SpaceX IPO, Iran War Fallout, Quantum Bitcoin Hack, The Space Opportunity

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, to you all-in podcast. David Sacks couldn't make it this week, but we have the trio. David Friedberg is here, your Sultan of Science, Chamath Palihapitiya, SpaceX filed confidentially to go public on April 1, targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. When SpaceX goes public at that $1.75 trillion valuation, it’s weird to say “trillion-dollar valuation” for an IPO. It would be the eighth-largest company in the world, right behind TSMC and Saudi Aramco. They’re both worth about $1.7 trillion at the taping of this podcast, and Tesla is number 10, with a $1.37 trillion valuation.

If you were to combine those two, as many people are speculating will happen at some point, and you could buy the stock ticker ELON, that would be a $3.1 trillion company. That would make it the fourth-largest company, ahead of Microsoft. They’re aiming to raise $75 billion, which would be by far the biggest raise ever in an IPO. It’s expected to go out in June. I think they were trying to hit the 4/20 date because that would have been even more hilarious, but they’re not going to be able to do that.

SpaceX recently acquired xAI for $250 billion. That includes X, formerly Twitter, and the xAI large-language-model company. Starlink is generating between 50% and 80% of SpaceX’s revenue, and it’ll be close to $20 billion a year, according to reports. Launching rockets is the other 40% of the business—$5 billion in 2024, according to reports. Total revenue in 2025 was $15 billion to $16 billion, with $8 billion in profit, according to Reuters.

So, let’s stop there, and we’re going to talk about all the other IPOs that could be coming. Chamath, I think people really want to know—and you may have mentioned this on an earlier episode—what are the chances that, after this IPO goes well, Tesla and SpaceX could wind up being the same company? We saw that they’re collaborating on a fab. Is that what you’re putting it at, 100%?

Okay, okay, sorry. Let me be clear: 99.999%.

What will that mean if those two companies—or when those two companies—merge?

One of the great things that happened in my career was reaching a point where you grind at one level, and then you get exposed to things at a different level. Then you grind for years and get exposed to things at yet another level. In one of those steps, I was very fortunate to be introduced by Thomas Laffont to the head of the law firm Wachtell Lipton. His name is Ed Herlihy. He said, “This is the most important, well-known, well-run, powerful law firm in America.” Then I looked at the transactions, and they’re just in the middle of everything.

Now, my lawyer, Raj Narayanan, who does everything for me, is one of the senior partners at Wachtell, and I can attest that they’re incredible. They said to me, in the middle of all this stuff, when I was doing a bunch of deals, “Chamath, just get ready to pay a tax.” I said, “What does that mean?” They said, “The way that the American capital markets are set up is that you can both be incredibly creative and do incredible things, but—and we talked about this a little bit last week—there’s a bunch of tort that allows folks to hang around the hoop and get paid no matter what.”

You see this in all IPOs. Shareholder lawsuits abound, and they try to create a class out of it. The reason they do that is that there’s D&O insurance that will then pay out some number of millions of dollars. The attorneys take 40% or 50%, and then these plaintiffs get a few bucks. You saw how egregious this court manipulation was when this guy with 10 shares sued Elon’s comp package at Tesla and won. What was that really? That was the trial lawyers trying to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting a seam. It was a shakedown. Call it what it was: a shakedown.

Why am I bringing this up? If you take the Raj and Ed example of this, this SpaceX IPO is going to set up a couple of things. The first is that there’s just going to be the natural noise in the market, and Elon will have to sort through all of the little ticky-tacky things. But the most important positive thing that will happen from the IPO is a validated external mark-to-market valuation of SpaceX.

The market, every day in real time, gives you a valid mark-to-market assessment of the value of Tesla. This allows you to put these two things together to minimize these losses, and I think that’s what Elon really needs. It’ll make his life tremendously simpler from a governance perspective. It’ll make the companies’ quibbling about his time a nonissue because, again, nobody talks about Zuck, Satya, Sundar, or Jensen allocating time across various projects inside Meta, Google, Microsoft, or Nvidia.

Nor should they really make this claim about Elon because, as you’re seeing, there’s actually an enormous overlap and commonality among the various things that he’s doing. He’s building the robots, but they’re used inside SpaceX. He’s building a Terafab, and they’re used inside Tesla. He’s building xAI, and it’s used across both.

Now you’ll have all of that in one place. Then you think about the brain trust that he built at those two companies, plus The Boring Company and Neuralink. If they’re all in there, all this cross-disciplinary learning is going to compound and compound and compound. Elon knows more about factories than probably anybody. There are people in China—Foxconn knows a lot about factories—so there are some people who know as much or probably even a little bit more about some aspects of it. But that’s a true advantage of bringing those two teams together. You saw it: people would go from one company to the other.

Friedberg, my question for you, very acutely, with your NASA hat and your background: 20 years ago, Elon started trying to get to space with SpaceX, and here we are. There are more rockets going off in a month now than there are days in the month for the entire country, and he’s got rockets going up every 2 or 3 days. You can basically hop on a SpaceX flight and get to space. Maybe you could use your vision to tell the audience what things could look like in another 20 years if SpaceX continues at this cadence, or even goes faster because of AI.

This week is a pretty important milestone for that point because we just launched Artemis II yesterday, which is humanity’s return to the Moon. The United States launched this rocket with 4 astronauts on board. They’re going to orbit the Earth, head to the Moon, come back around, and return to Earth in anticipation of landing on the Moon in about 2 years.

Getting to the Moon is going to be very important, not just because there’s this important social milestone and race happening right now with China, but because I think the Moon could end up being the next industrial frontier for humanity. The reason is that, if you can get to the Moon, it has an extraordinary abundance of material that we can mine, process, and manufacture into goods. Ultimately, the cost to ship those goods back to Earth is zero.

It will cost less to move goods—manufactured goods, processed or precious metals—from the Moon to a specific point on Earth than to ship them using any other terrestrial, conventional method, whether that’s a boat, an airplane, or a railroad. The reason is that, on the Moon, you can take advantage of the low gravity—it’s about 1/6 of Earth’s gravity—and the complete lack of an atmosphere. That means it’s frictionless to move material off the Moon and requires very low energy to do so.

You do not need to use high-energy rocket propellant to move things off the Moon. In fact, the design for moving material off the Moon is to use what’s called a mass driver, which is like a train track, a rail, or an electric rail. You see these in high-speed trains that use magnetic levitation. You could put a package on that rail and use electricity to accelerate that package to 100 G-force, shoot it back to Earth, or theoretically shoot it to Mars, and it will go to the exact point on Earth where you want it to go. It reenters the atmosphere and lands with a simple parachute where you want it to go.

We could run continuous mining and continuous manufacturing processes on the Moon at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to do it here on Earth. The biggest limiting factor is getting people to the Moon, and that is largely solved, or will be solved in the next few years, by robotics. I think there’s a pretty profound intersection between what’s going on in robotics and this moment of space industrialization and moving to the Moon.

Tesla, I think, 20 years from now is actually a more interesting story, whether they’re separate, independent companies or the same company. I think we’re going to look back one day and have this laughing observation that Tesla started out as an electric car company.

100%. It ended up becoming an autonomous car company, and the autonomy competency is what led to the robotics revolution. And the robotics revolution—even if the socialists ban robotics on Earth and tell us, “No robots allowed, they’re taking all the jobs”—[laughter] you could ship all those robots to the Moon, and they could get to work and create an entirely new manufacturing frontier for our civilization, for humanity.

