Epstein Files Fallout, Nvidia Risks, Burry's Bad Bet, Google's Breakthrough, Tether's Boom

(0:00) Bestie intros LIVE from The Venetian Las Vegas (1:13) Epstein Files breakdown (10:06) Biggest Epstein questions: where did his money come from? (14:44) Tether's booming business (23:50) Michael Burry vs. Friedberg, Nvidia's blowout quarter and risks for 2026 (35:25) Google's Gemini 3 and TPU breakthrough (42:51) Investing your own money vs. LP capital, why Friedberg returned as a CEO (48:57) Alan Keating joins the show to talk poker strategy, thriving in chaos, risk psychology Special thanks to The Venetian Las Vegas for hosting us!: https://x.com/VenetianVegas Join us at the All-In Holiday Spectacular!: https://allin.com/events Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/RepClayHiggins/status/1990868089056219267 https://x.com/michaeljburry/status/1991289193037746579 https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-end-of-2025 https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1988879389992386897 https://x.com/PokerGO/status/1987406318832132256

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. We are together in person. Yes, the besties are together in Vegas. It's gonna be a great time. We're here for F1. This is a test. And our friends at The Venetian have been amazing, gracious hosts. They gave us their beautiful studio here. We're gonna play some cards. We're gonna have Phil Hellmuth, Jason Kuhn, all of our besties are coming, and... I've never stayed at The Venetian before. It's amazing. Wonderful sweets they gave us. It's beautiful. They VIP'd us out, and this is the place you wanna play cards. They've got a beautiful, brand-new poker room. They got a high-stakes room. We'll be playing here later. We'll be playing a secret game.

• 0:40David Friedberg?

  And, and, yes. Trackside for Formula One.

• 0:44Jason Calacanis?

  And we're here for F1. We're gonna be releasing... I brought a car dealer with me. Wait, you brought a car dealer with you? You know, Matthew. Oh, your car dealer from your home game is here? Yeah, Matthew, car dealer. Is he dead money? What's the story here? Sadly. No? Okay. Sadly. I haven't been in the home game for a little bit, and it looks like people got out of line. But anyway, thank you so much to our friends at The Venetian. They're doing a ton of poker content here, so you can look at that on their YouTube. All right, everybody. You've wanted us to talk about the Epstein files, and we're gonna talk about it today. In a stunning turn of events, the House and Senate voted nearly unanimously to release the Epstein files. The vote was 427 to 1, Chamath, for the Epstein files transparency act.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  No, the person who abstained, well played, was Republican Clay Higgins from Louisiana. Thanks for asking. He said it reveals and injures thousands of innocent people, witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members. He makes a great point, but AG Pam Bondi, of course, has addressed that already, that they're not gonna release any open investigations, and they're going to remove names if it would harm anybody. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent, which requires a sign-off from every senator. And Trump, in a reversal, signed the bill last night, saying, "Give them everything." We did see some emails come out from the Epstein files last week. Friend of the pod, Larry Summers, was a main character in them.

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  And he was communicating with Epstein up until 2019, asking him for advice on dating. He's since stepped down from OpenAI and several other public-facing roles. And was just, I think, put on leave from Harvard.

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, what do you guys think is gonna be the fallout from this, I guess, is what?

• 2:29David Friedberg?

  From the release of the files? Is that the question?

• 2:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess we'll put our tinfoil hats on.

• 2:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's break this down. So I think the first question is, what is the relation between the Epstein files and Donald Trump? And I think the answer is, it's flimsy. And the reason is because this is the most investigated, most litigated human being on earth. And I think that if you had something that was incredibly salacious and accusatory of Trump, it would have been released during the Biden administration, because it would have made a lot of sense politically to try to damage his candidacy. So the fact that we haven't seen much of anything other than some photos means that there's nothing there related to Trump. So then the question is, why didn't the Biden administration release more of the files when they had them for four years?

• 3:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's probably because there are a non-trivial number of Democratic operatives that are touched by these things.

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, also, they did have, I think the reason they didn't release them was because there was an open Ghislaine Maxwell case as well, and she was appealing it, so they couldn't release it.

• 3:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's probably two of them, but you know how this works. There's innumerable number of ways to leak stuff, right? My point is, now what you're starting to see in these documents is that it seems to be tainting the Democratic establishment elite more than the Republicans. It explains why there was so few leaks in the last four years. The point is, Jeffrey Epstein was a total creep, right? That island should be covered in cement and drowned. The house should be burned to the ground and replaced with something nice. And you have to make sure that these, you're the one that said this, the thousand women?

• 4:03David Friedberg?

  That's what I saw reported.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  They keep saying a thousand women, yeah.

• 4:06David Friedberg?

  Someone said a thousand women. Apparently in there, there's claims that it's, oh, it was one of the victims who said there's a thousand of us.

• 4:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, I mean, you have to be incredibly careful and thoughtful to protect their rights and just to respect what they've gone through. But I think now we need to just release these files in an orderly manner and put this episode behind us, learn what we need to learn from it, get better, be better, treat these people with respect and move on.

• 4:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:31David Friedberg?

  But do you think the release of the files is meant to help the victims? Or do you think it's meant to identify fodder, to go after political enemies?

• 4:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Neither of those two things. The releasing of the files at this point is one of these things... That is about a compact between those that have power and those that ask for something. This is an issue that has animated millions of Americans. So when they constantly keep asking for these things to be put out there, I think it's a good signal for the government to listen to folks and release them. Again, in a respectful way. Similarly, there are other things that I think fall into this. We've heard about the JFK files, right? The killing of Martin Luther King, the Amelia Earhart files, and so...

• 5:20David Friedberg?

  All the UFO files?

• 5:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All the UFO files. I think what it does is it shows a pattern of being responsive to the voting public. And I think that that's a good thing.

• 5:30David Friedberg?

  So Higgins, who, by the way, was a sheriff. He was an Army Staff Sergeant, and he's been in Congress for, I think, nine years. In addition to talking about the victims, he said, you know, "This abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America, and releasing broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt." Do you think this is like a singular situation with Epstein? Because it's so extraordinary, and there's so many people tied up in it? Or does this set a precedent where anytime people and the media start to say, "Hey, we want to know what's going on in the middle of an active investigation or formal investigation," that these files kind of get released? And this becomes a new standard? Where we're just going to start to open up investigative files like this? You think it's like a singular thing?

• 6:15David Friedberg?

  Because this is his whole point.

• 6:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This feels like a singular thing. Like, and also, it'll bake for... A lot of these issues have to bake for a decade or two before people want them to come out. This has been going on for now for how many decades?

• 6:26David Friedberg?

  Well, it's like a 20-year story.

• 6:27Jason Calacanis?

  20-year story.

• 6:28David Friedberg?

  I feel like the investigative piece that's missing is how did he get away scot-free in Florida?

• 6:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually...

• 6:34David Friedberg?

  When there was... He was criminally charged. He was convicted and plead out. And he was basically let go. That's the piece of the story that I feel... You know about this.

• 6:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I know a little bit about it because I met Epstein a half dozen times at the TED conference.

• 6:47David Friedberg?

  Oh, you did?

• 6:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 6:48David Friedberg?

  So interesting.

• 6:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've talked about it on my Twitter incessantly, because I'm in his...

• 6:53David Friedberg?

  You are in his book.

• 6:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I am amongst the thousands of people in his black book. I met him at the TED conference, my book agent, Jeffrey Epstein.

• 7:00Jason Calacanis?

  David and I.

• 7:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, congratulations, you guys weren't in New York.

• 7:04David Friedberg?

  I went to the TED conference. I just avoided that room.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there was a billionaires dinner at the TED conference. I didn't actually go to the TED conference. My book agent would host the billionaires dinner. And if you type in billionaire's dinner.

• 7:16David Friedberg?

