AI Bubble Pops, Zuck Freezes Hiring, Newsom’s 2028 Surge, Russia/Ukraine Endgame

Summary

All-In Podcast: Episode Summary

Episode Title: AI Bubble Pops, Zuck Freezes Hiring, Newsom’s 2028 Surge, Russia/Ukraine Endgame
Date: August 22, 2025
Hosts: Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, David Friedberg
Theme: The crew tackles the AI “bubble,” Meta’s hiring freeze, the emerging 2028 political scene, and Trump’s efforts at a Russia/Ukraine peace deal.

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode revolves around analyzing whether the rapid hype and investment in AI is hitting a correction point, as well as the ripple effects in company strategy (like Meta’s hiring freeze). The besties also debate the early odds in the 2028 Democratic presidential race and explore Trump’s recent negotiations with Russia and Ukraine. True to form, it’s an episode mixing sharp economic, tech, and political takes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. AI Hype Correction: Bubble, Pause, or Just Growing Pains?

Segment Start: [09:00]

• MIT Study Triggers Debate:
  A viral MIT study found 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to reach production — mainly due to employee resistance, poor output, and misallocated resources, especially in sales/marketing tools.
• Observations from the Field:
  • Chamath notes the first wave of “AI strategies” resulted from boardroom FOMO rather than true product-market fit.

    “A lot of boards read ‘AI’ and turned to CEOs—‘what’s your AI strategy?’ It got dumped down the org”—Chamath [10:24]

  • Many AI pilots may face the fate of “social” and early SaaS booms: an initial glut of investment, followed by consolidation to a few winners.
• Probabilistic vs. Deterministic AI:
  AI tools perform best in deterministic back-office optimizations rather than the messier, probabilistic world of sales and marketing.
• Sacks Sees Healthy Correction:
  AI stocks had a 10% dip; Sacks calls it a “healthy correction” rather than a bust.

  "I still think we're in an investment super cycle. But skepticism is healthy.”—Sacks [13:34]

• Narratives Cooling:
  Sam Altman compared the frenzy to the dot-com bubble, acknowledging both overexcitement and long-term importance.
  • Sacks highlights that expectations for imminent AGI are, and were, overblown, fueling both utopian and doomer narratives, now hitting reality.
• Incremental Evolution, Not Revolution:
  • Progress is more incremental than revolutionary; new models aren’t leaping far ahead—but specialization is increasing.

    “It’s more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”—Sacks [17:14]

2. Corporate AI Investment and the SLM Trend

• Capex Cycle and the ‘Internet Parallel’:
  Friedberg draws a parallel to the dot-com era: huge infrastructure built ahead of profits, but eventual huge value.

  “Ultimate promise of the Internet was realized many orders of magnitude greater. I think it'll be the same here.”—Friedberg [21:15]

• Three Key Trends Identified:
  1. Human + AI Pairing: AI tools require humans in the loop for debugging, integration.
  2. Architectural Pairing: Best results come from using AI as a layer atop deterministic (existing) systems (e.g., AI produces content, Unity renders it).
  3. Shift to SLMs: Small, specialized models (SLMs) are outperforming monolithic foundation models in many contexts—and may enable more efficient, cheaper AI applications as architecture evolves.
• The Trough of Disillusionment:
  Jason references the “trough of disillusionment” in tech cycles—innovation, hype, investment, then more sober incremental improvement.

3. AI Implementation Realities

Segment Start: [29:29]

• Pushback in Large Enterprises:
  • Even when AI works, internal resistance can kill it (“we were fired by our first customer, even though it worked.”—Chamath [29:43]).
  • Implementation often fails as projects leave the exec suite and reach the company’s “bowels.”
• Specialized Solutions Win:
  Chamath and Jason reinforce that AI tools solving narrow, vertical problems (like AI for tax prep) actually succeed with corporations, unlike generalized tools.

4. Meta’s AI Freeze and Talent Wars

Segment Start: [30:48]

• Meta Pull-Back:
  After an AI hiring spree (including offers of up to $100M for OpenAI talent), Meta institutes a hiring freeze.
  • “Meta is probably just digesting,” observes Sacks [31:44], noting this doesn’t signal a bust, but a pause after frenzied acquisitions.
• Discussion of Insane Offers:
  • Founders have reportedly turned down billion-dollar acquisitions without even shipping a product.
  • Sacks:

    “If they think this is the normal state of the world, they're going to be sorely mistaken.”—Sacks [33:34]

5. Valuations, Bull & Bear Cases for AI

• Making the Bull Case:
  Chamath describes a scenario where OpenAI’s DAU/MAU growth plus even a fraction of Facebook’s ARPU could justify massive valuations (up to $1.5T) if growth continues as projected.
• Specialization Drives Value:
  • Sacks emphasizes that business value from AI is about “last mile problems”—the closer to vertical and contextual, the more likely AI projects are to succeed.
  • The idea of a single “superintelligent” system that can just replace humans everywhere is not working in practice.

6. Politics: 2028 Democratic Race and the Newsom Surge

Segment Start: [39:02]

• Gavin Newsom Leads Early:
  Polls show Newsom leading among California Democrats for 2028, but the crew is skeptical about reading much into it.
• Style v. Substance:
  • Sacks: Newsom is “performative”—aping Trump’s style—but lacks authenticity and true core issues.
  • Friedberg expects the left to possibly veer more socialist, with AOC as a dark horse.
• Election Drivers:
  Chamath and Jason see the economy as the core issue, but also highlight housing, healthcare, and real wages as key Democratic talking points.
• California’s Record Debated:
  Sacks delivers a blistering attack on California’s performance under Newsom—a massive deficit, homelessness, high taxes, poor public services.

  “We pay the highest taxes for the worst public services...Wage stagnation is the highest in the country…”—Sacks [50:08]

• Grok's Rankings:
  Chamath queries the AI model Grok, resulting in Maryland > Michigan > California on quality of life, cost, crime [52:38].

7. Russia/Ukraine: Trump’s Negotiations and Endgame

Segment Start: [54:01]

• Breakthrough Summit:
  • Trump meets Putin in Alaska—the first US/Russian presidential face-off since 2021.
  • Sacks:

    “The President deserves enormous credit for reestablishing diplomacy… There literally hasn’t been a meeting since 2021…”—Sacks [55:13]

• What’s on the Table:
  1. Comprehensive Peace v. Ceasefire:
     The aim now is a comprehensive deal (not just a temporary ceasefire).
  2. Ukraine/Possibility of NATO:
     Trump concedes that Ukraine won’t join NATO—removing the original sticking point of the war.
  3. Territorial Concessions:
     All acknowledge some concessions to Russia are inevitable given facts on the ground.
• Skepticism on Final Outcomes:
  • Chamath notes historical precedent: most such disputes end in stalemates, not outright settlements.
  • Jason credits Trump for bold diplomacy, even if the odds are long.

    “Trump is incredibly good at foreign policy, specifically with dictators...Even if it's a 5% chance, you try.”—Jason [62:38]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI Hype:

  “We're not in a loop of recursive self improvement…it's a more normal technology race”—Sacks [17:48]

• On AI Specialization:

  “GROK is maybe more ‘based’...Google really good at video, Anthropic at coding. Specialization belies this idea of all-knowing, all-powerful models.”—Sacks [19:19]

• On Talent Bubble:

  “If they think this is the normal state of the world, they’re going to be sorely mistaken.”—Sacks [33:34]

• On Politics:

  “Do you want a replay of California on a 50-state scale? …In land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”—Chamath [44:51]

• On the Peace Talks:

  “If you're fighting a war and losing, you can't call a timeout.”—Sacks [56:17] “Trump is incredibly good at foreign policy...Even if it’s a 5% chance, you try.”—Jason [62:38]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Topic | Timestamp (MM:SS) | |-----------------------------------|----------------------| | AI Hype Correction | 09:00 | | MIT Report & Probabilistic AI | 10:23 | | Sacks' Cycle Analysis | 13:34 | | Altman Comments / SLM Trend | 19:59 | | Corporate Adoption & Pushback | 29:29 | | Meta Hiring Freeze / Talent War | 30:48 | | Bubble Valuations & Fundamentals | 33:34 | | Politics: 2028 Dem Primary | 39:02 | | Election Issues & Newsom Debate | 43:40 | | California’s Record | 50:08 | | Russia/Ukraine Endgame | 54:01 |

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Other Memorable Moments

• On Vertical AI Adoption:
  “Buying specialized AI tools from vendors succeeded two out of three times”—Jason [28:56]
• On Technical Sunk Costs:
  Chamath asks if big AI players may be “stuck” with massive sunk costs on LLMs, missing new technical waves [27:04].
• On The Emotional Cost of Innovation:
  Chamath shares being fired by a client due to internal pushback, not technology failure [29:43].

