IPOs and SPACs are Back, Mag 7 Showdown, Zuck on Tilt, Apple's Fumble, GENIUS Act passes Senate

(0:00) The Besties welcome Thomas Laffont! (3:26) State of LA, Hollywood's decline, positivity around GDP growth and AI productivity (10:19) Zuck on tilt over AI: $100M offers, Scale AI deal, hiring spree (23:58) Mag 7 AI Showdown: Ranking the most likely AI winners, biggest stock divergences, and more (42:41) Why Apple is fumbling AI and how they can fix it? (57:02) IPOs and M&A heating up in 2025 (1:16:18) State of liquidity: SPACs, Direct Listings, and more (1:25:40) Amazon's "kingmaker" position, job displacement (1:37:47) Sacks joins to discuss the GENIUS Act passing the Senate (1:52:13) Animal trailer Follow Thomas Laffont: https://x.com/thomas_coatue Animal Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NNW5r63oXU Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/sam-altman-says-meta-tried-and-failed-to-poach-openais-talent-with-100m-offers https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/10/zuckerberg-makes-metas-biggest-bet-on-ai-14-billion-scale-ai-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/12/technology/meta-scale-ai.html https://scale.com/blog/scale-ai-announces-next-phase-of-company-evolution https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-talks-hire-former-github-ceo-nat-friedman-join-ai-efforts-information-2025-06-18 https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/11/mark-zuckerberg-our-biggest-mistake-with-mobile-was-betting-too-much-on-html5 https://www.reuters.com/technology/china-launch-new-40-bln-state-fund-boost-chip-industry-sources-say-2023-09-05 https://x.com/JoannaStern/status/1933564098291048764 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCEkK1YzqBo https://x.com/chamath/status/1932157508698919320 https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Center/Stats/Pricings https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-on-generative-ai https://x.com/chamath/status/1935369326321877153 https://x.com/chamath/status/1935740807925100853 https://www.google.com/finance/quote/COIN:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SPOT:NYSE https://x.com/ylecun/status/1935108028891861393 https://x.com/ben_j_todd/status/1934284189928501482 https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-senate-ohio-brown-moreno-74c4b91e5866215d4201377fefcadad0 https://companiesmarketcap.com/microsoft/revenue https://apnews.com/article/election-2024-senate-ohio-brown-moreno-74c4b91e5866215d4201377fefcadad0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NNW5r63oXU

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. I'm your host and executive producer for life. Isn't that right, David Friedberg? J. Cal, Jason Calacanis.

• 0:11David Friedberg?

  Not at all what you are.

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  Make sure you tune into this week's startups and apply to Founder University.

• 0:17David Friedberg?

  You're something very different.

• 0:18Jason Calacanis?

  With us again today, the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. Can I just congratulate you on your fourth baby? If you double that number, you're going to be able to catch up to Chamath and his five plus three illegitimate. How are you doing, David Friedberg?

• 0:52Jason Calacanis?

  How are you feeling? You're tired and grumpy, aren't you?

• 0:54David Friedberg?

  Easy transition for me. I didn't have to do the work.

• 0:57Jason Calacanis?

  Are you tired and grumpy? And how's Alison? How's the month?

• 1:00David Friedberg?

  Everyone's wonderful. Thank you for asking.

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  And a beautiful boy. Beautiful boy.

• 1:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is crushing?

• 1:05David Friedberg?

  Nothing more amazing than seeing a child.

• 1:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How's schmeckel?

• 1:10David Friedberg?

  Magnificent. Magnificent. Thank you for asking. Thank you for asking that. Yeah. Okay, let's move on. Thank you.

• 1:16Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you for all the goers. And just, we sent over a gift basket, Chamath and I, Longhorn pecan ya steaks, a 10-year membership for.

• 1:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, hey, congrats to Olivia Landon, by the way, of Long Hill Wagyu. She had twins.

• 1:33Jason Calacanis?

  That means she's going to have more people to work on the ranch and slaughter cattle to send us our pecan ya. Congratulations. Shout out.

• 1:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Congrats to Olivia Landon.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's so funny because we love this, we love these steaks so much. She doubled. We mentioned it on the pod and you idiots started like searching for lunatics and they ordered out all the Kool-Aid steaks. So now Chamath and I are screwed. No Kool-Aid left.

• 1:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they ordered out everything. Everything was sold out. Everything was sold out.

• 1:58Jason Calacanis?

  So now we have to gatekeep with us again, your chairman dictator, Chamath Polihaupatia. He have two votes in our fine organization. How are you doing, Chamath?

• 2:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I love voting control. I'm doing great.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  He starts Thomas Laffont with a tie and then all of the.

• 2:17Jason Calacanis?

  Gamesmanship happens between the team of rivals, me and Friedberg. With us again, Thomas Laffont, a gentleman, a scholar, no idea why he's here, a true.

• 2:28Jason Calacanis?

  You want to put a true gentleman, a true scholar and host of Easts meets West, an incredible conference that I attended this week. With our bestie David Sacks, who of course is at the White House and can't join us. But Thomas, what a great event. Thank you for including me.

• 2:47Thomas Laffont?

  No box lunches, by the way, we, we took your feedback from a couple of years ago, so I hope that we met your standard.

• 2:54Jason Calacanis?

  You did.

• 2:55David Friedberg?

  What were the highlights for you guys at your conference, Thomas?

• 2:58Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, I think for me, obviously, I think a lot of news in AI this week. So I think that was kind of the centerpiece of most of the panels, pretty much up and down the stack from SaaS companies trying to transform into AI. To obviously the big Zuck news on scale. And then potentially I saw in the information today, the, the Nat Friedman news. So it feels like there's a lot going on in the industry, so it should be fun to talk about.

• 3:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and we're going to talk about it all today. We got a really full docket. Rick Caruso, the mayor who would have saved Los Angeles from the fires. He was there and you actually hosted at his incredible facility. What a.

• 3:37Thomas Laffont?

  We did. We talked about the, the state of LA, which J Cal is that, is that, it looks like that's where you're at, right?

• 3:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I'm at my LA home, which.

• 3:46Thomas Laffont?

  AKA the compound.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, it's, uh, it's available on Airbnb. So I'm here in LA, but yeah, Rick Caruso, what a great speaker.

• 3:54Thomas Laffont?

  Interestingly, Jake out today, a friend just sent me a chart showing the recovery of restaurants post COVID. And LA is 50% behind on the recovery per store location versus the national average.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  What do you attribute that to? Or what did they attribute it to?

• 4:13Thomas Laffont?

  I think, I think there's kind of a couple of different things, right? I think one, the economy, which, you know, unlike the San Francisco economy being levered to, to AI and on the upswing. Is more levered to entertainment. And I think. You know, secular decline. I think, you know, someone mentioned at the conference that filmings in LA are down 50% from peak. So, I mean, that's just a massive move down, losing share to other GOs, both in the US. I think Georgia, right, Jake How was mentioned?

• 4:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, Ted Sarand has explained exactly how aggressive New York is being, the UK is being, Atlanta. I mean, so many different hubs for movies giving much better deals than Los Angeles is.

• 4:57Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah. So I think it's a combination of, I think, you know, being levered to one industry that's kind of in secular decline.

• 5:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I can tell you from Mr. Beast that for Beast Games, we had a deal in Las Vegas and in Toronto. We got huge tax credits. And in the second season that we're doing for Amazon, we did an enormous deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And so we're filming a bunch of episodes there. We're building the sets there. We're actually going to keep them there after it's all said and done. We would not film in Los Angeles unless we absolutely had to. We will stay as far away from California as possible.

• 5:35Jason Calacanis?

  And regulations are such a big part of this.

• 5:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's uneconomic. You can't make it work.

• 5:39Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, 30% more expensive. I think it's is the kind of the official number on

• 5:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there's also speed, right, Thomas? Like, how quickly can you stand something up? How many, how much paperwork do you have to file? James Beard Foundation, I'm seeing here from the research, has found that all these independent restaurant owners said they just can't get staff here. So in Los Angeles, it's just hard for people to live here. And it's hard to get through the regulations. And if you make it hard, there are other options for people. This idea that California has a lock on anything other than incredible weather and beautiful people is farcical. There's a lot of beautiful people in other places with decent weather and you can go do your productions there. So.

• 6:19Thomas Laffont?

  Another topic that came up that a lot of people were talking about, something that I know you've talked a lot about, our debt issue and the debt to GDP ratio. There was a lot of talk on the flip side, on the GDP side, what if actually AI can increase productivity and regrow GDP faster than expectations, right? And perhaps that's one of the reasons why, you know, interest rates might not be quite as high as you might expect, given some of the trends that you guys have talked about. So I think a lot of, a lot of discussions around.

• 6:55Thomas Laffont?

  AI productivity and what we could look at over the next, you know, five to 10 years because of the the improvements we're seeing.

• 7:01David Friedberg?

  This is particularly beneficial to the US, right? I mean, if you think about where AI is going to accrue economic surplus first, it's likely going to be in the US, not global GDP. So the US kind of, does it compete away dollars or it increases overall productivity or both ahead of the rest of the world? If we do see advances from AI to accelerate GDP growth, is that because of all of the onshoring of manufacturing and industry that we outsource today? Like, do you think that that goes hand in hand with AI acceleration?

• 7:37Thomas Laffont?

  I think that's part of it. And I think the other part is just getting even out of the, you know, the knowledge worker workforce, right? Just getting significant productivity productivity improvements there. One of the things that we showed in our keynote is the adoption of these technologies and even taking doctors as an example, right? An area you know well, you know, this new company kind of coming in and and developing kind of a diagnosis kind of engine, right? That's now used by a third of doctors. So, you know, I think that it's open evidence, by the way, is the name of the company.

• 8:18Thomas Laffont?

  And already a third of US physicians are on the platform using it, you know, 10 times a day to kind of help diagnoses. So in particular, in oncology as an example, it's seen significant traction. So, you know, you multiply that by the legal profession, coding, I think we're already seeing, you know, what if we just see kind of a, an explosion of productivity gains across, you know, both the physical and the digital economy?

• 8:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah. The doctor one's a good example. If someone had the opportunity to go get more regular preventative checkups, they would. The problem is it's very expensive. It's hard to get an appointment or insurance won't cover it. But if the cost to a doctor goes down because they can leverage AI, the throughput goes up by 10x, they can see 10 times as many patients per day, then suddenly diagnostic care becomes more available. They can charge for that. They don't need to charge the same amount. The price will come down per checkup, but you'll, more people will be able to get a checkup per day. So that grows GDP in diagnostic care. That grows the size of that piece of the economy. It's a very good example.

• 9:22Thomas Laffont?

  I'll give you, by the way.

• 9:23David Friedberg?

  Anything where AI provides leverage to a service provider where their throughput now goes up.

• 9:28Thomas Laffont?

  I'll give you another example of that, Dave. So there was an LA dentist that kind of hit, got viral this week. I don't know if you guys saw this story. But basically, he, um, he created an ad using VO3 about a skydiving gorilla.

• 9:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 9:45Thomas Laffont?

  Who, you know, ultimately needs to get his teeth fixed because he was drinking while he was jumping out of the plane. And, you know, it's a very kind of funny viral ad. He probably made it for a couple, you know, a hundred bucks. And now his practice is totally full. He's been flooded with requests, right? For the new dental implants. So, you know, to your point about increasing productivity, boom. There's how, how VO3 can help the local dentist.

• 10:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome to the number one podcast in the world. We got a full docket. Full docket, but we're going to rocket the docket because there's so much going on here. Zuck is tilted clearly. Uh, this has been the big discussion in Silicon Valley. For the last 10 days or so, according to reports. Zuck is super frustrated that Meta is falling behind in AI. So he is swinging for the fences. Sam Altman said Meta has offered top open AI employees a $100 million. Wait for it, signing bonus. That's not comp. That's a signing bonus. Who knows if this is true or not? But he's also offering 100 million a year in annual comp. He's clearly cut out tens of billions of dollars for this effort.

• 10:52Jason Calacanis?

  Not to slimmer to when he did his VR efforts that didn't work out so well. Here's a 30 second clip of Sam Altman talking about this on his brother Jack's podcast, Uncapped.

• 11:03Sam Altman?

  They started making these like giant offers to, uh, you know, a lot of people on our team. You know, like $100 million signing bonuses, more than that comp per year.

• 11:12Speaker 05

  It's crazy.

• 11:13Sam Altman?

  And I'm actually, it is crazy. I'm really happy that at least so far, uh, none of our best people have decided to take them up on that. I think that people sort of look at the two paths and say, all right, OpenAI has got a really good shot, a much better shot at actually delivering on superintelligence. Uh, and also may eventually be the more valuable company.

• 11:31Jason Calacanis?

  Meta just also vested over 14 billion, I'm using invested in quotes, in Scale AI for 49% stake. And, uh, this probably is better described as a shadow aqua hire to get around antitrust scrutiny. Remember Microsoft did that with Inflection AI back in the day. Google did it with Character AI and Amazon did it with the Depp AI. I'm not sure if this is necessary anymore, uh, since Lena Khan's no longer in the position. Scale CEO Alexander Wang and others will be joining Meta to work on a new superintelligence team. They're saying that Scale is going to remain an independent company and get a new CEO. I'm not sure if that's going to happen. And if you don't know, uh, Scale does data labeling. They get experts to help train language models.