  I used to go to the TED conference.

• 7:17Jason Calacanis?

  You used to go to the TED conference. It was like.

• 7:18David Friedberg?

  I was never invited to the billionaires dinner.

• 7:20Jason Calacanis?

  This is in the 1990s. Like, this is how old this is. He was there giving donations to scientists, Marvin Minsky.

• 7:28David Friedberg?

  MIT, Joey.

• 7:29Jason Calacanis?

  MIT, all that stuff. And when he went away and he got busted in Miami, the way it was framed in the TED community was that he was set up and this was just like an underage girl. They had checked her ID and it was like some sort of setup and that he had been given a work from home.

• 7:49David Friedberg?

  Yes, that's right.

• 7:51Jason Calacanis?

  Sentence. He could go to work every day and then he had to report to jail. And that it was all just like a misunderstanding is how they framed it. I think, looking back on it, I think he's a spy. I think he worked for intelligence agencies. Now, I am not the conspiracy theorist of this podcast.

• 8:06David Friedberg?

  Worked for or shared intel with, because those are different.

• 8:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it could be any in that spectrum.

• 8:12David Friedberg?

  We all know people in the intelligence community and there's easy ways to pass intel without it being like working for.

• 8:18Jason Calacanis?

  Then I think the question becomes, was he an asset? Was he sharing information to what extent? And the reason I think this is because why would he have an interest in the top scientists in the top universities to get close to them? And then who did he want to pass that information on to? Who would want top intelligence from scientists? Russia, Israel, the CIA? And then the compromise thing does seem also likely because he had cameras everywhere and they've talked about this. So I think that.

• 8:51David Friedberg?

  And you're saying he recorded famous people and then used that to get things?

• 8:57Jason Calacanis?

  I think there is a non-zero chance that that part of the story is true.

• 9:02David Friedberg?

  The part of the story that's unanswered.

• 9:04Jason Calacanis?

  But I don't know that it's like a 90% chance that happened. And I think that when we go back and we look at this, there's a bunch of people who have embarrassing interactions with this person who spread money everywhere. Everybody wanted his money. That's why they were lining up. All the scientists, Joey Ito, Reid Hoffman, all of these folks were trying to get his money. Which is peculiar, and he was also giving tax advice to the Microsoft people, to Peter Thiel. So he was always trying to integrate himself into powerful people with money and scientists. Why? Was it to make money, or was it for some other purpose? I think it was not to make money. I think there was some other purpose here. Now, I am not a conspiracy theorist, but because this thing has gone on so long, and it has not been released, I think there's

• 9:48David Friedberg?

  There's mechanisms that are keeping it at bay.

• 9:50Jason Calacanis?

  That's what, that's to me like the Occam's razor version of this. I think there's going to be very embarrassing or compromising things for intelligence agencies, which is, I think, the same thing behind JFK's assassination.

• 10:02David Friedberg?

  If I could have one question answered for me out of the Epstein files, or if I could just have the question answered, I'd want to know, where did all his money come from? Because it is not very clear how a guy who was managing money for a billionaire

• 10:14Jason Calacanis?

  Wechsler.

• 10:15David Friedberg?

  Wechsler, we all know, like, if you're a money manager, maybe you're making half a percent a year.

• 10:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, that was documented.

• 10:20David Friedberg?

  How he got all the money?

• 10:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Leon Black, who's the founder of Apollo, in one year, paid Epstein $168 million for tax advice. That came out in the lawsuit that ultimately led to Leon Black resigning from Apollo.

• 10:36David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 10:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And

• 10:37David Friedberg?

  But was it tax advice?

• 10:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what he said it was. Now, look, I'm not trying to high roll anybody, but I've had all the tax advisors come and give me their advice.

• 10:47David Friedberg?

  It didn't cost you $168 million. It cost you $1,200 now.

• 10:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, it's cost me millions.

• 10:52David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 10:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's never, I am hard pressed to understand what advice could have been given to me

• 11:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That where I would have paid $168 million.

• 11:03David Friedberg?

  Shemah, breaking news, here's your accountant. They just sent the bill. It's $172 million. And it's crazy. Right, you're right.

• 11:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and look, if you go to the best estate lawyers in the United States,

• 11:14David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 11:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It will cost you $5 to $10 million.

• 11:17Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think he was getting paid for? I mean, was he getting a portion of the savings for doing tax loopholes? Maybe he was charging on some sort of a commission, but he had, he was a money manager for many of these, like, Microsoft executives, et cetera. And when Peter Thiel said, "Why did you make it with me?" He said, "Tax advice", which makes total, that's a total Peter Thiel, like, legitimate That totally tracks. Peter Thiel was known for his Roth, right? And he's known for like studying these kind of things. Makes total sense to me. I think that we're gonna have a bunch of Larry Summers-like embarrassing things. There could be embarrassing things there for Democrats, Republicans, everybody in between. The scientists, obviously, who went to the island and all that stuff. It's gonna be all embarrassing. And I think we're gonna get to the end of the day.

• 11:59Jason Calacanis?

  We're gonna find out that some intelligence agency was somehow involved in this. And that's why it's being covered up. And that's why it's so toxic.

• 12:06David Friedberg?

  That's your prediction?

• 12:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's my prediction, yes.

• 12:09David Friedberg?

  Mr. Kenneth has spoken.

• 12:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which intelligence agency will you pick? Oh, good, sir. Look into your crystal ball.

• 12:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, CIA. I mean, it would be one of the big three. The CIA, which he was talking to. I think in this latest volley of emails, he was talking to people from Israel, from the CIA. And he was talking to Russians. He was talking to all three in the emails that have been leaked. So you could just search.

• 12:34David Friedberg?

  He was talking to Russian intelligence?

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  He was talking to Russians.

• 12:37David Friedberg?

  Oh, my God.

• 12:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Really?

• 12:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. Russians, I think, is just generally, he was very involved with Russians.

• 12:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Could you imagine how much anxiety we would have if that was our job? Could you imagine? I can't even imagine. I just wanna go to my office, build some stuff, make a few investments and go home. Play with my kids.

• 12:54David Friedberg?

  Text people.

• 12:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know?

• 12:55David Friedberg?

  Like mess around.

• 12:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It just seems like, what? What? Oh, my God.

• 12:59David Friedberg?

  So, Jason, when they make the movie, are you gonna play yourself?

• 13:02Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you look online, if you go to the edge.org site and you look at those billionaire dinners, you'll see me in a couple of pictures with Larry, Sergey, Zuck, Ev Williams, when we were all 29, 30 years old.

• 13:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I nominate Jesse Eisenberg to play you? I know his hair is curly and yours is straight.

• 13:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's more like Leo, probably now. Or people might say Ethan Hawke. I get a lot of those, but I digress.

• 13:27David Friedberg?

  Who would play Ghislaine?

• 13:29Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, which young Ghislaine?

• 13:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who plays Reed Hoffman?

• 13:33Jason Calacanis?

  Reed Hoffman. Who would play Reed Hoffman?

• 13:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I just don't see a world in which Reed was involved in shenanigans. I'll be totally honest. I think he was just trying to raise money. I think it's unfair that everybody is like,

• 13:47Jason Calacanis?

  who met him is being dragged into like, oh, they were somehow a pedophile. Like, that's just crazy. I think they were all trying to get his money.

• 13:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah, because this guy was a consummate networker, obviously doing a bunch of stuff.

• 14:00Jason Calacanis?

  He funded all of those dinners. He was funding all of these dinners. He was hosting dinners in New York. In New York, he was known for having these dinner parties with, you know, all kinds of famous people. You can look online. He was constantly...

• 14:14David Friedberg?

  That was his business, pretty much.

• 14:15Jason Calacanis?

  His business was to meet with people, and he would...

• 14:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  To throw dinners?

• 14:19Jason Calacanis?

