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

0:00 All right, everybody.

0:00 Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, to you all-in podcast.

0:05 David Sacks couldn't make it this week, but we have the trio.

0:08 David Friedberg is here, your Sultan of Science, Chamath Palihapitiya,

0:12 SpaceX filed confidentially to go public on April 1st

0:18 targeting a 1.7 5 trillion with a T valuation.

0:24 When SpaceX goes public, if it's at that 1.75 trillion dollar valuation,

0:29 so weird to say trillion dollar valuation for an IPO.

0:32 They would be the eighth largest company

0:34 in the world right behind TSMC and Saudi Aramco.

0:37 They're both worth 1.7 X at the taping of this podcast.

0:42 Tesla is number 10 with 1.37 trillion dollar valuation.

0:47 Hey, if you were to combine those two as many people are speculating will

0:50 happen at some point and you can buy the stock ticker E L O N,

0:54 that would be a 3.1 trillion dollar company and that would

0:58 make them the fourth largest company ahead of Microsoft.

1:01 They're aiming to raise Chamath 75 billion,

1:03 which would be the by far the biggest raise ever in an IPO.

1:07 Expected to go out in June.

1:09 I think they were trying to hit the 420

1:10 date cuz that would have been even more hilarious,

1:12 but they're not going to be able to do that.

1:16 SpaceX recently acquired X.AI for 250 billion.

1:20 That includes X and Twitter and the XAI large language model AI company.

1:25 Starlink generating between 50 and 80% of SpaceX's revenue.

1:29 We'll have all those details shortly.

1:32 And it'll be close to 20 billion dollars a year according to reports.

1:37 Launch of rockets is the other 40% of the business,

1:39 5 billion in 2024 according to reports.

1:42 Total revenue 2025, 15 to 16 billion

1:45 with 8 billion in profit according to Reuters.

1:49 So, let's stop there and we're going to talk

1:51 about all the other IPOs that could be coming.

1:54 Chamath I think people really want to know

1:57 and you may have mentioned this on an earlier episode,

1:59 what are the chances that Tesla, after if this IPO goes well,

2:03 that Tesla and SpaceX could wind up being the same company.

2:05 We saw they're collaborating on a fab.

2:08 100% is what you're putting it on?

2:10 Okay.

2:10 Okay, sorry.

2:11 Let me Let me be clear.

2:12 99.999%.

2:15 Okay.

2:16 What will that [laughter] mean when if

2:19 those two companies or when those two companies merge?

2:23 One of the great things that happened in my career was there was a point where,

2:27 you know how like you grind at a level and then,

2:30 you know, you just get exposed to things at a different level.

2:32 And then you grind for years and you

2:34 get exposed to things at a yet another level.

2:37 In one of those steps, I was very fortunate to be introduced by Thomas Laffont,

2:43 actually, to the head of Wachtell Lipton.

2:46 Is it a law firm?

2:47 Law firm.

2:49 And his name is Ed Herlihy.

2:52 And he said, "This is the most important, well-known, well-run,

2:58 powerful law firm in America." Then I looked

3:00 at the transactions and they're just in the middle of everything.

3:02 And now, you know, my lawyer, Raj Narayanan, who does everything for me,

3:07 one of the senior partners at Wachtell, I can attest are incredible.

3:10 And they said to me,

3:11 in the middle of all of this stuff when I was doing a bunch of deals,

3:16 they said, "Chamath, just get ready to pay a tax." And I said,

3:20 "What does that mean?" They said,

3:22 "The way that the American capital markets are set up is

3:25 both that you can be incredibly creative and do incredible things.

3:29 But, and we talked about this a little bit last week,

3:32 there's a bunch of tort that allows folks to hang

3:36 around the hoop and get paid no matter what.

3:38 You see this in all IPOs, shareholder lawsuits abound.

3:42 And they try to create a class out of it.

3:44 And the reason they do that is that there's D&O insurance

3:47 that then will pay out some number of millions of dollars.

3:50 The attorneys take 40 or 50% and then these plaintiffs get a few bucks.

3:54 You saw how egregious this court manipulation was when this guy

3:58 with 10 shares sued Elon's comp package at Tesla and won.

4:01 And what was that really?

4:03 That was the trial lawyers trying to get paid

4:06 hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting a seam.

4:08 It was a shakedown.

4:09 Call it what It was a shakedown.

4:10 Why am I bringing this up?

4:11 If you take the the Raj and Ed example of this, this SpaceX

4:16 IPO is going to set up a couple of things.

4:19 The first is there's just going to be the natural noise in the market

4:23 and Elon will have to sort through all of the little ticky-tacky things.

4:26 But the most important positive thing that will happen

4:28 from the IPO is a validated external mark-to-market valuation of SpaceX.

4:36 And the market every day in real time gives

4:39 you a valid mark-to-market assessment of the value of Tesla.

4:44 And this allows you to put these two things together to minimize these losses.

4:50 And I think that that's what Elon really needs.

4:53 It'll make his life tremendously simpler from a governance perspective.

4:58 It'll make the companies and this quibbling

5:03 about his time a non-issue because again,

5:06 nobody talks about Zuck or Satya or Sundar or Jensen allocating time

5:14 across various projects inside of Meta or Google or Microsoft or Nvidia.

5:20 Nor should they really make this claim from Elon because as you're seeing,

5:25 there's actually an enormous overlap and commonality

5:28 to the various things that he is doing.

5:31 He's building the robots, but they're used inside of SpaceX.

5:34 He's building a Terafab, they're used inside of Tesla.

5:37 He's building xAI, they're used across both.

5:40 So I think we need to do this.

5:41 It'll minimize the shareholder noise because it'll

5:44 give less room to somebody that says, "Hey,

5:46 he set a valuation out of thin air." Well,

5:48 and But, dollars to donuts, these things are going to merge.

5:51 And it speaks to the singularity that's going on right now.

5:55 You know, you had a car company, you had a space company.

5:58 Okay, that was a pretty How do those two things overlap?

6:01 And it's like AI, data centers in space, where do you get chips from?

6:05 And then actually going to raw materials inside of one factory,

6:09 going out the other, and having discussed with Elon many times,

6:13 what he learned, you know, at Tesla or SpaceX about advanced materials

6:18 informed different products at the different companies.

6:20 And now you just You'll have all of that in one place.

6:23 And then you think about the brain trust that he built at those two companies,

6:26 plus Boring Company, plus Neuralink.

6:28 If they're all in there, all this cross-disciplinary learning is going

6:32 to compound and compound and compound.

6:36 Elon knows more about factories than probably anybody.

6:40 Like there's people in China who have,

6:42 you know, Foxconn knows a lot about factories.

6:44 You know, so there are some people who know as much

6:47 or or probably even a little bit more about some aspects of it,

6:49 but that's a a true advantage of bringing those two teams together.

6:52 And you saw it, people would go from one company to the other.

6:55 Freeberg, my question for you, very acutely with your NASA hat and uh you know,

7:00 your your background today, is 20 years ago,

7:05 he he started trying to get to space with SpaceX,

7:07 and here we go, there's more rockets going off in a month now

7:11 than there are days in the month for the for the entire country,

7:14 and he's got rockets going up every two or three days.

7:17 You can just basically hop on a SpaceX flight and get to space.

7:21 Maybe you could just use your vision there to tell the audience what could

7:26 things look like in another 20 years

7:28 if SpaceX continues at this cadence or even,

7:31 you know, goes faster because of AI.

7:33 Well, this week's a pretty important milestone

7:37 for that point because we just launched Artemis 2 yesterday,

7:40 which is man's returning to the moon.

7:43 So, the United States shipped this rocket with four astronauts on board.

7:48 They're going to do an orbit around the Earth,

7:51 head to the moon, come back around,

7:53 and come back to Earth in anticipation of landing on the moon in about 2 years.

7:59 And getting to the moon, I think, is going to be very important,

8:02 not just because there's this important social milestone

8:06 and race happening on right now with China, but I think the moon could end up

8:10 being kind of the next industrial frontier for humanity.

8:14 And the reason is if you can get to the moon,

8:16 the moon has an extraordinary abundance of material that we can mine,

8:21 process, and manufacture into goods,

8:24 and ultimately the cost to ship those goods back to the Earth is zero.