That frontier can manufacture precious metals and other goods and ship them back. You could manufacture semiconductors on the Moon. All that’s missing is the robots. So moving the robots to the Moon, or setting up the materials for robots to build themselves on the Moon, is the first phase of this transition. Asking about 20 years from now, the next phase is building stuff up.

So I think this may not be, and certainly won’t be, limited to just SpaceX. But SpaceX is demonstrating its capacity to be effectively the railroads. What the railroads were to the West and to the frontier in the West in the last generation, SpaceX will be to the Moon and ultimately to Mars. And there’s going to be an extraordinary abundance of production that comes out of the Moon. The Moon has everything.

I’ll say one more thing about SpaceX. SpaceX has also created—and this is going to be a big part of the valuation analysis that many are doing—a backup to the internet. The internet is fundamentally limited by all of the nodes on the network and the connectivity among all those nodes. That connectivity is largely driven by copper and fiber-optic cable.

In space, with the number of satellites going up with Starlink, and with the ability to actually deploy data centers that can output data on those nodes on that network, SpaceX has largely built a backup internet. That backup internet can coincide with the Earth’s internet, but it creates this extraterrestrial communication network that gives us, theoretically, the ability to think about, “Hey, if governments collapse, if there’s civilizational upheaval, et cetera, et cetera.” This becomes a fundamentally important technology infrastructure that’s going to exist in parallel.

So I’m pretty excited about these 2 separate paths for SpaceX and where they intersect with Tesla. I think it’s pretty profound at the moment. And it can’t be understated what lowering the cost per kilogram to get to space has done for entrepreneurs around the company. There are multiple entrepreneurs who are now doing asteroid mining, or Varda doing experimentation in space.

I’ve been doing some late-stage stuff, Chamath, with my syndicate, and one of the interesting companies we syndicated—we did Zipline, which is a great company, but we also did this company called Vast, Vast Space. Jed is the founder. He created Ripple and some other crypto projects, and he put hundreds of millions of dollars into this company, Vast Space. They’re designing a space station.

How did they do it? They just bought carriage on SpaceX rockets. They paid in advance, they have their slot, and now they’re doing this massive innovation to make modular space-station components. The thesis is, “Hey, what if Google or Amazon want to have a space station in space?” It’s completely possible they may want that.

Here’s what I’ll say: I think sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. There are all of these ways that so many people will end up with participation in SpaceX. I think we all owe Elon an enormous thanks. I think this is going to unleash an unbelievably large economy of things that we have no idea about.

When I see that video that you just showed, what it reminds me is that we have a very rudimentary capability in space. What does that mean? If you catch a ride on Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, basically it’s dropping you off at 550 kilometers, I think. You have a different sort of problem if you’re trying to get to GEO.

But even if you get dropped off at 500 or 550, how do you get to your actual orbital plane? If you think of Elon as the big container ships that go from China to America, once it gets to Long Beach, you need FedEx. There’s an entire infrastructure there that’s going to get all of this logistics built for the last mile.

There’s a huge garbage-collection problem that’s building up. We still haven’t technically solved how to do garbage collection in space. There are nets, there are magnetic plates. All of that is getting fixed. Then there’s going to be an explosion in actual power generation.

The cell composition of solar cells up in space is materially different. It’s a really incredible thing. You look at these thin sheets; they’re like 1 millimeter thick. If you carried one in your hand, the glass would break. Yet you can smash a meteor into it when it’s laid and laminated, and nothing happens.

So my point is, in every single dimension of what the earthly economy looks like, it’s now going to go and get rebuilt in space. There’ll be a FedEx of space. There’ll be a Maersk of space. There’ll be—I don’t know what the garbage-collection companies are—an Allied Waste of space. There’s going to be everything of space that exists in the United States.

Friedberg just talked about the Freeport-McMoRan of space. Everything. And we owe that to him. I hope he gets that credit, because the number of businesses I think can get created, and the amount of value that will be created on top of SpaceX’s shoulders, is vast. It’s the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.

And it’s going to create enormous opportunities for people who are smart and resourceful. Friedberg, maybe you could comment on the PGMs—the palladium that’s on asteroids—and the fact that they’re rare here on Earth. If we had an unlimited supply or a continuous supply of those minerals, what could the downstream effect of that be? And what if we find things in space that we’re unaware of? There are unknown unknowns, correct, Friedberg, when you start to conceptualize this?

I do think asteroid mining is an interesting concept, but I think it’s going to be more likely that we’ll have the need for infrastructure so we can produce ores and refine them, versus bringing chunky rock back. I think you could do this very effectively on the moon.

The primary elements that are missing from the moon, compared with what we have on Earth, are carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen—basically, the things that make life on Earth. But that’s because they primarily exist in gaseous form, and the Earth has enough gravity to retain those gases and have an atmosphere.

The moon is too small to maintain an atmosphere. The gravity is too little, so those gases all went away. They evaporated in the early formation of the Earth and the moon. But on the moon, there’s everything else. There’s aluminum, silicon, palladium, platinum, gold—there’s everything you possibly need.

So I think as we do the calculus on all of this, we’ll end up realizing that the moon is probably the best frontier. One of the biggest issues is dissipating heat because you don’t have an atmosphere. But theoretically, you could recapture that heat and use helium gas or something to turn a turbine and actually run production of even more electricity.

You just put a couple of solar panels out. I did the math on this. It’s like 500 square meters of solar panels will let you run a 4-kilometer mass driver to ship material back to Earth every 10 to 15 minutes—one kind of material every 10 to 15 minutes.

The sled you described earlier that Elon’s been talking about as well, yeah.

So you could think about having autonomous mining vehicles deployed on the moon, processing the ore, and then sending completely processed material back. For a heat shield for reentry to Earth, you just use moon rock. You only need about 15 centimeters of moon rock at the front of the package.

That’ll burn up when it reenters the atmosphere, and the package parachutes down and lands where you want it to land—in your industrial shipyard or whatever. I think we’ll continue to iterate on this. I’m speculating in a bunch of different ways.

The beginning of the beginning. Gosh, I mean, can you imagine having a moon base in America? It’s just—wow. Well, imagine being permanently present on the moon. It’s just—and factories on the moon are just wild to consider.

Wild. Can you guys just imagine the middle or early 19th century—like the late 1700s, early 1800s—in America? There was all this land out in the West, and whatever people were contemplating in that moment about what they were going to do with that land in the West, when they started to travel west, their minds would have been blown to see what happened 100 years later, or now 150 years later.

That’s the moment that we’re at right now, and the railroads are being built to get us to this next great frontier. They’re being laid out before us, and the opportunity is really limited only by our imagination.

Before, we would never have been able to tackle these great frontiers, but this magical new technology came about called robots. These robots are going to allow us to actually make use of these frontiers—

[clears throat]

—and explore them and develop them. And again, this is not a zero-sum game. This is expanding humanity’s potential, expanding production, which is so different from the way the socialists on Earth are talking about it, where everyone’s fighting against progress because they think that progress—

The truth is, it’s about everyone building stuff that’s new and everyone benefiting from this.

I'm going to open a hotel casino in space. That'll be good. That'll be so good.

No, I'm serious. Absolutely. You think it's funny, but I am.

I would love that. And then: no rake, no gravity. No rake, no gravity. No tax on poker winnings. I love it.

Whoever implements the red-light district in space is going to become a trillionaire.

