White House BTS, Google buys Wiz, Treasury vs Fed, Space Rescue

Friedberg had this great story. There’s a machine there I’ve never seen in my life, but he knew the machine.

It’s a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine.

There’s a machine right by the Navy mess where we had lunch in the Situation Room that dispenses—literally, I’ve never seen this before. This is how out of touch you are. This is in every 7-Eleven, theater, McDonald’s, movie theater—everywhere. This is everywhere. You have not left.

I was blown away by this machine. All Coca-Colas, all of the Gatorades. Let me ask you a question: How much is a dozen eggs?

$3.99.

He got it—$3.99. That’s right. No, $3.99.

Pretty close. It depends. It’s pretty much double that in the Bay Area at Whole Foods, but yeah, it’s half that.

Ask me how much milk is.

$8.99 to $1.99, depending on what you buy.

How much is a sweater, Chamath?

My sweater is $4,000.

All right.

I just popped in to reminisce about this trip that Chamath and Friedberg just did. Absolutely a trip of a lifetime. We had all the besties at the White House. It was really incredible.

Oh, wait—was Jason there, actually?

It’s interesting you say that. I checked my spam filters, and my invite got stuck in the spam filters.

It was a little bit of a problem.

I noticed there were some other invites stuck in my spam filters. A couple of other invites got stuck.

Yeah, my Jeopardy! invite—I see that you guys are all going to be in the next Jeopardy!, in the second round. My invite to Jeopardy! somehow got lost. I have to talk to John, the CEO, so that was kind of a bummer.

I also missed my invite to Bridgerton. You got a cameo in Bridgerton there, I see, Bri? I guess I’m not going to be on the Netflix show Bridgerton. I missed that.

I think we’re in a bit of a—let’s keep going. It looks like my White Party invite here with Diddy—oh, well, we cut it in.

Thank God for the White Party.

Oh, look, Epstein’s Island. Oh, no, I’m sorry—that was Reid Hoffman’s invite. That one was out, bro.

All right, let’s get back to it. It was a triumphant week for our besties. They were like little schoolgirls going crazy on the group chat: “Oh my God, I’m in the White House! Oh my God, look, I’m getting closer to power!”

What was it like, Chamath? Your dream has come true. You came here to America from Canada, you built all this from nothing, and you wound up at the White House. Give it to me.

It was probably the most intense 3 days that we had. Nat and I were there to see the president, but obviously we were there to see Sacks as well. There were a bunch of other things that happened. Myself, Friedberg, New Money Sunny was there, and our bestie Elon Musk, obviously—we dropped in with him.

To recap, on Sunday we got in. It was raining cats and dogs, so there’s nothing to say there. Then, on Monday, we basically had some meetings in the morning, and David said, “Guys, let me just walk you around and show you where I work.”

By the way, we camped out in Sacks’s office for 3 days, which was awesome. We had the passes to be at the West Wing and the Eisenhower Building. That’s Sacks’s office, so we all kind of worked from there and went to our meetings from Sacks’s office. Sacks’s incredible chief of staff, Tracy, escorted us around anytime we needed to go anywhere.

Then we started to walk through the West Wing. We dropped by and looked at Sacks’s office for a second.

I love what you’ve done with the place. Were you allowed to put up a piece of art? And look at that desktop rig.

I think the most iconic part of the West Wing is the Portico, where you see those very famous shots of all these important people. In this case, it’s just the 4 of us, but you can see the shot of all of us.

The Portico connects the West Wing to the president’s residence. Tracy, Sacks’s chief of staff, escorted us from the West Wing, after we did an amazing tour, over to the residence. I don’t know if we were really supposed to do it, but she has full access, so we were able to go on the walk and take a walk around the residence and all the rooms.

This is the entrance to the West Wing right here. When you come in for meetings, administrators walk in and out.

Pam Bondi’s on her way out.

We got to meet Pam Bondi. It really is amazing. Members of the Cabinet are coming in and out of this door, and members at work in the West Wing are coming in and out.

Or leaders.

Yeah, and then we saw leaders coming in. One of the most iconic things we were allowed to do was see the Press Room.

By the way, the people that work there—and we’ll get to it in a second, because we met some incredible people that work in the White House—but some of the folks that don’t necessarily get a lot of flowers, like the folks who work in the upper press room and the lower press room, are some of the kindest people.

They said, “Why don’t you guys come and see where they do the presidential briefings?” The one thing about the White House is that everything is in a nook or cranny away. This is where you obviously see the presidential seal. It isn’t there because the president is not there, but we were able to do that.

We met some really incredible people. Nick, you can find a picture of myself, Friedberg, Sunny, and Sacks. We’re with Taylor Budowich, who’s the deputy chief of staff for communications at the White House.

His office is well placed because through that window behind us is the gaggle. There’s this lawn outside the White House called Pebble Beach, and all the networks have tents there. They’ll do recordings with White House officials, with the White House in the background. It’s not a green screen or an LED; it’s the actual White House in the background. That’s why it’s all set up there, and it’s called Pebble Beach.

Then there’s an area—I think they call it “the stakeout”—which is basically just a paved area where White House officials can go out and get swarmed by the media asking them questions. That’s called the gaggle. Taylor can keep an eye on everything happening with the media through that window in his office.

Is that where Marine One lands and you see everybody yelling at the president and trying to talk to the press?

That’s on the other side. A lot of those reporters will just move over there when they have the ability to do that. When you see Caroline Leavitt, who’s the White House press secretary, or Stephen Miller, who’s the deputy chief of staff for policy, come out and all of a sudden speak into a microphone, there’ll be a lot of reporters. That’s usually the stakeout, and that’s the White House gaggle.

We saw Elon. Nick, you can just show the picture of all of us with Elon. The incredible thing is that here you have the most incredible entrepreneur of our lifetime dealing with so many complicated issues, and Elon works in one of the smallest offices I’ve ever seen. All he has is a desk with an enormous screen and his phone.

You can see that there is nothing that matters except the task at hand, and that’s really inspiring. It puts everybody on the same level. You feel this energy that all of these guys are doing incredible work on behalf of the country, to a person, where there’s no ego about some of these things: What is the office size? What is this? What is that? They’re just here to grind.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a workforce more happy. You get there, and the energy and intensity are very much like the TV show The West Wing. There’s just this constant momentum every day. People live a whole lifetime, and everyone is energized.

I was talking to Sacks’s chief of staff, and she said, “You just never calm down. You’re never—there’s never a dull moment here.” That’s why everyone has this grin on their face. They’re so happy to be doing this work.

The intensity—I’m going to describe to you a 45-minute-or-so experience in the Oval Office.

The next day, Nat, Sacks, and I went to see POTUS in the Oval Office. There’s this incredible meeting room, and you wait there—the waiting room is quite large and very beautiful, with beautiful sofas, et cetera. Then they say, “The president’s ready to see you,” and you get escorted into the Oval Office.

The one thing that struck me about the Oval Office is that it’s also much smaller than what you would think. It’s a very good size and a very natural size, but it’s beautiful and inspiring.

Our experience was that Nat was in the front, I was in the middle, and David was beside me. As we were walking through, you could hear that there was this very important conversation happening between the president and somebody else—I won’t say who—about something that I won’t say. But this was really important.

We walked through the Oval Office and into the back, and then we went into his private dining room. It has all this incredible memorabilia hanging around. Nick, maybe you can show the picture of me and the president.

We had this conversation, and in the middle of it we had a chance to watch some Fox News together because the Dragon capsule was landing. I texted Elon and said, “Hey, we’re in the Oval Office. Do you want to come drop in?” He texted back, “Can’t. Dragon capsule landing.” I’m like, “Yeah, I know. We’re watching it right now.”

