Transcript of Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!

So we had a dinner where me and Friedberg and J. Cal were invited to have dinner with the folks from the UK and their other top podcasters.

It was an off-the-record dinner. Let's talk all about it. There was an interesting moment which even Friedberg had to recognize, which was we went around and said, Hey, what podcast are you listening to? Which ones are your favorites? We went out in the room, and I got to tell you, you know what your podcaster's favorite podcast is?

Bingo.

All in podcast.

Well, the funniest thing is my wife thinks I'm bullshitting all the time. I say this is a- Mine, too. Pretty reasonably successful than well. She doesn't believe it. She thinks we're all bullshit.

Why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for All In? All the ankle biters called, and I said, no, I'm just going to wait. I'm holding out. I'm going to wait till the besties call.

Can we just say it, nick? You got to beat it up. Power move. When the besties podcast called, you're like, No, can't do it.

No, I'm waiting for the real deal.

I don't need JV.

Let your winners ride.

Rainman, David Sack.

We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one business, finance, technology, science podcast, in the world. This is the place where we call Balls and Shrikes, where we tell the truth, where there is zero censorship. Every week, we tell you about the truth behind the most important stories We point out who the heroes are and who the villains are, who are the delightful ones, and who are the Disgracia. With me again on this week's program. Disgracia. The Cackling Chairman Dictator. My guy, Shemoth Poly How are you doing? How was your victory lap? How was your victory lap?

It was really, really, really fun.

You looked like you were in your afterglow. I have to say, that was looking pretty good.

We have some pictures. Don't worry, we're going to go through behind the scenes in a That's her first site.

Armani came through for Amore, the Amore collection from Armani coming this fall.

By the way, I mean, Armani couture is like firing on all cylinders. The other one, which you'll see, is a great picture of this incredible jacket Louisa Becaria. Two shoutouts, Armani and Louisa Becaria.

I was just thinking that Armani really has been making it happen.

Now that we've talked about that, we'll talk about my wardrobe when the time comes. Could we just get through the rest of the interest? All right. And, of course, here he is your sultan of science, David Friedberg.

Move along, J. K. Let's go.

He had a wonderful... He's very bitter today. He's got a lot of anger. He is the barista of bitterness today. He's serving up bitterness all day long, and he had a great time at the... Maybe he's a little upset about the Lex Friedmann triangle we're in right now. I think that could be a part of it. We have a special guest here. Thomas Lafont is the co founder of Cotoo Management. They got a 50 Billy under management, public, private, yada, yada. Before that, he worked at Creative Artist Agency for seven years after he went to college, so he does have the college degree. He signed Captain America, which is Friedberg's favorite Avenger.

Chris Evans.

Chris Evans. Still a CIA client, by the way. Yes, and you're still in touch with him?

I am not.

You're not.

But I've I watched with wonder at what he's achieved after I left being his agent. It's been incredible. Great career.

Now, behind you, we see this incredible view.

No, but wait, you're missing the one part, which is that Thomas was one of the highest rated speakers that we had at the All-in-Summit.

Yeah. That's true, actually. He did really great last year.

Really crushed it.

Crushed it, of course.

I think I'm in the seventh besty position and hoping potentially after the podcast to at least move up by one.

Okay, there you go. Let's see what happens here. Now, what's his view behind you?

This is Los Angeles.

I definitely put you ahead of Jcal, Thomas. So you're, wow, you're up the spot.

Oh, my God.

He really is serving up the bitterness today.

You know why You know why he's mad? Why is it so better? I'll tell you why. Please. Okay. What do I do this time? This is for the audience. Jason is complaining all week in the group chat that he has influenza A. He's sending pictures of him getting IVs. And so Friedberg, the conscientious guy and co founder of the pod that he is, says, I will moderate. And then he invests his time. He's got a lot of things going on. He's got three kids plus one in a way. He's running a company. Strawberries? He prepares. Then you wake up after a dose of Tamaflu and decide, No, I'm ready to moderate. Of course. You can't just do that because it's not nice.

All right. Hey, Madame producer, can Can you come on the horn for a second here?

Are we really going to do this?

Yes, we are. We're going to do it. We're doing it, Madame. This is so stupid. This is so stupid.

This is so stupid.

Did I tell you to get Friedberg involved? No. No. I did it myself. Okay, you went rogue. Can I say why? You can go rogue. I'm fine. I said, Hey, Jason, how are you feeling?

You said, Horrible.

I have the flu.

I'm getting an IV tomorrow morning. To me, that was like, Oh, okay.

There's a 50% chance he misses the show. So I reached out Friedberg.

I said, Hey, Jason's really sick with the flu. Maybe you should just prepare yourself to moderate tomorrow. Okay. Now, when did I find out about this?

When did I find out? I think that was a smart decision. But you, sir, are a small bitter man. And so what you did was you wanted to just You wanted to blow up Friedberg's preparation.

I found out about this this morning. I found out about this like an hour ago.

How are you feeling?

I feel 80% of a normal J-Cow, which is 110% of any other moderator. I'm, Get yourself Andrew Vora-Sorkin. Oh, I'm Sorry, he's genuflecting at Davos to a bunch of mids.

Well, we're going to get Lex soon. We're going to get Lex soon.

Oh, that'd be great. Hello, I am Lex Friedmann. Welcome to the number one podcast in the world. Today on the program, we have Thomas Laffont, investor in such great companies as. All right, listen, enough shenanigans. We had so much fun. We tore DC apart.

Let's start with actually just, Thomas, did you watch any of it on TV? Did you think about going? It was really like there were so many tech people in Washington this weekend.

I saw the livestream. I talked to Sacks last night to get the download. My takeaway just from watching, especially the executive borders was democracy in action, democracy is self-correct, and dictatorship is double down. To watch in real-time a country of our scale and a democracy decide to make a change, I I think that's why we've been great for 250 plus years and will remain great. It was fun to watch. I'm really curious to see what your takeaway was.

Okay, well, we'll just go behind the scenes. First of all, it's hard to see that this was me dressed up for Sacks' Ball. I really brought the heat. This is, by the way, Luca Rubinacci is the tailor here. It's hard to see my jacket. Is that a blue coat? No. This is what I'm saying. I think the picture is very hard to see, but it's a very refined green paisley.

Subtle.

Hard to bring it out. Now, I will say this was the most popular shirt over the entire weekend. This is just a simple Brioni tuxedo shirt. There was 200 versions of it. I felt bad when I saw because normally I don't like to wear things that other people are wearing.

Correct. What did Michael Saylor think of this? When you saw Michael Saylor at the- I met Michael CFO, wonderfully nice guy.

So this is us at the Crypto Ball.

I went I have a white tuxedo on the first night. I've never had three tuxedos before.

David looked really great. I really love this. David looked great, yeah. Sacks had this incredible tux, which was more crypto-themed. It looked like the opening scene from the Matrix. So there was this cool print. You can see my green in there a little bit, Thomas, in this one.

Okay. Yeah, got it.

There's Sky and New Money Sunny, the President of Grok.

Sandip Madra, x. Com/sandeep.

Here are the besties.

I was Let's be honest, guys, even in all your bit in your freeberg, you felt the love at this moment when we were all back together. Did you not?

Well, five minutes before this, when the three of us took a photo, it was great. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, great. He's so better. Here's Do you let you moderate? You can moderate if you want.

If you're that part- No, you're doing a great job, J. You're keeping us on track. We're 18 minutes into this and we're doing fashion still.

You're doing great. Vinnie, Sky, Diego Bertican, the co founder of Cloud Kitchens.

So handsome, that Diego. Can we go back to the Diego? A big ball.

Go for a second? This was the crypto ball.

This was the crypto ball. This was Sachs's event. It was incredible.

It was a large number of people there. I was shocked at the number of people at the crypto.

It was huge. Next level. Here's a little poker. Oh, behind the scenes.

With Pinka, TK.

Tk, Travis Klein, the co founder of Uber.

Oh, look, that's the founder of Uber. Hold on, we got to see who's got the biggest stack.

Look, it's the founder of Uber next to the third investor in Uber and the founder of Cloud Kitchens next to the investor in Cloud Kitchens. Here, this is Peter Thiel's house.

This is Katie Han and Kyle Simani, my wife and Kyle's wife. Amore.

Amore.

This is at Peter's house. Peter had this Teel had this person going around taking pictures where you got this frame.

Bad lighting. Not good lighting for you.

Good lighting.

This was great.

Also at Peter Teel's house.

Yeah, that was great. I have to say, Chamath, putting aside Jason likes being a Republican.

Here's a dinner that we had. There's Lex Friedmann, Julius Genakowski, who's the former chairman of the SEC.

Little known.

The- Brad Gerster.

Former roommate of Obama.

That's by the way, following this dinner, all those streets were walked off, and there was no way to get around. You could see it there. Look, you see the barricades in the right there? It was like 10 degrees Fahrenheit. So we walk out.

Yes, it's terrible.

It was like you were going to die after two seconds out there. It was so cold. It was so cold. Vinnie and I were walking to try and get our car, and after walking for half a mile, we're like, Dude, there's no way out of this downtown area. Vinnie was shaking. He's like, I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die. He turns around, he goes running back to the restaurant, jumps in, and basically huddles down in the restaurant. Then after about 10 minutes, there's no way out. It's like you're in a military zone. He's like, I'm going to go forth. He runs out, jumps on a scooter, and he disappeared into the distance, and I swore I would never see Vinnie again. I'm like, That's it.

I think it's very smart that Lex wears the same outfit, the black suit with the white shirt with the black tie. I really like the consistency of it, actually. It looks really good.

It was incredible. He was getting stopped every two minutes. It was unbelievable.

Here's Armani. Here's Armani. Here's Armani. Here's Armani. Here's the jacket. This is Louisa Becaria. Then here's the box from Armani. Thank you.

The boxing. Whoa, Wawa Weewa.

Oh, look, there's a little side boob there with that. I didn't notice that. I'm wearing Tom Ford.

Shout out Tom Ford.

Shout out to you.

Perfect offers.

Here's a huge shout out to two guys that I had really wanted to meet in person. I finally got that chance to meet. This is at Zuck's Party. This is Brandon Carr, who's the incoming chairman of the SEC. Actually, this picture was taken right after he had gotten confirmed. So this was his first day as the chairman. And then this is a guy who I've been following for a couple of years, Jared Isaacman, who is now going to run NASA. He's the founder and CEO of Shift4Payments. But both of these guys are pretty epic. You should follow them on Twitter.

He did a space walk, the first civilian space walk. He did.

He's really, really incredible.

Brandon was really nice. I met him at Peter's event, and he told me he's a big fan of the pod. He listens to the show everywhere.

Brandon's amazing. I mean, by the way, if you want to see some really amazing tweets, he had some real bangers. He's a very smart guy.

I've had Brandon on this week in Star Wars a couple of times. He's the guy who fought for Starlink over wasting 5, 10, 20 $90,000 per home to install broadband. I mean, this guy's a hero. And he did that when he was in office under Biden and all that crazy corruption and griff.

This is a picture of Mike Johnson and his wife. This is a crazy story. There was a G7 summit in Italy, and Mike and his wife was seated beside my father-in-law, and that's dad, at a dinner. They got to know each other. He, as a proud grandpa, showed Mike and his wife pictures of Nat and myself and our kids. How we actually met in this moment was his wife was like, Oh, my God, I recognize you. You're Sergio's son-in-law, you're Sergio's daughter. It's amazing. Then we had a cool conversation. That was cool. Then this is Bill Pulte, who is nominated to run FHFA, which for folks that know, will be in control of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Really great guy, also a co-investor with me and Mr. Nat.

You're an investor in Mr. Beast.

There you go. I did the Series A.

This is the first time I think you've said it on the five.