Oh, wow. That's—

Yeah, with the robotics and the pleasure droids, replicants. Oh, man, it could get crazy.

All right. Well, let's just hope we're not the Donner Party on the way there.

2026. Don't worry, you'll be safely on the ground.

Do you own any rockets? You guys might be retired, but I'm in the game. I'm in the arena trying things. I'm selling enterprise software every day. That's what I do. Shout out to the syndicate.com and flying [laughter] to join me in great companies.

Chamath said, “Hey, JCal, can we get wrapped up real quick? Because I’ve got to get on a sales call. I’ve got to get on a discovery call.”

Listen, I like the fact that we're all working. We're working into our 50s. I love it. Hey, 2026 could be an all-time record for IPOs. Looks like it will be. And PropTech, OpenAI, Databricks. I mean, these are all 9- and possibly 10-figure IPOs in terms of the valuations. The long tail is other companies: Stripe, Cerebras, Canva, Discord. Lots of people waiting.

Here's your Polymarket: SpaceX, 94%, obviously. We just talked about that for 20 minutes. Anthropic, 41%. People were saying 70% in February. OpenAI, 38%. Databricks, 32%.

People are wondering what could derail this. Obviously, we have a very pro-business group of people in Washington, D.C., but you have potentially this Iran war. We'll talk about that later in the program. It could potentially push us back if, God forbid, it were to spiral or there were a recession. Maybe the Democrats take control of Congress, the Senate, et cetera.

What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs? We're talking about trillions of dollars of companies, Chamath. And if that does happen, let's start talking about the second- and third-order impact of that kind of distribution chain that could happen for LPs, and also all these employees—and then a currency for these companies. We'll go from a Mag 7 to a Mag 17, it looks like.

I think that we have a bit of a risk problem, and I think this is why it makes so much sense for Elon to get out first. If you think about appetite as equivalent to a person at a Thanksgiving dinner, when you first come in and see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful. Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. And I think in a moment like that, you want to be the one that is consumed first.

Mhm.

I think the risk increases when you are at the tail end because the risk is that the diners will run out of space. If you use that analogy, I think the reason why people's plates will get full are probably twofold, and maybe threefold.

The first and most important thing is that there's enough tactical event risk that people generally want to be risk-off and have more margin of safety. I think the Iran thing is kind of in there, but I think the big tactical event risk is that we have a lot of these really important financial moments tied to this concept of AGI and ASI.

I don't know if you saw the OpenAI announcement on their final terms, but a huge slug of Amazon's capital is tied to a 2028 IPO or a moment that calls for this. Then there were a bunch of leaks, text messages or whatever, that said that there's a version of some AGI running inside Anthropic. Then there was the fact that the leak of Claude Code basically demonstrated that they had feature-flagged away a bunch of improvements. So, if you stack up all these improvements, they're actually much further ahead than the models reveal.

If you take all of that as a basket, it goes back to what I said last week, which is we have a real pricing problem. If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none. If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are now raising billions of dollars needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly. History will sort out which one is right, but both cannot be right.

So, in that vein, I actually think, JCal, that we're not going to have these so-called blockbuster streams of IPOs. I think what happens is SpaceX is going to get out. They're going to do great. Then maybe the next one does good to great. The next one will do good, and then the appetite runs out because you just can't absorb incrementally trillions of dollars of new demand.

If you think about it, where is it going to come from? Is it going to come from the sidelines? I don't know. I think it's more of a reallocation exercise. But if you look at the S&P, most people are now defensively moving away from these kinds of things toward the things that are more protected, what the industry calls HALO: high-asset, low-obsolescence kinds of businesses.

Those things trade for zero today, Jason. You could buy hundreds of millions of dollars a year in cash flow for 2 to 5 times right now in the stock market. So why are you going to go way out on the risk curve and buy something at 200 times revs, let alone earnings?

I don't know. I'm more in the camp that I think it's good to be first. It's pretty decent to be second. But if I were you, I would get the heck out, get public, get your money, and fortify your balance sheet ASAP because I think the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you're in.

Yeah, there's going to be a competition for investor dollars, whether it's retail, institutional, or sovereign wealth funds. They're going to have a lot of choices here. Do you want to be in Nvidia? Do you want to be in SpaceX? Maybe you have to rotate out of Amazon, Google, or Disney in order to take on those opportunities. And that's going to be a great competition, probably.

We could see a lot of these IPOs, Friedberg, trade below their IPO price in the year or two after they come out and get repriced, yeah? Like we've seen before.

I think the market's going to need to find a price. Remember that the shareholders in a lot of these companies have held on to these shares for a long period of time, and the valuations are extraordinary. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars in market value are coming to market liquid for the first time.

Some of these investors, regardless of whatever their entry price was, are going to be looking for liquidity. So there's only so much capital to absorb those shares on the buy side. Meaning, if the buyers and the bid are not there to fulfill all of the selling, then you're going to see the share price decline. The market's going to find a price.

I think this idea that an IPO is just a step in driving the price or value of a company up is a pretty false sense. I think we'll realize it's pretty false as some of these IPOs take place because there is so much pent-up selling demand. There is so much value that's been created. There's going to be so much selling pressure.

Then there's going to be very little buying activity on some of these because anyone that could have bought at scale on the buy side post-public were already in a lot of these companies pre-public, as private companies. So I don't know who the big buyers are that everyone's expecting are going to show up.

They're probably thinking it's going to be retail. Retail, yeah. But how much money does retail have left? If you look at retail investors, they have a certain amount of powder, and it's probably deployed. It's not like they have unlimited places to look for that.

Bloomberg ran an article on Wednesday. OpenAI is falling out of favor with secondary buyers. According to a report, OpenAI investors can't find buyers at the new $850 billion valuation that Chamath referenced earlier. Investors Bloomberg spoke to are looking to sell $600 million worth of shares. The people looking for liquidity said they were institutional investors.

Anthropic, currently valued at $300 billion, is seeing major secondary bids at a $600 billion valuation. So I think, Chamath, what this shows us is you're correct. OpenAI and Anthropic are the 2 next cards. That's your turn and river, folks.

If SpaceX is the flop, maybe they're massively overvalued right now. Maybe they're $300 billion, $400 billion, or $500 billion companies, not trillion-dollar companies. And if you look at the amount of revenue—$24 billion for OpenAI at $850 billion—that's a 35-times price-to-sales ratio, and that is an absurd price-to-sales ratio, depending on whether the growth keeps happening.

And as you referenced, Chamath, what if we are at artificial general intelligence, AGI? The moats on these things are de minimis, or there is no moat. Anthropic just got hacked. All their secrets are out. Somebody translated the code into another language and posted it on GitHub. I don't know if you saw that story, Friedberg, but this is kind of mind-blowing.

Somebody took the Anthropic code—I don't know what it was written in—and basically just put it into another language and reposted it. If Anthropic comes and says, “Hey, you can't do that,” well, that negates their argument, Chamath, that they're allowed to train on other people's data and then spit out a different output. So this is a very weird moment in time, right?

It is. I think you're bringing up a bunch of different points, so let me just sort them out in the order that I think is important.

Is there a market for OpenAI at $800 billion? Yes, and there should be. When I read that press release, my mind was blown. This is—I’ve never seen a business like this.

I'd say the same thing about Anthropic. What an incredible thing that both of these companies have been able to create. Nobody in the history of the world has ever seen two businesses like this at this scale. It's unbelievable. These are trillion-dollar companies. They both are, and they both deserve to be.