8:29 It will cost less to move goods, manufactured goods,

8:33 processed or uh precious metals from the moon to a specific point on Earth.

8:39 It will cost less to do that than

8:41 to ship it using any other terrestrial conventional method,

8:44 whether that's a boat, an airplane, or a railroad.

8:48 And the reason is that on the moon, you can take advantage of the low gravity.

8:53 It's about 1/6 the gravity and the complete lack of an atmosphere,

8:56 meaning that it's frictionless to move material off of the moon,

9:00 and very low energy to move it off of the moon.

9:02 You do not need to use a rocket propellant with high energy

9:06 like we have to do to move things off of the Earth.

9:09 In fact, the design for moving material off

9:12 of the moon is to use what's called a mass driver,

9:14 which is like a a train track, like a rail, like an electric rail.

9:18 You kind of see these in, you know,

9:20 high-speed trains that work on kind of magnetic levitation,

9:23 and you could put a package on that rail

9:25 and use electricity to accelerate that package to a 100 G-force,

9:30 shoot it back to the Earth, or theoretically shoot it to Mars,

9:33 and it will go to the exact point on the Earth you want it to go

9:36 to, reenters the atmosphere and lands

9:38 with a a simple parachute where you wanted to go.

9:41 So, we could run continuous mining,

9:42 continuous manufacturing processes on the moon at a fraction of the cost

9:46 of what it would take to do it here on earth.

9:48 The biggest limiting factor, getting people to the moon.

9:51 And that is largely solved or will be solved in the next few years by robotics.

9:55 So, I think that there's this pretty profound intersection with what's going

9:58 on in robotics with this moment

10:01 for space industrialization and moving to the moon.

10:04 So, you know, Tesla, I think 20 years from now is actually a more interesting

10:08 story whether they're the same independent company or the same company.

10:11 I think we're going to look back one day and have this kind

10:14 of laughing observation that Tesla started out as an electric car company.

10:19 100%

10:19 Ended up ended up becoming an autonomous car company

10:22 and the autonomous competency is what led to the robotics revolution.

10:26 And the robotics revolution,

10:27 even if the socialists ban robotics on earth and tell us no robots allowed,

10:31 they're taking all the jobs,

10:32 [laughter] you could ship all those robots to the moon and they could get

10:35 to work and create an entirely new

10:37 manufacturing frontier for our civilization, for humanity.

10:42 That frontier can manufacture precious metals

10:44 and other goods and ship them back.

10:45 You could manufacture semiconductors on the moon.

10:48 All that's missing is the robots.

10:49 So, moving the robots to the moon or setting up the materials for robots

10:53 to build themselves on the moon is kind of the first phase of this transition.

10:57 You know, asking about 20 years from now

10:58 and then the next phase is building stuff up.

11:00 So, look, I mean, I think that this may not

11:02 be and it certainly won't be limited to just SpaceX,

11:05 but SpaceX is demonstrating its capacity at being effectively the railroads.

11:09 You know, what the railroads were to the west and to the frontier in the west,

11:13 you know, in the last generation,

11:14 SpaceX will be to the moon and ultimately to Mars.

11:17 And there's going to be an extraordinary abundance

11:19 of production that's going to come out of the moon.

11:21 The moon has everything, by the way, and I'll say one more thing about SpaceX.

11:24 SpaceX has also created, and this is going to be a big

11:27 part of the valuation analysis that many are doing,

11:29 they've created a backup to the internet.

11:31 You know, the internet is fundamentally limited by all of the nodes

11:34 on the network and the connectivity amongst all those nodes.

11:37 And that connectivity is largely driven by copper and fiber optic cable.

11:41 So, in space, with the number of satellites going up with Starlink,

11:45 and to actually deploy data centers that can

11:48 output data on those nodes on that network,

11:51 SpaceX has largely built a backup internet.

11:53 And that backup internet can coincide with the Earth's internet,

11:56 but it creates this extraterrestrial communication network that gives

12:00 us theoretically the ability to think about, "Hey,

12:02 if governments collapse, if there's civilizational upheaval,

12:05 etc., etc., etc." This becomes, I think,

12:07 a fundamentally kind of important technology

12:10 infrastructure that's going to exist in parallel.

12:12 So, I'm pretty excited about like these two separate

12:15 paths for SpaceX and where they intersect with Tesla,

12:19 I think it's pretty profound at the moment.

12:20 Yeah, and it can't be understated what lowering the cost per

12:25 kilogram to get to space has done to entrepreneurs around the company.

12:29 There's multiple entrepreneurs who are now doing

12:32 asteroid mining or Varda doing experimentation in space,

12:36 and I have a I've been doing some late-stage stuff Chamath with my syndicate,

12:40 and one of the interesting companies we syndicated We we did Zipline,

12:45 which is a great company, but we also did this company called Vast, Vast Space.

12:49 Uh Jed is the founder.

12:50 He He created uh Ripple and uh and and some other crypto projects,

12:55 and he put a lot of his money,

12:56 hundreds of millions of dollars, into this company Vast Space.

12:59 And they're designing a space station.

13:01 How did they do it?

13:02 Well, they just bought carriage on SpaceX rockets, and they paid in advance,

13:08 they have their slot, and now they're doing this massive

13:11 innovation to make modular space station components.

13:14 Here's what I'll And the thesis is, "Hey,

13:16 what if Google or Amazon want to have a space station in space?" You know,

13:20 completely possible they may want that.

13:23 Here's what I'll say.

13:23 I think sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

13:28 There are all of these ways that so

13:30 many people will end up with participation into SpaceX.

13:33 I think we all owe Elon an enormous thanks.

13:38 I think that this is going to unleash just an unbelievably

13:42 large economy of things that we have no idea about.

13:48 And when I see this thing, that video that you just showed,

13:53 what it reminds me is that we have a very rudimentary capability in space.

13:58 What does that mean?

14:00 If you take if you catch a ride on Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy,

14:04 basically it's dropping you off at 550 km, I think.

14:07 You have a different sort of problem if you're trying to get to GEO.

14:11 But even if you get dropped off at 500 or 550,

14:14 how do you get to your actual orbital plane?

14:16 Right?

14:17 So, meaning if you think of Elon as like

14:19 the big container ships that go from China to America,

14:22 once it gets to Long Beach, you need FedEx.

14:25 There's an entire infrastructure there that's going

14:27 to get all of this logistics built last mile.

14:31 There's a huge garbage collection problem that's getting built up.

14:34 We still haven't technically solved how to do garbage collection in space.

14:38 There's nets, there's magnetic plates.

14:41 All of that is getting fixed.

14:43 Then there's going to be an explosion in actual power generation.

14:46 The cell composition of solar cells up in space are materially different.

14:50 It's a really incredible thing.

14:51 You look at these thin sheets, they are like 1 mm thick.

14:55 You could if you carried it on your hand, the glass breaks.

14:58 Yet you can smash a meteor into it

14:59 when it's laid and laminated and nothing happens.

15:02 It's like the It's like So,

15:04 my point is in every single dimension of what the earthly economy looks like,

15:12 it's now going to go and get rebuilt in space.

15:15 There'll be a FedEx of space.

15:17 There'll be a Maersk of space.

15:18 There'll be a I don't know what the garbage collection companies are,

15:22 Allied waste of space.

15:23 There's going to be everything of space that exists in the United States.

15:27 Freeburg just talked about the Freeport Macaran of space.

15:31 Like everything.

15:33 And that we owe to him.

15:35 Yeah.

15:36 And I hope he gets that credit because

15:39 the amount of businesses I think that can get

15:41 created and the amount of value that will

15:43 be created on top of SpaceX's shoulders is vast.

15:48 It's the beginning of the beginning of the beginning.

15:50 And it's going to create enormous opportunities

15:53 for people who are smart and resourceful.

15:55 And Freeburg, maybe you could comment on the PGMs,

15:59 the palladium that's on asteroids, and just they're rare here on Earth.

16:04 If we had an unlimited supply or a continuous supply of those minerals,

16:10 you know, what what could the downstream effect of that be?

