12 Day War, Socialism Wins in NYC, Stocks All-Time High, AI Copyright, Science Corner

Summary

Podcast Summary: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Episode: 12 Day War, Socialism Wins in NYC, Stocks All-Time High, AI Copyright, Science Corner Release Date: June 28, 2025

---

1. All-In Tequila Launch

Duration: 00:00 – 05:18

The episode kicks off with the hosts celebrating the successful launch of their premium tequila brand. David Sachs enthusiastically shares the backstory, highlighting the meticulous sourcing from a rare distillery in Mexico where agave is aged in American oak whiskey barrels for five years—significantly longer than the typical three years for extra añejo.

Notable Quotes:

• David Sachs (00:04): "I honestly think that was the funniest post by a White House ever was the Daddy's home video."
• Friedberg (02:12): "This tequila has been... finally here."
• Jason Calacanis (04:16): "Beautiful box slides open. So gorgeous."

The discussion emphasizes the exclusivity of the product, with only 7,500 bottles available, ensuring it remains a unique keepsake. They also share plans to distribute additional bottles for their upcoming trips, fostering a sense of camaraderie and exclusivity among the hosts.

2. 12 Day War Between Israel and Iran

Duration: 06:00 – 25:38

The hosts delve into the geopolitical tensions that escalated into a two-week conflict known as the "12 Day War" between Israel and Iran. They provide a recap of the initial surprise attack by Israel, targeting Iranian military and nuclear facilities, followed by missile exchanges and the fear of a potential World War III scenario.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Calacanis (07:09): "They dropped a load of bombs the likes of which I've never seen before."
• David Sachs (10:45): "President Trump negotiated the ceasefire, which was extraordinary."

David Sachs defends President Trump's handling of the situation, praising his ability to negotiate a ceasefire without dragging the U.S. into a prolonged Middle Eastern war. Chamath Palihapitiya lauds Trump's strategies as pivotal in re-establishing the U.S. as a global superpower, emphasizing technological, economic, and military supremacy.

Key Insights:

• Chamath Palihapitiya (14:01): "President Trump has almost single-handedly brought back the United States as the global superpower."
• Jason Calacanis (26:12): "Huge credit to Trump for that. If it does go well and he ends the war in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, give him the peace prize."

The discussion also touches on the potential for future conflicts and the intricate diplomatic balances involving China and Russia, underscoring the complexity of maintaining global stability.

3. Socialism Wins in NYC

Duration: 28:15 – 59:21

In a heated discussion about the recent political shift in New York City, the hosts analyze the surprising victory of Democratic Socialist candidate Zoran Mamdani over incumbent Andrew Cuomo. They attribute Mamdani's success to widespread dissatisfaction among young, college-educated voters burdened by escalating student debt and the allure of socialist policies promising affordable housing, free transportation, and increased government support.

Notable Quotes:

• Friedberg (42:02): "This is really a revolution against the system that brought them to this moment."
• Jason Calacanis (46:37): "He wants free buses. It doesn't sound like that big of a deal. He wants to freeze rent... etc."

David Sachs criticizes the Democratic establishment for embracing socialist agendas, drawing parallels to historical failures of socialism in oppressive debt cycles. He warns of a long-term economic and social decline, citing examples from other cities like London and Chicago.

Key Insights:

• David Sachs (48:12): "San Francisco went through this. Now Louisiana is... and New York is about to learn this for themselves."
• Friedberg (50:32): "We can recover from it by making student debt dischargeable and encouraging capital lenders to underwrite loans based on degree value."

The conversation underscores the generational divide and the consequences of unchecked government intervention in education and housing, predicting a potential nationwide wave of socialist governance rooted in economic desperation.

4. Stocks Reach All-Time Highs

Duration: 74:00 – 87:36

The hosts discuss the remarkable rebound of the stock market, with the NASDAQ hitting record highs shortly after recovering from significant downturns triggered by previous tariff announcements and geopolitical tensions. They explore factors contributing to this surge, including successful ceasefires in the Middle East, favorable trade deals, and robust earnings in the tech sector.

Notable Quotes:

• Chamath Palihapitiya (30:39): "The market is the sum of many, many, many millions of informed opinions."
• David Sachs (86:23): "When the media tries to sow doom or spread panic... that's a great time to buy."

Chamath attributes the market's resilience to strategic policy decisions that have stabilized geopolitical risks and promoted economic growth. Meanwhile, Friedberg offers a cautious perspective, suggesting that asset inflation may not necessarily reflect underlying economic health.

Key Insights:

• Chamath Palihapitiya (33:31): "Steve Witkoff spoke about expecting the Abraham Accords to expand, leading to cheaper energy."
• Jason Calacanis (84:19): "The only road from here is probably up. You could see the S&P at 7,000 very quickly."

Xavier Friedberg emphasizes the importance of discerning between asset inflation and genuine economic improvement, hinting at potential future challenges despite the current market optimism.

5. AI Copyright and Legal Battles

Duration: 87:36 – 104:02

The episode transitions to the contentious issue of AI and copyright, focusing on recent court rulings involving Anthropic and Meta. The discussion highlights the legal distinction between AI training using copyrighted material and the generation of original content by AI models.

Notable Quotes:

• David Sachs (95:32): "If AI models violate someone's copyright by outputting something identical, that's a violation. But transforming the work into positional encoding is not."
• Jason Calacanis (99:19): "These cases will be very easy to win... Authors should be compensated to keep AI models competitive."

David Sachs argues for a balanced approach, advocating for fair use definitions that protect content creators without stifling AI innovation. Jason Calacanis suggests that licensing deals and revenue sharing with content creators could sustain the AI industry while respecting intellectual property rights.

Key Insights:

• David Sachs (95:45): "AI models transform works into mathematical vectors without directly copying, which should be considered fair use."
• Jason Calacanis (104:43): "Content creators can profit by licensing their work to AI models, ensuring a symbiotic relationship."

The hosts express concerns over China's disregard for American copyright laws, emphasizing the need for the U.S. to establish clear legal frameworks to remain competitive in the global AI race.

6. Science Corner: Age Reversal Breakthroughs

Duration: 64:10 – 77:40

In the Science Corner segment, David Friedberg shares groundbreaking research on age reversal using the FoxO3 gene. The study involved engineering stem cells to overexpress FoxO3, which produced signaling molecules encapsulated in exosomes. When these engineered stem cells were introduced into older monkeys, significant reversal of age-related deterioration was observed across various tissues, including the brain, muscles, and bones.

Notable Quotes:

• Friedberg (66:09): "They looked at tissue, blood, MRIs, and saw age reversal in 54% of the tissues examined."
• Chamath Palihapitiya (71:38): "Imagine going from being 60 years old to having the body of a 45-year-old in terms of muscles."

The conversation highlights the potential of cell therapy for humans, although the hosts caution that such treatments are still in the early stages of clinical trials and may take a decade or more before becoming widely available.

Key Insights:

• Friedberg (70:31): "This opens the door for using stem cell therapy to reverse aging in humans."
• Chamath Palihapitiya (73:07): "Wouldn't it be incredible if you could all of a sudden only sleep four or five hours and be completely rested?"

The hosts speculate on future advancements, including gene editing for enhanced human capabilities, while acknowledging the ethical and safety concerns associated with such technologies.

---

Conclusion

This episode of All-In offers a comprehensive analysis of pivotal geopolitical events, political shifts, economic trends, and scientific breakthroughs. The hosts provide insightful commentary on the intersection of politics and economics, the rise of socialism in major cities, the resilience of the stock market, the evolving landscape of AI and copyright law, and cutting-edge scientific research in age reversal. Through a blend of expertise and candid discussion, they elucidate complex issues affecting the global landscape, making the episode both informative and engaging for listeners.

Stay Connected: For more in-depth discussions and exclusive content, visit All In Summit and join the community behind the number one podcast in the world.

Transcript

[David Sachs]

Did you guys see this White House video?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, is there a White House video?

[David Sachs]

I honestly think that was the funniest post by a White House ever was the Daddy's home video. Oh, I feel like popping bottles to this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Come on now. Up in the club. Oh, in the vip, popping bottles with the Rain Man. Let's buy two bottles of that. All in tequila. We get a double.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That is the best.

[David Sachs]

The backstory to that is that Mark Ruta, who's the Secretary General of NATO, called Trump daddy at the.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, he called him daddy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, guy got weird. Freiberg, you missed it. We were just up in the club. You want to go back to the club for a second?

[Friedberg]

I do. I love the club.

[Jason Calacanis]

You ready?

[Friedberg]

I love the club.

[David Sachs]

Popping some bottles with the NATO summit.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We're doing it again.

[Jason Calacanis]

Come on, Friedberg, Let me see you stand up. Friedberg, your sultan of science.

[Friedberg]

What club are we going to this weekend?

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, dad is home.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We are gonna bring the club to us.

[David Sachs]

I think it's called Club NATO Sax.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Can you get the hall pass? You wanna come to Vegas this weekend?

[David Sachs]

Maybe. Let's talk about it all off camera.

[Friedberg]

J Cal, come out. Where are you?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Pop on a Southwest flight. Meet us in Vegas.

[David Sachs]

Southwest.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sass.

[David Sachs]

And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just crazy with her.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love you, Queen of Quinoa. All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all in podcast. Your favorite podcast. We're back. We got the original quartet here and everybody's really excited because we had a fun time on Saturday night. What a party we had at Delilah. All four besties there step and repeat. Freeberg, you lost a bunch of money playing bomb pots with me and Rob Goldberg, you drank a lot. You looked great. Your impressions of this evening?

[Friedberg]

Oh, I loved it. It was great. I think the tequila turned out fantastic. This tequila has been. I mean, you guys realize when we first started talking about this, this was like two and a half, almost three years ago when we first started talking about this. And it is finally here. It took forever to get through this kind of design development process, but, man, I think it turned out great. I thought it was awesome.

[David Sachs]

Everybody at the party was surprised by how good it was because they thought that, I don't know, we were just doing this as a gimmick or something. But we actually put in the time to make it great.

[Friedberg]

Took a lot of time.

[David Sachs]

A lot of time.

[Jason Calacanis]

Talk a little bit about the sourcing because I think that that sourcing was very important.

[David Sachs]

Well, we went down to Tequila Mexico. There's only one part of Mexico that's even allowed to be called Tequila. And we found a distillery that had been aging some agave in American oak whiskey barrels for five years. And normally extra anejo is aged for three years. So it was pretty rare to find a cache of five year age. And so we basically bought it all. But there's only enough for 7,500 bottles. So that's what we did. But this is not about creating some large new tequila label. This is more about creating something that we ourselves like. And that's what we did. Sort of a small batch product. I mean, the money's not going to change anyone's life, you know, except maybe yours.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, absolutely. I don't know. Uber hit another record today. So with Uber past 88, you guys are all, I don't need to be here anymore.

[David Sachs]

But look, do things because they're fun. And it was fun to create this here. I've got the.

[Friedberg]

It is fun. It was really fun.

[David Sachs]

Well, look at this thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, beautiful box slides open.

[David Sachs]

It's backlit in the box.

[Jason Calacanis]

So gorgeous.

[David Sachs]

So that out of the box experience is just amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's a great unboxing. Steve Jobs would be proud. Tell us about the bottle design. That was a lot of work, Sax. I think this probably took an extra six months to get this right. If I'm recalling correctly on the schedule.

[David Sachs]

This is super complicated to execute. Well, the bottle is designed after a stack of poker chips. And so you can see the chips are stacked and they're a jar. So it's like highly. It's a lot of texture here. It's made with glass and then there's these black chip accents that are actually painted onto the bottle perfectly. So this took a lot to get right. We went through a lot of prototypes to get this and it just looks amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, there you have it, folks. The all in Tequila as promised.