  To throw dinners, Chama.

• 14:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That seems calorically taxing. You know what I mean? Like, dinner parties, like, you overeat at a dinner party. Imagine having like, three of those a week?

• 14:28Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Do you know anybody who's having three dinner parties a week?

• 14:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a lot.

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 14:33David Friedberg?

  Jason and I went to Carbone last night. Well, we'll talk about it when Keating gets here.

• 14:36Jason Calacanis?

  That got a little heated. I mean, speaking of...

• 14:38David Friedberg?

  No, we'll talk about it when he gets here.

• 14:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we'll talk about it when he gets here. Somebody got out of line. All right, thanks again to our friends at the Venetian.

• 14:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had dinner last night with Paulo Arduino, CEO, founder of Tether.

• 14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Can't wait to meet him.

• 14:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing, amazing guy.

• 14:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is an incredible business.

• 14:55Jason Calacanis?

  What have they got, 150 billion in treasuries now?

• 14:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is, it is an incredible, and here's why that business is incredible. This is what I learned.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  You're talking about Tether, the stablecoin?

• 15:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tether, the stablecoin.

• 15:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 15:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are 500 million people using US dollar-backed stablecoins from Tether all around the world, all over Africa, all over Central America, all over Asia, number one. Number two, his user base is growing by 30 million users a quarter. It's the financial inclusion that then ties back to US dollar hegemony is...

• 15:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unbelievable. So if you think about Circle-

• 15:32David Friedberg?

  So wait, I buy a stable, explain it to me like I'm an idiot who's never bought a stablecoin.

• 15:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, okay.

• 15:36David Friedberg?

  Which is like every week, which is what I am. It's like every other week.

• 15:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So let's look at these businesses as roughly the same. There's Circle, there's Tether, there's World Liberty Financial, they all have a stablecoin. What is it? Okay, so let's just say that Jason is a cash worker in India. Let's just use that example.

• 15:55David Friedberg?

  Sure.

• 15:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He gets paid 100 rupees and he's like, you know, the rupee is constantly getting devalued. I have, I'm constantly losing purchasing power. I want to swap that into a US dollar. So he would create a crypto wallet and what Tether will say is, great, give me your INR, your 100 euros, oh sorry, your 100 rupees. They immediately swap it to a US dollar. So now there's a US dollar and there's a token for that dollar. I give Jason the token for that dollar. Now I have this dollar. What do I do with it? If, when I accumulate enough of these dollars, 50 billion, 100 billion, I can take that and I would invest it in treasuries so that it's completely safe.

• 16:38David Friedberg?

  US treasuries.

• 16:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  US treasuries. Now if Jason decides to send it to you and then you redeem, I can sell a little bit, $1 of those treasuries that I own and undo the change.

• 16:48David Friedberg?

  And does Tether earn all the interest on the treasury?

• 16:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I'm getting to this. So now Tether and Circle and World Liberty, they earn interest on that. And so now when the number gets big enough, this number gets ginormous. Then what they do, in Tether's case, is they then reinvest this capital into all kinds of distributed assets. Bitcoin, gold, real estate, but what they also do is they now invest in things like financial inclusion in Africa. So he walked me through kind of a bunch of things that he's doing yesterday. It is an incredible business.

• 17:20David Friedberg?

  And so as a holder of the stablecoin in my wallet, I'm not earning any of that treasury yield. I just have a flat dollar-denominated or dollar-protected-

• 17:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a pegged-

• 17:29David Friedberg?

  Right, to the dollar.

• 17:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have a dollar-pegged stablecoin.

• 17:31David Friedberg?

  Right, right.

• 17:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that is sufficient risk management and risk mitigation for half a billion people.

• 17:38David Friedberg?

  Right, they're not, they're not trying to get a 4% or 3% interest yield.

• 17:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 17:42David Friedberg?

  They care more about not being in-

• 17:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, in fact, you're bringing up the big point, which is in the United States, what is, what is the big fight now? The big fight in the United States in this thing called the Clarity Bill that is meandering through the House and the Senate is- What should happen in the market structure? So, meaning if you, David Friedberg, is the one that gave me the dollar and I am, let's for say, for example, say Coinbase, and I issue you a stablecoin.

• 18:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do I share that revenue with you? Do you earn all of it? Obviously, the banks, like the JP Morgans of the world, the Citibanks, they don't want that, right? Because that's their net interest margin. That's what, that's what happens today. You deposit money in the bank.

• 18:23Jason Calacanis?

  And Sacks said this on the program. They, in the tether, in the stablecoin legislation, they weren't able to give the stablecoin providers the ability to pay interest to consumers. They did that concession, but that will change over time. But the banks were able to fight for that concession.

• 18:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The banks were able to fight for it, but then you have the, the emergent crypto companies who say, hey, this is like, let's find a way where we can do a, a sharing mechanism. How they hack around it is they do kind of sharing, but this, via this kludgy way called rewards.

• 18:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 18:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So like you earn rewards and you earn reward points, but it's not really what it should be. It should be that if you earn net interest margin, you should be able to share that. And, and by the way, you should be able to have different rules in different markets. Because again, if you're in Kenya, the last thing you're probably thinking is, do I get the 4%? What you're more worried about is the Kenyan currency, whatever it's called, is about to depreciate another 60% this year.

• 19:15Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 19:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me just hedge that.

• 19:16Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 19:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And that's more than enough value.

• 19:17Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 19:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, I thought Paolo was incredibly impressive.

• 19:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I will say this.

• 19:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The business is really impressive.

• 19:22Jason Calacanis?

  I have been super critical of Tether publicly, and they had a lot of challenges as a business. They were banned in many markets. They didn't do any audits. People didn't know what was in there. They've done an incredible job cleaning all that up. Now, they are starting to do, going from attestations to audits, and they desperately want to be legal in America in that legislation. They have three years to do it, and they have to then unwind being banned in New York, banned in Canada, all these places they got banned.

• 19:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have an offer for you.

• 19:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Which is... I just want to say, let me finish my thought for a second. I just want to give credit to David Sacks. What we saw under Biden, and what we saw with the anti-crypto approach that they took, and, and Trump in his first presidency was anti-crypto. Anti crypto as well. That decade of anti crypto led to a lot of people doing offshore stuff like tether, a lot of shenanigans and actually Sacks, who can't make it this weekend. He has now created a framework which is helping people do it the right way and taking out all of these questions.

• 20:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Jason Calacanis?

  And tether is example one. They were involved in human, the tethers have been the default for all kinds of.

• 20:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you know that for sure?

• 20:33Jason Calacanis?

  The, this has been in our congressional hearings. They have documented very clear.

• 20:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's not make the accusation if we don't know. What I saw yesterday was a very, very, very credible and thoughtful entrepreneur.

• 20:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And a great business. The other thing, sorry, that I'll say is I would like to invite you to come with me to the tether conference at the end of January.

• 20:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 20:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We are going to go.

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  He's never turned down an invitation. Here we go.

• 20:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what we're gonna do. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna fly together to El Salvador. We're going to do.

• 21:03Jason Calacanis?

  El Salvador? We're gonna do a tour of the prisons?

• 21:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, we're gonna, we're gonna do a, we're gonna do an interview with Bukelli.

• 21:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 21:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then we're gonna do an interview with Paolo and then we'll fly home. Will you come with me?

• 21:15Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, if I can ask him any question I want. You have to go check out the prison.

• 21:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I've been told, I've been told you cannot go to ERCOT the first trip. You go to ERCOT the second trip.

• 21:25Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to go anywhere near that prison, but if I can ask him any question and he'll be fine with it.

• 21:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's great dude.

• 21:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm happy. I'm happy to go. Yeah.

• 21:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In any other world, he would have been in Silicon Valley doing the same thing.

• 21:35Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway.

• 21:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Half a trillion dollar company.