• 12:13Jason Calacanis?

  Two of their biggest customers are OpenAI and Google, and they both canceled their contracts. So Zuck is taking that chess piece off the board so he can get all that data into his L L Ms. He's also reportedly in talks to hire former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross to work on AI. They have a incubator investment fund for AI. Daniel Gross had a really cool startup incubator called Pioneer Labs. I had him on this week at startups a couple of years ago. Really smart cat. Meta has 70 billion in cash. Thomas Laffont, when you see Zuck doing this, what's your take? Not only on what Zuck's doing, but how big of an opportunity is this, you know, in terms of

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  the prize of having the best large language model? What is he going for here? And what's your take on these really aggressive packages and 49% purchases?

• 13:06Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, look, I think, one, it feels highly rational, right? If you think about Meta's market cap is, rough math, 1.7 trillion. If you're the CEO and you ultimately believe that maybe 50% of your market cap is at risk because of AI, 850 billion. Why would you not spend maybe 4% or 5% of that if you think it increases the odds even slightly that you're going to win the market? So, to me, it kind of reminded me of a few things. Number one, the scale and size of the opportunity, right? Obviously, people think AI is massive. But frankly, J Cal, I'm even wondering, putting the regulatory scrutiny to the side, if it was time, he just didn't want to wait.

• 13:49Thomas Laffont?

  And obviously, doing it this way, I think Alex, literally the next day, who's the CEO of Scale, can show up to work at Meta. So I think it's urgency of a large opportunity. I'm curious to get Chamath's take, because it reminded me a little bit of the pivot away from HTML5, and also a much smaller acquisition, but one that we really felt, which was of a company called Onavo. And for those that may not remember, Onavo was a small data service provider, but what it did is it had a panel of phones, and we, as investors, could see what people, which apps people were using. And the data was incredibly valuable, because it was the only service that gave you true engagement data. And so, obviously, as an investor, you felt, wow, this is an incredible tool.

• 14:34Thomas Laffont?

  And eventually, it sold to Facebook, and Facebook used it internally and didn't allow anybody else to use it. And we'd lost one of our key abilities, right, in the mobile app revolution, to tell who was winning and losing.

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  And you're saying the Scale acquisition is, you know, parallels that in a bit? This is great service, a lot of people rely on it, he buys it, shuts it down for everybody else, gets the tool for himself, gets the data for himself?

• 14:59Thomas Laffont?

  Correct. So I definitely see parallels, and I think, given this, you know, their market cap and the size of this opportunity, I think it makes a lot of sense.

• 15:08Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, your thoughts on Zuck's action. Obviously, folks know you worked with him as you went from tens of millions of Facebook users to hundreds of millions. And you were there, actually, during the HTML wrapper app disaster that I think maybe...

• 15:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was a debate at our executive team, at our M team. And I was on the side of apps and, well, without embarrassing him, somebody else was on the side of HTML5. I thought it was fucking stupid.

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Why was...

• 15:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But that decision won because, you know, all of my political capital at the time was also wrapped into native apps, our own phone, an entire verticalized, integrated stack. And politically, I think I made the decision for them very hard because I was not a very play nice in the sandbox with others kind of executive. I was more of a scorched earth, get it done kind of person.

• 16:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so no changes over the last 15 years. That's good to know.

• 16:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They made it. They made an enormous mistake, but then they admitted it about a year after I left. They said this was the single success.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Explain in plain English why HTML5 wrappers versus native apps.

• 16:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I can't because it's retarded.

• 16:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. I can explain it.

• 16:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So like native apps are, was obvious in 2010. And the only, the only reason to use HTML was as an end around for different carriers and for different ecosystems that were trying to charge us a toll. So in 2010, I went to Mobile World Congress and I took a group of my most talented developers and we built an entire replica of Facebook that we called Facebook Zero, which was only available via URL. And we launched it at Mobile World Congress and we did it. And I announced it there because if you went to India, as an example, all of them... Folks there would try to charge us a tax.

• 17:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But if you could navigate through the browser, you wouldn't have to pay it.

• 17:06Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 17:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that was a good example of what to do in a developing market when people were toll taking. But the real solution was to build an extremely integrated app from the software all the way to the hardware. And the only way to do that was as a native application. And that has tremendous applications to today. But just to finish on yesterday, my proposition was full phone, full stack, full app. All of this other HTML stuff should only be as a side thing that we do in markets where they try to make it difficult for us. Instead, it became politicized and it became a big bet on HTML5, which I thought was absolutely stupid and unjustifiable. And that was also when I said, okay, well, this phone's not going to happen, so let me leave.

• 17:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And a year later, I think Mark, to his credit, said, this was really stupid and ripped all the HTML5 stuff apart, went native, and the rest is history. So let's fast forward to today. Yeah, there it is. Biggest mistake was betting too much. It was, it was an, and that was, again, I'll just say it. People politicizing what should have been an obvious technical decision.

• 18:08Jason Calacanis?

  And the other piece to that, just to add to it, was it was also a religious decision. And people liked the open standards of HTML5. So there were certain developers who felt like we have to support open standards.

• 18:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  People thought that. Only stupid, non-technical people thought that. It was stupid. It was obvious. You'd have to be a fucking moron. And there were fucking morons at the executive team that advocated for this. Anyways, we were right, they were wrong, and he was fine. Okay, fast forward to the, where are we today? It's the exact same story playing out. Now, what do I mean? You have to look very carefully at Microsoft's deal with OpenAI. Why? Because what you see is the compounding of secrets. There are secrets in the training layer. There are secrets in the model layer. There are secrets in how these things are tightly coupled to infrastructure and compute.

• 18:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what we have to remember is what OpenAI got from Microsoft was an extremely competent partner that built an enormous Azure compute infrastructure to train everything from ChatGPT all the way up to the O3 model, DALL-E, everything. Why is that important? Because you start to figure out these tricks. How do you really optimize these models to be extremely performant? Now, if you look at all of the other models, they've also had some level of that advantage. So if you look at DeepSeek, what did they do? Well, we don't know, but what we have been told is that there's very tight coupling to hardware.

• 19:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you look at what XAI is doing, I think what you can bet is that there's an extremely tight coupling to hardware and infrastructure and compute.

• 19:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you look at what Facebook is doing, they generically train on Nvidia and they launch it in the open source. So I think that what they need to do is more of the OpenAI, more of the Google playbook. Look at Google. Google's Gemini models are extremely tightly coupled to TPU. And it enables and unlocks an entire stack of secrets and capability that then get manifested in model quality. So I think the first thing that Mark has to do, if I were him, is start to chip away at all of the sets of secrets. So what secrets do you get from Alexander Wang and scale? It's what are the labeling techniques that allow these models to be more and more performant?

• 20:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What labeling techniques are used in the reasoning models? What labeling techniques are used in more traditional LLMs? It is clear that Llama doesn't know this. Meta doesn't know this that well because their model quality is meh. So now what you get is that set of secrets. So what do you get from Nat Freeman and Daniel Gross? You get what are the apps doing? How are they approaching writing agents? These agentic tips and tricks that make usability and value more obvious.

• 21:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then what's missing? I think the thing that's missing is the infrastructure and compute set of secrets. I think it's insufficient to buy stuff off the shelf from Nvidia and expect these models to fundamentally compete. So I think if I were a betting man, he's bought the training secrets, he's bought the app secrets, and now he has to buy some infrastructure and compute hardware secrets. You put it together and he's got a pretty good strategy here.

• 21:24Jason Calacanis?

  And also, just to add to that, Chamath, Nat and Daniel have invested in a lot of AI companies, and those companies are...

• 21:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those are the apps.

• 21:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and those are... Well, actually, I think they have somewhere along the full stack. Friedberg, your thoughts on this strategy as described by Thomas and Chamath and just the data we're seeing on the playing field? Aggressive acquisition of talent in companies.

• 21:49David Friedberg?

  I don't know if I have much to add here.

• 21:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 21:51Thomas Laffont?

  One additional point, Chamath, by the way, that you mentioned, if we look at the winners, right, in models of the past 12 months, Anthropic, the same, right? They've been very, um, kind of deliberate and have explained how TPUs, right? They've been a big user of them, how it's helped define their training models. So I think you're 100% right. If we look at the models that have really performed, it's ones that have that, that quote "secret," as you mentioned.

• 22:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When I first started 80, 90 a year ago, one of the key bets I made, which was a mistake, and we unwound the bet, but the first bet that I made was, can we build a transpiler? Which is to say, can you take a CUDA workload and then can you redirect it away from Nvidia to different hardware? And basically what I learned in that process are all of the attention mechanisms that are built into transformers that really differentiate how good the models are, need to literally be hand tuned for every single target of silicon that you have. So when Amazon just kind of wakes up and says, here's this chip, it means nothing unless you can incentivize somebody to build to it. But the opposite is also true.

• 22:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you have a model and you just run it generically, you're not going to get the gains and it's not going to be as special as if you have a dedicated infrastructure and compute architecture and say, we're going to tightly couple these. It's been clear that OpenAI has had that, Anthropic has had that, Google has had that, DeepSeek has had that, and I think Meta needs to do that. Otherwise, they're always going to be floundering on their back heel.

• 23:22Thomas Laffont?

  One quick misnomer, I think, you know, when people hear labeling, they kind of assume a photo of a dog and someone says, "This is a dog," right? I mean, that's definitely how it started, but if you look at Skil's business, it's completely more from that. So you could actually label a problem. So for example, in simple terms, 2 plus 2 equals 4 is actually a reasoning dataset, right? So you've got to think of labeling not just in the simple terms of, you know, this image, but of massive datasets of outcomes, and that's what's kind of really used to train these reasoning models. But I think there's another, yeah, there's another story here, guys, in my opinion.

• 24:03Thomas Laffont?

  And it's the performance of the Max 7, right? And I'm going to have to check with my data science team, but I'm wondering if we're, this is the year where we've seen the greatest divergence amongst the Max 7, right? So if you look at the Max 7, and if I just gave you, right, this performance, you can see, okay, so Meta's up 18, Google's down, Nvidia's up 8, Tesla down 20, Apple down 21, Amazon down 3, and Microsoft is plus 13, right? So it's kind of interesting in a market that, you know, historically over the past few years, where we feel the Max 7 have been truly correlated, now the market is saying, "Wait, hold on, we might start to see diverging performance." What I read from that in one

• 24:48Thomas Laffont?

  element is the market's starting to try and sort out who are going to be the winners and losers, who's well positioned versus maybe falling behind, right? So I think we're going to start to see some divergent performance from the Max 7. I think it's going to reward not...

• 25:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can you put that back up there for a second? I mean, I think that's so interesting because if you look at the conditions on the field today, you know, Google's down 8%, but again, I would tell you, as a user, Gemini models are exceptional, like absolutely just barn on exceptional. I think Anthropic is incredible for code gen, incredible.

• 25:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What I see is every single company on this list that isn't Nvidia baking and rolling their own silicon, yet Nvidia is up and the rest are down. I told you that I spent time last week at Tesla. I would not be sleeping on this business. I think that it is yet again back into the land of being misunderstood. The only one that I understand why it's down this much is Apple, because it's not clear that they're even baking something in private. There's nothing public, there's nothing private. It just seems like they're transitioning into being a cash cow and getting into sort of that cash harvesting mode. But it's almost weird that the price action is what it is, because I would have thought that Google

• 26:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  would be up, Meta would maybe be a little flattish to down, Nvidia is up, but maybe it could be down, Tesla's down, but it should probably be up, Amazon's basically break even and Apple is down. And I think that kind of makes sense. That's sort of how I read this table.

• 26:25Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, I mean, look, what I love Chamath, by the way, on that is that like now there's debates, right? And you can argue whether, you know, you agree with Chamath or whether you don't.

• 26:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, Zuck's not spending 20 billion because he's because he's not afraid.

• 26:38Thomas Laffont?

  Correct.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know. Let's pull the chart up again here, because I think this is an interesting way to discuss each of these companies.

• 26:46Thomas Laffont?

  The only reason Microsoft is not on this list is because of the limitation of the DOS era interface of the Bloomberg terminal, where it will only allow you to compare six charts and not seven. But we know that Microsoft is up 13.

• 26:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Cooperplexity.

• 27:00Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Jason Calacanis?

  So, you know, when you also, when you look at these, there are some extenuating circumstances here, like Tesla's car sales are down, all car sales are down. And I think that's the piece that maybe isn't being accounted for here. And they're in a transitional period. Apple obviously distracts the odd.

• 27:17David Friedberg?

  Yeah, there's a lot of regulatory overhead. So Tesla losing solar and EV tax credits.

• 27:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 27:23David Friedberg?