Here's this thing. This is where Jcal is at his peak. Go ahead, nick. Just play the video. I don't even know what this is. What did you order?

All right. I've given it some thought, and I'm going to order the $95 Dover's Soul. I'm ordering the $95 Dover's Soul. It's tips included in this. I mean... That's so far. We were just having such a great time tearing it up. I did order the $95 Dover's Soul.

This is... Oh, sorry. That's me and Bobby Kennedy, but this is walking into the capital for the inauguration. Oh, wow. So basically, you have to get off. All these busses were taking us in because of the security, and then you walk underneath an underground to get into them. And this is Bobby and the guy right Calleigh means another great American, make America healthy again.

All right, here's a couple of my pics. This is me with somebody who's going to be in the administration. I'm not big on politics, but- Tulsi Gabbard.

She's so strong. She came to our party. I like her. This is the picture of our party. She is incredible.

She came up to me. You can always tell who the real fan is, and she came up and she said- I love Tulsi Gabbard. I just want to tell you, Jake, how I am a huge fan of the pod. I love what you do. I love the balance you bring problem. She really liked new details about the podcast. And so I wanted to get a picture with her. So as a joke, I said to her, Do you want to take a selfie? I said, I'm okay with the zombies. She goes, I was going to ask. I was like, No, I'm preemptively asking.

We took it together. She's such a star.

I think she's going to be great. I like her a lot. She's such a star. Oh, well, yeah.

This is- Hello.

I am Lexas Friedmann. Today, with love and peace in my heart, I am interviewing dictator Eid Amin, who has eaten after his enemies. We will share love, kindness, and a fatty liver. Enjoy. So, yeah, that was us just tearing it up after the YouTube party where we hung out with Sundar and Neil from YouTube. They It's been very good to us. Then here's one more, I guess.

And golfer, Bryson DeChambeau.

Oh, there's me and the Presidente Twitter. And, yeah, this is the podcast crew at the Free Press Party.

Okay, let's talk about key take What is your big takeaway from the weekend?

I think my biggest takeaway is that if you look in the past, there was a very tight coordination, I guess I would say. Between private industry and the private sector and the public sector, meaning the President and then people who were in charge of managing huge, vast swaths of resources in America. Some were along the way, that became either unfashionable and uncool, particularly under Democrats. What I saw was a very broad-based embrace of business people Because I think that the President understands how important it is to make sure that economically, America is just firing on all cylinders. The one thing to remember, for example, in the inauguration, I know that you saw the picture and it was basically meta Google, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, CEOs, et cetera, founders. Arnaud was there. Mukash Ambani was there. So it's just business people from the entire world were there. And so I think what it says is America is going to basically turn a totally new page. We're not going to ostracize people. We're not going to play favorites. That's the other thing. Elon was there right at the beginning. But if you saw all the CEOs of the major companies were there, it's not like he excluded stuck because of his past issues or anything.

Or Sam Alman.

Or Sam Alman. That was the biggest takeaway.

That would be the more notable one, yeah, to exclude.

That the President doesn't play favorites, that this is like Team America thing, and it was a projection of tremendous power to the rest of the world. This is what America is about. I loved every minute of it, and I think that this is exactly how the American government should be working, which is hand in hand with private industry to basically set the pace for the rest of world.

Thomas, did you have a takeaway after the weekend?

I did. I'm curious what you guys thought, but to me, what was notable from Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary, he was asked in one of the exchanges about the green energy race with China. He reframed the debate, I thought incredibly well, where he said, We're not in a green energy race with China. We're in an energy race with China. That's right. He made the point that China is adding 100 coal plants. It's adding nuclear. To me, it was just- 137 gigawatt hydro facility, which is- Exactly.

Unbelievable.

It was such a good framing of the debate because I think, Chamath, to your point, it's about reframing the right issues. I think that just that little piece of dialog to me is exemplified and was a really important takeaway, and I think more of what we'll see over the next coming year.

Friedberg, did you have a takeaway coming out?

There was just so much. It was so impressive to be there. I definitely echo the sentiment about seeing the strength of America represented between the entrepreneurial engine that has driven this country for 250 years and the government that's meant to serve the people working together to try and take America forward. It was just really inspiring. The one thing that was the biggest observation for me, which was a bit of a disappointment, unfortunately, is I feel like Doge and cost-cutting is going to be a lot harder to realize than folks assume. Nearly everyone I met with who works in government or is entering government had this, if not disdain for DOGE, a concern that it doesn't really align interests with the political objectives of politicians, that they need to get more stuff for their constituents in order to get reelected, and that they're not going to vote programs away. They're not going to vote themselves out of a job, which is effectively what they do if they cut programs. In fact, I was watchingbrooke-Rollins' Secretary Ag Confirmation hearing this morning, and Mitchell O'Knowl was given the opportunity to ask her questions. You know what his question was?

He said, In the last farm bill, I was able to get $60 million to build an Ag research lab at the University, Kentucky, and it hasn't started being built yet. It's been four years. What are you going to do about that? This is literally the intention of so many of these conversations, if you sit and watch. Then I watched a similar conversation with a senator from Minnesota who, I won't get into all the statements, but every single conversation you hear, and we even talk with Ted Cruz about this, is all about- He was great, by the way.

I love Ted Cruz.

Ted Cruz is excellent. It's all about what can I get for my constituents? How do I get more jobs and how do I get more money? Ultimately, that incentive is what gets people elected, and I don't think it's going to change. That was the biggest shock for me. I thought that there was a moment of the importance of cost-cutting, the importance of deficit reduction, the importance of debt reduction. I was just a little saddened to see that there's no stop in the train. That was my takeaway. It's a little bit bitter. I hope I'm wrong. I really do hope Doja is effective, and I really do hope that policymakers start to recognize the importance. By the way, Ray Dalio has a new book coming out. We'll talk more about his book once it's released publicly, but it speaks very clearly to the challenge the United States is now facing with respect to spending. I know I've I talked about this. I know we all felt like there was a big reprieve with this election, but for me, it was a little bit bitter.

Can I say a little bit on that first topic? I just want to double down on that because one of the things that some folks said, and I guess it makes sense now that you think about it, but when you look at the confirmation hearings, there are certain folks for whom the resource allocation is relatively modest inside of America. They tend to just do much better in general. If you saw Marco Rubio's confirmation process, it was like 99 to zero. To your point, what they say is that folks that actually allocate the internal spending in the United States gets a lot more scrutiny because there's all of this horse trading because they want some of this money to get allocated into their specific area. It is going to be a very complicated thing. The one thing, though, that changed, I don't know if you saw, but DOGE was meant to be outside the auspices of the government, and it wasn't actually a government department. It'll be interesting to understand when it's explained, but in the 11th hour, the EO that established DOGE established it actually as a governmental agency.

Yeah, we're going to get into that in just a moment. To build on your point there, Dave, Senator Sanders had a tweet today. Nick, I just sent it to you. Already, the discussion of who should take the brunt of these cuts is starting to happen, and he's pointing out as he should, Hey, what's going to happen with the VA? You're putting a freeze on hiring people. We have to make sure our vets are taken care of. We have a shortage of doctors, a shortage of nurses. But we do have people responding to him saying, Hey, how are we going to pay for all this? Even if it's going to be hard to do, it's going to take courage because you're going to be faced with situations like this where, does anybody want to see VA's budget cut? And these veterans who are coming back, they should get all the services in the world. And these hard discussions are now happening, and it's not taboo. So the Overton window is wide open now to discuss even the budget of the VM, and where is the money going to come from? So I think we're actually going to make progress on it.

This was like a sacred cow, and now we're talking about it. To Bernie Sanders's point, I don't know if you saw, there was a note on there, nick. Communitynotes pointed out that Trump put that none of the cuts should impact vets. And so I thought that was a good use of CommunityNotes there.

The one comment I'll say about Bernie Sanders is when Russ Vot, who is the nominee to run OMB, went through his confirmation yesterday. Sanders asked a similar question around Medicare and Medicaid. What was interesting is Russ tried to actually answer the question and give the details around where there can be waste, fraud, and abuse. Sanders really didn't want to hear it. He just wanted a sound bite. I think these confirmation processes are- Performative? They're hugely performative.

Yes.

I do think that, and this applies, I think, to both sides, Democrats as well, when they are eventually in power. I think that when you're given a very clear mandate as a President, I think you should be able to get to pick your team. Because it's clear that the American people have voted an agenda. It's not like he hid that agenda. And so the people that then want to implement that agenda should be put on the field.

It seems like the point of these should be if somebody could get compromised or there was something really gnarly in their background. But otherwise, let people build their team, and then they have to own their results.

Tell us about your feelings and takeaways about the weekend.

Well, it's obviously mixed. I was a never-trumper, and now I am rooting for him wholeheartedly to do great work.

Be honest, you like him. Come on.

You do like him. Well, I mean, anybody who's met- You can just say it. Anybody who's interacted with Trump likes him- Before you go your diatribe, just say it.

Just say, You like him.

There are aspects I like about the platform. I like probably 80% of the platform. You want to say it? And I will tell you today the 20% I don't like. I'm always going to call balls and strikes.

No, no, no. But you want my takeaway- But you, I'm just saying you like him. Just say you like him. You do like him.

I like 80% of his platform this time around.

No, him. Him as a person.

You know what? There's things I really don't like, and I'll talk about him today. But anyway, let me put it inside. The personal thing doesn't matter. What matters is what he does for the American people and for the country.

Because you like him. I know you can't say it yet, but they're deep down inside you like him. You were happy to be there? Until I have to say I had a lot of fun.

The J. Cal brings the heat to a party.

Republicans are fun.

I will say, Republicans are fun. Fashion was off the hook.

Off the hook.

A lot of great fashion, and it was a great party.

Make America beautiful again. My gosh.

I Listen, I- No more jogging pants and white fox.

Get rid of it. Burn it to the ground.

What I'll say my takeaway was, as somebody who had concerns, I'm not going to make the show about me, but the important thing for me is, who is Trump going to lead with this time around? Is it going to be the people from the 1. 0 movement or the 2. 0 movement? There was not a 1. 0 person.

Couldn't be found.

And so on the margin one or two. And they were not the focus. And who you put in the front row speaks volumes. Who did he put in the front row? Sundar, Elon, Zuck, Lawrence Sanchez. He's got his priorities straight. Lauren Sanchez, I thought.

The priorities were very clear as to what's important for this administration.

I'm fully behind all of his priorities, both of those priorities, All those priorities seem incredibly important to me.

You're such a troll.

I don't want to troll too much. But that's the big takeaway for me. If that is indicative of where he wants to go with this, which is business first, We're proud of our leaders, we're proud of innovation. I think he's sticking it to it. Did you see him at Davos today? I mean, this guy's got just crazy energy.

Sorry, Humalay.

Trump zoomed into Davos and just dunked on them for 45 minutes.

He did?

Yes. And he just destroyed everybody at their dying conference in their irrelevance as they genuflected, begging him to come next year.

Did you see the photo of the half empty conference room? Yes. Most of the events were just empty chairs.

It's irrelevant. I mean, these people are irrelevant now.

Thomas, you guys remember when Davos used to be a really big deal? Is it dead?

I think it's worse, Chamath. I think it's a counter indicator now. It is.

There was a good conversation yesterday. Graham Allison, who spoke at our summit, was on this panel, and they basically said, We lost, they won. Our group here Davos lost. It's over. They're no longer, to your point, on the right side of history. They said, We had a point of view on the future. We believe we were going in the right direction. Everyone told us in this last couple of months that we were wrong.

The gentleman, by the way that spoke after Graham Allison is also very good. This is incredible.

This is the greatest comeback in political's history of a politician.

And then, therefore, he thinks he can do anything.