16:13 And then what if we find things in space that we are unaware of?

16:17 There are unknown unknowns, correct, Freeburg,

16:20 when you start to conceptualize this?

16:21 I do think like the asteroid mining is an interesting concept,

16:24 but I do think it's going to be more likely that we'll have

16:27 the need for infrastructure so we can produce ores and refine and so on versus,

16:33 you know, bringing chunky rock back.

16:35 I think that you could do this very effectively on the moon.

16:37 The primary elements that are missing from the moon

16:40 that we have on the Earth are, you know, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen.

16:46 Basically, these things that make life on Earth.

16:49 But that's because they primarily exist in a gaseous form,

16:53 and the Earth has enough gravity to retain those gases and have an atmosphere.

16:58 The moon is too small to maintain an atmosphere.

17:00 The gravity's too little, so those gases all kind of went away.

17:04 They evaporated away in the early formation of the Earth and the moon.

17:08 But on the moon, there's everything else.

17:10 There's aluminum, there's silicon,

17:12 there's palladium, there's platinum, there's gold.

17:15 There's everything you possibly need.

17:16 So I think as we do the calculus and all of this, we'll

17:19 end up realizing that the moon is probably the best frontier.

17:22 One of the biggest issues is dissipating

17:24 heat because you don't have an atmosphere,

17:26 but theoretically you could recapture that heat and use like helium gas

17:30 or something to turn a turbine

17:31 and actually run production of even more electricity.

17:34 You just put a couple solar panels out.

17:35 I did the math on this.

17:36 It's like 500 square meters of solar panels will let you run a 4

17:40 km mass driver to ship material back to the Earth every 10 to 15 minutes.

17:44 One kind of material every 10 to 15 minutes.

17:47 sled you described earlier that Elon's been talking about as well, yeah.

17:50 So you could think about having autonomous mining vehicles deployed on the moon,

17:54 processing the ore, and then sending completely processed material back.

17:58 And then for a heat shield for re-entry to the Earth, you just use moon rock.

18:02 You only need about 15 cm of moon rock at the front of the package.

18:06 And then that'll burn up when it

18:07 re-enters the atmosphere and the package, you know,

18:09 kind of parachutes down and lands where you want

18:11 it to land in your industrial shipyard or whatever.

18:13 So there's just like you know,

18:15 I think we'll we'll continue to kind of iterate on this.

18:17 I'm speculating in a bunch of different ways.

18:19 the beginning of the beginning.

18:21 Gosh, I mean, can you imagine having a moon base in America is just wow.

18:25 Well, imagine permanently present on the moon is just

18:29 and factories on the moon is just wild to consider.

18:32 Wild.

18:32 Can you guys just imagine like the middle or the early 19th century,

18:36 like the late 1700s,

18:38 early 1800s in America, and there's like all this land out on the west,

18:42 and like whatever people were contemplating in that moment about what

18:45 they were going to go do with that land on the west,

18:47 and they started to travel west,

18:49 their minds would have been blown to see what happened 100 years later,

18:52 or now 150 years later.

18:54 You know, like it's just That's the moment that we're at right now,

18:57 and the railroads are being built to get us to this next great frontier.

19:01 They're being laid out before us,

19:03 and the opportunity is really limited only by our imagination.

19:07 And before we would have never been able to tackle these great frontiers,

19:11 but this magical new technology came about called robots.

19:14 And these robots are are going to allow

19:16 us to actually make use of these frontiers [clears throat]

19:18 and explore them and develop them.

19:20 And that's why this is such

19:21 an incredible moment where this intersection of autonomy

19:24 and robotics and space traversal kind

19:27 of drive forward humanity into this new era.

19:30 And it's Again, this is not a zero-sum game.

19:33 This is expanding humanity's potential, expanding production,

19:36 which is so different than the way the socialists

19:38 on Earth are talking about it where everyone's fighting against progress

19:41 because they think that progress And the truth is it's

19:44 about everyone building stuff that's new and everyone benefiting from this.

19:51 I'm going to open a hotel casino in the space.

19:54 That'll be good.

19:54 That'll be so good.

19:55 No, I'm serious.

19:56 Absolutely.

19:57 You think it's funny, but I am.

19:58 I would love that.

19:59 Yeah, and then no rake, no rake, no gravity.

20:02 No rake, no gravity.

20:06 No tax, no tax or poker winnings.

20:10 I love it.

20:11 Whoever implements the red-light district in space

20:14 is going to become a trillionaire.

20:15 Oh, wow.

20:16 That's Yeah, with the robotics and the pleasure droids, replicants.

20:21 Oh man, it could get crazy.

20:22 All right.

20:22 Well, let's just hope you're we're not the Donner Party on the way there.

20:26 Um 2026 Don't worry, you'll be you'll be safely on the ground.

20:31 Schlepping syndicates.

20:33 I'll tell you something.

20:35 Thank you.

20:35 Shout out the syndicate.com and flying [laughter] to join me in great companies.

20:40 Do you own any rockets?

20:42 You guys might be retired, but I'm in the game.

20:44 I'm in the arena trying things.

20:46 I'm selling I'm selling enterprise software every day.

20:49 That's what I do.

20:50 Chamath said, "Hey J Cal,

20:51 can we get wrapped this up real quick cuz I got to get on a sales call.

20:53 I got to get on a discovery call." Listen,

20:56 I like the fact that we're all working.

20:58 We're working into our 50s.

21:00 I love it.

21:00 Hey, 2026 could be an all-time record for IPOs.

21:04 Looks like it will be.

21:05 And PropTech, OpenAI, Databricks.

21:09 I mean, these are all nine and possibly

21:12 10-figure IPOs in terms of the valuations.

21:16 Long tail of other companies, Stripe, Cerebras, Canva, Discord.

21:23 Lots of people waiting.

21:24 Here's your Polymarket.

21:25 SpaceX 94%, obviously.

21:27 That looks like it's We just talked about that for 20 minutes.

21:30 Anthropic 41%.

21:32 People were saying 70% in February.

21:34 OpenAI 38%, Databricks 32%.

21:38 People are wondering what could derail this.

21:41 Obviously, we we we have a very pro-business group of people in Washington,

21:46 D.C., but you have potentially this Iran war.

21:50 We'll talk about that later in the program.

21:52 Could potentially push us back if God forbid

21:54 it was to spiral or there was a recession.

21:57 Maybe the Democrats, you know, taking control of Congress, Senate, etc.

22:02 What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs?

22:06 We're talking about trillions of dollars of companies, Chamath.

22:09 And if that does happen,

22:10 let's start talking second and third-order impact of of that kind

22:14 of distribution chain that could happen for LPs.

22:18 And then just also all these employees, you know,

22:21 and then a a currency for these companies.

22:23 We'll go from a Mag 7 to a Mag 17, it looks like.

22:26 I think that we have a bit of a risk problem.

22:30 And I think this is why it makes so much sense for Elon to get out first.

22:35 If you think about appetite as equivalent

22:39 to like a person at a Thanksgiving dinner,

22:41 when you first come in and you see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful.

22:44 Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

22:46 And I think in a moment like that, you

22:49 want to be the one that is consumed first.

22:53 Mhm.

22:53 And I think the risk increases when you are at the tail

22:56 end because the risk is that the diners will run out of space.

23:00 And if you use that analogy, And if you use that analogy,

23:04 I think the reason why people's plates will

23:07 get full are probably twofold and maybe threefold.

23:12 The first and most important thing is there's enough tactical event risk

23:19 that people generally want to be risk off and have more margin of safety.

23:25 I think the Iran thing is kind of in there,

23:28 but I think the big tactical event risk is that we have a lot

23:33 of these really important financial moments tied to this concept of AGI, ASI.

23:39 I don't know if you saw the OpenAI

23:42 announcement on their final terms, but you know,

23:44 a huge slug of Amazon's capital is tied

23:47 to a 2028 IPO or a moment that calls for this.

23:51 Then there was a bunch of leaks,

23:54 text messages or whatever that said that there's

23:56 a version of some AGI running inside of Anthropic.

24:00 Then there was the fact that, you know,

24:02 the leak of Claude code basically demonstrated that they

24:05 had feature flagged away a bunch of improvements.