  Apple, Apple being told to onshore and stop buying from China. So their supply chains being disrupted because of tariffs. Those two companies in particular are far more affected than the rest. And even Amazon, you know, there's been some conversation about tariff effect on Amazon. But obviously, that's offset with some of the benefits they've been realizing and promoting, as Jassy spoke in his letter this week from AI. So I think that there's a variation here that's probably a little bit more Thomas kind of tuned to.

• 27:54Thomas Laffont?

  These conditions that aren't necessarily call it natural market forces, but are kind of influenced market forces associated with the new administration and some of the policy choices that are being made.

• 28:05Jason Calacanis?

  If we were looking at those, number one and number two, which one do you think gets to AGI first? Thomas?

• 28:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, wait, hold on. By the way, the other thing you should note, Jason, which I find really interesting is nobody talks about AGI anymore. If you listen to the language of all the companies, it's all superintelligence, which is a much more achievable goal because it's defined as being, you know, multiples more intelligent than a human being. But I think you're, I think if you actually did a search for the number of times AGI is being said today, it's meaningfully less because I think people have realized that that's not in the offing.

• 28:37Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah. By the way, another lens, Chamath, that I think about on these is who controls their own destiny of these seven companies in AI, right? And I would argue Tesla does.

• 28:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would argue Tesla.

• 28:48Thomas Laffont?

  Tesla does, Nvidia. And then it's kind of interesting, right? Neither, Amazon doesn't have its own foundation model, right? They're kind of dependent on others, right? Microsoft, 49% does, right? Because of this kind of relationship they have with OpenAI. It's both, you know, they own a big share, but they don't control it. So there's kind of interesting. And then maybe six months ago, we would have said, well, Meta absolutely does. Maybe Zuck's turned in a question that a little bit. And, you know, it's, it's fun, in my opinion, to kind of bring different lenses to this list, right? There's the regulatory one that Friedberg was just talking about. I kind of think about if I was the CEO, do I control my own destiny in this market, right? And I expect these companies are not going to want to be dependent on others

• 29:33Thomas Laffont?

  and are going to at least want to say, no, I'm going to control my own destiny, whether I win or lose.

• 29:38Jason Calacanis?

  Who's your number one? Who's your number two? If you had to, could only bet on two here to achieve superintelligence, AGI, let's just say, win the AI, win the AI, uh, big prize, the big prize, superintelligence, AGI, you know, in the midterm, five years, five years from now. We're sitting here. Thomas, give me your number one. Give me your number two.

• 29:58Thomas Laffont?

  Look, I, I think to me, number one, I, I still think Nvidia, right? I don't see the GPU kind of getting displaced. I see additional architectures kind of coming on board, right? And growing the market, but, um, at the end of the day, all roads still lead to the GPU for all of these models. So I would kind of still put, um, kind of Nvidia on that. My number two, more of a dark horse, but I, I would pick Tesla. I do think it has the most potential for vertical integration, right? From all the way, the silicon to the model, to actually the hardware, right? That might become super important, not just in cars, but in Optimus. So Nvidia one, Tesla is my dark horse.

• 30:38Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, stunning. Chamath, who's your number one and number two in the midterm? Five years from now, we're sitting here on All In, episode 700.

• 30:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tesla's one and Google's two. And the reason is because they are the closest to having that vertically integrated stack that I spoke about. I think that Tesla has the best vision models. Now with XAI, they'll have one of the best LLMs and reasoning models. And they'll be able to eventually stick that on Dojo. And then all of that will be in all of the physical AI that you will interact with in your daily life, whether it's a robot, or whether it's a car, or whether it's a robotaxi. So that's number one. And then number two, for many of the same reasons, I think Google. Because you'll have the Gemini family of models, which just absolutely kick ass.

• 31:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like VO3, which we haven't really spoke about, is going to destroy Hollywood.

• 31:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like in the next year, like Hollywood is done, I think. But they're landing model after model. They have the TPU and the next generation TPU, I think, is exceptional. They're baking quantum and then they have an entire funnel of billions of people that they can direct experiences to. So Tesla one, Google two.

• 31:55Thomas Laffont?

  Chamath, quick follow up on that. I'm curious on Google. This is the, because I oscillate a lot on this particular name. Can Google win if search declines?

• 32:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes, and I think that what probably has to happen is, bear with me when I say this, but if you had to boil down Google's economic North Star metric, right? Not the value North Star, the economic North Star metric would be price per click.

• 32:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I do think that Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through Gmail, through Workspace. I think through search, but probably it's a different kind of model. It just requires them to rip the Band-Aid off at some point, but yeah, I think Google can do it.

• 32:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna go with you, Chamath. I'm one. My one and two are either Google or Elon. And I'll just say Elon because I, like you, I spent a day up at XAI and I saw what a magnet for talent he is. I got to sit in some meetings and just, he was interviewing people and he was working with that talent. Eight o'clock at night, there's a lot of people there on a Saturday grinding it out. It was nuts.

• 33:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I first went to XAI. In the 15 minutes that I was in the parking lot finishing a call, the kinds of people that were walking in and out of there, you could tell they were big brains.

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know how, you know what I mean? Like from every walk of life, they all just looked much smarter than the rest of us.

• 33:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And some of them were like chain smoking cigarettes and just like stressed out. It was crazy.

• 33:36Jason Calacanis?

  I hit a couple of zins, I'll be totally honest. But the reason I say Elon versus Google is I think Elon's in a unique position. I don't have any insider information here and I haven't talked about this or I'm not back channeling from Elon, lest anybody aggregate this. I think what Colossus has done and what Tesla has done, both of these things, Tesla with their own stack of hardware, to your point Chamath, hardware plus software, plus the user application of FSD and Optimus. Then you put that together with the data, the real time data of X, formerly known as Twitter, plus, you know, what he's building with XAI and obviously those two companies merged. I think Tesla board, XAI board have to get together, put those two companies together.

• 34:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 34:17Jason Calacanis?

  One's worth a trillion, one's worth a hundred billion. Put them and just have all that brain power going in one direction as opposed to Elon test switching between the two. You do that, I think he wins number one. You don't do that, I think he either gets one or two. And then I think Google is going to have a better search product, Thomas. I think it's a really important point. Do they lose search share? Doesn't matter. What I think matters is are their ads more effective? Is their ad network more effective? And I think based on what they know on you from your chat searches and your discussions and what they analyze in your email. Just analyzing your Gmail and your surfing behavior in Chrome, if they get to keep it, your Android phone, if you use it, your YouTube list and what you how, when you drop off All In

• 34:59Jason Calacanis?

  and when you start listening to another podcast, whatever it is, all that data, all that data is going to lead to an ad network that performs so much better that even if they lose search share, their ad network is going to continue to grow. And I think it will increase in velocity. So those are my top two. Friedberg, I'm curious from your position,

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  which one you think is number one and number two? I saved you for last because you know what we do here? We save the best for last, Friedberg. Go ahead.

• 35:23David Friedberg?

  I think there's a difference in how I would kind of lump them. I think that Tesla probably has the, it is the best place to invest if you want to have a shot at a massive new industry. So they've got a baseline business in, in obviously the automobiles. But I think this humanoid robot opportunity is absolutely mind-blowingly ginormous. And I don't think that there's a better company on earth positioned to execute against this humanoid robotics opportunity than Tesla. So, you know, it's sort of like, I would call it a low probability, high upside sort of call option embedded within that business. And obviously, you're paying a

• 36:08David Friedberg?

  premium for that because it is still a very healthy premium you pay for that business. I think Nvidia, to Thomas's point, I think the common thesis is it is the most protected, the durability of the business is there. But I would argue that there's actually a low probability, but very high severity risk to Nvidia in China. There was just a demonstration last month of a one nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process out of China. I think the more that we continue to try and isolate China from a policy perspective, the more we are emboldening investment in China, meaning from the government, from private industry into China to create alternatives to the chip stack where the United States companies, particularly Nvidia,

• 36:51David Friedberg?

  have a moat today. So I do think that there's going to be an emergent competitive threat coming out of China to Nvidia. And just like we were knocked over by DeepSeek, I think we will be knocked over by some semiconductor manufacturing processes coming out of China in the near term. But the overall kind of-

• 37:08Thomas Laffont?

  By the way, Dave, just on that point, I think-

• 37:11David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 37:11Thomas Laffont?

  Saxon's work on the diffusion rule. Just generally, I don't think has kind of gotten enough attention in the rescinding of the diffusion rule, which essentially handicapped our ability to even arm our allies, right, with our semiconductor technology. In my opinion, was kind of a milestone and very important moment to try and offset exactly what you were just describing.

• 37:37David Friedberg?

  Exactly right. I mean, there is a report a few months ago, and I mentioned it on the show, or maybe I didn't, or maybe I sent it to Sacks and we talked about it offline. I can't remember, but it was about a $40 billion investment being made in developing competitive semiconductor manufacturing full stack solutions out of China. So I do think that the lithography IP moat is being crossed in China. I do think that China is developing actually new technology for DUV and EUV systems. I do think that there's a risk to Nvidia's core. Now, look, Nvidia is such a durable business, there's great moats, great advantages, but we're creating every incentive for an alternative to Nvidia to emerge from China. And then my third kind of categorization would be what's the portfolio solution?

• 38:22David Friedberg?

  I think that's Google. I think that there is a diversification of high beta bets inside of Google of any one of which could have, call it a trillion dollar market cap outcome, ranging from Waymo to quantum computing, to the biologics work that Demis is working on out of Isomorphic. There's a number of things that do not get a lot of attention at Google. So yes, there's a core business that may be at risk, Thomas, but I think that there's a portfolio of options you get at Google, and you just need any one of them to hit to kind of make up for the loss. But I do think also Sundar, in my interview with him, which we put out a couple of weeks

• 39:02David Friedberg?

  ago, is very thoughtful about where search evolves to, and he is being, I think, reasonably aggressive in trying to evolve the search product architecture to meet the market, to meet the consumer. I do give him credit for that. So Google would be in a good place for me as an overall kind of pick in that set of options.

• 39:20Jason Calacanis?

  So just to be clear, Nvidia won, Google two, or Nvidia Tesla?

• 39:23David Friedberg?

  Like I said, I think in terms of like having the right sharp ratio is how I would think about it. The alpha and the beta adjusted returns, I would put Google number one. I would probably put Tesla. Tesla's valuation, I think, already has a premium associated with those options.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 39:39David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so I don't know if I would really pay that premium. I think.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, aside from the valuations, let's take valuations out of it. Just the game here is who wins the AI prize five years from now.

• 39:49Thomas Laffont?

  That's how I understood it as well. Yep. So valuation irrelevant.

• 39:54Jason Calacanis?

  Valuation irrelevant. Who wins the AI prize? One, you're saying Google, two, you're saying Tesla.

• 39:58David Friedberg?

  I think Google's in such a position. I mean, look, Demis, I think has been fairly coy about where they are. They obviously promote Gemini 2.5, but there's a lot still coming. And as Chamath pointed out, it's not just L L Ms. There's a pretty sizable family of models, including a lot of these graph-based models that are being used in really novel applications that no one else is even close to. No one's spending time on. I mean, some of the weather forecasting, it might seem small and trivial, but it's a demonstration of Google's competency in core model development that shows an understanding and a depth of research and work that goes well beyond L L Ms. So I'm pretty bullish on the depth of talent, the full stack.

• 40:43Jason Calacanis?

  And whatever they learn there could apply to Gmail, could apply to search, could apply to ads, could apply to YouTube algorithm, right? It just goes up and down.

• 40:50David Friedberg?

  Yeah, from a product perspective, I do think you see this kind of multi-model emergence that we're now seeing. No one talks about the single model that sits behind the application. There are multiple models that work together. And obviously, this agentic architecture unlocks another layer of not just kind of solutions to complexity.

• 41:12Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 41:13David Friedberg?

  And so there's quite a lot, I think, that's emergent here that Google will start to kind of benefit from in the year ahead.

• 41:20Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, for those of us, you know, who love tech, right? If we stuck back for a minute. I really feel like to use the analogy of this podcast, like we are now at the WSL, World Series of Poker, right? We got seven companies around the table. The stacks are trillion in size, right? And all of us are going to get a front row seat to see what happens over the next five years. I mean, and on top of that, we're going to get to analyze, bet ourselves on who we think is going to win. We know there's some other companies that are pushing to get at that table, right? With some sharp elbows. I mean, what a time to be doing what we're doing.

• 41:55David Friedberg?

  But Thomas, I don't know if I love the analogy because I don't think, first of all, it's a zero sum game where there's this X number of chips and someone ends up with all the chips. I do think you could see as an example, just talking about the scenarios we just described, Tesla developing an extraordinary humanoid robot business that's worth a trillion dollars. Google building, you know, to Chamath's point, a media empire based on generative AI in media. And then, you know, Nvidia building an entirely new chip stack that everyone's participating. And so all of them in an ecosystem based way could be major winners.

• 42:26Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, you're right. I didn't mean it in the zero sum nature of it. I meant it more in the in the stakes, right?

• 42:32David Friedberg?