[David Sachs]

It's finally available on our website. So if you go to tequila.allin.com you can now buy it. There's only 7,500 bottles. I think we're only going to sell 6,000 because we're going to keep the rest for our own personal stuff.

[Friedberg]

We've sold a good chunk already, so.

[David Sachs]

They'Re going really fast. We just opened up the website. Previously they were only available to people who had attended the all in summit. They could pre order it and reserve, but now the website is open.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh wow. Beautiful.

[David Sachs]

There it is.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, there you go. Order your bottle, limit to two, and go have that.

[David Sachs]

You know, this is not a cheap product, but, you know, if you look at the. The pure competitor for this product is the class Azul Ultra, which I think sells at $1,700 a bottle, although sometimes I've seen it sell for as much as 3,000 a bottle. So we're priced competitively with that.

[Jason Calacanis]

There you go. And each of the. Those boxes. And when you open it up, the lights up and you can recharge it. So it's a keepsake. Right.

[David Sachs]

There's a charging port in the box so that it never runs out of the battery to power the box.

[Jason Calacanis]

So genius. So genius. I love that little touch. All right, folks, there's tons in the new. Look at this room service coming. I mean, before we get to World War 3, let's get the room service at the. Beep that out.

[David Sachs]

Chamatha, do you want a side of caviar with your besties all in tequila?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Listen, being an elitist guys is very hard.

[David Sachs]

That's why I was tweeting how stressful it is. Somebody was saying that we weren't living up to our job as being the elite. And I was like, man, it's really stressful being an elite. It's very stressful. We need a drink.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. I'll take a double. You have no idea. So did you go with the. On your eggs bearnaise there? Did you go with the truffles or the caviar? What did you do?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, honesty, I. I went quite healthy. I have some avocado.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, very nice.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I have mango and I have some.

[Jason Calacanis]

Eggs up to $72.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, David, do you want to see my pillows with my initials on them?

[David Sachs]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, Lord, here we go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is the best thing that the.

[Jason Calacanis]

Does shout out to our friends at Politico how out of touch we are.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Look, Sax, they always have my initial.

[David Sachs]

They do that for you?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They do that for me. Isn't that incredible?

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here we go. All right, there's lots to discuss in the news. We'll shift from conspicuous consumption and talk about the 12 day war between Israel and Iran. It's two weeks later, obviously. Quick recap here, and then we'll get the besties take on where we're at today, June 26th. When we tape this, Friday, June 13th, Israel launched a surprise attack, took out a bunch of Iranian military officials, some folks who work on the nuclear program, and they traded missiles for about a week before everybody debating if this was going to be World War Three. And on Saturday, June 21, quite shockingly, the US jumped in and carried out Operation Midnight Hammer.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I've had a couple weekends in Vegas that have been called Midnight Hammer.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, yes, Midnight Hammer, also known as. Wow. There we go, folks. Over a dozen bunker buster bombs on two, maybe three of Iran's key nuclear facilities, Fordo and Natanz. These bombs weigh 15 tons each. They'll go deep underground. Israel doesn't have them. And that's the reason we're given of why we were pulled into this, is because we're the only people in the world who could have taken these out. On Thursday morning, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Kaine showed a video. If you haven't seen, folks, this came out this morning. Here's the video.

[David Sachs]

It's a video of what they call a massive ordnance penetrator. It basically goes through the ground. I think in this case it's going through a ventilation shaft. And it doesn't immediately go off. It basically burrows to its maximum depth and then goes off.

[Jason Calacanis]

This looks like a test to me.

[Friedberg]

This is just demonstrating it.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is a demonstration how it works. Yeah. And so here's the before and after photos you've probably seen. Kind of hard to understand what's going on here, except for the discolorization, obviously, we're going for things underground ground. And then, shockingly, Iran did a, a, I don't know what you call this, a ceremonial response. Sachs, where they sent some missiles to one of our bases in Qatar. They gave us a ton of notice. None of them landed. And then both countries have been bombing each other a little bit after Trump said he negotiated a ceasefire, which made our president a little bit upset. Here's the clip of the President not dropping a Moab, but dropping an F bomb. Israel. As soon as we made the deal.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They came out and they dropped a load of bombs the likes of which.

[Jason Calacanis]

I've never seen before.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The biggest load that we've seen.

[David Sachs]

I'm not happy with Israel.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, when I say, okay, now.

[Friedberg]

You have 12 hours, you don't go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Out in the first hour and just.

[David Sachs]

Drop everything you have on them. So I'm not happy with them. I'm not happy with Iran either.

[Jason Calacanis]

We basically have two countries that are been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the they're doing.

[David Sachs]

Do you understand?

[Jason Calacanis]

Trump is not happy. He did the lean in. Did you notice the lean in there, Sachs, when he dropped the F bomb?

[David Sachs]

Well, in fairness, President Trump's not the first president to Drop an F bomb in frustration with Netanyahu. It was reported back in the 90s that Bill Clinton, when he had to deal with Netanyahu as being very obstinate and was basically rejecting all of Clinton's entreaties and plans. Clinton is reported to have said, who's the superpower here? In frustration. So this is not the first time that an American president has gotten frustrated with Netanyahu. But I think people reacted quite well to that on the whole because it showed that President Trump was willing. First of all, he negotiated this ceasefire, which was amazing. Then what happens is that, you know, there was this deadline and it's like in a fight where they ring the bell and the fighters keep slugging with each other.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sachs]

It's like they both want to get a few extra hits in and that's what. Last licks. Yeah, they got some last licks in. But President Trump negotiated the ceasefire, which was extraordinary, and then he's willing to reprimand Israel for basically violating the ceasefire too, which you have to do if you want to enforce it. So I think that's basically what happened there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now, you, Sachs, I'm sure the audience wants to challenge you on this. You were, hey, Trump is a never get involved in forever wars. Obviously, it looks like this might not be a forever war, which would be fantastic if that turns out to be the case. And you were saying, hey, the reason to vote for Trump is he won't get us into another war. And here we go. And obviously, Tucker Tulsi, there's a number of people who are did not want to do this, and you were one of them. So how do you reconcile all of this? As somebody who did not want to.

[David Sachs]

See us do this, President Trump accomplished that. We're not in a forever war. We're not in a war with Iran. You look at Mark Levin today, he's apoplectic because he and people like him were advocating for a regime change war. And they felt like this was the perfect opportunity to drag the United States into such a war. And President Trump resisted that and instead negotiated a ceasefire. So it seems to me that he lived up to exactly his promises on this. Look, I think President Trump had to thread a very difficult needle here. If you look at polling, the vast majorities of the American population believe in two things. Number one, they don't want Iran getting a nuclear weapon by like 80 something percent. They also, by 80 something percent, don't want to get dragged into a new forever war in the Middle East. Right. They don't want to be in a long, protracted war with Iran. President Trump managed to accomplish both those objectives. He took out the Iranian nuclear sites in these highly precise targeted strikes. But he did not get dragged into a new Middle Eastern war. In fact, he negotiated a ceasefire and at least an end to the war right now between Israel and Iran. I think there's very few leaders who could have threaded this needle. Imagine if Kamala Harris were president, just do the counterfactual. Would she have had the situational awareness to realize that when the Iranians struck at our base in Qatar, that it was performative, that it was telegraphed, and that it was meant to basically be for domestic consumption and end the war? She might have escalated it. Certainly a lot of the neocons who were on social media were saying, this is our chance. Right when the Iranians engaged in that performative hit on Qatar, they were saying, we gotta escalate. We gotta basically bomb all of Iran now and get into a big war. And Trump, he had the overall awareness of the situation to avoid that. And this goes back to his experience with Soleimani back in the first Trump administration. The Iranians did the same thing where they fired some missiles at American bases. But they were telegraphed. We were told in advance they were coming. They were easy to avoid. No Americans got harmed. And then Trump ended the conflict there. And I think that a lot of presidents might have gotten sucked in to a new Middle Eastern war.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chamath, let me pull you in here. Obviously, little cognitive dissonance. Folks didn't want to go to war, but we don't want WMDs in the hands of Iran. How do you reconcile all of this? Is the outcome make it okay in your mind, or would you rather have seen we not get involved in this?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Can I uplevel this slightly? I think that this has been probably the most important week and I would almost say most important few months in US politics in 30 or 40 years. And the reason is that it starts to converge a bunch of things together that I think are really worth putting on the table. So from my perspective, I think what President Trump has done is almost single handedly bring back the United States as the global superpower. And I would put that in all caps. So what does it mean to be a superpower? I've said this several times, but just to be slightly redundant, in order to be a superpower, I think you need to have three things, but they work in a hierarchy. The first is that you need to have technical supremacy. And then from that technological supremacy, you need to establish and project economic supremacy and military supremacy. So if you look at the first one, you saw a tactical demonstration of technological supremacy with the B2 bombers. But taking a more general step back, if you look at the largest companies in the world, who are the ones that are actually driving the world forward, these are all American companies. I think these last few months you've seen America firing on all cylinders, technologically, economically. At the same time, you now have the stock market back at all time highs. You have interest rates incredibly starting to compress even in the absence of the Federal Reserve willing to act on data. So you're projecting economic supremacy. And then these last few weeks, frankly, have been a pretty clear cut case of military supremacy. And so I think what's pretty simple now is like the US is essentially telling the world our words carry weight again. We're going to shape the global order. Countries will now have to calibrate their actions around what the US is willing to tolerate and what it isn't willing to tolerate. And in the case of Iran, the President made those lines, I think really crystal clear. He warned them a hundred times where the line was and he was clear, you cannot build nuclear weapons. And when the line was crossed, and look, I think the CNNs of the world want to debate that the line wasn't crossed. All I can tell you is I don't know because I don't have access to the intel. I believe what he and Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. vance and Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth are saying is that they crossed the line. And then he showed that he will use decisive military force when that happens. But then here's what's crazy, and this is where I think you become a real superpower. It's what happens after. Once you cross the line, you notice that he doesn't try to humiliate or dominate Iran. He tells Iran that he wants them to stabilize themselves. He told them that he wants to see them trading oil with China. He wants to see them improving the lives of their people because he realizes that a stable Iran is a stable Middle East. So I think it's really amazing. And then the fact that he was able to bring Israel and Iran, who's been on the verge of some kind of conflict for decades, and broker a ceasefire. It's a really important moment, I think, in American history. I really do think that if you look at my little framework, it is the closest thing for us to being able to say that we are truly a clear cut, singular hegemon, global superpower again. And that's really exciting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, he definitely did provide that golden bridge for Iran to, to cross over to and maybe move into another phase. But Freiberg, maybe you could steal me on the other side of this just for the discussion here. This could have gone another direction. We could be sitting here and there could be terrorist attacks or sleeper cells, you know, in the United States. It could turn out when we do the postmortem here that they weren't close to having a nuclear bomb and we did this and we got goaded into it. So maybe, obviously things have gone well to date, but things might not have. So maybe you could steal, man, the other side of this. What's the argument for not having done this? And what if things had gone another way? How bad could this be?

[Friedberg]

I don't know if this is over.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, that's my point.

[Friedberg]

Yeah. I mean, we're kind of in the middle of a choose your own adventure book here. And I've got to imagine that the Israelis and Netanyahu, who's been pretty vocal about this regime that's been shouting for decades now, death to Israel, death to the usa, needs to change, is going to suddenly say, hey, let's take a beat and walk away from this and we'll all kind of have peace in the Middle East. I think we've got to expect that there is another page to turn that's coming. And I don't know if you guys heard. I don't know if it's genuine or if it's authentic or not. Did you hear that audio of one of the kind of Mossad or IDF people calling an IRGC commander and telling him that he has 24 hours to leave Iran with his wife and child? Did you guys hear that?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I have not.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I saw it. Yeah. I mean, I heard it.