How profitable they are, I don't know. What their terminal valuation is, I don't know. What people will pay for an IPO, I don't know. But Jason, I just shared something with you: These two companies need to get out as quickly as possible. The reason is that every single company that comes after them—all those companies that you just named, Jason—are not nearly as important and do not need the money nearly as badly as these guys do.

Where will it come from? The specific answer to your question, when you look at this chart, is that the tech-sector P/E is going to shrink faster, in my opinion, than the non-tech P/E. The reason is that, with the combination of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all 3 are baking an AI technology that, first and foremost, will go after the tech sector. It will eliminate, cannibalize, and erode most of the moats that support this differential trading.

If I were a betting man, my first bet is that as those 3 companies come out, these software businesses are going to approach the rest of the non-tech P/E. That's the first step that has to happen. So, the rate of change of the multiple erosion will basically say to the world, "Hey, these tech companies—I don't know. I'll buy the first 5 or 6 years of this story, but I'm not buying year 15 of this anymore because these 3 guys are going to build something."

That's where the money comes from. That's why I think that after SpaceX, these 2 guys need to get their act together, file quickly, get out, and just get the money. Fortify their balance sheets and be in a position. Everything that happens after that is a total coin toss because once these 3 companies are public, I think the blue line will converge to the orange line, and it's going to be nasty.

Yeah. Friedberg, just looking at this, do you believe that the secondary market is a canary in the coal mine here with OpenAI? Because we've gone through this year after year here. These are exceptional businesses. They've grown incredibly. Customers love their products, but the burn is brutal. The circular financing problem is still out there. What's reality here?

That's all going to come out when these S-1s get filed and they're publicly traded companies and they have quarterly earnings reports. Market share for these could be flipping. Anthropic and Gemini, along with other players, are coming into the market. What are your thoughts here on Anthropic and OpenAI post the SpaceX IPO?

Like I said, there's only so much capital in the world. I do think one of the things that's probably being underestimated at the moment is the liquidity crunch that's ahead for capital-intensive technology businesses, given the conflict in the Middle East.

I don't think that Qatar, certain Saudi offices, and certain offices in the UAE and Oman are as eager as they were, or have been, to provide large slugs of capital to support these initiatives. Remember, that capital moves its way through the markets, whether it's through JPMorgan and a loan to SoftBank, which then gets paid to OpenAI. At the end of the day, there has to be unencumbered, debt-free capital being provided to these systems from somewhere in the world.

If you trace all of it back, a large chunk of it has historically, in the last couple of years, come from Middle Eastern sovereigns and family offices. I think those are likely going to tighten up in the near term. That being the case, there's probably less demand.

I do think that there's a lot of secondary demand coming from family offices in Europe and Singapore, places like that that generally have not had great access, or early-stage access, to private companies. But at some point, there's only so much demand there. I don't know how far this is going to go or when this capital crunch, which I think is going to emerge from the Middle East, will hit.

We haven't really felt the shock wave yet from what's happening because, remember, a lot of these Middle Eastern capital commitments were made in the last cycle as LP commitments or whatever. If they downscale LP commitments or stop doing primary and secondary transactions, it takes a little bit of time before the market feels that. Then it's like, "Oh, the reliable go-tos are gone."

A lot of the big funds—the mega-funds that are out there—that have Middle Eastern LPs are gone, and suddenly everyone's going to be like, "Whoa." The shock wave will hit. So, let's see. It is a risk for the United States because I don't think China is going to be as challenged. We're so dependent on Middle Eastern capital, but maybe China has a capital advantage actually going into this mess.

I mean, we talked about force majeure coming into play here if this Iran thing spirals, God forbid, out of control or gets worse. People could say, "You know what? We're going to downscale our commitments, and hey, there's a war, so we don't have to fund this."

I think the markets will shake that off, Jason. I don't think that they view this Iran thing as a big thing. I think the big event risk in the market is, is AI real or not real? And if it's real, what are all of these companies worth? That is the big sword of Damocles over the stock market.

Yeah. All right. Well, that's a good segue into talking a bit about Iran. We took the week off from it last week, and we're going to catch up here, by the way—not because, just to be clear, we intended to, which all the comments railed us on, but we literally—Jason did a terrible job moderating. It was on the freaking docket. We were supposed to talk about it, we didn't get to it, and we went right up. That's it. It's clearly my fault.

He DM'd it. You know, it's like—

Yeah, I know. I'm just protecting Trump. I'm out here getting cover for Trump's mistakes.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows I'm in the pocket of President Trump.

Take a ticket. Oh, you have an issue? Okay, well, you're issue number 17.

Trump DM'd me and said, "Can you please take this off the docket?" I was like, "You got a pass." And then you're like, "Oh, sorry, office is closed. Come back tomorrow."

Today is day 34 of the Iran war—military operation. Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night for a brisk 18 minutes. Here's a 40-second clip.

Donald Trump

We're now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help. We don't have to be there. We don't need their oil. We don't need anything they have, but we're there to help our allies.

For years, everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, but in the end, those are just words if you're not willing to take action when the time comes. Our objectives are very simple and clear. We are systematically dismantling the regime's ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders. Tonight, I'm pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion.

All right, the costs here are mounting. War is a very serious business. Thirteen American service members have tragically died, and over 200 have been injured. On the other side of the ledger, 3,500 Iranians have died, including 1,600 civilians and over 200 children. Twelve hundred people in Lebanon have died from Israeli strikes, and we now have 50,000 troops deployed to the Middle East.

The chances of a ground invasion are increasing. The war has cost $70 billion so far. That's assuming $2 billion a day, which there seems to be consensus on via the Department of War. The Pentagon has asked Congress for another $200 billion. To put that in context, the war in Ukraine was $113 billion in the first year. This could quickly exceed it when we hit 50 days. This isn't cheap. There are a lot of costs.

Here's your Polymarket on a cease-fire: a 25% chance of a cease-fire by the end of April and a 47% chance by the end of May. The sharps are thinking this could wrap up, but a ground invasion, which would be really impactful, I think, has a 63% chance by the end of April and a 71% chance by the end of December.

We're going to get into the second-order effects, but what do you think, Chamath?

I think 2 things, and the president alluded to 1 that I think is very important: If you are not energy independent, you are at risk. I don't know how many more examples world leaders need to be shown to get their acts together.

If the Ukraine-Russia conflict didn't show Europe, then this should show not just Europe but the rest of the world: You need to be in control of your own energy infrastructure and energy independence. Stuff happens in the world, and you're not always in control of, or able to shape, how that stuff can indirectly or directly affect you.

The United States has energy independence. It's an incredible situation. What's interesting to me is that if you look at Europe, they gutted a couple of their energy markets, and they essentially ceded control to a combination of very expensive imports and China. They did that in markets like nuclear, where they just got out of it. They did that in things like natural gas, where, again, we can debate—but where did Nord Stream 2 go? We don't know. And they did that in things like solar, where they just gutted all of the credits.

What's interesting is that they're starting to turn that around. I think Italy just reintroduced what's effectively called investment tax credits. Spain just did as well. Germany is restarting nuclear. If you look at the last few months, just that change is incredibly important because our largest ally, Europe, should be fundamentally energy-independent so that it preserves complete and total optionality, like we do, in how we respond to these situations.

That, I think, is a critical thing that is a positive outcome of what's happening. Second, Jason, which I think is a huge question mark and builds on what Friedberg said before: the Middle Eastern states—specifically the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait—are our most important financing and banking partners in the future. I think we need to see a conclusive end to this war because they need to be in a position to monetize these critical assets.