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Tone & Style

The episode is candid, irreverent, and blends expert economic and technical insight with political hot takes and playful rivalry—classic All-In. (“Empty nest syndrome” about their kids and bulldogs is balanced with billion-dollar cap-ex analyses.)

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In Summary

The group sees the AI market as moving beyond unsustainable hype to a phase of healthy skepticism, especially with enterprises demanding more practical, verticalized results. Meta’s hiring freeze is seen as a consolidation pause, not a tech winter. In politics, early polls are taken with a grain of salt; authenticity and results are likely to matter more than style. On Ukraine, the panel is split on how much progress is possible, but they largely agree: more realism, more specificity, and a willingness to embrace incremental, pragmatic change will define the next era—in both AI and geopolitics.

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For a full all-in immersion:

• Skip the AI “magic” hype—watch the vertical specialists
• Track the 2028 odds, but watch the primaries’ playbook evolve
• And never underestimate what a bulldog (or a founder) will do to get on the couch.

Transcript

[A]

In confidence. Zach's told me he's a little broken up about the empty nest kind of thing. And by empty nest, I mean his bulldog, Moose is coming to live on the ranch.

[B]

Has the moose landed?

[A]

The moose is landing next week. We're giving him a three month trial. If he's on his best behavior, he stays.

[B]

He's going to be great. He's so well trained.

[C]

What's going on?

[B]

Moose is our bulldog. Yeah, Moose is loose. He needs the space. He needs a ranch. He's a very athletic bulldog. This dog is not a couch potato. He's like very active and he just needs the space. Space to run around.

[C]

Why don't you just buy a ranch and give him his own ranch?

[A]

Why buy a ranch when a bestie has one already?

[B]

Yeah, a bestie who loves bulldogs. But no, he's a spectacular specimen of a bulldog.

[A]

Stunning bulldog.

[B]

Yeah, he's a beautiful dog.

[D]

Great bulldog.

[C]

This is a trial adoption, a Calacanis adoption cycle. Oh my God, this is sad.

[B]

You know, these bulldogs resist training like.

[D]

Jason, you know, like.

[A]

No, they are the most stoic loyalty like Jason, but stubborn individuals, they will.

[D]

Overweight, Stoic, stubborn, overweight.

[A]

This is a svelte dog.

[C]

How dare you.

[A]

How dare you.

[B]

Moose is a specimen in terms of personality. This is founder market fit. I mean this is like owner pet fit, founder bulldog fit. So what Moose would do is he would jump on the couch and just kind of lay there so it like moose no go down. So we put him down, he jumps right back up. We would take him down, jumps right back up. I mean he can go on all night doing this. So finally you just give in and let him sit there.

[C]

It's literally J cal.

[A]

It's literally. They are.

[B]

Now it's his couch. Now it's his couch.

[C]

It's literally J Cow.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sack.

[B]

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

[A]

Love you, Matt. Heidi, Queen of Ken Wall all Everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We got a banger episode for you today. All the topics that you want to hear about in the world. And with us, our amazing crew, our chairman dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. Enjoying the final moments of summer. How you doing there, brother?

[D]

Well, I come back in a couple days.

[A]

You get a little melancholy there, brother. You're a little sad.

[D]

I mean, I think everybody should have a two to three week vacation in August. I think it should be mandatory around the world. I think the World should stop and we should all go on vacation.

[A]

Yeah, well, you proved that to the audience by not showing up for the show for a couple of weeks.

[D]

Yeah, it's the best time to go on vacation.

[A]

I agree. I just literally got back from a.

[D]

Little kick your ass off through the end of July. Take two weeks off with your family. It's nothing better.

[A]

I just did a little visit down to Mexico City, which was absolutely delightful. Rome is amazing. Have you been there before, Chama?

[D]

No, but I've heard it's incredible. I heard the food scene in Mexico City is bananas.

[A]

It was bananas. And the startup scene there is amazing. It's kind of like if Spain and Williamsburg Brooklyn had a baby, that would be Mexico City. It's super hip, super fun. Lots of young people, lots of energy. Hey, speaking of young people with lots of energy. Hey, Freeberg's back with us in his cell working throughout August to get incredible things done, like our AI Summit and the All In Summit. Freiberg, you gave up your summer once again for the all in crew and for the audience. How do you feel? You resentful or you feel good about your decisions?

[C]

I live for the work, jcal.

[A]

You do. How's Ohalo doing? It seems like you're doing a lot of work there. You got your head down. Just give us a little update on the company.

[C]

I appreciate the ask. There's a lot going on. We're very busy. I actually had a really cool test tube here that we had a customer visit today. I'll go find it. The world's first true potato seed and we are ramping up production. A lot going on. It's pretty exciting.

[A]

Yeah, sounds. Sounds thrilling. Sax, any thoughts there on potatoes and just how thrilling this exercise has been?

[B]

What are we talking about?

[A]

We're just talking about Ohalo. Freebury got a thrilling summer. He's. He's got a new potato in a test tube that he's working on.

[B]

Just wait. Did we invest? Is that what's going on with that?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You're a shareholder.

[B]

I'm in. Okay.

[A]

All right.

[B]

Well, okay.

[A]

I care about you.

[D]

No, he did not.

[B]

I know he wanted to investment.

[A]

I think.

[B]

I didn't get any subject.

[D]

No. Why no?

[A]

No. For me, when this thing becomes worth 10 billion and I didn't get to slide in a little 250 slice. Not even a slice, huh, Friedberg? Look, guys, a slice for your friends.

[B]

They want value added investors. JCal, what's your value add? Exactly.

[A]

Value add.

[B]

How about spreading disinformation on this podcast?

[A]

Okay.

[D]

Yeah.

[A]

All right. Well, since I'm not on the cap table, good luck with your mutant potatoes. It's information mutant potatoes. Oh, we'll get through it, folks. We'll get through it. Hey, Zachs, you and I did a little interview with a certain senator. Give us an overview.

[B]

Yeah, we did a great interview with Senator Eric Schmidt from the state of Missouri, who previously was Attorney General and wrote a book about his experience as attorney general. He brought the lawsuit Biden v. Missouri, which exposed the Biden administration censorship apparatus that they ran through social media companies. This was the government side of the Twitter files and the discovery he brought when married with the Twitter files that Elon released really paint a picture of how the government was in bed with social networks to basically censor Americans free speech rights in favor of their point of view on Covid and many other issues. So great. I think it was a really good conversation.

[A]

Yeah, it was spicy and it's everywhere where you can find all in. But we got this big event coming up. The summit is coming, folks. Here we go for the fourth time in just a few weeks. September 7th through the 9th, I think 8th and 9th are the main days. Man, this lineup is stacked. Alex Karp, Vlad from Robinhood, my guy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and I are going to have a great discussion, part two. Wow. Uber CEO hitting an all time high circle CEO. Just an incredible lineup here. And Friedberg, it looks like we've got some great partners. Yeah.

[C]

First of all, the event is going to be very expensive to put on this year. We actually have, in addition to the great speakers, we have Diplo headlining one of the main parties.

[A]

The Diplo?

[C]

Yeah. Gary Richards and Dylan Francis. And so we have a huge set of blowout parties every night. It's going to be awesome to put all this on to pay for the event. We want to thank the sponsors. So Solana, big shout out. They were a sponsor last year and they're stepping up as a big sponsor this year.

[A]

Big shout out to our friends at Solana. They're amazing. They support everything we do. They're doing over 100 million transactions a day. It's unbelievable what they're getting done over there. Great team. And they're going to do a full open bar for us Sunday, juice bar, coffee, the works. Classy team over there. And we don't just have like these typical sponsorships of events. What we do is we ask, you know, our partners, hey, make an activation. Make a place for the besties and for the fans to hang. And they've all created these amazing experiences. And there'll be matches and espressos and craft beers and sushi and all kinds of great stuff. And to our friends at OkX, they're going to be coming back. They're building an onstage. Got a matcha bar coming. All these great things by our partners. Google cloud's back. Offering 350k in credits to Google Cloud for startups. What mentions? They are over there. Google's crazy. Look at this, man. They're putting out a mini campus at the Summit. And yeah, 350k in cloud credits have become athletic Brewing's back. They're doing the scholarships again. We have a couple of scholarship slots left. Please don't apply for the scholarships if you have means to buy a regular ticket. But if you do need a scholarship, please do apply if you're an up and comer. Allin.comsummit or allin.com yadda yadda yadda.