We need to also factor in not only who's won, which is Trump, but who's lost, which is to say us.

And then the guy has a whole long monolog on why they lost and what they lost, which I think is pretty relevant that that elite, if you will, has been replaced with a populist vote and a populist leader.

All right, let's get to our docket today. And I just want to give a special shout out. We did our inauguration live stream, and it was awesome and fun. Special thanks to Aircall, Abra, And Hims. Thomas, if you've ever got an issue with weight or other issues that men have, you can go to Hims and use the code All In to get something. Hims. Com/allin. I want you to write that down, Thomas, okay? In case you ever have any issues. That's what it's- What makes you think I haven't already? Well, anything's possible. Are you on the choose or the pills? Anyway, we'll talk about it offline. But that's a full head of hair.

It is a really incredible head of hair.

Thank you. All natural, baby. It's great.

What product do you put in?

Do you put product C-Salt or you got promise? What are you doing?

All in one. All in one, Prel. Shampo plus conditioner, one bottle. Easy.

No, but you don't use any product afterwards?

None.

Jesus Christ. Do you blow yourself or do you have it blown?

It's a question- I do both. But in this case, it's like Cuba Gooding in Jerry Maguire, I air dry, baby.

Oh, air dry. Got you. So when you're driving to that Santa Monica office, you just put the top down on whatever convertible, living that full lifestyle. Okay. Yeah.

This is where I do have to admit, unfortunately. After you appeared on the summit, I had all these women, they were like, Oh, my God. Thomas Lafont is so good-looking. And I was like, No, he's not, because I'm very competitive in zero sum when other men around me get... But you were the smashed hit. And then I figured out it must be the hair and also the glasses. I think the glasses were a huge hit. It looked very Clark-kentish.

Are they real glasses or you just wear the clear ones to get the extra Intelligence points.

By the way, the only time I've ever been stopped in the street in my life, in the Presidio, a very nice lady tapped me in the shoulder and said, I loved your all-in talk. It's never happened before. That says more about all-in than me, but the reach is It's decreasing.

It's a little bit too much. By the way, shout out to Akash sing who joined us on the live call as well.

Oh, yes. Akash was hilarious. Thank you, Akash, filling in our DEI Department. We lost Shamath, and they sent Akash, so he did great.

Get him back to guess us.

Absolutely.

Yeah, there's a moderator slot open, so he's going to be. Absolutely.

If you know anybody who knows science. All right, in our first topic, President Trump smashed the record for day one executive orders, 26 in all, beating the prior record of nine by Uncle Joe Biden. No other President signed more than one EO in day one since the federal register started tracking this in 1937. Let's go through them. If you want to comment on when, we'll stop and pause, or we can just run through them, gentlemen. Doge officially was established, and people are making note of the DOGE SWAT team. Doge will assign an agency head to each federal agency. The agency head will build a four-person team. This will include an engineer, an HR specialist, and an attorney. It was separately announced that Vivek was leaving Doge to run for governor of Ohio. Fascinating. Interesting. I don't know if anybody's going to take there. They suspended the TikTok ban for 75 days. There's a lot more to get into this, so we're going to break that down a little later in the show.

Let's talk about TikTok.

Yeah, okay. We'll go right to that in a minute. The January sixth pardons. They pardoned 1,500 January sixth participants, including some that savagely beat cops. Very controversial. We'll get back to that in a moment. Ending birthright citizenship. This is a controversial one that is being fought legally. Those born in the US to illegal immigrants would no longer be considered citizens. If this holds up, the birthright citizenship is codified in the 14th Amendment, and 22 state attorney generals have already sued over this executive order, so it might be a performative one. Energy Unleashing American energy. We're going to jump into that one for sure. Then federal employees, a hiring freeze, and a full return to office. The hiring freeze doesn't apply to military, immigration, enforcement, or public safety. Then a regulatory freeze on regulations. Gentlemen, where do we want to start? Jan 6, TikTok, Doge. Thomas, you're our guest. Where do you want to start?

I'm happy to chat about TikTok.

Okay. As we mentioned earlier, Trump extended TikTok's grace period by 75 days. Trump said he wants to get a deal done. He also said at a press conference that he'd like the US to own 50% of TikTok, and that it could be a trillion dollar asset. That's unique and interesting. He was also positive about the idea of Elon possibly buying it, or maybe Larry Ellison or anybody. So he wants to make a deal. What are your thoughts, Thomas, on what should happen with TikTok and what will happen?

I don't know what will happen, But I do think it'd be interesting to share you guys. We are investors in TikTok. We invested back. It was obviously just a Chinese company, and investing in China was very different back then. But what resonated to me when I met founder, and he just had a very simple idea, which is his view was, if I have a piece of content, and it's a great piece of content, how can I have it be shared? His view was that if you share it on Instagram, the only way people see it is if you had a lot of followers. He just had a really simple idea, and he said, What if I take every piece of content that's uploaded into the system and I show it to at least one other user? No matter what that content is, at least one person will see it, even if you have no followers. Then based on whether that person views it or how long, I might show it to another user, and then a third and a fourth. It was such a revolutionary idea, and it really resonated with me at the time.

It just goes to show how we're in an idea business, and when you have a truly revolutionary idea, it can get really big. The whole genesis of TikTok came from that really simple concept of your content will be shown, and if people like it, it will be shown to a lot of people. Obviously, I mean, if you look at TikTok in the US, we can just, very back of the envelope, look at the math. If we look at DAUs, Mother Blue, or Meta, as we love to know, the Facebook hat roughly site has about 200 million DAUs in the US.

Daily active users for folks who don't know the terminology.

Yeah, correct. If you look at Facebook plus Instagram, you'll see it's about 200 million DAUs. You can look at the time spent What's interesting about TikTok's time spent is the DAUs are about half of combined meta and Insta, so we get about 100 million DAUs in the US. But the time spent on the platform is the equivalent of Facebook plus Instagram. So obviously incredible, not just scale in terms of DAUs, but also on time spent. If we think about, okay, well, what would that mean the business is worth? If we look at meta today, the market cap is roughly one and a half trillion. I think internet investors generally assume that roughly half the market cap is US. If we take the one and a half trillion, maybe that's 750 billion. Now, we know that the time spend is equivalent, but the DAUs are half, so maybe we cut the 750 in half. That would tell you that the max value if you monetize the way Meta does and ran it the way Zuck does, might be 375 billion for the US asset alone. I think from that point, you start to apply a couple discounts.

One is, if that's my long-term value, what return would an investor want potentially to get to that to 375? Is it 50%? So maybe you cut that by 50%. Then I think the devil would be in the details. What are exactly are you getting? Are you just getting users? Are you getting the algorithm? Are you getting data? Maybe you also want to apply a more severe discount to that. But I think you put it all together, is 100 billion a reasonable scenario? I think the math proves it. Then could it be a trillion dollar asset the way Trump has mentioned? I mean, in a world where Facebook is one and a half, and the penetration of TikTok in the US is 50% of what meta is, I don't think it's unrealistic. Let's see what happens. I don't have any particular insight on what will happen, but what I do know is that it's an incredibly valuable franchise.

Let me ask you the obvious question. People are looking at this and saying, Wait, you're going to take 50% of your shares. In this case, we actually have somebody who has shares. So are you comfortable with the government seizing 50 % of your shares, I guess, is one way to frame it?

Well, I don't know. I mean, first of all, there's no deal, so it's a little bit hard. I can tell you that when- That's the deal he proposed.

In that scenario, Would you... Yeah.

We never attributed much value to the TikTok US asset in the sense of our analysis was always based on the value of the Chinese business, specifically because it's just hard to know what the TikTok asset X China would be worth. Is it worth zero because it's so compromised regulatorially? Is it worth a lot more? It's just very, very difficult to know. We always took a very conservative view of really looking at the Chinese and some of the other assets as the core value of ByteDance, the holding company. Ultimately, what TikTok happens, it's the classic when you try and sell a company, what's the value? Where it depends, is there one bidder or five bidders? Is the government the only bidder for that asset? In that case, it will indicate a value of X. Or are there other companies that potentially could be an acceptable bidder to both sides?

It's just really hard to know. Well, the Trump deal, though, is he saying the government, the United States government, the citizens of America, we get half of the company. That would be the equivalent of you giving half your shares. The US company. The US company, yeah. What do you think of this proposal? Because this seems like unique in all the world. So if in order to have it spin out and maintain half your shares, would you be willing to give all of us, the government, the citizens of the United States, half your shares?

Well, I mean, if you think about it, what did we learn a couple of days ago? We learned that it might just get shut down and be worth zero. In one sense, anything that's greater than zero, by definition, is better. I think ultimately, it will come down to, does the government want to be the only bidder for the asset, or would the government be comfortable with either Elon owning it and merging it to X or Microsoft owning it, or what have you?

What do you private equity for your bird? Well, Thomas, let me ask you a question. Can you just tell the audience a little bit about... Because you guys have been involved as investors in China for a long time. I would love for you to share behind the scenes what has gone on with respect to being an investor in China in technology over the last couple of years. What has changed and why and what goes on today? You guys made a fantastic investment in ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok. You've made other incredible investments in China. Are you still investing in China? If not, walk us through what What happened and why?

I think if you look, David, virtually all of our investments in China were Chinese companies catering to the Chinese market. There was a massive trend of a very significant economy that was adopting technology. We can think about whether that be smartphones, companies like Huawei, whether it was companies like Matoan that were doing food delivery or Tencent that were doing gaming. And so all our approach was basically based on these companies. By the way, a lot of them were public, which is what people don't remember. Chamath, you may remember, but Tencent, at one point, was a public company listed in Hong Kong. The market cap was 200 million.

Yeah, I do remember.

Wow.

What was interesting about it, Dave, is a lot of that played out. Baidu was an early IPO. A lot of that trend of Chinese companies catering to the Chinese market really played out across public and private markets for over 20 years. I think to me, what significantly changed over the past five years is technology really became a matter of national security. I don't think that when we were early investors in Métouan, that we necessarily viewed that as a national security threat as an example. I think as companies got bigger, as AI came to be, it became pretty obvious that there were national security implications. Our view as investors is we don't set the rules of the road. We rely on government and regulators to do so. It was pretty clear, I think, to obvious that the regulatory regimes were changing in both countries. For us as investors, we were just, Well, we're just going to follow what the rules are and what the governments are. My only regret through this whole thing is, and I don't know if you guys had some exposure to this, but the quality the entrepreneurs that came out of that era was unbelievable.

That's a strong cohort.

Absolutely. When you think about the founder of Métuan, Wang Xi, and just how brilliant he was and what he's done with that franchise and not just doing food delivery, but also the software operating system for restaurants is truly incredible. Pony Ma from Tencent. It was such an incredible group of entrepreneurs. They were a lot of fun to be around. They were excited and passionate about bringing technology to their country. Is it over? Hard to know. If you look at the capital markets, you can see we've not seen a tremendous amount of innovation or new companies coming out. I think the key question is, is it a pendulum? Does the Chinese regulatory regime move one way and then it moves another way? Or is it fixed in this state?

Is it your read? Is it correct to say that the The CCP wanted to stop this extraordinary wealth creation by a subset of individuals in the country, that this was becoming too much of a capitalist enterprising system and challenged some of the foundations of the CCP? Is that what was going on and why this all got throttled back? Or is there something else, some other security reason?

I don't really know, Dave, because as an investor, it's not a regulatory regime that you have interaction with. You're really talking to the entrepreneurs and you're reflecting off of their energy and their business ideas. We would meet businesses and we would meet founders, and if the idea was interesting to us, we would fund it.

It's a black box in some ways in terms of a market to invest in. You only have a limited amount of information. You got to think after Jack Ma disappeared for a couple of years, if you're an entrepreneur and you want to...