24:07 So, if you stack up all these improvements,

24:10 they're actually much further ahead than the models realize.

24:13 If you take all of that as a basket,

24:15 it goes back to what I said last week, which is we have a real pricing problem.

24:20 If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none.

24:25 If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are

24:30 now raising of billions of dollars

24:32 needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly.

24:35 History will sort out which one is right, but both cannot be right.

24:38 So, in that vein, I actually think J Cal, I don't think we're going to have

24:42 like these quote-unquote blockbuster stream of IPOs.

24:45 I think what happens is SpaceX is going to get out.

24:47 They're going to do great.

24:49 And then maybe the next one does good to great.

24:52 Then the next one will do good.

24:55 And then the appetite runs out because you just

24:58 can't absorb incrementally trillions of dollars of new demand.

25:04 And if you think about it, where is it going to come from?

25:06 Is it going to come from the sidelines?

25:08 I don't know.

25:08 I think it's more of a reallocation exercise.

25:10 But if you look at the S&P, well,

25:12 most people are now defensively moving away from these kinds

25:16 of things towards the things that are more protected,

25:18 what the industry calls halo, right?

25:21 High asset, low obsolescence kind of businesses.

25:24 Those things trade for zero today, Jason.

25:27 You could buy hundreds of millions of dollars of year of cash

25:30 flow for two to five times right now in the stock market.

25:33 And so, why are you going to go way out on the risk

25:36 curve and buy something at 200 times revs, let alone earnings.

25:41 Yeah, the the So, I don't know.

25:43 I'm I'm more in the camp of I think it's good to be first.

25:48 It's pretty decent to be second.

25:50 But if I were you, I would get the heck out and get public and get your money

25:54 and fortify your balance sheet ASAP because I think

25:57 the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you're in.

26:02 Yeah, there's going to be a competition for investor dollars,

26:06 whether it's retail or it's institutional or sovereign wealth funds.

26:10 They're going to have a lot of choices here.

26:12 Do you want to be in Nvidia?

26:13 Do you want to be in SpaceX?

26:15 Maybe you have to rotate out of Amazon or Google

26:18 or Disney in order to take on those opportunities.

26:20 And that's going to be a a great competition probably.

26:24 We could see a lot of these IPOs, Friedberg,

26:26 trade below their IPO price in the year

26:29 or two after they come out and get repriced, yeah?

26:33 Like we've seen before.

26:34 I think the market's going to need to find a price.

26:36 Remember that the shareholders in a lot of these companies have

26:40 held on to these shares for a long period of time.

26:43 And the valuations are extraordinary.

26:45 I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars in market

26:47 value coming to market liquid for the first time.

26:51 Some of these investors, regardless of whatever their entry price was,

26:55 are going to be looking for liquidity.

26:56 So, there's only so much capital to absorb those shares on the buy side.

27:02 Meaning, if the buyers and the bid is not there to fulfill all of the selling,

27:06 then you're going to see the share price decline.

27:09 And the market's going to find a price.

27:11 And so, I I think this idea that like an IPO is, you know,

27:15 just a step in driving the price or value

27:18 of a company up is a pretty false sense.

27:20 And and I think we'll realize it's pretty false as some

27:22 of these IPOs take place because there is so much pent-up selling demand.

27:26 There is so much value that's been created.

27:28 There's going to be so much selling pressure.

27:30 And then there's going to be very little buying activity

27:33 on some of these because anyone that could have bought

27:36 at scale on the buy side post public were already

27:40 in a lot of these companies pre-public as private companies.

27:43 And so, I don't know who the big buyers

27:45 are that everyone's expecting are going to show up.

27:47 They're probably thinking it's going to be retail.

27:49 Retail, yeah.

27:50 Yeah, but how much money does retail have left?

27:52 I mean, you if you look at retail investors,

27:54 they have a certain amount of powder and it's probably deployed.

27:57 It's not like they have unlimited places to look for that.

28:01 And, you know, there's some evidence

28:02 of this Blue Bloomberg ran an article on Wednesday.

28:05 We tip on Thursday, folks.

28:07 And you get to listen to the pod on Fridays.

28:09 OpenAI is falling out of favor with secondary buyers.

28:13 According to a report, OpenAI investors can't find buyers at the new

28:17 $850 billion valuation that Chamath referenced earlier.

28:21 Investors Bloomberg spoke to are looking to sell $600 million worth of shares.

28:27 People are looking for liquidity and said they were institutional investors.

28:31 Anthropic, currently valued at $300 billion,

28:33 is seeing major secondary bids at a $600 billion valuation.

28:36 So, I think Chamath, what this shows us is you're correct.

28:40 They're, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic are the two next cards.

28:43 That's your turn and river, folks.

28:45 If SpaceX is the flop and maybe they're massively overvalued right now.

28:50 Maybe they're three, four,

28:51 500 million billion dollar companies, not trillion dollar companies.

28:55 And if you look at the amount of revenue 24 billion for OpenAI at 852 billion,

29:01 that's 35 times price to sales ratio and that is a absurd

29:06 price to sales ratio depending on if the growth keeps happening.

29:09 And as you reference Chamath,

29:11 what if we are at artificial general intelligence, AGI?

29:15 And the moats on these things is de minimus or or there is no moat.

29:20 Anthropic just got hacked.

29:22 All their secrets are out.

29:24 Somebody trans muted the code into another language, posted it on GitHub.

29:30 Can't be stopped.

29:31 I don't know if you saw that story, Freeberg, but this is kind of mind-blowing.

29:34 Somebody took the Anthropic code, I don't know what it was written in, and then

29:37 basically just put it into another language, reposted it.

29:41 If Anthropic comes and says, "Hey,

29:43 you can't do that." Well, that negates their argument, Chamath,

29:48 that they're allowed to train on other people's

29:49 data and then spit out a different output.

29:52 So, this is a very weird moment in time, right?

29:55 It is.

29:55 I think you're you're bringing up a bunch of different points,

29:58 so let me just sort them out in the order that I think is important.

30:02 Is there a market for OpenAI at 800 billion?

30:05 Yes, and there should be.

30:06 When I read that press release my mind was blown.

30:09 This is a I've never seen a business like this.

30:13 And I'd say the same thing about Anthropic.

30:15 What an incredible thing that both

30:17 of these two companies have been able to create.

30:19 Nobody in the history of the world has

30:23 ever seen two businesses like this at this scale.

30:26 Okay?

30:27 It's unbelievable.

30:28 These are trillion dollar companies.

30:31 They both are.

30:32 And they both deserve to be.

30:35 How profitable they are I don't know.

30:38 What their terminal valuation is I don't know.

30:41 What will people pay for an IPO?

30:43 I don't know.

30:44 But Nick, I just shared something with you.

30:46 These two companies need to get out as quickly as possible.

30:51 And the reason is every single company that comes after it,

30:54 all those companies that you just named Jason,

30:56 are not nearly as important and do not need

30:58 the money nearly as badly as these guys do.

31:01 And where will it come from?

31:02 The specific answer to your question when you look at this chart

31:04 is the tech sector PE is going to shrink faster,

31:08 in my opinion, than the non-tech PE.

31:11 And the reason is because as these companies come out,

31:15 the combination of SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic,

31:19 all three are baking an AI technology that first

31:24 and foremost will go after the tech sector.

31:26 It will eliminate and it will cannibalize and it will

31:30 erode most of the moats that support this differential trading.

31:36 So if I were a betting man, my first bet is as those three companies come out,

31:41 these software businesses are going to approach the rest of the non-tech PE.

31:46 Okay, that's the first step that has to happen.

31:49 So the rate of change of of the multiple

31:52 erosion will basically say to the world,

31:55 "Hey, these tech companies are I don't know.

31:58 I'll buy the first five or six years of this story,

32:00 but I'm not buying year 15 of this anymore because these three

32:03 guys are going to build something." So that's where the money comes from.

32:06 That's why I think after SpaceX,

32:09 these two guys need to get their act together, file quickly,

32:11 get out, and just get the money,

32:14 fortify their balance sheets, and be in a position.

