Trump vs Powell, Solving the Debt Crisis, The $10T AGI Prize, GENIUS Act Becomes Law

So, Gavin, were you at the Coldplay concert in Boston last night?

Sadly, I missed that.

It’s amazing. Exactly. I was at home with my wife, but, yeah. Wow. How insane. There are just so many layers to that story. It’s impossible to get away from. It’ll be 72 hours of memes.

Dave, were you at the Coldplay concert in Boston last night? And if so, were you with Woody, your astronaut friend? Did you take Woody to the concert?

No, counselor. I was here in Santa Cruz last night.

You were in Santa Cruz on a business trip.

The funny thing is, if they had not reacted the way they did, the camera would have just panned away. Nothing. No one would have ever known. There is some great irony to the head of people and human resources apparently being in an affair with the CEO.

Allegedly. Don’t draw conclusions, Jason.

No, it could have—he could have been cracking her back, like when you get your back tight. A chiropractic move.

Yeah, chiropractic move.

Oh, my God. Let your winners ride. Rain Man Dave. We open-sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

All right, let’s get to work. It is the slow news week of summer, and we are delighted—delighted—to have fan-favorite, super-intelligent bestie Gavin Baker with us from Atreides. How are you, sir? How’s your summer shaping up?

Fantastic. It’s been awesome.

The stock market is back. That’s good for you because you invest in both public and private companies.

My firm does, yes.

Gavin, let me ask you a question. How do you price tariffs today? Where do you think this ends up? Obviously, there’s a lot of back-and-forth, and everyone’s trying to make a read on what the endgame is. What’s your market take as you’re making investments right now, and where do we end up on the tariff front?

It is a good question. It’s open. We’re going to see what happens with sectoral tariffs. I think it’s hard—you’re doing the Winning AI Summit—it’s going to be hard to win in AI if we put tariffs on semiconductors.

But for a lot of what I do, for now, tariffs are not super relevant. For the market and the economy, they are relevant, but for AI, they’re maybe a little less relevant because I think everyone is maybe a little more sophisticated about the downsides of tariffs for constructing data centers here in the United States.

Ultimately, don’t we look at the tariff situation and say that despite the shock and awe of the opening salvo, it’s quite a boring position now? It just seems to be reciprocity, and reasonable reciprocity at that. That’s how we would sort of categorize the endgame here.

I would say for everyone but China. It is, and we’ve clearly reached some sort of deal with China: rare earths for H20s and MI308Xs. But it’s interesting, and one of the trade deals that has been finalized is Vietnam, and there’s a special carveout for goods that were transshipped from China through Vietnam. So they are clearly focused on China more than almost any other country, rightly or wrongly.

I do think there were maybe 3 months where Trump said he did not care about the stock market, but now he’s back to quoting the market at all-time highs. He clearly cares and is clearly very sensitive to market feedback. So I think that will be a dampening mechanism on tariff volatility.

They passed the bill, and he immediately went back to tariffs. We’ll see where we land in August. But I just think the most important thing in the market by far is AI. It kind of overwhelms everything else.

Absolutely. I guess the other big story with the market—and we’ll get into the H20s. David Sacks will be joining us in a moment, so he’ll be jumping in halfway through it—but let’s start with maybe this soft launch of the firing of Jerome Powell.

On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg reported that Trump was likely to fire Powell soon after talking with Republican lawmakers. Shortly after that, The New York Times reported that Trump had actually drafted Powell’s termination letter. The market instantly reacted negatively and dropped 1%. Bond yields rose about 10 basis points. You can see the blips here on these charts starting around 11:30 a.m., when the article was published.

Polymarket’s odds of Jerome Powell being out as Fed chair in 2025 spiked up to 30% on Wednesday before dropping back down to 20%. Trump quickly squashed these rumors, the markets rebounded, and Trump said, “We’re not planning on doing anything regarding Powell.” Some people speculated that maybe this was Trump testing the market reaction. As you talked about earlier, Gavin, he does seem to care about the market, as most presidents do.

If you remember, Trump nominated Powell as Fed chair on November 2, 2017. He has gone on a tirade over the last couple of months, calling Powell stupid, numbskull, stubborn, low IQ, a knucklehead, mentally average. It’s a long list of descriptors for the person he placed. Powell’s term ends in May of next year. White House officials have confirmed Trump is in the process of selecting his successor. Polymarket says that could be Kevin Warsh at 22%, Kevin Hassett at 19%, and Scott Bessent at 15%.

This hasn’t actually ever happened, right? We’ve never had a Fed chair fired. But we have inflation coming back a bit. If you all remember, there’s a dual mandate for the Fed: to keep unemployment low. Check. That’s pretty good. And to keep inflation under control. That’s been going very well since our massive inflation spike over the past couple of years.

CPI ticked up 10% from 2.4% to 2.7%, a 30-basis-point increase over May. So, any thoughts, Gavin, on these macro issues around inflation coming back a bit, the stock market at an all-time high, and unemployment? If you believe the unemployment data—and we’ve had a bunch of debates here about that—how correct is it to say that unemployment is close to an all-time low in our lifetimes? Let’s go macro.

I wouldn’t read too much into the CPI bouncing up a little bit. There are base-rate effects, I think, on a month-over-month basis. And if you looked at what economists call core, supercore—different ways to maybe smooth out CPI—I think inflation is still relatively contained.

A lot of very smart people are convinced that tariffs will lead to inflation. We’ll see. There are certainly sound theoretical arguments for why they will, but it does look like maybe overseas exporters are eating a little bit more of the tariffs than people thought they would, which is good for U.S. inflation. But the combination of a very weak dollar and tariffs theoretically should lead to a little more inflation.

Firing Powell—I worry that the market only went down 1%. I do think the market would go down quite a bit more if Trump did fire Powell. I think it would be a mistake. I hope he doesn’t do it, and there are very sound reasons for the Federal Reserve to be independent. I hope he does not read from that trial balloon that a 1% decline is all that would happen.

Look, the world would continue spinning. America would go on. But it would be a mistake.

Friedberg, we have this idea that there would be a couple of rate cuts and maybe we get monetary velocity going again. People will be able to take more loans out and invest more in business. But with the stock market tearing it up, there’s a lot of wealth being put into the system. With the big, beautiful bill, there’s a lot of spending in there, as we’ve talked about here.

Putting that aside, it feels like the economy is in really great shape. The chances of a rate cut have now flipped. No change is now the favorite option for September, whereas a week ago the favorite option was 25 bps. So this idea that we’re going to cut, or the Fed’s going to cut, seems to be changing as well. What are your thoughts on the macro picture here?

I’m not sure the firing of Jerome Powell necessarily solves the U.S. fiscal challenge, which is rising interest rates on the long end of the Treasury curve. If you look at the 30-year Treasury yield over time—and, Nick, maybe you could pull this up while I’m talking—as of today, we’re at exactly 5% on the 30-year.

You can see that this 5% yield, which is what the market is demanding the United States government pay in order to be loaned the money to make the bill payments that the U.S. government has to make every year, is the highest it’s been going all the way back to 2007, as of today.

I think this is the real story for the United States. We have $36 trillion of debt. The average interest rate we’re paying on that debt today is 3.3%. That’s the average of all the Treasuries that the federal government has issued—the Treasury Department has issued—to borrow the money that it is using and has used to pay all its bills.