  Yes. And there's a lot of hands to be, I like the analogy because there's a lot of hands to be played. And there is a price pool, right? And you could have three or four people at that table. One thing I just want to point out here is just speaking of regime change, what is going on at Apple? Like they Siri was just the early idea of an AI agent. It's just totally disgrazia. It's disgusting. It doesn't work. It's embarrassing. And then their biggest developer conference, they're redoing the UI? Like, is it time for regime change at Apple?

• 43:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, this has happened many, many, many times in many industries before, which is that companies that were stalwart organizations, transitioned themselves from being a growth business to being a cash cow. And these are well documented transitions. And it requires an extremely brutal reset if you want to shake that up.

• 43:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 43:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that the same thing that I think you have to respect Apple for, which is stability, the duration of some of their best, longest serving executives are there for 20 and 30 years. On the scale of innovation, it's a horrible thing. And the reason is that we all just get old. Our skill sets become rusty. And we don't have the energy or the capacity to think about what the future actually looks like because we are not living it. And then what happens is you task those decisions to people that you try to hire. But you know, you saw it in the clip with Sam. Even in all of that crazy recruiting chaos that's happening right now for these brilliant

• 44:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  machine learning and AI people. Maybe that's a fight between OpenAI, Meta, and maybe Google. But what you don't hear is Apple. So who's Apple getting? I have to think that Apple is not getting any of those people. So by the time you end up at Apple, it's just a different caliber of person.

• 44:30Jason Calacanis?

  That is true.

• 44:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they're living inside of a cash cow organization that's going to optimize for don't make mistakes.

• 44:38Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 44:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But that's happened. It's happened to HP. It's happened to Lotus. It's happened to Intel. It's happened to General Electric. It's happened to umpteen companies.

• 44:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's just shocking.

• 44:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's happening to Apple, so we should just not sweat it and move on.

• 44:54Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know, Thomas, what are your thoughts? I mean, it's kind of shocking with all that cash. And they don't acquire anything. They had Project Titan, $10 billion to build their own car and they just shut it down. Imagine if they kept going with that. You think regime change time, maybe Tim Cook retires and puts somebody who's a product person in charge of it, or maybe they should merge with Tesla and put Elon in charge of it all? There just seems to be no new products coming out of there. Like, it's absolutely uh, confounding that they're optimizing for share buybacks and earnings per share instead of having some amount of that money go towards innovation and acquiring companies. Biggest acquisition is Beats? Give me a break.

• 45:33Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, it's interesting, right? For me, and I've studied Apple basically my whole career and it's kind of interesting, right? Because if you think about the, their defining Competitive advantage, right, was the integration of hardware and software that led to the beautiful MacBook that we're all using, it led to the iPhone and, right, the fact that they were so coupled between hardware and software, the user interface, you know, etc. And I think it directly led to them winning, let's call it the mobile era, right? But I think back to Chamath's point, and I think the analogy holds, in AI, they're the opposite, right? They don't control, you know, the silicon, they don't control the underlying models. And so now they're back to maybe, you know, using a historical

• 46:17Thomas Laffont?

  analogy, the PC makers who didn't control the OS. That's right. So I think the good news for them is, look, they still have a monopoly on users, they have three trillion of market cap to kind of play with. So I think it's way too early to count them out. But I think, you know, the market, let's posit, what's the most extreme thing that they could do, right, just for, just for intellectual sake, right? Buy OpenAI for 500 billion. I'm just going to put a crazy thing out there, right? So you think, okay, that's the most extreme. Well, is it even that extreme? And what would Apple's stock do that day? Go up? That's my view too, right? I actually think it would go up, not down, even if they did something like that. So I do think they need to be kind of aggressive. I do

• 47:02Thomas Laffont?

  think, to your point, I think, Friedberg, it is important that, you know, all seven of these companies could actually win and do well, right? That is an absolute possibility. But I would love to see them be a little bit more aggressive. I mean, you guys remember when Steve Jobs bought Fingerworks, right? It was this tiny acquisition, they made this little trackpad that you could use your fingers on, no one figured out why they did this, and then in turn into multi-touch and scrolling, right? So I think it's, it's going to be fascinating to see what they do.

• 47:31Jason Calacanis?

  Thomas, that was a great question I was about to ask. If Apple could do one thing, they could do one internal project or buy one external company, maybe we could do both around the horn, what would we advise them to do? My number one is build a humanoid robot. Like, how does Apple not have a humanoid robot? That seems like that's obviously the next giant consumer market is having Optimus or Figure in your house. Friedberg, I'm going to go to you first, since I went to you last, last time. Is there a product that they could do, that they could build, that they would be uniquely suited to, that would turn this all around? If you could pick it on their roadmap, what would it be?

• 48:06David Friedberg?

  I do think there is. I do think they're doing it, and I do think they have a shot at winning, which is this kind of ambient AI assistant. I don't know about you guys, I must own thirty friggin' Apple devices. I have many Apple computers I use in different offices. I have phones, I have many AirPods. I got everything, watches, everything. I'm ubiquitous on the Apple platform, so I'm an easy transition into this if it works. So as everyone races to build kind of the agentic AI assistant that is sort of in my ear all the time, or available, where I don't have to stare at my friggin' phone like this, it is a great unlock for humanity, it's a great unlock as a consumer,

• 48:46David Friedberg?

  it's feasible technically, and I'm sure Apple, of everyone that we've referenced today, is best suited to both access the consumer, design and engineer the solution in a way that can be truly transformative. I think it references a little bit what Johnny Ive and Sam Altman have been talking about doing, but I do think that this is exactly the direction Apple is headed, and I do think that they've got a very great shot at winning at it. I don't think they need to own the full stack to be successful here.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay, so we've got Optimus, we got the device you're talking about, this ambient assistant is part Siri and part maybe a pendant that records your behavior in the world and gives you feedback to it, and that's what they're calling a Puck, perhaps, that Johnny Ive has made, or these pendants that record everything. Thomas, what's your thought on the one product they could create?

• 49:36Thomas Laffont?

  To that point, it's interesting to think that the AirPod business at Apple is 3X OpenAI's revenue base today. That's right, and that's just the AirPod business.

• 49:46David Friedberg?

  And by the way, let me just say one thing about this. We all think about devices in the context of A single device being an assistant. I think if there are more devices integrated into our lives and the assistant is ethereal and ubiquitous amongst the devices. It's almost like the Star Trek Next Generation. You walk in, you say, "Hey, computer." And there's always a device available that's doing things. There's always a device observing. There's always a device able to take care of things for you, whether it's in your ear, whether it's your phone, whether it's your watch. But basically, these devices all, instead of acting independently, they all know what you've been asking or talking about with the other devices. And so you could get in your car and you could pick up, you know, the conversation you were

• 50:28David Friedberg?

  having, you know, while you were sitting in your office in front of your computer to do work. And so the agent effectively is almost like this ethereal ambient assistant. So everywhere you go, the agent is there.

• 50:38Jason Calacanis?

  They could even be in a candlelit bath with you. Freebrooke could be in there.

• 50:43David Friedberg?

  They could. Well, I mean, by the way, think about also, you know, it having identity, so it knows who you are. But I could be in your room, in your home, J. Cal. Not that I would ever get invited to your home, but let's say I was there.

• 50:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:54David Friedberg?

  Uh, you know, I could walk into the, the living room and there's your puck and it starts talking to me because it knows.

• 50:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's you.

• 50:59David Friedberg?

  Who I am. And yeah, it's like, it knows me. Yeah.

• 51:01Jason Calacanis?

  Or you and I, I have a bath for two. You and I could be a candlelit bath for two.

• 51:04David Friedberg?

  And it would know the difference. When, when each of us are fighting over what music we want to play, the assistant will, you know, hear out the debate.

• 51:11Jason Calacanis?

  Make a shared playlist. Chamath, do you have a, a device, before we go on to IPOs here? Do you have a device or an angle for Apple to go after if they were truly ambitious? Or maybe they are and it's just in stealth. What do you think? You think it's the goggles, the glasses? You think it's a pendant? You think it's Optimus? What do you think?

• 51:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think they have any chance of anything.

• 51:28David Friedberg?

  Great. Love it.

• 51:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would take the exact opposite of what Freebrooke says. Look at this chart and I'll tell you why.

• 51:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 51:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This chart is not, this chart is not a strategy. So this is a chart of Apple's revenue. And what you see is iPhone has completely stalled out. And so to Thomas's point, where do you make money? You make money in other hardware. This is not a strategy of success. This is a strategy of inefficiency. I lost my AirPods. I need to buy a new pair. Oh, the cable's changed. I need to buy a bunch of those. This and that. And this and that strategy is not a strategy. It's a tactical play for revenue optimization in the short term. A company that focuses on this kind of revenue growth is not capable of creating something that's exceptionally unexpected. That will come from a new company who has no ties to the past,

• 52:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  has no nostalgia on the fact that we're going to swap out the connector type and, you know, book another billion dollars. What Thomas said is an indictment, actually, about their ability to do it. When your AirPods business is two or three times bigger than OpenAI, what there is internally, when you try to have a strategy meeting about what to do, is derision about OpenAI. Because you're like, that's small. And even our AirPods business is three times big. That's what some smart ass MBA will say in that meeting, and it'll shut the meeting down. So how do you expect that culture to then all of a sudden get their act together? I think it's exceptionally hard. It's a good point. And here's the clip on cue. Play the clip, Nick. It's a great point. Here's the clip.

• 53:03David Friedberg?

  I'm Apple nostalgic.

• 53:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Me too. Bring Steve Jobs back. Watch this lunacy.

• 53:08Speaker 06

  You probably saw that Johnny Ive has linked up with OpenAI to create some sort of future AI device.

• 53:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know what that is. I don't either.

• 53:16Speaker 06

  Is this a space that Apple's looking at? Is this a space that goes beyond what you have in the current lineup of devices? Something that is more personal? Maybe you wear it, glasses?

• 53:27Speaker 05

  I think, I mean, I think we have some extremely personal wearable devices. If you want something that's aware of your environment with audio, I think you're wearing one right now on your wrist. If you want something that you can capture the environment with and see and also receive visual content, you might just have one in your pocket right now. Are there other form factors that can make sense to AI? Sure, but pretty hard to beat something that's with you all the time and glanceable or, you know, provides a nice screen that you can interact with. So, yeah, I don't know what they're working on.

• 54:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think, Chirav? Again, I think, I want to be very clear about what I'm saying. That is a very competent, Craig Federighi, very, very competent executive.

• 54:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And whoever the person beside him is, that guy's, I'm going to assume competent as well. They're competent at making money. The way that they've made money for the last 17 years with no meaningful disturbance.

• 54:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think it's just something to appreciate that after 17 years of unmitigated linear success. It's very difficult to retool yourself. It's like asking Michael Jordan to go and all of a sudden become an all-star baseball. It doesn't work. And so I think, I think it's okay, though. This is my point. It's okay, guys, to have creative destruction of companies. Like, there was probably a version of us blathering on about HP and being nostalgic about the transistor radio that they made and the, you know, HP 12B calculator that they made. And oh, my God, why can't they figure their shit out? And where are we today? HP doesn't even exist. It's okay.

• 55:15Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, just, Thomas, the fact that they launched Siri, they bought that company and Siri can't do anything other than like an alarm, can barely play a song, it barely can do directions. I, I mean, literally, we're in year like 27 of Siri and it can't do anything. And then I have the, the Google and Grok voice. And when I turn that on, it does whatever I want. It will load on my Pixel, it loads other applications, fires it off, does specific tasks in it. It's absolutely disgrazia. On your, Thomas? On your Pixel? I have a Pixel. When I, when I flip open my Pixel. I have, it's nine inches. I have the Pixel 9, Chamath. It's the anaconda of smartphones. Pixel 9 foldable. Got it. It's the greatest assistant ever.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's what Siri, it's what Steve Jobs showed Siri. I had you at nine? You had me at anaconda, yeah. I had you at nine inches? And we can all aspire, maybe get Roman. Get that extra, get that extra inch, Thomas. Go ahead.

• 56:11Thomas Laffont?

  Chamath, I would argue to you that I think this management team has done it once. And it's in the transition of their gross profit base, which doesn't show in the chart that you just highlighted. But with something that I kind of lived as an analyst covering the stock for a long time, where if you remember over a decade ago, 90 plus percent of their gross profit was a one-time hardware sale on the iPhone. And No one thought that they would ever be able to get away from the drug of selling that one iPhone unit, right? And cut to, you know, over a decade later, it's 40%, right? And I don't think they get enough credit for actually transitioning from hardware to a recurring gross profit base. But look, you might argue that that was an easier pivot and challenge than what they're

• 56:56Thomas Laffont?

  going to face. And so let's see whether they can do it. The other thing, guys, I wonder about, um, let's, I know we want to talk about IPOs, but I do wonder whether Zuck buying scale for 15 billion gives air cover for other companies to really start being aggressive, right? And, and to me, as we think about Circle and CoreWeave, two companies that have gone IPO recently, it's, it's kind of amazing, kind of numerically, that the charts are almost identical, even, you know, on a dollar basis, uh, on a share price, right? Because to me, what it says, we were talking about the dispersion of the Mac 7 before, right? Which are going to do well, which are not. I expect we're going to have a lot of opinions on this

• 57:38Thomas Laffont?

  over the next few years. And frankly, they may change. We, you know, we may think Apple one way today, it may change in a month, right? But I do think the market is starting to realize that there is dispersion, that AI might create some all winners or some winners and then some losers, right? And is starting to think about, okay, how do I want to be positioned for the next five years? What are big open-ended growth opportunities? And here comes two companies, one levered to crypto, right? And the other levered to AI. So I don't think it's a surprise. To me, these things are intertwined.