[B]

Did you guys see this?

[A]

What's going on now?

[B]

Apparently I was in the new south park episode.

[A]

The whole thing was around the sycophancy of AI. That's you.

[B]

Do I say anything in the show or is it just I'm just in the background?

[A]

No, they had a line of people giving tributaries to the President based on the Apple gift that Tim Cook gave to our amazing president. It's a funny episode. You know what I like about the administration? Like JD actually retweeted all this stuff and it's good fun. We get to mock our civil servants.

[D]

That's the vice president to you.

[A]

That's what I said. My guy jd what did I say?

[B]

Suddenly on a first name basis.

[A]

My guy jd hold on a second. Let me just say hi to JD here and I'll just get his feedback. I'm going to invite him to the diploma party. Hold on. Your biggest nightmares here. Me and Chris Wright also talking directly. Now I'm directly plugged in. Oh yes, Chris Wright. I'm bringing him a special gift to the Summit. You're going to be. You're going to love it. All right, we got to talk about AI. AI mania hit a bit of a detour this week. All over the three or four days, AI stocks were down across the board because of this MIT study that went viral, as well as Sam Altman's comments about a bubble and zuck instituting a hiring freeze in AI after going on a complete blitzkrieg. So let's get into it. Act one Monday, Fortune dug up a generative AI study that MIT published last week or last month. I should say. In that study, MIT found that 95% of Gen A pilots are failing to make it to production because of employee resistance, poor quality output. And the most interesting problem seems to be resource misallocation. According to the study, 70% of Gen AI budgets are going towards things like building sales and marketing tools which have poor roi. The highest ROI was found in back office optimization, like automating tasks that cut back spends, you know, on various departments. Basically these pilots aren't working chamath is what this study found. They evaluated 300 AI implementations and interviewed 150 leaders across 52 companies. You've been grinding it out with your own software company now called 8090. Does this align with what you're seeing on the field? Jamal?

[D]

I think what I would tell you is that I think the first wave was just a lot of boards who read the words AI somewhere in an article and then went to a board meeting and turned to the CEO and said what's your AI strategy? And then the CEO turns around and sends that down into their org and it eventually hits the CTO's desk. And I think the first wave is mostly people just spending money because they had large existing budgets and so they were like let's just go and try a bunch of different things. And I think now we're going through the sorting function of realizing that there's a big difference between probabilistic software and deterministic software. That's probably the biggest reason why you're seeing so many failure modes in sales and marketing. It's very hard to codify sales and marketing into a set of heuristics that never change. But back office processes, why they're so good and a great target for AI is ultimately you have so many people that have been hired to deal with edge cases, right? I think like that's what people do in most companies is they're in charge of a process and they're, they're dealing with edge cases. And I think that you can get extremely high rates of accuracy if you implement AI correctly in back office tasks. I think the real question is like what happens to all of this revenue that has been generated? You're seeing companies generating 50, $100 million of ARR in a matter of months and then raising huge rounds. I think what we haven't seen is whether there'll be any sort of either local churn or dollar churn as new companies come in with even cheaper solutions. The foundational models move up the stack and just absorb capability or things just don't work and they get abandoned. All of that churn happened in social. I remember when I was in the middle of helping build Facebook, we went through that whole cycle, there was seven or eight thousand social companies and within six years there was five of us left. It happened in SaaS. When I was investing in SaaS, there's a couple of very early and important successes like Yammer, which SAC started, which I was very lucky to be an investor of. But then it took many years for the handful of winners to get really sorted out. And I suspect we're about to go through that same cycle in AI. So I think that article basically paints a very accurate picture. There's been a lot of trialing and experimentation. We now need to go through a sorting and a cleansing and then we'll rebuild from first principles around the not.

[A]

Surprising, not surprising to our sultan of sas, David Sachs, because the sales and marketing departments, they, they're very promiscuous when it comes to new tools, getting a great lead, closing a sale, you can directly connect it. So we always see them test stuff out. Doesn't surprise me that we'd see sales and marketing go after this first. But what do you think about the brittleness of this revenue, the churn Sachs? Are we going to see a lot of these companies rocket up to 100 and come back down to 50? Is this something you're seeing or your firm, which I don't know, your status at the firm? Maybe you could tell us how that's working out in terms of your intelligence there. But what is CRAFT seeing on the field there?

[B]

I think we're seeing a lot of interesting AI applications being developed, but it's still very early days. And I think that over the past week or so there was a correction in sentiment towards AI, but I think it was a healthy correction. I don't think this was the beginning of a bust cycle or something like that. I still think that we're in a boom. I still think we're in an investment super cycle. But I think there was a healthy dose of skepticism applied to some of the more fantastical claims that have been made about AI. And I think this is why you saw there was roughly, what, a 10% correction in public AI stocks, and there was that MIT report that said that 95% of projects at companies are not making it to production yet and so forth and so on. So I feel like we're getting in the weeds a little bit here. And what we should be talking about is just sort of where we are in this AI super cycle.

[A]

And where do you perceive us at? We're in the experimentation phase, we're in the pilot phase. But this issue around probabilistic versus deterministic makes it hard to trust the software. Is that what you think the key issue is?

[B]

Well, let me tell you why I think that this correction is actually healthy, is that after ChatGPT launch at the end of 2022 and then throughout 2023, the dominant narrative in AI is that AGI was just two to three years away. And everyone kind of had their own definition of AGI was. But it was kind of this idea of smarter than human superintelligence and kind of magic AI. AI would be able to do everything. And as a result of that, you kind of had both utopian and dystopian narratives really proliferated. And so you started getting this job loss narrative that within a few years 50% of knowledge workers would be out of jobs. You got this rapid takeoff narrative that basically the leading AI models would be able to turn their intelligence towards improving themselves, towards recursive self improvement. And therefore within a couple of years, the leading models would basically achieve superintelligence and leave everyone else in the dust and then capture all the value of humanity. And then based on that narrative, which again, it was the same underlying narrative that fueled both utopian and dystopian or doomer takes on AI, you got, I think, a huge backlash which has already been forming, where you have a thousand bills running through state legislatures right now and you have all this AI safety legislation. You got bills like in California, the SBA 1047, which would have applied a tremendous amount of new regulation to AI. So you saw this policy backlash happen as well. And it was all based on these fantastical and kind of magic views of what AI was going to do in just the next two to three years. And I think that the reason why this recent skepticism is healthy is because I think it's rebutting all of that and it's showing that AI is a powerful tool. I mean, I definitely think it's a new and important form of computing and it is going to unlock tremendous value in the economy, but it's going to take us a while to get there. I mean, you can't just tell the AI, be a sales rep, be a customer service rep, and kind of throw it over the wall and expect that it's going to replace a human. It takes a lot of prompting and iteration and validation to make the AI work, to make it generate business value. And if we were on a path towards rapid takeoff, then what you would see is that the leading AI models would be increasing the distance between like the top one or two models would be increasing the distance between the rest of the models. And instead what we're seeing is a clustering of model performance around the same performance benchmark.

[A]

It's incremental, right? They're incrementally increasing.

[B]

The progress seems to be a little bit more incremental. It's more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And I think this really crystallized around the launch of ChatGPT5, where a lot of people were expecting GPT5 to be this huge breakthrough. Sam Altman was sort of teasing this concept by posting photos of the Death Star. The idea that this model was going to blow everybody else away and the reviews ended up being very mixed. And then we saw that on the performance evaluations. It's not that the model didn't represent progress, it just fell short of these lofty expectations that have been created.

[A]

So Freeberg, let me get you in on this.

[B]

Just sorry, I've been kind of long winded here, but let me just sum this up which is, please, I think that what people can now see is that we're not in a loop of recursive self improvement. We're seeing that there are a handful of great model companies, but the development of this technology is going to be a more normal technology race. It's not like the leading players just all of a sudden get achieve AGI just very quickly. And as a result of that, I think because it is a more normal technology race, I think we can apply a more normal logic to it from both an investment and a policy standpoint. And I think that a lot of the narratives that were hyped up about imminent doom or imminent utopia, depending on what side you were on, were just massively overhyped. And this is why I think it's just a very healthy thing.

