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All-In · · 127 min

Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO

Chamath PalihapitiyaJason CalacanisDavid SacksDavid FriedbergJoe Lonsdale

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TL;DR

  • The tariff campaign is simultaneously a border lever, an industrial-policy experiment, and a bid to rebase America’s reliance on the U.S. dollar and its ability to fund deficits. Joe Lonsdale reads the Canada/Mexico threats primarily as fentanyl negotiations; Chamath Palihapitiya sees a broader attempt to rebase dollar dependence, deficit funding, and corporate competitiveness. David Friedberg supplies the connective tissue: tariffs, lower income taxes, and lower government spending form “three legs on a stool,” but erratic on-off implementation can make the investment case impossible to underwrite.

  • The investable version of tariffs favors commodities and sectors with domestic substitutes, while unique technologies remain inflation traps. Chamath calls autos a workable case because many global manufacturers can absorb reciprocal tariffs, but an irreplaceable ASML machine, innovative drug, or single-vendor technology can simply become 25%-30% more expensive. Predictability matters as much as the rate: no executive will commit $10 million to a U.S. factory if the tariff may disappear the following week.

  • The administration may tolerate equity weakness if it suppresses consumption, inflation, and long-term Treasury yields. Chamath’s mechanism is explicit: lower stock prices reduce the wealth effect, money rotates toward the 10-year, and cheaper borrowing helps refinance roughly $1 trillion due over the next 9-12 months. His larger call is that MAGA’s durable coalition includes working- and middle-class people who do not necessarily own many stocks or homes, pro-innovation and pro-tech people, and patriotic business owners, so policy may be viewed through Main Street rather than Wall Street.

  • DOGE’s easy waste targets quickly collide with the harder constraint that AI requires vastly more electricity. The panel cited 35,855 ServiceNow licenses across three products with only 84 users and 11,000 Acrobat licenses with zero users, yet Chamath warned that renewables supplied almost 91% of December’s incremental generation while 35,000 projects awaited FERC approval. With a new gas turbine unavailable before 2030 and nuclear before 2035, indiscriminately repealing IRA incentives could leave America without “enough electrons” for GPU clusters scaling from 100,000 toward one million units.

  • CoreWeave offers spectacular growth wrapped around a difficult asset-liability bet. The neocloud operates 32 data centers and 250,000 Nvidia GPUs, reported $1.9 billion of 2024 revenue, and was expected to raise at least $3.5 billion above a $30 billion valuation—but it also carried almost $8 billion of debt, lost nearly $1 billion, and derived about 60% of revenue from Microsoft. The decisive underwriting question is whether GPU useful life resembles ten years or five: “This business is deeply underwater” if management amortized the hardware too slowly.

  • The AI model layer is becoming abundant enough that distribution and real-world workflow integration matter more than benchmark launches. Chamath preferred Claude 3.7 for code and Grok 3 for consumer use, while calling GPT-4.5 merely “good” and warning that model makers are overfitting SWE-bench, IMO, and AIME. His metaphor captures the market: “100 Michelin-star restaurants” have opened at once, leaving users overwhelmed while X, Google, YouTube, and Meta turn existing distribution into the durable advantage.

  • Sacks’s Bitcoin policy creates a long-term reserve, a managed stockpile, and a disclosure-first regulatory framework. Bitcoin forfeitures enter a “digital Fort Knox” that Treasury may not sell; other adjudicated digital assets enter a stockpile Treasury may rebalance, while budget-neutral strategies can add Bitcoin. Sacks estimated the federal government once held 400,000 BTC and sold roughly half for $360 million—coins later worth more than $17 billion—and said he divested roughly $85 million personally attributable to him before day one of the administration to remove the appearance of self-dealing.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Tariffs are being asked to solve three different problems

  • Jason Calacanis framed the week as policy whiplash: Canada and Mexico tariffs moved markets sharply, exemptions followed, and TSMC simultaneously announced a $100 billion U.S. investment. The central puzzle was whether this was negotiation, industrial policy, or a broader bond-market and financial strategy.

  • Lonsdale’s narrowest interpretation was fentanyl leverage. He said tens of thousands of young Americans had died, Canada had done “nothing about their border,” and Trump was using trade pressure to force action. Lonsdale noted that Canada was still on while Mexico might be off, and that importers still needed to know what the rules were.

  • Chamath saw a genuine schism after the Trump-Elon honeymoon: one camp viewed DOGE and tariffs as deranged chaos, while another believed the administration was “sticking to the plan.” His definitive formulation was that tariffs could rebase dollar reliance, deficit financing, and the long-term economic vitality of American companies.

2. Friedberg’s master plan is a three-legged fiscal stool

  • Friedberg’s optimistic synthesis joined tariffs with lower income taxes and lower government spending. His greenhouse LEDs had just become 25% more expensive, creating a crossover point where manufacturing them domestically might finally beat sourcing them from Asia—one example of tariffs redirecting industrial capital.

  • Lower corporate and personal income taxes would then leave capital available to fund the newly viable factories. Friedberg also entertained moving from income taxation toward consumption taxation, with tariffs functioning as a tax on spending, but stressed that America had not run that experiment for roughly 150 years and its outcome remained contested.

  • Spending cuts complete the stool by moving labor from government-supported work into private production while offsetting tariff inflation. Friedberg cited government’s roughly 30% share of GDP; Lonsdale translated the proposition more bluntly as redeploying “a million workers” from Washington’s consulting and paper-pushing economy into productive businesses.

3. Tariffs work cleanly on commodities and dangerously on scarcity

  • Chamath’s “other side of the tariff knife” separates competitive markets from irreplaceable products. Autos have many manufacturers and can support reciprocal treatment; an innovative drug or sole-source ASML machine cannot, because the supplier may simply pass a 25%-30% increase downstream. That is inflationary and problematic if the product is something people must have.

  • Chamath added an environmental argument: American producers bear cleaner-air and cleaner-water rules while overseas producers may externalize those costs. A tariff can compensate for that asymmetry rather than rewarding production that “shits all over the environment.”

  • The panel converged on predictability and reciprocity. Friedberg cited the EU’s 10% tariff on American cars against America’s 2.5% levy on European cars; matching rates seemed defensible, but turning tariffs on and off leaves a manufacturer unable to justify a multiyear, multimillion-dollar U.S. plant.

4. DOGE’s headline waste is real, but payroll understates government labor

  • Jason noted that direct government employment had risen by about 1.3 million across the prior two administrations. Friedberg and Lonsdale pushed back that payroll misses contractors, subcontractors, nonprofits, and state workers supported by federal checks—roughly four million contractor jobs around Washington and another 1.6 million at states, by Lonsdale’s figures.

  • Lonsdale’s criticism was aimed at Congress as much as DOGE: reconciliation proposals contemplated only $1 trillion-$2 trillion of cuts over ten years, while he wanted at least $5 trillion. Even if Elon Musk found $500 billion or $1 trillion, legislators still lacked “the balls” to remove comparable spending from their own bill.

  • The sharpest procurement specimen was DOGE’s report of 35,855 ServiceNow licenses across three products with 84 users, plus 11,000 Acrobat licenses with zero users. Jason demanded refunds and an investigation into possible fraud or kickbacks; others cautioned that vendor misconduct was unproven and simple buyer incompetence might explain it.

5. Cutting the IRA wholesale could cost America the AI power race

  • Chamath said a FERC report attributed almost 91% of December’s incremental electricity generation to renewables. That matters because AI clusters are moving from 100,000 GPUs toward one million, while 35,000 generation applications sit in the FERC queue and existing forecasts do not capture the new demand.

  • The physical lead times are unforgiving: order a gas turbine now and, in Chamath’s telling, it cannot operate before 2030; new nuclear cannot arrive before 2035. Renewable projects are therefore the only near-term incremental source, supported partly by an approximately $200 billion tax-equity market reinforced by the IRA.

  • His objection was not that the IRA lacked waste, but that repeal requires surgery. “You don’t have enough electrons” if Congress removes the incentives behind roughly 90% of incremental energy-generation incentives, so a budget cut intended to discipline spending might surrender the AI race through an avoidable power shortage.

6. Friedberg’s battery grant illustrates why the chainsaw must become surgical

  • Friedberg contrasted his battery-materials company with a grant profiled in a Barry Weiss investigation. Beginning in 2019, his team invested tens of millions, secured an OEM deal, spent millions on an application, was rejected, survived, reapplied, and finally received a $100 million Energy Department grant after roughly two years.

  • The reported comparison enraged Friedberg: an organization connected to Democratic infrastructure allegedly formed and received $7 billion within 30 days—“70 times bigger than us.” The episode did not adjudicate that claim, but Friedberg’s point was institutional: functioning companies endured technical validation while politically connected applicants appeared to move at extraordinary speed.

  • Jason’s sequencing metaphor became “start with the chainsaw,” then get surgical. Cancel unused software immediately; preserve the narrow tax and permitting mechanisms that produce power, materials, or other measurable outputs after examining the details.

7. Acquisition reform is the answer to both old and new kleptocracy

  • Asked whether replacing legacy contractors with Silicon Valley companies merely creates a new kleptocracy, Lonsdale argued for contests rather than favors. He said Epirus defeated entrenched defense vendors by stopping hardened drones 9.5 times farther away, at much lower cost, yet faced specifications apparently written around incumbents’ older cathode-ray-tube approach.

  • His historical contrast was deliberately stark: a one-page requirement and six competing manufacturers produced the Colt 1911 within about three months; a modern pistol effort generated a 700-plus-page document over years and still failed to deliver. Procurement should specify outcomes, not incumbent inputs.

  • Friedberg’s safeguard was open standards: publish every RFP, specification, evaluation criterion, and test result, then provide escalation when the data contradict the award. Chamath’s related recommendation was to make the process open source and use open standards. That does not eliminate perceived conflicts for government advisers, but it makes preference visible and shifts the incentive for service toward actual patriotism.

8. Campaign-finance limits split the panel on first principles

  • Lonsdale defended super PAC spending as one form of speech among many sources of influence—celebrities, unions, doctors, health systems, and media already shape politics. Removing wealthy donors’ channel could simply increase the relative power of those other institutions.

  • Friedberg’s animal-welfare example sharpened the boundary problem: he wants the freedom to fund websites, books, community engagement, advertisements, and other efforts supporting humane treatment. A book about communism distributed near an election may influence votes without naming a candidate, making “political activity” difficult to define without censorship.

  • Jason favored hard caps, potentially $5 million-$25 million, plus public support for the final candidates. Chamath favored returning to the prior system by getting rid of Citizens United, arguing that money’s downstream effect on state and local elections, redistricting, and gerrymandering had made communities “sclerotic.”

  • A Grok query cited on-air estimated that 56% of 2024-25 political spending went to advertising and 44% elsewhere. That moved the discussion toward narrower caps on explicit candidate advertising and canvassing, but no consensus emerged.

9. CoreWeave’s technical edge turned rented GPUs into a giant business

  • CoreWeave entered its IPO process with 32 data centers, 250,000 Nvidia GPUs, $1.9 billion of 2024 revenue, and a November 2024 secondary valuation of $23 billion. Analysts expected at least $3.5 billion of new capital at more than $30 billion.

  • Chamath credited a simple architectural choice: CoreWeave avoided conventional hypervisors and let customers write closer to bare metal. That native approach improved performance and proved a startup could still maneuver around AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud through one consequential technical decision.

  • Friedberg highlighted CoreWeave’s SUNK orchestration framework for scheduling workflows and batches, along with its acquisition of Weights & Biases, which is widely used. Lonsdale instead traced the edge to the founders’ commodity-trading background: they initially acquired hardware for crypto mining, then locked down scarce chips, power, and data-center capacity as a coordinated supply trade.

10. CoreWeave’s IPO is ultimately a duration and concentration trade

  • The balance sheet is the counterweight: almost $8 billion of debt, nearly $1 billion of 2024 losses, and substantial interest expense incurred to buy GPUs. Chamath’s decisive variable was useful life—if management modeled ten years and economic obsolescence arrives after five, “this business is deeply underwater.”

  • Customer concentration compounds that risk, with roughly 60% of revenue attributed to Microsoft. The panel could not determine whether that demand represented durable Azure usage, temporary capacity for OpenAI, or another arrangement, leaving the largest revenue line difficult to forecast.

  • Friedberg compared CoreWeave with 2003 “speed doublers”: highly profitable caching services that accelerated dial-up websites until broadband erased the need. With four or five hyperscalers each spending roughly $80 billion annually, neocloud scarcity may be a transitory arbitrage—though mapping future capacity, power, GPU economics, and demand requires an economist rather than a simple software multiple.

11. A Main Street coalition could make lower equities politically tolerable

  • Chamath described MAGA’s potential durable coalition as working- and middle-class voters with limited stock or home ownership, pro-innovation technologists, and patriotic business owners. Scott Bessent’s message—“Wall Street’s done great”—and Trump’s statement that he was not watching stocks suggested policy was being reframed around Main Street.

  • Jason’s proposed market mechanism starts by accepting weaker equities. Lower asset values reduce margin borrowing, second-home purchases, car spending, and other wealth-effect consumption; that could depress inflation without requiring the same degree of labor-market pain.

  • Jason then argued that volatility drives a flight to quality: investors sell stocks and buy the 10-year Treasury, pushing its yield down. With approximately $1 trillion to refinance over 9-12 months, Chamath said borrowing near 3%-4% rather than 4.5%-5.5% could save the government trillions over time.