• 58:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're 100% on, because here's the thing. The average profit margin of the S and P 493 is, drumroll please, 12%. The average growth of the S and P 493 is, drumroll please, single digits. So to your point, why would you be long any of these 493 companies that may turn around and one day just get decapitated by something you don't even know? That's getting cooked up by a couple of kids in a garage using OpenAI or Grok or what have you? It just makes a lot more sense when you find investable companies in the big themes of the future to add a minimum hedge, right? Be less long the past and frankly make some bets about the future.

• 58:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think that that's where you're seeing these IPOs just absolutely rip. What is a better comparison, in my opinion, are the companies that are truly levered to the future themes of AI and crypto versus any of these IPOs that have happened of companies that are not. And I think what you see is there's a dispersion there as well. And they are being treated almost as similarly, Jason, as the S and P 493. It's like, yeah, it's good. Yeah, it's fine. They get some reasonable gains, but if you're levered to any of those two trends, you're off to the races because it's just so disruptive, people don't want to be backholding these old legacy companies.

• 59:37Jason Calacanis?

  We're already into our next topic, which is IPOs and M and A. Lina Khan is no longer in the building and M and A is back on the menu, as are IPOs. As Thomas pointed out, three IPOs, March 28th, June 5th and June 12th, CoreWeave, Circle and Chime. Obviously, CoreWeave up 4X after going public, $81 billion market cap, absolutely stunning. Circle, 25X oversubscribed, 6X from its opening price, $48 billion market cap. Chime, that's a neo-bank like New Bank, which is already public. That was up 40% in its IPO price, but then it went down 20%, $12 billion market cap. On the other side of the ledge, we have a ton of M and A this year. So when you look at what's happening under the Trump administration, look at what's actually happening.

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  The game on the field is three major IPOs. And then massive amounts of billion-dollar acquisitions. Obviously, we talked about Google acquiring Wiz for $32 billion. SoftBank bought Empire, I don't know what they do, 6.5 billion. OpenAI bought two companies, one for $3 billion, one for $6.5 billion. Developer co-pilot, Windsurf, $3 billion. Johnny Ive's I/O, making some sort of a puck or hardware device. Databricks bought Neon for $1 billion. Salesforce did an $8 billion acquisition. And then interesting, DoorDash bought two companies. Uber made two smaller acquisitions. There is a ton of activity here. What does it say about the market, David Friedberg, that we're seeing so much M and

• 1:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  A and these amazing IPOs coming out, all within the last three, four months?

• 1:01:08David Friedberg?

  Okay, so let me just follow up to a comment Chamath made and ask Thomas his view. I have a theory and I haven't looked empirically to see if it makes sense. For most of the S and P 500, the fundamental profit growth is pretty anemic. With the exception, obviously, of a couple of the big tech outliers, the Mag 7 and a few others. But for the majority of the S and P, this is a pretty kind of anemic environment relative to the transitions that are underway in the world fundamentally with AI and ancillary technology. So are the institutional fund managers hungry for access to some of these new, you know, high-growth offerings?

• 1:01:51David Friedberg?

  And they have been held off because just to kind of go back, I think it was around 2008 or so. Public institutional fund managers started to do crossover investing into private equities. And that scaled up and scaled up and it entered, obviously, a stage where it was a heavy flurry, a lot of activity and a lot of crossover late-stage investing. You know, right until 2021, when things started to pop, 2022. And because they were overexposed with their private equity portfolios relative to their public equities, they came out of 21, 22 with the market declining. And they now had a higher concentration of private equities than they were supposed to have. And so they have been kept out of the market for the last three or so years of the private market.

• 1:02:36David Friedberg?

  And now is there kind of this pent-up hunger or pent-up demand for new issuances, for high-growth tech issuances? Is that what we're seeing? Is there kind of this pent-up demand because they've had to stay out of the private market for three years? And if there is, obviously, it bodes well for late-stage growth startups that are looking to go public because the demand will be there. And I think the reports were that the Chime IPO was like 18x oversubscribed.

• 1:02:59Thomas Laffont?

  I think you're right in something that. You know, I've talked about with you guys and was a was a big conversation at our at the All In Summit last year was the health of the private ecosystem, right? And we talked about the concept of, look, if you put a dollar in, you need to get a dollar out. Right? And so I do think that we're starting to see a healthier market where we know a lot of dollars have gone in, but now we're starting to see some dollars coming out. So I think that's both in M and A, by the way, and it's also in IPOs. So I think that's one element. But I also think the second element, which is we're the tailwind of the mobile and SaaS era. Right? And even if you look at the SaaS companies, we kind of put this together in our deck when we were preparing it for our conference this week.

• 1:03:44Thomas Laffont?

  Chamath, I think you'll find this interesting, right? If you look at SaaS in 2021, the median growth rate for SaaS companies was 17% and a quarter of those were growing over 25%. Okay? If you look at SaaS today, the growth rate has been cut in half, 17% to 9%. And only 5% of that cohort is now growing above 25%. So I think, Dave, what's clearly happening, right, is other sectors, which were predominantly seen to be growth, are now slowing down. Right? So that's kind of one piece. So the market can no longer just rely on saying, oh, I'm just going to own the best summer SaaS index, right, for the next decade and I'll do great, because those companies have really slowed down.

• 1:04:29Thomas Laffont?

  And I think it's starting to look forward and think, okay, now, over the next five to 10 years, what are the companies that can compound at maybe 25% per year over that timeframe? And I think companies like CoreWeave and Circle and Chime, by the way, and others, are going to kind of fill that gap.

• 1:04:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I really like this chart. If I had to guess about what has changed from 2021 to 2025, is that most companies have realized that buying yet another

• 1:05:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Vertical software solution is not going to help their business. That it typically adds bloat, it adds cost, and it adds people. And I think, starting in 2023, what people started to guess is, at some point in the near future, you're going to have some AI way of rewriting all of this vertical software. And I think that's why it stopped growing. I don't think this SaaS market ever had the return on equity that it was supposed to. And I think so many companies have woken up from this hangover, saying, there's got to be a better way.

• 1:05:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It can't always be yet another tool, yet another program, yet another multi-year delay, yet another price escalator. And I think that the jig is totally up for software.

• 1:05:56Jason Calacanis?

  You're referring to the Salesforce and the SaaS category, Chamath, and what you're doing at 80, 90 specifically, yeah?

• 1:06:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, it's not just us, but like, if you look at anybody that's rebuilding software, it is so much easier to rebuild software from scratch today. Like, my team of 30 people can transact hundreds of millions of dollars of work, not because we are so prolifically amazing, but frankly, because, well, I think the team is good, but honestly, because the underlying tool chain gives you a level of leverage. And so if you rebuild the software development lifecycle using these tools, you can't help it but become much more efficient. And you can't help it but deliver custom solutions that are meaningfully cheaper. And I think, Jason, if you look at the entirety of the software that runs the world, we're

• 1:06:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  going to rebuild it, soup to nuts, all of that.

• 1:06:51Jason Calacanis?

  And the tool you're referring to, just for the audience, is the AI co-pilots that are making, that are contributing 30, 40% to codebases at Microsoft and Google.

• 1:07:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Less specifically that, because those are, those are good for individual people, but the software development lifecycle is more the horizontal end-to-end of making things.

• 1:07:09Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:07:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What we do internally at 8090 is we have an entire process that starts from the PRD all the way out to the functioning code and we use different techniques at each step. But what you get is a 50, 60, 70% increase at each step, which then compounds. Yes. And so you have the ability of a team that would otherwise be able to service tens of millions of dollars, be a team that can service hundreds of millions. Massive leverage. And then a team that would otherwise service hundreds can service billions.

• 1:07:37David Friedberg?

  Let me ask you guys your response to this theory. If there is going to be this kind of accelerated, call it custom software rebuild of business models and you take the S and P 493, do you think that we enter an era where there is a similar dispersion as we're talking about seeing in the Mag 7 with the S and P 493, where there are going to be probably the biggest money-making opportunities for investors that we've seen in decades, between those that do adopt and do rebuild using AI and those that don't or are laggers?

• 1:08:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nailed it. Hundred, hundred percent. Absolutely. Now, I had a call yesterday with one of the largest private equity funds in the world, hundreds of billions of dollars under management, and we're doing something with them at 8090 with one of their most important assets. And when you're an owner of a business and you can direct very specific change and you can rip out hundreds of millions of dollars of software licenses and replace it with tens of millions of dollars of highly customized software, it's an enormous lift to OpEx and business model quality. So why doesn't it happen more?

• 1:08:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason it doesn't happen right now for this S and P 493 is that the IT organizations inside all companies essentially speak a different language than the CEO, the CFO and the board. So if the CEO, CFO and the board of directors of the S and P 493 speak English, the IT organization speaks Mandarin Chinese and you get away with saying all kinds of bullshit. I'll give you an example. I went to a CIO conference, one person that I met, an 18 billion dollar a year IT budget.

• 1:09:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What the does that actually even mean? To spend 18 billion dollars a year on IT? I'm not saying that this is a mag 7 company, guys. And when you take that example and you multiply it by 50 and 100 and 493 examples of people spending money, there's an entire cartel of influence that's been built in software that's going to get undone. Because you're not going to be able to justify it, Friedberg.

• 1:09:58Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely correct, Chamath. And the response from the SaaS industry is changing from the per-seat model. As the number of employees at these companies continues to get lowered, obviously, Microsoft, a lot of layoffs, Andy Jassy talking about layoffs. They're moving from the per-seat model. They're not taking this laying down. They know that people are going to make custom software. So what they're doing is they're moving to a consumption model. So you're seeing people charge per call, per customer support call, etc.

• 1:10:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I know, but that doesn't work.

• 1:10:27Jason Calacanis?

  At, well, it's.

• 1:10:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll tell you why it doesn't work, Jason.

• 1:10:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's working in combination. Hold on, hold on, let me finish. The other thing they're doing is they're dramatically lowering the number of people and the developers they have on their team. And then a lot of what's happening in the background is the third piece they're doing is they're starting to do roll-ups and people are starting to talk about how can we take, you know, 20 of these SaaS companies, lower them just like you're doing to compete? Chamath, you're the.

• 1:10:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I was just gonna say.

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  That three-part playbook.

• 1:10:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I just wanted to comment on this, like, consumption-based pricing. It doesn't work. And what I mean is, you can have some adoption in the short term. The best example is Snowflake. But in the long term, it destroys your business. And the reason is because you don't know which data is valuable and you're not going to put up with a variable business model that increases more and more costs because you need to trap everything. And so what happens is, all of these other companies develop around you. People go back to Postpress, people go to Superbase, they find all of these ways of saying, "Snowflake makes no sense." And the reason is because in this world, nobody's going to pay consumption because you're like, "How do you expect me to, you know, hold and store and pay for?" Terabytes and terabytes, potentially a day of data.

• 1:11:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not sustainable.

• 1:11:39David Friedberg?

  We'll see if Intercom, Salesforce, HubSpot, we see if all of those people start Slack, start losing their customer base, or if they lower their pricing to make it just too easy to keep those systems in. Thomas, your thoughts?

• 1:11:51Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, so two quick thoughts. Number one, Chamath, to put a kind of a mathematical frame on this, right? We know that Anthropic is kind of the level zero of code generation. They're doing incredibly well powering companies like Cursor, right? I think, and this is order of magnitude correct, that Anthropic in Q1 added 70% of the net new ARR in the SaaS industry, right? Defined by public SaaS companies, right? So let's just think that the company in AI that is most powering the disruption of SaaS added three quarters of the net new of the entire industry, right? So that's kind of point number one. I think Friedberg, point number two, I think what we're seeing in the Mac 7, right? Where we're starting to have debates about who's well positioned and who isn't, who's going to win and who isn't, right?

• 1:12:36Thomas Laffont?

  Is actually, as it was in the past five years, going to be a broader lens into the S and P 493. I think inside of boardrooms, inside of every investment committee, you're going to see the exact same conversations that we've been having about the Mac 7, right? Who's well positioned? Who can win? What are the management teams, maybe like Zuck, that are being aggressive and bold and capturing the opportunity and which are the ones that are not? So for me, as a stock picker, right? I think over the next five years, I couldn't think of a more interesting time where we're actually going to see dispersion between winners and losers.

• 1:13:12David Friedberg?