[Friedberg]

It's pretty incredible. And I've got to imagine that there's going to continue to be effort to destabilize whatever regime remains in Iran by Israel, Mossad. And this isn't going to be kind of a quiet, peaceful transition. There's going to continue to be more conflict. Whether these guys are going to be trading missiles back and forth tomorrow, I think we don't really know. But this isn't over. And I do think that the next set of actions is going to be critical. But what I was pretty surprised by, I did not like everyone was saying, hey, we're on the brink of World War three. I mean, there was some serious statesmanship that must have gone on to keep China And I have no idea, I've had no insight or conversations with anyone to give me any sort of proprietary access to knowledge about what's gone on here. But I've got to imagine there were calls to China and Russia that kept them in the loop and kept them in play on how this all played out. Because China and Russia, the whole fear was this was going to create this magnet in the Middle east that everything was going to rush in and we're going to catalyze World War Three. And it didn't happen. So I do think that, you know, first of all, nothing that folks predicted actually happened and no one predicted what did happen. So I'm not going to sit here and try.

[Jason Calacanis]

Pretty shocking, right?

[Friedberg]

I mean, and I'm not going to sit here and try and predict what happened next. And I will say, if I'm thinking about like, you know, game theory, optimal poker play, I got to give credit to this President because it was completely unpredictable what was coming next. And I don't think that there was a really clear path on what he was going to do. Just like what has happened repeatedly, everyone always slams a table and says, he's starting World War iii, he's driving economic collapse, everything's about to end. And then it turns out he kind of ducks and weaves and finds his way through. And everyone's like, holy, I didn't expect that to happen. That was. It's very unpredictable what's gonna happen next. So I am not gonna sit here and try and estimate what's gonna happen next. I can tell you, I don't think the Israelis are gonna sit by quietly and allow this Iranian regime to, to continue to go out and build up a military that's constantly shouting debt to Israel, debt to the usa. And I think that they've taken their first shot and I don't think it's their last. So we'll see how this all plays out. I really don't know.

[David Sachs]

Well, I'm sure, I'm sure that's right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me just tee up one person who did get it right. Here's John Mearsheimer at the all in Summit just nine months ago. Let me play this clip here and get your reaction. Sachs. To counter the Iranian escalation scenario, the fact is Iran does not want a war with the United States and the United States does not want a war with Iran. And it's the Israelis, especially Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been trying to sort of suck us into a war because he wants us, the United States, to really whack Iran weaken it militarily and especially to go after its nuclear capabilities, because, as you well know, they are close to the point where they can develop nuclear weapons. So the Israelis are the ones who want us to. To get involved in a big war with Iran. That's the escalation Flashpoint. And the $64,000 question is whether you think the United States and Iran kind of colluding can work together to prevent the Israelis from getting assigned.

[Friedberg]

So that question will be answered based on the next who leads the next administration?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, if you believe that it matters who leads the next administration, that's true. And there, Sacks, there's you laughing for this incredible insight, which is, as you were saying last year, and Mearsheimer has been saying, this was manifest destiny, this was going to happen no matter who was president. And here we are. So your thoughts on Mearsheimer? Sort of. I mean, wow, he just nailed it there. And that was to your question, Friedberg, by the way. So well done to Friedberg. We didn't put your question at the beginning because he went on for five or ten minutes there, but go ahead. It's actually a reaction to Mearsheimer's incredible prediction.

[David Sachs]

That's Professor Mearsheimer being prophetic as usual. But let me go back to a point that Freeberg was making. To Friedberg's point here. This is not over. Iran and Israel are mortal enemies, and we have a ceasefire here. We have a pause in the action, but it's gonna flare up again at some point. The question is what US Policy is gonna be. And I think that what President Trump did over the past two weeks is make it clear that, number one, the United States does not want to see Iran get a nuclear bomb and that we are willing to take military action to prevent that, but that that action will be narrowly targeted, as narrowly targeted as possible to achieve that objective. Number two, that the United States does not have an interest in going to war to basically achieve a regime change. If the people of Iran want to make Iran great again by rising up and toppling the government, then that's up to them. Certainly, I think we would welcome that. But the Trump administration rejected all of the calls over the past week or so for the United States to plunge into a regime change war in Iran. And that's why the neocons right now are not happy at all. So that's point number two. Look, I think Trump found the right balance here, which is we are gonna be narrowly focused on preventing a threat to the United States, which is Iran having a Nuclear bomb. But we're not gonna go plunging into another forever war, another regime change operation. We've had plenty of experience with that in the Middle East. None of it worked. Every time we went for regime change, it backfired, backfired in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and on and on. So there's no reason to believe regime change would work. And by the way, there's no way to get regime change in a country unless you send in American GIs to basically keep that government propped up in power, because it's almost certainly gonna be perceived as a puppet of the United States. I mean, if you put Reza Pahlavi or something, the shah's son, in power in Iran, he's gonna face an insurgency right away, and there's no way that his government's gonna stay in power without the American military protecting him and keeping him in power at the end of a rifle barrel. So this whole idea that you can achieve regime change without its evil twin, which is nation building, is a total fantasy. You can't do it. You would need an American occupation going on for decades. And I think that the Trump administration wisely rejected all of this giddy talk. Remember in the first couple of days of that Israeli surprise attack where it was Israel who hit Iran, and there was all this talk about decapitation, that the Iranian regime was about to collapse. It just needed a little bit of a push.

[Jason Calacanis]

Lindsey Graham.

[David Sachs]

Lindsey Graham. That's what Lindsey Graham said. That was all heady talk that turned out not to be true. There's no question that the Iranian regime took some damage, but they did not collapse. And in fact, if you look at history, one of the things Mearsheimer's pointed out is that you don't get regime change just through air power alone. It takes boots on the ground. And most Americans are not willing to put boots on the ground in Iran to change the regime there. We believe that it's sufficient just to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon. And that's what American policy should focus on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I really fell for this.

[David Sachs]

What do you think?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I really fell for this check raise from Trump, who was like, yeah, no, we're not doing this. We're not doing this. And all of a sudden, he does it right. Nobody expected him to do it. Everybody thought he was going to not intervene. And I, as a Gen Xer like you, Sachs, and I guess Freeberg and Chamath as well, when I saw them building the case here, the Lindsey Grahams, the hawks, et cetera, reports of WMDs that were imminent who knows if that's true? These people support terrorists they're trying to assassinate. The president became part of this. Remember that for last time with Bush Senior, spreading democracy in the Middle East. The regime changed. Stuff that made me all very nervous. And I think the most important next step here is that this administration explain in detail to the American people so we don't have another WMD situation. Just honestly the truth. Like, did we hit them? Did we hit some of them? Was there imminent? Was it sort of imminent? We just need to have full disclosure here. I don't like the attacking the press for a leak inside of the administration. It's the administration's responsibility to not have leaks. And it's the press and the opposing party, whoever opposes this action to really vet this. And we need that part of the democratic process. I hope we don't shut that down and we just blindly follow, you know, the leader. Because it went well. Because this isn't over, number one. Number two, it did go well. Huge credit to Trump for that. If it does go well and he ends the war in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, give him the peace prize. I'm all for it. Fantastic. But let's get the disclosures here and let's not blame the press for getting a leak. Let's actually look at this and explain to the American people what we accomplished, what didn't get accomplished, and what the realistic next step is. And I give them a lot of credit for telling Israel where the line is and giving the golden bridge to Iran. They will have a revolution on their own timeline, but we should not be part of that. Right? That's the lesson we learned. To your point, Sachs? We can't be the revolution in Iran. They have to.

[David Sachs]

It's gotta come from the bottom up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely.

[David Sachs]

May I also disagree with one other thing you said, which is you said you were starting to get nervous about the stampede towards war. I think you were correctly perceiving what was happening in the media. I mean, and this includes Fox News, especially Fox News. There was all this talk about how easy it would be, it'd be a cakewalk, that the government was on its last legs, that it was weak, that it was basically almost topple. We just need to push it over. You're right about the WMD talk, the talk about the assassination. This is all literally like a carbon copy of the arguments that were made back in 2003. It's the playbook to get us into the Iraq war. But look, I think two things are different now. Number one is President Trump is not George W. Bush. I mean, that was made abundantly clear. Number two is we now have alternative media. That even though the mainstream media and Fox News was basically acting like this was 2003, you had alternative media and you had people like Tucker Carlson speaking out and Steve Bannon and I have to give him credit on this and others who are pointing this out and making the case that this would not go well. And I do think that it's been very helpful to have those chorus of voices as a rebuttal. Yes, you correctly felt that we were being pushed into war, but I think this was different now because 20 years later, people remember what happened, at least enough do that they're able to make the counter case. And I think that fortunately we have a decision maker in chief who also remembers and listens to those arguments.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, I think we've made some good progress here. Let's move on in the docket. We've got a lot of other topics to talk about. Obviously oil prices. Chemath, you had talked about those in relation to. To this action. You said, hey, if this goes poorly, we could be looking at $100 a barrel oil. Quite interestingly, while it did spike a little bit up to $74, almost hit your $100 Chamath racing up from the $60 mark. You know, we come back down now and I think people are. Energy independence here in the United States makes us not immune to this, but we're somewhat protected. And I think that's the great thing about energy independence. But here we are. The markets have digested this, priced it in, processed it in a way that I think maybe none of us thought it would. So maybe you could unpack your thinking now on the market's reaction to the war.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The fear that I had was that if there was a protracted conflict, what you effectively would see is a bunch of supply go offline. And if that supply went offline, and as long as the demand stayed even roughly the same, you would see prices go up. My thought was the price of oil could double. I think Goldman had it slightly under a doubling. So that was definitely the. The fear what folks had going into that weekend. But coming out of it, this is where I think you have to be very respectful of the fact that the market is really the sum of many, many, many millions of informed opinions. And I think what they saw was that Iran was not really in a position to do anything but capitulate and give up. And I think that what they also saw, whether you agree with the Israeli policy or not was that they had systematically gone from where they are and marched eastward. Essentially they effectively decapitated Hamas, they effectively decapitated Hezbollah, they effectively decapitated the Houthis. I think finally putting a nail in the coffin of this Iran nuclear ambition program was not just important for them, but it's critical for Saudi and the UAE. MbS had an incredibly powerful quote which was if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, we will have no choice but to get our own. Right? So by taking all of that risk off the table, what you're now talking about is an enormous supply that could essentially service world productivity needs unhindered. Because it's not just Iranian supply. You're talking about Emirati supply and you're talking about Qatari supply and you're talking about Saudi supply. So I think what the market realized was okay, now the Middle east is the closest it's ever been to fully monetizing the oil that they have and to invest aggressively into their own people. The second thing is that Steve Witkoff spoke about the fact that you should expect the Abraham Accords to expand. So if you think about that one, two punch, not necessarily from a geopolitical lens, but from an economic lens, the first punch is neutering the Iranians ability to be chaos monkeys in the region. But the second punch is the one that then now creates normalization across the region. With Israel, it double and triples down the ability to monetize oil and start to invest those returns in future projects that have a much better roi. All of that leads to cheaper energy.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Iran becomes the odd person out here in this new federation of people in the Middle east who want peace and normal relations.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think it's a phenomenal question, Jason, but I think that's what the market sniffed out and I think that's what the market is now saying, that this is a chapter that we can close and move on.

[Jason Calacanis]

This could be a big paradigm shift. And freebridge, the major part of this paradigm shift that we're seeing here comes from an investment in energy in the United States. Since the Iraq war, since the Afghanistan war, we now are energy independent, we're a net exporter, we've invested in solar, we've invested in wind, we are doing more drilling nat gas. And this week I think we saw some new starts for nuclear as well. So this time around, when we look at our Middle east policy, it is not informed by our need for that oil. Is that correct Freiburg in your mind?