[D]

By the way, the other concerning thing is it's concerning when models successively don't get meaningfully better, especially because there's a tendency for incremental models to get overfit to benchmarks. That's another concerning thing that I think people were like scratching their heads about. And if you look at the last big set of model updates, X of grok, they didn't really meaningfully improve their separation from the last generation model on the big benchmarks that matter. And that's also very concerning because they tend to overfit to begin with.

[B]

Yeah, and I would just say that another just piece of evidence here is that the model companies are still leapfrogging each other to some degree with their latest versions. And again, that should not be possible if one model achieved rapid takeoff. The other thing you're seeing is that it's not like one model is dominating all the other models. You're seeing that models are developing areas of competitive advantage. They're becoming increasingly specialized, they have different personalities. If ChatGPT has been accused of being sycophantish, GROK is maybe more based. I mean they have different modes that they excel at. Google I think has gotten really good at video, for example. Anthropic is really good at coding. The specialization really belies this idea of one model becoming all knowing and all powerful. We're seeing a proliferation now of specialization.

[A]

Let me try to get Freeberg in here. Altman appeared to compare the AI craze to the dot com bubble according to cnbc. Here's the quote. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes. And then quote from Sam Altman, another quote. I think we totally screwed up some things with the rollout of GPT5. So it's kind of admitting that. Freeberg, what does this mean in terms of the massive investment? OpenAI was talking about $500 billion. So is this, do you think if you were to game what Sam is saying here? Maybe he wants it to cool off. Maybe these investments are too large. Given the problem and the progress. What's the game on the field here, Freeberg, in terms of the massive investment that people are claiming this is going to require if we're not seeing the results in corporations, the big capex investment.

[C]

Because most of the capital that's been raised has been raised by the model companies and most of it's been deployed into chips.

[A]

Right.

[C]

In data centers.

[A]

Right. So does that make sense right now or do we, does that need to cool off as well while these companies prove, hey, we can get some things done in corporate America?

[C]

So I think one of the key things that's being understood so you know, the Internet was being connected, there was connectivity and fiber being deployed in a rate that exceeded the economic value creation by the end users on the Internet during the dot com boom. And so as a result, the dot com boom became a bubble that burst. But the ultimate promise of the Internet was realized many orders of magnitude greater than I think most folks declared and proclaimed at the time. It was just delayed by A few years. I think it's likely to be the same here. Whether this particular capex cycle is going to have that ROIC or not, I think is a bit tbd, but I think there's kind of three big trends underway that are worth noting. The first is that there's a realization now that you need to pair humans and human engineering with the generative tools that these generative AI systems are providing. So you can get a bunch of code written, but you still need to debug the code, you still need to get it into production, you still need to get it to integrate. So this kind of pairing of humans with AI is something that's being learned. What's the right model? It's not that you just turn on generative AI and it runs your business for you. It's like, where does it fit in the org? Who are the people that run it, how do they use it, et cetera. Then similar to that, I think we're seeing a lot of partner models being developed. Rather than have a SORA or a video model, just generate a movie, it turns out that you can use the generative AI to generate the object and then use an existing rendering engine like Unity to actually make the video. So those sorts of pairing models where you use what's being called a deterministic system or an existing piece of software that integrates with generative AI can accelerate outcomes. So filmmakers can now make AI movies by coupling the AI generative tools with an existing off the shelf kind of rendering system. And that works a lot better than just telling the AI make a bunch of video where then all the people look different. You can't control the objects, you can't change the camera angle, you can't change the framing, the color, the lighting, all the features that you may want to otherwise control. So layering AI on top of the existing system seems to be the right answer. And I think we're seeing that not just in filmmaking or digital content creation, but in other areas as well, where the AI provides almost like a substrate that can sit on top of existing tools and just be like a marionette and do a better job. I think the third key thing that we're seeing that's causing a bit of the observed hiccup is this movement to slms. And you guys have seen a bunch of these papers from Nvidia and others that have shown performance improvements by actually moving away from one large model that does it all to much smaller specialized models that work in a specific task and a specific application, or that work together as a network of models. And my personal belief on this is actually that these models are going to move towards SLMs that we don't understand how and why they work the way they do in a network fashion. Because today we're designing the SLMs in a deterministic way. We're saying this is an SLM that does X, Y or Z. But if the models eventually get developed by other models, those SLMs will become really not well understood, but they'll work in a network. The reason that's important is because this re architecturing of these systems dramatically reduces the energy cost and the dollar cost per token generated. And so it brings down the cost and the runtime of these systems. So to your point, jcal, the capex investment suddenly gets much higher ROIC rather than the challenged ROIC that it's dealing with today because the systems are so energy and cost inefficient today. So if the architectural redesigns work, then these systems become much more efficient, 10x100x more efficient. And I actually think at that point token production will go way up, not way down. So those are three big trends that I see kind of underway right now that might be architecting the overall kind of ecosystem and, and probably causing some of the observed hiccups. Jcal, what do you think? Is it like, do you think there's a big slowdown underway? I mean, yeah, I mean it's, this.

[A]

Is following exactly the technological curve that we see. Nick, you can pull it up here where we've seen this with smartphones and the Internet itself, but the trough of disillusionment is probably where we're living right now because there were so many expectations. You know, this innovation comes out, people get really excited, massive amounts of money is invested, and then people wonder, hey, was this a good investment or not? And then it just takes incremental improvement over time. We saw this with Uber as an example where people were like, oh, it'll never be profitable, never be profitable, profitable. Doordash will never work. And then they just added a couple of bucks and it scaled globally. The network effects kicked in. We're going to see it again with self driving. Self driving is actually probably just getting through the peak of inflated expectations where people are starting to realize, oh, these edge cases are pretty serious. You probably don't want these things going too fast. You're going to need to be very thoughtful about putting them on roads. And that leads to a really interesting discussion. Sachs, we should have at some point on this program about should that be federal or Local should the local states get to decide self driving rules on their roads or should the federal government come in and make a blanket one? But looking specifically at the sales one, we're seeing on the field that maybe the salespeople aren't being replaced by AI, but the SDRs are becoming 10 times, like literally 10 times more effective at finding the next lead at organizing leads and targets. So it's definitely happening, but it's incremental inside these organizations and it's just going to take specialization and people have to actually embrace the tools. That's probably the biggest thing is there's a lot of resistance to these tools already. And once you get people actually embracing them, they start to work. But if people aren't going to embrace them and there's some resistance, it's kind of like what we saw with the Internet. Yeah.

[D]

Here's a big question that I have. You know how at some point, like you get so invested in a way of doing things that when things change, it's almost too hard to change the way your company orients. And you see it in every single phase of these big innovation cycles. The question is, is there a point at which these foundational model companies have invested too much money in LLMs where so many of their employees only understand that and all of a sudden there are completely different ways of building these models. State space is one example. But then, you know, some new entrant decides to build a completely different kind of representation, they may also then build custom silicon for it. All of those things have yet to happen. And the reason is we're really only a few years into what should be a multi decade innovation cycle. So those are like some really important questions because then you have this problem of the sunk cost fallacy of well, we spent all this money on this LLM based approach and now all of a sudden there's this thing that comes around the corner. That's the thing that I'm really curious about and waiting for is will there be these small teams? And it may take advantage of what Friedberg said, uses an LLM as a jumping off point, but then builds an entirely different approach. He's able to generate entirely different and cheap silicon. That hasn't happened yet. And the reason it hasn't happened is not because it doesn't make sense, but it's because we're so early into it.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

And then what do these big guys do? The big guys have spent tens of billions of dollars.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

On all kinds of stuff. Human capital, opex, Capex.

[A]

It's going to be.

[D]

It's going to be really interesting.

[A]

Well, the study actually addresses this purchasing of AI tools from specialized vendors. Those succeeded two out of three times. So the statistics in that early study seem to indicate you're right about that. Chamath is if you're doing something very specific and we've got a couple of companies doing very specific things like tax. GPT is one of our companies we incubated and they're only going after, you know, tax and CPAs and being a co pilot for them. Those things seem to be succeeding faster than going to a general model and asking tax questions to it.

[D]

There's also all this other stuff that people never talk about that are very practical realities of building a so for example, we've been selling into the enterprise at 80, 90 we'll do this year. This is our first full year of business. We'll do about 40 million of bookings.

[A]

In the first year.