• 21:37Jason Calacanis?

  The other challenge they're gonna have is when interest rates go down, these businesses are gonna have to figure that out as well. But $183 billion in circulating USDT, that's a ticker symbol right now. 135 billion of that's in treasuries and then another like 10 billion in Bitcoin and gold.

• 21:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And land.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  And well, and that means they're throwing off whatever 5%. They were making 7, 8 billion dollars a year just on the holdings.

• 22:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not gonna tell you what the details are, but I've never seen the business.

• 22:07Jason Calacanis?

  No, they said it's a 500, the word on the street is a $500 billion market cap, which would be roughly 50 times their. Price to sales ratio.

• 22:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me say differently.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  They're making 10 billion.

• 22:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's more, it's, what do you think their profit margins are? Forget the growth quantum.

• 22:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you only need 100 people to run the business.

• 22:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah, if the interest is the revenue, it's probably 60, 70% margin business.

• 22:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Upwards of more than 95%.

• 22:33Jason Calacanis?

  It makes total sense because you, I mean, how many people do you need?

• 22:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know what I thought last night at dinner? Here we are, grinding, trying to get to 30, 40, 50%. It's so many of our businesses. And he's like, yeah, yeah, it's incredible. It's incredible. Good for him. Congratulations.

• 22:48Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations. The good news about that is.

• 22:50David Friedberg?

  There's a, there's a financial theory, though, that high margin businesses like that invite competition more.

• 22:55Jason Calacanis?

  That's literally where I was going.

• 22:56David Friedberg?

  This is where competition gets ground down.

• 22:58Jason Calacanis?

  Stripe bought the, like a stablecoin provider. It's pretty well known, Stripe, Visa, everybody's going to have their own stablecoin. So Tether will not have the market all to themselves. And obviously, Germular and Circle is a very viable competitor.

• 23:12David Friedberg?

  Fortunately, margin like that's only got one direction to go, so.

• 23:14Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. And if the.

• 23:16David Friedberg?

  All right, let's talk about Nvidia.

• 23:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and if the margin, if the interest rates go down, which is, we'll talk about that as well. That's going to be headwinds for that whole space. All right, we've been talking a bit about the, about Brad Gerson personally deciding to blow up the AI bubble and then destroying the stock market. I'm joking. Shout out to Brad Gerson.

• 23:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My gosh, this short Bitcoin thing has been a bonanza. Oh, crazy. Wow. Is it below 90? It is, right? It's like 87?

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

  I know it hit 88 or something, but I mean.

• 23:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Watch out below. Let's see the price.

• 23:48David Friedberg?

  Okay, let's talk about Nvidia.

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  So Nvidia had a blowout quarter. Revenue up 62% year over year. 22% quarter over quarter. Net income 31.9 billion. That's up 65% year over year. Expect 65 billion this quarter. Jensen, friend of the pod, has said that they can't keep. Their product on the shelves, it's sold out everywhere. And then, at the same time, Michael Burry, who has got the short on it, he's been mixing it up. He is posting in response, I think, to you, Friedberg, last week, making it a defense of

• 24:28Jason Calacanis?

  the reasonable life of an H100, of these new chipsets, you know, that Nvidia sells. Is it four years, five years, six years, seven years? When do they get replaced? When do they have a useful life? And GAAP accounting? He believes, just to make it easy for the audience to understand, that major tech companies, big tech, are cooking the books in order to spike their earnings, that this is a house of cards, and that he's going to short Palantir, because it's 100 to 1 sales, price to sales ratio, but he's going to also, you know, short Nvidia, et cetera, because of the depreciation. What's your thoughts? I know you've seen his comments. Friedberg?

• 25:07David Friedberg?

  I downloaded the GAAP depreciation rules. I was going to play Accounting Corner jingle, which a fan, by the way, sent me over the week.

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, great.

• 25:14David Friedberg?

  But I cannot get the internet working.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  We'll put it in post. We'll put it in post. I want to hear it, though.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Depreciation and round trips to let's talk about some unearned revenue. Sharpen your pencils, let's see what you've got. It's Accounting Corner at the All In Pod.

• 25:30Jason Calacanis?

  Very nicely done.

• 25:31David Friedberg?

  Thank you, thank you for joining me here at Accounting Corner. And thank you to Roxana Martinez for that incredible jingle. I think we should adopt it.

• 25:40Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 25:40David Friedberg?

  Love it.

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  Send in your jingles, folks.

• 25:42David Friedberg?

  GAAP depreciation rules, accounting standards, 360.

• 25:46Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 25:47David Friedberg?

  Depreciation must reflect the asset's estimated useful life, not market innovation. The specific language.

• 25:57Jason Calacanis?

  Can you call us at 11:30 tonight and put us to bed? Wow, this is even, you found, you found a corner even more boring than Science Corner.

• 26:05David Friedberg?

  Come on, people love Accounting Corner.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I explained it, because I wanted to.

• 26:08David Friedberg?

  Yes, it is actually important. So, under the GAAP standards, the general accepted accounting principle standards. So, you set a useful life, and you reset that useful life as you do a reassessment on when you're actually using that asset, not necessarily if there's a better asset that makes more value. So, let's just explain this again. You make a big investment in property, plant, equipment.

• 26:30Jason Calacanis?

  PP&E.

• 26:32David Friedberg?

  And that investment you write down over a period of time that you as an accountant estimate to be the useful life of that asset. So if you're going to use a building for 20 years, every year you write down the cost of that building by 1/20. You don't get to write it all down in the first year. In fact, what Burry is arguing is that if you wrote it all down in the first year, your profit would go down and your business would look worse. So when you make an investment that you can use over a period of time, unlike salary, when you pay someone a salary, you're paying them for the hours they're working that quarter, that year. Yeah. And so that money is an expense. It gets recognized as paid out that period. But when you make an investment in a building or a piece of equipment that you're going to use over time. You depreciate it, yes. You depreciate it, just to go through that principle again.

• 27:15David Friedberg?

  And so there's standards in GAAP on how do you recognize the depreciation schedule? What's the useful life? And the useful life is when you're actually realizing return value from that asset. Burry's point is incorrect. On Twitter, he said, "The idea of a useful life for depreciation being longer because chips from more than three to four years ago are fully booked, confuses physical utilization with value creation." That is incorrect. There is value creation because they are generating revenue from those chips this year, six years later. So there is in fact a useful life for that chip that has extended into year six. Now, let me ask you- And so it doesn't matter, and this is a part of the GAAP point that I wanted to bring up. So what he's arguing is you should depreciate it over, say, three years, which means you're

• 28:00David Friedberg?

  doubling the cost every year and then it's all written off in three years. But if you did that, to give you a point of example, in Google's case, their total net profit would come down by roughly 10 to 12%. So it's not like they're cooking the books and recognizing some massive delta in their profit by doing this. The difference between three and six years is roughly 12% of their profit. And they're still using these chips. And what GAAP says is that only if the new asset, meaning the new chips, replaces the old one- Then the old assets remaining useful life has to be marked down and you take accelerated depreciation that year.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  Of course.

• 28:35David Friedberg?

  Or if the maintenance costs spike, which mean you have to spend money to fix the asset, which is not the case with chips. The third is if the throughput requirements exceed the old equipment capabilities, forcing early retirement. They're not retiring, they're still making revenue off the old chips. Or if technological obsolescence means that you're putting it up for sale, then you can, meaning you stop using it after a period of time.

• 28:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and if you put it up for sale, you would actually know the market value of it, you could take that from the depreciation.

• 29:00David Friedberg?

  This is almost textbook gap, which is that if you're still using the asset after six years, you can depreciate it over six years or whatever.

• 29:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think this conversation lacks technical literacy. So, let's assume you're Google, and let's just say that the equivalent of an output token was the equivalent of a link.