The The message was sent.

The message was sent, message received. Then you start thinking about Chamath, what Trump just did. And what Xi Jinping just did. You put those two things together. Trump put all of our top guys, top dogs on stage. Here they are.

It's the exact opposite of China. The message is very clear. It's what Thomas said. Technology is a national security imperative, and so we're going to embrace these guys. We're not going to play favorites. We're not going to pick one and not the other. We're not going to have summits and have the founder of an entire category not be invited. That's just... Honestly, it's patently stupid and immature. That's what the Biden administration did. Picked favorites. That is dumb based on the implications and importance of technology. I just want to go back to the TikTok thing. I want to make three points. One is from the past. I'll give you my sense of the TikTok thing, and I'm going to make a prediction for the future. In 1984, the way LVMH began was through a deal that Bernard Arnault architected. There was a business owned by the French Cotton King, Marcel Bussac, and inside of that empire was Christian Dior. Long story short, his empire was crumbling, and Arnaud did a deal where he bought that dying business, essentially from the French government for one franc. Fast forward now 40 years of very hard work and tremendous execution, that's a $350 billion public company.

Now, imagine back then in 1984, if the French government actually had done a deal where they said, We'll sell it to you for 50 of whatever you build. Take it for a dollar, but we're going to own 50% of the upside. They would have an extra $175 billion today. I think that that's very important in terms of what is possible I like Thomas's math. I believe it. I do think it's about a hundred billion dollar asset. But at the end of the day, the President was very clear that it is completely and entirely worthless without his permit, and he wants to own 50 % of this asset. Now, if you're a buyer of something, you're not going to pay $100 billion dollars if you control whether it can exist or not. You're basically going to pay today's equivalent of one franc, which would be one dollar. Now, I'm I'm not saying that it is going to be a dollar, but if the United States Treasury wants to hold 50% of an asset that could be worth $100 billion or 500 billion or maybe a trillion, it would make sense for the United States Treasury and the United States people to own that at effectively zero.

I think that the incentive is there, and I think he has essentially said that he is going to do the best deal in his interests, which is the United States' interests, which I suspect means a price that is as low as possible, approaching $1.

And ultimately, won't this be Chinese government's decision? Because they could always say, You know what? Let it die.

Maybe. But my point is, it may not be a dollar. Maybe it could be 25 billion, maybe it could be 10 billion. But my point is, I find it very hard to see how it gets to the actual value that it is today. Then I think, let me just make a prediction for the future. There's a question that this raises, which is, does it make sense for the American government to be a little bit smarter going forward about how it allocates incentives and resources? The American government is still the largest single landowner in America. We give concessions to private companies to drill, to build things. It just turns out that if you apply this example more broadly, wouldn't it make sense where when you create incredible economic incentives and upside for private investors and investment for some portion of that gain to go back to the American people? Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. For example, if you said, We're going to accelerate permitting for all these data centers, we're going to make any form of energy, which was the opposite of what the Biden CEO said on his way out the door.

He had all these conditions. But if the President Trump CEO on data center says, Any energy, but we want to own a 5% royalty, and we'll allow you to put it on federal lands or 10%, or 15 %. Would it really change the underwriting that Blackstone and all these other companies will do? I don't think so. Would it enrich America? I think so. Would it make it easier for people to feel like they're participating in all of these incredible gains? I also think so. So my prediction is that this becomes more of a template for the future. It'll be less about permitting. It'll be more about creating incentives and allocating those incentives for a share of the upside. And I think that there is a really strong economic argument for America to do that.

You know what you're about to build on that? People don't remember, but Tesla got $465 million from the Department of Energy. That was called the ATV program, which was the advanced technology vehicles manufacturing. That was a very visionary program at the time.

Visionary. But it took no equity.

But it didn't take equity.

That was dumb.

So dumb. They should have gotten some portion of equity, some portion of a loan. Tesla did so well, thanks to Elon and the team's hard work, that they paid it back early. They paid it back early. That's how well they did. If they had owned 10% of Tesla, but 10%, my lord.

I think the President has sniffed this out, by the way. You may not think that these are related, but when he said that he's considering eliminating federal income tax and funding this thing from tariffs, and he just had a press conference today where he's inviting every single company to come and make things in the United States because he will create economic incentives to make it here cheaper. But if you make it abroad and bring it in here, he's going to charge money and a tariff. All of this are part and parcel of, I think, this broader economic realization. And unlike 2008, '09, '10, when we were allocating money, or 2020, '21, '22, where we were just sending money out the door with, frankly, no consequence and no accounting, this The time around, I think he's got some incredibly sharp business people. This is, by the way, the upside of having folks that have actually been successful in the real world working inside of government is they're going to help him get to this realization, and I think it's a really good one.

I don't think Tim waltz would be done this.

My one put back to you, Chamuff, on that would be, I just think it's a dangerous game for the government to start picking winners. For example, if it owns 50% of a TikTok, does it disadvantage a meta as an example? I do wonder, is the value-capturing mechanism for the government taxes, essentially? The way you capture the portion of the value creation of these companies is through a tax system. I do think we just have to be careful of the government all of a sudden picking different companies to win. I do think having a good set of incentives, a level playing field, let the competitive dynamics of different companies fight each other and then capture the value through taxes.

I think you're right. I think that that part is absolutely fundamental. But I think there is a way to architect this. For example, you have these RFPs that by design have to be published in the open source and available for anybody to bid on. My only point is just to say that when there is an ultimate winner, why not have a small stake in the upside? Look at the amount of money that the DOE gives in grants. I'll give you an example. One of these companies that I helped start a few years ago to make advanced battery materials, we got 150 million dollar grant. I'm very appreciative of that grant. But if they also asked for 5 or 10 % of the equity, I would have still said yes.

Of course you would have. Yeah, it's a great deal. Why not give a little upside to the taxpayers? I agree with that.

By the way, a parallel to that would be Spectrum, right? If you think about wireless, got built, the government auctioned off Spectrum and then allowed public, private companies to come and bid on it. There's a lot of different interesting mechanisms you can bring to that.

Friedberg, which EO What would you like to go to next?

Well, I'll just wrap on the TikTok.

Sure.

I do worry a lot about the precedent being set here with respect to foreign government actions on US companies in their local countries. Imagine the CCP tells Tesla they have to sell their Chinese operations and give 50% of the Chinese operations to the Chinese government because of their concerns concerns about security where Tesla is now able to track Chinese citizens driving around and where they are. You can see very quickly how this whole overall, I think, presentation of the security risk that we face with TikTok and their we will shut it down or own it, creates, I think, a counter that could really hurt American companies. You could see this going to Google, to Apple, to Tesla, even food manufacturing companies that have operations overseas where local governments to say, Hey, we need to, for local security purposes, we need to take ownership of your business. I think one of the things that's really benefited Americans in global trade is our ability to sell and export our technology, our goods, and our services around the world through open trade. I do think that we've used this TikTok security thing to say this is a rationale for us doing this as a one-off, but it also opens up a lot of other people to say this is a one-off.

I'm just generally very wary about this whole TikTok situation, opening up a can of worms.

You're 100% right. By the way, the CCP has done it already. They did it to Apple. If you follow what happened when they introduced iCloud, I don't know if you remember GCBD, GCBD, is the Chinese state-owned data company, the cloud provider there. They just told Apple, We get all the data. They just had to roll over. And all citizens in China who use an iPhone, in order to use an iPhone in China, your data is owned by the government, period, full stop. And Apple had no choice but to do that. If you want to play in a certain market, you got to play by the rules.

The thing to keep in mind here is I hear all of these theoretical qualms about how it's unfair, but this stuff happens all the time, and it's just that we don't benefit from it. So Jason brought up an excellent example of Tesla. The other example, just to remind you guys, is during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve stepped in and started buying commercial corporate bonds. They owned a ton of Ford bonds so that these things wouldn't default. There's all kinds of action all the time where the federal government is involved in private companies. My point is, if you're going to be involved, have some legacy ownership on the back end of it so that in case this stuff really works, that it's broadly value creating for more Americans. I think it would create a way to de-escalate this sensation that a few people are winning and everybody else is just staying still.

We I'm going to talk about Stargate and the AI project because I do think it tees off on one of the- I'm going to talk about Jan sixth, though. Okay, but it does tee off on one of the other key things that I heard a lot about in DC, and I know Thomas is passionate about, like I am, which is energy, electricity, capacity build out in the United States because it's critical. Building AI infrastructure means that we need to build energy infrastructure.

All right. Anyway, let's- We'll go right to that after we wrap up these. We wrap up these executive orders. I, too, wanted to talk about January sixth. Just to give people the update here, JD Vance had said that the people who committed violence on January 6, quote, obviously shouldn't be pardoned. This is a parade of people who are on the Republican side who are coming out against how President Trump handled this. I think you all know where I would fall on this side of it. Where are your thoughts on this?

Where do you fall on him?

I come from a family of cops, and I feel like he's betrayed the blue on this one. If there are people who... I think he should have taken his time with this. It is possible that some people had sentences that were too long. The justice system is imperfect in our country, and the pardon power is theirs, I think, specifically to do a very granular job of looking at each case. I think we have to look at pardon power generally after what we saw the Biden family do, and now we see Trump doing this. I think the pardon power is not being used as it's intended. It's being used politically now by both parties. I'm trying to call balls and strikes here. But as somebody who's in law enforcement, a family that's in law enforcement, and my chosen career was to be a cop and an FBI agent. Just looking at it, it's just heartbreaking to see people beat cops and then be treated as heroes. Some of these people are very dark people. The Oath Keepers and some of these people are extremely violent. They're coming out now after this all been said and saying that they're going to double down, they're going to buy more guns, and that they're going to get their retribution.

I think you have to be really careful with violent people that you give them this coronation and that they were justified because they'll go do more a lot of things. I understand he made this promise to people. I think he should have been very granular in doing this. I totally understand there could be people who got sentences that were too long, and I would have liked to see him do this thoughtfully. This was not done But hopefully, I have a certain amount of goodwill towards the new president, and this has lowered it.

I knew that this would be really important to you, so I took a few minutes to try to collect my thoughts. I've been walking myself through it since yesterday. This is not an explanation other than to you, Jason, my friend, about how I think we got here. I just wanted to take a few minutes to explain that to you. I think that before you can look at January I think you got to go back to what happened during the COVID lockdowns and what we started to see in a bunch of these liberal cities.

Talking about BLM riots?

The The Clem riots, the Antifa riots, what happened in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, the lawlessness that you see in places like New York, the decarceration movement. I think that what started happen was a sensation that for the same weight, there were different measures. For example, if you I'm going to start to look at some of the deportations that are happening now. It's really quite shocking. I sent nick a clip of them. Nick, you can just maybe show the first few seconds. But you are talking about some incredibly, incredibly violent offenders that were just walking randomly down the street, essentially. I'm not going back to Haiti.

One of those threats is this illegal alien from Haiti. Ice says he's a gang member with 17 criminal convictions in recent years.

You feel me?

You're Biden forever, bro. Take Obama for everything that he did for me, bro. There's more after this, but there was a rapist that they picked up in Boston. There's a person that was charged with assault. There was this sensation, Jason, that was building up for a long time that all of a sudden the law was being applied in very odd ways, where depending on what you did, you would get adjudicated in totally different ways based on your political affiliation or your leaning or based on the desire of a district prosecutors to go after one thing or another. Let me just pause. That's the thing that was building and cascading. I do agree with you that I think January sixth is like a stain. I think there's nothing to be proud of there. But I think what we found out since January sixth is somewhat important. I think the first thing we found out was that there was a bunch of these folks whose convictions were very speculative. I think the Supreme Court already ruled that in June of last year. It was like a 63 vote that said at least 300 150 of these convictions should probably just be thrown out.