32:16 Everything Everything that happens after that is a total

32:19 coin toss because once these three companies are public,

32:22 I think the blue line will converge

32:24 to the orange line and it's going to be nasty.

32:26 Yeah, Freeberg, just looking at this, do you believe that secondary

32:30 market is a canary in the coal mine here with OpenAI?

32:33 Because if we we've and we've gone through this year after year here.

32:37 These are exceptional businesses.

32:38 They've grown incredible.

32:40 Customers love their products, but the burn is brutal.

32:44 The circle of financing problem is still out there.

32:46 Like, what's reality here?

32:48 The And that's going to all come out when these S-1s get

32:50 filed and they're publicly traded companies

32:52 and they have quarterly earnings reports.

32:54 Market share for these could be flipping.

32:58 Anthropic and and Gemini, other players coming into the market.

33:02 What are your thoughts here on uh Anthropic and OpenAI post the SpaceX IPO?

33:09 Like I said, there's only so much capital in the world.

33:12 So, I do think one of the things

33:14 that's probably being underestimated at the moment is

33:18 the liquidity crunch that's ahead for capital intensive

33:21 technology businesses given the conflict in the Middle East.

33:26 I don't think that Qatar and certain Saudi offices and certain offices

33:31 in UAE and Oman are as eager as they were or, you know,

33:37 have been to provide large slugs of capital to support these initiatives.

33:41 And remember, that capital moves its way through the markets,

33:44 whether it's through JP Morgan and a loan to SoftBank,

33:47 which then gets paid to OpenAI.

33:49 At the end of the day,

33:50 there has to be unencumbered debt-free capital that's being

33:53 provided to these systems from somewhere in the world.

33:57 And the If you trace all of it back,

33:58 like a large chunk of it has historically in the last

34:00 couple of years come from Middle East sovereigns and family offices.

34:04 And I think that those are likely going to tighten up in the near term.

34:07 That being the case, there's probably less demand.

34:09 I do think that there's a lot of secondary

34:11 demand coming from family offices in Europe and Singapore,

34:15 places like that that that generally have not

34:17 had great access or early-stage access to private companies.

34:20 But at some point, there's only so much demand there.

34:23 So, I don't know like how far this is going

34:26 to go or when this capital crunch that's going to emerge,

34:28 I think from the Middle East.

34:29 I don't think we've really felt the shockwave

34:31 yet on what's happening because remember a lot

34:32 of these Middle East capital commitments were made

34:35 in the last cycle as LP commitments or whatever.

34:38 And you know, if they stop if they downscale

34:41 LP commitments or they stop doing primary and secondary transactions,

34:45 you know, it takes a little bit of time

34:47 before the market feels that and then it's like, "Oh,

34:49 the reliable go-to are gone." And a lot

34:51 of the big funds the the mega funds that are

34:53 out there totally that have Middle East LPs

34:56 are gone and suddenly everyone's going to be like,

34:58 "Whoa." And the shockwave will hit.

35:00 So, let's see.

35:02 It is a risk for the United States because

35:04 China I don't think it's going to be as challenged.

35:06 We're so dependent on Middle East capital but maybe that China

35:11 has an a capital advantage actually going into this mess.

35:14 I mean and we talked about force majeure to come into [clears throat] play

35:18 here if this Iran thing spirals God forbid out of control or gets worse.

35:23 People could say, "You know what?

35:24 We're we're going to downscale our commitments and hey,

35:26 there's a war so we don't have to fund this."

35:29 I think the markets will shake that off, Jason.

35:31 I don't think that they they view this Iran thing as a big thing.

35:34 I think the big event risk in the market is is AI real or not real?

35:37 And if it's real, what are all of these companies worth?

35:40 That is the big sword of Damocles over the stock market.

35:43 Yeah.

35:44 All right.

35:44 Well, that's a good segue I think into talking a bit about Iran.

35:49 We took the week off from it last week.

35:52 And we're going to catch up here

35:54 way, not because we just to be clear not because we intended to which

35:57 all the comments railed us on but we

35:59 literally Jason did a terrible job moderating.

36:01 It was on the freaking docket.

36:03 We were supposed to talk about it.

36:04 We didn't get to it and we went right up.

36:07 That's it.

36:08 It's it's clearly my fault.

36:10 Um [laughter] He DM'd it.

36:11 He you know, it's like Yeah, I know.

36:13 I'm just protecting Trump.

36:14 I'm out here getting cover for Trump's mistakes.

36:17 Yeah.

36:17 Yeah.

36:18 Everybody knows I'm IN THE POCKET OF PRESIDENT TRUMP.

36:21 a ticket.

36:22 Take a ticket.

36:23 Oh, you have an issue?

36:23 Okay.

36:24 Well, you're issue number 17.

36:25 Trump DM'd me and said, "Can you please take this off the docket?" I was like,

36:29 "You got a bus." And then you're like, "Oh, sorry, office is closed.

36:32 Come back tomorrow." Today is day 34 of the Iran war {slash} military operation.

36:39 Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night for a brisk 18 minutes.

36:42 Here's a 40-second clip.

36:44 We're now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help.

36:50 We don't have to be there.

36:51 We don't need their oil.

36:53 We don't need anything they have, but we're there to help our allies.

36:57 For years everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons,

37:01 but in the end those are just words if

37:04 you're not willing to take action when the time comes.

37:07 Our objectives are very simple and clear.

37:10 We are systematically dismantling the regime's ability to threaten

37:14 America or project power outside of their borders.

37:18 And then tonight I'm pleased to say

37:19 that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion.

37:24 All right, the costs here are mounting.

37:27 A war is a very serious business.

37:29 13 American service members have tragically died.

37:32 Over 200 have been injured.

37:33 On the other side of the ledger,

37:35 3,500 Iranians have died, including 1,600 civilians and over 200 children.

37:41 1,200 people in Lebanon have died from Israeli strikes.

37:45 And we now have 50,000 troops deployed to the Middle East.

37:50 Chances of a ground invasion are increasing.

37:55 War has cost $70 billion so far.

37:58 That's assuming $2 billion a day,

38:00 which there seems to be consensus on via the Department of War.

38:04 Pentagon has asked Congress for another $200 billion.

38:09 To put that in context, the war in Ukraine was $113 billion in the first year.

38:16 This could quickly exceed it when we hit 50 days.

38:21 This isn't cheap.

38:23 There are a lot of costs.

38:24 Here's uh your polymarket on a ceasefire,

38:27 25% chance of a ceasefire by the end of April, 47 chance by the end of May.

38:32 The sharps are thinking this could wrap up,

38:34 but ground invasion which would be just really impactful, I think.

38:43 63% chance by the end of April, 71% chance by the end of December.

38:48 We're going to get into the second-order effects,

38:49 but what do you think, Chamath?

38:51 Uh this obviously is super unpopular war.

38:55 I think two things, and the president kind

38:58 of alluded to one that I think is very important,

39:00 which is if you are not energy independent, you are at risk.

39:04 And I don't know how many more examples now that world

39:07 leaders need to be shown to get their acts together.

39:11 So, if the Ukraine-Russian conflict didn't show Europe,

39:15 then this should show not just Europe, but the rest of the world.

39:18 You need to be in control

39:19 of your own energy infrastructure and energy independence.

39:23 Because stuff happens in the world,

39:25 and you're not always in control or can shape

39:27 how that stuff can indirectly or directly affect you.

39:33 The United States has energy independence.

39:34 It's an incredible situation.

39:36 What was interesting to me is if you look at Europe,

39:39 you know, they gutted a couple of their energy markets,

39:43 and they essentially ceded control to a combination

39:46 of very expensive imports and China.

39:52 They did that in markets like nuclear, where they just went out of it.

39:55 They did that in things like nat gas, where again,

39:58 we can debate, but where where did Nord Stream 2 go?

40:00 We don't know.

40:01 And they did that in things like solar,

40:02 where they just gutted all of the credits.

40:05 But what's interesting is they're starting to turn that around.

40:08 I think Italy just reintroduced

40:11 effectively what's called investment tax credits.

40:14 Spain just did as well.

40:16 Germany is restarting nuclear.