[Friedberg]

Well, I think you have to look at it on a global basis. Iran exports $60 billion a year, and about 55 billion of that goes to China, and that number is up from, I believe, sub 30% just a few years ago, or sub 20%. So the relationship between Iran and China and the importance of that relationship to China's economy and productivity, I think cannot be understated. So independent of the United States on a global stage, the situation with the supply of energy and the partnership on energy with what is effectively the US's largest rival now is critical to take into account when doing the calculus on how to resolve forward here. Which is also why, and I don't think that we have perfect information, I don't think the public has been given perfect information about the statesmanship that's gone on between the United States and China, or the conversations that gone on at a high level between the US and China, or at a high level between the US and Russia regarding what is the right way to transition the region. When I look at the region and when you hear about other leaders in that region speaking publicly, the King of Jordan, MBS from Saudi, the Omanis from Bahrain, all of the other leaders in that region, even the Qataris, who seem to kind of try to straddle both sides here, they all seem to have a very strong imperative and incentive to modernize the Middle east, to bring those economies into the global stage, to bring them into kind of a modern economy. Jason, I know you've talked about this and you visited, and the rest of us obviously have relationships there, but there's a strong demand and a strong interest in this region in modernizing, and that modernization is going to benefit the world because they will ultimately be net exporters. They will ultimately net producers of things that everyone else will buy and participate in. And they will also be very big consumers. They are already very big buyers of American technology and American businesses, and also big financiers of global capitalism. So in that context, I don't think it's just about, hey, we gotta go get the oil, or hey, we gotta go get the energy. It's about, how do you balance China's need for energy, how do you balance the Russian incentives, and how do you help the rest of that region modernize? And I think that's where there's a very complex dance underway that we have very little insight into the details of those conversations. And I'm not going to just sit here and be like very flippant about, oh, we should do this or we should do that, because there's a lot at play. And I think that that Is in my opinion the net calculus, the bigger picture calculus that's underway in trying to transition the region.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sachs, let me ask you a question here, leveling it up. Pretty well known the Israelis have nuclear weapons and many of them, and they have for some time, even though they're not part of any of the treaties and they will claim they don't or be a little coy about it. What is the argument for nobody else in the region being allowed to have one if the Israelis have many? And would you be okay with Saudi having nuclear bombs? And what is the argument we would make to them as the West, Americans, people who have nuclear weapons, Russia, China have them. Why can't Saudi have them? What's your best argument to them of not acquiring them if the Israelis have dozens to hundreds?

[David Sachs]

Well, nuclear proliferation is just not in our interest. We don't want more countries getting nuclear weapons. Obviously some countries have them, but if you use that as the rationalization for everyone being able to have them, then you're going to end up with 200 countries that have nuclear weapons. So I think the nuclear non proliferation regime is in the interest of the United States. We all understand the danger of these weapons. The more countries that have them, the more dangerous the world becomes. Now, it is true that unofficially the Israelis have nuclear weapons, but like you were saying before, if Iran gets nukes, then Saudi Arabia will be forced to get nukes and so on down the line. And so there will be a domino effect with each country that gets nuclear weapons. More countries around them will feel the need that are threatened to have their own deterrent. And the question is just where you stop this? And I think we just want to stop it here. We don't want more countries getting nuclear weapons, particularly ones that we have hostile relations with.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. And the last country to give up their nuclear weapons, Ukraine. Really bad decision perhaps, I think.

[David Sachs]

Well, that was in the 90s, actually.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[David Sachs]

Another country gave up their nuclear weapons program, which was Libya.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yep.

[David Sachs]

And what happened to Gaddafi? He got killed by rebels who are being backed by the United States after he gave up his nuclear weapons program. Yeah, I think that was a really bad sense.

[Jason Calacanis]

They actually had the weapons, not just a program. Right.

[David Sachs]

But there's some, there's some truth to that. But that's a little bit simplifying the situation because what happened is at the end of the Soviet Union, there were a bunch of Soviet nukes that were in Ukraine, but as I understand it, the launch codes were in Moscow. So these were Soviet nuclear weapons that happened to be on Ukrainian soil. And then when the Soviet Union came apart, they were there, but they were always under the control of Moscow. And so I don't think that the Ukrainians gave up much because they were never their nukes. It's not clear they could have used them. And one final point on this is that it was the Russian government and the American government that pressured Ukraine to comply because we don't want more countries having nuclear weapons.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, let's get onto this democratic socialist who's on the verge of becoming New York City's mayor. Little known New York State Assemblyman Zoran Mamdani took the Internet by storm this week. Shocked the world, beating out Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic nomination. Here's the poly market chart. Just crazy. One month ago, Cuomo was at 93%. Zoran had a 6% chance. My Lord, what a flip. A couple of things happened that led to this. Obviously a bunch of viral moments. He's a great speaker, reminds me of Veik in that regard. Really good in debates and speaking publicly. Started rising in the polls. Got a ton of endorsements from millennials. Gen Z AOC endorsed him as well. And now he is mom. Donnie is the 75% favorite to beat Eric Adams. But looks like Eric Adams is going to get a shocking amount of support because people don't want a democratic socialist who's got some really unique and colorful history of becoming the mayor of one of the greatest cities in the world, my hometown. He wants to have free buses. It doesn't sound like that big of a deal. He wants to freeze rent and triple the development of affordable housing. City owned government grocery stores. That sounds crazy. A $30 minimum wage. New York's at 1650, by the way. He wants to defund the police, replace the cops with social workers in high crime areas. A bunch of really wacky interesting proposals. And you were, I think, onto this early, Friedberg, in your predictions last year, you saw this coming again. If you listen to the number one podcast in the world, you're going to get this information a year earlier than everybody else. That's why we are the number one podcast in the world. Freeberg, maybe you talk a little bit about your prediction last year and where we are right now and your reaction to this. I don't know, perplexing, shocking. Is this perplexing, shocking or obvious to you?

[Friedberg]

For me, it feels like actually a little bit of a beginning of a wave that's going to continue to sweep over this country, starting in cities. And I think that we're at the very early stages, I think we'll look back and I jokingly say that Kamala Harris is going to look like a conservative candidate pretty soon. And I do think that this is a broad kind of reaction to the economic condition of the United States. And I've talked a lot of people, don't quite recognize and see how important the debt and the deficit is with respect to how it's ultimately going to lead to socialism, as it has every single time in history when you've had a free voting democracy, a representative democracy, that becomes encumbered with too much debt. So, Nick, if you'll pull up this chart, it'll just show you a microcosm of it and specifically how it played out in New York and how it will continue to play out in cities. This is the total amount of student loan debt. In the last 20 years, the student loan debt has ballooned from 500 billion to. To 2 trillion. 4 million college graduates per year in the United States. About 40% of them have student loan debt that they leave. That means that in the last 20 years, 80 million people, young people, have graduated from college and they've accrued $1.5 trillion of new debt. And based on the percentage and the distribution, that means the average debt for these individuals is sitting around $60,000. So you're a young person. Where do those young people go? Where do they live? And remember, there's about 32 million of them. They live in cities. They don't go back to rural towns. Most of that population sits in cities. It sits in New York, sits in Los Angeles, sits in Seattle, sits in San Francisco, sits in Portland, and sits in Chicago. And what we're seeing in those cities is a massive political shift. People call it left, but it's actually quite different than just being more traditionally left. It's really a revolution against the system that brought them to this moment. Because the promise that we gave in America, the American dream, was if you will go to college, you will graduate, you will have income, you will have stability, you will be able to buy a home. And what we did is we increased the government's role in making that dream possible. And in doing so, we created effectively a system where we gave unrestricted access to capital, which inflated the cost of education. People could go to school like Zoran and major in African studies at Bowdoin College. They could get a loan and graduate with 200, $300,000 of debt and then never get a job. The guy has not had a real job. And this is the truth. For 32 million young Americans, they find themselves living in places where they cannot afford to pay their bills every month. And they will never get out of the debt cycle that they were thrust into and believe that they were going to be able to graduate from and excel in the world and increase. They all have what is called negative capital. They have debt and they will never be able to get out of that cycle. So where do you turn in that moment? You don't go turn to corporations to solve your problems. You don't go turn to your friends and your siblings and your family. They're not going to bail you out. You turn to the voting booth and you hear a guy like Zoran show up and say there can be a better path forward. The better path forward is the government can and should do more to help. And in doing more to help, we will increase government. We will tax the rich, we will tax the corporations, we will take all of that capital and we will redistribute it in the form of services and checks and support for all of the people that find themselves unable to take care of themselves. And this becomes a tipping point when the majority of the voter base ends up in that situation where they're that deeply in need, where they have negative capital. And that is the situation America finds itself in today's. There is no easy answer and there is no easy solution out of this. But I can tell you one thing for sure, that in historical perspective, we have seen it time and time again across dozens of countries that have embraced socialism to get out of the debt cycle that ultimately absorbs and swallows up the young. It swallows up every family, it swallows up every person in the working class with debt. They're swaddled with it and they all try and get out of it by increasing government and embracing these socialist concepts. And it has never ever worked. More government is not the answer. Less government is. We can get into that. But if you look at the Results, Zoran won 61 to 39 with college educated young people voted for him. Old people did not as much. White people voted for him because they went to college. Non white people did not as much. At the end of the day, young college educated white people elected this guy. And that is the beginning of a wave that will sweep over America. And I really do worry about where this takes us.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So way to go, dummies.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I mean, V, you're correct. He won amongst Asians. Why? It's college educated. And to put a finer point on it, Freeberg, it really isn't just college, it's the Cost of college. Increases in the cost of college degrees have outpaced the wage growth of entry level salaries by 10x over the last 20 years. You could go 300,000, 400,000 not in debt. But that might be what you paid for those degrees in those major cities. And you don't believe in capitalism anymore and you believe that you need to tax the rich. Just one warning for people in these states, in these cities, we saw this Sachs. In San Francisco we saw the, the, the doom spiral you and I worked on the Chesa Boudin recall and now they have Dan Laurie there and things are starting to slowly turn around a bit. In Los Angeles we saw this with Karen Bass. They didn't vote for Rick Caruso. He would have been an amazing mayor. They voted for incompetence and these people are voting for incompetence and a plan that will not work because 2/3 of the tax base in New York is paid for by the top 10% who are leaving. People will leave. They will see that. Austin and Miami are fantastic cities to live in at half the price, A third of the price and you get a tax break. And you can always go back to New York and California and hang out for a month and get whatever values left in those cities that hasn't been destroyed by these socialists and the incompetent people running them. Sachs, what are your thoughts on what's happening in New York City specifically?

[David Sachs]

Well, you're right that every generation seems to need to learn this lesson for themselves because they don't study history and they don't see that socialism always fails wherever it's tried. San Francisco went through this. I mean, it was a doom spiral. Now I think we've turned the corner. Louisiana is in the midst of going through it and a large portion of LA just burned down because there's no water in the fire hydrants. Basically all the public services have been looted and New York is about to learn this for themselves. So it just seems like every generation just has to learn this. There's no way to teach them. So I do think that that is one thing that's going on. I do agree with Freeberg that a big underlying root cause here is the student debt is the fact that these kids have negative capital. They've got no skin in the game. They graduate from college with worthless degrees and massive amounts of debt. That debt was not used to make their education better. Universities have been using the spiraling tuitions to fund massive amounts of bureaucracy for DEI and WOKE and all sorts of stuff like that and these kids have no prospect of getting out of debt or being able to buy a home. So they just have no skin in the game. And so this is part of why they're turning against capitalism. One thing we need to do, by the way, is we need to make the student debt dischargeable. In bankruptcy is one of the. It's the only kind of debt that you can't get out of through bankruptcy. And if we were to make that change, at least these kids would have a way out.