If you look at the 5% number, that’s a 1.7% hike. At 3.3%, which is the current average rate we’re paying across $36 trillion, we have a run-rate interest expense. Just the money we’re paying each year in interest on the outstanding debt is $1.2 trillion a year.

And if this spikes up to 5% from 3.3%, we’re talking about nearly $2 trillion a year in interest expense. That number is only going to get bigger as we borrow more money each year and the loan balance goes up, the outstanding debt goes up, because we are still running a deficit. The government is spending more than it’s making every year.

So the crisis that America faces is a more profound fiscal crisis, where the rates that we’re having to pay are a function of what the market is telling us. The market does not want to loan the United States money over a 30-year period for less than 5% as of today.

And so making adjustments to the short end of the Treasury curve—making overnight loans cheaper, which is what the Fed can do—will stimulate the economy and make more money flow easily. Now you'll be able to borrow money overnight to do things like build a building and then sell the building next week or next month, or take out a car loan, pay it down, and use your car to drive for Uber and grow the economy, among other things.

So the theory is that if we can drive rates down on the short end of the curve, we'll grow the economy such that we'll be able to make those payments on the long end of the curve. But there comes a point where, again, you're only going to be able to move the market so much until the more important fiscal situations are addressed: spending, taxation, and some of the other key policy issues.

So I think what the market is saying is that it's not as much about Jerome Powell. Frankly, getting rid of a prudent individual may be more challenging than it is beneficial when the real challenges facing the United States need to be more heartily addressed. So I think that's my take on this whole—

Yeah, go ahead, Gavin. Build on it.

Point number one: the 30-year has gone up since Powell started cutting rates. So that is just empirical proof that what David is saying is right.

Second, the deficit has been a feature of American politics dating back to Ross Perot's 1992 presidential run—

You know, 1992—

His independent third-party run.

His independent third-party run.

Here we go. But yes, the deficit never really mattered because interest rates kept going down, such that even as our debt grew, interest expense as a percentage of the government's budget stayed relatively low.

Now that rates have gone up and don't seem like they're going down anytime soon, the deficit does matter, and it really matters. You can run a couple of scenarios, but pick your metric. If the deficit continues at current levels and we were to refinance the debt at the prices David was talking about, it's only a few years before spending on interest is significantly larger than spending on Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, or the military. Pick something you care about.

Our current course and speed put us in the not-too-distant future where interest expense is the biggest line item for the government. That is not healthy, and that's why the deficit finally matters. It's just that rates are higher.

But the great thing is that there is a virtuous cycle here. As you close the deficit, rates should theoretically come down, and then those two things feed on each other to help the problem.

It is possible. There's no silver bullet here, but some combination of slowing government spending, extra revenue, and tariffs could help. We've never had a consumption tax here in America, which I think is a good thing because consumption taxes are very regressive. But the reality is that even when Obama controlled the House and the Senate and was the most popular Democratic president of our lifetime, I don't think federal government tax receipts as a percentage of GDP got above 18% or 19%. So that's kind of the ceiling for income taxes alone.

Tariffs are really just a consumption tax that kind of incentivizes domestic manufacturing. There are all sorts of reasons they're bad ideas. David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is 100% correct: free trade is a good thing. But introducing some sort of consumption tax, growing the economy a little bit faster through deregulation, and slowing government spending—

I think there is a way out of this for America.

Yeah.

But it's important to find the way, because the deficit finally does matter after really never mattering in my political lifetime.

It is interesting. We've never had to worry about our debt. It was always manageable because it wasn't that large. And even when it got large, it wasn't that large compared to GDP because the country was doing so well.

We had the PC revolution. We had the internet boom. We've had boom after boom after boom in efficiency that we've led the world. When companies like Google or Apple take over the world and all those tax receipts and income come into our country, that does make you not look at it.

I've been talking to you, Gavin. Not to make this super political, but both parties have proven historically—and in the current one—that they have no interest in cutting spending. It's just the nature of it. So we can sit here, whether you're a Biden fan or a Trump fan, and put it all aside: both parties love spending, and they're not stopping.

One of our friends has proposed that maybe in the midterms we have a couple of these House positions and a couple of Senate positions that we try to flip and create a new party that cares about this issue. What are your thoughts broadly on that? If a couple more Joe Manchin types were in the House and the Senate, could this country maybe start to make this the deciding issue? Could we see some movement from the other two parties, some pressure on them by a third party—an America Party, perhaps?

Yeah. Well, I think a few things. I do think there is room for a much more centrist party in America. The way the primaries work leads to more extreme candidates than anyone would actually want to be each party's candidate.

I think a third party would be helpful. I think there's plenty of room for a party that is fiscally conservative, reasonably socially liberal, and pro-American energy production—

All kinds of energy production, including solar—

Importantly. So I think there is room for that. And I think it is right that if you just target a few races, you can have a big impact.

But I would just say, humbly, I think the America Party is a great idea. I just don't know that it is the highest and best use of Elon's talents at this moment in time, with what's happening with AI. To the extent Elon is a friend of the pod, I just think staying focused on AI and Mars might be the highest and best use of his particular talent.

100%.

Hasn't that been the case for some time, Gavin? Any time there's something, whether it's Neuralink, the Boring Company, or some other new project, there are these claims that this is a distraction from the highest-priority work that should be done. Is the political stuff unique?

His point of view on the political stuff, just like it was with Twitter, is that it's existential to society and civilization and our ability to function and achieve the progress that he aims to achieve in his core function. Obviously, he is succeeding as the CEO of many different companies, but I think a big part of what makes him exceptional as a CEO is the perfectionism and the drive.

Politics is not a game of perfection. It's a game of compromise. So I'm sure that if he sets his mind to the America Party, he will succeed. But I think there are other things for him to focus on. The Boring Company and Neuralink are games of perfection. This is about engineering. This is about solving a problem. It's not compromise and the art of the possible.

So I think he would succeed. I just think that there are other things that may be a higher calling for him.

Yeah.

Yeah. The cost of being away from his businesses this last time around, as he said very publicly, was severe. It was intense, and he's had to really regroup.

But we got this incredible news when Grok 4 came out. I think we should talk a little bit here about what that big prize is. The big prize, I think, is actually going to be an open question.

Friedberg, I think the big prize is whoever wins general intelligence or superintelligence, or whoever has the biggest cluster or the most power to power the biggest cluster that powers general or superintelligence.

So where do we sit on the language models today, Gavin, and Elon's recent—incredibly dominant—release of Grok 4? I don't think people expected that. They didn't expect him to be able to leapfrog everybody. And let's be honest, people are leapfrogging each other every 4–6 months.

I fully expect Gemini will leapfrog Grok, and OpenAI will have its time in the sun again as well. But this was pretty impressive, right?

I would say this is the biggest leapfrog we've seen in quite some time. The benchmarks that matter are ARC-AGI-2 and Humanity's Last Exam.

In the case of ARC-AGI-2, it's called semi-private, which is important because some of the questions were held back. A criticism of these models is that they memorize the answers. ARC-AGI-2 has not seen the questions before, and it did roughly twice as well as the state-of-the-art Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic models.

On Humanity's Last Exam, exceptional humans score 5%. Grok scores in the 40s. So this is incredible progress.