  And do you think that these roll-up models make sense? So you've probably heard, and I don't know if you guys have considered this, but obviously some fund managers are putting together pools of capital to go out and buy businesses that they can then apply their know-how, they're bringing smart people in AI, to then create a category killer and go after that market? And are you guys participating in that? And how do you kind of view that opportunity? Are all the public companies basically? Too mature, or are some of them going to kind of go after this type, this model as well?

• 1:13:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It goes back to whether you can attract the talent to go and do these things. My advice to this large private equity firm is you can probably try to stand up your own AI org, but I suspect you're going to get the person that didn't get an OpenAI offer, didn't get a Meta offer, didn't get a Google offer, didn't get an 80/90 offer, then didn't get an Apple offer, and then that's the person you hire. How good that person will be, who the hell knows? I think the problem is that even if you take some of these kind of meh industries and roll them all up, you ultimately have to find a buyer who wants to own that business after you. So the question is, like, if you were to buy a bunch of accounting firms,

• 1:14:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  or law firms, or IT services firms, and you do an incredible job, who wants to buy that in seven years? Meaning, if you talk to, like, if you went to the OpenAI Demo Day, there was this really interesting chart where Andre Karpathy talked about integrating Google Login into one of his apps, I think it was his MenuGen app. And the comment he made, which profoundly hit me, is like, "Why am I doing any of this? Why isn't this just one click behind the scenes?" And you could take that generalization and apply it to all of IT services. Why does any of that exist? Why isn't it all one click? And eventually, if these agents become smart enough,

• 1:15:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the fear that I have is that there is no terminal buyer for many of these companies.

• 1:15:17David Friedberg?

  But they could still be public, Chamath. I mean, they could, they could trade at some multiple of cash flow, and you're basically arbitraging the cash flow. But I'm not talking about the private equity trade. I'm actually talking about the public equity trade. If you look at the 493 companies...

• 1:15:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those are better positioned. I think, like, instead of an IT rollup, I think what you could do is probably sort, like, here's what I would do. I would take the 493, and the filter that I would apply is, what offline assets do they have? What online assets do they have? What percentage of those assets are defensible and unique and exist in a post-AI world? And what percentage of those assets disappear in a post-AI world? And I think where I would end up is I'd like own a specialty chemicals company or something, you know, like you're still gonna need lubricants and stuff and you can find some way to make it. But if you're like a feature-

• 1:16:07David Friedberg?

  We know you need lubricants. Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:16:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, I love the lubricants.

• 1:16:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But uh-

• 1:16:12David Friedberg?

  No ditty, no ditty.

• 1:16:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But uh, baby oil making, you know, like just-

• 1:16:17Jason Calacanis?

  Buy by the crate.

• 1:16:18David Friedberg?

  Chamath, do you want to talk about your SPAC tweet?

• 1:16:20Jason Calacanis?

  Uh oh, you know the market's back and we see this much M and A-

• 1:16:23David Friedberg?

  Can you play the siren? Can you play the siren?

• 1:16:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, as with all my tweets-

• 1:16:29David Friedberg?

  It's like a Cabo, like a Cabo Beach party.

• 1:16:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As with all my tweets, it starts when, look, here, here's, X is an incredible platform. I use it for recruiting-

• 1:16:40David Friedberg?

  Pull up the tweet.

• 1:16:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I use it for a lot of things, but what I-

• 1:16:42Jason Calacanis?

  You're in your villain phase right now, man. You've got full supervillain. It's so great. I love it.

• 1:16:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The retweet is more important. Yeah, I love that.

• 1:16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Quote, retweet, here we go. Here's the tweet. Chamath says, incredible that almost 58,000 people voted in his tweet if he should launch a new SPAC. So, uh, give the people what they want, Chamath, or what?

• 1:17:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I first, I first started this because I, when I use X sometimes to, to, just to like sound off because it de-stresses me during the day. And like, I'll troll people or whatever. And then I just did this. And I was so impressed that 58,000 people voted, but really what happened was I had a lot of very smart money people on Wall Street and some crypto folks call me that I respect. And, and basically what they said is like, it would be really good if you did it. So I don't know if I'm gonna do it, but I'm heavily leaning towards doing it.

• 1:17:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the argument to do it is you learned a lot since last time. There's a lot of inventory there. You've got a lot of access to pre-market companies. I think what people need to understand is when you're doing SPACs, and, and correct me if I'm wrong here-

• 1:17:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what I'll say, Jason. This poll and this community note- will be in every single document I do. Nobody that is listening to this should participate in this. This is going to be for me and a handful of, you know, advanced, large pools of money. You should stay as far away as possible.

• 1:18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so there's your disclaimer.

• 1:18:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Whatever I do next.

• 1:18:04Jason Calacanis?

  Don't participate in Chamath's next back. That's the rule here.

• 1:18:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stay on the sideline, do something else.

• 1:18:10Jason Calacanis?

  Don't come in the arena, because we're trying things.

• 1:18:12David Friedberg?

  Chamath, don't you have enough going on? Like, why would you do this when you have?

• 1:18:16Jason Calacanis?

  Because fate loves irony.

• 1:18:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fate loves irony, bro. Fate loves irony.

• 1:18:19Jason Calacanis?

  It'll be hilarious. It'll be the greatest IPO of all time.

• 1:18:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If the poll was yes, I'd be like, oh shit, this is the last thing I need.

• 1:18:27Jason Calacanis?

  All in SPAC. Let's go.

• 1:18:29David Friedberg?

  Thomas, commentary?

• 1:18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Thomas, are you gonna buy the all-in SPAC? What's going on?

• 1:18:33David Friedberg?

  Is the SPAC market coming back?

• 1:18:35Jason Calacanis?

  80, 90 SPAC?

• 1:18:35Thomas Laffont?

  I'm open to all great companies come into the public market.

• 1:18:39Jason Calacanis?

  Love it, love it. I mean, but.

• 1:18:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Actually, Thomas, can I ask you a question? Like, tell us about the state of liquidity and actually about IPOs and SPACs in general. Like, where's your, where's your temperature on it? Just give us a read on what you think.

• 1:18:51Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, look, I, I think we're getting real-world data, Chamath, right? Like, in real time. Um, not just from kind of higher visibility companies like Circle and CoreWeave, but, um, Chime also did really well. Um, Charis, uh, company, you know, more in Dave's, uh, wheelhouse, right? Um, also just coming out, so, and then wait till we see, um, the flurry of S1s that have already been filed, right? Figma is a, is a generational potential company, right? That's going to be coming. So I think we're going to see fantastic assets coming out.

• 1:19:25Thomas Laffont?

  And I think the market is saying, we're open for business. The, the Mac 7 is controversial. To Dave's point, the, the S&P 493, there's going to be lots of winners and losers. It's maybe not as obvious. There's going to be some dispersion. So. Bring on the new cohort.

• 1:19:41David Friedberg?

  I think it's the first time you could probably argue that you could go short the S and P.

• 1:19:45Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45David Friedberg?

  And pick a couple of winners. It's, it might be the first time that I would feel in the last 20 years. Cause I'm pretty negative on people being able to kind of pick stocks. But I do think that this is such a transformative moment that if you really have a sense for what's possible, you could start to see category killers emerge out of the S and P and it's an opportunity to short the S and P and pick a couple of winners.

• 1:20:05Thomas Laffont?

  Totally.

• 1:20:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you, Thomas, but do you, do you care about how these companies go public? Like, do you care about SPAC versus direct listing versus IPO like?

• 1:20:14Thomas Laffont?

  I don't. I, I only care about the quality of the underlying asset. And what I think it can be worth five years from now. Now, obviously I do care about the liquidity that I'm getting in the IPO Chamath. So, you know, am I getting a million or a hundred million or a billion is the float, right? That's number one. And obviously I also do care about the percentage that is floating. And I do care about the lockup, right? So those, those three elements are really important in terms of a company going public and how we think about participating.

• 1:20:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Give the listeners the guidance there. So for the first thing, bigger is better than smaller.

• 1:20:49Thomas Laffont?

  Correct. So it's number one, can I even buy it, right? If, if the IPO is so small. And, you know, we can't get in a, a large enough position, it doesn't really make sense for us, right? So that would be kind of point number one, right? Point number two is how much of the company is publicly floating, right?

• 1:21:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bigger is better there as well?

• 1:21:10Thomas Laffont?

  Correct. We, you kind of get a truer price, right? When a higher percentage of the company floats, it's also most likely going to be less volatile and less susceptible Chamath to,

• 1:21:22Thomas Laffont?

  you know, pricing, predatory pricing and, and manipulation and things like that.

• 1:21:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's the percentage float that?

• 1:21:29Thomas Laffont?

  I think 20% is, in my opinion, kind of a minimum. Some have gone out, you know, I think I remember correctly, Chamath, you may know this, I think LinkedIn went out at like 10% or something. I, I remember it being really small.

• 1:21:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:42Thomas Laffont?

  And a lot of us thinking like, wow, that is, that is a small percentage.

• 1:21:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah. Which ended up, by the way, being very volatile.

• 1:21:50Thomas Laffont?

  So so number two, the float, and then number three, the lockup, right? First, is there one? Um, in a direct listing, there may not be one, right? So you may you may get in that scenario to a truer price faster.

• 1:22:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But Thomas, why do you think there's been no direct listings? Like, why has that totally fallen away after? I mean, Spotify did one, we did one at Slack.

• 1:22:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then where are they? Like, why? Why don't people pursue those?

• 1:22:16Thomas Laffont?

  So here's a statistic. I actually had to double check this because I couldn't believe it, right? If you look at the cohort of companies that went IPO in 2021, right? And and I'm actually not including SPACs in this particular analysis, right?

• 1:22:32Thomas Laffont?

  If you look at that cohort, T plus one year, the cohort was down about 40% on average, right? Okay, fine, maybe they went up too high. 2021 was a peak, they didn't do well in one year. T plus five years, it's down 50%, right? Which which really kind of shocked me, right? So I think there's kind of scar tissue on both sides of the table, on the buy side about, wait, hold on, what am I really buying? And how do I make sure that it's kind of a sustainable kind of company? But frankly, probably also from boards, right? Who are taking their best assets public and may just want to pursue a more conventional approach in the beginning stages, right? I can tell you for us,

• 1:23:17Thomas Laffont?

  direct listing versus IPO makes makes no functional difference. You know, I think each has a benefit. And I think in some, depending on how concentrated your ownership base is, how understandable your business model is and things like that. But we just want these companies to come.

• 1:23:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a market behavior, by the way, in direct listings. And I've mentioned this once, but I've been in two transactions with direct listings. The first was Slack. And in the execution of it, we misexecuted, we meaning me, because I had a huge Ownership of Slack, but I didn't know what to do with it. And I ended up distributing portions along the way. And it then went through all kinds of turbulence and then it got acquired slightly above the IPO price. And what I learned in retrospect was the best trade is actually the first day trade on a direct listing. So then when it came back around and I got a distribution the day before of Coinbase, and I mentioned this to Brian, this was not a judgment on the company.

• 1:24:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I said, if this direct listing process is going to map to what I've experienced at Slack, the right thing to do is to sell. And I sold that on day one at 335 bucks a share. And it's just, it's, I think, Jason, it's still not at the IPO price?

• 1:24:35Jason Calacanis?

  I think it might be getting close, but no, it's not back.

• 1:24:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So these, yeah, so these direct listings are not what they're tracked up to be either.

• 1:24:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. If we look back on SPACs, I think SoFi is above the price. And that might have been one of yours, Trumath, Joby getting close. These were venture investments. These were late-stage venture investments in your mind, Thomas? And then retail tried to become venture capitalists? And they didn't have the five, 10-year horizon that we as venture capitalists have? Is that your assessment of it? And are there any great ones that came out of the SPAC movement?

• 1:25:05Thomas Laffont?

  Well, I mean, the direct listing era as an example, let's talk about Spotify, right? Which basically has seven Xed, right, over that period? So again, I, it's hard to tell.

• 1:25:17Jason Calacanis?

  What about SPACs though?

• 1:25:18Thomas Laffont?

  Right, causation versus correlation? That's why I like, I think ultimately for me as an ultimate kind of long-term owner of these businesses, I really just care about the quality of the business. And whether you chose to go SPAC or direct listing or IPO is a mechanical decision. To me, the output is quality of business and, you know, that's ultimately what wins out.

• 1:25:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I want to end on this. You just shared a chart of AppLovin and the massive. Revenue per employee, this is just astounding. Thomas, Apple 11, as we can see here, had 3.6 million revenue per employee in '21. Now up to 7.6 million. They peaked at 1,000 employees, now down to 750-ish, it looks like. In related news, obviously, Microsoft, we talked about the other week, let go of 3%. They are planning on massive cuts again for sales. These are organizations that are at record cash, record revenue in an industry where we had a tradition of not firing the gray beards and people had been at the company for more than 10 years. Andy Jassy didn't come up as like one of the companies we think is going to win at AI,

• 1:26:21Jason Calacanis?

  but it might be the company most impacted by deploying AI inside their enterprise. He launched Emissive. Here it is, I suggest everybody read it. When you send a missive like this to your employees, you're trying to communicate something to them and to the public markets. So he published it on his website. He talks about dozens of AI projects, AI tools for advertisers, obviously, Gen I for sellers, you know, their product detail page. He's talking about Alexa coming back with a brand new version, shopping assistance, everything. But then he started talking about the workforce size. He says in this manifesto, "In the next few years, we expect this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."