At the same time, if you see these big pools of demand start to become energy-independent by either accelerating nuclear—but again, that's just problematic and slow—or, frankly, ramping up solar, that's the only way that you can dispatch energy quickly. I think what that does is decrease hydrocarbon demand over the long run. That then decreases the monetization capacity for these countries. So, if you put these 2 things together, all of these folks in the region want safety and security, and they need a quick end to this thing now.

I think they're more incentivized to put boots on the ground, Jason, than America is. That's the point I was trying to make. Friedberg, let's talk a little bit about fertilizer. You had brought up, when we had the start of the Ukraine war, “Hey, this is the breadbasket. We could have a massive famine.” Thankfully, that was avoided.

There were carve-outs for getting wheat and other crops out of Ukraine, but here we are again: a significant amount of fertilizer comes out of that region, and it's not flowing right now. Do you have concerns this time around that we could see something similar?

Fertilizer is made up of 3 elements. There are different fertilizers. One element is N for nitrogen, P for phosphorus, and K for potassium. Ukraine is the largest producer of K, the potassium, the potash. But the N in fertilizer is nitrogen, and that is about 60% of what goes into the ground. About 60% to 65% of global fertilizer is nitrogen. That's what really drives agricultural productivity.

We need nitrogen fertilizer to grow crops everywhere on Earth that we're growing crops to feed people at scale. That nitrogen is primarily made where natural gas is produced and processed, and the reason is that they use natural gas as an input to the production process. They get the carbon, the hydrogen, and the oxygen.

Then they compress the nitrogen in the air to 200 times atmospheric pressure. Remember, 70% of our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen gas. They run it over an electrical current with a metal catalyst, break apart the N₂ molecules so you have just single nitrogen atoms, and then combine them back together. You end up getting ammonia out of the other end. That's why nitrogen fertilizers are produced where natural gas is processed.

The Middle East, obviously, is a massive producer, particularly in Qatar, of natural gas. That's why so much of the world's nitrogen fertilizer is made in the Middle East. In fact, about 35% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz. It is then shipped to countries around the world that farm and need it to grow their crops.

The swing producer in the world is China. China historically makes about 15% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer. When the war started, a few days after it began, China shut down exports of its nitrogen fertilizer. So they basically choked out the rest of the world. When the Strait of Hormuz shut, the nitrogen stopped flowing.

Here you can see the price spike that happened. As the war began, this is urea. Urea is the solid form of nitrogen fertilizer. Urea was trading at about $350 a ton before the conflict took off, and it continued to spike. It reached over $700 a ton in the last 2 days.

This is really impactful. It's not just, “Oh, the price is double.” Number 1, there's a supply deficiency. Farmers in places like Africa and South Asia are not getting the urea they need to farm. That is going to have a massive follow-on problem.

In markets where they have access, because the price has spiked, like in the United States, our biggest crop is corn. You need about 200 pounds of that urea per acre for corn, and that cost basically makes you unprofitable. There is no way you can make a profitable crop of corn. The other thing that China did at the same time is stop buying corn.

Corn prices would normally spike up, but corn prices have remained low while input prices have spiked for American farmers. So American farmers are in a real pickle. Fortunately, for this spring planting, which is happening right now, about 2/3 of American farmers had already secured their fertilizer before this began. But a third did not, and they're switching crops, typically to soybeans.

We have a fall planting coming up in a couple of months, and the choke points on production are going to keep prices very high. In the United States, we make a lot of our own ammonia at our natural gas facilities in places like Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, and other places. Then it ships directly to the farms. But the cost is so high because of the global market that it's going to become very hard for farmers to make a profit.

Around the world, there are many farmers—millions and millions of farmers—who can't access this fertilizer now. So the choke point in the Strait of Hormuz is turning out to be a real critical global food-supply crisis yet again, similar to Ukraine. Remember, there were about 400 million people following the Ukraine war globally who we saw enter into a state of malnutrition. This means more than 1 year of 1,200 calories or less per day for a year.

So, coming out of this crisis, it could be even more severe, given the criticality of nitrogen-based fertilizers and the shutdown of the strait. Let me make 2 more points on this. You would think, “Okay, we'll make more nitrogen fertilizer.” The facilities take at least 3 to 5 years to fix when they break, which is what just happened in Qatar.

That facility got damaged—the main facility being used to make fertilizer. That is the largest producer of urea in the world, and it's now going to be incapacitated for 3 to 5 years. If you want to build a new facility, it takes about 7 years. All the facilities around the world that make urea and ammonia, these nitrogen fertilizers, typically run 24/7, 365 days a year, at full capacity. There is no downtime where you can just turn on excess production in the world.

The world is very delicate in its balance of inputs, food production, and outputs. The whole world has less than 30 days of food—of calories—stored up. As these kinds of supply-chain problems start to percolate, shock waves start to be felt around the world. So it's a pretty serious crisis ahead, and it'll take a few months before it will be fully realized.

In the meantime, U.S. farmers are getting their asses handed to them. They can't make money, and China is using this as a moment for extraordinary leverage over America, taking advantage of the situation by shutting down exports of its fertilizer and, at the same time, not buying American production of corn.

We probably need, Friedberg, to have some sort of resiliency here and address this like we did with pharmaceuticals, PPE, and all these other things.

Yeah, we should have some sort of stockpile of fertilizer. Chamath's point is absolutely correct. Natural-gas reservoirs exist around the world, and we've been loath to exploit or develop them because of the climate-change, carbon-risk issues. But I think what we're realizing is that those are luxury beliefs to an extent.

You can only say, “Let's not exploit carbon resources,” until you hit a shock wave like this. Then people are like, “Wait a second. We really do need to have these systems up and running, and we need to have excess capacity and local capacity in the system.” Single points of failure for the whole world's food supply are not going to cut it anymore.

Particularly as the world is becoming more fragmented and multipolar, with less U.S. policing of the world, it's going to be very critical that everyone starts to think about doubling down not just on energy production but on some of these other critical inputs, like fertilizer.

Another output, just as a quick side story on natural-gas production, is helium. When you pull natural gas out of the ground, that's the primary place we find helium. Helium—we're all waking up to the fact that we never really think about helium. We think about kids' balloons at birthday parties. But helium goes into MRI machines. Helium goes into semiconductor manufacturing. Helium goes into mass spectrometry machines that are used in chemical analysis, with a lot of applications around the world.

Helium is a critical input to medical equipment and manufacturing equipment, and all of a sudden, a third of the world's helium coming out of Qatar is not making it out. So we're now going to have a helium supply shock that's going to affect the world.

We're starting to wake up to the fact that perhaps these natural-gas fields that we've allowed to turn a blind eye to—saying, “Let 1 country exploit them and let them make all the natural gas”—need to be developed. The U.S. is actively developing. I went down and visited that Cheniere facility in Louisiana with Doug Burgum a couple of months ago, which was an amazing sight to see, where we do all the LNG exporting.

But the U.S. has extraordinary natural-gas reserves. So do many other places in the world that have failed to take advantage of developing them. I think we're realizing the criticality of doing so at this moment.

Looking at this, I think we'll have Trump pivot extremely soon. I brought this chart up.

This will be the 4th time you've brought this up.

J. Cal? You think he's going to wrap this up?

He's 100% going to wrap this up, and I can show why.