It's worth mentioning that this model was trained on Hopper. This model is probably about as far as you can take the last generation of NVIDIA GPUs. The next models we see—Grok 5, '05 from OpenAI, whatever OpenAI calls its next model, and the next Gemini—will be trained on Blackwell, and I think that will be a really big step function.

But I do think the ultimate prize here is artificial superintelligence. Artificial general intelligence will create a lot of economic value.

But maybe we will be able to work less as humans. But I think ASI—artificial superintelligence—is what is really exciting to you in terms of maybe being able to live longer and really fundamentally changing the fabric of our lives.

Can you take a stab at explaining that difference in definition to the audience? They hear these terms, and we kind of bundle them into either a transcendent intelligence that we haven't seen before, that we as humans can't comprehend—it goes beyond human intelligence—or this is the smartest human on the planet, and where we are right now in this journey. I think these terms are all getting muddled together, and I think we have an interesting conversation here if we parse them.

I think artificial general intelligence—I would define it as an AI that can take economically useful actions in a variety of domains and be better than the average human in most domains, all domains.

Being able to draft a contract, that's not superintelligence, but it is useful. Being able to do a medical diagnosis—not superintelligence, but it is useful. Being able to book my travel, and so on and so forth.

Superintelligence means exactly what you said: that it is smarter than any human. It has access to all of human knowledge. And I think one of the most interesting questions is, what will the economic returns to superintelligence be? They are definitionally unknowable because we have never seen superintelligence before.

If, as humans, we have pushed the limits of physics, biology, chemistry, and the laws of the universe, then maybe the economic returns to superintelligence won't be that high. But if superintelligence is curing cancer and inventing warp drives, then the returns are going to be really, really high, and it's fundamentally unknowable.

Yeah. Okay. So we're at general intelligence. Your lawyer, your tax adviser, and your accountant are going to go much faster. They'll have a copilot. This is all going to be great for a business. Every business gets 10% more efficient a month. Seems like a reasonable bogey, which means every 7–8 months, every business is going to get twice as efficient at these kinds of chores.

I wouldn't say that's a reasonable bogey. I think that might be a little aggressive. It's a Bill Gates quote: The world always changes less than you expect over the next 1, 2, 3 years, but way more than you expect over 10 years. It just takes time for technologies to diffuse. Maybe really nimble startups will see some of the gains that you were talking about.

But if we doubled productivity, that would be like an economic revolution.

We're seeing it in programming. I think if you talk to the average developer, they would say they're getting 5% to 10% better a month—better being defined as shipping more code faster.

Rule of 72. Every year, at least, you're going to be twice as good. I think that actually seems to be happening with developers.

I think it is happening with software. I think software is the first area where you've seen a real, true economic productivity impact generalized. A lot of companies are having incredible success with AI for customer support and sales. I think you see it more in startups than big companies, but the impact it has had on coding is undeniable.

Friedberg, let me swing this around to you. We've got superintelligence out there. We've got AGI out there. One of the things Gavin said was, by definition, you can't quantify the gains of superintelligence. That is the big prize here. That's why people are putting this much money into these kinds of data centers.

In your mind, it's not just general intelligence—that would be the silver medal. People are going for the gold here: not general intelligence, but superintelligence breakthroughs that we can't imagine. Would you say that's a fair way to sum up the massive interest in investing in these projects?

Yeah. I mean, I think there's something where everyone has identified this asymptotic return moment where, if you get to that moment, you're limitless in terms of the upside. Is there one winner? I don't know. I don't think so. But I would also reframe this as not some binary condition. I think we're talking about general intelligence and superintelligence as being on a spectrum of leverage toward complexity.

Complexity meaning, I can do a simple task. Instead of writing a letter and putting it in an envelope and having some guy carry it to my mom, so she gets it the next day, I can digitally get her that message instantly over email. That creates an incredible amount of leverage and solves a lot of the complexity of getting her that communication from me.

So if I, as a human, said, “I would like to harness fusion power similar to what the sun uses to make energy, and I want to do that on Earth today,” we're in, call it, year 40 or 50 of a research cycle of humans trying to solve that particularly complex problem. It's a scientific problem. It's a discovery problem. It's an engineering problem.

And this idea of superintelligence is that it could give us immense leverage in solving that complex problem that we otherwise may be challenged to solve over decades or hundreds of years. Or think about one day solving a problem that would take humans thousands of years to solve.

I don't think that humans are limited in our ability to solve problems. I think we're limited in terms of time. What digital intelligence gives us is leverage on time, so that we can now tackle ever more complex tasks. As you think about these tasks, the amount of time isn't just an incremental 1 or 2 years, but it becomes 100 years or maybe 1,000 years.

This relates to, I think, projects around physics, chemistry, transportation, and biology, where we're probably fundamentally scratching the surface today and where superintelligence is an enormous leverage creator for us. And so I don't view it as some species or race that independently persists in its own intentions. But it is a tool that provides leverage in a way that is orders of magnitude greater than the leverage we got from yesterday's digital tools, probably today's AI tools, and probably tomorrow's general intelligence tools. That's kind of how I would think about it.

Maybe it's because one model does so much stuff better than any human that you can call it superintelligence. But I think, functionally, leverage into complexity is where this becomes super compelling for humans. It's why I think we can and should be highly optimistic about living very long lives, traveling anywhere we want, having abundance in food, having abundance in resources, and having abundance in recouping our time to do the things we want to do instead of the things that we have to do today because we don't have access to this incredible leverage.

I love it. I think it's a great way to look at it. But I want to go back to the silver medal here in this sort of competition, gold being superintelligence. We start solving fusion and really big problems on deep research cycles, and the velocity of that goes up.

Just going back to the silver, everybody in the economy becomes—I don't know—single-digit more efficient every month, and some amount every year. I've been trying to back-of-the-envelope what I think the value is for a human being in the West, in the modern world, and what they should spend on AI per month.

I've come up with a number of about $75. Somewhere in that range is a no-brainer to spend on your AI per month as an individual working in the world. If that's the premise, I think there's 1 billion people in the developed world who could spend, let's call it, $100 a month. It's $1,200 a year. It doesn't take a genius to figure out this is $1 trillion in revenue. Based on market cap, that's probably $10 trillion in market cap.

And then we just have to back into the spending of what it costs to build this. You're doing these kinds of calculations, I'm sure, at Atreides. And this general back-of-the-envelope that I've come up with in my mind for a mental model—that there's a $10 trillion prize, $1 trillion in revenue just in the silver medal—does that jibe with the spending we're seeing today? I think people are putting in $10 billion worth of equipment a year across 5 different companies, right?

Well, I think they're putting in quite a bit more than $10 billion per year.

Each?

No, no. Google alone's doing $70 billion this year. Each? $70.

But is that $70 billion they're putting in this year going to be repeated for the next 5 years? So it'll be $350 billion?

If you look at it—well, yeah, TBD. The future is always uncertain. But if there are economic returns to that, they will keep doing it for sure.

Something interesting is, as we've discussed in previous All-Ins, AI is extremely compute-intensive. At no point in my career as a tech investor, except at the very beginning—which was kind of the end of the PC wars, which Dell won by being a low-cost producer and going direct, cutting out the working capital—has being the low-cost producer mattered.