Nat, myself, POTUS, and Sacks were watching this thing unfold. Then our meeting ended, and we walked out into an area where Taylor’s office is, where that picture was. We continued to sit there randomly, watching.

This is what you mean, Friedberg: Marco Rubio comes by. So now we’re just standing around. There’s Marco Rubio, and we were talking about the landing. Then, out of the left-hand side, Sheikh Tahnoon comes in because he’s there to say hi to the president. He says hi to Marco Rubio, says hi to me, and we talk for a few minutes. Then he leaves.

The intensity of the people within 2 steps of each other—you saw the CIA director walk in and out. It’s an incredibly mesmerizing place. Irrespective, I think, of your political ideology, the minute that you’re there, it’s hard not to be anything but Team America. I think it’s impossible, actually, and it’s really inspiring.

By the way, coming home, I feel like I’m crashing. There’s such a level of adrenaline and dopamine. We are observers, so I can only imagine, Sacks, what it feels like for you when you’re in that environment.

It’s a very intoxicating, mesmerizing place.

I think that’s well said, and every day there’s something new. One day it’s the Navy mess, which you didn’t mention, but we got a chance to go over there.

We had lunch there. It was incredible.

Did you get a photo of the burgers?

I did. I sent Nick a photo of the burger. I got the veggie burger.

Famous, right?

It’s got the seal on the top.

They must use some sort of grill tool to burn the seal of the president of the United States onto the burgers. I think that’s a nice touch.

They didn’t do it on the veggie burger.

What does that send?

They’re sending you a message.

A message.

By the way, what’s incredible about the narrowness and smallness is that there’s just a door that does not look all that imposing. It’s very unassuming, and there’s just a small sign that says “Situation Room.”

There’s a little corridor off the West Wing lobby. Like you said, if you’re hanging out in the West Wing lobby, you’re going to run into all sorts of interesting people. You go down this little passageway—it’s so small. The headroom of the door is so small that Sriram, who does AI policy, is 6 feet 6 inches and almost concussed himself once because he hit his head at the top of the door.

I think the door frame is about 6 feet 2 inches in clearance. Maybe it was made over 100 years ago. He literally has to duck his head every time he walks by.

In any event, if you walk to the end of that passageway, there’s a little kiosk to get a coffee, or you turn the other way and you’re in the Situation Room. You could be whacking a terrorist from 4,000 miles away, or you can get a mocha. You could do both. Why choose?

Sayan Banister

I have a question. I want to know from David what his favorite piece of art is there and whether David and Chamath saw the Declaration of Independence.

Actually, yeah, we saw it.

This is the problem, Sayan. I feel like I want to redo that moment. David gets to do it every day, but I want to redo it 50 times because we didn’t necessarily stop there. He has to open and close the curtains because they want to keep the sun off the Declaration of Independence, probably a good idea.

I didn’t think to say, “Can we just stop?” It was such a whirlwind that I want to redo it.

I think you’ll get a chance to. I think you will.

Sayan Banister

When I run and I’m president—because I’m the only one here who can—

Oh, wait, Sayan, you’re an American?

Sayan Banister

Yeah.

You’re really dialing up the misogyny. Good for you.

Sayan Banister

I was talking about the besties here. I forgot for a second.

She bests.

I was wondering about the choice of the double-breasted suit, Chamath. This is a strong, strong choice here. To go double-breasted to the White House—take me through the thinking.

First of all, a big shout-out to Luca Rubinacci, my tailor. I wore double-breasted on Monday and Wednesday.

Whoa, 2 in a week. So you quad-doubled it in 1 week?

But then I went single-breasted to see Bessent.

I did notice that.

It’s a little gratuitous to go triple-double.

You don’t want to triple-double.

No. By the way, we were hanging out at the White House, and randomly, at about 1:00 in the afternoon on Monday, they said, “Would you guys like to sit down with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent?” They said, “Special bonus episode, 5:30 today,” and we had a dinner at 7:00 or 7:30, so it was pretty tight. But we were like, “Yes, that sounds good.”

Then we got to go over to the Treasury later in the afternoon. We had a camera crew come and set up. Here’s this beautiful room in the Treasury. I forgot the name of the room. It was the Cash Room, I think. We have to find this beautiful room.

We set up the interview on YouTube, on X, and on the main feed.

Then we got a call after we did the Bessent interview. Howard Lutnick, who Chamath was going to have a meeting with on Wednesday morning, right before we were flying home, said, “What if I come in early before our meeting, Chamath, and we do a sit-down?”

So we said, “Let’s do it.” Then we got to go to the White House press briefing room. They have a special auditorium just outside the West Wing. You guys will recognize the stage, obviously, from many Biden press interviews.

We did this interview with Lutnick, and my God, this is going to be a barn burner of an interview when it comes out.

I ran into him after he had done the interview, and he was excited about it. It sounds like you guys were on fire.

He was on fire, Sacks. This guy—I think there are going to be so many clips out of this interview. It was incredible. It was over an hour and a half, and he just kept going and going.

Afterward, we went to his building. By the way, he’s secretary of Commerce, and Howard’s office is in the old War Department building. We jumped in his car and went to his office. It is the most beautiful—I didn’t think to stop and take photos. I should have taken more photos, but his office is outrageously beautiful.

I don’t know if you’ve been over there.

Yeah, I have.

Let me just say one thing. Politics and policy aside, these individuals—from the White House deputy chief of staff to these members of the Cabinet to all the staff that work in the West Wing—were incredibly open and transparent.

There were no press people intervening or involved. It was very random and ad hoc that we got to have these sit-down conversations, and they were just so open. I want to say that was really refreshing and incredible, and I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to sit through this.

When you work in the White House and have been successful in the private sector, like Scott Bessent, Howard Lutnick, myself, Doug Burgum, or Elon especially, I would describe it as a money-for-purpose trade. You’re giving up money, but the sense of purpose you feel working for the White House and for this president is incredible.

I think you guys picked up on that. In my view, that’s a trade that you should be happy to make any day of the week, because it’s really an honor to work at the White House and for this president. He actually wants to get things done on behalf of the American people.

The default state of Washington is that nothing gets done. You guys know that. The bureaucracy, entropy, and inertia basically rule the day. So it takes a president who, number one, has a mandate from the American people; number two, has a tremendous sense of mission and purpose; and number three, brings tremendous energy to the job.

Then, I think, finally, he assembles the right team around him. Those are the conditions under which you can actually make positive change for the country, and we have that. It’s kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If we don’t get this done now—if we’re not able to cut the deficit and debt now—when are we ever going to do it? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I think everybody there feels that. Everyone in the White House is really proud to be there, excited to be there, and having fun.

Part of it is that you can tell the president makes his job fun because he’s having a great time.

Yeah, he was really born to do this job. In so many ways, he brings so much energy to it. He’s indefatigable, and he’s empowering.

Everyone we met with, to Sacks’s point, had been successful in another part of life, in business, or elsewhere, and they’re generally post-economic people. But he’s letting everyone run. We got to meet with several other members of the Cabinet, and they were all sharing with us that they’re being given autonomy and authority. They can just run.

I think that’s really important. If you want to bring in high-impact people, you need to let them have an impact and let them do their thing.

Let me give you one quick anecdote to wrap this segment up. When we were in the private dining room, Steve Witkoff, who’s another incredible entrepreneur, was dealing with something sensitive. He came in and told the president, “Great, great job.”

Then there were 3 other issues. Sacks had something, Sergio had something, and then, on top of all of that, the president said, “Guys, listen, for this dinner coming up, I really want to make sure the acoustics are right so everybody has an opportunity.”