• 29:18David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 29:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The first thing you would tell me is, hey Chamath, not all links are made equal. Right? So for example, if you generate a link for a pharmaceutical drug, Google charges a price per click that's way different than the link that they generate that goes to Amazon to buy toothpaste. Right? Now, for Amazon, it actually costs the same amount of money to generate that link, for Google, sorry. Right? I think the thing that he needs to understand is he's equating this to energy. But the reality is that in AI models, the thing that we care about is what is that output token? What is the revenue that's being generated?

• 29:54David Friedberg?

  It's revenue, that's right.

• 29:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is the revenue that's being generated by the output token? And ultimately, what he doesn't appreciate is that obviously Google and Facebook and Microsoft and OpenAI and X are not going to be in the business of generating negative revenue output tokens just for the sake of it. How do you know that? My wife got to the end of the internet this week. She launched X, put it on voice mode, she was stuck in traffic going from our house all the way to San Mateo and back.

• 30:21David Friedberg?

  That's like 10 minutes.

• 30:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And she, no, no, it's 25 minutes up, 25 minutes back. And she said, hey, you know what? I ran out of tokens. Like it said, you can't use it anymore.

• 30:31David Friedberg?

  Oh, on Grok, you mean?

• 30:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, on Grok.

• 30:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why do they do that? It's because they are very conscious of there's a certain energy output, there's a certain revenue potential, and then beyond this, they start to gate it.

• 30:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You do it on OpenAI, you do it on all these things. So they are already keenly aware of the value of these output tokens, they know the revenue it's generating. Sorry, just one thing.

• 30:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, the second thing is, in the bowels of these organizations... Everybody has completely rebuilt all of the decoder infrastructure. What does that mean? Before something gets to you, the user, there's all kinds of different manipulations that people are doing in the models, after the models, before the models. And all of that stuff has been rebuilt. So I think what he needs to understand, and look, in fairness to him, what I would say, what Gap needs to appreciate is when those laws were written, it's for a factory. It's for a turbine. And it's a static thing. It probably doesn't do a very good job of understanding the world of chips. But could he take a little bit of effort to call somebody and actually learn how this works? Yes.

• 31:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is he doing it? No. So.

• 31:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, hold on. I think the most important point of what you said there is, Chamath, this is a new asset and it's a new space. There might be some companies that are like, we're going to lose money on this and we're going to let you build, I don't know, Sora videos, right? And that's just going to be a money loser for five years as we get ChatGPT to 2 billion users. We don't care about it. And those machines are going to have 90% of their utilization in the first three years. And then for the next seven years, it'll be, you know, 10% of their value. They'll be doing some small jobs in the background that won't be as important. Accounting isn't built to do this kind of refined depreciation schedule.

• 32:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you mean 90% of their utilization? Because if they're still making revenue.

• 32:22Jason Calacanis?

  Value to the consumer. So that if you theoretically think about the value of that H100, what value did the users get out of it? Well, the value today is like, I'm making goofy Sora videos that generate no revenue. It's all money losing. But down the road, that might actually be, you know, advertising and it might create some number of clicks. It might create some number of subscriptions. So we'll actually be able to attribute revenue to it. There's no way to look at these devices right now and to know, you know, how much of them are actually generating revenue in the first two years versus the next two years.

• 32:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we know now much more than we did even six months ago.

• 33:01Jason Calacanis?

  How do you?

• 33:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How to value an output token?

• 33:03Jason Calacanis?

  And then what is the? What is the instructions we give to the accounting community on how to deal with that?

• 33:09David Friedberg?

  Dude, this is not that complicated. In the past, there have been efforts to try and change straight-line depreciation. But your point of utilization, I don't think is necessarily the correct one. If they're still making revenue on that chip every year, year four, year five, year six,

• 33:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so even if it just makes a dollar or two.

• 33:25David Friedberg?

  It's still generating revenue for them. And I think that the, remember, the cost of electricity and the cost of running the data center

• 33:33Jason Calacanis?

  This is the same.

• 33:33David Friedberg?

  is still, like, it's still an expense in that period. So all of that shows up as an operating expense. So if it's generating negative profit, negative gross profit, the market sees that. And I will say one more thing that I think is really important.

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  And they would turn it off.

• 33:48David Friedberg?

  Under GAAP standards.

• 33:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They'll tolerate it to the point, and then they'll stop.

• 33:51David Friedberg?

  You get, look, there's no hidden information here. Burry's implication that they are cooking the books or hiding accounting is completely false, because all of the accounting is apparent in the cash flow statement and in the balance sheet. Remember, companies have three financial statements: an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement. The cash flow statement reconciles the income statement and the balance sheet, makes the linkage, and it shows you all the cash that's going in and out of the company. And many analysts and many investors that are intelligent and do their homework will look at the cash flow statement, and they will see the CapEx, they will see all the investments going out, and they will calculate a number typically called free cash flow that will allow them to estimate the true cash generation of the business in a particular period and make an assessment of, should they be valued on free cash flow?

• 34:35David Friedberg?

  Or should they be valued on the GAAP standard of EBITDA? And the investor has the choice on how they want to value the company. And Burry is incorrect in thinking that they're hiding anything because it's all there, they're following GAAP standards, and then investors make a market. And they all decide, what do I want to value this company on? Cash flow? EBITDA? Let them choose. And then the market sets the price.

• 34:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we've given this guy way too much airtime. He's not very good at what he does.

• 34:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean.

• 35:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I'm sorry, but like.

• 35:02Jason Calacanis?

  Come on the program, Burry. We'd love to double-click on it.

• 35:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is there any other random person out there on the internet you want to take? Let's just use a magic eight ball to, like, generate numbers and names.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  I would say that there's a lot of people who think highly of his analysis.

• 35:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Doesn't mean they're right, and doesn't mean he's good.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, but I think it could be a good conversation.

• 35:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know who we've never had on the pod? Stan Druckenmiller. Let's get Druck before we get Michael Burry.

• 35:23Jason Calacanis?

  We have both of them. I mean, why are we choosing here? Okay. Google released Gemini 3. It's pretty great. They regained the lead on most of the benchmarks. Polymarket now has Google at 89% to finish the year as the top LLM. And all the speculation that Google was going to have their search franchise absolutely slaughtered by ChatGPT has turned out to not be true, at least not this year, with their searches going up, revenue going up. But the big story is speculation around Gemini 3 being trained only on Google's TPUs, not Nvidia's GPUs. Your thoughts, Chama?

• 36:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think TPU is an incredible product. I'm biased, but I think it's an incredible architecture. This latest spin is very profound, but I also think that what we are quickly seeing is that there's going to be a highly fragmented layer of decoding chips that exist in the marketplace. Grok is one, TPU is one, Microsoft has a spin, Amazon has Inferentia. Facebook, I think, is apparently spinning up their own silicon. So we're going to get to disaggregated decode pretty quickly. The question is, who will win? There will be a bunch of different solutions. I think what's incredible about Google is, I don't know if you saw the stats, but

• 36:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  they went from like 8% share to like 16% share of the entire chat market as of like this last month. That's an incredible stat on the enterprise side, and Parapic is just absolutely crushing. So what are we seeing? We're seeing a nascent market get created. We saw an allocation of traffic that basically favored one company over everyone. And now we're starting to see a sorting function and a classifier in all of these different markets. It's like breaking apart, right? There'll be winners in science, there'll be winners in enterprise-level coding, there's going to be winners on the chat side. And where are the advantages going to be? On the enterprise side, it's going to be model quality. Anthropic is excellent.

• 37:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  On the chat side, it's probably going to pivot around your existing inherent distribution.

• 37:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which is operating system, which is your browser, which is your phone, which is Apple and Google and Microsoft.

• 37:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, the only thing that I would push back on what you said, though, is that I agree that Google has done an absolutely incredible job in defending search.