  • Europe supplies the mirror image. Curtailing U.S. aid and intelligence for Ukraine pushed European governments toward debt-financed defense plans; their bond yields rose as markets demanded a higher price for continuing the conflict, increasing fiscal pressure while U.S. yields could benefit.

12. Refinancing helps Main Street, but it does not repair the fiscal deficit

  • Lonsdale agreed that lower rates would revive real-estate agents, title companies, brokers, and transactions frozen by expensive mortgages. He resisted calling that merely “trickle down”: housing turnover directly activates a wide Main Street employment network.

  • His preferred disinflationary alternatives were higher productivity through AI and genuine spending cuts. Both are less destructive than manufacturing 8%-10% unemployment, though government can mainly avoid obstructing AI rather than command its productivity gains.

  • Friedberg assigned a 60/40 probability that Trump 2.0 would tolerate more short-term market pain and listen to Bessent. His caution separated financing from fiscal policy: cheaper refinancing improves the liability structure, but America must still address how it spends money and its fiscal position.

13. Peace in Ukraine does not settle what NATO is for

  • Jason put the financial ledger at roughly $175 billion of U.S. support and floated recovering $500 billion. He said that because the support was structured on a lend-lease basis, Trump had negotiating leverage. Jason calculated that receiving $500 billion would represent a 42% three-year IRR, while acknowledging that sovereignty and lives cannot be reduced to dollars.

  • Lonsdale was categorical that “Putin’s a bad guy” who should not have invaded, while arguing the prior administration mishandled deterrence. His desired endpoint was peace through strength: pressure Putin, bring both sides to the table, and require Volodymyr Zelensky to accept that some Ukrainian territory might be surrendered.

  • On NATO, Lonsdale would not casually abandon the UK, Germany, or long-standing allies. He nevertheless backed fierce conditions, including more European responsibility and pressure over what he sees as deteriorating free-speech norms.

  • Chamath widened the question to whether NATO, the UN, WHO, and similar transnational institutions have outlived their utility. Europe’s individual nations remain powerful, he argued, but the EU accumulated laws without resolving whether political identity and authority are fundamentally national or European.

14. Technological abundance weakens the resource case for empire

  • Friedberg contrasted a scarcity worldview, where powers fight for access to finite resources, with a techno-optimistic one in which AI, automation, better mining, abundant energy, housing, food, and water reduce the rationale for global policing and territorial conflict.

  • His concrete example was a reported Inner Mongolia thorium reserve said to contain 60,000 years of energy at current consumption if used in molten-salt reactors. He also cited an AI-and-sensing startup finding that rare-earth deposits may exist at orders of magnitude beyond current estimates.

  • Lonsdale accepted the direction but not the timing. Until technology produces something like 5%-6% growth, global trade, security, and nuclear nonproliferation still matter; a post-scarcity world may reduce NATO’s relevance, but policy cannot assume it has already arrived.

15. AI benchmarks are losing signal as model abundance explodes

  • Chamath called Claude 3.7 “exceptional” for automated code generation and said his consumer use had shifted largely to Grok 3. GPT-4.5 looked merely “good,” while Alibaba’s Qwen was among the best open-source models and DeepSeek remained strong despite receiving less attention.

  • Grok’s advantage was distribution inside X: click beside a post and receive sources and context without copying text or formulating a prompt. Chamath’s desired next step was an explicit veracity analysis, turning the same interface into a scalable fact-checking layer.

  • His “dirty little secret” was benchmark overfitting. Model makers optimize against SWE-bench, IMO, AIME, and other known evaluations like students drilling the SAT, so scores increasingly measure test preparation rather than broad capability; the industry needs difficult, changing, independent, verifiable tests.

  • Distribution therefore becomes decisive. Google can insert AI into search and YouTube, Meta can push a standalone assistant toward a billion users, and X already owns the information stream. Users are “drowning in abundance”—the equivalent of 100 Michelin-star restaurants opening in one city.

16. Cheap intelligence is moving from models into workflows and labor

  • Jason’s Superhuman example showed the cost curve in practice: AI now drafts every email reply and creates summaries continuously, work that would have been economically prohibitive six to 12 months earlier. Paid software can absorb that inference cost and make the assistant ambient.

  • Lonsdale described email systems that route work and create team reports automatically, relieving CEOs of being “traffic cops.” His portfolio companies use multiple models and tools such as Cognition’s Devin, with capabilities improving an estimated 10%-15% each month rather than asymptoting as he expected.

  • Chamath cited journalists and domain experts being hired by data annotators for about $40 an hour to evaluate answers and improve models. He envisioned AI-training, fact-checking, and refinement roles paying $50,000-$150,000 annually, perhaps as a new reinforcement-learning job class.

  • Friedberg no longer tries to parse each weekly release. He pays $200 monthly for ChatGPT Deep Research, uses multiple models on Google Cloud at Ohalo, and sees the model race like the early web: important, fast-moving, and currently impossible to predict winner by winner.

17. Bitcoin gets Fort Knox treatment while the rest of crypto gets rules

  • Sacks said Bitcoin merits special treatment because it was the first cryptocurrency, has no issuer, is highly decentralized, carries roughly a $2 trillion market capitalization, has resisted compromise, and is the most widely accepted crypto store of value. The reserve is a “digital Fort Knox” that Treasury is prohibited from selling.

  • He estimated the federal government once held about 400,000 BTC and sold roughly half for approximately $360 million; those coins would later have exceeded $17 billion. Roughly 200,000 may remain, but the executive order requires a government-wide audit, and assets enter the reserve only after final adjudication and victim-restitution claims are resolved.

  • Other finally forfeited assets enter a digital-asset stockpile under Treasury’s “responsible stewardship.” Treasury may sell or rebalance that portfolio, while Treasury and Commerce may devise budget-neutral ways to accumulate additional Bitcoin; Sacks rejected Jason’s proposed 0.01% crypto transaction tax, warning that “modest” taxes rarely remain modest.

  • The appearance issue remained live: Lonsdale said Trump naming specific coins looked bad and surrendered moral high ground. Sacks said the policy was not picking winners beyond Bitcoin and disclosed that Craft sold about $200 million of crypto—roughly $85 million attributable to him—while he exited Bitwise, Multicoin Capital, Blockchain Capital, and other crypto exposure before day one.

  • Sacks’s regulatory principle was freedom to trade backed by accurate disclosure. FIT21-style market structure would distinguish securities, commodities, collectibles, and other property; issuers should disclose insider ownership, sales, lockups, token creation, and scarcity, with fraud punished “like a ton of bricks.”

  • Collectibles may have no intrinsic value and still trade if that fact is clear, while functionality claims create heavier obligations. Jason pushed for prominent presentation rules and broader investor education; Sacks placed detailed implementation with Congress, the SEC, and CFTC, citing French Hill, nominee Paul Atkins, and Commissioner Hester Peirce as the relevant actors.

Jason Calacanis

We’re starting off with 3 of the 4 original band members: Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator; the sultan of science, David Friedberg; and, of course, I’m your host, Jason Calacanis. David Sacks from the original band will be on the second half of the show, where we’ll do some of the classics, including Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine.

But with us again, sitting in the red throne, is the one and only Joe Lonsdale. He is, if you can imagine, further right than Keith Rabois and Sacks. They tell him to pump the brakes. Welcome back to the program, Joe Lonsdale. How are you doing, brother?

Joe Lonsdale

Hey, Jason. I’m doing great here in Texas today.

Jason Calacanis

I see you right over the hill on the ranch. Our ranches are within 20 minutes of each other. Joe Lonsdale and I are shooting guns at our ranches. Are you on a ranch, Joe?

Joe Lonsdale

Well, I bought a bunch of the homes and connected them, so it’s kind of like a ranch, but it’s actually a suburb.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, it’s more like a compound.

Joe Lonsdale

A compound suburb.

Jason Calacanis

That creaking sound you hear is the liberals rolling in the guillotines. He bought the small town.

Joe Lonsdale is here. Of course, he is a venture capitalist and the founder of 8VC. They’ve got $6 billion in assets under management. He co-founded Palantir, OpenGov, and Addepar—3 billion-dollar-plus companies—and was an early investor in Anduril. I’m in the market for secondary shares in Anduril, if you know how to reach me, folks.

He was also involved with Oculus and Oscar Health, among his other investments. What was the feedback, Joe, on your first appearance here on the All-In Pod?

Joe Lonsdale

People loved it. You guys gave me no warning, so I was on a mobile phone sideways, but it worked out. It was great. Everyone saw it.

Joe Lonsdale

I guess it looks like people actually watch your show, Jason. It was surprising. Apparently, people tune in from time to time.

Jason Calacanis

And that’s why we call it the number-one podcast in the world. Chamath, how are you doing, brother?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’m doing really well.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, once again, giving me a ton to work with there. Friedberg, what would you like to know?

David Friedberg

Why don’t you ask me a question?

Jason Calacanis

I asked you how you’re doing. Maybe you say, “I had a great time with my kids. I took them to Disneyland,” or, “The chef made an amazing arugula salad.” You used to give me some color to work with here.

David Friedberg

Nat was in Rome all last week.

Jason Calacanis

Great. What was she doing in Rome?

David Friedberg

She had to go see her factory. She also had to renew her visa at the U.S. Embassy there.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, so she’s renewing her visa. Hopefully, she’ll be able to get back in the country. I know we’ve tightened up the borders.

David Friedberg

She’s on an EB-2 visa. She should switch to an EB-5 as soon as it’s announced.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, yes. You can get the golden visa. I think you already put a down payment on one.

Jason Calacanis

How was your week? How’s everything going at Ohalo? You’re having a productive week?

David Friedberg

As one of my management team members told me today, “It’s a very complex business.”

Jason Calacanis

That’s usually not a good sign when the conversation starts with that. Is that a way of saying everything’s going badly?

David Friedberg

No, no, we’re good. I was on the road this week and just got back. It’s hard running a business. You hire the smartest people you know, and what happens? They bring you all the problems they can’t solve. It’s never easy.

Jason Calacanis

We’ve got an incredible docket today. Let me give you a quick recap, boys, of the week since we last taped. To say the zone was flooded, in the words of Steve Bannon, would be an understatement.

Here’s your Trump tsunami for the week. Thursday, when we taped, we had the Epstein-file-dump fiasco. You remember that, Joe, right? A big zero, a big nothing burger. Then, on Friday, Zelensky was dressed down and kicked out of the White House by the vice president. The markets collapsed, and then they rebounded. On Saturday, we got a beautiful day-off video of Trump dancing down a catwalk to “Y.M.C.A.” Maybe he played some golf. He was at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

Sunday, at 9:24 a.m. Eastern, the president announced that 3 specific cryptocurrencies—Solana, Cardano, and XRP—would be in the first government strategic crypto reserve. Joe Lonsdale started tweeting. I started tweeting. Everybody was tweeting. He quickly retweeted himself, including Ethereum and Bitcoin.

The reaction was, “Wow, crazy.” Cardano dropped 70%, XRP dropped 32%, and Solana dropped 25%. Then there was this crazy trade: one whale went 50 times long on BTC and ETH, a $200 million position on a $4 million investment. Everybody’s trying to figure out who that was. I’ll leave it to you to speculate.

Then we started the week. Monday, Trump said there would be significant tariffs on Canada and Mexico. The market collapsed. He walked back the tariffs a couple of hours later, and the market started to rebound. Then, at 2:38 p.m., Trump announced a $100 billion investment from TSMC in American fabs. Huge applause for that. Our boy David Sacks was dragged out to the podium for a quick 15-second cameo. Very nicely done to our boy David Sacks.

Then, on Tuesday, we had the most chaotic State of the Union I’ve ever seen. Highlights included an angry man shaking a cane and getting kicked out. There were some auction paddles from the liberals—I don’t know what they were bidding on. There were 13 Biden mentions and one Pocahontas.

On Wednesday, we had news that the DOGE blitz might slow down. The Supreme Court chimed in with a 5–4 decision backing the federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to pay out $2 billion to USAID contractors. Then there was a closed meeting with the Senate and Elon. Maybe they discussed an approval process, maybe some voting-type things.

Here we are today, Thursday, when we’re taping. The market’s down 2% on more tariff news. Breaking news drops at 11:30: Trump announced tariffs are off for Mexico. The markets aren’t rebounding. We might be leaving NATO.

David Friedberg

Hold on. Almost there.

Jason Calacanis

We might be leaving NATO. Breaking: we’re shutting down the Department of Education. Psych—we just found out we’re not.

Gentlemen, that’s the week that was.

There are 3 things that are also interwoven in all of this. OpenAI dropped GPT-4.5, and I don’t think it was very well received. I didn’t even know. Nobody’s talking about it. Qwen, the open-source Alibaba model, dropped and seems to be really best in class. That was very interesting. Then there was a story that said Llama is going sideways—Facebook’s open-source large language model.

The markets have been doing, I think, the craziest thing I’ve actually seen in 20 years of following them. Specifically, you’re seeing the Magnificent 7 compressed toward the rest of the S&P 500, and you’re seeing this insane trade away from Europe. A ton happened this week. I don’t remember a more eventful week.

Joe, is this a little too much?