40:18 So, if you just look at the the last few months,

40:22 just that change is incredibly important because our largest ally, Europe,

40:29 should be fundamentally energy independent so

40:32 that they preserve complete and total

40:34 optionality like we do in how we respond to these situations.

40:39 That I think I think is a is a critical

40:41 thing that is a positive outcome of what's happening.

40:44 And then Second, Jason, which I think is a huge question mark

40:47 and it builds on what Friedberg said before,

40:49 the Middle Eastern states, specifically the UAE and Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait,

40:56 they are our most important financing and banking partner in the future.

41:03 And I think we need to see a conclusive end to this war

41:07 because they need to be in a position to monetize these critical assets.

41:11 Because at the same time, if you see these big pools of demand

41:15 start to become energy independent by either accelerating nuclear,

41:19 but I again, that's just problematic and slow.

41:22 But frankly, they're just going to ramp up solar.

41:24 That's the only way that you can dispatch energy quickly.

41:28 I think what that does is it decreases hydrocarbon demand over the long run.

41:31 That then decreases the monetization capacity for these countries.

41:36 So, if you put these two things together,

41:38 all of these folks in the region want safety,

41:40 security, and they need a quick end to this thing now.

41:43 Okay.

41:44 And I think that they're more incentivized to put boots on the ground,

41:46 Jason, than America is.

41:47 That's the point I was trying to make.

41:49 Friedberg, let's talk a little bit about fertilizer.

41:54 You had brought up when we had the start of the Ukraine war,

41:59 hey, this is the breadbasket, we could have a massive famine.

42:02 Thankfully, that was avoided.

42:03 There were carve-outs for getting wheat and and other crops out of Ukraine,

42:10 but here we are again with a significant amount of fertilizer

42:15 comes out of that region and it's not flowing right now.

42:18 Do you have concerns this time around that we could see something similar?

42:23 Fertilizer is made up of three elements.

42:25 There's different fertilizers.

42:27 The one element is N for nitrogen, P for phosphorus, and K for potassium.

42:33 Ukraine is the largest producer of the K, the potassium, the potash.

42:39 But the N in fertilizer is nitrogen.

42:42 And that is about 60% of what goes into the ground.

42:46 That's 60 to 65% of global fertilizer is the nitrogen.

42:49 That's what really drives agricultural productivity.

42:53 And we need nitrogen fertilizer to grow crops everywhere

42:56 on Earth that we're growing crops to feed people at scale.

43:00 That nitrogen is primarily made where natural gas is produced and processed.

43:06 And the reason is that they use the natural

43:08 gas as an input to the production process.

43:10 They get the the carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen.

43:13 And then they compress,

43:15 remember 70% of our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen gas.

43:18 So, they compress the nitrogen in the air to 200 times atmospheric pressure,

43:23 run it over a electrical current with a metal

43:26 catalyst and you break apart the N2s, so you have just single nitrogen atoms,

43:30 and then you combine it back and you

43:32 end up getting ammonia out of the other end.

43:35 That's why nitrogen fertilizers are produced where natural gas is processed.

43:40 So, the Middle East obviously is a massive producer,

43:43 particularly in Qatar, of natural gas.

43:46 And that's why so much of the world's

43:48 nitrogen fertilizer is made in the Middle East.

43:50 In fact, about 35% of the world's

43:52 nitrogen fertilizer goes through the Strait of Hormuz.

43:55 And it is then shipped to countries around the world

43:58 that farm and that need it to grow their crops.

44:01 The swing producer in the world is China.

44:04 China historically makes about 15% of the world's nitrogen fertilizer.

44:08 And when the war started, a few days after it began,

44:11 China shut down exports of their nitrogen fertilizer.

44:14 And so they basically choked out the rest of the world.

44:17 And so when the Strait of Hormuz shut, the nitrogen stopped flowing.

44:20 Here you can see the price spike that happened.

44:22 So as the the war began, this is urea.

44:25 Urea is the solid form of nitrogen fertilizer.

44:29 So urea was trading at about 350 bucks

44:31 a ton before the the conflict kind of took off.

44:35 And it continues to spike up.

44:36 Uh it reached over $700 a ton in the last 2 days.

44:40 And this is really, really, really impactful.

44:43 It's not just like, "Oh,

44:43 the price is double." Number one, there's a supply deficiency.

44:47 So farmers in places like Africa and South Asia

44:50 are not getting the urea that they need to farm.

44:53 That is going to have a massive follow-on problem.

44:56 And in markets where they have access, because the price has spiked,

45:00 like in the United States, our biggest crop is corn.

45:03 You need about 200 lb of that urea per acre for corn.

45:07 And that cost basically makes you unprofitable.

45:10 There is no way you can make a profitable crop of corn.

45:13 The other thing that China did at the same time is they stopped buying corn.

45:17 So corn prices would normally spike up, and corn prices have remained low while

45:21 the input prices have spiked for American farmers.

45:24 So American farmers are in a real pickle.

45:26 Fortunately for this spring planting, which is happening right now,

45:29 about 2/3 of American farmers had already

45:32 secured their fertilizer before the this began.

45:36 But a third did not.

45:37 And they're switching crops, typically to soybeans.

45:39 But we have a fall planting coming up in a couple of months here.

45:43 And the choke points on production is going to keep prices very high.

45:47 In the United States, we make a lot of our own ammonia at our natural gas

45:50 facilities in places like Oklahoma and Texas and Wyoming and other places.

45:54 And then it ships directly to the farms.

45:56 But the cost is so high because of the global market

45:59 that it's going to become very hard for farmers to make a profit.

46:01 And around the world, there are many farmers,

46:04 millions and millions of farmers that can't access this fertilizer now.

46:07 So, the choke point in the Strait of Hormuz is turning out

46:10 to be a real critical global food supply crisis yet again, similar to Ukraine.

46:14 And remember, there was about 400 million people following the Ukraine

46:18 war globally that we saw enter into a state of malnutrition.

46:21 This means more than 1 year of 1,200 calories or less per day for a year,

46:26 400 million people after Ukraine.

46:29 So, coming out of this crisis,

46:31 it could be even more severe given the criticality

46:33 of nitrogen-based fertilizers and the shutdown of the strait.

46:36 Let me make two more points on this.

46:38 You would think, "Okay,

46:39 we'll make more nitrogen fertilizer." The facilities take at least

46:42 3 to 5 years to fix when they break, which is what just happened in Qatar.

46:46 That facility got damaged,

46:47 the the main facility that's being used to make fertilizer.

46:49 So, that is the largest producer of urea in the world

46:52 that's now going to be incapacitated for 3 to 5 years.

46:56 And if you want to build a new facility, it takes about 7 years.

47:00 All the facilities around the world that make urea and ammonia,

47:02 these nitrogen fertilizers, typically run 24/7 365 at full capacity.

47:08 There is no downtime where you can just turn on excess production in the world.

47:12 So, you know, the world is very delicate

47:13 in its balance of inputs and food production and outputs.

47:16 The whole world has like less than 30 days of food, of calories stored up.

47:21 So, as these kind of supply chain problems start to percolate,

47:24 there's shockwaves that start to get felt around the world.

47:26 So, it's a pretty serious crisis ahead.

47:29 And it'll take a few months before it'll be fully realized.

47:31 In the meantime, US farmers are getting their asses handed to them.

47:34 They can't make money,

47:36 and China is using this as a moment for extraordinary

47:38 leverage over America and taking advantage of the situation

47:41 by shutting down exports of their fertilizer

47:44 and at the same time not buying American production of corn.

47:47 We probably need Friedberg to have some sort of resiliency

47:50 here and address this like we did with pharmaceuticals,

47:53 PPE, all these other things.

47:55 Yeah, we should have some sort of stock pile of fertilizer.

47:59 Chamath's point is absolutely correct.

48:01 Natural gas reservoirs exist around the world.

48:04 And we've been loath to exploit them or develop

48:08 them because of the climate change carbon risk and issues.

48:13 But I think what we're realizing is that those are luxury beliefs to an extent.

48:17 You can only say let's not exploit carbon resources until you hit

48:21 a shockwave like this and then people are like, wait a second.

48:24 We really do need to have these systems up and running

48:26 and we need to have excess capacity and local capacity

48:29 in the system because single points of failure for the whole

48:31 world's food supply is not going to cut it anymore.