So there was one body that was that. Then there was a whole bunch of them where, to your point, you took a misdemeanor, you trumped it up to a felony. You had all kinds of things where procedural motions were denied for the defense, approved for prosecution, and you had sentences that didn't match the crime. Then you have a president who, frankly, was the subject of welfare himself. I think that what would have been better was a more methodical approach to this. I agree with you. But I do think that what's happening here is essentially a moment where we can close this entire chapter and we can get back to a focus on observing the law and adjudicating it equally for everybody. I think that that's probably the best way that we can all deal with this, because I think that there was a bunch of pardons that were 100% obvious. Then there was a bunch that had to be done because the court was perverted in how they dealt with some of these folks. Then there was a small number, and I don't know the exact number, to be fair, Jason, where these folks did some really bad stuff.

Now, it's also mixed in with this thing where there was a bunch of informants, then there was a bunch of folks that were The informant stuff that you do, we have to wait for that to come out because that's in the conspiracy corner for now. Anyway, my point is, I just went and I collected that as a way to try to explain to you how- I appreciate you understanding my passion on it and wanting to bring it up. How we got here, I think it's like- I'm well aware of it. I think we got to put a pin in this and say both sides should now have enough experience to say, We're going to apply the law equally to everybody going forward from this moment out. Let's just go forward and not look back. I think that's the best thing that we can all do.

Let's hope. I'll just leave you with this, the proud boy leader, Enrique Tarrio. This is his quote on getting out. I'm happy the President is focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I'm not going to play by those rules. They need to pay for what they did. These are some seriously bad hombres, the proud boys and the oath keepers. So don't be surprised if they do something worse.

I also want to talk about the citizenship thing, and I just want to just provide a little color for people. I'm sure that there's a lot of folks that are listening who have people that work for them that may be- The birthright thing.

If you came here illegally and had a child, you get to be a citizen, just to be clear.

This is going to the Supreme Court, and just to put a little bit of color on it, in the 14th Amendment, there's this very important part that says, birthright citizenship is applied to people who are subject to the jurisdiction of America. For a long time, that phrase was not really considered in how the Supreme Court administered the 14th Amendment. I think what this EO did and the lawsuits that happened almost instantaneously as a result, we'll now send this back to the Supreme Court very quickly, and people will opine on what that means. If it means nothing, it means that if you are here, however you're here, and if you have a child, they're going to be a citizen of America. If that qualifier is is now part of the administration and the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, I think what President Trump has written is what will happen, which is if you are here illegally, it doesn't apply. If you are here under a visa that necessarily means you're still subject to the jurisdiction of somebody else, it may not apply. But I think the Supreme Court is going to get to decide this in pretty short order.

Okay, a couple more issues I want to get to on the docket.

Sorry, let me just make a quick comment on the- Sure, Dave.

Go ahead.

January sixth. I just generally don't like this power of pardon.

Agreed.

We saw what Biden did. He gave... I mean, how many thousands, nick? You could pull the number up, but 8,000. 8,000. 8,000 pardons. I feel like the original intention of the power of pardon, which is in the Constitution, was meant to protect the Union, the civility in the Union, at times of we need to come back together and realign ourselves. It has been so far abused beyond that original intention. It almost feels like an extraordinary injustice. It almost gives the President the ability to rewrite the law that many of the actions from the executive branch can simply supersede the actions of the judicial branch, which is really meant to protect and execute the laws of the nation. I think it's gone too far. It It feels like there's a necessary amendment to address this, that these presidents can come out and preemptively pardon people for things that might be found in the future because they're close with them. It has nothing to do with the original intention. If you go back to the argument for the pardon being in the Constitution, you can see that Alexander Hamilton wrote deeply about it in federalist paper number 74.

In that paper, he talked a lot about and emphasized that the justice system, which is designed to be fair, may occasionally result in overly harsh or unjust outcomes. The pardon allows for acts of mercy to correct these situations. A lot of these sorts of actions that we saw happen with Biden do not fit the bill for that definition. I will tell you there's a quote from federalist paper 74 from Hamilton. It goes as follows, In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments when a well-timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the Commonwealth. To counter my point, Hamilton's argument is that when the nation is divided, the act of the pardon may actually help bring the nation back together, as may have been the case with respect to the January sixth. But it may not necessarily be about justice. Or Nixon. Or Nixon. It may not necessarily be about justice, but it's much more about restoring tranquility of the Union and allowing the nation to move forward, even though it may not seem just. It may be the right thing for the nation. I'm trying to defend the action or defend the pardon.

I really don't like the act of pardoning as a tool that's being used in a hundred different ways. It's being abused. It's certainly been abused. It's being abused. It's being abused. It's being abused. It's being abused. It's being abused. It certainly seems like it requires change.

Yeah. Just programming note here, research note, 6,500 people of those 8,000 seem to be convicted of marijuana possession or dissolution. And you know what's needed there? And they were pardoned.

Then the law should have been changed and the courts should have overturned all of those convictions. It does not necessarily need to fall, and it It shouldn't fall on the executive branch to take that action. The courts need to do their job and the legislators need to do their job.

I don't disagree, but I think there is some compassion in the pardon concept for how long do they have to wait for that. How long do you have to wait for that? Then the people who were convicted of selling dime bags or having an ounce of weed on them were black and brown. And then all my white friends who started weed companies are now taking them public in Canada. So shout out Trudeau. All right, let's keep moving here. I think we did some good job here on the reconciliation on the pod. Where do we want to go next? Stargate Project? Stargate.

Stargate. Stargate. Stargate. Stargate and Energy. Yeah.

Stargate and Energy. Okay, so here we go. And I'm going to go to our guest here, Thomas. Thomas, anything on January sixth or controversial topics like smoking weed? That you want to jump in on there? No? Okay, great. Sure. Your LPs just breathed. Hey, you're coming on the All In podcast.

When it's LPs, they're going to be so happy. But then when they hear the J6, they're just going to be clenched waiting for their- They're going to be clenched.

Wait, hold on. My mic went out. Oh, never mind.

I missed it. Okay. All right.

It was well said. Honestly, I don't have anything to add. You guys summed it up nice.

Anything on Lauren Sanchez's outfit. Okay, let's continue. Another big story from week one. We are literally not even three or four days into this. It's going to be a crazy four years. According to OpenAI's press release, the Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest 500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. Friedberg, we got to find out what's going on here with the Stargate movie and TV series, if they got IP permission to do this, SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead- Good question, Jago. I'm just thinking out loud, and we have to talk about where this ranks on your list of great sci-fi and most accurate- Top 30, top 40, sci-fi.

Okay, right up there with the Star Trek original series and the next generation.

Softbank and OpenAI are the lead partners with Oracle and MJX, also participating. Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will build and operate the infrastructure Microsoft is involved, although we'll see about that. Masch is, Yoshi San was at the announcement he's going to be the chairman. However, Gavin Baker and Elon both called Cap on X, saying they don't actually have the money. Gavin did some back the envelope math. And of course, as always, Sam and Elon have been spicy in the replies. Sam is hurt. Elon is dunking. It's just their relationship is so fluid. Microsoft CEO Satya Adela jumped into my thread with Elon saying he was good for the '80 bill, and then he was ready to build other products and services, and that was what was important. What do you think here, Thomas? Are you an investor in OpenAI I guess? Let's get that out there. Or in XAI, just so we know where you're coming from here if you're talking your book.

But is 500- I am an investor in OpenAI. Okay. There's three points I want to make here. Go. Point number one, going back to the origins of this podcast and sitting watching both public market investors and venture investors. One notable difference is I think venture investors tend to be very tribal. If you're in one tribe, you are, by definition, not in another. I think there's a lot of domain-specific reasons for that. For me, as my legacy as a public market investor, I'm very comfortable being both pro-open AI and pro-Tesla and pro-X. I just caveat that as a first point. My second point is, can we do a slight detour on Masa for one minute? I'm curious to get your guys's opinion. But is Masa the goat? Because when I started in the growth business, I with Yuri Milner, and he said, Thomas, you get in the Hall of Fame if you can have one deal that gives you a billion dollar return, i. E, whatever you invest plus what you take out is a billion dollars or more. And he actually kept a tracker in his mind of who had made those deals and what share he had and et cetera.

Let's go to Masa for one minute. Masa is the $100 billion club.

Yeah.

Okay. And not only that, he's actually done it twice. He did it the first time with SoftBank and Alibaba, which at its peak was a $200 billion our win, and I think he ultimately netded like 80 plus billion out of it, so that's one. He did it again with Arm, that he bought for $30, and now is sitting on a gain of $135 billion. And he could have done He wanted a third time with NVIDIA if he hadn't sold.

I mean, guys- There's nobody like him.

There's nobody like him.

Incredible. You're 100 % right. You got to give the man his flowers. He is the goal.

So I'll tell you what, Chamath, I am never betting against Mahsa, ever. Because you got to give the man credit for what he's done. Now, let's go to OpenAI. You guys mentioned we do own some OpenAI. I am bullish on OpenAI, which I guess is now a counter against the grand view. But guys, my point of view on OpenAI and the reason I'm so bullish is really ChatGPT. I do think when OpenAI gets... It does have different businesses. It's got the model business, it has the API business, and then it has the ChatGPT business. If you look at the downloads, maybe nick bring up the charts, but it is really interesting to watch the market share of ChatGPT versus Google, Gemini, and Grok. This is both in the US and international. It really is a dominant franchise. It is maintaining 80% plus market share. J. Call, if this was ride sharing, we would say, Wow, this company is the winner. To me, I think the quality of the ChatGPT franchise, I think they disclosed 300 million weekly actives, over a million enterprise users. It has become a core part of my own workflow. I have it on my phone, I have it on my desktop, I use it all the time.

I can't even quantify the value that it brings. It's so important for what it does for me. I do think that it just keeps getting smarter. Every query that I ask, it learns more about me, it learns more about our system. I do think the ChatGPT franchise inside of OpenAI is one of the great, most successful, fastest-growing stories. That's the underpinning of my OpenAI thesis. On Stargate, specifically, look, I think the real question to me isn't whether they have the 500 billion, right? Because we know that the 500 billion could come from equity. It could come from Masa. If you look at Gavin's tweet, by the way, he does caveat it, saying that assumes that Masa doesn't want to sell Arm and SoftBank, right? So I'm not sure- Or just leverage it up and use debt. Correct. You have debt. I think to me, the real question, guys, is, do we ultimately believe that you can get an ROI on that 500 billion? Because if you can, there will be people that will want to fund it. You can do a data center by data center. You can do it actually at the GPU level.

So The financing is there. To me, the 500 billion doesn't scare me from an absolute number. I think the question we really have to ask ourselves is, do we believe that the market is big enough, that the opportunity is big enough, that investors can get a return on the $500 billion? I think you framed it- So to me, that's the real question.

I think you framed it perfectly. And since you bring up ride sharing and the 80% there, I really think that's an important thing to take a moment to settle on because in that case, you didn't have Uber being challenged by Google, Microsoft, and Elon Musk at the same time in a digital product as opposed to a real-world product. And so when I I use Gemini or XAI and ChatGPT, and I use them all daily in Claude, the difference between the products right now is really narrow. I think if the equivalent would be somebody who had a 100 million cars on the road already competing against Uber, which doesn't exist or didn't exist at the time. That, I think, is the way I look at this as a slightly different type of race. I do believe the ChatGPT franchise is worth something, but I think enterprise folks, when I talk to them, want the open-source product most of all. Anyway, I think it's still anybody's... I think it's anybody's game right now. I don't know how you get a return on 500 billion in this. That's the other thing. I don't know if that's the real number.