[D]

Yeah, that's crazy. And it's all back office type stuff. But our first customer where we delivered enormous gains, we were fired. And the reason we were fired was not because the technology wasn't working, but it's because as it goes lower and lower from the board and the CEO into the bowels of the organization.

[C]

You.

[D]

Actually run into huge pushback. And I think that there's going to be that cycle that we have to deal with as well, which is in all of these AI businesses. There's all kinds of stuff that scare people and there are many people in decision making roles at many of these companies that will have to sort out where's their comfort level. And it was like one of these things where I was like, well what are we supposed to do? We escalated and blah blah blah and it got resolved. But my point is that I think is a cycle that has yet to play itself out in all of the Fortune 2000 Global 2000. I would not expect that the AI boogeyman that has been created doesn't have some negative ramifications over the next couple of years as well as this stuff.

[A]

Gets sorted out, the last piece is the talent war. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Meta was looking at downsizing its AI division as part of a larger restructuring. Wall Street Journal then reported Meta has a hiring freeze across the AI divisions, which is just crazy because just eight weeks ago Zuck went crazy. He was trying to buy Ilya's super intelligence startup. You remember Ilya declined, says Zuck Poach. Daniel Gross Meta Aqua hired the Scale AI team and then they agreed to invest 14 billion in that Sam Altman claimed Zuck was making $100 million offers regularly for OpenAI talent. I'm curious, you know, what you think of that? Sachs is. The talent war seemed to go insane for a couple of months and now is pausing. What's your take on all this? I don't know. Uncertainty, boom, bust cycle in such a compressed period of time or is this just.

[B]

I mean you are seeing founders turning down multibillion dollar acquisition offers for startups that hadn't even released a product yet. As if those types of offers grow on trees and they don't. I mean these types of $100 million job offers, they don't come along very often. I mean you have to be at kind of the sweet spot of a boom cycle and you need a huge company with tons of money that feels like it's strategically vulnerable and is at risk of being left behind. And if you get a confluence of those factors, then you can get kind of crazy offers like that. But they don't come along very often. I think that what Meta is doing is probably digesting a little bit. They've now made a bunch of talent acquisitions, they've done some aqua hires at very expensive aqua hires and they're probably just consolidating a little bit. Like I said, I don't think this is the best part of the cycle. I don't think that a bubble has popped or anything like that. I actually think that we're still probably early to the middle of this investment super cycle and it's just a healthy correction in sentiment here that people are realizing it's going to be a little bit harder and take more work than just oh, the AI is going to figure out how to improve itself and we get to super intelligence. That was always a little bit of a fantasy.

[A]

Mira should have taken the billion dollar offer from Zach, or Ilya should have taken the 30 billion Sachs. I mean these things never happen.

[B]

And as you're saying, I guess it depends how much they have in the bank account. If they're already billionaires from whatever they did before then maybe it doesn't matter. But if you were just starting out, for example, and didn't have any money in the bank, that's a pretty hard thing to turn down. I mean, realistically, yeah, they probably sold.

[D]

A bunch of OpenAI equity at 300 and 500 billion.

[B]

They're both OpenAI co founders.

[D]

They seem like they're free rolling, so they have no incentive to sell.

[B]

Yeah, which is fine. It's just that there's a lot of people who've never been through a bust cycle before and if they think that this is the normal state of the world, they're going to be sorely mistaken.

[D]

By the way, you're right, Sachs, it's hard to build, as you know, because you did it. A billion dollar company that then exits for more than a billion dollars.

[B]

It is hard, right, where you justify that valuation based on fundamentals. So right now we're in a part of the cycle where you can justify that valuation based on its strategic value to a multi trillion dollar market cap company. But that only lasts while those companies are in the market for strategic acceleration.

[A]

Yeah, if they're behind, if they're stuck.

[B]

Then you have to make your company work on its own as an actual business. And to get to a $30 billion valuation based on fundamentals, that is extraordinarily difficult. I mean that implies, you know, multiple billions of revenue. Actual revenue.

[A]

Somebody want to underwrite 500 billion for OpenAI common shares. Anybody think that that is a good trade?

[D]

I'll make the bull case. I'll make the bull case.

[A]

Good idea. Please. Yeah.

[D]

I think the simplest way to make the bull case is if you look at the CAGR on their mouse and the conversion from mouse to daos. You essentially take a small minor percentage of the Facebook or Google terminal ARPU and apply it to some number of mao daos three or four years from now. So if I had to guess, if you take 4 or 500 million Mao Dao growing at I'm guessing that's just.

[A]

Because 50%, 100 million weekly active users. Right.

[D]

7:50. Okay, so then, so then I would probably put that at like 500 DAO to be conservative. It's probably doubling every two years. So 500 goes to a billion, billion goes to 2 in four years and at 2 billion Dow they generate a tenth of Facebook's revenue just to be very conservative. And you probably get to a trillion five valuation.

[A]

There's Right. You could triple up on that bet.

[B]

Yeah, I mean look, OpenAI has actual revenue. I mean they have actual revenue because they have subscriptions and they appear to have the dominant position in the consumer space. And it is a replacement for a lot of people for search, which is the most lucrative franchise on the Internet. And that's just one of their applications. So I actually think that you can make that case pretty comfortably. But can we go back to a point you were making before JCAL about in the survey that the attempts to just apply some sort of generalized AI model didn't work very well. Like 95% of the time it didn't succeed in these large enterprises. But if they used a more specific vertical application or vertical model or an SLM approach, which is more a smaller specialized model, then it showed much greater success. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me, is that in order to drive business value, there's a lot of what I would call last mile problems. Right. Like LLMs need context. And so you have to first of all connect to all of your enterprise data sources and you have to prompt them in a very detailed way in order to get to a good answer. And then you have to validate that answer to make sure it's not a hallucination. And then you need to iterate on it. And so this idea that you're just going to have one superintelligence that just figures all this stuff out, it's just not the way it's playing out in the real world. You're seeing again, a lot of very specific business problems that have to be solved. But I think that this is a great thing ultimately for the ecosystem because it implies that you're going to get lots of vertical applications and lots of specialized models that capture value in lots of different markets. And that's actually the way that we're going to drive this throughout the economy, as opposed to it just being one foundation model, eating all the value. So I think this is a very healthy thing for the ecosystem.

[A]

Yeah, it makes total sense that the vertical systems would feel more deterministic, Sachs, because they have a tighter problem set, a tighter data set to actually come to an answer. Whereas the probabilistic just asking an LLM to come up with a business plan for you, it just feels like it could be 80% correct, 90% correct, as opposed to 99% correct, which the vertical ones are actually getting very good at, getting the correct answer. Okay, let's talk a little bit.

[B]

That last 10% is fundamental and that's where you get all the last mile problems. And you have to understand the industry in order to solve the problems of how you kind of go from, let's say 90% accuracy or effectiveness to 99, which is where the business value is.

[A]

Well, and you use last mile sacks. I think it's quite appropriate if you look at self driving, which is the tip of the spear, I think in this argument, Waymo has a bit more deterministic model. They don't have safety drivers. Robo Taxi has safety drivers for a good reason. They're using a probabilistic model and they're getting an intervention every X hundreds of miles, let's say, which means if you were to use it daily, you're going to have an intervention, I don't know, every week or two. And obviously they'll iterate and they'll get that down to the same level as Waymo. But on what timetable, Friedberg, on what timetable do you see a probabilistic model like Elon is pursuing with his robotaxi program versus the more, you know, deterministic one? When do you think those crossover? Do you have any insight as a scientist or any guess?

[C]

I don't know.

[A]

Yeah, that is the $10 trillion question is when will that problem be solved? All right, let's talk a little politics here. According to Polymarket, Gavin Newsom is the early favorite in the 2028 Democratic presidential race. So who gets the nomination? So here's some background. Newsom is surging in a couple of polls this week. Here's one from Politico that asked California Democrats and left leaning independents who their preferred candidate would be in 2028. Newsom came in first with 25% of the vote. Then Kamala, your favorite sax and Pete Buttigieg aoc, your favorite chamath there. Tim Waltz, another one of Sachs's favorite. And the odds have jumped about 9 percentage points on polymarket. Here's your poly market Newsom at 28, AOC at 14, and a bunch of people you know in the single digits that you could probably guess. So your thoughts on the early information here. Does this, is any of this even valid, Sachs in your mind, or is it just too much time between now and then?