Joe Lonsdale

You guys missed the “Shalom Hamas” tweet by Trump, too, which, for a lot of us, is a big deal. He said—I don’t know if this is hello or goodbye—but he’s threatening them really strongly. For people who care about that part of the world, it’s interesting to watch what’s going to happen. That also happened.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, my Lord. “Shalom” is hello and goodbye, right? Just to clarify, as a word, you would say it both ways?

Joe Lonsdale

Shalom means peace, and it can be ambiguous.

Jason Calacanis

Maybe he’s leaving it open to interpretation. Maybe they get to pick.

Joe Lonsdale

That’s what he wrote in the tweet.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, he did?

Joe Lonsdale

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

It’s a choose-your-own-adventure for Hamas from the president of the United States.

I think we should probably get into tariffs. This is confounding to most people. Since I just did the whole rundown, I won’t go into all the details about tariffs again, but just looking at it from first principles, Joe, I asked a couple of group chats—you’re in one of them, in fact—and I have about 400 people total in these 4 group chats. What’s the strategy here? What do you think Trump is trying to accomplish? I got a range of answers.

Let me ask you: What is Trump, in your estimation, trying to accomplish with the tariffs on, the tariffs off, the tariff on, the tariffs off? As Chamath said, this is creating more chaos than any of us have ever seen in the markets.

Joe Lonsdale

Listen, Trump’s negotiating. I actually ran into David Sacks. Each senator gets one guest, and we were both guests in the Senate dining hall, hanging out with a bunch of these guys. Multiple guests were spouses of senators. Multiple guests were people who had lost kids to fentanyl, and this is a very serious issue. It’s a big thing on the populist right, as it should be for all Americans.

We’ve lost tens of thousands of young people recently to fentanyl, and Canada has done nothing about its border. You just reported breaking news that I hadn’t even heard yet, that Mexico might be off. Canada is still on. He’s using this to negotiate.

I talked to the senators and asked them what was going on because, obviously, I import things all over the place. I’d like to know what the rules are. Trump wants people to crack down on this stuff and save American lives. I think it’s a reasonable thing to use as leverage to negotiate and force them to do that.

Jason Calacanis

So you believe it’s a negotiation because of the fentanyl issue? Chamath, let me go to you, because many people are saying this has more to do with some Great Reset and maybe the 10-year note. Do you think this is about fentanyl at the border or something else?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think this is the first week where I’ve seen a real schism in how people are interpreting what’s actually happening. Trump and Elon were very much in a honeymoon period until this week, and there was a benefit of the doubt. But what I saw on X was a real divergence.

On the one hand, there were people saying DOGE is deranged, Elon is crazy, and Trump is lighting the world on fire. The other camp was saying he’s sticking to the plan. When I thought about it, if you go back to November 5, it’s important to remember that we were at a fork in the road.

There were all these important issues where, I think, the best way to generalize it was that the Democrats believed the lines should continue to be blurred. Whether that was gender or race, merit versus some other immutable trait, or fiscal and monetary policy, things were getting more and more blurred. Trump and Elon showed up and said, “Actually, we want to refocus and make the lines very visible and clear” on all those dimensions.

A majority of Americans voted for that, but I think what you’re starting to see now is the difficulty in implementing that plan. Tariffs are nuanced and complicated. On the one hand, there are short-term wins. There are impacts you could deem positive or negative to the dollar. There are impacts to U.S. bonds and bond markets. There are impacts to how countries deal with foreign reserves.

Then there’s the impact that happens when the markets react to a tariff, Trump takes it off the table, and the markets snap back. You have this weird set of boundary conditions right now. I think we’re in the difficult part of sorting through the long-term implications, and I can get to some of them later. But I think that’s where we are.

Jason Calacanis

The goal of tariffs, in your mind, is fentanyl, finance-related, or something else? Give me your definitive answer. What do you think this is about?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think what tariffs allow us to do is rebase our long-term reliance on the U.S. dollar. They allow us to rebase our ability to fund our own deficits, and they allow us to rebase the long-term ability for American companies to be economically vibrant.

Jason Calacanis

Okay. Friedberg, we’ve got one person saying fentanyl and border negotiations. We’ve got one person saying trade. Some portion of this, I hear, is “He’s throwing stuff at the wall,” “The border,” “He’s trolling the 10-year note,” “He doesn’t care about stocks,” and then there’s onshoring and manufacturing: We’re going to make it more expensive to bring things in, so why don’t you consider making things here?

Do you think that third possibility is what’s going on? David Friedberg, pick one of these 3 choices—or another. What’s going on here with tariffs?

David Friedberg

I don’t sit inside Trump’s head, and I don’t have a direct line of communication to the people constructing the theory and the policy. If I were to say what the most masterful, optimistic plan could be, I would craft it as follows: Tariffs aren’t being done in isolation. They’re being done along with a coordinated policy effort to reduce income taxes and another policy effort to reduce government spending.

Those are 3 actions, 3 legs on a stool: tariffs, reduced income taxes, and reduced government spending. They’re related because if we increase tariffs, importing products becomes more expensive. For example, I buy LED lights in my greenhouse, and the price of those LED lights went up by 25% this week.

I spoke with the CEO of an LED company and asked, “Why don’t you make the LEDs here?” There starts to become a crossover point where it makes economic sense for the company to make the LEDs here instead of sourcing them from Asia. There are 100,000 examples of this.

When the industrial supply chain goes to the lowest-cost point of production, it’s going to end up offshore when there are no tariffs. If there are tariffs, then you start doing production here. You’re increasing security for the U.S. supply chain, but you’re also increasing demand and creating a workforce.

I think the income-tax piece is critical because, in order to make the capital available to build that industry here, we need to unleash capital by reducing income taxes. The economic theory would be that capital will now flow into entrepreneurial activity—into opportunities that have emerged where it suddenly makes sense for me to make textiles, metals, materials, cars, and all this other stuff here in the United States that I otherwise wouldn’t be making.

Both corporate and personal income-tax reductions unleash capital that, instead of going to the government, goes into the private sector and into building businesses.

There’s another theory about this, which is that, as you drop the income tax, one of the key theories we’ve heard a lot lately—and will probably hear a lot more this year—is trying to get the United States to move away from an income-taxation model to a consumption-taxation model.

Effectively, tariffs create a tax when you buy certain things. Instead of getting taxed when you earn money as an individual, you get taxed when you spend money. Some people think that’s both a fairer system and a more economically vibrant system because it drives investment in the things people want to produce. The money goes into production.

Jason Calacanis

Do you think that’s a really interesting economic theory?

David Friedberg

I’m not opposed to seeing an experiment play out where we look at a shift from income taxation to consumption taxation and see whether it affects economic growth and productivity. It hasn’t been done in 150 years. There are economic theorists on both sides saying that it does or doesn’t work.

Let me say one last thing. By reducing government spending, we’re moving workers from the government into the private workforce. As new industries pop up and investments start getting made in building new industry onshore, where are the workers going to come from?

Remember, the government is 30% of U.S. GDP today. If that’s not a great way to invest money, maybe private industry is better at investing money and employing people. That would unleash the workforce and counterbalance the inflation we’re experiencing.

There’s a lot of inflation because of tariffs. By reducing government spending, that’s the offset to inflation. Those 3 actions are 3 legs of a stool, and they’re all interrelated. That would be my grand theory of what might be going on.

Jason Calacanis

This is an interesting triangulation theory that people have been speculating about. There are a couple of caveats here, Joe. Number one, we do have a lower-income-tax and lower-services experiment. It’s called Florida and Texas, along with a couple of states where they have lower income tax and more consumption tax. We pay a lot more in real-estate taxes here—something we consume.

Putting that aside, the really interesting issue is that we’re at the lowest unemployment rate of our lifetime, around 4%. Where are all these workers going to come from? What do you think, Joe? Now that you’ve heard the other 2 panelists discuss it, what are we trying to get to? Where’s the destination at the end of this term?

Trump is a lame duck. He can go wild here. He’s not running for reelection. What do you think he wants to see? Does he just want to cement some sort of legacy? If so, what’s that legacy, and how do these actions equal his goals?

Joe Lonsdale

I agree with what David was saying, Jason. It’s also important to mention that, over the last 4 years, the economy has looked okay partly because the government has been hiring like mad.

Having twice as many people harassing me—I just got back yesterday from an action on an audit that has been harassing me for 3 years, and they found nothing—or having twice as many people doing things like running TSA or pushing papers around in the Department of Labor doesn’t add output to the economy.

It does seem like it makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a million workers out of the consulting class around D.C., out of the paper-pusher class around D.C., and deploy them into the productive economy. Elon and Trump have both been saying that. I think David is 100% right.

A lot of my companies think the tariff stuff is pushing them to build more things here. I’m not a huge fan of tariffs personally, but they definitely make sense for defense, and they make sense for negotiating with countries. It is pushing certain people, including me, to build more things in America.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Here’s where tariffs make a lot of sense. If you have markets where there are domestic alternatives, or where things are fundamentally commodities, there’s no reason tariffs can’t work to create incentives to redomicile economic productivity inside the United States. That’s a slam dunk, I think.

Jason Calacanis

And Chamath, there’s another twist on that, too, which I think we should all acknowledge.

Chamath Palihapitiya

America has some really tough environmental laws. Despite what Jason may think of me, I don’t want my daughters growing up with messy air, messy water, or a screwed-up country.

Jason Calacanis

I don’t think that of you. I know you’re a nature guy. You’re a classic Bush guy.

Chamath Palihapitiya

In China, Indonesia, and all these other countries, they’re just shitting all over the environment as they make things. I think tariffs are very reasonable in that case. It’s not fair to make it more expensive for us because we’re doing it well, and then outsource it to them so they can destroy everything.

There are cases where it does make sense. The other side of the tariff knife is that, if there are markets where you’re making something fundamentally innovative and you’re the only maker, the problematic part is that tariffs can make the price of a product for which there are no competitive alternatives go very, very high.

That’s inflationary, and it slows down consumption. If that consumption isn’t just of something nice to have but of something people must have, then it becomes problematic.

You could see how tariffs might affect certain industries. If there are innovative drugs, I think that’s problematic. If there are innovative technologies for which there’s only one vendor, that’s problematic. All of those issues need to get sorted out.

On balance, in commodity markets—look at autos—there are so many purveyors and providers of autos and OEMs around the world that having a compensatory system doesn’t seem unreasonable. A tit-for-tat tariff seems reasonable.

But in markets where, for example, you need a specific piece of equipment from ASML to build a chip, and now that machine is 25% or 30% more expensive, with the cost passed downstream, it becomes speculative and fragile.

Jason Calacanis

This is dangerous, though, because I agree with you in theory, but if everyone lobbies for their thing to be an exception, you end up with a very crony system. You have to be careful how you define these things.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Exactly. This is why, sector by sector, you can probably apply a smell test. If there are multiple providers, or if something is a commodity, it’s easier to absorb the tariff in the short term.

Maybe that’s the right way to think about it. If Trump believes everything should be tariffed, instead of debating whether something should be tariffed, perhaps the right thing to debate is when. You have to put things on a much longer glide path so that you don’t create inflation out of nowhere, hold back American businesses, or hurt American consumers.

David Friedberg

This is a key point because you need predictability to make investments, and reciprocity matters. There are 2 important points Chamath is making.

On reciprocity, these things haven’t been looked at for a while. I’m not sure how they got so out of whack, but just to put some facts to it: When we send cars to the European Union, they get a 10% tariff, but when we receive their cars, it’s a 2.5% tariff.

Who let it get out of whack? I’m not sure. Why not make reciprocity perfect? If you say 10%, we say 10%. If you say 2.5%, we say 2.5%. That would make a lot more sense.

To put some numbers on government employees, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of our spending is not employee-related. But if you look over the last 2 administrations, we’ve added 1.3 million additional employees. This doesn’t include contractors, so we don’t know what USAID was doing with NGOs and contractors. I think that’s where we need some clarity.

To Chamath’s point, this all has to become predictable. You cannot put tariffs on and off every week, or how does your friend Dave, who wants to build LED lighting, know whether he should build a factory and invest $10 million in it?

Jason Calacanis

You disagree with the number of employees? Do you want to address that?

Chamath Palihapitiya

The government accounts for 30% of GDP in the United States. That’s an extraordinary sum. The direct employees of federal agencies are a much smaller percentage, but that doesn’t matter.

The direct employees of federal agencies are a fraction of the people employed indirectly by government spending. Many government agencies write checks to large contractors, subcontractors, and third-party service providers that do the work for them.

The money gets transferred, those companies employ the people, and they do the work. It doesn’t technically show up on federal government payroll registers, but these are people who are indirectly employed by federal spending.

It’s important to acknowledge that a large percentage of the U.S. workforce is indirectly supported by federal dollars.

Joe Lonsdale

It’s gone up massively with NGOs, too. You’ve had about 4 million people employed by contractors in D.C., 1.6 million more at the states through federal spending, and then you have the NGOs. No one knows what the Biden administration was spending on them because it took down the data. I used to see the numbers in 2020, so we don’t even know how much money was involved, but we know it was hundreds of billions.

The number-one thing about how DOGE isn’t being done fully is that Elon is doing an amazing job. Whether he cuts $500 billion, $1 trillion, or a lot more, the senators and congressmen are not willing to take the cuts out of their bill.

The reconciliation bill is talking about cutting $1 trillion to $2 trillion over 10 years. That’s ridiculous. If it were equal to what Elon is doing, it would be at least a $5 trillion cut.