Friedberg, what do you think?

I don't know.

This is out here in some crazy- I think, guys, the way these things happen is you don't fund it all equity up front.

I think these things get funded, facility by facility, data center by data center, across four years. To Chamas' point, it's not just equity, it's site level debt, et cetera. It's a complex capital structure to these things. But look, we live also in a world where I was just looking at this chart, the cloud CapEx chart. We know that in total, 2025 CapEx for the top five players in the US is going to be 312 billion. So that's this year, that's in one year. We can also frame this and saying, hey, does that number make any sense versus what others are spending? It's at least in the order of magnitude, when you think about it's over four years. By the way, another really interesting corollary on this point is the US Internet companies spend 20X what the Chinese companies spend on CapEx. Really interesting as we think about our competitiveness, Dave, to your point, it's not just power, it's also compute. I mean, pretty powerful that you're spending 20X what your competitor is on these advanced technologies.

Jamal, how do you look at this?

I think that value and money are are correlated in some industries, like real estate or heavy industry, but I don't think that it's very correlated in tech. I tried to say this in my tweet. I don't know, nick, can you find this tweet where I was just talking about the deep seek model? What did we see last week? We saw a model that got released by the Chinese under, by the way, a totally open-source MIT license that you can run on a laptop. It turned out to be as good as OpenAI's '01 model, so a couple of versions old. But the point is that this model cost millions of dollars and was able to compete with a model that took billions of dollars to train. My takeaway from that was that these costs are falling really precipitously. So that's my one observation is spending more money doesn't necessarily get you further along if the goal is progress. And I think that that's very true in what we're learning about AI, because we're learning as we go along. Then I think it just brings up this question of what is the point of saying all these grandiose numbers?

This is where if you look at a different industry, if an oil company came into the oval and said they were about to spend 500 billion, you know that it's real because you know what these things cost and you know what the entire infrastructure will be, and you know it's all directly correlated.

And we've seen landmands, so we know. We know what goes on.

Yeah. The deeper the oil is in the and the harder the rock is that you got a breakthrough to get there, the more you have to spend. Those numbers become very grounded in reality. If you were a rocket company and you wanted to build a rocket and send it to Mars, you can also be very detailed in what the costs are. And you can assume some amount of reductions of scale. Somebody said you'd have to spend 500 billion. The thing is that in this world, it seems that there are these advances that are happening that allow you to do things cheaper and cheaper almost overnight by spending one one-thousandth what you spent even six months ago. I think the spending money part, to be honest, is more of a gimmick than it is a technical commitment. I guess if they want to spend the money, go ahead. But it doesn't actually tie to whether they're going to be able to make custom vaccines, whether they're going to cure cancer. I thought that these things were just joint. My takeaway was entirely different. It was not a commentary on Masa or Larry or Sam. I think all of those three companies are, frankly, very good.

It was more a comment that you have to be very careful to protect the President's legacy, if I were them, to make sure that the things that get announced are actually further down the technical spectrum and are actually going to be real. Because if they achieve these things, but it costs you a billion dollars and you only hire 50 people, there's going to be a little bit of egg on the face. That was my own takeaway. I think that the things were decoupled. It just seemed more marketing and sizzle and hastily put together?

It was definitely put together with hast.

You know what I mean? Yeah, you got that sense. But I think it would be great if OpenAI builds in another incredible model, whatever comes after '03, '04, '05. But it's not clear that you have to spend 500 billion to do it.

I think people are playing to what Trump likes, which is a big number and which is his influence on growing the number. So there was specific details where Mahsa said, you I told you 100 billion. You challenged me to get two. I came back with five. This is the Trump ethos is, Hey, we're going to swing for the fences. In a way, you could be critical of it and be like, Well, Trump's a BS artist or whatever. Or if you're from Silicon Valley, you can say, Hey, listen, he's moonshotting it. He's going to just shoot for the stars and get the moon. If these guys wind up spending 50 billion or 100 billion, it makes us more competitive, more power to me.

The question I had was, did Elon have any insight that this was happening? Probably not from the reaction on X.

I bet he did. I think I have no insight either. But I do think if you were going to be critical of Trump, that he was putting his thumb on the scale for any one company or individual, this shows that he's not. It's an open platform. The Trump administration is an open platform. Highest bidder gets to come to the White House. Whoever spends the most, whoever buys the most military, BIO buys the most ammunitions from us, you're going to get your time in the White House. This is a capitalist country, and this is the greatest one in the world. Equal opportunity. Equal opportunity. Anybody can make a bid.

The obvious consequence of this data center and chip infrastructure effort, which is obviously going to happen with or without government involvement, is an increase in electricity demand. Thomas, I know you've got some slides. Do you want to pull those up and show them? Because I think they're something I've talked a lot about on the show, which is the difference in electricity production capacity in the US versus China, historically and then prospectively going forward. Ultimately, as I've talked about in the past, the US today is paying roughly, call it one and a half to three X, the price per kilowatt hour for electricity in the United States, over what China is paying. We have, I believe, half of the electricity production capacity of China. They're adding more. The cost to add is one-tenth of what our cost to add is. Call it one-tenth to one-half our cost to add per gigawatt of production capacity. Everything is in the wrong direction. Ultimately, if AI and automation are the critical factors for economic growth going forward, and electricity is the critical input to that, we are hugely disadvantaged and aren't going to catch up. It seems like you've pulled this analysis together, which indicates the same, if you think it makes sense to walk through this Yeah, I'd be happy to.

I mean, Dave, you're 100% right. If you think of the GPU as the atomic unit of the future, and the key competitive advantage and the key ingredient, you can't power a GPU without a data center, and you can't use a data center without power. I do think at the end of the day, it really comes down to the grid and it comes down to power. I think that's constraint number one. The other thing, Dave, that I think is really important is in an inflationary era, you do not want to increase or have this industry be perceived to be increasing electricity prices for the consumer. Somehow we need to add capacity. We need to make it so the consumer doesn't go bonkers by having their bills go higher. We can, nick, run through a couple of the slides, but the data shows exactly your point, Dave, which is we basically did not invest for a very long period of time in our grid, and China did. If you keep going, we can run through these a couple of times. But that wasn't always the case. During the post-World War II boom era, during the information age, we did invest, and we did a lot of it.

Then suddenly in 2000, we just stopped.

This is globalization, you're saying, is why we stopped? Correct.

Exactly. We start to outsource- Is it by interpretation of that that we didn't have factories?

We didn't have factories, so we didn't need as much power? What's the reason we didn't invest or we didn't need to?

I think we just outsourced a lot of our hardcore manufacturing.

The USD industrialized.

That's what I guess. Correct.

That's offshore. No factory equals no need for additional electricity. Now, the new factories are H100 factories.

We need it back. Exactly. Or AI factories. Ai factories. By the way, the way to think about it is almost like a subscription business on a net ad basis. This makes it even more stark because this is net additions, and it just speaks for itself.

Just read the numbers out so the audience that's listening can get a sense here.

You can see. I mean, since 1985, the delta, roughly between China and the US is almost, what's the quick math? It's almost 7X, right?

In 2000, the US and China were both roughly a thousand terawatt-hours. Today, the US is 1,600 terawatt-hours, and China is 9,000 terawatt-hours. This is just an extraordinary ramp up relative to correct US emissions.

On the AI side, there was a Biden EO last week. I spoke about this on Tucker because it happened the day I went on Tucker, but The EO basically said, We will allow the permitting of power plants on federal lands to power AI data centers, which started off like a very intelligent EO, but right in the second paragraph started to talk about DEI and all this other stuff and how you had to have a certain percentage of it from certain sources. But just today, it looked like President Trump overturned it, and now it's full steam ahead. If you have it permitted, then it's all about just get the power however you need the power, which I think is the smart decision. Back to your earlier point, we are in a race here.

In your analysis, Thomas, can we do this without nuclear? No. Can we catch out without nuclear? Okay.

In fact, we can't.

Why we buy uranium.

I think you can speak to that better. One of the really interesting parts, you can see, by the way, just the percentage of nuclear It needs to go higher. I don't know if you guys have been following this stock in the public market, guys, called Constellation Energy. Oh, yeah. It's a really interesting idea. What's interesting of what Amazon Microsoft is they're actually signing deals directly with these companies to do what's called back behind the meter types of deals, so they have direct energy access. To your point, Shamath, on the Biden administration, at the end of last year, a deal got publicly announced that federal agencies were also contracting directly now with CEG to power some of their facilities. Even though the When total, the number was small, we took it, and I think the market took it as a clear indication that the government, even under Biden, was acknowledging that nuclear is the best path forward. We expect and we think just the trend generally towards nuclear energy is going to continue. It's been proven in China, it's been proven in Europe. I think it will show to be a key part of the AI arms race over the next 10, 20 years.

This is, to me, the story in one slide, which is if you look at basically the nuclear capacity in the US, it's basically been flat for 25 plus years.

Ridiculous. When Scott Besson was asked, Are we in a green energy arms race with China?

He was thinking about chart number on the right, which basically shows how much nuclear or China has added right over that time period. I think it's pretty clear what the answer is. I think China is leading the way in that measure, and I think we need to follow.

I think what's really important to note is over that same period of time, Thomas, we're in a different era on nuclear than we were when we had Three Mile Island and prior to that, turnover. We have new Gen 4 technologies that are meltdown proof, that have a totally different architecture where there isn't a setup where you have runaway heat and ultimately a collapse of the reactor and a release of radioactive material, which is what happened at chernobyl. Well, these new systems, which we highlighted on the show a couple of months ago, like the pebble bed reactor that's been in production making electricity in China, are incredible new technology architectures, and they're here, and they're running. China is rolling out dozens or hundreds of these stations, and the United States is rolling out zero, and that needs to change. I think we only have a couple of months to get the engine stood up that will allow us to make the material, that will allow us to make the production technology needed to actually deploy these stations to try and have a shot at catching up. If we don't, we're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an energy cost basis.

We're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an ability to actually deploy AI technology competitively.

That's key. By the way, you also can look at France, right? My my home country, not known as a technology leader, but 70% of its energy, of its electricity comes from nuclear.

But France helped align, right? When Europe tried to really deprecate its use of nuclear, Germany did. But France helped align.

Yeah, it's too important, Chamat. It's 70% plus. I think there's examples, it's doable. I think now with AI, it's a matter of national security.

National security.

We got to get it done.

By the way, that'll dovetail into Fabs, which which is obviously another key component, which is a short term for semiconductor manufacturing facilities, which is another, in my opinion, key strategic area that we need to ramp up in the US.

The thing that I noticed about that chart is the trend line. I mean, look at how fast they're building these. And this is where, I don't know what government incentive we need to create or what red tape has to be moved here. But if we can't build multifamily housing in some states, this nuclear is going to really need to... We're going to have to figure out a way to change that trend line, Friedberg. What would it take to build these nuclear power plants at an accelerated rate?

I will tell you that there is a lot of capital, and we mentioned this last time, a lot of intellectual capital in the United States that's eager, hungry, and ready to get moving on buildout. The only thing that's challenged and the only thing that's holding it back is regulatory challenges, regulatory roadblocks. If those get removed through emergency action, I view this to be more of a national security threat, frankly, than the border. I think we need to get energy increased in this country in an accelerated way for the United States to even be in a position to be able to challenge China with respect to manufacturing and AI in the decades ahead. The United States needs to consider this an emergency. Emergency declarations may be needed to drop the regulatory roadblocks that are keeping the proliferation proliferation of electricity production in the United States at bay. I think it's time for that action. I think that's the only thing that's getting in the way.

We have the tech, we have the physics, we have the will, we have the talent, we have a blocker, and the blocker is regulation, and that regulatory blocker needs to have leadership in government to remove it. Am I summarizing correctly here?