[B]

Well, I think it's valid in the sense that you're seeing Democrats react positively to what Newsom is doing. And what Newsom is doing is mirroring Trump's style in an attempt to again give Democrats what they want, which is they want a Trump of their own. And despite Democrats feigning objections to Trump's style, this is really what they want, is they want someone who they perceive to be a fighter. That said, I think there are two problems with presumptively crowning Gavin as the nominee three years in advance. One is that what Newsom is doing here is completely performative. Everyone can see that he's acting and he's aping Trump's style or what he thinks is Trump's style, whereas Trump is completely authentic. Trump is always Trump and everyone understands that. And there's something very authentic and likable about that. Whereas I think that Gavin comes across as being synthetic or plastic and you don't really have a sense of who the real person is. And I think trying to pretend to be the left version of Trump only I think reinforces that problem that he already had. So one is authenticity, the other is that I think that Democrats make a huge mistake if they think that Trump's popularity is based on his style. I mean, it's true that Trump has a trillion dollar personality and that is very helpful in politics. But ultimately I think the reason why Trump has done so well for a decade is because he's been on the right side of a bunch of core issues in American politics that other people just weren't focused on or weren't talking about.

[A]

Safety in cities seems to be one that heads up versus Gavin Newsom will become one of the attack vectors or one of the grand debates. You have Freedberg, you have California's descent into madness in the major cities and then obviously Trump is cleaning up DC from a very first principled basis like hey, you can't camp here period, full stop. So what do you think the chances are here, Friedberg, that this new strategy going on the podcast, having a podcast, being spicy on social media is going to work for Gavin or you and Sachs's camp? It's a bit performative and maybe not fake. And by the way, Gavin Newsom can't wait to have you on the pod. Go ahead, Freeburg.

[C]

I would say that the current polling is a reflection of the non Trump aligned market response to Trump. And so it will change certainly over time as the results of the administration's actions bear out, etc. One way to think about this or forecast this is what is the reaction going to be? Who this administration? I think there's a, as I've talked about many, many times, a very high probability that someone who's a little bit more socialist aligned is going to end up being kind of thrust forward here. And I think AOC fits the bill there. So then I think the question is what's the Republican response going to be to the choice they may have in trying to prop up or frame up one of those two candidates? And I think frankly there may be some group that would say we would rather be up against the socialists because they're going to look like idiots and we're going to win and so there's going to be weirdly support for a socialist like candidate. The other side is the honest moderate question, which is who would you rather have as president, a socialist or Gavin Newsom? And I Do think a lot of moderates would say, if I had to pick between those two, excluding the Republican candidate, I would want to pick the moderate. I would want to pick Gavin Chamath.

[A]

What issue will determine the midterms and then the 2028 election? Look at your crystal ball there, Chamath, and tell us what you see in those two elections. Yeah, midterms might be easier to think about. Right.

[D]

I think the midterms are going to be about the economy, but the economy is going to be a window into a lot of these other issues. The safety security issue, the immigration issue, the tariff issue, rates. I think rates are going to be an enormous swing factor here. I think Powell is really holding on white knuckled to a position that probably doesn't underlie the data. So I think in the short term, it's just going to be more of an economic up or down vote for the Trump administration. Many things I think are positive and in their control, but there are a few things that are not in their control in 2028. I don't know. The one thing I would say about the candidacy though is like, I don't know if you guys remember, but when the Republican primary process started, the person at the top of the polls at the time was Ron DeSantis. And I said, you do not want to be ahead early. These people never win. They never win.

[A]

They take all the arrows and peak too early.

[D]

No, it's not even that. It's just like they never win. So if I had to apply that rubric here, what I would say is the practical choice that the Democratic voters will have is to actually ask whether they want a replay of California on an American 50 state scale. And if you look at it through that lens, I think Gavin Newsom is going to have a very difficult path because of what has transpired over his tenure as the governor. And he's going to have to explain away a lot. So I think that in the absence of real choices, I think that he's the clear winner. What is that phrase? In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king sort of a thing. I think when you actually go into the election cycle, starting after 26, in 27, honestly, it's going to be up in the air. What I will tell you is that the way that the Electoral College is set up and the voting dynamics for the presidency is set up, a socialist cannot win. But the way that the Democratic primaries are set up, a socialist can absolutely win. So this is the sort of Saxon's point which is I think for the Republican side, the best outcome is a very radical agenda that isn't really supported by substantive facts and is more supported by vibes. This is what I feel. I just feel it should be right. And I think that those things may win a primary but will just get destroyed in a federal election. What about you, the world's greatest moderate? What do you think?

[A]

Pretty clear that the socialist movement is happening and that is going to inspire a lot of young people to come out like they did in New York from Mondami. And I think you have to think about what the platform is. I agree the economy will determine the midterms, but I would look ahead at the core issues we've discussed here many times. Freeberg and if I was advising the Democrats, I would smash the Republicans where they don't speak up about important issues to the American voter and where young people feel they are being ignored. So what would I say if I was them, if I was running their platform in 2028? I would go with real wages that are stagnant. And Trump doesn't talk about that. In fact, he's cutting taxes on the rich. They gotta credible attack vector right there that nobody's talking about the minimum wage and Trump doesn't care. JD doesn't care about you or the minimum wage or your wages. I would go after education being unaffordable, and again, Trump and JD don't talk about that. Then I would go after housing. Republicans don't talk about that. They don't talk about housing. And then I would go right at the immigrant issue and I'd say, listen, America's for immigration. This country was built off of immigrants. And JD And Trump want to pull up the ladder behind everybody and not allow other people to immigrate to this country after they benefited from it. That's the perfect attack vector for beating the Republicans in 2028. Housing, wages, education and healthcare, these are things you'd never hear Trump talk about. You never hear J.D. talking about these. And I think that that's the way to. If they want to beat.

[D]

They talk about them all the time.

[A]

It's way down the bottom of the list. No, they, they don't. When's the last time What's. Okay, so tell me, Jamath, what is the proposal?

[B]

Oil wages went up significantly in Trump's first term, and then they started stagnating again under Biden. And that's the whole purpose of his trade policy is to encourage reshoring of manufacturing in the United States.

[D]

He passed the huge tax Bill that locked in all these gains, no tax on tips. So you can debate the impact to the broad population, but there are enough examples where actual take home wages are higher than what they would be in a counterfactual.

[B]

Yeah, and by the way, Gavin Newsom has a super majority in the California legislature. He can run the state however he wants. He also has a very compliant court that will rubber stamp his decisions. Completely different than Trump who has a very narrow majority. And he has a court that basically tries to stop everything he does. So Gavin Newsom can run the state. He could be operating this state for the benefit of its citizens instead of holding all these performative press conferences and doing podcasts and tweeting all day. So where is the program that you're talking about? It doesn't exist.

[A]

It's a fine criticism, but if the. I'm talking about the Democrats as a group. If the Democrats came out and just said, we're gonna add a dollar to the federal minimum wage every year for the eight years we're in office, that would fly with the American public. They said we're gonna.

[C]

That's not a strategy.

[A]

You can make that argument. I'm just telling you what the winning argument is. The winning argument is.

[D]

Well, no, you're saying whatever it takes to get elected, but giving stuff away is not how adults make hard decisions.

[A]

You mean like giving people no tax on their overtime and no tax on their tips? Those kind of giveaways?

[B]

Jamal, there was a tax plan that's helping middle class and working class.

[A]

I don't disagree. But to the point of giving away free stuff doesn't work. It actually does. It does get people out to vote. People were very motivated when they heard those proposals by Trump. I'm saying they should just take that proposal and 10x it's. That's a way to win. I'm not saying it makes sense. I'm not saying I'm endorsing it. I'm just giving you the playbook.

[B]

Okay, well, what I would do to fight your playbook of empty promises is I would actually talk about the record of the candidate.

[D]

Exactly.