This is just basically looking at the history of this. You guys remember I brought up this chart with Trump's net approval rating, and you look at how this has changed over the 3 times I brought it up: first in June last year, then October, and again now. The stuff with ICE, then the Epstein files, and just going right down the line of unpopular decisions, Trump's net approval rating has now plummeted to -17. This is the least popular he's ever been, and he's had to pivot here.

Pam Bondi, at the time we're recording this—as I predicted on a previous episode, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi would be fired—or, I guess in Trump's terms, he likes to get them a new job and give them a window seat. This is absolutely going to result in a quick pivot. Who knows what the downstream effects are, but the inflation three-handle is coming back, according to Polymarket. Gas is over $4 a gallon.

You can easily mock, like we did earlier, these No Kings protests, but 8 million people came out for that. That's a large number. And if you look at the Polymarket for what's going to happen in the midterms, there's now a 51% chance that the Democrats take the Senate and an 86% chance that they take the House. And what you're going to take from that is—

Wait, sorry. Polymarket is now showing the Democrats winning both houses?

Yeah, pull it up, Nick. There's a significant chance of that. And when this happens, how much money is being bet on that? Let's just see: 51% they take the Senate, 86% they take the House, and $4.5 million on this.

$4.5 million on this? Oh, gosh. I tend to filter how seriously I take Polymarket just based on the total quantum, but this is a big number. This is not me trying to dunk on Trump based on my personal beliefs. I think when you lose Tucker, when you lose Megyn Kelly, when you lose Joe Rogan, and people are looking at who Trump surrounded himself with, there's really just 2 groups.

You have these super highly qualified people: Bessent, Lutnick, obviously David Sacks. You've got really highly qualified people—J.D., who I think the world of. I think these people are great. But then he puts some people in positions that I think weren't up to the task: Pam Bondi, Kristi. I'll put Stephen Miller and Kash in that as well. That's my personal belief in that case. Those people have not served him well.

They need to get this presidency back on track, because what's going to happen is we're going to have 2 more years of impeachments and investigations, and the whole thing's going to be derided. We really need to start thinking about who's making these decisions. Who made this decision to go into Iran, and why? Who made these decisions to have ICE go into Minnesota, and why?

A lot of it goes back to Stephen Miller. I got mocked a bit here on the pod for blaming him, but you can correlate Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, and Pam Bondi with all of the downside of this presidency and the plummeting ratings. Trump's going to need to clean house. He's cleared out 2 of 4. I predict he'll clear out the other 2, get great leadership in there, and turn this presidency around.

This is going to be socialism now, and AOC's going to win. This is going to cause massive chaos if he doesn't get out of Iran and do it soon. That's just my handicapping of the situation. Hegseth, I'm not so sure. I'm not sure what I think of him yet, but we don't have information on why Trump did this. That's going to be the next shoe to drop: why he did it.

Friedberg, I think this is the point I made the second this war happened—or military operation. I mean, let's call it what it is. This is a war. When you kill the top 100 people, it's a war. I said I don't have the information on why he did this. He might have information, Friedberg, that we don't have that made this an absolute must for us to do. But we haven't revealed that information. He hasn't explained it well to the American people.

I think that's why the ratings are—I'm not trying to make the ratings like TV ratings—his popularity is getting crushed here. The way this was explained to Americans, again, I'm not inserting my position here, I'm just talking about the disconnect right now, is that Operation Midnight Hammer was supposed to have just decimated this. So why did we do this again? We don't have the information.

This is why I try to stay humble in this and say, what information does Trump have that we don't have? Some people seem to think, Chamath, this was overconfidence. There's obviously this debate: did we get baited into this by Israel and get pushed into it? Is he a Manchurian candidate? That's above my pay grade, too. I don't have any information on that. I'm not in the CIA.

It's hard to be an armchair critic on this stuff in both senses. It's easy to say, "This guy got talked into doing this. Israel manipulated him into it." It's also easy to say, "We should go get rid of the country that's made all the nuclear weapons." Both of those are easy to say without all of the texture of the relationships and the details and what really went on. None of us know the truth.

That's literally the point I've been trying to make here. How do we do the same thing with Venezuela? How do we know? We don't have any intelligence to map. We're not in the CIA. We don't have any of these insights that Mossad or the Israeli intelligence services have. How do we know how this was going to go down? That's all going to come out, I think, when this all gets investigated.

I think Trump is and has been the most consistent anti-war president of modern history. I think it's fair to say that he has demonstrated enormous restraint and has had the highest bar thus far for actually getting into conflict. What Friedberg says is very important. There's just so much we don't know.

I think Trump doesn't want to stain his legacy with a typical American forever war. He doesn't want that. I don't think he needs to be anywhere near that. So there is obviously stuff that we don't know. I still think that there's a short-term problem, which is not just the threat that Iran poses to Israel, but the threat that Iran poses to the rest of the Middle Eastern community.

That neighborhood is a complicated place. There was an interview that MBS did on Saudi television. Nick, maybe you can find it. It's in Arabic, but there's a good version of it that I saw with subtitles. If you hear MBS's telling of what the Iranian threat is, it's not dissimilar to how the Israelis would characterize the threat.

I think it's important to understand that unpredictable actors should not be given an opportunity to have a cataclysmic weapon that can completely destroy the Earth as we know it. That just doesn't make sense. If you can intervene to prevent that, we're now aware of the damage this can do to enough of a degree where there should be enough nuclear disarmament from here on out.

The 6, 7, 8, 9 countries that have it, okay. There are all kinds of reasons why maybe we could have remade those decisions over the intervening 70 years. Maybe there are some that we never should have let have it. The Pakistan-India thing is a good example of one. But we are where we are, and I think we can all agree that no more countries should incrementally get access to this thing. Absolutely not.

And this regime specifically believes that anybody who is not part of this specific religion needs to die, and the whole—

Well, that Islam needs to be reunited in order to take on anybody who's not part of—

Well, I would say their version of radical Islam. It's a religious lunacy in that country. I think everybody else should be murdered if they don't convert. I think it's important to say that the overwhelming majority of Sunnis and the overwhelming majority of Shias are peaceful, observant people. There are fringes in every religion.

Specifically in this case, I think the most important thing is not to take your word or anybody else's word. I do think it's important to listen to somebody like MBS, because I think it's the lived experience of having to run a country in that neighborhood and what it means. What you see, as you're articulating, is many layers of complexity that most of us in the West have zero appreciation for.

All of this goes to the short term. I think they forced themselves into a corner. We can go back and relitigate why Obama let them out. That was a really, really stupid idea. We probably should have kept our thumb on the scale and had them close to teetering on economic insolvency. That's the only thing that has kept them in check. They veered wildly away the minute we let them out of the disarmament agreements that we had.

But we are where we are. We've got to put the genie back in the bottle, and we cannot look to other countries and tolerate this idea that they also want to build the kinds of weapons that can literally destroy the face of the planet as we know it. It's a nonstarter.

The second-order effect is, how do we make sure that folks who are participating in all of this broader seeding of chaos are hemmed in? How do we create a more reasonable world order? I think the second-order effects, and I've said this before, kind of bring this back to China. A world where it's bipolar, where it's the United States and China, roughly as the 2 leading states of the world, is probably the Nash equilibrium here.

And so I think getting China in a position where they need to do a deal—and remember I said this—the worst thing that could happen for China was the president delaying the summit. Here we are: it’s now delayed for 6 weeks, and it’s going to go into mid-May.