The level of detail—from the most important thing all the way down to literally the acoustics in the dining room—he is on top of all of it. I was just like, this is crazy. To your point, the energy, the indefatigability, and the desire to get every little thing right—it’s pretty rare.

You saw it just in those few minutes, when he was being peppered with so many decisions and actions. You realize what a demanding job it is, and you really need a person who is special in that way, who is somehow cut out for that type of job.

It is.

Very difficult.

Totally agree.

I think you’re totally right. If we can create a pattern where people with high executive function—let’s just say that, because that’s less of a loaded word than “businessman” or “successful”—people with high executive function who have proven it should, at some point in their career, step into government and replace money for purpose, if that’s a trend this administration creates, I think America is in incredible hands eventually.

That’s how the Founding Fathers originally operated the government. There’ll be a moment when the Democrats win. There’ll be a moment when the Republicans return to power. There’ll be a moment when all the ideologies flip.

But if, in all of that, you can find people who are willing to pause their private lives, have demonstrated executive function, and make the trade, we’re going to kick ass and give back. It’s great.

David, thank you. I honestly thank you. You’re awesome.

Thank you.

Thank you for giving us a window into that, and shout-out to Tracy as well. She’s incredible.

Jason, what did you think of the Bessent interview? Did you see it?

I did watch the Bessent one. I would have loved to ask him a couple of questions. I probably would have thrown a couple of fastballs and curveballs and gone a little bit harder, but he is so impressive. You guys did about an hour with him.

What did we miss that you would have asked?

I think it’s a good time for me to drop off.

Yeah, I’ll drop off. Jason would do a better job.

He would do a better job?

Okay, we’ll see you later. You can tell everyone now what a great job you would have done.

Love you.

Love you. See you in the commissary.

What a guy.

I thought it was really good to hear from him long-form. I think there’s a little bit of chaos going on with the tariffs and stuff like that, but I don’t think the country knows how great he is. This guy is a powerhouse. He has an incredible track record.

By the way, I’m going to give Trump a little bit of flowers here. Obviously, folks know I’m an independent and a Never Trumper who is supporting the administration to do the best they can.

What does it mean to be independent but also have another label that says you refuse to consider somebody?

I don’t understand. Keep your options open.

No, I had my own issues with what Trump did on January 6, and we don’t need to get into it. Overturning Roe v. Wade—we don’t have to get into the things that I don’t agree with.

Putting all those things aside, I think he’s done a great job with the team he’s putting together. This is my message to some of the Americans, or people on the left: I would look at what he’s doing and some of these individuals. These are really high-functioning individuals.

The last time, I think he had a cast of characters around him who were kind of dark, and I didn’t care for a lot of them. With Bessent, this guy was previously a Democrat who gave to a ton of Democrats, and he is a powerhouse.

He was a big donor to Hillary.

And RFK was a Democrat. Tulsi was a Democrat. Trump was a Democrat. I was a Democrat. You were a Democrat.

My point is that Bessent is super-qualified. I came away from it saying, “This guy really understands finance.” I think the chaos Trump has been creating with the back-and-forth on the tariffs and his communication style made me feel better knowing that there was somebody as rock-solid as him in there, and who’s really thoughtful.

Right now, when you talk to 50 people who are knowledgeable about the markets and ask, “What is the strategy here that Trump has?” you get 10 different answers and 5 different vectors for it. People are trying to figure out exactly what he’s trying to do, and there’s a lot of nonconsensus.

Hearing that he has somebody like Bessent there, and you talking to him for an hour, I felt much better about the situation. Maybe there is a strategy. It was a solid interview.

Absolutely. The access level was great. Most of the time, he’s on something like Meet the Press or Face the Nation, and it’s 11 minutes and the guy can’t breathe.

For him to go an hour—and, Chamath, you did a good job of giving his history, which I think is context most Americans don’t have—I was very proud of the job the 2 of you did. I wish I was there.

You did a great job, by the way. Chamath had very good intuition on some of the questions he asked both Lutnick and Bessent. I think they revealed a little bit more about their character and who they are as people.

I’m all about the hard questions related to policy and agenda, but you did a great job bringing that out of them. That created a lot of texture for both interviews that I was not expecting.

Great job. I’m looking forward to the next one. I don’t know when that drops, but it should be really good.

The Lutnick interview—I mean, he’s a hardcore New Yorker, and you guys talked—

Let me tell you. The thing you need to know about Howard Lutnick is that he is an incredibly resilient and resourceful businessman. This guy has built himself up literally from nothing. He’s a good human being. I’m a little biased, but he’s a great guy, and you’re going to hear some really incredible stories.

Again, he’s another one who traded money for purpose.

I just want to say real quick, we had three sponsors that actually helped fund our DC trip and set this thing up for us, so I really want to say thank you to Hims, hims.com, For Hers, Gemini, and I Trust. Everyone listening to the show, please go to the description, whatever player you’re in, check them out. These three sponsors helped make this trip happen. We’re really appreciative. Please take a look at their websites and give their products a shot. Thank you to Hims, Gemini, and I Trust. You guys are the best. We really appreciate it.

We’re back, Sayan. I wanted to start with you. You had a really great announcement this week. Long Journey Ventures, your venture capital firm, announced a $180 million fund. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sayan Banister

$181 million.

$181 million.

Sayan Banister

Eighteen stands for life to people who are Jewish. My partners are Jewish, and it was something that was very important to them and to me: to stand up after October 7 and take a very public stance.

We announced our funding announcement on Bloomberg yesterday, and our office is on 18th Street.

Congratulations. That’s awesome. What is the mission of the venture fund? What stage are you going to do? You and I started as angel investors together 14 years ago.

Sayan Banister

We focus on early-stage seed checks, first checks in. This fund is our 4th fund. We institutionalized more in the beginning. It was high-net-worth individuals, and now we’re aligning what we do with our higher purpose.

We’re helping institutions help people go to school, solving cancer, and things like that. Every day when we get up in the morning, we’re aligning what we do with our mission.

Our mission is to chase the magically weird. We’re looking for alpha in things when everybody is consensus investing and doing the same thing and talking about the same things. We’re thinking 6 to 8 years in the future.

In our Fund III, we invested in a company in the chip space. We were thinking ahead about what’s going to power AI and crypto. Now that everybody is investing in the application layer, we’re going into the next thing: What is that going to enable, and what’s coming down the road?

We’re looking for founders who are thinking differently, whom most of my peers would look at and say, “That’s crazy. I don’t want to put any money into that.” That’s what we focus on.

This is such a hard thing for people to get their heads around: the nonconsensus bet and why that’s so important.

Sayan Banister

I’m training new associates at our firm, and they always go to safety. They’re looking at a vertical or a startup and saying, “This makes the most sense.” Then they look at the ones that don’t make sense but are intriguing, and they say, “I don’t know if I want to place a bet on that.”

I’m like, “That’s where the gold is.” A nonconsensus bet.

When you and I did Uber, it was a room of 21 people, and 3 people decided to invest. Nineteen didn’t.

That was a magically weird company at the time. If you remember, I sent it around to multiple investors, and they came back with the stupidest excuses I’ve ever heard. But it was their excuse: “Not everyone wants a black car. The car doesn’t come to my house yet. No one wants to get into a stranger’s vehicle.”

The list goes on and on. But it takes a vision of seeing the future and seeing how it plays out, believing in all the miracles that are going to happen. Getting in early is where all the alpha is, before the thing is defined as a category.

That’s where I like to play. I don’t want it to even have a market name yet.

Sayan Banister

That’s such a great observation. When an associate or some research company says, “It’s the on-demand economy,” that’s when you know the opportunity is gone.