[B]

And I think we're talking about a state like California, which is thoroughly blue and has been run by Democrats now for a long time. And Gavin probably will be the nominee because I do think that his performative antics are working with the base. I mean, they want an anti Trump, but the way to attack this is to talk about the record here. So let's just go through some of the numbers. So as we all know, we pay the highest taxes in the country for the worst public services. Gavin's spending turned a $75 billion surplus into a $20 billion deficit in just a couple of years. And somehow none of that money went to fill the reservoirs or fire hydrants. And so we had entire neighborhoods burned down as a result. And they can't get permits to rebuild. California has the fourth largest economy in the world, so that's good. But we have the highest rates of poverty, homelessness, inequality, illiteracy, and wage stagnation. So, yes, wage stagnation, JCal is the highest in the country and we have the third highest unemployment among the 50 states. We're second only to Hawaii in housing costs. So you want to talk about making promises to lower housing costs, but if you look at blue states like California, they're among the worst. We're the worst in energy costs, and we have the highest rate of both retail crime and frivolous lawsuits. And that's why businesses are moving out of the state. You may have seen that Bed Bath and Beyond said that even as they're opening 300 more physical stores, they're not going to return to California. And this just got the CEO mocked by Newsom because he never actually takes any of the criticism to heart. He just sort of deflects it. So until the Democrats, I think, confront why they really lost, okay, and it's not just because of the style of Trump, they want to just attribute it to Trump's style, but the reality is it's because of the policies, popular policies, and it's about the record. And until they're willing to confront those things and change their policies, then I think they're going to continue losing.

[D]

I put into GROK the following question, and the reason I asked the question this way is I think that the three, three most credible candidates that have a record to run on on the Democratic side are Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer and Wes Moore. So I asked GROK rank Michigan, California and Maryland. So three Democratic states run by three very popular, well known Democratic governors on three metrics, quality of life, cost of living, and crime, and summarize that into a ranked overall list.

[A]

Right?

[D]

So pretty standard, plain vanilla question. And at the end, I can publish this later if you want, but at the end, the final overall rankings were. Maryland, first excels in quality of life and has the lowest estimated crime rates with a moderately high but manageable cost of living. Michigan, most affordable with decent quality of life and moderate crime, making it a balanced choice. California, high quality of life in terms of opportunities and lifestyle, but severely hampered by high costs and elevated crime rates. And there's all kinds of detail, but I was just giving you the final summary. So I think that when you get into a Democratic primary, those are three people that will run, and I think Democratic voters will have to choose. What record do I want to put up to vote for the broad voting American public? Is it California's, is it Maryland's, or is it Michigan's? And if you just do a quick AI driven analysis, Wes Moore, then Gretchen Whitmer, then Gavin Newsom, just on the facts.

[A]

Yeah, makes sense. Freeberg, your thoughts on the platform I put out there or anything else with this 2028 discussion as we wrap up?

[C]

No, I think the socialists are going to continue to grow their momentum and, you know, it'll be fun, see what happens.

[A]

Okay, here we go. So Trump had a busy week. He met with Putin, then Zelensky and some of the leaders in Europe. Sachs, this is your time to shine. We didn't talk about this yet because it happened after we taped. But last Friday, Trump met with Putin in Alaska. A lot of hand wringing around that lasted about three hours. No ceasefire was reached. That was the stated goal of it. And on Monday, Trump.

[B]

That's not the state of the goal.

[A]

Okay. I'm just going by what Trump said when he was on his way there, that he wanted a ceasefire. And then on Monday, Trump met with Zelenskyy and a bunch of European leaders at the White House, first in person meeting since that argument, you remember, back in the overall office in February and included the EU President, NATO Secretary General, Chancellor of Germany, Italy and UK showed up as well. Your thoughts on where we're at with the Ukraine and if we're going to get a ceasefire, a peace negotiation or a peace settlement, or if the United States is just going to walk away? Because it seems like Trump is a little perturbed by the progress here. And he has said maybe it's just up to them to figure it out and he'll be done with the whole thing. Your thoughts, Sachs?

[B]

Well, I think that the Alaska summit was major progress. I think that first of all, the President deserves enormous credit for reestablishing diplomacy and communication with the Russians. There literally hasn't been a meeting between the US President and the Russian President since 2021 while this war is going on and while the war has continued to escalate. I guess the Biden administration's policy was just to ignore the Russians and roll their dice and hope that the war didn't escalate out of control. In any event, I think Trump deserves a lot of credit for again, reestablishing that diplomatic connection and trying to use diplomacy to end the war. And it was shocking to see how much Democrats in the media were openly rooting for him to fail in these efforts to end this war. And effectively they're rooting for hundreds of thousands of more people to die or get maimed.

[A]

They were pretty hysterical right on the news. It was pretty crazy.

[B]

Yeah. And by the way, they claim that they care about the Ukrainian people, but the Ukrainian people, by large majorities, now want this war to end and they're willing to make meaningful concessions to do it. So there was a poll by Gallup, which, Nick, maybe you can throw this on the screen where a year or two ago, something like 70% of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting the war. Now that number is down to 24%. Again, the vast majority are looking to achieve a peace. And I think that President Trump and President Putin made some important progress in terms of getting to an eventual peace deal. And I think there are a few. Number one was the recognition that we should try to get to a comprehensive peace deal, not a ceasefire. A ceasefire is temporary, and the Russians have already said they wouldn't do it because they understand from their point of view that this would just give the Ukrainians time to regroup and rearm and try to reset, but it wouldn't end the war. And the truth of the matter is that when you're fighting a war and losing, you don't get to call a timeout. So the Russians have been rejecting this idea of a ceasefire for months. And I think that it was wise, if our ultimate goal is to get to a deal, to recognize that the comprehensive peace deal is what we want to get to. So that's point number one. Point number two is that President Trump acknowledged that Ukraine would not be joining NATO, which was the key source of the friction. And it's the thing that ultimately led to this war. So I think that definitively taking NATO off the table, I think was a very important precondition to getting to an eventual peace. And then I think the third thing was that the parties, both the Russians and the Americans, agreed that there would have to be territorial concessions of some kind. And we don't know all the details yet. There was some conversation about land swaps, but the point of the matter is that we're not going back to the pre war status quo ante. The Russians have taken the big chunk of territory. The Ukrainians have not been able to get it back. People are trying to blame Trump for this somehow, but the real cause of this is the failure of the counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. Remember, we gave the Ukrainians something like $100 billion worth of weapons to retake that territory. And it was an abysmal failure. They didn't even make it past the first Surovikin line. That is a real cause of why the Ukrainians are gonna lose territory in this war is they're simply not able to retake it. And I think there was a general recognition coming out of that Alaska summit that there would have to be territorial concessions. And I think in these three pillars, I think you have the basis for a comprehensive peace deal, which is, again, number one, we're going for a peace deal, not a ceasefire. Number two, no NATO. And number three, we have to recognize the realities on the ground. Now, I think the big question mark, I think we could get to a peace deal pretty quickly if Zelensky and the Europeans were willing to acknowledge these three points. But so far, they have not been willing to acknowledge those three points. And I think this is one of the things that if you're listening to the remarks the following Monday, when the Europeans came to the White House, there was no recognition. They were still clamoring for a ceasefire, again, which the Russians had rejected, as opposed to a comprehensive peace. They were still clamoring for NATO, and they were still rejecting the idea of any territorial concessions, including even Crimea, which was lost over a decade ago. So I think that the issue we have right now is that Zelensky and the Ukrainian government, not the people, but the Ukrainian elite and some of these European countries that are backing him, are not willing to make the compromises necessary to achieve a peace deal. And as President Trump has said, at the end of the day, you need the Russians and the Ukrainians to agree. So I think that President Trump deserves enormous credit here for re establishing diplomacy, for making substantial progress towards a comprehensive peace deal. But at the end of the day, unless Zelenskyy starts being willing to make compromises, I don't know how you're gonna get to that deal.

[A]

Yeah. Friedberg. Dave, any thoughts on this negotiation chamath? Anything?

[D]

Well, I was pretty curious about the historical pattern of this, so I just went back and here's what I learned. What's interesting to note is that since 1945, so not assuming conflicts in Africa, because they are not really quite part of the Western political global order per se, it's Important to ask the question, like, how have other territorial disputes panned out? So there are disputes that end in stalemates, and when you end up in a stalemate, you basically arrange a DMZ demilitarized zone type arrangement. So there's one in Korea, right, 1953 to now. There's one in Cyprus, 1974 to right now. And there's one in Kashmir, 1947 to today. And then there's this kind of thing in between Israel and Lebanon. And then second, there are disputes where there's some action taken by one country to take something by force. But then there's no consensus internationally as to who owns the territory. So Crimea, As Sachs mentioned, 2014 to present, and then Israel and East Jerusalem. Sorry. So I think the point is that unless President Trump figures out a way to do something that's frankly, truly unprecedented, the historical pattern is that it's been nearly impossible for even the most powerful and influential person in the world to frankly draw deals in these kinds of situations, especially when they become protracted. And I think that's what he's getting to when he reinforces these things never would have started or gotten this far had I been president. You know, that's what he says in quotes. And I think this is what he's referring to, which is that the longer these things get drawn out, and particularly with Russia, Ukraine and Israel, Gaza, you're talking about conflicts and historical issues that have been simmering for hundreds of years, and in some cases thousands of years, all the way back to the antiquities. So I don't know. I just think that it's an incredibly, incredibly difficult position, and I just don't know what's going to happen. But I think that for modern progress to happen, I think it's important for both of these two issues to get put to bed as quickly as possible.