If you think the Strait of Hormuz numbers, as they relate to energy prices in Europe or anywhere else, are crazy, look at what’s happening inside of China right now. It is a no bueno situation. In May, if we can reestablish a set of operating criteria that keeps normalcy in check—no more of this rapid, random expansion everywhere, where the Chinese are trying to build bases near us and now we have to have a point of view near them—we don’t need any of that. So I think if we can use this as an opportunity to de-escalate, I think we should.

Yeah. We seem to have moved from—I mean, I think this is the question. There’s a doctrine, I don’t know if you guys have heard this one before, of “mowing the lawn,” which is the Israelis’ view of Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Iran. It’s just, “Hey, we have to take away their progress, the last 30 or 40% of their progress toward nuclear bombs, and we just do that consistently, and we contain them.”

This has tipped over into regime change, and so I think that’s the wild card. None of us can predict what happens from this point forward. I don’t know how you leave Iran in this state if they’re going to take over the Strait and charge everybody a dollar a barrel. Is that going to be tenable? Are they going to keep blowing stuff up? This is uncharted territory, and very high stakes.

President Trump also reiterated that the U.S. doesn’t need Middle East oil and that Europeans should go straight to the Strait and just take it. He said that the Strait will open naturally because, quote, “Why are you always focusing on the Strait of Hormuz, Jason?”

Why am I? You’re always overlooking the gays of Hormuz, as an example.

That’s true. That and the nonbinaries of Hormuz. They all count.

Well, why is it all about the Strait of Hormuz all the time? I don’t want to get canceled here because I don’t know the pronouns to use for these straits of Hormuz.

I don’t think you’re allowed to be gay in Hormuz. I think you have to keep that pretty quiet there, don’t you?

That was the greatest clip ever. If you don’t know what we’re referring to, it’s a clip—

Of purple-haired people?

No, not purple-haired. This was a young Indian lady. We all thought the same thing: Indians are so smart. What happened to her?

Well, what happened? They found an Indian who didn’t understand.

I think that was the one. They found a dumb Indian.

Yes, exactly. Oh, God. They found her.

Isn’t it a little bit homophobic that we’re so focused on the straights of Hormuz and not the gays of Hormuz?

I agree. Yes, for sure.

So why do you think we’re running to leave the gays of Hormuz behind?

I think it’s just history.

Which Ivy League do you think she went to?

Brown.

Yeah, 100% Brown or Columbia.

Okay. Oh, yeah, that’s a good call.

I would say Columbia. She might have gone to Vassar, actually. I think that would have been her safety school.

That’s the best—not Borat, not Borat—Bruno impersonation I’ve heard in a long time.

Sacha Freeburg, why are you so gay? You think the straights of Hormuz—

Are you making your potatoes nonbinary?

It’s literally the Bruno. You’ve got to do 10 minutes, Friedberg. Do you want to do your Bitcoin thing, or do you want to just break?

The Bitcoin thing was interesting because, in the last couple of months, what we’ve started to see is an increasing amount of research that says the expected availability of a functional quantum chip is probably not 25 or 30 years away. It’s probably in the next 5 to 7 years, if I had to guess.

For those who follow Bitcoin and care about it, my only advice on this topic is that the leaders of the Bitcoin ecosystem need to organize themselves and make sure that they have an answer to the question: Is this stuff quantum-resistant? Because if the answer is no, they are a very visible and obvious honeypot.

There is an answer that a lot of the Bitcoin community gives, which is, “Well, everything is screwed.” My only advice is: possibly. But if a nonstate actor gets hold of quantum technology that can defeat crypto as we know it today—SHA-256, ECDSA, the elliptic-curve stuff, the run-of-the-mill stuff that we all rely on—a nonstate actor’s incentive will first be to drain the obvious honeypots and then tell everybody that it’s broken. Then all the prices go to zero, they have all the money, and they can buy stuff. That would be the sequence of events if you were a nonstate actor.

So, yes, you’re right: the banks get hacked, and all this other stuff goes kaput. But I think you first go and exploit the obvious places, and I think crypto is the most obvious honeypot in a world where you can defeat encryption.

In fairness to the crypto community, much earlier they had to deal with this. They had to migrate from different encryption schemes in the early parts of Bitcoin, and they were able to self-organize. The difficulty here is that you’re talking about a big technological lift. You’re talking about all the wallets being rearchitected, all the transactional flows, and all the processing nodes. These are complicated things that need to happen.

I would just tell the crypto community: you have 5 to 7 years to get your act in order. That’s it.

Friedberg, quantum computing—just generally speaking, do you feel it’s going to have a major impact in the short term? Do you think it’s actually going to become viable in the midterm? Where do you think about it? It’s always been 10 years out, but it feels like we’re making some progress.

Yeah, there’s a lot that’s changed. The primary mechanism of modern encryption standards relates to factoring an integer into its prime factors. Discovering the prime factors of an integer would give you the ability to theoretically crack encryption.

There was an algorithm theorized by a guy named Peter Shor. I think I talked about this in a prior episode, back in 1994, called Shor’s algorithm. Today, it’s the commonly well-known model for how you could do this. You could watch a YouTube video on it. There are some YouTube videos that explain it pretty clearly, although it takes a bit of time to understand.

A couple of years ago, I think in 2023, there was another computer scientist named Oded Regev from NYU who published another paper that showed a faster, different approach to Shor’s algorithm. It was an improvement on Shor’s algorithm that basically reduced the number of quantum operations required to factor a large integer significantly.

Sorry, we went from 28 million of those operations down to 500,000.

Yeah, and there’s a lot of work going on right now, even before we have industrial-scale quantum computers. There’s a lot of work going on in quantum-computing theory, building models and algorithms. A lot of this is rooted in pure mathematics and statistics. That work is making progress in building better algorithms even before the compute comes online.

Then there’s a separate set of things that you can track. The market, if you want to trust the market, is betting that we are within spitting distance of quantum computers reaching industrial scale at this moment. Those 2 things intersect at some moment in the near term, where you have algorithms that are low-demand and low-latency, that can crack modern encryption standards, and then the computing comes online. Someone is going to execute.

The real thing is: What do you do about it? There’s a whole bunch of research that’s been going on for 20-plus years on quantum algorithms and quantum-resistant encryption standards. To Chamath’s point, these things exist; it’s just a heavy lift.

There’s going to be a pretty good business to be made in the next couple of years. All of the changes are going to need to happen across all encryption standards, across the whole internet, across how we do communications, and so on.

In a crazy way, Friedberg, crypto’s in the same place as all these software stocks. If AGI and ASI are real, these software companies are not what we thought they were. If quantum is real, a bunch of these crypto projects are not what we thought they were. You can’t have both, guys. You’ve got to choose.

Mhm.

Pick one.

Yeah.

All right everybody. This has been Oh hey we listen um you know I have an incredible EA. Executive assistant. It's a really been like, you know, everybody talks about like agents agents agents agents. And this was the pre-agent agent. Mhm. You know, my my EAs averaged around 188 to 200k a year. And then People are right now their heads are exploding in middle America. Let's tell the truth. I was paying 188 to 200,000 dollars a year. They were wonderful, okay? Right. And then I Jason was like try this try this thing called Athena. Athena Athena. I'm like what is it? So I called the guys and they're like yeah we have these really well-trained folks. They're like geniuses that work in the Philippines. It's 3,000 a month and we're building all this tooling. And so as all these agents get better and all these AIs get better, they'll get the advantage of that. I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” This is the first time I’ve had a male assistant. His name is Lei. Lei’s fabulous. He’s a math and computer science grad in the Philippines, okay? And he’s excellent.