The components in a PC depreciate, so if you have to go through a store where it sits on the shelves, you're at a big disadvantage from either a cost or quality perspective. But at no point in the 25 years I've been a tech investor has being the low-cost producer mattered.

Being the low-cost producer is really going to matter in AI because, at some level, the amount of tokens you produce is intelligence because of test-time compute, post-training reinforcement learning, and so on. If you can produce those tokens at a lower cost, you'll have a big advantage. If, for that $75 billion, $30 billion, or $50 billion that you're spending per year in capex, you can produce more tokens, that is a profound advantage.

I don't like your calculations. They're just a back-of-the-envelope kind of scratch, but they seem reasonable to me. The $1 trillion a year in revenue because of AI seems quite reasonable when you frame it as $1,000 for a person to be 30%, 40%, or 50% more efficient at work every year.

Yeah. We could probably go back and look at the early days of cell phones and what people were willing to pay relative to disposable income.

Your PC analogy would actually be the perfect one. A PC back in that era was what, $3,000 or $4,000 per person? They lasted for 3 years, so it was exactly $1,000 a year.

But this is why creating such a delineated distinction between different types of AI is also the equivalent of trying to create distinctions between other types of technology. The automobile, the airplane, the telephone, and the computer—all of these technologies are tools that created leverage on things that were otherwise complex and reduced them down to simplicity from a human perspective.

Pick up the phone and make a call instead of giddy-uping on your horse and going across the country to deliver a message, or use a computer to do a spreadsheet that calculated everything for you rather than calculating by hand, and so on and so forth. All of these tools reduce complexity to simple tasks for humans, and the ever-increasing complexity of what we can accomplish with digital tools is continuing in this era.

That's why I think it's very similar, Jason. This is not some new concept; it's the continuation of human productivity, the continuation of the improvement of what humans can do, what we can produce, and what we can accomplish. Yes, there's a concept now that intelligence has become such a—it's caught up to everything. But, David, I don't know if you think there is this concept of some moment of singularity, but it does feel to me like there's just extraordinary leverage being created that feels similar to—

Yeah, for sure that's true. I hope that's true. I hope your vision of it being a productivity enhancer for humans is correct. I do think people deep in AI think there's some probability that it goes sideways, but I hope that you're right.

Coming back to JCAL's $10 trillion prize, relative to the market caps and the companies involved, it needs to be at least $10 trillion. Something that I think is interesting and relevant, particularly to Grok 4 being the best product, is that the best product doesn't always win in technology.

No. Yeah.

Yeah. In sports, they say defense wins championships, and on the internet, distribution wins championships. Grok 4 has formidable competitors with lots of distribution: Google, Meta if they get their act together, and Microsoft.

From an industrial-logic perspective, something that I think makes a lot of sense, particularly since OpenAI bought Jony Ive's hardware startup, which will place them into competition with Apple at some point, is that xAI and Apple are natural partners. There's been a lot of news about Apple thinking about buying Perplexity or Mistral, but that's just a Band-Aid. Those companies don't get Apple what they need.

Apple has had an incredible partnership for many years now with Google that's generating tens of billions of dollars for both companies. I think there is solid industrial logic for a partnership. You could have Apple Grok, Safari Grok, whatever you want to call it, so that Apple feels comfortable. That probably also helps Grok in the enterprise, and it helps both Apple and Google with this DOJ trial.

In this incredibly high-Elo chess match being played between the leading labs, that partnership makes a lot of sense for both companies.

That's the first time I've heard anybody make that natural connection. But you're right: Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs at one point had this discussion. It was, “Hey, we've got search and you've got a browser.” The iPhone didn't have a browser, or they could have built their own search engine, or they could have partnered with Yahoo, but they decided to make this long-term partnership with Google. That dropped, what, $20 billion or $30 billion to the bottom line at Apple and cemented Google's search franchise.

Absolutely. Right now, that deal is being litigated by the DOJ, and the DOJ is considering remedies. If you bring on a really effective, credible AI provider, I think it could help both Google and Apple with their antitrust issues.

At the end of the day, Google has Android and its Pixel phones. OpenAI is making hardware. Anthropic is kind of a captive of Amazon. Meta is in a death match with Apple. So I think there is really sound logic for that partnership. I think it'd be good for both companies. I'd love to see it happen.

It feels to me like the interface is going to be the browser. I know this sounds crazy, but I've been playing with the Comet browser from Perplexity. Did you play with it yet, Gavin, or look at some of the demos?

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on this? ChatGPT just launched a virtual desktop that pops up to go do your little web-based scrapes, agents, assignments—I'm going to call them assignments, homework, chores. Go do your chores. What are your thoughts on this modality?

Yeah, the browser is part of distribution winning championships. Apple has Safari, and Google has Chrome. If you're not going to strike a partnership with one of those distribution channels, you will eventually need to do your own browser.

You can extend that logic all the way. That's why Google did a browser and a phone. I also think the companions from Grok have been interesting to play with, and they certainly make it more engaging.

That becomes the agent. It's an incredible, mind-blowing concept for that to be the interface.

All right, listen. Here we go. Calling in live. We've got a breaking bestie coming on board here. David Sacks calling in live. I see the pale yellow paint and an ancient building. You must be in some sort of wing of the White House. Is that correct, David?

I am. Well, I'm actually not in the White House, per se. I guess I'm on the White House grounds. We're in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That's where my office is.

I can tell from that. I've been here.

Yeah. No, they said great things. I checked my calendar. I'll send you some photos. It's great.

Well, no, but the calendar's wide open between now and the All-In Summit. So, the windows there, Sacks—the windows wide open? And I'll see you in the cafeteria, I guess.

Play your cards right on stage next week, JCAL, and you might get invited after the AI summit we're doing.

Yes, absolutely.

The AI event in DC next Wednesday, which has been publicly announced, is going to be exciting.

David, you brought a friend today. Maybe introduce your friend and tell us what you got done. What have you gotten done in the last week for the American people? They want to know, because you weren't here last week doing the pod, so you must have gotten something done for the American people. Let's hear it.

Well, first of all, this is the czar behind the czar, Bo Hines. He's the executive director of the President's Working Group on Digital Assets. That's the working group that I chair, but he actually does all the work. He's the executive director, and he's here every day.

He's been working on crypto pretty much nonstop since we started the administration, and he's kind of the unsung hero within our operation on these 2 bills that just passed the House, which are historic and quite momentous.

So, Bo, welcome to the program. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about these bills and what they do for the American people.

Yeah. First of all, David, you're too kind. We've had a blast working together. We connected back in the transition, I think in late November, and we started mapping out a plan for this. To see it come to fruition this week is really unbelievable.

The fact that we had the bipartisan votes we did today in the House is remarkable. It's unprecedented, and it shows you that leaders on both sides of the aisle understand that our country has to be at the forefront of this technological development.

But let's start with GENIUS, because I think GENIUS is really the foundation for everything else we can build upon in this space. A lot of the industry cares about market structure, as do we, and we want to see it done and on the President's desk as well.

But GENIUS is unique because it really updates the payment rails inside our current financial system. The payment rails have been archaic, and I've likened it to the fact that the ways in which we've communicated have changed quite dramatically over the course of the last several decades. The ways in which we move money really haven't, and we have the technology there in blockchain technology.