[Friedberg]

They have no skin in the game. The universities have absolutely no incentive to keep prices down and create a competitive or economic incentive for making sure that their degrees work. The only group that possibly could would be true capital lenders, people like banks or underwriters that are saying, here's a loan because I expect you to be able to pay it back. There's no underwriting in student loans today. There's no underwriting. The student loan program, the federal student loan program needs to go away. Because when it goes away, if it goes to zero, and people might say, oh, that's awful, you're taking away education. What will happen is the capital markets will flood to fill that hole. Banks and lenders will show up and they will say, you know what? We'll underwrite the loans. But they'll underwrite it by saying, good colleges get loans and bad colleges don't. Good degrees get the loans, bad degrees don't. And people that are expected to pay back the loans will now get loans, and all of the rest of the money that's caused everyone to end up in this debt spiral will stop and we'll be able to kind of recover from it.

[David Sachs]

It's ironic that a problem that is being caused by government is going to lead to socialism. It's gonna lead to maximum government.

[Friedberg]

That's right.

[David Sachs]

Which will then create the next spiral of problems. But I agree with you. I think this is very sad. But let me also say, I think there's one other thing going on here which is beyond just sort of the lack of skin of the game here, which is the failure of the democratic establishment. It's basically completely antiquated, desiccated, and out of touch. And who was Mamdani running against? Andrew Cuomo, who is really a perfect avatar for this establishment. He's a retread. He's been around for decades. He'd probably be finishing his fourth term as governor except for a harassment scandal that forces resignation. He's 67, which is something of a spring chicken by the standards of Democrat gerontocracy but he's twice the age of Mayendami, who's 33, and Cuomo hasn't even lived in New York City for three decades. He wanted to mount a political comeback that no one was asking for. And the Democratic establishment just fell in line rather than having a proper contest to choose a less damaged, more dynamic candidate.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's a Nepo baby, too, right?

[David Sachs]

So, you know, does this sound familiar? I mean, this is exactly what happened with Biden, is that no one wanted him to run again. He was obviously a very weak candidate, but the Democratic establishment just fell in line and covered up his weaknesses, and they used Lawfare to take out his opponents totally, rather than trying to find a more dynamic candidate. And by the way, one of the reasons why Mamdami is set to become mayor is because the Democratic establishment used Lawfare against Eric Adams to basically weaken him and take him out over some plane tickets. I thought this was a very weak corruption.

[Jason Calacanis]

There were upgrades even. Like, it was so insane.

[David Sachs]

It's a pretty crazy. Pretty crazy bipolar scandals. This is a really lame one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sachs]

And it was done because Eric Adams stepped out of line and was willing to criticize unions and buck unions, and he was for the police. He was basically a Democrat who was willing to take contrarian positions on a lot of things. And they took him out with Lawfare. And that is now they got something much worse.

[Friedberg]

Did you see Chuck Schumer and Bill Clinton put out ringing endorsements? And congratulations to Mamdani this morning, which, you know, I think the Overton window's blown open on this. Now, I do think that the Democrats, to your point, Sachs, are embracing the socialist agenda as the new agenda that is clearly gonna win the youthful vote for them at a negative 70 rating. They finally woken up to the fact that they can't have no agenda. They can't have nothing that they stand for, which is effectively my read on what's been the case for the last year and a half, two years, for the Democratic Party. They now have something to stand for, which is these principles of socialism, which they call justice and equity and fairness and redistribution of capital and all these other features that were kind of rung out at the Mamdani campaign and everyone embraced and ran to. The Democratic leadership perked up like a bunch of prairie dogs popping out of the ground like, this is now gonna be the way we're gonna win. Great. We're all over it. Let's do it.

[David Sachs]

They're accepting the inevitable. Look, the Democratic Party right now is the Democratic Establishment is in the process of being remade now the way that the Republican establishment was remade a decade ago. So remember, a decade ago the Republican Party was dominated by people like Dole and McCain and Romney and various Bush retreads. And it was antiquated and out of touch. And Trump came in there and remade it as a nationalist, populist Republican Party. And I think in a similar way you now have these socialists who've come in in the Democratic Party and they are remaking the Democratic Party in the same way that Trump replaced neoconservatism with populist nationalism. They are replacing neoliberalism with, you could call it populist socialism.

[Friedberg]

Yes.

[David Sachs]

And those are the choices for the future. Let me tell you. You can basically go with you're going to have a populist socialism in the Democratic Party or you're going to have a populist nationalism in the Republican Party. And to all my friends on the tech right, your choices in the future are not going to be neoliberalism or neoconservatism. It's going to be do you want Republican nationalism or do you want Democrat socialism? Those are going to be your choices. So I would get with the program here because your choices are MAGA or socialism. Which one do you want?

[Jason Calacanis]

There is a third way. But Chamath, what are your thoughts here in terms?

[Friedberg]

I don't know if there is.

[Jason Calacanis]

Since we're here. There is actually a path out of here which is telling the truth to young people. Your college degree is not going to get you an amazingly high paying job. What will get you an amazingly high paying job is excellence, learning skills and, and having radical self reliance. Being reliant on the state, being reliant on the government is a path to nowhere. It's a path to pain and suffering. To constantly be looking for this guy to create a breadline in his own series of Costcos, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, that he thinks that you're going to be able to create in New York City a series of government run stores. Does anybody have any sense to the arc of history that he wants to create breadlines and literally have the state provide you with food at this promised discount? It's absurd. Leave the state, vote with your feet, go to Austin, go to Miami, go to another state where radical self reliance and your ability to create your own opportunities and not get suckered into this debt spiral. That is the path out and that will be a new party that will emerge at some point. Some rational group of people are going to say, get skills, don't get debt. Chamath, what are your thoughts on all this? And then we'll move on to the next subject.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think the three of you guys are a little exaggerated to be quite honest. I mean, all the rhetoric sounds very clever, but I don't think it's accurate. I think the way that I see it is more nuanced than this. I think what's happened is that Zoran Mamdani is very smart and is running a playbook to win like all politicians do, based on a formula that has been winning in large cities for the past decade. And so I don't know if he really believes in this rhetoric or not, but it's worth noting that most of his platform is copied and pasted from London and Chicago. So the things that he's talked about, universal basic free meals, affordable housing, freezing the cost of transportation, public grocery stores, all three of you are reacting like these things were pulled out of thin air. They're not. These were the public platforms of the mayors who have won in London, in Vienna, in Havana, Cuba and in Chicago. So I think the reason why this works is that these are small pockets in the end of a large political spectrum. Even though New York feels big, it isn't that big in the context of the United States. And what you see is that when you try to take those policies in a city, take London, and then level it up at the national level, there's a quick schism that happens. So if you look at labor and labor trying to scale up the policies of a Siddiq Khan in London throughout the country, labor is now at the absolute Labour Party, the absolute lowest approval ratings in the UK of any party ever in this moment in time after an election. So I think what you're probably seeing is quite a sophisticated AB test. And I think that the political wingmen and the money people that want to be in control know how to run candidates on platforms that can win. And this is a clear winning strategy in left leaning major metropolitan centers. So what I would say just to refine what you guys are saying is that this platform is not new. I've seen it for the last decade. I think you're going to see it for the next few decades. It doesn't work. And so you're going to see the same results in New York City that you've already seen in London, which has become unlivable, sadly. One of my favorite cities in the world. If you don't believe it, go visit there. Chicago, which I haven't been to in 15 years and I'll never go to. It's a disaster. So my point is it just doesn't work so you can win. It actually isn't very effective and it doesn't scale to the national level.

[Friedberg]

When do you think it returns? Chamath like what's the reversal like? Do you think the reversal is everyone has some experience with crime. Is the reversal like the city's bankrupt is the reversal? Houses you don't have, you're unemployed. Unemployment hits a fire like with water in the pipes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'll tell you something which is my view, my view is much more basic. It's, it's much less sophisticated than I think what you're saying. My extremely simpleton view of things is that humans swing in a pendulum like fashion between poles and over multi decade arcs. You go between the thing that works to the thing that should work now because it's not the thing before. So I suspect what happens is that New York takes a 40 or 50 year journey and at some point it will look like New York of the 80s. And at that point you'll have an Ed Cook like figure, you'll have a David Dinkins like figure, you'll have a Michael Bloomberg like figure, you'll have the broken windows theory of policing reemerge as the cause celebre and the cycle will repeat itself. So I tend to think that these things are just between two poles. We've spent a lot of time in this more independent self reliance poll. A lot of people will want to experiment with this other thing. It just doesn't prove to work. And in the absence of something cataclysmically bad, I don't think it's going to change.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if you live there and experienced Dinkins and you know, Koch to Dinkins and then Giuliani to Bloomberg, I can tell you it's going to be really miserable to be in a Dinkins era. The city was chaos, it was dangerous. If you got off the wrong subway stop it was going to result in you getting robbed at guns.

[David Sachs]

We're going to have to go through that.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's London. Today the London subway costs $35 to go from the suburbs of London into the center of London. $35. Okay, that is ridiculous, right? You can't walk with your cell phone in central London anymore because there are more cell phone thefts than anything. There's knife attacks everywhere. Why is that? Well, you've had an agenda that was meant to be the socialist left leaning. Let's resolve all these problems for Everybody. And it turns out to not work at a very basic factual level. And every time it's been repeated over the last 15 years, it still hasn't worked. So if you think that this guy is going to be the exception that proves the rule in New York, I wish him the best of all. But I would be short New York real estate. I think it's going to crash and burn. And then, of course, pick up the pieces and we'll reset.

[David Sachs]

All right, let me pick up on something Jamal said about Mamdan. What's his name? Zoran.

[Jason Calacanis]

Zoron.

[Friedberg]

Do you guys remember that movie? And he would go to the arcade and what is it called? Ask Zoron. And you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Ask Zoron, can I have free pizza? I'm going to run for New York mayor and I'm offering everybody free pizza and bagels. I'm going to win.

[David Sachs]

Me pick up on what Jamal said about Zorin running an effective campaign, because it is true. And I think one of his best moments was during a debate where the moderator asked the candidates, which foreign country would you visit first as mayor of New York City? And the other candidates said, Ukraine or Israel. They're basically virtue signaling. And then they get to Mamdani, and he said, nowhere. I wouldn't go anywhere. I would stay in New York City. I would work for the people here. I wouldn't be going to foreign capitals. And he just crushed that answer. Now, his political solutions, his programs are not gonna work. But the reason why he's catching fire is partly because he is putting New York first, the same way that President Trump is putting America first. The American people are sick and tired of the politicians focusing on faraway places instead of their problems at home. Yes. It's like the Biden administration going off and defending the border of Ukraine while leaving the border of the United States wide open. And I think that even over the last couple weeks, you saw that substantial majorities of the American people did not want to get into a new Middle Eastern war. And I think this is the failure of both the neoliberals and the neoconservatives, which aren't that far apart. They are clinging to this post World War II fantasy of America being this global empire where we have to be the global policeman while America back home is collapsing, or at least rotting, suffering. They want the politicians to be focusing on our problems.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Karen Bass is that moment, like, if you need to understand that moment, she's in Ghana. She knew this place was gonna go on fire. She extends her trip. She doesn't come back like descratiad to the highest degree. All right, there's a lot of other stuff on the docket. We could go two ways, but I think, Freeberg, I want to get you involved since I know you got to get to a meeting. Can we go to the AI Story, which I think you would care most about, or you want to go markets? Freeberg, ladies choice. Freeberg, you choose.

[Friedberg]

Or do you want me to do Science Corner real quick? Because then you guys can keep going.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I love Science Corner. Absolutely. Ready, guys? It's time for a bathroom break. I'm sorry. Science Corner for. It's time for Saxon.

[David Sachs]

Here we go.