I’ve pushed a bunch of them, and they say, “The Congressional Budget Office,” and all these other things. I’m sure there are some tough issues, but this is crazy. We need to see what the DOGE cuts are and cut $5 trillion. None of these people have the balls to do it. There’s not the political will to do it, and that’s my interpretation. There are no cojones.

Jason Calacanis

Let me show you one chart to back that up. I have my new “disgraciados.” Chamath, you want to talk about software and waste? Look at this. According to DOGE, there are 35,855 ServiceNow licenses across 3 products, and they’re being used by only 84 people. There are 11,000 Acrobat licenses with 0 users.

That’s absolutely abhorrent. I’m saying it right now: I want an investigation into procurement. Who sold this? Who bought it? This could be a crime. This could be fraud. There could be kickbacks.

Joe Lonsdale

You’re totally correct. If ServiceNow ever wants to work with the government again, Mr. President, I want them to pay us back for the unused licenses. I want a full audit for the last 10 years. If they don’t pay that money back and give us a credit, hold on—list them as banned forever.

Jason Calacanis

It’s not necessarily ServiceNow’s fault. It may be the ineptitude of the people who bought the licenses, but they should still give us a credit. I want the money back for the American people.

Joe Lonsdale

I do think Adobe has the worst subscriptions. Have you ever tried to cancel an Adobe subscription? It’s impossible.

Jason Calacanis

The only thing harder than canceling an Adobe license is canceling the Wall Street Journal.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Let me say something about the budget because Joe brings up something important. We’re getting to the phase where the details are complicated, and they now matter.

We’ve talked about repealing the Inflation Reduction Act in its totality. That was a statement, and theoretically there’s a lot of money there. But the details are now becoming complicated.

FERC published a report this past week. What do you think it said was the percentage of incremental electricity generated from renewables versus nonrenewables?

I’ll tell you the answer: It was almost 91% in December. If you tie 2 huge initiatives together—how do we find a budget that saves money, and how do we continue to win in AI—you might have thought those things weren’t related. But we know that AI needs a tremendous amount of power.

Whatever you thought you knew, you have to rewrite it, because what Elon has shown is that we now need to create megaclusters: 100,000 GPUs going to 1 million GPUs. All the power forecasting we have is miscast. It doesn’t even account for this.

There are 35,000 applications into FERC to get approved to generate electricity. That’s going to meander through an administrative rigmarole. There is a 5-year delay to get a gas turbine into America and online. If you ordered one today, the fastest you could get it turned on would be 2030. The fastest you could get nuclear power turned on would be 2035.

We don’t have the ability to generate incremental electricity very quickly, except through renewables. But if you rip out the IRA, there are many parts of it that are trash. Nick, I don’t know if you can find it, but Barry Weiss found this insane thing that made me so angry.

It was a 30-day grant process that resulted in a $7 billion grant to some shell organization.

David Friedberg

That was throwing gold bars off the castle.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The other part of the IRA—this narrow part—is what it did to reinforce tax incentives and tax equity. That’s a $200 billion market that incentivizes the 90% of energy generation.

My point is that, when you start getting into the details, the House Ways and Means Committee has to figure out which parts to put back. This is going to be hard because if you get rid of the whole thing, you remove 90% of the incentives for incremental energy generation. Then there aren’t enough electrons. There isn’t enough electricity, and you lose the AI race.

We’re in the hard part now, where the details really matter.

Jason Calacanis

You have to start with the chainsaw. We saw that at Twitter. Maybe that’s where we are. You cut out the ServiceNow and Adobe subscriptions, and then you work on something more difficult.

David Friedberg

I want to do a rant on this pop-up NGO situation. To me, this is the worst of America, and it makes me so angry. I’m on the other side of this. I started a company with these guys from Tesla to make battery materials in the United States in 2019.

We put in tens of millions of dollars, got a deal with a big OEM, and then you see these Department of Energy grants. We spent millions of dollars filing a very detailed plan to build battery metals and battery capacity in America. We got rejected. It was an entire yearlong process.

We put it past us, kept working, found more deals, found a way to survive, raised a little bit more money, and applied again. We got a $100 million grant. That’s what just happened this year.

Then yesterday I read this Barry Weiss investigation. Somebody connected to the Democratic infrastructure had a shell organization that got a grant 70 times bigger than ours. We’ve made things. We have deals with OEMs. We had to validate every step of the way. We were rejected once. Our process to get a $100 million DOE program took 2 years.

These people showed up in 30 days and got $7 billion. That’s just wrong.

Jason Calacanis

Why didn’t you lead with DEI? You would have gotten $1 billion. You led with the wrong thing. You were providing a product or service people actually need.

David Friedberg

This is why you don’t have equity in there for the minerals. This is why it’s so frustrating to build for the government. This is what Palantir and SpaceX had to deal with. That’s why they both sued the government.

All the friends who used to be the CEO, who used to be the general, who made the right donations, and who had the right kid on the board—it’s all corrupt. Then the substantive people have to work. How do they give $7 billion in 30 days? We’re going to find out. You’ve got a bunch of Democratic operatives on the board.

Jason Calacanis

Let me challenge you guys on one point. There are now claims by reporters and third parties saying there’s a new form of kleptocracy, with all the friends of Silicon Valley installing their friends as agency heads, undersecretaries, and so on, which is going to benefit Silicon Valley investors and companies.

Joe, Chamath, how do you react to the claim that there’s now this new kind of kleptocratic movement? The old guard is gone, and now we have a new guard with Palantir and Anduril.

Joe Lonsdale

When I go to D.C., what I’m asking for is fair competition. If I win, I want my company to be able to win the contract. The way it’s worked for 20 years is that companies like Epirus—you just raised $250 million this week; it’s a great company—and L3, Raytheon, and Northrop have been in and out of government for decades. They’ve gotten tens of billions of dollars for the same technology areas.

When we went head-to-head with them, we didn’t just beat them by a little bit. We shot down the hardened drones 9.5 times farther away, with the same size and power. We completely wiped the floor with them.

Jason Calacanis

What was the cost difference between the bids? Were you saving the government massive amounts of money?

Joe Lonsdale

Massive amounts of money. I invested only $30 million or $40 million in the whole thing at that point, and they spent billions.

You talk to the chief of staff of the Air Force, the 4-star general running it, and he says, “Joe, this was written 3 years ago. It looks like Raytheon probably helped write it. They required all these things, and the way you’re doing it…”

I said, “I’m using a chip instead of a cathode-ray tube. That’s why it’s working so much better.”

He said, “It was written for the way they’re doing it. I could overrule it, but it would break a lot of glass, so you probably wouldn’t get in for 3 years. Everyone knows you’re the best, but it’s too stressful to give it to you right now.”

That is so frustrating. What I’m doing is not going to D.C. and saying, “Give my companies money.” I’m saying, “Make this a functional, logical process and give me a chance to win it against the best.” That would be 100 times better for the country.

Jason Calacanis

How do you make that transparent, and how do you avoid the perception of conflict and kleptocracy?

Joe Lonsdale

It’s acquisition reform. This is a really important story. We were in the Philippine jungles in the early 1910s and needed new pistols because ours were terrible. There was a one-page document outlining what was needed. Six arms manufacturers competed, and that’s how we got the Colt 1911 in about 3 months. It won by a large amount, and it’s an awesome gun.

Twelve years ago, we had a 700-page document that bureaucrats spent years writing to outline what they needed for a new pistol. It was a long, comical document. They still don’t have a new pistol today.

The way to do it is to create a very clear process that’s specific about the outcomes, not the inputs. Then you have a contest, and you make sure that it’s obvious who wins. It’s not that we’re slightly better. We’re shaming them. The only way they can stop us is by playing these games.

David Friedberg

If you’re in the administration, or if you join some part of the administration—whether you’re a full-time employee, a special government employee, or just a volunteer—there’s going to be a perception of impropriety or influence-peddling. That comes with the territory.

When the administration was being formed, I had an opportunity to work with some people to write proposals for what could happen in some of these bigger government organizations where there are huge pockets of spending. I spent most of my time on what Joe talked about: How do you create open standards so it’s very clear what the competition is?

The rules on the ground can’t be manipulated by people rolling out of government into private industry or by somebody with a deep relationship because of lobbying. Those things pervert the clarity of what should happen.

This time around, a different class of people is going to be seen on the populist side. It’s critical that all of us who are involved promote transparent, open standards. Publish every RFP, every specification, and every evaluation criterion. Make these things as measurable as possible.

If you’re going to field a drone, there’s an incredibly detailed set of data that should be published. It’s not dissimilar to how the FAA asks for flight-test data. You should be able to review it.

There also needs to be an escalation and a release valve, so that if somebody gets a deal through favoritism and you think you’re structurally better based on the data, you can say, “Hold on. This is being manipulated.”

You fight back not just against this version of a potential winning side versus a losing side, but forever in the future. The government should be open and transparent. Every point at which it makes a decision and gives money should be measurable and known.

Jason Calacanis

You guys got it exactly right. There’s transparency and oversight, obviously, but there are whistleblowers and there’s the role of the press to fact-check and check in on all of this as a safeguard, with the public getting engaged.

One of the great things DOGE has done is have a Twitter handle where I can pull up, “Here’s what’s going on with these licenses,” and make an example. That kind of transparency helps.

Finally, we have to look at campaign finance. That’s where a lot of the appearance of impropriety exists. Go back to this other thing because it’s important. It just occurred to me that, if what you said happens, the incentive in America is to position yourself to have one of these roles.

The reason is what David said: There’s a chance to preferentially nudge an opportunity your way.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

Why do people sit on committees? Why do people volunteer at that level? If you introduce open standards, then the real incentive to go do this should be that you’re patriotic and want to help.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think the best thing all of our friends could do is make it all open source and use open standards. That would be an incredible artifact for America.

Jason Calacanis

Joe, you’re telling us, “I trust these people. They’re our friends.” That works with all of us because we know them, and we know they’re going to do the right thing. If you already have a lot of money, some incremental amount of money isn’t going to move the needle.

It would be absurd to think that David Sacks is going to give up 4 years of income and sell all his positions because that’s somehow good for his balance sheet. It’s not. He’s going to miss out on 4 years of AI and the massive run-up of our lifetime in order to serve the country.

Joe Lonsdale

I want to push back on the incentive point. I know a lot of the people who are getting involved in this, and I really do think they’re there to fight for the country. I don’t say that naively. These people really are there for the right reasons, for the most part.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I know. I’m just saying that, generally, over the last 50 years, there’s been an implied sense of this. Goldman Sachs had a direct line to becoming Treasury secretary. If you were the CEO of Goldman Sachs, you became Treasury secretary.

Don’t you think that was discussed among the partners at Goldman? Do we not think that, on the margins, it beneficially helped Goldman? Of course it did. We’d be naive to think otherwise.

My point is not that my friends are doing this for that reason. My point is just that, going forward, the best thing all of our friends could do is make it open source and use open standards.

Joe Lonsdale

I think you’re right about the standards, but I want to push back on the incentive point. I know a lot of these people, and I really do think they’re there to fight for the country.

Jason Calacanis

I think Joe telling us, “I trust these people. They’re our friends,” works with all of us. But people don’t believe it. Just like you talked about the kleptocracy and the revolving door to Raytheon or whoever, people have talked about it forever.

What you need are whistleblower protections, journalists going after this, and strong whistleblower laws. Bari Weiss is doing old-school investigative journalism. We need to keep reinforcing those laws.

But I’m going back to the point that we need to limit campaign contributions. We have to get rid of super PACs because they create the appearance of impropriety. The appearance of impropriety with Trump’s memecoin and that announcement on Sunday about the crypto reserve doesn’t help the mission Trump is trying to accomplish.

Joe, maybe you can speak to that. Should the government, after all these donations from massive numbers of people—I saw them at the crypto ball, and they were all being tweeted by Trump—be doing this? That looks terrible. Tell me what you objected to with the coins, the memecoin, and the announcement of the crypto reserve.

Joe Lonsdale

I agree with you on the tweet, but you’re sneaking 2 things together here, so I want to be precise. There are many different ways that people can help politicians.

One way is that, if you’re a celebrity—even your show at this point—you can affect what people think. That’s powerful. There are other ways. If you’re part of a big union or a government union, that’s very powerful. If you’re part of the American Medical Association or a healthcare system, doctors and health systems are very powerful in our society, even without super PACs.

A super PAC is a form of free speech. It’s true that wealthy people have the ability to influence things through that speech, but it’s one of many forms of power. If you cut that off, you’re saying, “I don’t want Elon and Joe to have as much say, but I do want celebrities, doctors, and union members to have even more say.”

You’re dealing with a complicated situation with lots of forms of power. I agree with you on the tweet. I saw David and me give each other a hug, so I think we’re all good, but I was very frustrated with the posts of Trump mentioning specific coins.

I don’t know who was trading them beforehand. It just looks bad. We’re fighting all this grift and doing all these things where we have the moral high ground. I don’t want to give up the moral high ground with these silly schemes. That’s 100% the case.

Jason Calacanis

Are you saying that there are many forms of influence and you think super PACs and rich people should be able to—

Joe Lonsdale

I think speech is important.

Jason Calacanis

You think $50 million and $2 million donations are fair for democracy?

Joe Lonsdale

I think speech is very important. The ability for me to say, “I’m studying this. It’s corrupt. It’s been corrupt for 50 years. We have to get together and stand against these healthcare systems and crazy defense companies that have captured and broken everything”—I think my ability to speak and convince people is valuable. I should be allowed to do that.