• 1:27:05Jason Calacanis?

  So my question to you, Thomas, is when you hear public CEOs talking about lowering the number of employees while they're growing 10, 20% per year, this is obviously awesome for earnings, the share price, but there's going to be massive job displacement. Any thoughts on the job displacement, job replacement and society navigating that? And just as well, Andy Jassy specifically, and what you think of Amazon as a business? And them being a player in AI and AI being a player in their business?

• 1:27:38Thomas Laffont?

  You know, I think it's an important question and I'll defer to what Jensen answered on this topic because in my view, it's still the most credible and cohesive answer I've kind of heard, right? And Jensen is known, the CEO of Nvidia, an incredibly long-term thinker. And in his view, as he looks at a population that's getting older, and he wonders who are going to be all the young people that are going to take care of all the old people, whether it's nurses or doctors or other things like that. And in his view, we better get a lot more productive, right? To deal with our inverted demographic table. So I ultimately think this is going to enable more young people to take care of more old people, right? And it's just going to create, I think, knowledge workers are incredibly flexible. They can take their tools from, you know, one particular skill set to another.

• 1:28:23Thomas Laffont?

  So I think this is going to unleash incredible opportunities for the economy. I think it is going to make us more productive and wealthier. So I'm definitely on the more optimistic side of the scenario.

• 1:28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, any thoughts on Amazon? They didn't come up, but obviously AWS crushing it and they're a major player. And they have their own silicon they're making. You mentioned that being an important part of the stack. And then you have Optimus and Robots Figure that are going to be in their factories. That's a lot of jobs, delivery robots. They're doing drones like ZipLine. They have their own version of it, obviously, and they're doing Zooks. So if you just look at their behavior and you look at their investments, they're massively, massively investing in robotics, self-driving and chips. So they're pretty hardware focused, yeah.

• 1:29:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For physical AI, they're a kingmaker in parts because they're a sync for demand. So they'll just generate so much demand for robots. So if Figure lands the BMW or the UPS robot successfully, Amazon will buy a gajillion of them. If Optimus lands a successful robot that they tune inside the Tesla factory and then are ready to sell, Amazon will buy a gajillion of them. If there are drones that are delivering things, Amazon will buy a gajillion of them. So on the one side, there's a lot of typical OpEx lift that Amazon will get. I think the problem is more with AWS, which is that their success is actually their biggest bottleneck. The success is that they are not necessarily kingmaking.

• 1:29:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're about being a purveyor of many, many, many different things that you can find inside of AWS marketplace. And so, you know, the, the thing that they'll have to embrace. Is, well, do I differentiate my own hardware from Nvidia's at some point? Do I actually make a real bet on models and try to frankly buy Anthropic, which is probably their only solution? And tightly couple it in and say that, you know, if you want to have next generation Cogen experiences, they need to run inside of AWS. These are the difficult decisions that I think that Andy will have to face, and he's going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. But yeah, the Amazon retail side is going to be a kingmaker for all of these physical AI things.

• 1:30:39Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, any thoughts on Amazon, just as a company broadly? About saying, hey, they're a kingmaker. That seems like a really interesting insight. You have any insights there on Amazon and their playing a part here in the future of AI?

• 1:30:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't.

• 1:30:53Jason Calacanis?

  Thomas, and any closing thoughts here on, you know, the sort of old guard, Microsoft, Amazon, and their employee count and the cuts we're seeing there? And what these companies will look like in the future in terms of revenue per employee? They're not hiring young people. They're getting rid of the old folks. They're just advancing, it seems, at a, they're adopting AI pretty severely at these companies. What are your thoughts there?

• 1:31:19Thomas Laffont?

  I'm going to play, I'm going to play the role of J Cal, and I'm going to ask a question to all three of you guys.

• 1:31:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, here we go.

• 1:31:26Thomas Laffont?

  So Microsoft's employee count peaked at about 250,000, you know, call it about a year ago. Who here believes that in five years, Microsoft will have more employees than it does today?

• 1:31:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  More.

• 1:31:42Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to say the same. I think they'll have just about 250 plus or minus 10%. I don't think, if I, if I could pick push as the answer, I would pick push, which is they're going to get 10% better every year with AI, 20% more efficient. Therefore, they don't need to add people. But I also don't think they atrophy much more. So maybe they have 250.

• 1:32:02Thomas Laffont?

  Why, why do you say more so quickly? I'm curious.

• 1:32:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, so this chart, which I think is like a...

• 1:32:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Very dangerous vanity metric is why. So what Microsoft touts is what percentage of code is generated by AI, without answering the more important question, which is, is that code useful and good? And if you ask that second layer, Nick, I sent you this tweet from Jan Le Cun, and I'll tell you that this is my lived experience as well, is most code generated by AI is crap. And most of the tools that we use, you know, the reason we call these tools app crappers is because most of the code that it generates is crap. So it's great in a single-player mode,

• 1:32:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  but transitioning from single-player mode to a complex enterprise environment is not possible today. So I think that Microsoft puts these metrics out because they want to seem that they're on the front line of it. But I suspect that this is just like, you know how you used to hire McKinsey consultants to fire people because it was good air cover? It's probably just air cover to fire a bunch of folks that they probably wanted to get rid of anyways, but it's not related to that chart. And the reason is that Jan Le Cun's tweet is true. When you allow these models to run over complicated tasks over long periods of time, the error rates compound to such a degree that the resulting output is not worthwhile. And so until that problem is fixed, which I'm sure it will be, and I'm going to bet that it will be,

• 1:33:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the idea that all of a sudden it's because of coding agents that people are getting laid off, I think is a fallacy. So I suspect that Microsoft's business on the margin grows. Back to Dave's point, some of the 493 shrink and go away. It'll be cheaper for Microsoft to bundle together a bunch of other products that are point features today. So they'll have more people, they'll indeed more. The people will be different, they'll have different skillsets, but I suspect Microsoft's employee base grows.

• 1:33:58Thomas Laffont?

  Friedberg, what say you?

• 1:34:01David Friedberg?

  I think shrink.

• 1:34:03Thomas Laffont?

  Wow. So by the way, pretty interesting to think about. We have one decisively more, one medium, about the same, a push and a, and a less.

• 1:34:12David Friedberg?

  I only say that because I do think that there's a real probability of revenue decline in the next five years. So if you look at the enterprise install base, I think that cloud gets competed away. So I do think like on this, on the application software layer, they're going to have a really hard time in this new world. Because the old school customers that buy Microsoft are going to die. They're more likely to die in their marketplace compared to the folks that are going to build native software, native workflows. And I'm not really where Chamath is. I think you may be right about where AI written code is today. I, I don't think that that's true three years from now, four years from now, given the pace of improvement. And so in a world where you have software written workflows built for you through agentic tools.

• 1:34:57David Friedberg?

  I think that Microsoft's core business for the, is going to decline. The, the losers are their biggest customers and the winners are not going to use them. So I, I, you know, that, that would be.

• 1:35:06Jason Calacanis?

  Where are you at, Thomas? Maybe you're the tiebreaker.

• 1:35:10Thomas Laffont?

  I, I'm in Chamath's camp where I actually think the Microsoft business will be bigger. If anything, on, on kind of Ursher alone. And that at the end of the day, uh, we'll just need more people to support it. I just think they'll be, they'll be more relevant. They'll have more productive employees. But there'll still be more of them.

• 1:35:29Jason Calacanis?

  I'm predicting incredible growth and the same number of employees. So you guys are predicting incredible growth and employee growth.

• 1:35:36David Friedberg?

  I think that, that's interesting. So, so sorry, let me.

• 1:35:38Jason Calacanis?

  Less revenue, less employees. Interesting.

• 1:35:40David Friedberg?

  So the thesis as, as your grows, um, is basically where the, the application dollars go. Effectively is one way to think about this, right? So application dollars go there and that more than makes up for the decline in, in that business over time.

• 1:35:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:57David Friedberg?

  Right. And there's multiple clouds. By the way, I went to the Google Next event last year. And so I, I ended up going to these like special dinners or whatever, a couple of cocktail dinner thing. Cause I spoke there and I, I saw they put me with a bunch of these people and I, CIOs of, you know, whatever Fortune 50 companies. And all of them said that they're multi-cloud, like they're not, no one's going to standardize on one cloud. So everyone has to be on Microsoft and Google. And I had never really recognized this or thought about this as being a, a fact that it's not necessarily the best or the lowest price. At the end of the day, these guys are going to distribute their exposure. And so I think that maybe supports your case. I'm very easily, I'm very easily able to see other arguments today. I'm very convinced.

• 1:36:39Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the revenue. What a spectacular revenue run.

• 1:36:43David Friedberg?

  Well, I think all four of us would agree that if we could synthetically own AWS, Azure and GCP. If I could somehow automatically create an index of all three of those businesses, right? Over the next five years.

• 1:36:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:58David Friedberg?

  You wouldn't need to own anything else.

• 1:36:59Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:37:00David Friedberg?

  You wouldn't need to own anything else.

• 1:37:01Jason Calacanis?

  Man, I wish Elon would take that.

• 1:37:03David Friedberg?

  So why don't you put up with the shitty part of the rest of their businesses and just own all three and that's it? Call it a day. Cause you've got to assume that if one of them wins over the other two or accelerates ahead of the other two, it's going to more than make up for the losses that the other two might experience in their other businesses. The multiples aren't crazy on those three companies, by the way.

• 1:37:20Jason Calacanis?

  Quite reasonable, yeah. I think if Elon took what he did with Colossus and he had an AWS competitor, he would be a serious competitor in this space.

• 1:37:27David Friedberg?

  But this is like this, this is where.

• 1:37:28Jason Calacanis?

  The velocity at which he can build out data centers is extraordinary.

• 1:37:32David Friedberg?

  This is where Elon does better because he can actually get a better, like fundraising in the private market with XAI. Then what do you have to deal with?

• 1:37:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he's really, he's really struggling with that.

• 1:37:44David Friedberg?

  No, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. No, I'm saying it's better for him, right?

• 1:37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Hey guys, look who's here. Couldn't stay away. David Sacks, look at here. You can't get away from it. 11 o'clock happens on a Thursday and you start jonesing for your besties. Welcome to the czar, David Sacks.

• 1:38:00David Sacks?

  Good to be back. Jake, how are you? In L.A.?

• 1:38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Mm-hmm. I'm in L.A. This is.

• 1:38:05David Sacks?

  You're in someone's guest house?

• 1:38:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, actually, this is one of your guest houses. You, you just lost track of them. I still have the key code. It's a J Cal, Callan. J Cal Callan is at your guest house. Jado Callan. Jado Callan, here, I'm here. Come down the hill.

• 1:38:20David Sacks?

  Did he also get that reference? It's going to kind of date it now.

• 1:38:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, God. Kato Callan is ride or die. I mean, he would jump on a, a vent day or a grande for you, for sure. Let's talk a little bit here, since they got you, Sacks. Would you be willing to talk a little bit about the genius act we just passed the Senate? I think you have your fingerprints on this. Is that true? Yeah? Tell us everything.

• 1:38:40David Sacks?

  Well, it's definitely something we supported, and this is, I think, a huge milestone. I mean, just, you know, what basically happened is we had this genius act, which is the stablecoin bill passed the Senate with 68 votes, got 18 Democrats, they came on board. We had to hit that key threshold of 60 votes in the Senate. That's the threshold you need in the Senate unless, you know, it's a narrow exception for reconciliation. So it's very, very hard to pass any bill out of the Senate, and you need a significant amount of bipartisan support. And we got that. Now, when you consider where we were a year ago, you know, you realize what huge progress this is for the crypto industry.

• 1:39:21David Sacks?

  A year ago, you had crypto companies being prosecuted, you had this whole regulation through prosecution approach, where Gary Gensler, who was the chair of the SEC then, he wouldn't tell startups what the rules were, but they would just announce prosecutions. And this was driving all the crypto innovation offshore. And I think we were basically poised to lose the crypto industry in the United States. What happened then is President Trump adopted this cause. He announced that he wanted to make the United States the crypto capital of the planet. He really campaigned on this. And as part of his administration, he, in the very first week, signed a new executive order, making it clear that his administration supported crypto. We've been rooting out all the Biden war on crypto rules and regulations at the agency

• 1:40:06David Sacks?

  level. And now we have this first major legislative win. And I would expect the House will act in the next few weeks on this, and then the President will have a bill he can sign.

• 1:40:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is a great work, and it's really important because, to your point, Gary Gensler's concept was, hey, there's an existing playbook, there's existing rules, just follow those. But none of these things actually match the existing rules perfectly, so you need some new rules, they need to evolve.

• 1:40:32David Sacks?