[Jason Calacanis]

3.

[Friedberg]

That's funny.

[David Sachs]

2. 1.

[Jason Calacanis]

Science.

[Friedberg]

He's taking a leak.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he's taking a leak in a bottle.

[Friedberg]

Did he finish the tequila bottle?

[Jason Calacanis]

Sacked. Get back on camera.

[Friedberg]

I don't get. Isn't he the head of science for.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's it. When Science Corner starts, we all do a double of that, all in premium. Premium tequila. Tequila so smooth it makes you forget about Science Corner.

[Friedberg]

Right?

[Jason Calacanis]

It even makes Science Corner less.

[David Sachs]

I'm not feeling any pain.

[Jason Calacanis]

No pain.

[David Sachs]

No pain.

[Friedberg]

Zach, you know you're in charge of science for the government, right?

[David Sachs]

I am under duress.

[Jason Calacanis]

Under duress.

[David Sachs]

That's. That's Michael Gracios. I just do my two issues. I've got AI and crypto.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, listen, shout out to our sponsor this week. Nicotine, chilled mint. The reason my moderation is so on point.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

What are you doing? Are we doing one of those with. With.

[Jason Calacanis]

I. I'm doing it twice a day.

[David Sachs]

I did two so far this episode you're hooked on.

[Friedberg]

Now, are we getting paid for that or are you getting paid for that?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, I thought use the promo code.

[Jason Calacanis]

Jcal, and get two extra free of the jcow.

[Friedberg]

Nick, we're not doing any private promos on the show. We are.

[Jason Calacanis]

I have a private entertainment.

[David Sachs]

He's got his own side deals. He's got his own side deals.

[Friedberg]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Check your doing a side deal right now. He's doing his.

[Friedberg]

Wet your beak. If you want to make money, you share with the group.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm just giving a shout out to my guy who drives our ratings.

[David Sachs]

He's like the guy at the valet stand who's putting the tips in his own pocket instead of putting them in the kitty.

[Jason Calacanis]

Entrepreneurship. It's called entrepreneurship.

[Friedberg]

You want your car out front, Nick, I want to bleep. I want to bleep and blur out all of that stuff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, pixelate this. Just pixelate it.

[Friedberg]

Do you guys want to talk about age reversal?

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, yeah, let's talk about age reversal. While I hit this, as is the.

[Friedberg]

Case with most cutting edge science nowadays, it is coming out of China and not out of the United States. So this research study was done on age reversal. We've talked about using these Yamanaka factors to change the epigenome of cells and make them youthful again. In this particular case, the study was done on engineering stem cells that were then placed into the bodies of monkeys and reversed the age of these monkeys on the order of what would be the equivalent of, in humans of several decades of age reversal. It's a pretty amazing and astounding result. So cell therapy is the modality that would be kind of employed at scale for humans to utilize this tool. There's a lot of work that's been done in age reversal in mice, some work in primates, some work in humans now. And there's obviously a few startups doing this based on the studies and research around Yamanaka factors. So kind of changing the epigenome and effectively getting cells to act youthful again. In this particular case, this team focused on a specific gene that it is known that when this gene is expressed or overexpressed, meaning the gene is turned on, it actually creates a whole bunch of signaling molecules, little tiny molecules that then get absorbed by other cells and tell those cells to start to act young again and reset those cells. That gene is called FOXO3. What this research team did is they took stem cells and they engineered them using CRISPR to get them to over express FoxO3. And so now these cells start making this FoxO3 protein. And when that cell starts making that FoxO3 protein, it actually makes a whole bunch of other molecules, little small proteins, little molecules. They then get packaged up into what are called exosomes. These are like little packets that get spun out of the cell and they get absorbed by other cells and trans trigger those cells. We don't know how, we don't know why necessarily to start acting young again. So they engineered these stem cells, overexpressed Fox03 and then put these stem cells in these monkeys. And these monkeys were kind of the equivalent of being 60 years old. And then they looked at what happened. So what happened? Well, they looked at tissue, they looked at blood, and they did MRIs and scans of the brain. And what they found is that the monkeys brains effectively started to get completely rewired and act like young brains again. They were able to increase their memory, increase their responsiveness, their age related atrophy reversed. So their brains actually grew, their bones started to grow, their muscles started to grow, their blood cells started to reverse aging signals. So across bone degeneration reversed. They looked at 61 different tissues from 10 distinct systems in the bodies of these monkeys after they received the stem cell treatment. And 54% of the tissue examined showed reversal of age. In the case of lungs they saw in monkeys, it was a four year age reversal, which is 12 years in humans. Skin reversed by six years, which is the equivalent of 18 years in humans. So imagine a 60 year old person taking this, suddenly they're 40 years old in their skin. Skeletal muscle went by five years in the monkeys, which is the equivalent of 15 years in humans. So imagine going from being 60 years old to having the body of a 45 year old in terms of muscles, the spleen, the brain, all across these different systems, they saw significant signals of age reversal. And then they identified these little exosomes, these are like little sacs that are spun out of the cell and then they go into other cells and they start to trigger all of this age reversal cascade that happens. And by the way, they saw no side effect, they saw no negative health effect. There was no increase in cancer. These are the sorts of things you typically look for. And in tissue, in blood cells, in mri, across the board, they saw age reversal. So it was a really kind of incredible result. And I think that it opens up the door for this idea of using cell therapy based on stem cells that are engineered to be injected into blood to actually reverse aging in humans. And I think that we should expect over the next couple of years, these sorts of trials to kind of begin to see if we can see similar results. There's a lot of background work, by the way, in Fox 03 in this particular gene, a lot of background work in engineering stem cells, a lot of background work obviously in Yamanaka factor and other age reversal that predicated this. But this particular paper, I think put a lot of things together and showed some, some pretty nice results.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you think Yamanaka factors are the thing still, or do you think that there's going to be a lot of other genetic manipulations that advance age reversal before Yamanaka factors do?

[Friedberg]

The latter is more of this, what we call like a complex cascade of proteins and molecules that we haven't identified yet, that we don't know how or why they do what they do. That's what we just saw with this study. We don't know what's in those exosomes sacs, and we don't know why they cause other cells to reverse their age. We don't quite understand the mechanism. It's really hard. So I think that this becomes sort of call it an easier path. Whereas with the Yamanaka factors, if you apply too much, the cells don't just rejuvenate, they can become, you know, cancerous.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Let me ask it more directly, other than the novelty of all of this, do you think there will be something in the market, some injectable or something that average people like us can take in the next five or 10 years to solve a problem that we have or to live longer with higher health?

[Friedberg]

Yes, there are clinicals underway right now and I know of the clinical trials that are underway.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Like in stage three. You're saying phase three clinical trials, early.

[Friedberg]

Stage one in humans, like one A's? Yeah, very early.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So maybe a decade from now.

[Friedberg]

I think that's right. Well, look, I mean, let's see what the FDA does. But the FDA is trying to accelerate outcomes here. As you know, Blake Byers came to.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

My house for poker. He's sponsoring a study at ucsf, which I thought was incredible. You know the gene that allows Donald Trump to sleep four hours?

[Friedberg]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They've isolated that gene. Clinton had that gene too. And Blake is sponsoring a trial to basically edit a handful of subjects who want that gene to see if they can sleep four hours and be rested. So I don't know if you guys know this, and he explained this to me and it makes so much sense, but I didn't realize it. We sleep 20 years of our life, we're sleeping. And so if you can cut it in half, you get an extra 10 years of living. If you think about it like that way, that is an incredible reason to do the gene editing to get the Trump gene. But the thing that nobody knows, we.

[Jason Calacanis]

Could ski all day, play poker all night.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The thing that they don't know is, you know, Trump and Clinton were born with that gene from day one. And what they don't know is what could go wrong if you injected it and manipulated yourself at the age of 30 or 40 or 50.

[David Sachs]

Yeah, of course.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But wouldn't it be incredible if you could all of a sudden only sleep four or five hours and be completely rested?

[Friedberg]

Well, do you remember at the all in Summit, Nikki Paul, she gave a talk on this gene? That was her opening piece. I mean, that's definitely insight chemob. I know there's a bunch of labs working on that exact gene target. But this, this was just amazing because this is A cell therapy. So you can kind of think about getting an injection done. You get an infusion done of these stem cells, and all of a sudden your skin is 20 years younger. It's incredible.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Like, my forehead.

[Friedberg]

I mean, this actually plays out your foreskin. Yeah, if you have it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I kept it because it's like. It's like a sheath. It's like a sheath for the anaconda.

[Friedberg]

Like a sleeping bag.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's like a sleeping bag.

[Friedberg]

Freebird. Okay, very good.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's like a man sleeping in a sleeping bed.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sleeping.

[David Sachs]

With, like, a little hood.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're back, folks. We're back. It's been a strange six months, but the pod is officially back. We are so back. The NASDAQ's at an all time high. We've got IPOs. The wrath of Lena Konzo. He's pandering with his dog. Science Corner's back. Sacks is double fisting.

[David Sachs]

I'm double fisting. I mean, tequila is so good.

[Friedberg]

Timothy, we gotta get some bottles for Vegas this weekend.

[Jason Calacanis]

We gotta get you a double straw.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Hey, David, can you send somebody to the OR to my plane with some bottles or no.

[David Sachs]

Yeah, please.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do you have an extra few?

[David Sachs]

I only have this one at home, but we have some. We have them here.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Actually, Friedberg, I brought two bottles to the Bay Area so I can take them from my house. I'll bring them. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Also, Nick, just take a note. Can I get one of those bottles? Just deliver it to United Flight 376 to Vegas from Boston Terminal. I'll be in C2C Terminal 2. If you could send it to the Centurion Lounge. I just got upgraded to the Centurion Lounge.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Also, did you get the. Did you. Did you follow up with the guys from Robin Hood to get the gold card?

[Jason Calacanis]

You didn't get a gold card yet.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, he was the only one. Vlad texted me and said, hey, Freeberg's the only. He's the only best without it. So I said, get one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Your invite got lost in the mail.

[David Sachs]

You know this gold card?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, look, I have mine here. Here I have mine.

[David Sachs]

But you know where this came from? This came from the startup that I funded that got acquired by Robinhood. So those guys did a great job.

[Jason Calacanis]

So now you got double Robinhood shares. You got it from that.

[David Sachs]

Great job.

[Jason Calacanis]

Great job. It's a great app, by the way. And if you move your money into there, they give you and your crypto. They give you like 1 or 2%.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And shout out to shout out to Brian Armstrong. I'm Getting my Coinbase Bitcoin card.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, they have a coin. I thought you were saying you're launching the all coin.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You get 4% cash back in bitcoin. I mean, I'm going to buy another global 7500. Like $70 million.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now I'm happy. I mean, that was the saddest day. You got rid of the 7,500.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I mean, that plane is expensive. So I was like, it's not.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was like, chamath, when are you going back from Italy? He's like, I'm coming back on this date. I was like, okay, I'm coming out 10 days before that. I'm flying home with you. I booked my trip on Chamat's return flight on the 70 500.

[David Sachs]

That is a beautiful plane. So I actually flew on that recently because my plane broke down. I charged a 7,500, and, man, that is a gorgeous plane. That's a great plane.

[Jason Calacanis]

Did you see the leaf?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's a little overkill, to be quite honest with you.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was for sure.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It was a little overkill.

[Jason Calacanis]

My favorite was that, you know, you have two tables for dinner and there's a leaf that goes in between the two, and you make a full table for six. Oh, my.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

By the way, you guys, do you know how good Starlink is on these airplanes now?