So what we're doing here is fixing the plumbing of our financial system. We're securing U.S. dollar dominance for decades to come. If you want to access our capital markets, you're going to have to use a dollar-backed stablecoin. You're also providing a pathway for tokenization of public securities, 24/7 markets, and the things that people have dreamed about for quite some time. This is a revolutionary piece of legislation, and the fact that it had this much bipartisan support is incredible.

It's a testament to President Trump's leadership. It's a testament to our fantastic AI and crypto czar, David Sacks's leadership. He's truly been the guiding star behind the ideology and what we're pushing here. He has a phenomenal team as well. I'd be remiss not to thank Tracy, who's David's chief of staff.

In the midst of all the chaos, getting this done took so many steps. We had to beat the banking lobby to get it passed in the Senate, then it moved over to the House, where we had to basically fight some members who really misinterpreted or misunderstood what this bill actually did. The president stepped up. David stepped up in an enormous way. It wouldn't have happened without either of them.

Now we have this bill heading to his desk tomorrow. To pivot to market structure briefly, this provides the rules of the road for the exchanges, the brokers, and everyone in the space. They desperately need it so that we can break down the wall between traditional financial institutions and these digital asset players. I think that's well underway.

Obviously, getting a vote as strong as they did in the House is indicative of what can happen in the Senate. If we deliver on these 2 pieces of legislation, that's about 90% of what needs to be done for crypto to make the U.S. the crypto capital of the world. It's just remarkable. We're over the moon.

Okay, Sacks, you got these 2 things over the finish line. Congratulations on that. There were lots of compromises you had to make, so I want to get into what the compromises were to get this done.

Just to clarify one thing: when you say “finish line,” as Bo was saying, there are 2 bills. There's the GENIUS Act, which is the stablecoin legislation, and then there's the CLARITY Act, which is market structure. It's basically all the other tokens besides stablecoins.

Where we are is that both passed the House today, but GENIUS has already passed the Senate, so it's going to the president's desk tomorrow, and it will become law. We're doing a bill signing with the president. By the time this podcast is released, it will probably be law. I think we'll have the signing. CLARITY started in the House, and so it has passed the House and now it's going to the Senate. They still have to do their hearings and markup on it, and we expect that'll happen over the next couple of months.

In fact, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Tim Scott, has said that he wants to finish the market structure legislation by the end of September. If all goes well, then we could be looking at a second bill signing in October. As Bo said, that would be pretty much the crypto industry's wish list for having a clear legal framework in the United States for both stablecoins and other crypto tokens. It's really pretty amazing.

When I started this job, one of my friends in Silicon Valley said that I might be able to get some AI things done, but I'd never get anything done on crypto. The reason was that the entrenched interests were too powerful and would stop it. The banking lobby would stop it, or Elizabeth Warren would stop it, or all the status quo players who could get disrupted by blockchain-based technology would somehow find a way to stop it.

That didn't happen. We've actually now moved forward. GENIUS is about to become law, and I think CLARITY is looking like it's going to have the votes in the Senate as well and become law. It's pretty amazing how much progress we've made in just 6 months.

As Bo said, this really comes down to President Trump's leadership. He made the promises during the campaign to prioritize crypto and to make the United States the crypto capital of the planet. It was his negotiating skills and dealmaking that made this all happen.

This past week has been a bit of a roller coaster. There were reports over the last couple of days that the whole thing was falling apart and wouldn't happen. There was a moment—I think this has been publicly reported, but I'll give you some color on it—when 12 members of the House whose votes were necessary to advance the bill to today's vote were brought into the Oval Office by President Trump. He worked out all the differences personally, and that's what put this bill over the top.

If it wasn't for the president's direct involvement and action and understanding of the issues, we would not be here today. He listened to all the concerns, paid attention to the ones that were real, and rebutted the ones that weren't. If it wasn't for his direct involvement, we would not be here today.

He understands crypto. He's involved in it. He seems to have an understanding of the value of stablecoins for the U.S. dollar. That seems to be a key motivator for this being bipartisan. You got twice as many Democrats as you thought you would get. Is that because people want to make sure dollar supremacy gets locked in through stablecoins as a way to do that? You can't have a stablecoin unless it's backed by a dollar.

As I've talked about on this show before, it shouldn't be that hard to sell regulation to Democrats. What we're doing here is providing a regulatory framework for the industry. They didn't have one before, and that's why the number-one stablecoin player in the world right now is an offshore entity. They will have to come onshore as part of this bill in the next 3 years.

What we're doing here is creating a regulatory framework. The reason why it's substantially bipartisan is because the industry wants this regulation. They want the stability it gives them in terms of having that legal authorization. They want to make sure that if, 4 years, 8 years, or 12 years from now, there's some new Gary Gensler who comes in and turns the whole industry upside down because he doesn't like some aspect of what they're doing, he can't just start prosecuting them, which is what the industry experienced over the past 4 years with Biden's war on crypto.

The Trump administration could fix the Gensler issues just with agency rulemaking, and we're certainly on that path to do that. But if you want long-term stability that goes beyond just this administration, you have to get legislation. You have to canonize it into law. That's why the industry was so interested in getting these bills passed.

I think that's why you're seeing some bipartisanship here. As Bo said, I do think that there's a substantial number of Democrats who understand that this technology is the future and it's a positive thing for the U.S. What could be bad about allowing digital dollars, which extends the dollar's dominance online so that it basically bolsters the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency over time as we get challengers from BRICS, for example?

This is going to make the U.S. dollar stronger. Every time a dollar token trades somewhere in the world on a crypto wallet, there has to be a physical dollar in a U.S. bank account invested in a U.S. Treasury. That creates demand for our debt, which is another positive thing. There have been studies done that show that the results of this bill could be trillions of dollars of new demand for our debt, which is only a positive thing.

If you don't allow a legal way to do this and you don't have a proper framework, you've been dancing around this person who has 3 years to get their act together. That's Tether. You can type “Tether controversies” or “shenanigans” into a search engine, and you'll find plenty of them.

I don't think it's fair to say they don't have their act together. I think they have their act together. It's just that they did not know how they'd be treated operating onshore in the U.S. under Gary Gensler and the Biden administration. The last administration, by creating all this uncertainty and doubt, was driving all the innovation offshore.

Okay, fine. They have a sordid past. That's my statement, not yours. But now they have to clean up whatever messy stuff they have in their past. That's me saying it, not you. You can have your opinion; I'll take mine. But we're in agreement that if you don't have a framework, they would be doing even more things that were maybe off the reservation, in my mind.

I would just say, one, David, congratulations. It seems like an incredible achievement. Two, I try to invest in areas where I feel like I at least believe I have some sort of competitive advantage, and it's not clear to me that I have any sort of competitive advantage in crypto.

Three, David, I'm curious about the stablecoins. Does the GENIUS Act limit them to dollar-backed stablecoins? It's not like you can create a stablecoin and then swap in something other than a dollar. Is that true?

Anybody can create a stablecoin that's backed by anything. In fact, I think there are euro-backed stablecoins out there, for example, but nobody uses them. If you look at the stablecoin market share, it's 98% U.S. dollars and 2% euros, because there's a flight to quality.