Jason Calacanis

When you say “speech,” do you mean writing very large checks?

Joe Lonsdale

You have to be careful. The reason the Supreme Court ruled in favor of super PACs is not just about giving them money. You’re not giving them the money; you’re speaking yourself. When Elon spends $300 million, he’s spending it many times by putting out his own speech.

Jason Calacanis

What about you, Chamath? Do you think Soros and Elon—let’s take the names out of it—should there be a cap on what someone can donate to super PACs? This creates a massive appearance of impropriety. Whether it’s crypto or Soros on the Democratic side, it seems like a problem.

I’m in favor of hard caps, whether it’s $5 million, $10 million, or $25 million. There need to be caps. We should put a fund together for the last 2 or 3 candidates and let them get that money from the government to run their campaigns, as other countries do.

Chamath Palihapitiya

It’s important to note that this pendulum has swung pretty wildly out of whack with Citizens United. It’s not just a Republican thing. There are a bunch of factions.

There’s the George Soros faction, the liberal Democratic faction, and we forget that Zuckerberg spent $350 million in 2020. There’s the Koch brothers’ faction, and then there’s what showed up this year with Elon.

My point is that there are all kinds of pockets of spending in all kinds of ways. The question is whether Citizens United should have allowed this kind of spending and whether we’re better off as a democracy because of it.

The reason I would favor going back to the way things were is that I think the biggest problem is redistricting and gerrymandering, and the amount of influence that takes place downstream inside state and local elections. There are places that are so sclerotic and stuck.

At the federal level, despite all the spending, you still see reasonable and healthy competition between 2 presidential candidates. It’s much more difficult to see dynamism lower and lower down the ballot. The reason to get rid of Citizens United, from my perspective, is that you’d have much more vibrant local, state, and mayoral elections. Those things have huge impacts on quality.

Jason Calacanis

So you and I are in that camp. Joe’s in the other. Friedberg, your thoughts? You’re the deciding vote here. It’s 2–1 on the panel.

David Friedberg

You just said to me that you think we should go back. The Supreme Court is on my side, so you guys are in trouble.

What does it mean to spend money on a political point of view? It means you can put out a book. The other side wanted to censor books. If I want to pay someone to make a book for me, pay people to engage the community, or pay someone to make a website to promote my point of view, I should be able to do that.

If my point of view is related to a vote Congress might take, a candidate running for election, taxes, or some other social issue, I don’t know how you can clearly delineate the difference between a political party or candidate and my having a point of view on an issue.

If I care deeply about animal welfare, which I do, and I had enough money to influence people’s point of view to improve animal welfare through laws and candidates, I would spend that money. I should have the right to do so. I shouldn’t feel restricted from publicly expressing my voice, making websites, putting up billboards, putting up posters, or buying ads in newspapers to tell people how wrong it is to treat animals the way we do—to slaughter them and keep them living for their short lives in horrific conditions.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Can I ask you a question? If the way to get your point of view into power were to redistrict certain places so that you could get a majority of people ideologically aligned with you elected, would you do that as well? Forget the ads. This would be a different form of electoral influence. Would you do it?

David Friedberg

How do you spend money to redistrict?

Chamath Palihapitiya

You get certain people elected by bringing people out to vote, and then you get that person to join a coalition that redistricts.

David Friedberg

Maybe bringing people out to vote should be illegal. That seems reasonable to me.

Jason Calacanis

To your point, Friedberg, you asked how you define it. What I’m trying to point out is that, for every dollar that goes into politics, I’d ask you to suspend disbelief that 100% of it goes to ads.

David Friedberg

No, I’m saying that a very small amount—not a very small amount, maybe 10% to 20%—goes to ads, and 80% goes to all kinds of shady stuff. Canvassing is part of that, too.

Jason Calacanis

You call it shady, but what if I want to make a bunch of websites? What if I want to have people go out and express a point of view in the town square? There are other aspects of what you might call political activity.

David Friedberg

I’m saying that’s fine. That’s in the 10% bucket.

Jason Calacanis

What I’m trying to tell you explicitly is that the way it’s spent today is not the way you think.

David Friedberg

I think the fact that someone calls it shady might be because they disagree with my point of view. If they agree with my point of view, they might not call it shady.

Jason Calacanis

I play with the conditions on the field, but if you look at what’s happening today—using dollar incentives to incentivize people is allowed. You can pay people to vote today.

Let’s get Joe involved. You heard Friedberg. You’re broadly aligned, but we can define some specific things that are obviously political. For example, the window when you spend the money, telling people, “She’s for this and he’s for that,” is clearly a political ad.

Joe Lonsdale

You could take those ads and canvassing, define a subset of behaviors, and say you can raise up to a certain amount of money per person in that way. Those things are explicitly political when you tell people it’s about candidate A versus candidate B.

Jason Calacanis

You could say, “We’re not going to mention any candidates. We’re going to talk about puppies,” and then try to increase your Q score on the podcast by saving puppies.

David Friedberg

Animal welfare is a bipartisan issue and something we should all agree on.

Jason Calacanis

Don’t trigger Friedberg. I’ve got 33 acres of paradise. I’m going to save every animal in Central Texas.

David Friedberg

I’ll give you money to do that.

Jason Calacanis

I’ve got a deal.

Joe Lonsdale

I agree with what Chamath was saying about gerrymandering. We could use AI for that, but that’s a separate conversation.

The problem, at the end of the day, with defining what’s political is that the boundary cases are really tough. You end up needing an effective censorship rule.

For example, I write a book about the dangers of communism, explain how it’s linked to things going on today, and give it out to people who are going to vote. There are so many boundary cases. You could say, “You can spend up to $10 million a year doing political activity,” and that gives you a cap.

Jason Calacanis

This is not political activity. It’s my art.

David Friedberg

It’s an artistic piece.

Jason Calacanis

But when you put in the book, “Vote for Biden,” then we would say—

David Friedberg

You see what I’m saying? It becomes complicated.

Jason Calacanis

I just ran it through Grok, and the answer was that 56% of all spending happened to be on ads. Forty-four percent of all dollars in 2024 and 2025 was spent on other things.

David Friedberg

If you put canvassing in there, I bet it’s 75%.

Jason Calacanis

If we put a hard cap on those 2 activities, I’d be for that. But let’s keep going. We’ve got a bunch to talk about in the market. Let’s talk about CoreWeave.

If you don’t know CoreWeave, it’s part of a new type of infrastructure provider called a neocloud. That’s a fancy way of saying they use GPUs to build data centers.

This is a really interesting company because it got onto GPUs early and locked in a large number of Nvidia’s GPUs. It has 32 data centers with 250,000 Nvidia GPUs. As an example, when Elon built the largest, fastest data center, Colossus, it had 100,000 GPUs. CoreWeave is a really, really big company.

They’re going to do an IPO. Analysts estimate they’ll raise at least $3.5 billion at a valuation of more than $30 billion. Their secondary valuation was $23 billion in November 2024, so this is cooking with oil.

They had incredible revenue—$1.9 billion in 2024—but if you look at how much revenue they had 2 years ago, the growth is amazing. It’s almost 10 times each year or something crazy like that.

They’re very unprofitable, though—almost $1 billion in losses in 2024—and a lot of that is interest payments on their debt. They have almost $8 billion in debt, a huge debt load, to buy all these GPUs. That has been the question we’ve been talking about: Are these GPUs and these neoclouds sustainable, or are they just a fancy way of saying, “I’ll give you a GPU”?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’ll give you a couple of factoids about CoreWeave that I find super impressive. The first question is, why didn’t AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure eat these guys for breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

As it turns out, CoreWeave made one very specific technical decision that I think was extremely valuable: It did not use hypervisors.

Jason Calacanis

Explain what that is.

Chamath Palihapitiya

A hypervisor is basically a middleware layer of software that allows you to abstract units of compute and make them available. CoreWeave instead allowed you to write directly to the bare metal.

That very native approach allowed the company to get a lot of traction. It’s a really interesting example of how one simple technical design decision can allow you to build what looks, at least from a revenue perspective, like an incredible business.

Kudos to them. It’s cool to see that you can still maneuver around the big giants. The big question with CoreWeave is the period of amortization and the useful life of these NVIDIA GPUs.

A lot of their losses are interest payments. As long as they’ve calculated correctly in their models that they need to borrow all this money to buy the GPUs from NVIDIA, this could be a killer business.

To the extent that they got that calculation wrong—if they thought the useful life was 10 years but it turns out to be 5—this business is deeply underwater. That’s the bet. They’ve made a lot of headway and are going to continue doing good technical engineering, but the other side of it is the useful life.

Is the technology curve right? Will Moore’s law and all these other things work in their favor or against them?

Jason Calacanis

People say the useful lifespan of GPUs is 3 to 5 years before the next generation is so much more powerful, especially in relation to power consumption, that it’s worth replacing them.

With old servers and CPUs running Facebook, it’s a totally different story. You can keep those running for 5 to 7 years before they’re not worth running anymore.

Joe, what do you think?

Joe Lonsdale

You’re right that there’s an economic question involving power and all these other things. I actually know Brandon. He lives near me in Montana. He’s a very smart guy.

The really interesting thing about how they built this, which I think is relevant going forward, is that these guys were commodities traders. They were originally buying things to mine Bitcoin and do other things like that. They realized, as commodities traders, that there’s a certain supply and demand in the market—not just of GPU chips, but also of data centers.

What they did was lock down the full supply of tons of data centers, tons of the power they needed, and tons of the chips. They’re very thoughtful. They’re effectively traders, very economic, and I think they’ve modeled this well.

Chamath Palihapitiya

That explains the technical decision because, as commodities traders, they would need very low-latency throughput to transact efficiently.

Jason Calacanis

There is one vulnerability here for the company, Friedberg. They’ve had massive revenue growth, but they have a dependency on one customer: 60% of revenue now comes from Microsoft.

Microsoft seems to have done this either to service the OpenAI deal, where it needed to provide a bunch of infrastructure, or it might be for Azure. It’s unclear. People have been asking this question for a couple of years now.

What do you think of a business with 60% revenue dependency on one client?

David Friedberg

This is how these things work. One client tends to grow really, really fast. They also do this orchestration framework called SUNK—I know a little bit about it—that makes it easy to schedule workflows and batches. A lot of other people are using it well.

They just bought Weights & Biases, which basically everyone uses.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a great buy. They’re killers for training.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think they’re crushing it in training.

Jason Calacanis

Sacks said Microsoft might not be using this for long-term usage. Friedberg, your thoughts on CoreWeave?

David Friedberg

I’m not as deep as you guys are. In 2003, I worked for 9 months at a private-equity firm. I would cold-call companies that hadn’t raised venture capital, were profitable, and were growing, and see if they would take our money.

I spent a lot of time looking at businesses that were called “speed doublers.” I don’t know if you remember those companies. In 2003, a lot of people were still using dial-up internet. You could pay $9.99 a month for a speed doubler.

It would set the proxy server on your browser to be their server, and they had a cache of many popular sites on the internet. When you browsed the internet, everything loaded faster because they had fast servers and caches.

These companies were doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, had 50%-plus EBIT margins, and were growing more than 100% a year. We spent a lot of time looking at them.

I thought it felt like a transitory business—an arbitrage between where we were and where we were going. That’s what ended up happening. Many of them cash-flowed out. The founders took money, got a smart private-equity recap, got some money out, and ran at a low multiple of EBITDA.

I worry about a business like CoreWeave where 4 or 5 companies are each doing $80 billion of capex this year to create infrastructure that effectively replaces what CoreWeave offers as a service.

If I were doing diligence on this business, that’s where I’d spend most of my time: What is the capacity going to be in 1 or 2 years? When broadband hit the internet, you didn’t need speed doublers anymore. Do you really need to pay as much as you’re paying today? Is there going to be as much demand? How much of this gets bundled into Google Cloud or AWS in the future?

That would be my macro hesitation and caution in the diligence process.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I ran my diligence on this thing, and you basically need an economist to map it all out. It’s the same question for data centers in a related way. You need to map everything, and I don’t have those numbers. You’re right—it’s hard to figure out.

David Friedberg

That’s right.

Jason Calacanis

The founders control the company. They sold a few shares—maybe $150 million each—but they’ve kept most of their position. They’re smart guys, so we’ll see. They still own the majority, I believe.

I don’t want to speak negatively about the business. I haven’t spent much time on it.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The worst thing that can happen when you speak negatively about somebody’s business is that you end up on somebody’s list for a decade.

Jason Calacanis

What is it like to be on somebody’s list for a decade?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I don’t know. The ratings keep going up for This Week in Startups and All-In, so I’ll take it.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s move on. Chamath, you and I have been going back and forth in the group chat, and you’ve been talking about Main Street versus Wall Street and what’s going on in the markets. There are European bond issues, and it seems like the Trump campaign may not be thinking about the stock market as much as it’s thinking about the bond market.

Explain your take on the markets right now.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think there are 3 markets that are important. There’s the long end of the U.S. curve, meaning the 10-year bond yield. Then there’s the U.S. equity market. The next most important market is the European bond and equity markets together, and I’ll explain why in a second.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I do think we’re in a secular shift. The MAGA majority and the base of people who can be a reliable voting bloc in the future are working- and middle-class people who don’t necessarily own a lot of stocks or homes. That’s a large group.