That’s where all of my peers can go lose all their money in an ocean of dead bodies. I don’t want to play there.

Sayan Banister

You had a price advantage too, right? If you enter early, before it’s a defined category, you’re taking on a lot of risk. I’m getting deals anywhere from $5 million to $10 million post-money, while all of my peers are playing in the $20 million-to-$30 million range.

Obviously, you and I are the product of our early bets and the lessons we learned. One of those lessons was to be in early.

It’s literally what I’m doing with Founder University now. It’s just like a pre-accelerator. If I find 2 or 3 founders I like, I give them their first $25,000 check or $125,000 check, where they can just come do it with me.

We’re starting next Friday.

University, but it's just like what we used to do in the old days: trying to get in and be the first investor. It's really working, and it's super fun.

Hey, listen, there is great news, I think, for the venture industry. This Google acquisition of Wiz could be the starter's pistol.

Google has acquired Wiz for $32 billion in cash. If you don't know what Wiz is, just imagine you have cloud services like Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Oracle Cloud. You need to have security between these things, and Wiz helps do that.

It's the largest deal in Google's history. David was there, I think, for some of the other big acquisitions. There haven't been a lot of acquisitions. We know the wrath of Lina Khan was pretty acute for the last 4 years.

Looking back in history, Salesforce buying Slack, which our bestie Chamath here was an early investor in, was a $27 billion deal that occurred in 2020. Then we had a couple of things get blocked. HPE's acquisition of Juniper, I believe, for $14 billion last year got blocked. Adobe-Figma got blocked in the UK, although people assumed it was going to happen here.

We talked about this on Episode 189. Chamath, Wiz turned down $23 billion from Google. They said at the time it was because they wanted to IPO, but now reporting is saying it was because of the antitrust environment under Biden, plus the UK. Go ahead, Chamath. You can take it from there.

I think this is the Trump premium. The problem when that deal was being looked at back then was that there was still a chance there could be a Democratic administration, and it was very clear that they were anti-M&A and, quite honestly, anti-tech.

When Trump won, I think it basically said, “Okay, we can now look at these deals.” There's another important part of this, though, and this was part of our interview with Howard Lutnick. I'd love to just play this quick clip.

“What I'm doing is I'm saying, ‘Okay, I got to collect tariffs, right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth and I say, I want you to give me—you're going to build for me, for America, you're going to build the greatest customs processing ever.’”

What's incredible is that you're convincing these companies to do right for America and build software for you. You think that's going to be a movement throughout the government?

“Here's the idea: I say, ‘Build it for me for free.’”

“Yeah, I put it in for free. I don't know what other countries in the world aren't going to buy it now, right? If it works for us—”

“Well, remember, you have to connect to me.”

“Yeah.”

“So every country—”

This is what he's really saying. There are all kinds of companies doing all kinds of work. Google famously has its 20% time. Could you imagine if some of that 20% time was allocated to rebuilding the core infrastructure of America and giving back to the country that gives you the ability to have a multitrillion-dollar company?

That's but one example. When you connect the dots, the way that I interpret it is that I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it's what you've been asking for. I think you're going to get it.

The reason why you're going to get it is that you're going to have a very open-minded administration that will let the M&A happen. There are also ways where you can build goodwill by doing the kinds of things Howard is talking about.

Could you imagine if somebody volunteered, let's say Palantir, and said, “Hey, we can build the following software for the IRS so that we can completely automate tax returns”? It's okay for Palantir; they're still a $200 billion company. They could allocate a small amount of time and get that done.

If Oracle stepped up and said something similar, all of that goodwill would then allow America to grow faster. Under that economic umbrella, a little consolidation isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm really interested in how all of these pieces move together.

I'd also like to say something very narrowly about Wiz. Wiz does not do something that's necessarily unique. There are other products in the market, but they have done one thing better than everybody else, and I think it's really worth rewarding: they have incredible taste.

If you use it—and all my engineers at 8VC live inside of this regime—when I ask them, “Hey, we need to implement something,” they all pick Wiz. If you ask them why, and if you ask our sysadmin why we implemented it, the answer is not only that it's good, but that it's the most beautiful, intuitive, and well-integrated product.

It's an incredible lesson. Even when other people do the same thing, you can build $32 billion of value by doing that thing in a more coherent way. Design matters. Having taste matters. Having a point of view matters. That was rewarded.

Chamath, what do you think of what I'll call Lutnick's lighthouse-customer approach? In other words, make this piece of software for the U.S. government. We'll become your first customer, the lighthouse that pulls in other customers. We get it for free, we help you set the standard, and then you get to use us as your reference client. Let's start with that, and then we'll get into M&A.

I think the government has long relied on private industry to solve some of its biggest problems, and that's what sets us apart from other countries in the world. You look at some of the best companies, like SpaceX and Palantir. We need more companies like this if we're going to compete.

Doing this absolutely makes sense, and it's just going to help the sales cycle to get that sort of stamp of approval that our government is using the software.

Friedberg, your thoughts on Lutnick's lighthouse strategy? Could it work?

I think this is what makes it good to have folks with high executive function, business experience, and acumen in key leadership positions in the government, so they know how to drive better economic outcomes—negotiating the price of a contract down and, in this case, saying, “Give it to us for free.”

One of the things Lutnick said in the interview, which you didn't see in this clip, is that the government can actually accept free contracts. These are “gift” contracts, and you don't need to get approval to do it. They can operate within the executive branch.

That makes total sense. You don't need approval if it's a gift. That's also a big unlock.

Well, then I guess we can contrast this, Chamath, with Tim Walz, a potential vice presidential candidate. I have a real problem with this clip, Chamath. This was the most infuriating thing I've ever seen from a politician.

Tim Walz gets on stage, pulls out his stock app, and starts mocking the greatest American car company ever created because its stock is down. This is disgraceful to me. Play the clip.

Tim Walz

“On the iPhone, they've got that little stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. Two twenty-five and dropping. And if you own one—if you own one—we're not blaming you. You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off.”

I'm not going to say anything personal, except to say that I think it is incredibly lowbrow. At the end of the day, he represents the American people. He needs to be firmly on Team America.

I don't think he understands, because he's never actually had a real job, that the auto industry is a vibrant part of how many, many Americans earn their living. Tesla employs more than 125,000 people. There is no reason a politician should be wishing any American company to fail, period.

I think that should be the price of entry. To lack the basic decorum and understanding, and then to whip people up into wanting an American company to fail—there are many American companies I like or dislike, and some that I'll buy the stock of and some that I won't. That's not the point.

You cannot openly and actively be cheering, as a politician, for these companies to fail. I think that is incredibly lowbrow. I think it's the bottoming out of the Democratic Party. That moment will be looked at as the bottom.

I think it's incredibly lowbrow. I agree with Chamath. It's so distasteful for a public official to do something like that, especially to an American company.

When you hear the people cheering in the background, it's obvious that there's a base that supports this, and that frightens me even more. He's saying these things because his constituents believe them. A politician says these things because they think it's going to motivate people to vote for them in the future.

It really frightens me that we are riling people up to cheer on the destruction of an American company and possibly go out and burn cars.

That's the thing, because whenever you incite this kind of aggressiveness—and, by the way, both sides do it—you get a contingent that takes it too far.

Friedberg, maybe we wrap up on this and then jump back to Wiz. Sorry for the diversion.

I think the Democratic Party has split into 2 parties. There's the Democratic Party with beliefs, and there's the Democratic Party without beliefs.

The Democratic Party with beliefs is the one that's very far left, and its beliefs are fundamentally rooted in concepts of socialism and Marxism. They're very clear about those beliefs: traditional power structures need to be dismantled, and assets and influence need to be commonly redistributed.