I mean, everyone wants to use the best one, right? And this is why it's in the interest of the United States to basically enable this technology to continue flourishing, because as the best fiat currency, we're the one that's going to get used the most. There's no reason to have multiple fiat stablecoins, not really. So this is going to accrue to the benefit of the United States.

And if they don't, they can't participate in our market, right? So that's the good news here: If you choose not to go through those audits and you do attestations or other fugazi-fugazi stuff offshore—not saying anybody's doing that, but people have—then you just don't get to participate. And this is the great thing about having some basic rules of the road.

We should talk a little bit here about infrastructure. Sacks, you were in Pittsburgh this week. There were some announcements. This was another bipartisan win. I think Shapiro was there, and there was a bunch of investment going on there. Maybe tell us a little bit about the progress made in Pittsburgh with regard to AI and infrastructure.

This was an energy and innovation summit organized by Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick, and they did an amazing job bringing together all of these different companies and interests that have a stake in energy in Pennsylvania and the development of AI.

Pennsylvania is, I think, the second-largest energy-producing state in the U.S. It has tremendous amounts of natural gas, and they feel like they can expand that. I think there's been a lot of fracking in the past there, for example. They even have nuclear—Westinghouse is there—and it makes sense to have the data centers near the power source, right?

We know that these big AI data centers are going to be powered by either natural gas or nuclear. Pennsylvania just makes a lot of sense as a place to build this AI infrastructure. This was a summit to announce new investment in Pennsylvania, something like $90 billion. President Trump was there to keynote the summit and talk about these investments.

It's his policies toward energy that he started describing long ago. Remember, he made the campaign promise of “drill, baby, drill.” He's been talking about the need for energy expansion in America for many years, and I think he was very far-sighted in seeing that energy is the basis for everything. It's the basis for AI. It's the basis for all other kinds of growth. So by promoting energy dominance, we also get AI dominance.

We've talked on this show before about how we're going to need that energy to power the electricity for all these new AI data centers. This summit brought together all these different groups. The thing I thought was really interesting, the thing I learned from it, was just how diverse the business interests are that are going to participate in this whole AI boom.

It wasn't just big tech. Ruth Porat from Google was there. It's also small tech. There were hardware companies and robotics companies, but there were also these energy companies. There was nuclear. There was gas. The trade associations were there. It's construction, electricians, and carpenters.

There's a huge, diverse array of different parts of the economy that are going to experience growth from this AI boom that's taking place. It's not just a Silicon Valley thing. So that was what I took away from Pittsburgh, and it was a really cool experience.

I thought there were two interesting notes as well. Hydro—I saw Google was investing in hydro and upgrading some dams there. I think one of the great upshots of the AI boom is that the AI companies, whether it's Meta or Google, are so motivated that they'll actually go and upgrade the infrastructure.

They'll invest in the small modular nuclear reactors that are coming, and even gas turbines. Obviously, natural gas is a major part of this as well, and you saw that up close and personal with the build-out of Colossus at xAI.

Yeah, absolutely. Electrical production is fundamental to AI. If we do not significantly increase domestic energy production and electricity generation, we are already at a disadvantage to China, and I do think we want to close that electrical-generation gap as quickly as we can.

Natural gas is great, nuclear is great, solar is great, batteries are great. We need it all.

Yeah, all of it. And Sacks, I saw your favorite governor, Josh Shapiro, was there, and he was being very positive about finding common ground on energy and economic development, saying, “Hey, this is a great example of bipartisan efforts to collaborate.”

Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because you had two great moments of collaboration between the Trump administration and the Democrats. This is good for the American people—both on the crypto project and on AI in Pennsylvania.

I've never met Shapiro. I did see him there at the event, but I didn't see him on the stage. I don't know if he was part of the roundtable, so I don't know exactly what his status was.

What's interesting about Pennsylvania right now is that it's a state that's turning red. So you see that Fetterman, who's probably the most right-wing member of the Democratic Party in the Senate, and Josh Shapiro obviously are tacking toward the center because they see the direction of travel in Pennsylvania.

Yeah, I think you've got some centrist Democrats in that state.

Yeah, it's working out pretty well. Josh Shapiro every 2 days tweets something about how he's deregulated something, how he's made it easier to do business. He's on the program. He seems like a sensible man.

Yeah, 100%.

I'll just give a final shout-out to Bo here for all the work that he did on GENIUS. I mean, he's kind of the unsung hero.

Bo, how are you doing all this while finishing up your degree? When do you graduate from college? The kid looks like he's 20 years old. How old are you, Bo?

I have the baby face. I'm 29, turning 30 next month.

Look at you—29 in the White House, leading and working with David Sacks. This is a dream come true for you, huh?

It is. David's been incredible. I've learned so much from him—just the way that he negotiates and the way that his brain works. It's been a blast just to be a part of it.

But I have a 10-month-old now, so I should have bags under my eyes from lack of sleep. Jason, I'll make one more point before I jump off on the Tether topic. The one thing that I think your viewers should know is that this year they'll be the fourth-largest purchaser of U.S. Treasuries.

I think that's something that we should really contemplate. I agree with David's sentiment on this. I'm excited to see what they do here in the U.S. I'm glad they're going to be a part of our system under the regulatory regime, but so will everyone else. I think that's a great thing for our country. It allows us to have control.

That's great that you guys are backing them up, because they've been banned so many times by other governments. I'm glad you got their act together. I'm going to keep on those Tether guys until they get their act together.

Keep qualifying that you speak only for yourself.

I only speak for myself. I've been following that Tether story for a long time, and I think it's great.

I want to make this point. I always know that our critics have never actually watched the pod when they start talking about the All-In point of view on something, right? As if there's a singular point of view from the All-In pod. It's like the All-In bros whoever think something, when anyone who's watched the show knows that we've been fighting like cats and dogs for years.

There are 4 distinct points of view, and sometimes we agree, but there's almost always some disagreement.

We've disagreed about this issue. Trump and I, as you know, are relentless supporters of Ukraine. We believe we should be giving them weapons and support. And David, you happen to disagree with me and our president on that. You've had a different position historically. So here we are. I'm going to stay in my lane on that one.

David, can we talk about the H20s, or would you rather not? I feel like you've been so dead right about this, and it seems like they're going to get the export licenses. That is 100% the right decision for America, and I do give you credit for championing that.

Can you frame it for a second for the audience, given what we're talking about here? NVIDIA obviously was banned from selling its latest and greatest to China, and even the last generation, the H20s, and obviously that creates an opening for Huawei and other players to create competitor products as opposed to using the standards built here in America.

Yeah. Well, I think you said it well, but first of all, it's not the latest and greatest.

It's not even the last generation. It's a deprecated version of the last generation, right?

Yeah.

So, remnants. It's a less powerful version of the Hopper chip, and now they're on to Blackwell. Anyway, Gavin can explain.

Yeah, it is. It's many, many years behind the state of the art here in America. But while it's many years behind the state of the art here in America, I think it's kind of devilishly clever because, let's call it, 2 years ahead of the chips from Huawei. And so it kind of gives America an advantage while preventing China from developing a domestic NVIDIA alternative.

The real threat is that China does have more electricity. They can do things that we cannot do here in America. The Blackwell racks are exquisitely designed to be as power-efficient as possible. If you don't care about power, you can make very different kinds of design decisions.