The second cohort is people who are pro-innovation and pro-tech. The third is patriotic business owners. I think that cohort is very large.

When the core strategists inside MAGA figure this out, one of the big takeaways will be that they’re not going to care about the stock market and Wall Street. A lot of policies will be viewed through the lens of Main Street.

You’re starting to see this rhetoric now. One example is from Scott Bessent, and the second was from Trump himself.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s play the Bessent clip.

Scott Bessent

Over the medium term, which is what we’re focused on, it’s a focus on Main Street. Wall Street’s done great, and Wall Street can continue to do fine, but we have a focus on small business and the consumer. We’re going to rebalance the economy and bring manufacturing jobs home.

Jason Calacanis

The second one was just today. Trump said he’s not looking at the stock market.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’m not sure I believe that, but okay.

Jason Calacanis

Why is this valuable? If the government of America is incentivized to implement policies that crack the equity markets, it could actually be good in some ways.

Number one, if you deflate asset prices, you also deflate inflation. Here’s an example. NVIDIA is ripping at all-time highs, and you think, “I’m so cash-rich.” You can get a margin loan, take that money, reinvest it in a second or third home, sell some stock, and start buying cars. All of this drives consumptive behavior that isn’t there if the markets are much lower.

If you rebase the equity values people have, you depress the amount of free cash flow they have to spend on other things. It’s a deflationary tactic.

How the bond market reacts is that, if the stock market goes down, you get a flight to quality. People say, “There’s volatility in the stock market. I don’t want to deal with it going down. I’ll sell, take some chips off the table, and buy 10-year bonds.”

Chamath Palihapitiya

When you buy bonds, the interest rate goes down. Why is that good for America? We have $1 trillion we need to borrow in the next 9 months. If we can pay 3%, 3.8%, or 4%, we save trillions of dollars versus paying 4.5%, 5%, or 5.5%.

The third thing is what happened this week because of the Ukraine and Zelensky situation. Trump said we’re totally hands-off on this war. I’m not going to debate whether that’s right or wrong, but that’s what he said. We’re going to curtail aid, and we’re not even going to share intelligence. They’re on their own.

What did that force? The Europeans had to circle the wagons and say, “We’re going to step up.” They announced a 4-year plan to borrow money to invest in defense. The United Kingdom specifically said it would borrow in a clever way so that it wouldn’t count in the debt-to-GDP calculations of the country.

How did the bond market react? It said, “If you want to fight this war, obviously you’re allowed to do whatever you want, but the cost is going to go up.” European bond yields have been going up every day. This is severe fiscal pressure on these governments. I don’t know how they sustain their deficits and raise more debt.

All of this is happening at the same time. I think Trump is pro-Main Street. Equity markets don’t get bid. Bond markets respond positively, and yields go down, which is good for America. The administration extracts itself from spending programs.

Russia and Ukraine is more than a spending program, but narrowly, it is a spending program. If you take that off the table, the responsibility goes to Europe. The markets are saying this isn’t right. They want this war to end, and they’re going to make it more expensive for Europe to continue fighting it.

Put it all together, and it’s a very interesting moment in the markets. I haven’t seen one like this in a very long time.

Jason Calacanis

Joe, do you think refinancing our debt is the end game here? There are maybe 10% of people who seem to have fallen into that camp when I queried the group chats.

If we can depress everything, lower consumption, break inflation even further, maybe people lose their jobs, consumption goes down, rates go down, and we pressure the Fed to cut rates 3 or 4 times. Then maybe we can refinance our debt, some percentage of which is coming due.

What do you think of that theory?

Joe Lonsdale

Chamath has a lot of interesting thoughts, and I think it’s a very smart analysis. I’m not fully aligned with it.

It is true that bond markets hate war. War is expensive and inflationary. Europe is going through that right now.

In the United States, I think the number-one thing Scott Bessent and Trump want is to fight for Main Street, as they said. That really is the populist energy we have right now.

They are focused on lower interest rates. I know someone who works with me whose spouse is a real-estate agent. They’ve had a tough couple of years because interest rates spiked. If you get interest rates down again, there are so many places in America where people start making money again—with title companies, brokers, and all the transactions that happen as a result.

Jason Calacanis

It’s a trickle-down effect.

Joe Lonsdale

It’s not just trickle-down. This is the part of the economy that starts to turn on again. Certain transactions can happen, and cheaper debt is an advantage.

Chamath may be right that it’s worth hitting assets to get inflation down. That’s something Scott Bessent could be working on because of all the debt, but it is true that the easiest way to get there is to do this. We do need it.

Jason Calacanis

You said there are more clever ways to get there. We obviously don’t want to see 8% or 10% unemployment. That’s another way to get there, but we don’t want that because Main Street equals jobs. What are your other ways?

Joe Lonsdale

There are 2 very positive ways right now. One is higher productivity through AI. I’m working on a ton of things, as I’m sure everyone else is, and we’re doing construction for much cheaper.

Jason Calacanis

The government can’t do that.

Joe Lonsdale

Government can’t be involved in that. That’s up to us.

David Friedberg

David’s doing good work. We can make sure not to screw it up.

Joe Lonsdale

A lot of people are trying to screw it up. David’s job is very important there.

The second way is cutting spending. Giving out hundreds of billions of dollars willy-nilly to Stacey Abrams and others is inflationary. Cutting spending is a very positive thing we could do, and we could do a lot more of it.

Jason Calacanis

Friedberg, you’ve heard the 2 gentlemen. What are your thoughts on refinancing interest?

David Friedberg

As I’ve said before, I’m going to give you incredible leadership credit. Three years ago, on this podcast, you pushed all of us to think about what would happen if the debt increased by another $8 trillion, which it did.

I think that influenced a lot of people in our circles, and it’s obviously something the president took on when none of us thought any president would take on that issue.

How much pain do you think Trump is willing to take with the stock market going down in order to refinance the debt? Is he willing to be incredibly unpopular? Is he willing to deal with criticism from Wall Street and equity holders over a sustained period?

If the market goes down 10% or 20%, do you think he’ll cry uncle, or is he willing to take that kind of pain?

I don’t know about Trump. I’d say there’s a 60% chance I’m right and a 40% chance I’m wrong.

Jason Calacanis

That’s actually a pretty good ratio in poker if you can win that many hands.

David Friedberg

I’d say there’s a 60% chance he’s different from Trump 1.0 and less influenced by short-term rumblings about the market. He’s probably listening to Bessent on this one, although I think it’s a complicated relationship between the two of them at the moment.

I do think he’s aware, and I’d imagine the administration generally—with Bessent and others in key leadership positions—is trying to make the case that if we can get rates down, we have an opportunity to refinance the $1 trillion coming due in the next 12 months and get ourselves into a more sustainable financing position.

There’s still the fiscal position: How are we spending money, and how are we spending it over time? That needs to be addressed. This is the central question.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s address that specifically with Ukraine. Joe, you’re a bit of a hawk and an American exceptionalist. We’re looking at a situation where we’ve spent $175 billion there. Trump was floating some other numbers that were incorrect and got fact-checked. According to all accounts, $175 billion is what we’re actually in for.

As I’ve said many times on this program—and gotten laughed at for—we did this on a lend-lease basis. Because these things were done on a lend-lease basis, Trump now has the upper hand with Zelensky. He’s a great negotiator, and he said, “We want $500 billion back.”

I don’t want to make this about dollars and cents because obviously this is life and death, and we’re talking about a country’s democracy and sovereignty. But if Trump gets that $500 billion back, that’s a 42% internal rate of return in 3 years. Even if we just got our money back, that would be fine for the American people.

How do you look at the war in Ukraine—financially, in terms of containing Putin, and in terms of our participation in NATO? Is it time for us to leave NATO?

Joe Lonsdale

Putin is a bad guy. He shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine.

Jason Calacanis

Thank you for saying that. It’s refreshing to hear it on this podcast.

Joe Lonsdale

I think the last administration mismanaged the situation. I don’t think Putin would have invaded with Trump as president. He certainly would have invaded with an incompetent person who threatened him.

Now we have to have peace. I do want peace. I don’t want the war to continue. But to get peace, you have to get both sides to come to the table.

I prefer peace through strength. I prefer being strong with Putin and showing why he has to have peace, but then you need Zelensky to be a partner, too.

I do think Zelensky had the wrong idea at the White House last week. He should have been thanking them. He should have come more humbly and been directed toward genuinely wanting peace.

I agree that Ukraine is a corrupt country. We may find out that Zelensky and his cronies have been taking a bunch of money. I don’t know whether they have or not. Either way, he has not been signaling the right way to be open to peace.

I think the peace deal on the table does involve giving up a little bit of Ukraine. That’s the direction I want.

Jason Calacanis

What’s the NATO outcome? Europe seems to be signaling that it’s willing to go it alone. Should the United States just say, “Okay, go for it. We’re out”? That’s what Sacks recently retweeted.

Joe Lonsdale

This is really tough for me because some of the people I care about most in the world live in places like Germany. I want them to be safe.

I also think the historic relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States is extremely valuable. These are critical, longtime allies and cousins. They shouldn’t just be tossed aside.

Europe is in a very bad place. It’s dysfunctional. I do not see European civilization going in the right direction over the next 20 or 30 years.

JD Vance is right to criticize Europe on free speech—for example, arresting people who criticize the Islamic threat more than the people committing the rapes. These places have lost their minds. It’s bonkers.

Do I want to give it all up? No. Do I want to demand fiercely that certain things get fixed and use our foreign-policy apparatus to make sure they get fixed if we’re going to stay in the relationship? One hundred percent.

Jason Calacanis

Chamath, this NATO question seems like Europe is signaling that it’s willing to go it alone. Should the United States say, “Okay, go for it. We’re out”?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think the question is: When do these transnational organizations outlive their utility? That’s the question on the table, and it’s not just about NATO. It’s also about the WHO, the United Nations, and many other organizations.

What you’ve seen is that competitive organizations emerge that are just as important, if not more so. If you didn’t like OPEC, then OPEC+ appeared. If you didn’t like how Europeans and Americans gathered intelligence, Five Eyes appeared. If you didn’t like the G7, there’s BRICS.

The world has a tendency to create startups to challenge incumbents as conditions change.

The most important thing right now is for Europeans to acknowledge that individual European governments are vibrant and powerful. The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth, so the people there started passing inordinate numbers of laws.

That has made it complicated to be a European company and a European citizen. That has to get sorted out. What is the real identity? Is it about being Italian, or is it about being European? What’s the separation?

I don’t think that’s clear. Once they figure that out, all this other stuff becomes much easier to figure out.

David Friedberg

There is a viable case for a peaceful transition to a multipolar power dynamic. If you’re a techno-pessimist, you’ll believe there are limited resources available to humans on Earth, and therefore we need power and influence to access those resources.

If you’re a techno-optimist, you’ll believe that through AI, automation, and all these other technologies, we can have abundant housing, fuel, materials, and generally an abundance of everything a particular group might need.

You don’t need to be an empire to access the resources your people demand. The mining industry is a good example.

There was a discovery that we put on the docket for the science corner today of a giant thorium reserve in Inner Mongolia, which could be used to make a thorium molten-salt reactor. There’s enough thorium in this reserve in China to produce enough energy for 60,000 years of consumption at current rates.

I saw a fantastic presentation this week by a startup using AI and other sensing technologies to identify new rare-earth deposits in the Earth’s crust that we have no visibility into today. Many of our assumptions about the availability of certain rare-earth metals may be wrong. There may be many orders of magnitude more material available to mine.

Mining technology is improving, discovery technology is improving, and so on. In that world, where I can make all the food I want, everyone can be fed, there’s plenty of land, housing, and water, and robots are serving me, do I really need to have a conflict with Russia and China over access to some jungle or plot of land on the other side of the planet?

Can I live sustainably in my country while everyone is generally happy? I think this idea that the United States exits NATO and dials down its level of conflict and opposition to Russia and China is a reasonable, maybe even techno-optimistic, point of view.

We may find that, in the next couple of years, we start to believe it. If we do, many of the things we’re fighting over today won’t need to be fought over anymore, except for the expansionist intentions of individuals, which is a sociological phenomenon that may continue.

I would argue that NATO in a multipolar world of abundance may not be as necessary as it has been in the past century—a century that was limited in resources, fighting for access, and dealing with a growing global population, particularly in the developed world.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a beautiful Star Trek vision of abundance in the world. If these rare-earth minerals create unlimited energy and you’re energy independent, you look at the world differently. We all look at the world differently now that America has energy independence than we did under George W. Bush and the wars in the Middle East.

Joe, we’re all basically Gen Xers here. What are your thoughts?

Joe Lonsdale

I’m one of the most optimistic people. I call myself the American Optimist. I would love AI to get to the point where it accelerates growth and this energy can be mined more easily. I think it will.

Until we’re at 5% or 6% growth, though, I still think global trade really matters. We’re going to a post-scarcity world, but we don’t know what’s coming.

Global security matters. We don’t want random people to have nuclear weapons. There are issues that affect all of us.

Dave makes a great point that it’s becoming less important over time. Until we’re at that level of abundance, there are still some things we need to protect.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s talk about ChatGPT. I guess OpenAI came out with GPT-4.5, and it was such a dud that I didn’t even realize it had launched. Chamath, are you monitoring this? Friedberg, did you try it?