[Jason Calacanis]

Incredible.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I flew to Toronto and then Toronto back to la. I didn't miss a beat. I had Starlink. I was doing Zooms. I was making phone calls. I have never been more productive. And then I was just watching YouTube, and it's like I was on the ground in my living room. It's crazy. I think the only thing that you should be searching for when you're flying is. Is it Argus Platinum?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And does it have starlink? It's the only thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was on the first one. I was on Elon's playing with it when he first put it on, and it was nuts. He was playing Diablo. And I'm watching Netflix at the same time. No latency. I'm watching 4K.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's incredible.

[Jason Calacanis]

Netflix, I was streaming. It was bonkers. And United, the entire fleet's going to have my preferred airline. I think it's like, this could change productivity. You think about the flight to the Middle east or Singapore, Asia, Japan. When I go skiing in January with Tucker, all that is now gonna be productive hours, and then we're not gonna sleep. So it's like you get two careers. You could be a podcaster and a venture capitalist.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's it. That's crazy.

[Friedberg]

All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

The stock market is nearing a record high. In fact, Uber hit a record high today, just two months after the big Trump tariff chaos and the market going down 15, 30%. We've had a full recovery from Trump's Liberation Day tariff announcement. Yeah, market might even be up 1, 2, 3, 4% since then. They called it a stunning turnaround at your favorite network, Sachs. CNN called it a stunning turnaround. Lots of different things are contributing to this. Obviously you got the ceasefire in the Middle east, you've got the trade deals with UK and a truce with China. Nasdaq 100 is at an all time high. You know, there's, there's also with these tech companies, the perfect storm M and A is back on the menu. People are buying companies again. That equals growth. People are continuing to lay off the dead weight. So you're having earnings rise and then the product announcements coming out of big tech, which I think you sort of alluded to, that American companies are firing on all cylinders earlier in the program. Chama, all of this is amazing. The AI trade is on. So this all equals though, however, big controversy. Friedberg, what's the point of cutting rates if we're at an all time high and employment is somewhat full? There are some concerns there. We'll get into it. But what are your thoughts here on the market? And then, you know, Trump is going hard at Powell, saying he's going to fire him, saying he's an idiot, he's stupid, blah, blah, blah. This is the guy he placed, by the way. So, so Freiberg, what are your thoughts here? And then we'll go to you. Chamath.

[Friedberg]

I'm not sure that equity market prices going up is necessarily the best indicator of where we are because we did have negative GDP growth in Q1. Arguably there was a lot of tariff blipping happening in Q1, but there's a real question on this GDP growth outlook for the rest of this year. And we're still running a modest inflation. When you combine those two and you combine the government deficit right now, there's an argument to be made that we're actually seeing assets inflate. Not necessarily. So multiples are going up. I think that may actually be a result of kind of an indication that we expect rates to cut, that we expect to increase the money supply. And again, remember when you end up in this debt death spiral, all assets go up in value. They all increase because you start to flood things with cash. And as you flood things with printed money, when you start to print more Money, everything goes up in price. So one argument here might be that we're actually not necessarily seeing an improvement in the fundamental business environment. We're not seeing record revenue across the board. As we talked about last week, The S&P493 are really struggling relative to the MAG7. And there's a really kind of questionable outlook ahead for the vast majority of equity cap out there. So I would say that there might be a bit of an inflationary aspect to this, not necessarily just a pure business performance upgrade that we're saying, all.

[Jason Calacanis]

Right, we got Dr. Doom's position, I mean that respectfully, but give us the other side chamath, if you have one.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, I mean, look, if I was a betting man, which I am. You are. I think the free money trade here is to be levered long. I think you can make a lot of money right now. Why is that? The first chart I want to show you is the velocity of money. So what is this? This is the M2 money supply. It's a measure of how much money is circulating in the economy. What this shows is the impact of rates where we were able to start to slow down and contract the money supply. But then as you saw as the economy stabilized and people started to project was possible in 18 to 24 months, you started to see money coming back into the system. That's what has given a bid to the equity markets. That's great because a percentage of this capital gets allocated into things that can generate a superior return to money markets. And that's where the bid to the equity market came from. So you would say, well, where does it go from here? The next chart, Nick, if you just give the second one, is look at how much money. And again, you can just look at the last five years. Look at how much money is sitting in money market funds. And what this starts to show you is you have trillions and trillions of dollars of dry powder on the sidelines that will need to find a home. I think that Jerome Powell is in an increasingly untenuous situation because he will be looked at as politicizing the office of the Federal Reserve. There is enough data that can justify cutting rates. If you cut rates, and we've talked about this before, two things will happen. Number one is people will take some amount of money out of the money market funds because they will want to go and seek superior returns somewhere else. It will increase the velocity of money. At the same time, you put those two things together, that is a bid to the equity markets. And so if we're at an all time high today with rates at 4.5%. And Powell is back against the wall to cut. The only road from here is probably up. And so you could see this thing get re rated quite aggressively. And then the question is, do you do it where you manage your risk and you're short some stuff, or do you just say, you know what, I'm just going to take it all up and take most of my shorts off and let the thing go? I think that if Powell starts an aggressive cutting program, either because he has to or because he's trying to keep his job, I mean, man, you could see the S and P at 7,000 very quickly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sachs, yeah. Obviously you're a member of the administration, so I don't want to make sure people know you're not speaking for the administration. But I guess your personal thoughts on the markets here and what the right thing for Powell to do is, because he does seem to be in an untenable position. He's being criticized super heavily. He might even have his replacement announced, you know, before his term is even up in the spring. And gosh, you know what, what is the reason for Powell to cut rates if everything's going so well? And then he would look like maybe he poured gasoline on what appears to be, you know, a pretty robust economic fire right now.

[David Sachs]

That's not the right way to look at it. The question is just what's the inflation rate relative to interest rates? And inflation has come down all the way to, I think, 2.4%. So it's way down. We're back to a two handle. I think inflation has largely been licked and it's time to start lowering interest rates and that will be good for the economy. There's no reason for rates to be as high as they are. It'd also be good in terms of financing our debt. So I think that it is time for Powell to act and I think he's being overly cautious here. He's being slow here. Just like he was slow to raise at the beginning of the cycle, he's being slow to cut at the end of the cycle. And again, I think he's just afraid of being proven wrong here. But I think that the timing is right to start the cuts. Now, to go back to the question of how do you trade this market? I mean, I have a very simple idea, which is anytime that the media tries to sow doom or spread panic about the Trump administration's policies, that's a good time to buy. We saw this when Jim Cramer started touting the Black Monday that was coming. And Larry Summers has been out there constantly with his tds. Whenever the media puts these experts on to tell you that there is chaos and doom, that has proven to be an excellent time to buy the dip. Absolutely. I think this is a very easy way to trade the Trump presidency.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, the conspiracy corner folks are like, Trump's doing this on purpose. The volatility in the market. Market is helpful in some way, but it does seem to be the playbook I'm calling this. I don't mean this in a derogatory way. Again, I don't like the term taco because I think that's trying to goad Trump into or frame what he's doing as not thoughtful. I think it is thoughtful. I think he does shock and bore. He does something shocking. He pins his negotiation to that. Whether it's what's happening in Iran, whether it's what's happening with immigration or what happened with tariffs. He starts with a bang and then he falls back to a reasonable position that the markets can digest. So you just have to take a 90 day view of everything he's doing and then you'll be fine. When he says, you know, we're going to give people 150% tariff, just cut it by 2/3 or make it reciprocal. Fine. When he says he's going to deport 20 million people, cut it to 500 to a million, whatever Obama did. And that's where it's going to wind up. And he says, we're going to smash Iran, it's going to be very strategic and then he's going to give them the path off. So he's actually playing a very interesting, perhaps, dare I say sophisticated approach this time, which seems chaotic, but there might be a method to the madness.

[David Sachs]

Yeah, well, I think the media has an incentive to spread the site. They have an incentive to hype the chaos. Basically, they're the ones who are creating the panic and they bring on all these fake networks who've got tds to basically hype this narrative. So my point is just that when the media is spreading this narrative, that's a great time to buy because it's an opportunity for those of us who don't have tds.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's not even tds, it's ratings. I'll just tell you right there, being a media executive for most of my life, if you want to work the left, you say Trump's out of control. Look at this chaos. He's a dictator, yada yada, ratings go up if you're Fox, you take the other side, you get ratings, it equals advertising. You don't really have to think about it. You want to talk to independent media like all in podcast. Tucker. People on the left, people on the right who are actually having first principle discussions about this.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think it is tedious though.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, there are some members.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, but like just as we were taping, there's just a whole deluge of economic data that came out. The GDP print for Q1 came in at minus 0.5%. I mean, so how could anybody interpret for Q1? So how could anybody at the Fed or in the media covering the Fed not understand that? By the way, when we were talking about this, just like I said that we're probably going to print like a three handle on GDP in Q2, we also talked about the fact that we were probably going to have a negative GDP print again, Q1. So we've been knowing it for months. We've basically been calling it right. So why is there an inability to just look at the data and just say the obvious truthful thing? Whatever you think of Trump, it doesn't really matter. Rates should not be where they are today. They should be 50 to 100 basis points lower, period. It's categorical.

[Jason Calacanis]

He'll do it in September. He's going to do a 25 in September. It's obvious.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There's no logical explanation explanation for it. There is a subjective explanation and that's political.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think he just, after the tariff stuff, he said let's just push it out two months, get some more data and then we'll cut it in September. What's the difference between a July August cut or a September? It's probably not going to be meaningful in the arc of history.

[David Sachs]

But if you're against the tariffs and you're buying into Jim Cramer's doom narrative or Larry Summer's doom narrative, that's more of a reason to cut.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you believe the doom narrative, that he's not going to relent. Yes. But if he does relent and he negotiates it, I think you would say stay the course and see what happens. Anyway, all of this is on the margins. The truth is these companies are very strong, entrepreneurship is strong and the debt's the issue. So we still got to address the debt. We'll see if he does that in.

[David Sachs]

But Tommas point, the last year of the Biden economy was very weak, especially the last six months of the Biden economy, such that Q1 was negative GDP growth. So President Trump came into Office inheriting a very weak economy. Since then, he's done a bunch of things to turn it around. There's obviously no reason to have interest rates at. What are interest rates at right now? It's still at 5%.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's pull up the poly market just real quick.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

4 or 5 guide where he.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think the market thinks 25, 50 bips is like the 80%. I haven't looked at it in a week. Here's September. What are we seeing here? 59%, 25 bips, 8%, 50 bips. So you put those together, it's 2 third chance he's going to cut in September, obviously. And what does October say? Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So is there a poly market on who replaces Powell? Nick, is there anything in there about who replaces Powell?

[Jason Calacanis]

He's going to announce it. I mean, I think he'll just announce it and it'll make Besant. People seem to like Besant. He feels like a steady hand. He feels like he's got experience.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's obvious who is the most likely new fetcher or something like that.

[Jason Calacanis]

I think it's Besant. Here we go.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh, there it is. Chris Waller. Really? Huh?

[Jason Calacanis]

Besant. Only 14%. I think that's your sleep right there. But It's. Listen, there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 people with 14 to 22%. So this is a.

[David Sachs]

The best one's only at 14%. Yeah, I agree. That seems low. Hassett's at 18. I mean, I work with both Bessant and Hassett and I know them both well and they'd both be great.

[Jason Calacanis]

They both would be great.

[David Sachs]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

They both have a ton of experience, a lot of time in the game, which is what you want.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Warsh has been in the game for a long time. He really knows how the markets work. He.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean this. Yeah. Chamath, is this a case of. Or Sacks, Is this a case of picking you. You have a bench. Do you want to move Besant out of where he's doing a good job?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think Besant's crushing a treasury. I would love to keep him in the job.

[Jason Calacanis]

So, yeah, I think that's the decision. Right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think the thing is elevating Waller has. That's an interesting set of implications. Warsh is, you know, very consummate and capable of doing the job. The question is, does Trump believe he's MAGA or does Trump believe he's more established Republican?