The rest of the Democratic Party, which people call the moderate part of the party, doesn't really know what its beliefs are. When you talk to anyone in a leadership position in the Republican Party, you hear very clearly what their beliefs are.

We saw it this week in Washington, D.C. Every member of the Cabinet we met with—and there were quite a number of them—had the exact same message and the exact same set of beliefs about what this administration stands for and what they're trying to do.

You may agree with those beliefs or you may not, but they have stated their beliefs. The problem is that the moderates in the Democratic Party have not stated a set of beliefs, a set of objectives, a vision for the country, or a vision for their party.

The party is effectively being represented by the part of the party that does have beliefs—the deeply socialist, Marxist beliefs. They have basically subsumed the message.

As a result, this is why people have lost interest in the Democratic Party. The moderate aspect has not been really clear about what its beliefs are.

There's an opportunity for some of these moderate leaders in the Democratic Party, like Dean Phillips and—and people may not like me saying this—like Gavin Newsom, who I don't think is all the way over on that far-left side of the spectrum, to be really clear, paint a vision, and really state the beliefs of the party and what differentiates it.

Recently, the only thing that underscores what that party stands for is, “We're not the other guys. We're not the Republicans.” That's it.

People who don't like the Republicans say, “Well, I don't know, because then I'm subsumed by the socialist-Marxist rhetoric. I don't know if I want to be a part of that, either.” That's why a lot of people feel left out, and that's why the recent polling data on the Democrats is something like 23% in this country. It used to be in the 30s.

Did you see the crazy clip that showed the racial and demographic split on some key issues, like DEI? Is this the one that says white college-age women are just this weird—

I have an idea, too. That's a really good framing. I really like that.

Here's another framing: is it so hard to agree on something? I think one of the brilliant things that Trump did was say, “Here are some things we can agree on,” and then subsumed those issues—fighting for the working-class person, saying no tax on tips. Those were Democratic positions.

I think this just proves that meme where everybody is standing here and the left just went too far left.

Let me give a piece of advice to the Democratic Party leadership that might be listening. Take away the opportunity for the distinction that the Republicans have right now, which is a more efficient government—a fairer government where money isn't wasted and taxpayer dollars aren't being destroyed.

The Democratic Party has an opportunity to stand up and say, “We don't want to have things like regulatory capture, pork, or inside deals going on.” They have an opportunity to make that the core set of beliefs that still aligns with reducing government and increasing efficiency in government.

Efficiency in government should not be a party issue. By allowing the Republicans to say, “We're for efficient government,” it implies that the Democrats, to be the opposite of that, are saying, “We're for inefficient government.”

If the Democrats want to win this, they can take that message and say, “You know what? We're for more efficient government, and the way we're going to do it is by getting rid of things like regulatory capture, inside deals, and all the other stuff.”

That may not resonate, but there's an opportunity for the Democrats to really stand up and take the country in the direction that we all, as Americans, need it to go, which is toward a sustainable federal government. That's going to require some degree of fiscal conservatism and action, but they could take a different point of view on how they do it and have core beliefs around that.

By the way, Dean Phillips, we're inviting you back on the program. Ezra Klein, Sam Harris—we want to have some more people on the left come on here and talk about this very issue.

It's really 3 things they could work on. Number 1: build 10 million homes in this country that are affordable. That's a key issue. Rich people should pay their fair share of taxes, and we should reform the tax code. Third, health care for everyone.

Those 3 things would get this party back on track. We're going to make a more efficient government, you're going to be able to buy a home, you're going to get health care, and rich people are going to start paying their taxes, which they're not. We're going to stop with these crazy Trump tax breaks.

That would be the perfect positioning. It's not personal. It's just, hey, we're a rich enough country that people should get health care. Why shouldn't people have health care in the modern world? Why can't these rich people who are donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump pay some more taxes and make sure poor people have basic health care?

I disagree with all those points, obviously, but sure, they could run on them. They have tried. They've definitely said they're going to have health care for all, and they've tried selling the American dream of homeownership.

I actually think that is flawed in many ways. We're putting people into debt for things they can't afford, and they get screwed.

I think they need to find a unifying figure and figure out who their moderates are. There are also politically homeless people we didn't include—people who are just like, “Well, I can't vote right, and I'm not left anymore, either.”

We've got to bridge this divide somehow, and they have to figure out the messaging. But I don't think going back to what they used to do is going to work, because they promised universal health care and it hasn't happened, and they had plenty of opportunities to do so.

All right, let's get back to the Wiz deal and the docket. Let's see if there's anything we didn't cover.

We should talk about the price they paid, the strategic rationale, and how others are going to respond. The deal got sweetened massively over the year between when the first offer was made for $23 billion and when it went up to $32 billion.

The revenue roughly doubled since the time of the first offer. There are some really interesting details. There is a huge breakup fee. We saw the breakup fee with Adobe and Figma, but this one is tremendous: 10% of the deal size, or $3.2 billion in cash.

Wiz gets $3.2 billion in cash if this deal doesn't go through. Let that sink in. This company is massively high-growth—zero to $100 million in revenue in 18 months after it started, and last year it passed $500 million in ARR.

That puts the deal at roughly 60 times its run rate, which is a high price. However, they're supposed to hit $1 billion in ARR this year, which would put it at 30 or 32 times forward-looking revenue. That's not outrageous, because Google, or Alphabet, probably has some concept of how it could increase the velocity of that revenue, or this could be a defensive position.

David Friedberg, your thoughts?

Google Cloud's revenue is about $40 billion a year, and Microsoft and Amazon are both, give or take, around $100 billion a year. Google has been lagging a little bit in the cloud market.

The thing about enterprise sales is that there's a common strategy: you land with a beachhead and then expand from there with additional products and services. This is why so many enterprise software companies over time, from Oracle to Salesforce to Microsoft, have been acquisitive and able to make very synergistic acquisitions.

You can acquire a new product or service and sell it into your installed base, or acquire the customers and then cross-sell your existing products or services into their installed base. You can increase the overall revenue by putting the 2 together, combining sales teams, and offering a combined product.

The theory here—and this is something I don't understand well enough—is that security has become such a top requirement and product category that it now effectively enables a beachhead-type model to be successful.

You can cross-sell security into all of your existing customers, or there may be enough new customers that Google acquires through Wiz that it can bring new GCP services to and cross-sell into.

To figure out how this actually makes sense, Google's ROIC is about 30%. That means when Google makes a capital investment, it expects to see about 30% of incremental profit per year come back at some point from that investment.

The capital investment here doesn't hit the income statement. It goes on the balance sheet and gets marked mostly as goodwill. Google is going to have a $32 billion move from cash to goodwill, so now it has this asset on its balance sheet and has to make an incremental $10 billion a year in profit.

You have to do the math: $10 billion a year of incremental profit against $40 billion of cloud revenue and $1 billion of Wiz revenue. There's a lot to be built here to make this make financial sense.

It becomes difficult to think they're going to get there very soon, but Google has made some investments.

I think it's a Trojan horse into the other clouds. The reason Wiz exists, and Jason mentioned this up front, is because of the value it creates in a multicloud, multitenant environment across Azure, GCP, and AWS.

When the deal was done, one of the things Wiz said was, “Don't worry, we're not going to prefer GCP.” It was interesting, because I thought, “Wait, people actually thought they would just prefer GCP?”

No, it's the exact opposite of why Google would want this. What you now have are tentacles. Think of any other service that a cloud provider offers where most of the revenue is coming from the other clouds. Can you name one? It didn't exist until now.