I’ve been using Grok as my default, then Gemini, then ChatGPT. That’s my order right now. I wanted to see how good Grok is, and it has really caught up. I don’t have an interest in any of these companies. I own Google in the public markets, but I don’t own the other 2.

What do you think of this GPT-4.5 dud, and what does it mean?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I use these models in the company-building context, specifically at 8090 because of what we’re building. Anthropic continues to do an incredible job. Claude 3.7 Sonnet kicks ass.

Jason Calacanis

You’re using Claude on the back end?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Yes. We use it for a lot of automated code generation. Its coding models are exceptional. They’re the best in the market.

As a consumer, I’ve mostly flipped my usage to Grok 3. The reason is that it’s in line with where I consume most of my information. It’s elegantly integrated inside X.

When you’re on X, there’s an xAI button in the top right-hand corner of a post. When you click it, it gives you the full context of the post.

I was reading one of Dara Khosrowshahi’s tweets about autonomy. Uber had added 2 more partners. When I clicked the button, Grok gave me more context than I could have wanted. It was almost like a deep-research report on the context of a very short tweet. I didn’t have to copy and paste it or formulate a question.

Owning a social network creates an instant advantage. We can show it with Joe’s tweet, where he said, “The crypto tax feels like taxation to me.” Grok finds 4 web pages, including Wikipedia and CNBC, and gives you Joe’s position.

That’s elegant. I think there’s a small tweak to this. Elon and I were talking about it on X. The ability to analyze the post for veracity would be extremely valuable. That extra little feature, when it’s available, will have a big impact on how people use it.

I use Grok for consumer applications. For code generation, we use Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which is exceptional. Anthropic is also doing a major funding round.

The thing with GPT-4.5 is that it’s good. But here’s a tangent: We’re at the bleeding edge of where benchmarks are useful.

Part of why you may not have been watching this closely, and where the media and sense-making organizations get confused, is that they don’t know what to say anymore. They’ll say, “Look at how it performed on SWE-bench, the IMO, or AIME.”

The dirty little secret of the model makers is that these models are so trained on the evaluations that they’re overfitting. That makes the results unreliable.

To translate this into plain English, they’re optimizing for the tests that are the benchmarks. It’s like a high-school student optimizing for the SAT. It doesn’t mean they’re going to be a great student. It may just mean they spent a lot of time taking SAT tests.

We need extremely difficult, constantly changing, third-party, independent, verifiable benchmarks.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a great idea. Like the safety test for cars, which isn’t run by the car companies.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Less about safety, more about capability, but yes. If we reported on that, these leaps would mean more than they do today.

When Alibaba released Qwen, it was an exceptional model—probably one of the better open-source models, if not the best. DeepSeek is also quite good. It doesn’t get much press anymore.

We’re getting to a place where there’s such abundance that people are overwhelmed with the choices and don’t know how to differentiate them. It’s like having 100 Michelin-starred restaurants open in your city. You don’t have enough meals to eat.

We’re drowning in abundance. To Friedberg’s point, we don’t understand how golden this golden age is. Distribution becomes really important. I think that’s why integration inside a social network is valuable.

Jason Calacanis

Google is also going to drop an AI button into the front search page. When you’re logged in, you’ll get a snippet at the top. Inside YouTube, they’re doing summaries of chats and comments.

Then think about what Meta could do. They already have the AI box up there, but they’ll knock some of that off Google’s front door. Does anyone even use Google.com anymore?

David Friedberg

Google searches are still going.

Jason Calacanis

Facebook is about to launch a competitor to ChatGPT and Grok.

David Friedberg

They’re going to launch a standalone app. The thing they’re so good at is that, whenever they launch an app, it doesn’t matter when they launch it. They’ll just get it to a billion people.

Jason Calacanis

All of this leads to so much abundance. I was the first investor in a company called Superhuman, very elegant software for email productivity. Give it a shot.

What they’ve done is make AI so cheap that they can compose replies to all of your email in real time on the back end. You can see potential drafts. They summarize everything. Even if you never read the summary, that would have been cost-prohibitive 6 to 12 months ago. Now it’s a no-brainer.

Because it’s paid software, the economics work. This is going to get very interesting very quickly.

Joe Lonsdale

I’m actually building something on email, as you said, that works with your team to automatically create reports on everything that comes in and route it for you. When you’re a CEO, you basically become a traffic cop. AI is going to do the email routing for you.

I’m invested in Grok 3, and I’m biased toward Elon, but a lot of our companies will build on top of multiple models. Cognition’s Devin is crushing it. This stuff is getting 10% or 15% better every month. It’s really amazing.

It’s good for companies at our level to be able to use all of them. I love the competition because it makes everything cheaper and better for the companies I’m building. It isn’t slowing down.

David Friedberg

No, it’s getting better. It’s scary, actually. I thought it would asymptote, but it hasn’t.

Chamath Palihapitiya

That’s the part that’s so fascinating. There’s an interesting ripple effect that I don’t know if you’re aware of.

Journalists who have been losing their jobs at a tremendous pace are now being hired by data annotators to look at queries. If you had expertise in agriculture, they’ll pay you $40 an hour to sit there, answer questions about agriculture, look at answers, and refine them.

We’re going to have a new job class: people who train AI, fact-check AI, and refine AI. This could be a $50,000-to-$150,000-per-year job because every time you make the AI a little better, everyone on the planet benefits.

This is an extraordinary new career. I don’t know what it’s going to be called—reinforcement learner, perhaps.

Jason Calacanis

Friedberg, you get the last take here. Great job on the abundance angle. Wrap us up with your thoughts on these LLMs and the pace of AI.

David Friedberg

I agree with Chamath. It’s changing every week. I’m not paying attention to the details anymore. New models come out every week.

This is like when the internet launched new websites. It’s carrying us forward, and it’s impossible to dissect and predict what’s going to win, when, and why.

I use ChatGPT Deep Research a lot—the feature that fires off a bunch of web searches.

Jason Calacanis

You’re paying the $200 a month?

David Friedberg

Yes, I pay $200 a month. I find it very good.

We build everything at Ohalo on Google Cloud Platform, and we run a bunch of different models.

Jason Calacanis

That’s Google’s cloud platform, for people who don’t know the acronym.

David Friedberg

Right. We run lots of different tools, and it’s awesome.

Jason Calacanis

As we wrap here, we’re following our muse at All-In. Friedberg and I have been obsessed with content creation and media, so we’re doing a little media summit at South by Southwest—apologies that it’s sold out. Chamath likes F1; I’ve never been, but I’m excited that we’re throwing the best party at F1 on Saturday, May 4th. Fans and our community can come; allin.com/events has all the details. We’re throwing a big party in Miami around F1 and doing a little stage show beforehand. We’re also going to celebrate my birthday because I won’t be able to make it in June.

My Trump grade for the week is a C for chaos and an A for effort. Let’s try to get back to a B, President Trump.

David Sacks

I think it’s been a very smooth week at the White House. The president has lived up to one of his campaign promises. This is not something new.

Go all the way back to his national speech during the campaign. He reiterated many times that he wanted to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Sometimes he called it a digital-asset stockpile.

What we’ve ultimately done here is both. He also asked, in his week-one executive order on crypto—which I came on the show to discuss—the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets to evaluate the idea of a reserve or stockpile.

We made a recommendation, and this administration is moving at tech speed. It’s great to work for an administration where you can get things done and things move quickly. We made our recommendation, worked with the lawyers to implement it, and the president signed the order last night.

This is fully consistent with everything he’s always said.

Jason Calacanis

The criticism you’re going to get when you face the media is about the order in which you’re doing things. Trump is very expressive on social media, which is better than the previous administration, where that communication simply wasn’t available.

The question is whether the optimal way to do this is for the president to announce something and then for you to explain it in greater depth. Should we not worry about it? Is this just the “move fast and break things” approach we’re used to in Silicon Valley?

People may be concerned that things are different in the White House and in the way we’re running the government. Have you considered that maybe there was an overreaction to a tweet?

David Sacks

If we’re going to place the blame on me, I wasn’t the only one. The original crypto OGs were saying, “Wait a second. Why is he picking these 3 and not those 3?” That made a lot of people ask what was going on and whether he was picking favorites.

Jason Calacanis

That’s everybody’s big concern. Maybe you can explain it.

David Sacks

We’re not picking favorites, except that we do think Bitcoin is special. I can explain why.

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. It was the first one, and it’s the only one that doesn’t have an issuer. It’s very decentralized.

In crypto, people call this the immaculate conception. We don’t really know how it got here. We don’t know who Satoshi is. It’s almost mystical.

It’s the most valuable, with a $2 trillion market cap, and it’s the most secure. It’s never been hacked. We’re now more than 15 years into this journey. There have been a lot of skeptics, ups, and downs, but Bitcoin continues to chug along.

I remember buying my first Bitcoin in 2011. I think it was $120. Now it’s around $90,000. There have been wild swings along the way, but it keeps chugging along.

You can think of the $2 trillion market cap as a $2 trillion bug bounty. If there were a way to hack it—to double-spend or create a counterfeit Bitcoin—there would be every incentive in the world to do so.

The fact that it hasn’t been compromised is remarkable.

Jason Calacanis

I think we can all agree that it’s been tested in a very robust way. There’s been every incentive to break the encryption, and it continues to chug along. The price has gone up as the protocol has gained acceptance.

David Sacks

Bitcoin is the most widely accepted as a store of value throughout the world. We do believe it should be treated specially.

That being said, we’re also creating a digital-asset stockpile.

Jason Calacanis

Explain the difference between the two.

David Sacks

There’s a digital-asset stockpile, which is the broader pool, and on the other side there’s a strategic reserve for Bitcoin.

We do acquire Bitcoin. The United States government seizes digital assets from terrorists, criminals, and others, and we often make the mistake of liquidating them when maybe we should be holding them.

Jason Calacanis

Explain that architecture.

David Sacks

We have the reserve and the stockpile. The reserve is just Bitcoin. The goal is long-term preservation. Think of it as a digital Fort Knox for digital gold.

We want to put the digital gold in there, keep it secure, and never sell it. That’s the goal of the reserve.

You’re right that we’ve made the mistake in the past of selling Bitcoin. At one point, we had about 400,000 Bitcoin on the federal balance sheet. We sold roughly half of that for something like $360 million in total.

If we had held all of it, the portion we sold would now be worth more than $17 billion. We made the mistake of prematurely selling Bitcoin when we should have held it. We don’t want to make that mistake with the rest of it.

There are roughly 200,000 coins left on the federal balance sheet, but the truth is that nobody knows because we’ve never done a proper audit.

Part of what this executive order provides is that, for the first time, we’re going to do a government-wide accounting of the digital assets we actually have.

If digital assets emerge in some department—the FBI seizes some, the CIA seizes some, or another organization ends up holding them—they’ll be legally required to report them. They’ll go into the reserve if there’s a final adjudication.

If the coins can go back as restitution to victims, or if the person they were seized from wins their court case and gets them back, they won’t go into the reserve. But if there’s a final adjudication and final forfeiture, they will.

That’s Bitcoin. Then you have the stockpile.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s talk about that.

David Sacks

First of all, we don’t know exactly what digital assets the federal government has. I’ve seen reports that it might have, for example, 50,000 ETH, but again, we need to get to the bottom of that.

Once we figure out exactly what the assets are, we’ll move them into the digital-asset stockpile. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship. It’s a place for safekeeping—a centralized account under the direction of the secretary of the Treasury.

The secretary of the Treasury will figure out how to maximize the value of these holdings.

There are important differences between the stockpile and the reserve. The executive order provides that the secretary of the Treasury will not sell the Bitcoin. We’re prohibited from selling Bitcoin.

There is no such prohibition with respect to the stockpile. If the secretary of the Treasury decides it’s in the long-term interest of the United States to rebalance or change the portfolio, the secretary has discretion to do that.

That makes sense because there’s a long tail of crypto, and we can’t predict the future. We also don’t have the staff to look at these assets every day like a fund manager would and say, “What percentage should Ethereum be of the overall stockpile?”

Jason Calacanis

So maybe the decision with Ethereum is, “This thing is waning. Let’s put it into Bitcoin because we know Bitcoin is the more solid one.”

David Sacks

That’s largely fair. The stockpile should be subject to good portfolio management.

Fortunately, we have a secretary of the Treasury who is an extremely successful former hedge-fund manager. He’s going to figure out the best way to manage these assets.

We give him the flexibility to do portfolio management. He has to make those decisions, and that’s going to be part of how he’s evaluated by the president. Hopefully, he’ll be sharp about it.

There’s one other important difference between the stockpile and the reserve. With respect to the reserve, the executive order provides that the secretaries of the Treasury and Commerce are allowed to figure out strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin if those strategies are budget-neutral and don’t cost taxpayers anything.

It’s possible—not that we necessarily will—that we could acquire more Bitcoin if we can figure out a way to do it without affecting the federal budget, the deficit, or taxpayers.

Jason Calacanis

I had a very simple suggestion, which I’ll float up the flagpole. How about a simple crypto tax?

Crypto wants to be legal and regulated. It wants the rules and the rails. Why don’t we charge every transaction in the United States 0.01%—about 1 basis point—in the native currency?

If you want to trade Solana for Ethereum, XRP, or whatever names you want to put there, the government says, “We’re going to need to take the most modest of taxes and put it in the stockpile.”

That seems like a reasonable way to fund the reserve.