• 37:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 37:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think what this creates... Is the setup where now they can cannibalize themselves versus having their market cannibalize for them. That's still going to be a very tough decision for Google to make and it's gonna happen.

• 38:04Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna take the other side of it. I think what's gonna happen is the AI gains in advertising targeting and the number of searches is gonna go up. So while the revenue per search might go down, the number of searches goes up and then the targeting goes up. So I'm gonna take the other side of it. I think the search franchise is going to grow and that Google is not gonna lose to ChatGPT. And I think the big loser in all this is gonna be OpenAI because they started with 100% of the market and they're only going down and they're facing a Google firing on all cylinders, Anthropic and Grok beating them in the leaderboards pretty consistently. So I think the short in all of this, if you were gonna put on the pair trade, is short OpenAI, which I think

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  is overvalued and is gonna go down. And I think I would be long Google, Grok and Anthropic. I think that they're gonna have many challenges. Also, I don't think the startup community, I'll just add this as my final thought on it. The startup community is not trusting OpenAI with their data. If you use OpenAI and you see them releasing products like Sora, if you were in the space of doing image generation, social networking, why would you trust OpenAI with your data? If you're doing a cursor and OpenAI has that product, they're not gonna trust them. They're gonna go with a model like Anthropic, which is taking a more neutral, we're not gonna go to the application level. And they're also using DeepSeek and open source models, again,

• 39:26Jason Calacanis?

  because they don't wanna give their data and their advantage over to a person and enabling somebody who might compete with them. Let me just, yeah, go ahead.

• 39:34David Friedberg?

  Make two comments.

• 39:35Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 39:36David Friedberg?

  Number one is, I think what we will see over time is probably a differentiation of general purpose workhorses in chip architecture to more of these kind of special purpose chips that work well with certain models and certain applications. You can kind of think about inference in machine vision in robotics. You don't necessarily need an H100 to do that. You can use a purpose-built chip to do that in a way that reduces power costs, reduces ultimate kind of capital cost to deploy that in an edge environment. In the core data center environment, you may end up having models that are different for graph neural nets versus LLMs.

• 40:21David Friedberg?

  There are going to be different chips that will likely fit very differently with different architectures. So, you know, I would say that the general workhorse is what we had. But now that everyone's making these investments, and you should expect that the investment dollars in chip design is only going to ramp up, not down.

• 40:35Jason Calacanis?

  Massively.

• 40:36David Friedberg?

  There's going to be differentiated chips for different markets and different applications.

• 40:39Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 40:40David Friedberg?

  And that's where there's a risk to Nvidia. The other kind of...

• 40:42Jason Calacanis?

  Who do you think has the best chance of challenging Nvidia?

• 40:46David Friedberg?

  So this is where I was going to go. The other black swan that I think is missing in the equation today, and my early prediction for 2026 is Huawei, where I think that there's lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China. And Huawei can create at a very low cost, probably very high volume, and probably in reasonably short order, chips that can start to rival for certain market applications, chips that might be expensive and long.

• 41:20Jason Calacanis?

  Give a timeline for that, two years, three years out?

• 41:22David Friedberg?

  I think they start to make announcements. And by the way, remember, chip architecture, and even Jensen's talked about this, is being redesigned with AI. So AI can design better chips.

• 41:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so announcements 2026, impact 27?

• 41:36David Friedberg?

  Probably fair, sure.

• 41:38Jason Calacanis?

  Great, love it.

• 41:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is this what it'll be like when we have to be in a studio? When we get to this level of scale where our show actually matters?

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we could be in a studio together, yeah. I mean, we'd have to...

• 41:50David Friedberg?

  The show would have never happened or worked.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, you have four people with actual schedules and jobs. It's not like we do this for a living.

• 41:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, you do.

• 41:58Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, I invest in 100 companies a year.

• 42:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not well, but I'm saying you do it.

• 42:03Jason Calacanis?

  No, my main job.

• 42:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You could have carved out the time the rest of us actually have jobs.

• 42:06Jason Calacanis?

  No, actually, I literally just got back from launching Founder University in Riyadh.

• 42:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what I'm saying, watching, that's the key word, watching. You didn't say doing.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  And launching Founder University in Tokyo, thanks to my partners there.

• 42:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you watch that too?

• 42:20Jason Calacanis?

  And investing in 100, 150 companies per year and launching the fifth launch fund next year. So go to launch.co and you can email me anytime.

• 42:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I got a distribution from you, by the way, recently.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, good. That first fund is like 5, 6X now.

• 42:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but it was on $8.

• 42:37Jason Calacanis?

  What's your top fund? Have you hit a 5X fund yet?

• 42:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So welcome to the club. Welcome to the club.

• 42:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was on 500 million, so it was like...

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great, awesome.

• 42:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's actually more than a 5X.

• 42:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. I'm happy for you. I'm happy for you.

• 42:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I should have just done it with all my own money.

• 42:54Jason Calacanis?

  That is actually the question, I mean, that a lot of people have. Do you feel you're a better investor when you're investing your money? Or do you think you're better when you have the discipline of having to report into LPs? It's actually a good question.

• 43:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My returns have been better when I've been by myself. But I think that there is something really valuable about working for other people, which it does keep you accountable. I mean, what's happened is my dispersion has increased massively, investing on my own, which means I cut the losers off far longer than I would have if I was running a fund. Because I think what I signed up for when I was running a fund was never lose money, ever, and return the money as quickly as possible and then run the upside. And so I would have traded a 7X with Hyval for a guaranteed 3 and 3.5X, because I think that was my responsibility as the GP, because my LPs were Memorial Sloan-Kettering, the Mayo Clinic. I wanted to give them the money back because they have programs.

• 43:49Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 43:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And it's not my job to hold the money back. With myself, I can keep it out, so then the ups are higher, but then the lows are also lower.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 43:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because some of these things just get annihilated. Like, look, like Relativity Space, you know, I took a $400 million goose egg.

• 44:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And this is the challenge, Friedberg.

• 44:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Eric Schmidt shows up and he's like, here, it's $1 billion, pay to play. And I'm like, okay, I'm not going to do it.

• 44:14Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you had a venture studio for a little while. You had to deal with outside investors. Now you're obviously in the driver's seat, CEO of a hollow.

• 44:22Jason Calacanis?

  You also had that pressure, you have to answer to LPs. Did it make you better at the job? Or did it make you?

• 44:26David Friedberg?

  No, I still do. Same investors. My venture studio owns the majority of Ohalo.

• 44:31Jason Calacanis?

  So just...

• 44:32David Friedberg?

  So it's our biggest driver of value. So I'm spending all my time on Ohalo. That's kind of my shift. But do you run the production boards still? Like, are there investments that you do? I'm on a few other boards. But no active investing? I'm not doing any new investing. Actually, a lot of folks moved into Ohalo or moved out to stop doing new investing. And then slowly, we're kind of, as we have a liquidity event, we'll do a distribution. But the goal is for TPB to end up being a holding company with just Ohalo in it. That's where all the value is going to come from. So we actually just did a distribution and then we're going to do kind of distributions as we have other kind of events for the other things that are in our portfolio. And then we'll just focus on Ohalo.

• 45:10Jason Calacanis?

  When you came into this venture studio model, did you anticipate, which is what most people do anticipate with venture studios, that you'd have one breakout and you would go all in on that?

• 45:22David Friedberg?

  No, I was delusional.

• 45:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 45:24David Friedberg?

  In 2011, two years before I sold Climate Corp., I started a company called Metro Mile. I was the chairman of the board of the company. I hired an outside CEO, fired him in a year, promoted the CTO to be CEO. For years, I worked with him as the chairman of the board. I invested close to 10 million of my own money in this company, spent years on it. It had raised a Series B, a Series C, Series D, was doing great. I'm like, man, this is awesome. I can be a chairman, not a CEO, run these companies. This goes great. Scaled to like, whatever it was, 100 million in revenue. I started Itza, which as you guys recall, was this quinoa fast food restaurant.