  It was much worse than that, because he would say things like, well, just come into the SEC and talk to us. You know, so in other words, you got to come in and talk to us and get our approval. But then when startups would go in there and talk to them, there'd be enforcement people there writing down everything they said, and the next day they get a Wells notice, and they would get investigated.

• 1:40:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's a honey trap, honey pot.

• 1:40:49David Sacks?

  Yeah, they were honey potted, basically.

• 1:40:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:52David Sacks?

  And so, the response, the industry was, okay, we're just going to leave the United States. And that was what was in the process of happening until President Trump won the election, and then changed the tone in Washington. I think there was one other really significant thing that happened, because, you know, obviously...

• 1:41:09David Sacks?

  President Trump has gotten Republicans on board with this cause, but the question is, why are Democrats on board with it? During the Biden administration, Elizabeth Warren really called the shots on crypto, and it was well reported that Gensler was was sort of her ally and her pick. I've kind of joked that Warren controlled the Biden autopen on crypto because she really did exert that kind of influence. So the question is, well, what changed? And I think one of the big things is that in this last election, Sherrod Brown, who was the chair of the Banking Committee for the Democrats in the Senate, lost his seat in a close election against Bernie Moreno. And I think there were many reasons for him to lose that seat. He was far to the left of voters in Ohio. Nonetheless,

• 1:41:52David Sacks?

  he had been a successful politician there for a long time. And one of the reasons why he lost is because the crypto industry really got behind Bernie Moreno because Sherrod Brown was just a total blocker to any crypto legislation in the mold of Elizabeth Warren. And I think that a lot of smart Democrats looked at that and said, why are we dying on this hill again?

• 1:42:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:14David Sacks?

  You know?

• 1:42:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16David Sacks?

  And I think Schumer-

• 1:42:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's also extraordinarily popular, Sacks, with consumers and businesses. So there is a demand here in Korea, Thomas-

• 1:42:23David Sacks?

  You've got you've got something like 50 million wallet holders in the US and their their their voters.

• 1:42:28Jason Calacanis?

  So that's one out of five Americans, adult Americans.

• 1:42:30David Sacks?

  Right. So I think a lot of Democrats said, well, wait a second. Why are we just blindly following Elizabeth Warren on this? What exactly is so harmful about this? Particularly when what we're talking about here is creating a regulatory regime. You know, it shouldn't be hard to sell Democrats on new regulations. But in this case, the reason why there's broad bipartisan support is because the crypto industry itself is calling for those regulations because having regulatory certainty is better for them than the possibility of the return of a Gary Gensler like figure who just prosecutes them without telling them what the rules are. So this is why I think you're getting some significant bipartisan support.

• 1:43:08Jason Calacanis?

  And as you said, bringing this on shore is such a great portion of it. There are tons of actors who some people might describe as bad or gray or dark. Tether comes to mind with a lot of regulation against it. And now those folks who are running away with the industry, Thomas, now they have to compete with people like Jeremy Aller and Circle, which are totally buttoned up here in the United States, and it levels the playing field. So it's an example of actually good regulation, bringing- This opportunity back onshore and taking it out of the gray area.

• 1:43:42David Sacks?

  Just on the whole offshore versus onshore. So it is true that the number one stablecoin issuer on the planet right now is an offshore company. And that is partly because there has not been a regulatory framework in the US and there's been hostility towards the crypto space. And so the logical reaction to that is to either not get involved in the crypto space, which is what the banks have done until now, or you go offshore. Neither one is good. And you can see in the wake of this genius act, the stablecoin bill, that the banks have now talked about getting into stablecoins. They're going to issue one. And then also Tether will, under this act, will have three years to come onshore.

• 1:44:26David Sacks?

  But the bottom line is they will have to operate in the United States. And that's a good thing for consumers. It's a good thing for the US.

• 1:44:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they gave them three years to get compliance?

• 1:44:34David Sacks?

  They have three years, but they have to move onshore. Now, all stablecoin issuers under this bill will have to be audited quarterly.

• 1:44:42Jason Calacanis?

  By a real audit, not this attestation nonsense, like real audits by American?

• 1:44:47David Sacks?

  Real audits, and it will verify that every stablecoin that's been issued is backed or fully reserved on a one-to-one basis

• 1:44:56Jason Calacanis?

  With?

• 1:44:56David Sacks?

  With real dollars in an American bank accounts that are in US T-bills or money market accounts. And so what it does is, by the way, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Tether, but this does provide additional certainty and confidence because you know that all the companies are onshore and they've been fully audited and we know that they're fully reserved. So that when you want to redeem and cash out your stablecoin tokens, there's a real dollar waiting there to cash out.

• 1:45:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You prevent the under-collateralization issue.

• 1:45:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:30David Sacks?

  And by the way, I'm not saying that there is.

• 1:45:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you're not saying that.

• 1:45:32David Sacks?

  But, but what I'm saying is now we create total certainty and confidence, which is good for the market.

• 1:45:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What happens if a stablecoin issuer does not? Like, can you issue US dollar stablecoins and not be governed under this system? Or no, you're saying because the US dollar is a US government instrument, then no matter where you are or no matter where you issue from?

• 1:45:53David Sacks?

  Yeah, all the issuers will be governed by this. And if you're a legacy offshore issuer, you're given this time period to bring yourself into conformity. But yeah.

• 1:46:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Otherwise, what happens if they don't?

• 1:46:04David Sacks?

  Well, it's a good question. I mean, I guess the exchanges won't be able to carry their their tokens. And they won't be able to set foot in the US. They'll be in violation of US laws. It's not a good place to be.

• 1:46:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, you don't have to guess. There have been dozens of actions and accusations like legitimate ones against Tether. New York's Attorney General did a major settlement with him in 2021. They've been banned from many jurisdictions and in Senate hearings.

• 1:46:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tether should just go public in America and be done with it.

• 1:46:35Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and the issue was there was deep concerns that they didn't have the deposits and now they're they're really trumping the fact that they're massively profitable, obviously. So there's been tons of, you can just search Tether and allegations and you'll find all that stuff. We don't have to hear it here.

• 1:46:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tether founders, Italian.

• 1:46:52Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, I got to give you a lot of credit. We knew that you would bring an efficiency level and some expertise to this administration, but I got to give you your flowers. We're five months into this administration. Can disagree about many things. One thing we can't disagree about is that this piece of legislation is here and we're only five months in. So maybe you could speak to the velocity at which things are getting done. And then any other closing thoughts. I know you got to get back to your day job.

• 1:47:18David Sacks?

  Jake, a lot of people deserve credit for this. I just want to give out a couple of shout outs. So Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee was the principal author of the legislation. He did an amazing job getting Democrat votes and also bringing the Senate bill into greater alignment with the House bill. So hopefully this can pass the House very quickly. Chairman Tim Scott is the chairman of the Banking Committee was also incredible. Majority Leader John Thune. And then we had a few co sponsors of the legislation, Cynthia Lemus from Wyoming. And then two Democrats actually were really important. Kirsten Gillibrand from New York and Angela Alsobrooks from Maryland. All of them did a great job and we've got great leaders on the House side as well. French Hill, who's the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Tom Emmer, who's the whip and Mike Johnson, who's the speaker.

• 1:48:01David Sacks?

  So kudos to all of them because I think that it really is a pretty incredible achievement that they've been able to get this bill through. Again, just a huge sea change from where we were a year ago, where crypto was basically under attack. It was being driven offshore. And now we have it as one of the first major piece of legislation by this new Congress. And again, that's all because of President Trump's leadership and prioritization of this issue. So thank you to all of them for making this happen.

• 1:48:27Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations to you, David. Hey, one tactical question I forgot to ask you. The float on these, this is like how Tether is making billions of dollars a year, and this is how people anticipate they're going to make billions of dollars a year. Are they able to split that with consumers yet? Because I remember reading in early legislation that you weren't allowed to pass on the interest made from a stablecoin to like the consumers, I guess. So you wouldn't, it couldn't be an interest-bearing account. If you buy stablecoins, you can't get interest on it, but the issuer like Circle, that's their main business model. So Right. Did that make it into the final? And maybe you can give us some background on that? No. No, it did not.

• 1:49:02David Sacks?

  The way the framework works is that the stablecoin issuers cannot pass on interest

• 1:49:07Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 1:49:07David Sacks?

  to the token holders.

• 1:49:08Jason Calacanis?

  Why is that?

• 1:49:09David Sacks?

  Look, I mean, I don't know if there's a great principled reason. This was a compromise that was necessary to get the support of the banking industry, quite frankly.

• 1:49:16Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, they see it as competition, I'm betting.

• 1:49:18David Sacks?

  Well, there was a lot of concern from community banks that if stablecoins were paying 5% interest, it would put them out of business. Personally, I think that that concern, although understandable from them, I don't think that that's what would have happened. But these are the types of compromises, quite frankly, that you need in order to pass legislation. I hope that at some point in the future, we'll revisit that and allow stablecoin issuers to kind of just do what they want to do.

• 1:49:43Jason Calacanis?

  Alright.

• 1:49:44David Sacks?

  And that'll be easier once the banks get into the act and they're participating in this industry.

• 1:49:48Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:49:49David Sacks?

  But right now, they're total outsiders and you can understand the fear factor.

• 1:49:52Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, Sax, when we drop you off, man, I wish we could have you on for the full show, but you're busy, you got a lot of things to do. Love you, David. Shed a little tear and I'll miss my bestie. See you soon.

• 1:50:01David Sacks?

  Alright, thanks, guys. Alright, I got you.

• 1:50:03Jason Calacanis?

  We got two hours of classic All In. In part two of the show, we're going to do an hour and a half on the Israeli conflict with Iran. We've got 90 more minutes coming up. Don't forget Ukraine. And we've got Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sax joining us in the second, in the third and fourth hour of the All In Podcast. How is the All In Summit going, Friedberg? How's All In Summit? You know, we might get Wait, Jason, can I do a shout out? Joe Tsai wants to come from Alibaba. Who's in touch with him? I am. You? Thanks to Philippe.

• 1:50:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just want to do one quick shout out to our friend and fellow bestie, Vinnie Lingam.

• 1:50:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes, he has movies coming out.

• 1:50:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A friend of ours did a documentary on

• 1:50:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's great.

• 1:50:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, you're gonna love this, on Only Eating.

• 1:50:48Jason Calacanis?

  I denounce, I love Vinnie, I denounce it so great. This film is amazing.

• 1:50:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, it's called Animal. Oh, it's great, Doc. And uh, it's Where can, where can people watch it?

• 1:51:01Jason Calacanis?

  I think he's got a couple of deals that's coming out.

• 1:51:03David Friedberg?

  Go down to your local slaughterhouse and put it on your phone and watch it at the slaughterhouse while you're there.

• 1:51:07Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the idea. You're gonna consume a certain number of calories to mouth. Us humans were designed to eat meat. That's the number one thing we should be doing as a species is eating meat.

• 1:51:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nick, can you put the trailer in the show notes so that then he can get a little?

• 1:51:19Jason Calacanis?

  Play, actually play us out with the trailer. You can play us out with the trailer on the show. We'll do a massage.

• 1:51:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Alright guys, I gotta go eat. I have a photo shoot in two hours. I love you guys.

• 1:51:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you got a photo shoot? Is it gonna be, you showing the legs or just the top this time? What are you showing?

• 1:51:31David Friedberg?

  What are you shooting?

• 1:51:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm gonna do it all wrong.

• 1:51:32Jason Calacanis?

  Blur out the anaconda. You should do pixelate the anaconda.

• 1:51:35Thomas Laffont?

  I hope it's Italian Vogue.

• 1:51:37David Friedberg?

  What are you shooting?

• 1:51:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thomas is in the general neighborhood. I, I can't comment, but uh...

• 1:51:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, tell us we'll bleep it out. Nice. Tell us you bleep it out.

• 1:51:45David Friedberg?

  Shomoff, give me a call. I gotta talk to you about this weekend.

• 1:51:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, love you guys. Talk to you guys.

• 1:51:49Thomas Laffont?

  I'll see you at the, uh, are you guys still doing the tequila launch?

• 1:51:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, Saturday night. We'll see you Saturday night. Absolutely.

• 1:51:54Thomas Laffont?

  I'll see you there.

• 1:51:55Jason Calacanis?

  Go to allin.com/ yada yada yada to sign up for the All In Summit. Apply there for Thomas LaFonte, Shomoff Pahopatia, Dave Freeburg, and the czar! David Sacks, I am the world's greatest executive producer. We'll see you next time. Jason at allin.com.

• 1:52:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bye-bye.

• 1:52:12Jason Calacanis?

  Play the trailer!

• 1:52:14Speaker 08

  We're too good of hunters. We came out of the trees not to eat the grass, but to eat the grass eaters.

• 1:52:23Speaker 08

  Meat is the most nutrient-dense food that human beings can eat. We're carnivores, but we're not living as carnivores.

• 1:52:31Speaker 09

  We are just better designed and more efficient at getting nutrition from meat.

• 1:52:35Speaker 08

  Gotta remember where we came from and what our food should be.

• 1:52:41Speaker 09

  It will change your life.