David Sacks

That’s always how taxes start: They’re described as very modest. When the income tax started, it applied to maybe 1,000 Americans, and legislators swore up and down that it would never apply to middle-class people.

I don’t like the idea of new taxes, even if people promise they won’t affect people very much. That sounds burdensome to me.

Jason Calacanis

This would be more like a sales tax handled by Coinbase, Robinhood, and the other platforms. It would be a transactional tax, not an income tax. If you own a bunch of crypto, it isn’t a wealth tax or a seigniorage tax.

David Sacks

If you can convince the secretary of Commerce or the secretary of the Treasury to run with your idea, it could potentially happen. They have the flexibility to figure out budget-neutral ways to accumulate Bitcoin.

I don’t know what those ways will be, but they’re creative and very successful businessmen. If they figure out a way to do this, it can be considered.

Jason Calacanis

I’ll be in the commissary later having lunch with you. You can introduce me.

Let me give you a fastball. The appearance of impropriety is what people are concerned about—the picking of winners and losers.

President Trump was the crypto president. He gave that famous speech saying, “I’m going to get rid of Gary Gensler. We’re going to make it legal.” To his credit, he has fulfilled that promise.

The donor class on that side said, “We’re going to back the crypto president, not the anti-crypto team.” A lot of people who are on Twitter and social media donated a lot and have a lot of holdings.

The appearance here is that someone is going to benefit. Of course, people came after you first. You were very clear and cleaned this up by selling everything and divesting.

Let’s make that clear to the people trying to say that you personally benefited. Address that.

David Sacks

People came out right away saying that I was engaged in a scheme to pump my bags or create exit liquidity for myself. They accused me of a serious crime with no evidence whatsoever.

That’s moral slander.

What they didn’t know, and what I then put out there, is that I sold all my cryptocurrency before day one of the administration because I didn’t even want the appearance of a conflict.

I could have waited. I didn’t have to do it that way. I decided to take it upon myself because, with crypto, there are going to be a lot of fluctuations in the market. You never want someone to point at one of those fluctuations and say that the cryptos benefited from it and created a conspiracy theory.

That’s exactly what happened. I got rid of all my cryptocurrency before day one.

Craft also sold all of its cryptocurrency.

Jason Calacanis

Craft is the venture firm you founded that has supported a lot of great founders here in the Valley.

David Sacks

We sold around $200 million of crypto, of which around $85 million was personally attributable to me. We cleared that before day one, paid taxes on it, and made sure there wouldn’t be a conflict.

Then the smear shifted in another direction: “Maybe he doesn’t own crypto, but he’s in crypto funds.” People pointed to Bitwise, Multicoin Capital, and Blockchain Capital.

I was also in Blockchain Capital. One by one, the fund managers came out and said, “Actually, David called us more than 2 months ago and said he needed to divest from our funds.” We did that as well.

They’ve basically given up on this.

Jason Calacanis

Full disclosure: when you saw me doing the Sea Scouts program, you said, “Why don’t you do a fund? I’ll be the anchor. I’ll be your first LP.” That was one of the most generous things you’ve done in our relationship. I had to call you weeks ago and say, “Okay, you’re going to divest?” You said, “Fine, no problem. You sell the assets to somebody else.”

The way this mechanically works is that, when you’re in a fund, Sacks can’t tell me what to do in the fund. He puts money in it, just as I put money in other people’s funds. They invest it, and 10 years later you get a return.

You hope the return in a venture or private-equity fund beats the public markets, but you can also sell your interest to somebody else. Mechanically, that takes time. You may have to sell it at a 50% or 25% discount, and it’s painful.

I estimate you’re going to lose 8 or 9 figures by serving the country for a couple of years. Not only that, but the great irony is that the things holding back the industry are regulation and overregulation of AI, along with a lack of clear regulation in crypto.

You’re going to fix the number-one and number-two issues on all of our agendas in Silicon Valley, which means the environment will be better for the rest of us to do business.

The sacrifice you’re making is extraordinary, and you’re making it a better environment for the rest of us.

Let me underscore something you said about your service. I don’t know how much they’re paying you for this job. What do you get—$50,000, $100,000?

David Sacks

I’m an unpaid consultant to the government.

Jason Calacanis

You get no money?

David Sacks

No, I don’t want any. Of course it’s costing me money, but it’s an honor to serve, and it’s an honor to be asked to serve. In particular, it’s an honor to serve this president because he genuinely wants to make the country great again.

That’s why I’m doing it. It’s a lazy and stupid narrative to say that someone who is already successful in business goes into government to make more money.

I was making money before this. This involves a substantial disruption of my business interests. I have to divest a lot of those interests, and in divesting them I either have to pay taxes or take a significant discount.

It costs money. It’s just a lazy narrative that people create. There’s no truth to it.

Jason Calacanis

To underscore the point, you were one of the funds I invested in—not because you were a crypto fund, but because you might have had a crypto position.

We went through the Launch Fund’s holdings, and there was something crypto-related in there.

David Sacks

We had one or two investments that pivoted into crypto.

Jason Calacanis

I had to have a call with you weeks ago and say, “You’re going to divest?” You said yes, and I said, “Fine, no problem.”

David Sacks

It wasn’t a problem for me. You sell the assets to somebody else.

Jason Calacanis

I just want people to understand how this works mechanically. Sacks can’t tell me what to do in the fund. He put money in it, as I’ve put money in other people’s funds. They invest, and 10 years later you get a return.

You can also sell that interest to somebody else, but it takes time, and you may have to sell it at a substantial discount. It’s painful.

You’re going to lose a tremendous amount by serving the country for a couple of years. The irony is that you’re going to fix the lack of regulation in crypto and the overregulation of AI—issues that were number one and number two on all our Silicon Valley agendas.

You’re making it a better environment for the rest of us to do business, while sacrificing a huge financial opportunity.

David Sacks

Let me underscore something you said about not picking winners and losers. I think that’s fundamental to my job.

We do think Bitcoin is special for the reasons I explained. Beyond that, we don’t want to be in the business of picking and choosing winners in the space.

If another digital asset could prove that it’s as decentralized, secure, and widely accepted as a store of value as Bitcoin, maybe it could be elevated in the same way. I’m laying out the criteria.

Beyond that, we don’t want to pick winners and losers. My job isn’t to be a regulator or anoint which assets are good or bad. It’s to be a policy adviser for innovation.

The way I see the digital-asset space is that disclosure is fundamental. If you’re an issuer of a digital asset, you need to disclose all the material facts about what you’re doing, and those facts have to be accurate.

You can’t lie. If an issuer lies about something, the government should come down on them like a ton of bricks because that’s fraud.

As long as people are honest, they should be able to trade these things. I understand that you think many of them are garbage. You may be right, and you can express that view in a trade.

But as long as everyone is above board in terms of disclosure, people should have the right to trade these assets. Some will make money and some will lose money. The government doesn’t want to get in the way of that. It wants to make sure the information is available and honest.

Jason Calacanis

We already have a regulated market as an analogy. When you lie and sell a share in a company, whether private or public, the SEC has a term for it: securities fraud.

Now we have this new type of asset. It could be an NFT, a trading card, an actual utility token that you burn to use a service, or something else. What’s important is that there’s an entity with a group of people who say they own it and are incorporated in the United States—not Panama, the British Virgin Islands, or somewhere else that may be faster or looser with regulations.

You have to be here in the United States. Maybe you have to be insured. Maybe there has to be a board, as there is in Delaware, or an LLC where there’s a person responsible.

If you lie while taking money for an asset, it should be securities fraud, and people should come down on you like a ton of bricks. If you promote something and don’t disclose it, there are rules about that as well.

We saw celebrities get punished last time for tweeting about cryptocurrencies. That’s the stuff that has to stop. It should feel more like what we do in angel investing, private companies, and public companies.

When will we see that framework emerge? You’re only 40 or 50 days into this. When will we have the actual rules of the road?

If I want to create an Angel Investing coin, or an NFT collection for All-In, when will we have the rules? That’s going to involve multiple agencies, right?

David Sacks

What you’re describing is known in Washington as market structure. Market structure provides a clear framework for market participants.

It would define what is a security, what is a commodity, and what is simply a collectible—property, but not a security. It would then define the rules for each category.

There was a bill that passed the House in the last Congress, but Biden and the Democrats stopped it in the Senate. It was called FIT21 and was authored by French Hill, who is now chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.

We expect him to introduce a new version of the bill, probably in the next few weeks. I don’t think I’m breaking news by saying that. People expect it.

That bill will provide the framework for market structure and many of the definitions you’re talking about.

I agree with your sentiment, but I may have a different view about what is and isn’t a security. To me, collectibles aren’t securities. But if something is a collectible, you have to disclaim that it has no intrinsic value.

Think about a baseball card. It’s a piece of cardboard with no intrinsic value. Its value comes from other collectors being willing to buy it from you. You could say that’s irrational, but that’s how collectibles work.

As long as people disclaim that a coin has no intrinsic value, they should be able to issue memecoins. It’s a separate question why people would want to buy them.

That’s very different from an issuer saying, “I’m issuing a token that has lots of functionality and value.” If you promise that, and say it’s going to have certain functionality, you better be telling the truth.

Then we get into the Howey test, which people can look up if they want.

Jason Calacanis

There needs to be an educational process. We went through this as a country when people bought interests in mines, gold claims, and oil fields. That’s when many of the regulations around accreditation emerged.

It’s a pet peeve of mine, but I think there should be an educational framework. There should be nuance around the presentation.

If you have a ticker symbol associated with something, or charts associated with it, it starts to smell like a duck, look like a duck, and quack like a duck. But then the terms of service say, “This is a collectible.”

There need to be ground rules about how these things are presented at the top level so the nuance of disclosure is clear.

When I tweet about something that’s an advertiser or sponsor of All-In or This Week in Startups, the FTC has rules. You have to say it’s a paid partnership. You can’t confuse consumers.

That’s where you’ll have to do cleanup and provide structure: disclosure, how things are presented, and perhaps an educational system.

If you want to own a firearm, drive a car, or become a beautician, you have to take tests. We can talk about overregulation, but people still have to take tests.

It would be better if consumers could take a 50-question test to show that they understand diversification and what they’re doing, so they don’t put their entire mortgage into one cryptocurrency.

What are your thoughts on disclosure, presentation, accreditation, and perhaps a path to accreditation for all Americans? Ninety percent of people can’t participate in private companies.

David Sacks

Disclosure is the key. These projects should have to disclose certain things.

The token cap table should be disclosed. Who are the insiders? How much do they have? When are they selling? What are their lockups? The market should know that information.

It’s easy to do with the technology provided by the crypto community and the blockchain. That was always the problem we had as venture capitalists with token projects: Who owns the tokens? Where are they? When can I sell? When can you sell?

I don’t think you have to disclose everyone who owns a token. That could be difficult to comply with. But you should have to disclose the insiders, their sales plans, and their lockups.

You should also disclose how new tokens are created. If the token is fully centralized and the issuer can create more, people need to know that there’s no scarcity. If there’s an enforcement mechanism and enforced scarcity, that’s a different story.

The market-structure bill should address that. There’s a version of it in FIT21 from the last Congress. I think the next one will include those rules.

The SEC is also looking at these rules and will create its own frameworks. Paul Atkins, who has been nominated for the new SEC chair, is actually very supportive of more Americans being able to invest in private companies and private equity. He’s given speeches on that in the past.

He hasn’t been confirmed yet, and the confirmation hearing still needs to happen. Separately, Hester Peirce, who is a commissioner at the SEC, is leading the crypto-related work.

Jason Calacanis

I know Hester. I’ve had her on This Week in Startups a couple of times. She’s great, very well informed, and very sharp.

David Sacks

I trust Hester and the SEC to produce the detailed frameworks you’re talking about. My role as an innovation-policy adviser is to make sure we have the big picture right.

I’m very confident that the SEC, the CFTC, and the legislature will figure out the balance.

Jason Calacanis

Sacks, I’m very proud of the work you’re doing. Congratulations on cleaning this up and presenting a thoughtful plan that we can all ask hard questions about. I appreciate you taking the hard questions here on the All-In podcast.

Good luck with the rest of the media circus. I wonder if I’ll be the hardest questioner.

David Sacks

I hope so.

Jason Calacanis

For people asking, I’m wearing a suit because I’m now joining the administration. Big announcement: I’m the official podcast moderator of the Trump White House.

I’m kidding.

David Sacks

People actually believe you.

Jason Calacanis

I’ve got jokes. Love you, brother. We’ll see you soon.

David Sacks

Cheers.

Jason Calacanis

I’m obviously conflicted. Sacks has been my friend for more than 20 years, and we’re partners here on the All-In podcast. Of course, I’m rooting for the administration, but I also have that journalist blood in me. I always want to call balls and strikes.

As you just heard, I’m going to ask hard questions. If you’re wondering where I’m coming from, I’m going to ask hard questions of my friends because they’re doing important work for the American people and for the rest of the planet.

These are important decisions that Sacks is going to have to make about crypto and AI, and that Elon is making with DOGE. I’m going to ask hard questions. That’s the way it’s going to be.

I’m excited that they’re coming on here and taking those hard questions. They’re done in a certain spirit: Yes, they’re my friends, but they have important jobs, so they need to answer hard questions for the American people. I’m also curious, as everyone is, where they’re coming from. I feel privileged that they’re choosing to come on All-In and face those questions.

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