I love Lei too. Somebody just put it in the chat. “I love Lei.” From Nick. Oh, yeah, Nick. Nick, you love Lei. Coming to NBC this fall.

These guys are incredible. They do everything for me. It’s the most incredible hack and arbitrage I’ve ever seen. Now I can direct a bonus to Lei at the end of the year, which is great because it allows me to feel like I’m giving him really good support. He works my hours from the Philippines. I have not looked back. Go, Athena.

Yeah, that’s great. I use it as well. I was the first investor in it.

You’re the first—you’re the first. How many Athenas do you have? One or two?

I have one.

I had two for a long time.

I had a second one, and then that person moved on.

Do you split it between work and personal, or no?

Yeah, it’s work and personal. As an example, there’s an incredible bakery where I live, out in Dripping Springs, called Abby Jane Bakery. They don’t take orders, but every Thursday, my Athena assistant calls at 8:00 a.m. and asks them what’s on the menu because they change the menu every week. Then they send me the menu, I order from the bakery, and he calls an Uber courier to pick it up and drop it off because they’re not on DoorDash or Uber Eats.

It’s a stupid example of something that made our lives incredible—to have the best bakery in all of Austin in the house every weekend for the girls and everything.

Everyday problems.

Yeah, everyday problems. Anyway, it’s a silly example, but I was having to go make that run, and I did it every fourth or fifth week as a treat. Now it’s every week. So you just look at what you’re doing.

The other thing we’re doing is they’ve been able to—we had Americans who were researchers sorting through the inbound applications from founders. We were able to put an Athena assistant on that and then define it, and now they’re learning how to use OpenAI. So the Athena Open Law merger is kind of happening in real time.

Yeah, no, I have him doing a bunch of advanced tasks that I typically wouldn’t give to my EA. He also deals with the more practical day-to-day tasks—scheduling, all that stuff.

Anyways, it’s been an incredible, eye-opening thing because it sets a very good example where you can be cost-effective and still get your work done. It was really bothering me, actually, because of the amount of cost inflation for that role. I don’t think I’ve ever needed an EA. I’ll just be honest and put it out there: I think I’ve always needed an AA.

I would title them differently, and sometimes I would call them—you know, I’ve said this before—but even roles like chief of staff just don’t make sense. The chief of staff should be the second-most-powerful person in the world because they work for the president of the United States. Everybody else should not have a chief of staff, in my opinion.

It’s a major unlock, and the problem is we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes. People just don’t want to take the EA or administrative assistant position in America. They just don’t. They want to do something higher up the stack, but the people in the Philippines do want that job.

Lei’s crushing. I love Lei. RJ’s my guy, and, yeah, first time—

I’ve got a guy, too, and he’s also very technical. Anyway, shout-out to Athena.

Shout-out to Athena.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Thank you, Athena. Awesome. Friedberg, I know you’re making great progress. You showed me some pictures of potatoes from Ohalo. How’s that going?

We’re shipping seed this week to farmers all over North America, so we’re getting going.

Are you sending seed to our friend Roger the Dirt Farmer?

He is. His son, yeah. He’s going to

Oh, that’s so great. Roger? I love it. Roger the Dirt Farmer is a phenomenal poker player. He and Keating often play in the game together.

Uh-huh. How did they do a couple of weeks ago?

They came and visited me the next day. Both of those two goofballs ran over the game. It’s so frustrating. It’s frustrating playing with Keating. Roger is much more of a TAG—a tight-aggressive player—so it’s no picnic. There’s no free lunch when both of those two guys are in the game.

On top of that, you’ve got Helmuth Koon, Robo—it’s not a winning game. It’s Murderers’ Row. I made a late trip to the Valley. I’m like, “Hey, Chamath, I’m coming to town. I get to play.”

Chamath’s like, “I’ve got some bad news for you. You’re no longer on the list, and I filled the game up plus two.” So I squeak into the game. I run up a quick 20, 25 Gs, and then passive-aggressive Hellmuth—who cannot handle the fact that I’m more famous than him now—was totally tweaked.

It’s broken his brain. He’s like, “Okay, a card dealer? Card dealer, you’re supposed to have a seat, and JCal doesn’t.” I’ve literally just doubled up at that point. Chamath’s like, “Okay, I guess you can book the win, JCal, because it’s poor taste to double up and then leave.”

“How much did you win? $40,000, $50,000?”

It was only like 25 Gs. It’s like a used Model Y.

Hey Chamath, we're here at the end of the show. I just wanted to make sure people know that the liquidity event that we're hosting, you can go to allin.com/events, has sold out and we've started a wait list. So, this is the quickest we've ever sold out. I asked Kimbra and Lisa to try to find another 100 seats. I think there's like 7.7 trillion dollars of money that want to attend. We can't get everybody in, so we're trying to get everybody together. We announced Bill Ackman and Andre Carpathy last week. Incredible. We're going to do an I Russell like pitch competition. There's like four whiz-bang hot fund managers. For folks who don't know, four of them in particular are running super hot right now, like taking 50 million, running it up to a billion to three billion. They're just ripping. And they're going to go on stage and give us their best ideas pitch. And the three of us, plus as many of the guests as can do it, will vote. And maybe we can even publish these ideas so folks can try to follow them. They can vet them, right? It's a really brave thing to do to get on stage and say, “Hey, I'm making this bet.” I did it four times. Yeah, I mean, I just spanked it, but hopefully these guys can do the same thing. We have a natural resources pitch. We have something in health care. We have something in tech. We have something in genius. It's great. It's like all the big categories, right? Something in crypto. So, you're going to get every shade of every whippy big alpha market.

By the way, you created a bit of a storm on the interwebs with your TAO mention in the Jensen interview. I just asked Jensen a question. I’m not long TAO. He redirected it to something called Folding@home, which, if you don’t know it, you should look it up. It’s how you can allocate compute to help solve health problems.

The point is that these open-source projects, or these distributed-compute projects, are the future. The real question is: What is the architecture, and what are the incentives? None of us knows that. But, man, I think it’s so important.

Well, the reason is because I did place a bet on TAO a couple of weeks ago. I went public with, “Hey, yeah, I’ve got a small bet here because I think these subnets are fascinating in distributed computing.”

You’re TAO-maxing.

I mean, I might be $500,000 or $600,000. A tiny bet.

You’re syndicate-maxing.

No, I did it myself. I made a small bet on TAO because I watched exactly—

This is syndicate-maxing.

I’m not maxing here. But I am certainly not doing any introspection. I’m just doing deals on great founders and companies.

Andreessen has been rage-tweeting about this guy that he watches—a genius who posts these videos about maxing.

Yes, I watched the videos. It’s incredible. This guy is fantastic. What’s the guy’s name?

I don’t know what the guy’s name is, but he goes on his back deck. He’s got a Weber grill.

Smoking a cigar, smoking a cigar, and he says, “Listen, it doesn’t matter.”

That may be the most incredible contribution of your life. That’s the most incredible contribution Andreessen may be making to culture and society in America—not the browser, but that he found this guy. I encourage you, Nick, find the video and post the links. This guy is incredible.

Because you’re overthinking it, folks. Just enjoy your life and work hard, and don’t think it through. Look what happened to Friedberg—he started ruminating. Don’t ruminate. Just go sell software and go make better potatoes, Friedberg. No more ruminating and therapy for you, Friedberg.