Huawei has something called the CloudMatrix 384, which uses fiber optics instead of copper to link the chips together. And while it's not nearly as power-efficient as the Blackwell and GB200 NVL72, they have all the power they need. And so I think it's a smart decision for America to sell this chip that gives America an advantage in AI and keeps China from developing their own domestic alternatives, which could eventually challenge NVIDIA, AMD, and other American AI accelerator champions globally.

We don't want that to happen. So I thought it was a mistake when they banned the chips, and I'm really happy and think it's really good for America if that is being reversed. Kudos to you, David.

Gavin, you said it so well. I don't think I have anything to add.

Can I just say one thing on crypto? You guys can put it in or not, but I thought it was interesting. David, I was always worried about stablecoins as a risk to the dollar, but I think you make a very good point: when you are the dominant currency, they entrench that dominance. I just had not thought of them that way.

Well, I think what's going to happen with these dollar-based stablecoins is they'll start being used all over the world. Let's say that you're in a country, maybe it's a developing-world country where the fiat currency is not trusted, and now all of a sudden you can transact in dollars using a wallet on a phone. The merchant also has a wallet on a phone, and now you can just transact in dollars. You could see a large portion of these economies dollarizing from the bottom up because, again, once you have your choice of fiat currencies through stablecoins, why wouldn't you just use the best one?

And that's what I think is really interesting, so I do think it extends the dollar's dominance internationally into the online realm. And previously, people were basing their stablecoins on a basket of assets—some Treasuries, some real estate investments—because they were seeking yield. Gavin?

So, they would buy real estate or short-term and long-term Treasuries. They might put equities into it. They might keep some cash, and none of that was known. And so that's where this big fear came from: These things are getting pretty big. There's obviously a demand to use this concept of a stablecoin. But what if there's a run on the stablecoins? Are there enough dollars or liquid assets in there?

That's where I think certain players may have moved their asset allocation. In order to be in the U.S. market, Tether's going to have to be 100% in Treasuries, right? They're not going to be allowed to be, say, in real estate. There was a concept that maybe they were buying Chinese paper for real estate back in the day, and people were concerned about that.

So, this cleans all that up and they have an easy path, but you can't make interest on it.

That's actually a very interesting portion of this. So that will have to come at a later time so the banks don't lose anything here, right?

Well, just clarify one point on that. One of the concessions that was made to community banks was not to have an interest feature, because the community banks were worried that this new stablecoin industry would put them out of business. I think that fear was wildly overblown on their part. I don't think that's what's going to happen remotely, but when you have a new technology like this and a very established industry, you can see why maybe they'd be afraid.

But the bill allows for all sorts of marketing, promotions, rebates, that kind of stuff. So maybe it's not called interest, but there are mechanisms to create, let's say, rewards for stablecoin holders. It's not as black-and-white as just, “Oh, there's nothing a stablecoin issuer can do to attract, incentivize, or reward one of their holders.” It is a dimension they could compete on.

So maybe if I were to buy $10,000 worth of a stablecoin, I could get mileage points or maybe a lodging gift card—or maybe, I don't know. We have to interpret the language, but the mechanism is there.

Okay. Well, there you have it, folks. All right. Reporting from our capital, David Sacks, czar of AI and cryptocurrency. I'll see you next Wednesday in D.C. for a very important summit.

All right, besties. I'm here at the White House with Senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee, the principal author of the GENIUS Act. He, I would say, along with the leadership of President Trump, is the reason why this bill happened. And we have stablecoin legislation just signed into law by President Trump.

Bill, you did a phenomenal job. I got to observe this whole process, and you really played the critical role. You were a very skillful legislator, crafting delicate compromises. You were kind of the glue that held the whole thing together. Congratulations on getting this done. Is this your first bill that you've gotten done as a senator?

It is. I've served in the Senate for over 4 years, but we were in the minority for the past 4 years. So this is the first opportunity, since the Senate was taken by the Republicans, to actually drive legislation through. And the fact that we had the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House made this possible.

It was just a threshold concern. We worked so hard, as you know, to retake the Senate in 2024, to retake the White House in 2024, and hold on to the House of Representatives. It worked. And that's the only thing that's enabled us to deliver this type of meaningful legislation.

And I say this, too: It's been a great team that has done this. I may be the author of the legislation, but the leadership that you've brought to bear from the White House, coming in and donating your time from the private sector, working as a volunteer here, but making certain that the leadership and the vision are present here in the executive branch—you've been absolutely great.

And that vision, I think, has carried forward into the Senate and the House. More and more people are understanding this and catching on. And I think what we've done today is launch the catalyst for what's going to make America the crypto capital of the world.

Yeah, it's been really amazing and interesting for me to watch this whole process. They say that you shouldn't watch legislation or sausages being made. But earlier in the week, the media was reporting that this bill was dead because there were a dozen holdouts, and President Trump made calls late into the night. He gathered people into the Oval Office. He cajoled, he twisted arms, and he also persuaded, and he got us over the finish line. It was pretty incredible.

Well, I think the Founding Fathers made it actually quite difficult to legislate for a reason. But it is difficult. It's taken months upon months to get to this point, and the GENIUS Act has been killed a couple of times in the media. Elizabeth Warren declared victory early on that she killed the bill. That didn't happen. She didn't have the juice to do it.

That's a big deal because until now, the crypto community has been living under Elizabeth Warren's reign of terror. She basically was calling the shots during the Biden administration on crypto, and I was there when the GENIUS Act passed the Senate. I was up in the bleachers or whatever. And she was not happy. I mean, there were photos of her, and she did not like losing.

There's a fundamental reason for this, David, because Elizabeth Warren and her crowd want to see a central bank digital currency. What they want is control of our transactions. They want the ability—they're the ones who wanted to go to a $600 threshold for your Venmo transactions, reporting everything. They want the ability to do Choke Point 3.0, right?

And if you think about it, they had visibility into our transactions, the ability to centralize and control them. They could control our lives. That may be okay for the Chinese Communist Party, but that's not going to work here in America. And this legislation put the final nail in the coffin to that.

It's really amazing that you got it through. And to get this passed in the Senate, you had to have 60 votes, right? Because with reconciliation, you only need 50 plus 1. But for regular order, I guess to get past the potential for a filibuster, you need 60.

That's exactly right. Exactly.

So, what demands did that put on you in terms of getting Democratic votes? Because the Republicans have what, 53?

Yes.

So, we didn't have all the Republicans. We lost Republicans. But what enabled me to get the other 9 Democrats to come on board was really an education process, because at its core, this shouldn't be a partisan issue.

This is about taking America's payment system into the 21st century. This is about making our nation more competitive. This is about expanding demand for the U.S. Treasury securities that we issue. This is about the dominance of the U.S. dollar. It's hard not to like it.

But I think there's a partisan bent here in Washington that's so strong that their objective is just to keep Republicans, Donald Trump, or David Sacks from getting a win here. Through education and listening—and frankly, I don't think it's my legislative skills—I think it's the business skills that I brought to the legislative branch. I think it's through those business skills and the ability to negotiate that we've actually gotten to this point today.

And so, tell us about that. Before this, you were a businessman, then you became ambassador of Japan. You met President Trump and told him you wanted to run for senator from Tennessee. He told the story in his speech.

He said that you had learned Japanese in 6 months as ambassador of Japan.