I think the strategic rationale is quite clever. You start to gain customer traction and workloads in all of these other environments, and I suspect that Thomas Kurian is smart enough to try to pull those workloads back into GCP.

They would have the data. They'd be able to see from Wiz, “Hey, 90% of this type of workload exists on Oracle, or it's over here on AWS.” All 3 of you would do that if you were running Google Cloud. Thomas Kurian is smart enough to do it.

The other thing I would say, David, is that this is where bankers get it totally wrong. As an observer watching a deal like this, it's never about the rate of change when you're trying to do a deal. It's always about the rate of change of the rate of change.

The most incredible thing Wiz had going for itself was that it was basically doubling in months. At that scale, the time to double is so powerful that you can do any kind of fantastical model with that raw input.

When that boundary condition is true and you're trying to de-escalate or scale down a model, you're still going to get crazy, gargantuan numbers that, when you discount them back, get you to this price.

Congratulations to these guys. I would love to find out how Wiz built a sales infrastructure that could scale that productively and that quickly. That's an incredible thing.

I wonder if a lot of people are self-serve—if they just sign up and use it.

It's got to be some percentage of it. In our experience, we had a guy come in and sell it to us. We had a little bit of a bake-off, and maybe we were unique. There may be a simpler, lower-scale product that's just more pay-as-you-go consumption.

Looking at this, I'm curious about your take on big VC. The Series A was a $100 million round, although we don't have the valuation for it. The Series B was at $1.7 billion a year later, so maybe we assume it was a $500 million valuation for 20%, something like that. I would guess maybe a $600 million post-money valuation.

Sequoia, Insight, Index, and Cyberstarts all did that Series A. When you look at the B, C, D, and E, those same players all participated.

This is another example of how sometimes your best next investment as a VC firm is the highest-growth outlier in your existing portfolio. What does this mean for venture capital, and maybe for the logjam we've seen over the last 4 or 5 years of no M&A?

You and I came up during a golden era of M&A, and then the IPO market started opening up with Airbnb, Coinbase, and, of course, Uber. Now we're sitting here. If this is the starter's pistol, what could it look like for the VC industry, which has just been dead?

I'll start with my thoughts on Wiz. This is really exciting for me because it's a great example of a contrarian investment.

When this investment was initially made, there wasn't a lot of money going into security. There still isn't. It's an underinvested category. With AI, the threats people can build, vibe coding, and everything in between, you're going to need better security.

I'm excited to see that maybe this might become an investable category. I think this is the largest exit ever in the security space. Am I wrong?

I think you're probably correct. It has to be. I don't think I've ever heard of anything this large in M&A.

Some action is better than no action, but Niantic was just bought by Scopely. We're starting to see some movement. You were an angel investor in that, right? That was the Pokémon Go company. I remember you showing me Pokémon Go over a decade ago.

That's amazing. It's a Saudi company that bought it—a Saudi conglomerate. That exited for $3.7 billion. How long were you in that deal?

Oh my gosh. As soon as Alphabet formed and spun Niantic out as its own entity. There's a funny story for another time about how I got into the deal, but I realized it was my only opportunity to get in as early as possible. I stalked the founder and sat at his door.

Tell us the story.

Before Pokémon Go, they had this game called Ingress. I started playing it with my friends, and I noticed that they were doing some really unusual things. They were chartering helicopters and traveling all over the world to cast these invisible triangles over the Earth.

It's a game of green versus blue and who can cast the biggest triangle. I thought, “Why are these people spending so much time on this? Why are they going around taking pictures of points of interest for Google? What is Google actually doing with this asset?”

That was my number 1 question. I realized that Ingress was part of a bigger mapping plan. If you look at the team and look at John Hanke, they all came from Keyhole and were obviously part of the Maps team that helped build Google Earth.

This wasn't just a game. Pokémon Go was a joke, basically an April Fools' joke. The founder of Pokémon said, “Wouldn't it be cool if we put Pokémon on the map and tried to find them?” John Hanke said, “Yeah, let's turn this into an Ingress-like game.”

I went around telling everybody, “If I had a chance to invest in anything, it would be Niantic.” Because they were part of Google, I thought there was no chance.

Then I got a call one day from a friend who said, “Did you hear Niantic spun out?” I thought, “Oh my gosh, I don't know anyone at Google. How do I reach John Hanke?”

I realized I'd invested in a company called Hint Water, and they were giving out game codes on the bottle cap. I was setting up her ticketing system one day and helping her out in her office when I saw all these tickets coming in with the subject line “Ingress game code.”

I thought, “What is this all about?” I connected the dots, and she introduced me to John Hanke. I went there with 2 engineers because I figured I had to show up with some value—2 badass engineers who were players.

We sat on the front stairs and basically said, “Please take our money.” He said, “I don't need you. I've got Nintendo. I've got Google.” We said, “No, you really need us.”

He gave one of those engineers a job offer pretty much that day. He gave me a key card to the office, so I could come and go from Niantic as I pleased, which was pretty awesome.

Amazing. Congratulations. Fun story.

The Fed held rates steady on Wednesday. Markets have been digesting this pretty flat. This is the second consecutive meeting where the Fed held rates steady, after 2 consecutive cuts—50 basis points in September and 25 in December.

We had high hopes that there would be 4 or 5 of these cuts this year, and there are apparently none right now. Trump posted on Truth Social that he urged the Fed to cut rates to create a smoother transition for his tariffs.

The tariffs are taking place, I believe, on April 2. Is that date going to change the history of the United States forever?

There were some other interesting takeaways. They lowered expectations on rate cuts and expect 2 quarter-point cuts for the rest of 2025. That would take us down to about 4%. Your thoughts, Chamath? Let's add some color from Scott Bessent.

One of the biggest mistakes that I think Janet Yellen made was this continued issuance of debt on the short end of the curve to finance these deficits. You inherit an incredibly difficult challenge.

I think over the next 9 months there's something like $9 trillion or $10 trillion that has to get refinanced. Do you want to talk about that?

When rates were low, you're supposed to extend maturities. Instead, the Treasury, for the past few years, has pulled maturities in. I think part of that was to keep rates lower, but they changed the issuance schedule when rates moved back up toward 5%, and I think they maintained that policy.

I'm going back to David's question: when are we going to see the results from getting government spending under control? I don't think the markets recognize it yet.

Can somebody translate that for me?

He's saying that the Treasury inherited a problem that it hasn't quite yet changed. When rates are low, you want to borrow for as long as possible. You don't want to borrow for the shortest amount of time.

Now that rates are high, you're in this difficult position where you have to refinance all of it at a much higher rate. That's effectively the net of it.

You can see and understand more when you watch Scott's old interview with Friedberg and me. I think there's been a fundamental disconnect and break between the Fed, the Treasury, and the government.

Scott was very clear that he views the Fed as an independent organization and that it should continue that way. But it was also very clear to me that they are singing from their own hymnbook.

It doesn't seem to me that Powell really understands the gravity of this situation, and I don't think he's willing to play ball. This is my total interpretation, but he would probably rather wait longer than necessary.

It's almost like a political gambit, and I think that's very dangerous. I do not think Powell has the data to make a very clear decision, and I don't think he will act unless it's totally necessary.

I think there's an overcorrection happening, which is dangerous. I think it's going to slow down the pace of cuts, and that will create a lot of other pressure in the economy.

David, I'll throw it to you. The Fed's mandate as an independent organization is full employment and that 2% target, which we've talked about before. That was just a number picked by an economist in New Zealand, of all places. It's not some specific dosage that's perfect, but it is their mandate. They're not supposed to be a political organization.

What are your thoughts on this situation and these high rates, which we have to pay for our debt? We've never been in a situation where, in 100 days, a federal government is setting out to cut its spending by $1 trillion.