That's right. Look, you have an energy Tsar that I think is very aligned with that intention in Doug Burgum. Obviously, we have this big AI arms race that's underway. We have an automation of manufacturing demand, which will massively increase energy demand in this country. We have, I think, a deregulatory administration. The stars are aligned, and I think that this is a moment where this could happen.

Chamath or Thomas, what's the downside to removing the regulation and going for it and building this extra capacity? Can we define any possible downside?

Yeah, the downside is the amount of time it takes to adequately build these things properly. The thing that China has had, it's as Thomas' chart shows, is decades of practice in building things safely and quickly. We can build things, but we haven't had the practice to build them either safely or quickly because we haven't built any. So that's a complicated thing to just acknowledge.

That's a valid concern. If there is any resistance to this, Thomas, what would be on the top of that list? Just theoretically, how could anybody want to block this? What would be the resistance?

One other element, guys, I think you know that we are blocking the ability of China to get access to the latest GPUs. And the whole point is we don't want them to use, to develop systems that could be used against us. But if one day China has 10X our power capacity, it won't even matter. Because they'll just have so many more, whether they're not quite the same advanced GPUs or not, they'll just have so many more of them. Their industrial AI capacity will be so much larger that even if we have the best H100s and the latest technology that Jensen and others can provide, it won't matter. In order to make our strategy effective, we need to be able to build this power base.

I think it's a very astute point. Hey, Chamath, I don't know if you've been watching Netflix, but I am a shareholder and I am delighted. I don't know what's going on over there, but they seem to be getting their subs right. And that disgratiaid of a fight seems to have somehow driven the stock price up. And there's some strategy that's working over there. Maybe you could just rift on it for a moment.

I have the opposite take.

Okay.

Yeah, I mean, It's obviously a very good company. I think it's been incredibly performant, but I think it has a little bit of a dark commentary on American society and productivity. So I asked nick to just put up these three charts. I'll show you the first one. This is the Netflix stock price from 2010 to 2020, and it's only gotten up since 2024. The only reason I did it at 2020 was because the other data. I went to the CDC and I said, Well, show me the percentage of people, Americans, taking SSRIs over that same period. For depression, for depression, anxiety, et cetera, and what you see that it's also gone up. Then the last chart, I went the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and I said, What has happened to the labor participation rate over the same period? I'm not blaming Netflix, but I think that this is a bit of a commentary on what's happening in society. It's a little bit of a leading indicator where as the company does better and better, the reality is that that company wins by being a sink for people's time. It's where you go to Netflix chill.

It's a phrase that we all understand. But the dark underbelly of it is that there's just a lot of people that are a little bit more dejected. There's a lot of people that just opt out and just don't decide to work. I think you could graph the fertility rate, and it's gone down ratably as well. It's all of this soup that is about people living in a life that, unfortunately, just doesn't exist. I It's a well-run business, and I wish them all the best at some level, but at some other level, I think it's a commentary that as this company does better and better, there are more and more people that are living a shell of what their life could be.

So cause and correlation aside- It's obviously correlated.

This is not causal. Yes.

Netflix is not causing depression.

It's just the thing. There's other things that obviously you can put on this plate. Sure. But that was my reaction is I just think that the more the time people are detaching and plugging out, the more that you're going to see these companies that provide ways of distracting yourself do well, I'm not sure that society benefits.

What do you think, Thomas? Opioids for the masses or just the golden era of television?

What I'm curious, Chamath, is how much of it is a substitutive effect away from traditional media? I've looked at it as different ways. At least the way it's measured, time spent watching television has not really increased over 20 years. To me, it's more a reflection of I could overlay the stock chart of Fox and Comcast and CBS, and just all of those have imploded. I think people have been substituting away. I think the question then you have to ask is, is there a reason that maybe the Netflix product is fundamentally more unsafe or detrimental to someone's health than the prior broadcast?

The one thing that I would say is, and this is not a Netflix commentary, but a general commentary, which is online products versus linear products have the power and the benefit of this algorithmic targeting and personalization. I think that what Netflix has successfully figured out, and a bunch of other products have successfully figured is that you can hypertune to what people think they want. But what people think they want is not necessarily what they need. I think when you had linear television, you had to take what was given. You didn't love Cheers, but you watched years. You didn't love seeing elsewhere, but you watched it. Now it's that you can go into a place where the thing really feeds you, and it gives you a very visceral feedback loop. You can stay there binge watching something for an entire weekend. And what didn't... I think the question is, what didn't you do? Yes. Necessarily didn't work out, necessarily didn't eat well, necessarily didn't- Didn't spend time with friends playing cards, laughing. And by the way, I'm not saying that I don't do it. I've done it as well. Our group chat, one of the interesting things when Jason, he's very good about television and stuff, he says, This series is amazing.

Our other friend Rob Goldberg does the same thing. It's hard for me to start it and then not end it.

It's addicting.

But I have to really check myself because then for those two days, I'll be tempted to not leave my bedroom. My kids are like, Where's my father? I think it happens to all of us. It's just a thing that, again, I'm not trying to pick on Netflix. I'm just trying to say societally, I think we want people that are vigorous and engaged in the real world. There needs to be a balance.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think you have to schedule these things. You have to make it a permanent part of your life, playing poker on a certain night of the week, doing certain things on the weekends with your kids, having certain rituals. The real damage to our kids is not that the screens are damaging them, it's that it's replacing time. I think we were alluding to there, Thomas, this anxious generation as Jonathan Haight, and we had a great interview with him, myself and Friedberg in the All In Interview series, that is what's happening. Kids are substituting, whether it's TikTok or Netflix Netflix or YouTube time for time with their friends, time doing physical activities. So you really just have to limit the screen time so that those other things and the boredom can emerge. And we will be having a talk in the coming years about dopamine. It is something that these algorithms have gotten really good at doing, which is firing your dopamine. Every time you swipe that TikTok, every time you get to the cliffhanger in a series or a Mr. Beast video, not singling anybody out, he's just a master of it as well.

They're just all really good at giving you that hook, that amazing moment. Musicians are doing this now, too, with the hooks, and then the hooks go on TikTok. The dopamine addiction, when you get burnt out late at night getting those dopamine hits, the next day, you feel depressed. Then you go to a doctor and the doctor said, Oh, well, you have depression, so here's your Wellbutrin, or here's whatever the... I don't know what the things are of the moment. I'll just tell you what I focus on and what I focus on with my family. Sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, meditation. Do these four things and you will reverse these trends. You don't need it. Listen, I don't want to tell you what to do.

Meditation is hard for kids, but I get the first three.

You know what? Try it. I'm not talking on my own book here. By the way, you know what's crazy? Get the Calm app.

It has a bunch of stuff for kids. When I was growing up, I grew up Buddhist. My father would make us sit there at nine o'clock every night, and my sisters and I would to say this Buddhist prayer, and then he would make us close our eyes for 15 minutes. And he said, Meditate. And I was like, I don't know what meditation is, but I was forced to just keep my eyes shut. And I would just daydream. But I suspect that there was some reasonably grounding value in that. So I get what you're saying. I just have such a negative connotation from it. I've never been able to come back to it because of that experience. But I would just daydream. And by the way, what I daydreamt was getting out of that house. I got to be successful.

So you got a vision.

A vision came to you. I got to manifest some success here because this sucks.

Hey, Thomas, thanks for coming on the show. Great first appearance here as a bestie. We'd love to have you back unless the king returns at some point.

You're the best. You should come back, and you should also come back to the Holland Summit.

Come back. Yeah, it will be great. I'm here for both. I know we still have some great topics like HockTan and others that I want to get to someday.

Well, that's actually when you come back, which we will do at some point in the next few months, I would love for us to double click into HockTan. For folks that are listening, Wait, what? We were going back and forth. Hocktan is the CEO of Broadcom. The reason when Thomas brought this up, Hey, guys, let's double click into Broadcom and the CEO, the reason why I was excited is that it is the only trillion a company that nobody talks about. Everybody knows NVIDIA, everybody knows Amazon, Meta, but Broadcom is a $1. 12 trillion business. And it started basically through a whole series of rollups. Anyways, we'll double click into this with you because I think it's so fascinating.

No, this is not the Broadcom we're all thinking of from the telecom era, is it? It is.

Yeah, Henry Samuoli. Yeah.

Correct.

The same one is still around.

I will leave you guys with a with a teaser to tease the next episode when we talk about it, and I'll tell you the story that when Hawk bought Broadcom, J. K. Health, to your point, Broadcom is the pride of Orange County, founded by Henry Nicholas and Henry Samuoli, legends and semiconductors, a legendary name. So It meant a lot to them that the combined company, Avago was buying Brottcom, keep the name Brottcom. And so Hawk, being who he is, got a little bit of a price discount to name the company Brottcom. To him, that was a great deal. That's who Hawk is. He's a great businessman. But what is the ticker of this particular company?

Avgo.

And so I said, Hawk, why is the ticker still AVGO? And you know what he said to me? Turned to me, he said, Thomas, they forgot to negotiate for the ticker.

Oh, never Don't forget the ticker.

Interesting. When he started, what was the market cap?

3. 5 billion, Chamath. Not only was it an orphan because it was a spin out of HP. Oh, my God, look at this chart. It was a spin out of A spin-out of HP. It was a double orphan.

300x.

Look at this. Yeah.

No one else like them. What's really interesting is in the last five years, the market cap has grown by 8X, NVIDIA has grown by 20X, but Intel over the last five years is what, down 70%? I think there's a big divergence. Thomas, do you think this is a function of... I don't know if it's directionally investing in the right things, or is it about making long term investments and thinking down the road. I mean, obviously the compounding advantage- He's an M&A master.

This is less about there was a product that won and more of a portfolio approach and a portfolio construction.

But did he buy well ahead of the curve? Did he buy over the Horizon, Thomas? Is that where Intel really missed?

I think Intel really missed. It's a complete abdication of corporate governance at the board level and the CEO level.

Hey, guys, breaking news story coming across my feed. I don't know if you can pull this up, nick, but there's a video trending on the internet. Apparently, an executive order has just gone across the president's desk, and it was delivered by none other than a gentleman named David Sacks. Now, there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

This is that crypto EO we're going to be forming an internal working group to make America the world capital in crypto under your leadership.

Which is really going up, right? Absolutely.

Here we go. Whoa. Look at this. What? He's using a Sharpie there to sign these executive orders? Oh, Sacks gets to keep the pen. There it is. An executive order. I love how he holds them up. It's so great. I wonder if Sacks gets to keep that. They It might not be excited, but we're going to make a lot of money for the country.

Thank you, sir. And so is David.

Oh, your reaction, Jamal.

I think this is great.

We're going to make crypto great again?

I'll be a little bit more specific. So I think that there are a handful of ideas that, if we can implement them correctly, are really revolutionary. I think that it's good to have a stockpile of crypto. I have less of an opinion on that. I think a set of stablecoin rails that makes payments instantaneous and costless is an enormous acceleration to GDP. It would cut fraud. I think that David is going to go and figure that out.

You're talking about stablecoins, specifically?

Stablecoins. I talked about this at the beginning of the year as one of my predictions, but I do think that the United States stablecoin rails will be hugely disruptive and value-added. He's going to have help from the head of the SEC and the head of Treasury to do it. I just think it's great. I think Sacks is already off to a hugely fast start.

The entire country knows that we need to win the AI race. The numbers are the numbers. You put up a chart like that, Thomas, and there's only one way for us to win, and that's to build more nuclear power plants. And so I think he's just got to hammer this through, and let's see who tries to stop it. I don't know if AOC or Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, Bernie Sanders, who wants to jump in front of this Trump train right now, but I think you'll get slaughtered. If only there were somebody who could comment on this executive order, that's what I need. You know Chamoth, if I had the bat phone, if I could call somebody-Who would you call Jason? You know, phone a friend?