It was a little longer than that.

Okay.

There's a piece of the story missing, because I started my career at a place called the Boston Consulting Group, and they sent me to Tokyo for 3 years back in the late '80s and early '90s. That's when I learned the language.

To go back as U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Trump in 2017 was the honor of a lifetime. I can tell you, representing the greatest nation in the world in any place in the world is an honor, but particularly in a region like that, which has so many strategic initiatives underway right now.

Think about this: Japan has more U.S. military stationed there than any place else in the world. Japan is in one of the toughest environments in the world. If you think about the neighborhood that they're in—North Korea, Russia, and China, right at your doorstep—the time that I spent as ambassador really helped me dig in deeply in terms of the national security issues that our nation confronts and those that our allies confront.

At the same time, we did 2 trade deals with Japan. Nobody thought it could be done. We were able to navigate that with Jamieson Greer working right beside Bob Lighthizer. I loved working with those guys, and we got 2 great trade deals done.

Jamieson is back now as the U.S. trade representative, and I'm very optimistic that we're going to see more trade flourish. President Trump knows how to do this. I've been with him in the trade negotiations. He knows exactly how to navigate this, and I'm looking forward to great results from our trade negotiations as well.

Excellent. We're only 6 months into this administration, and it feels like so much has happened and so much has been done. We just had the one big, beautiful bill, and now we have this legislation. What's next, in your view? What do you think is going to happen next?

What's happening right now in the United States Senate is that we just put through a rescissions package for a little over $9 billion. That's a small amount. It's a large amount of money, of course, but it's a small amount relative to the entire budget.

The Democrats have gone apoplectic over this. Any effort to cut back on spending, somehow they've got to be against that. They're only for spending, and we're trying to bring fiscal sanity back to America.

The focus is going to be to continue to find opportunities to legislate what has been found at DOGE. The other activities go well beyond DOGE. Every department head and every agency is looking for ways to streamline regulations, cut costs, and operate more efficiently. I've got to believe there are tremendous opportunities there, and many billions more dollars will come out of the budget as a result.

But we've gone into a fairly partisan mode right now, and I think it's going to be tough for the next little while. While we're in this sort of partisan gap, I think what we should be doing is focusing on market structure for digital assets, and we're working on that. I just talked to some of my colleagues in the House today about how we're going to marshal that forward.

I'm looking forward to your leadership there as well, and to the leadership of many people in the industry.

Just so everyone knows what that is: market structure is the legal framework, the rules for all the crypto tokens that are not stablecoins. The GENIUS Act just passed, giving the legal framework for stablecoins. Now we have market structure for all the other tokens.

It deals with questions like, what's a crypto security? What's a currency? What's a commodity? Who regulates those things? It's about providing clarity, so that market participants know what the rules are, because the last 4 years under Gensler, they were basically prosecuted without knowing how to abide by the rules.

Yeah, they called it regulation by enforcement. You don't know what the rules are, but they just launch an enforcement proceeding against you.

President Trump was funny today because he looked at the audience and said, “I guess half of you were being prosecuted here about a year ago by the previous administration. Things are going to change.”

He was on fire today. People should go back and watch it. He spoke off the cuff, basically like he normally does, for 20 minutes, and was very funny.

Part of the reason why he said that is that when we did the crypto summit at the White House back in March, the Winklevoss brothers, Tyler and Cameron, were there. They told the story about how, a year before, they thought it would be more likely that they'd be in the big house than in the White House. That's the way it was looking. They were dealing with so much unfair lawfare.

In any event, we've moved past that. So, thank you for your leadership on this. By the way, on the rescissions, I know this is the one issue that I think all 4 hosts of the All-In podcast agree on: deficit spending is out of control. Anything we can do to try to rein it in and have more fiscal sanity is appreciated. Even Calacanis can agree with that one. He's sort of the token lib on the podcast.

I'm telling you, we're going to continue to work along those lanes that the big, beautiful bill is following. It's oriented toward growth stimulation, right? Everything that we can do to stimulate more capital investment in the United States is embodied in the tax law as part of that bill.

With the growth coming out of the big, beautiful bill, and if we continue to go through the cuts with rescissions, I'm very optimistic that we're going to get back on the right path. That's the objective. That's the goal.

Meanwhile, taking us into the 21st century with our payments and digital assets, we're going to continue to work along those lanes as well. I appreciate your leadership in that regard.

Well, we appreciate you. I think the state of Tennessee, where I grew up—I grew up in Memphis—is very lucky to have you as its senator. The Republican Party is really lucky to have you. The Senate is very lucky to have you: someone with your business background and your skills, who has now gotten this first piece of legislation through.

Again, this wasn't a budget bill. It took 60 votes in the Senate. When's the last time that even happened? It's been years.

I heard the Senate Banking Committee hadn't passed a bill in, basically, 10 years because it takes 60 votes. It's been over 10 years since a bill got out of the Senate Banking Committee.

One of my friends wrote me yesterday and said, “I didn't think you could get the Ten Commandments passed out of the United States Senate.” So, congratulations.

I don't want to take the credit for it, because it's been a wonderful team. As I said, your leadership in the White House and the executive branch, our friends in the House of Representatives, and my great staff, led by Luke Pettit, have done just a terrific job.

Luke Pettit was amazing. We worked closely with him. Bo, who's the director of the Crypto Council, was on the show earlier today.

Tyler was wonderful at Treasury.

Yep. Tyler Williams at Treasury, who was Secretary Bessent's staff person. The staff never get the credit they deserve for all the work they do, right? But Tyler, Luke, and Bo were amazing throughout this process.

And in the Senate, too, we've had great leadership. Our chairman for the Senate Banking Committee is Tim Scott. He's been a true proponent of this. Cynthia Lummis is very focused on digital assets and was very supportive of me as she chairs the Digital Asset Subcommittee of our Banking Committee.

We've had great support in the Senate, and I think it's going to continue to grow on both sides of the aisle.

Cynthia Lummis has been great. I've met with her many times. Tim Scott's been great. I understand that Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democrat from New York, has been great to work with.

She brought in a lot of Democratic votes. I think you got 18.

The great thing about Kirsten, too, is that she was a Wall Street lawyer at Davis Polk. She understands the markets, and to have her level of technical expertise was a huge asset. She was able to really convey to the Democratic side that we were here trying to get the right thing done for the country.

This was not a partisan effort. This was something that really is aimed at growth, technology leadership, and, frankly, dollar dominance that we all should be for.

Amazing. I think it's really amazing that we got this done. When you compare this to where we were a year ago, it was nonstop. I guess regulation by enforcement is basically regulation through prosecution, lawfare, and the crypto community was being driven offshore. There wouldn't have been a crypto community in the United States.

Then President Trump won the election, and now, thanks to the efforts of Bill and others, it's law. The GENIUS Act is now law. We have a legal framework for stablecoins, and market structure is next. The CLARITY Act is next. We're going to try and do that by October.

It's really amazing. I thought that working for President Trump would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because he's a president who really wants to get things done, and that's what's happening. It's really been amazing.

Great. Appreciate it.

We'll let your winners ride. Rainman David and it said, "We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it." Love you. [Music] Besties are gone. That is my dog taking notice your driveways. Oh man, my appetiter will be up. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Your feet. We need to get mer. [Music] I'm going all in.