48:35 Particularly as the world is becoming more fragmented and multipolar and there's

48:39 less US policing of the world that's going to happen and so on.

48:42 It's going to be very critical that everyone starts to think about doubling down

48:45 not just on energy production but some

48:46 of these other critical inputs like fertilizer.

48:49 And another output just as a quick side story on nat

48:52 gas production is when you pull nat gas out of the ground,

48:55 that's the primary place we find helium.

48:57 And helium we're all waking up to the fact,

48:59 you know, we never really think about helium.

49:00 We think about kids balloons at birthday parties.

49:03 But helium goes into MRI machines.

49:05 Helium goes into semiconductor manufacturing.

49:07 Helium goes into mass spec machines that are used

49:10 in chemical analysis with a lot of applications around the world.

49:13 Helium is a critical input to medical equipment,

49:17 to manufacturing equipment and all of a sudden a third

49:21 of the world's helium coming out of Qatar is not making it out.

49:24 And so we're going to now going to have

49:25 a helium supply shock that's going to affect the world.

49:28 So we're starting to wake up to the fact

49:29 that perhaps these nat gas fields that we've allowed to kind

49:32 of turn a blind eye and say let one country

49:34 exploit them and let them make all the nat gas.

49:37 The US is actively developing, you know, I went down and visited that Cheniere

49:40 facility in Louisiana with Doug Burgum a couple

49:43 months ago which was an amazing site to see where we do all the LNG exporting.

49:48 But the US has extraordinary nat gas reserves.

49:51 So do many other places in the world

49:53 that have failed to take advantage of developing them.

49:56 And I think we're realizing the criticality of doing so at this moment.

49:59 Looking at this, I think we'll have Trump pivot extremely soon.

50:03 I brought this chart up now.

50:05 This will be the fourth time you've brought this up.

50:07 J.

50:07 Cal?

50:07 You think he's going to wrap this up?

50:09 I mean He's 100% going to wrap this up and I and I can show why.

50:12 I mean, this just basically look at the history of this.

50:15 You guys remember I brought up this chart

50:18 with Trump's net approval rating and you

50:23 you look at how this has changed over the three times I brought it up.

50:26 First time in June last year, then October,

50:29 and again, I'm going to bring it up here.

50:32 The stuff with ICE, then you know, the Epstein files,

50:38 and just going right down the line of unpopular decisions,

50:41 Trump's net approval rating now has just plummeted to -17.

50:46 This is the least popular he's ever been.

50:49 And he's had to pivot here.

50:51 Pam Bondi at the time we are recording this, as I predicted

50:56 on a previous episode that Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi would be fired,

51:02 or and I guess in Trump's terms,

51:04 he likes to get them a new job and give them a window seat.

51:08 This is absolutely going to result in a quick pivot.

51:13 Who knows what the downstream effects are,

51:14 but the inflation three handle is coming back according to Polymarket.

51:19 Gas is over $4 a gallon.

51:21 And then, you know, you can easily to mock

51:23 like we did earlier these like no kings protests,

51:26 but 8 million people came out for that.

51:28 That's a large number.

51:29 And if you look at the Polymarket for what's going to happen in the midterms,

51:33 51% chance now that the Dems take the Senate, 86% that they take the house.

51:39 And you know, what you're going to take from that is Wait, sorry.

51:41 Polymarket is now showing the Democrats winning both houses?

51:46 Yeah, pull it up, Nick.

51:46 Significant chance of that.

51:48 And you know, when this happens, how much money is being bet on that?

51:51 Let's just see.

51:51 51% they take the Senate, 86% they take the House,

51:55 and 4 and 1/2 million dollars on this.

51:57 4 and 1/2 million dollars on this?

51:59 Oh, gosh.

52:00 Yeah, it's I tend to I tend to filter how

52:03 seriously I take Polymarket just based on the total quantum,

52:06 but this is a big number.

52:08 Yeah, and and I you know, listen,

52:09 I this is not me trying to dunk on Trump and my personal beliefs.

52:13 I think when you lose Tucker,

52:15 when you lose Megyn Kelly, when you lose Joe Rogan,

52:18 you know, and people are looking at who

52:22 Trump surrounded him with, there's really just two groups.

52:24 You have these super highly qualified people,

52:26 Bessant, Lutnick, obviously David Sacks.

52:29 You got You got really highly qualified people, J.D.,

52:33 you know, who who I think the world of.

52:34 I think these people are great.

52:36 But then he puts some people in positions that I think weren't up to the task,

52:40 Pam Bondi, Christie.

52:42 I'll put Stephen Miller and Kash in that as well,

52:44 my personal belief in that case.

52:46 And those people have not served him well.

52:49 And they need to get this presidency back on track because what's going

52:52 to happen is we're going to have

52:53 two more years of impeachments and investigations,

52:57 and the whole thing's going to be derided.

52:59 And we really need to start thinking about what who's making these decisions?

53:03 Who Who made this decision to go into Iran and why?

53:07 Who made these decisions to have ICE go into Minnesota and why?

53:10 And I think a lot of it goes back to Stephen Miller.

53:13 I got mocked a bit here on the pod for like blaming him,

53:17 but you can correlate Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Kash Patel,

53:20 and Pam Bondi with all of the downside

53:23 of this presidency and the plummeting ratings.

53:26 Trump's going to need to clear house.

53:28 He's cleared out two of four.

53:29 I predict he'll clear out the other two and get

53:31 great leadership in there and turn this presidency around because listen,

53:35 this is going to be socialism now and AOC's going to win.

53:39 This is going to cause massive chaos if he

53:41 doesn't get out of Iran and do it soon.

53:44 Just my handicapping of the situation.

53:47 Uh Hegseth, I'm not so sure.

53:49 I'm not sure if I you know what I think of him yet,

53:51 but you know, we don't have information on why Trump did this.

53:55 That's going to be the next shoe to drop.

53:57 On why why he did it?

53:59 Freeberg, I think you know,

53:59 this is the point I made the second this war happened or military operation.

54:05 I mean, let's let's call it what it is.

54:07 This is a war.

54:07 When you kill the top 100 people, it's a war.

54:10 I said, I don't have the information of why he did this.

54:12 Like he might have information Freeberg that we don't have

54:15 that made this an absolute must for us to do.

54:18 But we haven't revealed that information.

54:20 He hasn't explained it well to the American people.

54:22 I think that's why the ratings are, you know,

54:25 and I don't want to make the ratings like a TV ratings.

54:28 His popularity is getting crushed here.

54:30 The way this was explained to Americans,

54:32 and again, I'm not inserting my position here.

54:34 I'm just talking about the disconnect right now is

54:37 that Operation Midnight Hammer was supposed to have just decimated this.

54:42 So, why did we do this again?

54:43 And we don't have the information.

54:46 This is why I try to stay humble in this and say

54:48 like what information does Trump have of that we don't have.

54:54 Some people seem to think, Chamath, this was overconfidence.

54:58 Uh there's obviously this debate, did we get baited into this by Israel and get

55:01 pushed into it and is he a Manchurian candidate, etc.

55:05 I that's above my pay grade, too.

55:07 I don't have any information on that.

55:09 I'm not in the CIA.

55:10 It's hard to be a an armchair critic on this stuff in both senses.

55:14 Like I think it's hard to say hey, this guy got talked into doing this.

55:18 Israel manipulated him into it.

55:20 You know, sorry, it's easy to say that.

55:21 It's also easy to say, hey,

55:23 we should go get rid of the country that's made all the nuclear weapons.

55:25 Both of those are easy to say without all of the texture

55:28 of the relationships and the details and what really went on.

55:31 None of us know is the truth.

55:33 That's literally the point I you know,

55:35 I've been trying to make here It's like, how do the same thing with Venezuela?

55:39 Like, how do we know we don't have any

55:42 intelligence to map We we're not in the CIA.

55:44 We don't have any of these insights

55:46 that Mossad or the Israeli intelligence services have.

55:49 How do we know how this was going to go down?

55:51 And you know, that's all going to come out,

55:53 I think, when this all gets investigated, yeah.