[Jason Calacanis]

Sorry, there's another name on the list that we forgot. Elon Musk or Trump. Oh, Chamath is in There. Oh, okay. Let's see. Okay, well, let's get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers. You can make 99 points.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think that I'm part of a cascade that happens if something else happens.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you put a thousand dollars in and you'll make three bucks. Yeah. All right, let's end on this. AI training. This is a super important story we talked about here. Anthropic received a favorable ruling in an AI copyright case. Bunch of caveats here. Federal judge out of San Francisco ruled anthropic use of copyrighted books and AI training was legal if. If the company had purchased or licensed the books through legal means. However, the ruling doesn't apply to more than 7 million books that Anthropic allegedly. Key to put that in there. Obtained through, quote, unquote, pirated means. People obviously have been training data off of a lot of what's on the web, and a lot of that stuff might have not been officially licensed. Authors Guild is going to appeal the decision, which came out of the district court in Northern California. Interestingly, a day after this ruling, Microsoft was sued by a group of authors alleging it used a collection of over 200,000 pirated books in its Megatron AI model. Interestingly, on top of that, I did a licensing deal. Harper's Business did a deal, or Harper's with Microsoft, and I got paid 2,500 bucks to license angel for their model. So there are also legal routes per page? No, literally for the whole book. And I did it. I know it's crazy. No, everybody got the same deal. They licensed like, I don't know, 5,000 books or something. Per word. Per word. Well, I used to get $3 a word back in the day, but actually for that book, what did I get? I got $25 a word, I guess, with a million dollar deal. So Meta also prevailed against a group of notable authors, including Sarah Silverman.

[David Sachs]

Now we know why he's so long winded. He gets paid by the word absolutely.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now you know, that's actually my deal.

[David Sachs]

Now you know why he never wants to cut anything. This goes on and on and on.

[Friedberg]

Absolutely.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

On and on and on.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. That's why we're the number one podcast in the world. You guys can send me my flowers, you know, the address of the ranch. Okay, so there was another one with Meta. And although the judge ultimately sided with Meta, he had a mixed ruling. Basically said that copyright protected works without permission is generally illegal. But the plaintiffs in that case failed to present any compelling arguments that there were actual market harm that's a key one. You have to have some harm in these cases in order for it to play. Ton of other cases still in play. The big one is the New York Times vs OpenAI and Getty Images vs Stable diffusion will follow those as they make their way through the courts. But here you are, Sacks. You are the czar of AI. So I don't know if we're getting an official position here or just your personal thoughts on this, but what's the interpretation of these two early cases by the czar? David Sachs?

[David Sachs]

Well, I'll tell you my point of view. I don't know that I can speak for everybody, but I'll give you my point of view, which actually is the same point of view I gave on this podcast a year or two ago because we had this debate over fair use, and me and Friedberg were on one side and you were on another side.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[David Sachs]

This judge in the anthropic case, I mean, the reasoning that he gave was almost identical to what Freeberg and I were arguing a year ago. The distinction he made is between input and output. If an AI model outputs some text that is basically a ripoff of someone else's copyright, then of course it's guilty of copyright violation. But the inputs or pre training is something different. And what AI models do in pre training is they take millions of text, millions of documents, and they understand the positional relationship of the words and they translate that into math into a vector space called positional encoding. That is a transformation of the underlying work. In the same way that a human can read a body of works and then come up with their own point of view. That is basically what AI models are doing. So if AI models violate someone's copyright by outputting something that's identical, then obviously that's a violation. But if all they're doing is transforming the work, they're doing positional encoding and then coming up with their own unique work product. This judge said that that is not a violation of copyright. I completely agree with that. One other point, one other distinction this judge made that I think is very important is the difference between pirating and copyright. What the judge said is, look, you have to buy the book. If you're going to basically do pre training on it, you can't rip it off. That would be piracy. But that's different than copyright. And so I agree with that too. Now, just one final point on this.

[Jason Calacanis]

How would you, Sacks, on that point, how would you propose a large language model, take a million books and put it in? Would they buy the physical book, scan them in, if you just buy the book.

[David Sachs]

So what Anthropic did is they created this large repository of books and unfortunately some of them weren't paid for. They were pirated material. And so Anthropic allegedly, by the way, allegedly is in some hot water. And then I think there is some case that's gonna move forward about that. But the judge distinguished again between piracy and copyright. So the point is, what Anthropic should have done, apparently is buy each copy of the book that they put in their repository. If they had done that, scan them in, scan them in, they wouldn't have had this piracy claim against them. But again, that is separate from copyright. Just one final point on this is I think it's very important that we end up with a sensible fair use definition like the one the judges come up with in this Anthropic case, because otherwise we will lose the AI race to China. The fact of the matter is China's not going to care about American copyright policy. They are going to train on every scrap of data that's available to them on the Internet. Apparently they use a pirated book archive called Libgen and so they're not going to abide by copyright laws at all. And if we don't allow our AI models to again have a sensible fair use definition that allows them to train but not violate an output, then we will lose to Chinese AI models because they'll have more data. And the fact is that the more data that you have, the better your AI model. So I do think it's very important for the US to consolidate around a fair use definition that makes sense. I'm not saying that the Synthropic case will be the final word. I think there will be other cases that come up with other definitions. There may be other judges that disagree. Ultimately, I think this is going to the Supreme Court. But where we need to end up is with some sort of fair use definition that makes sense. Otherwise we will lose AI race to China. Your view, jcal?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, obviously as a content creator, I'll take the other side of this. There is a nuance between training and there is a nuance, nuance between the output. I like to look at this as an opportunity. YouTube really did a great job with their content ID system of navigating this. Google has the most experience here with Google Images and Google News. The one box where you get a little snippet up top and the output is where this is really going to favor the content holders because these will be competitive products in the marketplace, the need to buy a New York Times subscription is no longer necessary. You can go onto a language model and ask them to give you wire cutter as one example. I like to cite what are their best picks for these, you know, air conditioners or microphones for podcasting, and they will give it to you. And when they started doing that, that was my main reason to subscribe to the New York Times and I no longer subscribe to it. I subscribe to OBNY because they can get the same information there. These cases will be very easy to win. And so I'm going to explain two things. One, how you can win this case as a content company, and then two, I'm going to give how the large language models can importantly win the AI race and actually not destroy the business on which they are built on. These language models have nothing without the content creators and the authors of these books, of which I am one. They need us. And so they should want to pay us. They should want us to be compensated because that will keep us more competitive than China, which will just steal it one time. So here's how you win. If you're a publisher, all you have to do is Disney, which is suing midjourney right now for obvious copyright violations on the output, in my interpretation, all you have to do is do a Marvel me, make yourself into a Marvel character, Disney me, or choose your own adventure, Star wars, and allow consumers to pay for that product. And any author right now that pops up, a website that says subscribe to the angel book and ask questions of it, $10 for life, a dollar per year, whatever it is, they will be able to prove damages very easily. And they will be able to prove that these language models are competitive. When they do that, then all of the output will need to be scrubbed or contained in some way. You can see this today if you ask ChatGPT, which is, you know, the main target since they're making 10 billion a year off of. In many ways, content creators work. That's why they're the big target. Because they have the most money. They will not let you make certain images, copyrighted images, specifically the Disney ones. Go ahead and try. Go try to make a Darth Vader image and they will stop you. So they know they're doing it wrong and they've already put the controls in place. You need to show that this is your opportunity as a content creator. And now to my second point, Sachs, which is the very easy. So that's how you can prove your case and win hands down versus all language models put a competitive product in the market, you will win. Then the second piece that'll make this tenable is, you know, ChatGPT is making $10 billion a year, according to reports. They should give 30% of their revenue, a small amount, the minority of their revenue, to the top 1000 newspapers, publications, podcasts, books, et cetera. And they should do that programmatically. And then they should hope that those companies double their revenue and increase their Investment. And then ChatGPT and the new York Times should do a deal. And I predict they will do this or with another language model that's smart enough to do it. Where when you go to ChatGPT and you do a search from the New York Times, you say, what does the New York Times say about Iran? Or what do they say about, you know, the wire cutters say about cameras? It should say authenticate with your New York Times subscription to have access to this. And on the New York Times website, they should say authenticate with ChatGPT. This would allow them to have a competitive advantage versus anthropic and, you know, Apples and whoever's. And this will become a massive competitive advantage for the language models, just like cable channels might, or Hulu might feature Disney plus or, you know, FX or whatever stations or content it is. Whoever does this first on the other side will make a tremendous amount of money because they will have access to all that data and the output. So you can make your kids a T shirt or a birthday invitation using the Star wars characters. That's the easy way for us to win as Americans, by respecting content creators and paying the money so they can reinvest. The amount of money we're talking about here is de minimis for the tech industry. These companies are going to be worth.

[David Sachs]

30% of revenue when the company's losing tons of money.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, that's their problem. That's not Saxon's.

[David Sachs]

No legal basis for that. Such a specific proposal. There's no legal basis for that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I mean, there is the music industry. If you want to play music in your restaurant, you have to pay. If you want to cover somebody's song, you got to pay. If you want to perform it, you have to pay. So there is tons of precedent for it. If you want to play a Disney film at your kid's birthday party, yeah, you can get away with it. But if you do it and you.

[David Sachs]

Invite people publicly, you're going to guarantee that Chinese models will, like Deepseek are better than American models, because they're not going to go through Any of that.

[Jason Calacanis]

So that's the reason of why.

[David Sachs]

Because they're just going to train on. No, not steal. I don't think it's stealing.

[Jason Calacanis]

The output I'm talking about specifically. Is the output stealing or not?

[David Sachs]

No, no, no, no. You can't copy the output. I fully agree there. And that is what the Disney case is about. No, I'm talking about free training.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm talking about the latter. So let's talk about the latter here. I'm talking specifically on the output.

[David Sachs]

No one disagrees on output.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay? So that's the licensing deal I'm talking about. Don't you think it would be worth it to give Disney $100 million a year to have access to all that?

[David Sachs]

I think you and I have different definitions of output.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think it's reasonable to pay Disney for pre training, and I think that they do. I told you, though, this, like, we did a licensing deal with OpenAI. We meaning, you know, Beast. They paid us and they're using it for pre training. It's quite reasonable. Is it the right price? We have no idea. But we did it so that we could be a part of the conversation and shape how these deals get done for content creators. But Sachs is right. Like, if you think about, like, what is the ultimate output? The output, if you look at how a transformer behaves, it's almost. It's impossible to say that it's copying the input, just not how it works. And so I don't know what gets turned into math.

[David Sachs]

What gets recorded is vector math on the relationship between the words.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is all a very interesting technical thing.

[David Sachs]

And then somehow, when you feed that into a neural net with billions and billions of documents, it somehow has an understanding and produces new content. And that new content is not a copyright violation. So I just think that copyright's the wrong way to look at this. This is a new technology. It's transformational. And then finally, we have the national security concern.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, so this is a topic we will monitor. Thanks again for listening to the number one podcast in the world. If you want to hang out with the besties and hear more prophetic interviews and discussions, go to the All In Summit, now in its fourth year, September 7th to 9th in Los Angeles. Every year we try to one up the last year and we will do it again this year. Apply for tickets all in.comsummit or all in.com yadayadayada. See you next time, besties.

[Friedberg]

Love you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I love you. I gotta go. Bye.

[David Sachs]

Let your winners ride Rain Man.

[Jason Calacanis]

David Sachs.

[David Sachs]

And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[Friedberg]

Love you, Queen of Quinoa.

[Jason Calacanis]

Besties are gone.

[Friedberg]

That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Oh man, my habit will meet me at. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy. Cuz they're all this useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

[Jason Calacanis]

We need to get merch. I'm going all in.