That has a significant recessionary effect on the economy because there are fewer federal dollars flowing out as revenue into various businesses and as income for people employed as contractors or directly by federal government agencies.

That's coupled with, for the first time in 100 years, a significant change in tariff policy for goods flowing into the United States. Will that reduce consumer spending, or drive up the cost of products for consumers?

We talked extensively about both of these issues with Bessent and Lutnick in Washington, D.C., this week. If I'm the Fed, I don't really have a great historical proxy for saying, “When this was done in the past, here's the effect on GDP, inflation, and employment.”

Lutnick is making the case that the current measure of GDP may not even be correct—the way we measure it and the way we count it. The traditional economist's point of view on making rate adjustments as a function of economic contraction or growth may be wrong.

There are quite a lot of confounding factors, so the Fed is in a very wait-and-see mode. What I would look to is the bond market, which also seems to be in a wait-and-see mode.

Right before the election, the bond market traded the 10-year down to about 3.65%. About a month ago, the 10-year was at 4.5%, and today it's at 4.22%. In the last month, we've seen the rate on the 10-year decline by about a quarter point, or 30 basis points.

The bond market is giving the Fed an opening, saying, “We expect this to be deflationary and recessionary. We expect you to cut rates.” That's what the bond market is saying.

Now we're going to wait for the reports that show the impact. I don't think we're going to know immediately. The first 100 days of this presidency and this administration's actions are going to be telling in terms of what happens to employment, inflation, and GDP contraction or growth.

Then I think the market will know how to handicap those numbers in the future based on the administration's actions. Right now, it's a lot of things happening very fast, and we don't know how they all fit together. So, wait and see.

I'm not sure the Fed and the people in the administration can't communicate the strategy clearly, or that the Fed can't interpret it. Bessent did that. What's uncertain is the effect it will ultimately have on the economy and over what time scale.

Sorry, specifically the tariffs. If they're on and off, to what extent? It doesn't feel like the entire administration is on the same page.

The Fed is not part of the administration.

Of course not. They're independent.

There's a quote today in The Wall Street Journal—you can look for it—where Powell's statement basically blamed rising inflation in this short-term period on exogenous factors.

He said their job was getting done and now there is exogenous inflation. I think what he's pointing to are these potential tariffs or something similar.

I think it's less that they're not coordinated and more that they're on very different pages. I don't think the Fed wants to play ball.

One of the things that really concerns me is how we've been so reliant on cheap supply for so long. Before this podcast, I looked up the prices at Shein and Temu, and they're up by 27% or something like that.

When you used to be able to get a garment for $18, you're now paying $37. Zara is about $75 for an equivalent. People really liked getting packages in the mail and feeling like their dollar went further, and it's not going as far.

When you have a bunch of people who can't buy anything—and consumerism is, unfortunately, a big part of our culture—what does that do to our country?

If you look around, there's urban blight everywhere in retail. We can't fill our malls, brick-and-mortar stores are shutting down, and Forever 21 just shut down.

These are the things people really care about, especially in a recession. People want to buy a tube of lipstick or a dress to feel better about their life, and right now they can't even do that.

That's what concerns me: the retail future and the consumer landscape, and how this affects everybody.

Consumer confidence is not good right now. People are feeling concerned about it. Immigration plays into this, too. We're supposed to be deporting 20 million people—maybe it's only going to be 1 million. Who knows?

Who's actually going to work in these factories? Are people getting laid off or not? There's just a soup of issues here that makes the Fed's job extremely difficult.

In an extremely difficult and confusing storm, what's the best thing to do when you're driving? Maybe you try to keep the car going straight and don't hit the brakes or the gas.

That's what the Fed is doing. It's taking a wait-and-see approach. Let's see if the administration can be a little crisper in its delivery of what the plan is, because it does seem chaotic to me.

Chamath, you said you had an anecdote.

I disagree with you in one way. I think the Fed has totally lost the script. I don't think it's doing what it's supposed to be doing.

What should it be doing?

It should be observing the fact that there are very complicated money flows. The front end of the curve makes no sense, and the back end of the curve hasn't gone down for long enough.

The Fed sat around and allowed the Treasury to pump trillions of dollars of short-term paper. It was complicit in what Yellen did. It's inconceivable that it didn't understand that strategy.

So what do you do when you have a recalcitrant organization—an organization that refuses to play ball?

There was a really interesting anecdote where Bessent talked in the interview about how he wants to deregulate and loosen bank lending standards, particularly at the community level. I think this is one very interesting workaround to the Fed.

If you think about where money gets transacted over a 10-, 20-, or 30-year duration, those are the big players making big capital investments. But where do you play for the 2-month to 2-year duration? It's smaller stuff—the capital required to get small businesses off the ground, the community lending standards that allow communities to thrive.

I think Scott realizes that if the Fed isn't going to play ball, the question is: how do you loosen credit and make sure that money is available to fight off a recession? You have to give it to these smaller banks. He was pretty clear about that.

It's almost as if the Fed is going to get relegated to this random organization. They'll control the reverse repo, but they just won't have any credibility. Maybe that's not a bad thing in the end.

Friedberg, it's your chance to shine. We have not 1 but 2 amazing space stories in Science Corner.

First up, SpaceX successfully rescued 2 astronauts. When they landed, there were dolphins breaching around the capsule. It was absolutely magical to see. Congratulations to the SpaceX team.

Firefly Aerospace also completed its moon mission after achieving the first commercial soft lunar landing. Take whichever one of these you want to start with, Friedberg, and then maybe we'll open the discussion up to a broader conversation about the moon.

SpaceX was able to rescue the 2 astronauts stranded by the Boeing Starliner debacle 9 months ago. We talked about it on the show. You can go back to Episode 192 in August.

Having spent far more on the Starliner program than on the Crew Dragon program, the Starliner program is basically done. The Crew Dragon program has now done 16 crewed flights to space—11 for NASA and 4 private commercial flights—and continues to perform.

Congratulations to the SpaceX team on making it to the International Space Station and bringing the astronauts home. Another successful mission for SpaceX.

There's a lot of hand-wringing: “Oh my God, Elon has a conflict of interest with SpaceX and DOGE, and he's close to the administration.” When we look at what SpaceX has accomplished—and I'm not a shareholder, but I know you are, Chamath. I'm not sure if the other folks on the panel are shareholders.

I am as well.

Congratulations, everybody. But putting aside our personal investments, when you look at how much they've reduced the cost of getting to space, is anybody even close to matching their cost?

This takes out the whole hand-wringing around the conflict of interest with SpaceX, both on Starliner and on this. It seems ridiculous to complain when the price is so cheap. We should just be giving Elon a high five and saying, “Thanks for charging us such a low rate.”

It's a great question. Boeing is obviously the big loser here. It's interesting to me how badly they fumbled this.

Then there's the political element. I don't know if we want to get into how we weren't able to save these astronauts and they were stuck up there. We saw them landing in the water, but what you didn't see was that they couldn't walk when they got out.

They were only supposed to be there for about 10 days, and it ended up being 8 months, which is horrendous. One of the things I believe America stands for is that we don't leave people like that.

It's an American issue, not a political one. There was no reason we shouldn't have engaged SpaceX sooner. It was offered, and they turned it into a completely political issue. Boeing fumbled the ball really badly.

Hopefully this is a message that's loud and clear. One of the things I'm so excited about is little kids watching this and seeing what it means for the future of the country.

They're looking up to people like Elon, and they're going to be the next political class in the future. This is the equivalent of the moon landing. To see somebody in private enterprise do what Elon has done is outstanding.

There are a couple of startup alternatives—I'll put “alternatives” in quotes because they're not generally available and they're not really launching yet. They're still in the early experimentation phase.