[B]

Jake Al, what do you think? We saw the media attacking Trump for even daring to hold negotiations with the Russians. Do you think this was a good idea, or do you think that somehow Trump was caving to Putin?

[A]

I give Trump a lot of credit. He is incredibly good at foreign policy, and specifically with dictators. If you look at our past presidents, they didn't want to meet with Putin, they didn't want to meet with Kim Jong Un, Kim Jong Il. They thought isolation was the best policy. It's not. I think talking to these folks and trying to find common ground is the best policy, even if it's a 5% chance of it actually working out, which is what I think Any president dealing with a dictator and a despot like Putin is going to have, I think you have a 5 or 10% chance. And I think Trump and Biden actually had a lot in common that worked. The loan, leasing of the weapons and not costing the American taxpayer any money. Where a lot of partisan people said, my God, this is costing the Americans so much. It's actually Trump has figured out a way to make it profitable. He's selling more weapons to Ukraine, and he got us the minimal rights. It turns out Trump was able to turn a cost center or a supposed cost center into a profit center in terms of this specific war. And if you look at the sanctions, Trump has increased the sanctions. So Trump had my exact position that I fought for here on this podcast for the past couple of years in this conflict, which was keep the pressure up on Putin. And Trump took it over the top by going to Putin's main client for his oil now, which is India, and putting a massive tariff on them and threatening them with a huge tariff. That was a bold, audacious way to deal with Putin. So I give Trump a ton of credit for trying to make peace here.

[B]

So here's my question.

[A]

Hold on, let me just finish. And Putin has been absolutely humiliated. He can't even get to Kyiv, let alone take over Finland or Poland. And this has cost Russia their greatest customer, which is the eu, Germany. These people are never going to buy his oil again, not after what happened here. And that you can give a lot of credit to Trump because he told them when they built their oil pipelines that the Germans were lunatics for doing that and for creating a massive revenue stream for a dictator who is, in my mind, a war criminal. What he did in invading Ukraine makes him a war criminal. What he did in kidnapping these children makes him a war criminal. I think it's awesome that Trump is doing this intervention, even if it has a 5 or 10% chance of working, and then making the NATO alliance pay their fair share and selling them more weapons, I think also brilliant. So I give Trump a lot of credit here. He's aligned exactly what I said we should be doing, which is holding dictators who invade other countries accountable for it. And he's added to it the fact that he can connect with people. So I give him a ton of credit for it. Sachs, I know that's maybe not the answer you want, but that's how I personally think.

[B]

I think you use this highly moralistic language and you engage in a lot of name calling, and I actually think that's.

[A]

Which one. Which name is Inaccurate, Please. Dictator or war criminal.

[B]

Well, look, you're complimenting Trump for engaging in diplomacy with Putin, but then at the same time, you want to call him a dictator and war criminal, and that's not going to be conducive to actually trying to reach a peace agreement. Now, it's fine to me, but I'm.

[A]

Not doing the negotiation. If I was doing the negotiation, I wouldn't come in and say, hey, dictator, war criminal, let's fight for peace. I'm giving you my personal belief as a person not negotiating.

[B]

So you're praising, and you're praising Trump for increasing the pressure and leverage that he has with the Russians, which I think is fine. My question for you is, would you increase the pressure or leverage with respect to Zelensky? So, for example, would you tell Zelensky in no uncertain terms, listen, stop demanding to be part of NATO because it's not happening. In fact, the president has done that.

[A]

What about the answer to that question is yes, I would say, listen, it's not realistic to join NATO. You can get some security guarantees. There's sort of talk of this NATO light. So I would agree with that. I would say, listen, we're going to take, and I said this on a previous episode, we should just take off NATO inclusion for like, 20 years.

[B]

Okay, so here's the hard one. What about territorial concessions?

[A]

I think that's a decision Ukraine has to make. We should encourage them to make whatever decision is best for them. But if they want to keep fighting this thing, that's going to be up to their people to decide if they want to fight for their land.

[B]

Well, people have said they don't want to keep. The problem you have right now is that 70% of Ukrainians say they don't want to keep fighting. They're ready. They're ready to make concessions.

[A]

Yeah. So it sounds like Zelenskyy should listen to his people. Yes, I think he should. That's his decision to make. I think he has sovereignty and the people get to make that decision in his country.

[B]

Well, but the problem you have is it's not just Zelensky. Right. It's his ruling clique. They have canceled elections and they will remain in power as long as the war continues. So there's a conflict of interest there. And there's a lot of money flowing into Ukraine because of the war. So what if the ruling elite wants to keep the war going forever while the people want it to stop?

[A]

Yeah, they're going to face a revolution right quick. And so I think they have to take the citizens of Ukraine into account. And it's a tough decision for them to make, but it's not our decision to make for them. Is that a reasonable position? It sounds like a reasonable position, right?

[B]

I think it's reasonable, yeah. I mean, look, at the end of the day, the Ukrainians and the Russians have to agree.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And I think that of the major parties, I think President Trump cares the most about peace. I mean, I think he is pushing the hardest for there to be a peace deal.

[A]

I know people are a little flabbergasted that I really believe that Trump is great at this. I think he's great at this. He is great at negotiating with difficult people. And I think he's going to get it done. I think he's got a 50, 50 chance of getting this done.

[D]

And I think other people just admit it. You like him. You really like him.

[A]

And that's whether I personally like Trump or not. It has nothing to do with that. I think I. I call balls and strikes here. It's all balls and strikes for me.

[C]

No, no, no.

[D]

You. You're in like with him. You may be in love with him.

[A]

I loved you. I love with my guy, Vice President J.D.

[C]

Vance.

[A]

Wait, wait.

[D]

And you, you loved it when he said even Jason, you loved it.

[A]

Well, I thought it was hilarious as a troll.

[D]

How many people did you send that link?

[A]

To be honest, I just tweeted it. I didn't send it to anybody. I tweeted it. Okay, so everybody, by a million people. I mean, it was a. It's a. It's a surreal, funny moment and a great troll.

[D]

Is it the high. But it's not a troll. It's not a troll.

[A]

I mean, it was a Trouble Sachs part, I think. I think Sachs may have encouraged it.

[D]

It's an incredible thing that you got.

[A]

Let's keep these great debates going here on the All In Podcast, a platform for important discussions. Another amazing episode. Summer months coming to a close. And we'll see you all in Los Angeles for the fourth edition of the All In Summit. I'm excited.

[D]

Next week, back to the office. Love you guys.

[A]

Back to the office and then back to the grind.

[D]

Summer is ended in summer 2025.

[B]

Way too soon.

[A]

Way too soon.

[B]

Believe it's over.

[A]

That's ridiculous. The only thing that is giving me some hope is that ski season is going to be coming.

[D]

You know, when your kids like, I mean, Sachs, you can relate to this. Actually, Jason, your kids are pretty old, too. The summers go by so quick, and it's like, you just start to see like they are Sax. What are you like? I am now 18 months from my oldest, leaving the nest. I know, it's the craziest. Oh, my God. It's so. Ugh. I can't deal with it. My son sits for his act in like three weeks. He's getting his driver's license in a week.

[A]

Are you sad about it? Are you feeling melancholy, like leaving the nest kind of thing, or are you excited for that new chapter?

[D]

I feel like all of my kids deserve to have their own adventure. And so what I tell my son is like, listen, you're packing your bags, you're building your little toolkit, and you're about to leave and you're just going to go on an adventure. And I'm so happy for him, but man. Yeah, Guts.

[B]

My oldest applying to colleges right now.

[D]

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

[A]

All right, everybody. Another amazing episode. All right, love you, besties. And we'll see you in Los Angeles. Love you boys.

[D]

See you next week.

[B]

Let your winners ride Rain Man.

[A]

David sat.

[B]

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

[A]

Love you. The queen of kin. Besties are my dog.

[B]

Taking a notice in your driveway.

[D]

Oh, man, my habit will meet me at. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy.

[B]

Cuz they're all just useless.

[D]

It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. We need to get merch.