Who would you call?

I don't know. I hit my saxy pool. It was always on speed dial. We used to hang in between. We'd have these great battles here on the pod. Then we go play chess We go have some drinks at the battery. But that was a different era. I don't got my boy anymore. He's busy. Do we got him? All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning into the All In podcast. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. We will see you next time. Bye.

Oh, sorry. What? There he is. There he is. He's back.

Back to reclaim his seat. It's yours. Welcome home.

We miss you, buddy.

You look so handsome. I'm going to cry.

I'm What day is not my bestie.

We miss you, buddy. Were you just in the oval office?

I was just in the oval office.

First time in the oval office? Let me ask you a question. Was that your first time in the oval?

Well, it technically was my second, but How was it, Sacks?

How's it been so far?

It's pretty incredible. Yeah, it's really been pretty incredible.

Well, tell us, what are the vibes and what's it like to go in to the oval office and to have that executive Executive Order signed. Tell us what the moment was like, and then tell us what's in the executive order.

Well, we did three executive orders today. We did one on crypto, one on AI, and then one on PCAS, which is the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. The one on crypto, I guess we can start there. The main thing it does is it forms an internal working group with the goal of making the US the world leader in crypto. So it's not one specific action. It's basically authorizing and creating a working group with the goal of achieving that objective. The members of this working group are going to be, there's me, there's the head of the SEC, the secretary of the Treasury, and all the agencies and departments that have an interest in crypto. We formed this working group. I'm actually chairing it, or I will be. Again, the goal here is to identify and make recommendations that the departments would then take back and they could execute And just again, with the goal of making America the world capital of cryptos, the President said, of Davos today.

And then the other two, Sacks?

Yeah, so that's crypto. Next one is AI. So the number one thing that that EO does is rescind the Biden EO, which we talked about on this podcast, I don't know how many episodes ago. But remember, it was this hundred-page monstrosity of burdensome regulation. And the President had promised on the campaign trail to repeal that, and he did. So it got rescinded. Actually, there was a master EO on Monday that contained dozens of Biden era EOs that got mass rescinded. This one provided a little bit more detail on it. Basically said that that EO wasn't necessarily burdensome. It said that we want to be the world leader in AI. In fact, it uses the word dominate. We want to basically have global dominance in AI. And similar to what we're doing on the crypto side, it directs the creation of an AI action plan. And that The study will be led by three people, the National Security Advisor, who is Mike Walsh, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who will be Michael Kratzios as soon as he's been confirmed, and then the third person is me. The three of us are going to work together on this AI action plan.

The idea is to figure out what is it that the industry actually needs to make us, number one, globally in AI. It's putting a little bit more substance behind what this our role means.

The last one is to build a science council. I don't know if everybody's familiar with that, so maybe you could just describe what that is, generally, for the audience.

Well, PCAS has been around for a long time. I mean, I think it's been around for decades. The goal of PCAS is to assemble a group of top science and technology minds to provide the President with advice. So this was already announced, but basically me and Michael Kratzios, who I mentioned before, is going to be the Director of OSDP. We're going to be co-chairing that. And this is an EO that provides the authorizing language to set that up. And then it provides some direction around what PCAS is going to do. I think some of the language that Friedberg may like is just... It talks about the need to return to truth-telling in science and getting away from woke science. The AI order discusses this as well. We don't want AI models to be ideologically biased, to have an agenda. I don't know if it uses the word woke AI, but that's basically what it's talking about. We want AI models to be as politically unbiased as possible.

Well, if you I need a recommendation for somebody for the council, I know somebody who is extremely well-versed on science. He's got a broad array of science knowledge.

Here, here.

Yeah, I have an idea. Then we could have two besties in and around the White House. Hey, well, Thanks for including us in so many aspects of the weekend. The audience really wants to know, what are the chances we get Sacks back on the pod now and again in 2025? We do appreciate everything we're doing You're going to sacrifice your money. We're doing it right now, but the audience is not going to just accept this little drop in here. They want to know what's the long term plan for David Sacks in the pod?

What's happened with media overall in the administration now that confirmation hearings are Underway Sacks and closing out, does that mean folks are going to be able to get back on social and things that they were restricted by over the last couple of weeks?

Sure. But I think that if you're working for the White House, there needs to be a reason for you to be out there because you don't want to be making news that you're not supposed to. So in the case here today, the President signed these executive orders on crypto and AI, and they want me explaining them. So it makes sense for me to go out there. I've got an appearance on Fox business in about an hour to talk about the EOS as well. So that might come out before this podcast comes out, but you guys are the first ones I'm actually talking to. But so there's a reason for me to come out and do it. And I think that there probably will need to be a good reason for me to come on the pod, but I'm going to try and come on the pod every chance I get.

All right. Well, this is our appeal to DJ T to let you come on and just chew the fat, and maybe there's some upside to it for him.

Do you miss being on the pod, Sacks?

Oh. Yeah, sure. Of course.

We miss you so much.

Look, I'll be back. Don't worry. At some point.

Are you a little emotional right now, Sax?

What are your favorite memories from the inauguration weekend?

Well, the inauguration ceremony itself was really pretty spectacular. You were there in the capital, Chama. It's funny. Jack and I took our seats in the rotunda in the back in the peanut gallery, and I thought that's where I was going to be And then somebody comes up to me and says, Mr. Sacks, we have a seat for you up front. And so they put me on the day- You were with the big boys. It was like the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Treasury, and then me. Then we were behind the the Trump family. You may not see me because those Trump kids are pretty tall, but that whole family is very tall. So I disappeared a little bit. But in any event, they put me on the dais, which was really pretty crazy. I wasn't expecting that. Wow, I didn't realize that. It was a huge honor.

There was a shot where David and Jacquelyn were in the front. They looked amazing, and they were looking around for where to sit. I was like, this can't be right because he must have had a name. It's good that it all got sorted out. But what was the vantage point from your side? Basically, you're looking out.

I was looking out, and I could see the faces of the Democrats as the President came out. President Biden and Kamala Harris. They didn't look too happy.

No. I wish they had a fixed camera on them the whole time. I wanted to see the reaction shots.

I've seen some of the reaction shots. That was really unique to have... I thought that that speech was really incredible. Because, well, first of all, it was completely consistent with everything the President had said during the campaign. And so you really felt like he has a mandate here because this is everything he said during the campaign. It remind me a lot of there's that famous quote by Abraham Lincoln, that public sentiment is everything. With it, you can accomplish anything. Without it, you can't do anything. And it really felt like that inauguration speech was full of substance, but it was substance that the President had delivered on the campaign trail. And so when he won this victory, where he only won the presidency, he won the popular vote, he won seven out of seven swing states, he won the House, he won the Senate, it really feels like he has a mandate. And I think he reiterated that mandate in his speech. And then, of course, just the cherry on top is just that the losers just have to sit there and listen to it.

Well, kudos to them for coming out and keeping the tradition.

Well, yeah. When he's talking about the corrupt establishment that try to put him in prison through this welfare. I mean, he's talking about some of those people who are sitting behind him. I just thought it was a remarkable moment.

That was a crazy visual. Do you want to take us back, Zacks, on how you... Because you haven't talked about this publicly, but how did you end up, I guess getting the offer for the role, deciding to take the role? Anything you want to share anecdotally on the path to get here?

I don't know that there's that much to report. I was helping with the transition. I got offered the role and decided to do it. I I mean, look, it's not something I was expecting or planning, as you guys know. I didn't even know there was going to be such a role, but when they decided to create it and they offered it to me, and so I decided to do it. Just one thing I should clarify, just to make clear, is there's still some things I can't do yet in the role because there's a whole government ethics process that you have to go through, and I'm in the midst of that process. We've signed these EOs. It's given me certain responsibilities and authorized me to do certain things, and that process is going to begin as soon as I complete this, I guess you call it onboarding. So just to be clear about that, there's things I can do, there's things I can't do. I can be in listening mode. I can't be necessarily shaping policy yet. So that's all going to be worked through over the next couple of weeks.

All right, Sacks. I got to ask. First time in the oval. What's going through your mind?

Yeah, great question.

My head was on a swivel. One of those moments, you're like, you can't really believe that you're there. It does feel a little bit like you're on a movie set. I mean, it's so famous, obviously, to be in that office.

Is it bigger in person or is it smaller in person? What is it?

I thought it seemed about the right size. I know that one of the things people say about it is that it's smaller than you expect. I didn't feel like it was smaller, but it also didn't feel bigger. It felt like the oval office that you've always seen. The other people who are in there, the staffers who've been in there a hundred or a thousand times, it's obviously it wears off and it's just where they do their work. But yeah, I've got to admit, the first time you go in there, you're pretty awestruck. There was a post that JD Vance, now the vice President, had where he... Actually, do you guys see this? Mike Johnson?

I saw the video.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. He's walking in and he's in shock.

Because he had never been in there. I guess he became a senator a few years ago. We've had a Democrat President, so he never had been to the floor before.

Here's the video.

He said that he was honored and humbled to be there. I mean, that's the way I felt as well. Those comments by the vice President resonated with me. I think probably every American would feel this way the first time you're in the Oval Office.

It is pretty incredible. You want me to repeat the words that the President said about you? There's nobody like this guy. They said, How did you get David Sacks? How did you do that? He's doing it for the country more than anything else. We appreciate it, David. Thank you very much.

He's been really nice to me. That's really incredible. He's been just incredible to me. He gave me the pen from the signing, which is pretty cool.

Can we see the pen? Can we see the pen? What's the brand of the pen?

Well, it's not Basically, it says the White House on one side, and it's got his signature on another. Look, I wasn't expecting to enter that.

Is it like a Sharpie? What is it? Is it a Sharp?

It is a Sharpie. You've seen him sign, right? Yeah. I assume it's what he likes. He gave me the pen, which is pretty incredible.

Have you guys seen that there's all these ASMR videos of the president signing, where you can just hear the pen, the pen, the pen on the paper? It makes the Exactly. There's all these ASMRs of that.

Well, Friedberg wants to know if you could assign his new Tesla. He wants you to sign it with that pen. He wants you to autograph it. When you get back to the valley, you can start doing autographs with that all around.

No. I think only the present is allowed to use this pen.

Only the present is allowed to use. Okay, well, put it somewhere safe. Don't lose the pen. Got to put it in a glass box or something. Sacks, there's thousands of commenters who are just begging waiting for you to come back. Do you have a message to your legions of commenters?

Well, I thank them and I'm back right now. I know maybe it's not enough, but- Soak it in. I would hope if you guys could just do a better job on the pod so they weren't complaining all the time.

We'll do the best we can without you. All right, get back to work. Get back to work. Come on. You're on the taxpayer clock here. Go go back to work here and save America. Make America great again. Listen, we wish you great success. We miss you greatly, and we thank you for the service to the country. We wish you all the best as you go handle two of the most important issues for our country, AI, and help advise our President on cryptocurrency as well.

Love you, Saxi.

And PCAS.

Yeah, and PCAS.

Pcas, yes, of course. And PCAS as well.

Boys, love you very, very much. David, love you. Hopefully, see you on Tuesday.

Yes. Thomas, thanks for coming in. See you guys. Thanks for the opportunity.

We will see you all next time. Thomas, thank you very much. You were great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank Thomas.

Bye bye.

Love you, boys. See you guys. Bye.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sack.

And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Westies.

I'm going all in.

Besties are gone.

That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh, man.

My haber-to-me, Asher, will meet me at what himself. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What? You're the B. What?

You're the B. What? You're the B. We need to get merches.

I'm doing all in. I'm doing all in..