One is Blue Origin, and the second is Relativity Space. The theoretical feature of both approaches is that there's a different economic model. But the reality is that SpaceX is the only company that's consistently been able to crunch these costs down while doing more than 1 launch a day this year.

It's an incredible scale and pace. There is no economic alternative. They're absolutely the cheapest in the market.

I'll tell you a quick story. I was also an investor in Relativity. I think I owned about 10% of the company, and I just got recapitalized out of that business because it needed a lot more money than people were willing to give it.

Eric Schmidt stepped up and offered, I think, $3 billion to the business. I said, “No, I'm done. I'm out of here.” Recaps are painful. You put all that money in, and I think I took a $380 million loss. It was not a good week 2 weeks ago.

But that's not the point. The point is that SpaceX is the best there is. Nobody is even close. The next-closest alternative is years and years away.

Would we benefit from more capacity? Sure. But the reality is that SpaceX is the only solution, and it's safe and reliable.

What David said is so true: when does America abandon people? Why do you do that, especially in space? Of all places.

Think about Mark Watney in The Martian. You would look at NASA and say, “You have WNBA players who get put in Russian jail, and we're willing to swap them for arms dealers in the last administration.” Fine. We didn't abandon her.

But then we let these 2 people flounder. I think it's really inexcusable. It makes no sense.

There definitely needs to be an investigation into what happened. There's a lot of speculation, and it doesn't look good.

I'm going to take Elon's word that he offered. I don't see any reason why he wouldn't. The astronauts even confirmed that he offered.

They did?

I know people were saying it was unconfirmed. If the Biden administration confirmed it, that was their way of saying, “Come get me.” They were literally withering away in space. They put their thumbs up: “Okay, come pick us up.”

Friedberg, take us to the next story, and then we have to wrap.

This is basically what I think is going to end up being the story over the next couple of years: the space race between SpaceX's platform and technology and China, which has effectively ripped off SpaceX, at least as this article describes it.

The Long March 9 rocket is a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 of their particular engines. That's comparable to SpaceX's first stage, which is powered by 33 Raptor engines.

Both are fueled with methane and liquid oxygen. Each Chinese engine has a thrust of about 200 tons, compared with about 280 tons for the Raptor. This is a very equivalent design.

The Long March 9 is China's super-heavy-lift rocket. They first started talking about it roughly a decade ago. The rocket originally had 3 stages and solid motors, but they've recalibrated the design, and it has effectively become a clone of Starship.

This whole system is going to be the big race. As we know, the way the Chinese operate when it comes to industrialization is that they can move fast, move big, move heavy, dedicate resources, and dedicate an entirely vertically integrated supply chain to achieving an objective.

Slave labor. They've got a lot of resources at their fingertips.

You can say that, but a lot of people use “slave labor” in China as a hand-waving way of describing their competitive advantage.

I think China has much more of an advantage in automation. If you look at many Chinese factories that everyone assumes are cheap because they have cheap labor, there's actually a lot of automation and engineering that has gone into building systems that allow them to have much higher throughput at much lower cost.

The Chinese industrial and manufacturing base is so superior to that of the United States right now that the U.S. has to figure out a way to build its manufacturing base up to be competitive in an age of automation.

It's not a labor-to-labor system. It's a system-of-production basis. This is where we are lagging deeply as a country.

You saw it in J.D. Vance's speech this week on revitalizing manufacturing in the United States. It has to be advanced manufacturing. It's not just about opening a warehouse and putting people in it.

Which means robots, not humans.

It means both. It's about smarter systems, designs for how you do manufacturing, and using new things like 3D printing and automation, coupled with great labor and great people working.

It's about designing entirely new ways of doing manufacturing. We've stalled out over the last 3 decades in the United States as we globalized and handed off all manufacturing to the East.

The United States basically imported manufactured goods while China invested in all the infrastructure needed to deliver advanced manufacturing at scale. We've got a lot of catching up to do.

Otherwise, China will get ahead of us in any product faster than we'll ever be able to stay ahead of the game. I think we're seeing that in the space race now.

I'm concerned about the cultural side of this. America is so ill-equipped, especially after the last 8 years of DEI infiltrating all of our institutions and the way we raise our children.

We taught them that math is racist, while China's kids are leading in AI. DeepSeek should show us that we have underestimated China every step of the way.

I'm working on a book that's coming out called The War on Science. A friend of mine wrote it, and it's a collection of essays exposing just how entrenched this became in every institution, from medical science onward.

How do we recover from that? How do we compete with China? I honestly don't understand how we're going to do it if we don't.

Part of it is seeing these space launches. Obviously, the next generation of children will be inspired by that, but we have a gap of about 8 to 10 years where we lost that advantage.

We saw it up close and personal in San Francisco. They banned AP math. What lunatics could justify that? I guess the lunatics in San Francisco could say it was some massive inequality that smart kids got to take harder courses.

Just to build on what you were saying, math was called racist at one of the best private schools here in Silicon Valley. They taught the girls—these are girls at the best all-girls private school in Silicon Valley—that reading was racist.

Could you imagine? There was a spreadsheet these kids had to memorize every day that listed every other kid's pronoun. If you didn't get it right, you'd get in trouble.

They are taught that you're either an oppressor or oppressed, and there's no other option. If you're a kid and you're born bad— inherently bad, evil from birth—what does that do to your self-worth and your desire to do anything in society?

We have to fix that. I think it's one of the number 1 issues in the country: getting kids excited about being Americans again.

We were talking about the Democratic Party. The far left doesn't love America. They hate America, and they're very loud and vocal about it. I'm glad their base is shrinking, but it needs to shrink further.

We need more unifying messages, and I think SpaceX could be one of those unifying messages, bringing people together and encouraging kids to think bigger about the future.

I'll tell you one anecdote. I've been hanging out at the University of Texas a little bit—go Longhorns—and I've had 3 or 4 people of means, people who could afford to send their kids to any college, ask me, “Do you have any hookups at UT? I want to take a tour. I want to check this out.”

I'm like, “Oh.” They're saying, “I just don't want to send my kids to these WMD madrasas, as Chamath has called them previously on the program. I want to send them to the South, to be educated in Texas or somewhere where they're not going to learn to be part of Hamas or al-Qaeda.”

Send your kids to a place that values free speech. First, look at the FIRE rating, and that should tell you everything you need to know. It's a huge trend that people want to go to these schools.

Getting back on track, I'll give a quick shout-out to Firefly as well. The Blue Ghost lunar lander landed on March 2 and lasted on the lunar surface for 14 days. It launched on January 15.

They're launching 2 additional missions. Mission 2 will launch in 2026 and Mission 3 in 2028, all of which will conduct geological surveys of the lunar surface.

The long-term goal here is to establish a base on the moon.

Mission 5 is going directly to your dingleberries.

They're going to get those dingleberries.

Those vegan dingleberries.

Would you guys be willing to go to the moon for a week? Is that something you would be interested in?

I talk to my guy. He said I could go out with him.

Do you guys have an interest in that? Is that something you'd be motivated to do?

One hundred percent. I'm going to do it when I'm 70.

One hundred percent.

A week seems like a lot.

I would go for a month.

What about a day? Just a lunar day. You go there for a lunar picnic and come back.

Yes.

What would you bring? A little Chardonnay? What do you think would pair well with the dark side of the moon?

I'd bring a white Burgundy.

What should Sean make us when we go? What should we serve on the moon? Do you think we should go with fish? A little surf and turf?

Surf and turf would be good. People don't realize that white Burgundy tastes great with meat. I know people think you should always drink a heavy red, but it's not true.