• 46:00Jason Calacanis?

  Robotic as well. You were way ahead of your time.

• 46:03David Friedberg?

  I put 3 million of my own capital in the business. And then I had a CEO run it. And then we raised outside money, which I was not planning to do in that business. And I'm like, man, I am so good at starting companies and being a chairman. This is what I should do. And that's what led me to start the venture studio. Both those companies ended up being net negative returners for me. And over time, many of the other projects that I was a founder of, but chairman of, didn't succeed financially. And over my years being on boards, I realized how frustrating it was to be on a board, where you would tell a CEO a bunch of stuff, they wouldn't listen. They would do whatever they wanted to do. I was frustrated, pulling my hair out, watching them do things I wouldn't do, not doing the things I would do.

• 46:47David Friedberg?

  So after many years of failure after failure, I realized... You know, this was the moment where we had this amazing outcome, series of outcomes at Ohalo. And it was a research project for several years. We put close to $40 million into this project. Before these results started to come in, I'm like, holy shit, this is the game changing business of my career. This is the power law. And that's when I made the decision, I'm gonna go all in on this and I'm gonna run it as CEO.

• 47:10Jason Calacanis?

  How did the LPs take that and how'd you communicate it to them?

• 47:11David Friedberg?

  Everyone was very supportive and very active. They were like, this is exactly what we always hoped you would do was to find a winner. And I'd never thought that that's what I would do. Cause I swore, after I still climbed a corp, I swore I would never be a CEO again. It's too stressful. It was damaging to my health. It's like overwhelming. I'm so into it. I cannot stop building the business. It's just, it consumes me. Everything about it, I have to win. I have to make the business an ultra success. It consumes me. And I knew that it would happen to me again and I've got kids and all this stuff. So I had to really like dig deep to make the decision to do it. And actually, you know what changed my mind about this was I saw the movie Oppenheimer in IMAX. And I left that movie and I cried and I realized I wasn't doing what I should be doing with my life by being, you know, this board member who was useless.

• 47:56David Friedberg?

  I'm like, what am I doing here? And I said, I'm gonna make this, and I'd been thinking about this. And I'm like, that's it. I tipped me over and I made the decision to step in as CEO. So yeah, the LPs, the investors were all thrilled because they had all said like, we hope you would run something one day. And then more capital came in and we've been running Ohalo for, it's been two years now, this month, that I've been running Ohalo as CEO. And I'm really happy I did it.

• 48:16Jason Calacanis?

  That's incredibly inspiring, Chamath. Would you like to mock Friedberg for crying at Oppenheimer in any way?

• 48:22David Friedberg?

  So you're queuing it up. He's queuing up. He's like.

• 48:26David Friedberg?

  Great movie, by the way.

• 48:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I cried. I cried when I got married. I cried when my kids were born.

• 48:31David Friedberg?

  Yeah, he cried at Oppenheimer. He's like, oh my God, he split the atom. Do you ever, but do you ever ask yourself, what did I do with my life? Like, do you ever think like, hey, the impact I thought I would have in my life, that there's a missing piece to that? There's something that I didn't accomplish, that I always expected I would, that there's something I didn't achieve as a person? And then you see these kind of extraordinary outcomes that others do and you're like, man, what was I do, what am I doing with my life? What am I doing?

• 48:55Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's a pretty profound insight you had. And it sounds like you made the right decision. All right, next up on the program, one of our favorite human beings. You know him from High Stakes Poker. The one, the only, the madman of the poker tables and the mensch in our poker group, Alan Keating.

• 49:13David Friedberg?

  Alan Keating.

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  Good to see you, brother.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  Thank you for the kind introduction.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  Have a seat.

• 49:17Speaker 04

  Good morning, brother.

• 49:18David Friedberg?

  How are you? You're sitting next to me.

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Oh, good, good, good.

• 49:20David Friedberg?

  Come on in. Just like at dinner last night. You were right.

• 49:23Jason Calacanis?

  Let me introduce.

• 49:26David Friedberg?

  Chamath, you went out to dinner last night.

• 49:28Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on, let me just do a proper introduction to the audience, understand who Alan Keating is. We'll get to it. Alan Keating, just type that into YouTube. Watch a bunch of Alan Keating clips. Alan, very famous thing.

• 49:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Parafors Keating, that's what I call him.

• 49:40Jason Calacanis?

  Parafors.

• 49:41David Friedberg?

  Seven.

• 49:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I saw that, that was incredible. That was legendary.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  Alan Keating ran the high stakes game here, the elite big game, for many years. Then he started investing in companies. He was the seed investor in a little company known as Polymarket. And he's gotten into our friend group. I don't know how many years ago Chamath, you brought him in and he fit right in. And we started hanging out 10 years ago. And we got to know him. In that time, he also started to play high stakes on TV. Stopped running the big game here in Vegas. And on TV, you're known for playing way above the rim in a way that, to call it non-traditional, would be an understatement. Take us through.

• 50:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 50:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, go ahead Chamath, you want to?

• 50:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, look.

• 50:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Chamath will explain your career to you. Go ahead, listen up.

• 50:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Keating, at his core, is an exceptional player. Not a traditional, like, you know, you'll see some of the other guys who are more solver oriented. But Keating has incredible, incredible live reads. Kind of like a modern, younger generation of Helmut. I mean, Helmut has good live reads, but now, you know, he's like an aging horse.

• 50:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he's older.

• 50:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're gonna send him to the glue factory soon. But Keating is in his prime. And what he can do is, he can sole read people, which when you're playing at the high stakes, honestly, that's all that matters, because you can't play solver-based. At the stakes in which we play, you cannot, you're just gonna get run over. And that's why you see him being able to do these things, because everybody else steps into the game. They're like a deer in the headlights. They're so afraid. And he is very comfortable.

• 51:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so he can see it and he can pick people off, like when he picked up Doug Polk with a four. How does that happen? It's because he can soul read people and he's attuned to play this game.

• 51:35David Friedberg?

  Kedrick Turfals, can you soul read people?

• 51:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I'm navigating fear on the poker table better than most. So I think when people are afraid, they tend to give things away or get scared or act different. And I try to get myself comfortable in it.

• 51:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The problem with the Doug Polk hand was that he [bleep] up the bet sizing on the turn.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He ships the turn you fold.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He puts himself in a horrible situation where he's befording the river. I mean, you just soul read him. And it was great. It was incredible.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  There were a few different tells that I wonder if I should delve into.

• 52:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't have to give up your tells. Break it down, because these guys, the most of the people...

• 52:17David Friedberg?

  By the way, I think this is important because a lot of people think poker became solved because of computers and AI. Everyone uses trainers now. But to your point, to Chama's point, like they're still at the core of the elite level of the game. Very much a tell and psychology reading kind of...

• 52:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We'll get Nick to play picture in picture this hand. How big was the pot? In the end, million something?

• 52:38Speaker 04

  No, probably 600.

• 52:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  600, 700K. Doug Polk, who is a phenomenal heads up player, had ace king.

• 52:45Speaker 04

  Like the best in the world.

• 52:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You, like a ding dong, had...

• 52:48Speaker 04

  4-2.

• 52:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  4-2.

• 52:51David Friedberg?

  It's playable.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  It's a 75.

• 52:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Someone in something a pot.

• 52:56David Friedberg?

  Somehow, somehow, seeing a raised flop.

• 53:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was like, what, like 150 on the flop?

• 53:04Speaker 04

  75, 3, 35, 75, all in.

• 53:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so take us behind the hand. Like, what's the read? And why are you playing 2-4 to begin with? Why don't you explain that to the people watching? But explain the thinking there, because a lot of people are trained.

