, they're just experimenting. It's like monkeys typing on a keyboard with words to try and hack everyone's brains to basically figure out how to steal all of their money. And some of those words are virtue signaling, some of them are guilt tripping and moral accusations, whatever it is. There's always some new words. Yeah. But it's never to solve a problem. In fact, all the problems just get worse. It's just to figure out how to separate you from your money. And I had this thought when I saw that, like, Mackenzie Bezos, you know, just giving away like $26 billion, uh, $26 billion of Jeff Bezos's money to all these left-wing causes.
Hey, she earned it too.
And well, but putting that aside, she gave away all this money. I'm like, oh, okay, so now like world hunger is fixed, right? Because remember how they told us that it was because of Elon Musk's greed that he refused to hand over. He didn't fork over a big chunk of his money. And with that money, we could have fed the whole world and solved world hunger. So why isn't the problem solved now that she just donated $26 billion? That's what they said Elon needed to do to solve world hunger. They always treat your money as if it belongs to them or it belongs to the government, and it's your greed and selfishness that's creating all these problems. None of these problems have been fixed. What's the proof that any of that money did anything? All it did was go to line the pockets of all these leftist NGOs and, you know, buy them more houses or pay them more salaries.
She would have been better off investing in Ohalo and other companies. No problems get solved.
If literally, I hate to break this news. What does the Polly Market say on Gavin's chances of becoming president?
Oh, he's down to, I think he's plummeting. He's plummeting. Yeah, Gavin's down to 20. He peaked at 40. Quite high though. I, I, I mean, I think people are real realizing it's a great haircut and, uh, you know, a really smooth talker, but just like he stole other things in his life, he's going to steal your money, period, full stop. I'm not going to get into details.
I think he's lower in these polls because the Democratic Party is moving left, is moving to the TSA, and people think he's too moderate. Absolutely. He's going up, and this John Ossoff guy's come out of nowhere. They're all to the left of Gavin Newsom. Problem And this is why he put out that video on the day that he was supposed to kill the BTA. He puts out a video endorsing billionaire taxes is because he needs to position himself to being more DSA adjacent.
Well, to be fair to Newsom, he also on the same day said he's against the Billionaire Tax Act and he's voting against it. This was his hedging video, which is to kind of zoom out his policy on, hey, this BTA doesn't make sense, but I do agree we need more taxation. I think was kind of the intent.
Yeah, he failed to kill DTA. Everyone thought— all these California billionaires in these chat groups thought Newsom would be their savior. That's right. And that was a big mistake.
What's it like, Sax? What's it like in that group chat? Tell us about that group chat. What's it like in there?
What's the meme? What's the meme like in there? In the billionaire group chat?
Go ahead. I— it's, it's 8:06 PM here. I have a meeting I have to go to. I want to say I love you and I miss all of you. Um, and I want to say a huge happy birthday to the most incredible country in the world. I could not have imagined my life being any better in any place. I feel so blessed and so lucky to be an American. I feel so thankful. I feel so grateful. It really is the best country in the world.
We have to fight for it.
Yeah, we have to fight for it. Yeah.
And on behalf of those of us—
Happy birthday, America. Happy birthday.
And for those of us who have been here for 7 generations, we think you're doing a good job. We're going to let you stay here. We're going to let you stay. On behalf of—
J Cal, how can we take away your citizenship? That's what I want is a law where we can revoke J Cal's citizenship.
7 generations, bitches.
I've been here. Which of the 4 of us should be deported? I think you would lose. Oh no. We'll find some constitutional loophole.
Enemy Aliens Act by Jason.
All right, feel free. On that note, happy birthday, America, and, uh, 250 more great ones. Best country in the world. Give a fuck what you think, Democratic socialist commie scumbags. All right, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye, love you boys.
Bye-bye. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sack. And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, besties. Queen of Kin Wah. Besties are gone.
That's my dog taking a shit in your driveway. Oh man.
Oh man.
Get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Wet your feet, feet, feet.
We need to get merchies.
(0:00) Bestie intros: Happy Fourth of July! (0:21) Palantir-Nvidia open source deal, Alex Karp's CNBC "Crashout" (33:52) Update on the AI jobs debate (50:24) Anthropic's Fable 5 available after export restrictions lifted (59:06) SCOTUS upholds birthright citizenship, striking Trump's EO (1:21:30) Newsom's "balanced budget" and how California's dire fiscal situation could break apart the Union Apply for Summit 2026: https://allin.com/events Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/palantir-secure-ai-us-agencies-nemotron-open-models https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2072326189079757277 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-blindsides-business-partners?rc=f8fu8f https://www.google.com/finance/quote/FIG:NYSE https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2072673187666813226 https://x.com/chamath/status/2072665199786561713 https://x.com/quxiaoyin/status/2072428278976074115 https://x.com/chamath/status/2072390507628540213 https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/chinese-national-pleads-guilty-running-birth-tourism-scheme-helped-aliens-give-birth-us https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democratic-socialist-melat-kiros-defeats-longtime-house-incumbent-in-colorado-primary https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/2070496029280276571 https://www.ocregister.com/2026/02/27/these-charts-show-how-californias-budget-has-skyrocketed https://x.com/JeanneIves/status/2072165726526308719 https://polymarket.com/event/democratic-presidential-nominee-2028