• 53:20David Friedberg?

  Let him talk.

• 53:22Speaker 04

  You know, a lot of people want to, like you said, put everything into a solver and reduce something into a vacuum and navigate that situation. And I don't really have a passion for that. I have a passion for like what's happening in this moment, what's happening with this person, what's happening with me, what are they perceiving me as? And, you know, in that moment Doug had gotten some confidence around a couple of hands and there was a player in between that I knew he didn't think much of his hand. And he didn't think much of my hand and it seemed like an obvious situation for him to pull it away from me. And I thought about re-raising all-in pre-flop just to simplify it. And I think that was

• 54:07Speaker 04

  probably a better way to do it. But at the same time, I do a lot of things for the fun of it. And I thought it'd be a little bit more fun to get him in a spot later on, a couple of streets down where I could bluff him out or call him down.

• 54:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And did he have a tell on the turn?

• 54:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. He goes 75,000, like kind of directly. And about an hour and a half before then, he had the same tonality, same cadence, and he was just stealing, airballing the situation. And there was just a myriad of things where it was like, that might be something, I'm not sure. That might be something, I'm not sure. Well, here's a lot of things that might be something, and I'm pretty sure that the combination of them leads him to this.

• 54:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What happens if you call and he shows pocket jacks or something? So, you know, and then do you, like in those spots where you call off and you lose, how do you process losing $700,000 over? Do you think this is so stupid? Why did I do that? Or do you, are you saying, what's the self-talk? What's the internal monologue?

• 55:15Speaker 04

  I don't know. I guess, I don't know where it came from, but I wanted to always kind of have a sense of humor around whatever happens to me. You know, the things I can't control, the things I can control. You know, if I...

• 55:29Speaker 04

  I put myself in a spot, I I I've gotten to a point where I can immediately recognize how ridiculous what I just did was and kind of laugh about it.

• 55:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And be okay with it?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, sure, like.

• 55:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So like you're forgiving yourself in during the hand?

• 55:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there'll be like an internal part that's just like, yeah, of course.

• 55:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is so dumb.

• 55:46Speaker 04

  You'd be so dumb to do that.

• 55:48David Friedberg?

  So to be able to pull off the hands you pull off, you have to have a I don't give a shit kind of attitude about.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:54David Friedberg?

  This is all a game. It I don't take it too seriously because that's where fear comes from.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  It's about mastering the fear. Yeah, I think I think I just recognize that people make bad decisions when they're scared. And that's why I like.

• 56:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But sorry, say that again, mastering fear. You put in reps, how do you put in reps to master fear? Because that extends to many other things in life.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  Right, absolutely. Like we talked about this in investing and, you know, uh, different strategies about how big of a bet you want to make relative to your bankroll and venture and stuff like that. Well, I I like making the bet where if it doesn't work out, I I'm in a little bit of trouble.

• 56:28David Friedberg?

  Right, you like to feel the pain. No, you like you like that that you like feels real.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a motivator. It's it's something that drives and I I like poker. I'll put myself in the same type of situation.

• 56:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is like two years ago, Keating calls me, he's like, hey, this is like about portfolio construction and like a specific company, we won't say the company. Talk for a hour and I'm trying to give him my best advice. Look, here's how you structure it to minimize volatility. You know, take some of these chips off the table, do this, do that. He goes, I really appreciate this, calls me two days later. Yeah, so I doubled down on this thing and I just put it all on the line. I was like, okay.

• 57:01David Friedberg?

  Throw that word rolling a management out the window.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  You don't you don't know this, but I've tripled down.

• 57:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly.

• 57:07David Friedberg?

  Well, here's the interesting thing. What was your purpose in calling him then? So if you felt that that was where you were gonna go, why are you checking it? Were you trying to check your sanity or like what were you doing there? Why do you check?

• 57:18Speaker 04

  I'm I'm inviting him to the deep end. I'm saying.

• 57:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, you're talking about me?

• 57:23David Friedberg?

  I'm asking why he called you.

• 57:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, why he.

• 57:25Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I thought you were talking about Doug Poe.

• 57:26David Friedberg?

  No, no, I'm asking why you called Chamath in that situation where you're gonna double down, triple down.

• 57:31Speaker 04

  You really don't like what was the. I have access to someone that's like infinitely smarter than than me at the thing that I'm trying to understand, right?

• 57:37David Friedberg?

  You're jumping in the deep end.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 57:40David Friedberg?

  Why are you asking him like, should I jump in the deep end first?

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Because I want to earmark like all the reasoning, right? I I'm I'm setting, I I'm trying to understand everything about this decision because. I'm gonna live with the outcome of that decision no matter what, right? So I wanna remember his take, my take, my feelings, other people's thoughts. And I wanna put that into like a little bit of folder that I can come back to.

• 58:05Jason Calacanis?

  You unconsciously, or you've discovered something, uh, which is referred to as super forecasting, um, in like behavioral sciences, which is if you write down and you understand all the permutations of your decision making, and then you reflect on it years from now, you'll just be better at decision making. So that's actually what you're doing, and I think it just comes natural to you. And you were gonna say, when you thought the question was about the poker and about inviting him to the deep end.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:31Jason Calacanis?

  Unpack that concept of saying, hey, we both know that this is, this hand's out of control. We're in the deep, dark waters. There could be sharks in there. Explain what you're doing. Cause I've been in hands with you where I feel like you just dragged me out to the deep water, where I've got jacks or queens, and then all of a sudden, I'm gonna be playing for my entire stack, and they don't feel good anymore, even though I have an overpair to the board or whatever it is. Yeah, that's a great point.

• 58:59Speaker 04

  I, I, I just think there's some, some purity or beauty in the chaos after everyone's, after you get past where everyone's prepared. And I'm, I'm interested in that space, and I have no interest in, in the space that everyone's prepared.

• 59:17Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. You remind me of Alex, you're the Alex Honnold of poker. Alex Honnold is the guy who... Oh my god.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Oh my god, what is this, we're in Vegas?

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  Uh oh.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  We're in Vegas, it's time to play some poker.

• 59:33Jason Calacanis?

  And you...

• 59:33Speaker 03

  You see?

• 59:35Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god, his bestie. And look, his meat hooks, his meat hooks. Cashmere.

• 59:42Jason Calacanis?

  And look, guys, Hellmuth decided, for this special occasion with us here taping All In for the first time in Vegas, uh, Hellmuth decided to wear a tracksuit that's only 12 years old. He was one of his newer tracksuits.

• 59:54David Friedberg?

  A few years ago, at Hellmuth's birthday, we each chipped in, I think, three grand to buy him a new wardrobe.

• 59:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was like 16, like, it was like... Like 70,000.

• 1:00:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there was 20 of us. And he put in 3 grand.

• 1:00:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Designer cards. I remember the whole rack of clothes and he hasn't won a single thing. All two sides.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  No, no, this shirt you guys bought for me. I will say this, between, no, hold on, between that wall, between that wall and that wall, you guys gave me all new,

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  What happened to all those clothes? Did you sell them?

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  Ton of clothes. No, no, I gave them to my sons.

• 1:00:23Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:00:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sit down, Phil Humble, please, sit down. I gotta close the show. Hold on. And then we're gonna play poker supplemental. Yeah, yeah, 3, 2, all right. Alan Keating, you're a mensch. It's a pleasure to know you. Great to play with you. And we're gonna have some exclusive content on our YouTube channel of The Besties Playing Poker with incredible professional poker players like Jason Kuhn, Alan Keating, and then I think Phil Humble with my children.

• 1:00:53Speaker 03

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:00:56Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:05Jason Calacanis?

  Love you. I'm the queen of Kinoah.

• 1:01:14Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are back.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:01:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because it all just feels like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:01:32Jason Calacanis?

  What, your feet, be, what, your feet? We need to get merch.