55:56 I think Trump is and has been

55:58 the most consistent anti-war president of modern history.

56:03 Yes.

56:04 And I think that it's fair to say that he has and has had and has

56:09 demonstrated enormous restraint and has the highest bar

56:12 thus far of folks for actually getting into conflict.

56:17 So, I do think that what Freeburg says is very important.

56:20 There's just so much we don't know.

56:23 And I think that he doesn't want to stain his legacy with a typical American,

56:31 you know, Forever war.

56:33 Yeah.

56:33 He doesn't want that.

56:34 I don't think he doesn't need to be anywhere near that.

56:36 So, there is obviously stuff that we don't know.

56:39 I still think that there's a short-term problem,

56:43 which is not just the threat that Iran poses to Israel,

56:47 but there's a threat that Iran poses

56:49 to the rest of the Middle Eastern community.

56:52 Yeah.

56:53 That neighborhood is a complicated place.

56:55 There was an interview that MBS did on Saudi television.

56:59 Nick, maybe maybe you can find it.

57:02 It's in Arabic, but there's a good version of it that I saw with subtitles.

57:06 And if you hear the MBS's telling of what the Iranian threat is,

57:13 it's not dissimilar to how the Israelis would characterize the threat.

57:19 And so, I think it's important to understand

57:21 that unpredictable actors should not be given an opportunity

57:27 to have a cataclysmic weapon that can just

57:31 completely destroy the Earth as we know it.

57:34 That just doesn't make sense.

57:35 And I think if you can intervene to prevent

57:37 that, we're now aware of the damages of what

57:40 this can do to enough of a degree where there

57:44 should be enough of nuclear disarmament from here on out.

57:47 The six, seven, eight, nine countries that have it, okay.

57:50 There's all kinds of reasons why maybe we could

57:52 have remade those decisions over the intervening 70 years.

57:56 Maybe there's some that we never should have let have it.

57:58 The Pakistan-India thing is a good example of one.

58:01 But we are where we are.

58:04 And I think we can all agree no

58:05 more countries should incrementally get access to this thing.

58:08 Absolutely not.

58:08 And this regime specifically believes that anybody who is not

58:13 part of this specific religion needs to die and the whole

58:17 Well, that Islam needs to be reunited in order

58:20 to take on anybody who's not part of

58:22 Well, I and I would their version of radical Islam.

58:24 Like it's a it's a if this is a religious lunacy in that country,

58:29 I think everybody else should be murdered if they don't convert.

58:33 I think it's important to say that the overwhelming majority

58:36 of Sunnis and the overwhelming majority of Shias are peaceful, observant people.

58:41 There are fringes in every religion.

58:43 And in specifically this, I think the most important thing

58:46 is to not take your word or anybody else's word.

58:49 I do think it's important to listen to somebody like

58:51 MBS because I think it's the lived experience of, you know,

58:55 having to run a country in that neighborhood and what it means.

58:58 And I think what you see is as you as you're articulating,

59:02 many layers of complexity that again I think that most

59:05 of us in the West have zero appreciation for.

59:09 All of this goes to in the short term,

59:13 I think that they forced themselves into a corner.

59:16 I think we can go back and relitigate why did Obama let him out?

59:21 That was a really, really stupid idea.

59:22 We probably should have kept our thumb on the scale

59:25 and had them close to teetering on economic insolvency.

59:31 That's the only thing that has kept them in check.

59:32 They veered wildly away the minute we let

59:34 them out of the disarmament agreements that we had.

59:40 But we are where we are.

59:41 We got to put the genie back in the bottle

59:43 and we cannot look to other countries and tolerate this idea

59:48 that they also want to build the kinds of weapons that can

59:51 literally destroy the face of the planet as we know it.

59:54 It's a non-starter.

59:55 And then the second order effect is how do we make sure

1:00:00 that folks that are participating in all of this broader seeds of sowing chaos,

1:00:06 how do we hem them in?

1:00:08 And how do we create a more reasonable world order?

1:00:12 And I think that the second order effects,

1:00:13 and I've said this before, kind of bring this back to China.

1:00:17 And I think a world where it's bipolar,

1:00:19 where it's the United States and China roughly as the two

1:00:23 leading statesmen of the world is probably the Nash equilibrium here.

1:00:30 And so I think getting China in a position where they need to do a deal,

1:00:36 and remember I said this, the worst thing that could

1:00:38 happen for China was the president delaying the summit.

1:00:41 And here we are, we're now it's delayed for 6 weeks,

1:00:44 it's going to go into mid-May.

1:00:46 If you think the Strait of Hormuz numbers as it

1:00:49 relates to energy prices in Europe or anywhere else are crazy,

1:00:53 look at what's happening inside of China right now.

1:00:57 It is a no bueno situation.

1:01:00 And so in May, if we can reestablish

1:01:02 a set of operating criteria that keeps normalcy in check,

1:01:08 no more of this rapid random expansion everywhere where the Chinese

1:01:12 are trying to build bases in near us and, you know,

1:01:15 now we have to have a point of view near them.

1:01:18 We don't need any of that.

1:01:20 So I think if we can use

1:01:21 this as an opportunity to de-escalate, I think we should.

1:01:24 Yeah.

1:01:25 We we seem to have moved from I mean, I think this is the question.

1:01:28 There's a a doctrine,

1:01:29 I don't know if you guys heard this one before, of mowing the lawn,

1:01:32 which is the Israeli's view of Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Iran,

1:01:37 which is just, "Hey, we have to take away their progress,

1:01:41 the last 30 or 40% of their progress towards nuclear bombs,

1:01:45 and we just do that consistently,

1:01:46 and we contain them." This has tipped over into regime change,

1:01:49 and so I think that's the wild card that none

1:01:52 of us can predict what happens from this point forward.

1:01:55 And I I don't know how you leave Iran in this state if they're

1:01:59 going to take over the the strait uh and charge everybody a dollar a barrel.

1:02:03 Is that going to be tenable?

1:02:04 Are they going to keep blowing stuff up?

1:02:06 This is uncharted territory um and yeah.

1:02:10 And very high stakes.

1:02:11 President Trump also reiterated the US doesn't need Middle East oil,

1:02:16 and that Europeans should go straight to the strait and just take it.

1:02:20 He said that the strait will open naturally because, quote,

1:02:23 Why do we always want to be able Why

1:02:25 are you always focusing on the Straits of Hormuz, Jason?

1:02:27 Why am I?

1:02:28 I mean, you're overlooking I think cuz I'm your You're

1:02:31 always overlooking the gays of Hormuz as an example.

1:02:34 That's true.

1:02:35 That and the non-binaries of Hormuz.

1:02:37 They all count.

1:02:38 Well, why is it all about the Straits of Hormuz all the time?

1:02:41 it's I don't want to get canceled here because I'm talking about

1:02:44 I don't know the pronouns to use for these straits of Hormuz,

1:02:46 but yes, the straits in Hormuz I don't think you're allowed to be gay in Hormuz.

1:02:51 I think you have to keep that pretty quiet there, don't you?

1:02:54 That was the greatest clip ever.

1:02:55 If you don't know what we're referring to, it's about [laughter]

1:02:57 clip of It's incredible.

1:02:59 of purple-haired people No, not purple-haired.

1:03:02 This was a young Indian lady.

1:03:05 Uh and she We all thought the same thing.

1:03:08 Indians are so smart.

1:03:09 How what happened to her?

1:03:10 Well, what happened?

1:03:12 She's the They found an Indian who didn't

1:03:14 understand [laughter] I think that was the one.

1:03:17 They found dumb Indian.

1:03:18 They found Yes, exactly.

1:03:21 Oh god.

1:03:22 They found her.

1:03:24 They found [laughter] her.

1:03:24 This is She's been absolutely I mean this

1:03:27 Isn't it a little bit homophobic that we're so focused

1:03:30 on the straights of homos and not the gays of homos?

1:03:33 [music] I agree.

1:03:34 Yes, for sure.

1:03:35 So why do you think we're running to leave the gays of homos behind?

1:03:39 I think it's just history.

1:03:41 Which Ivy League do you think she went to?

1:03:43 Brown.

1:03:43 Yeah.

1:03:43 100% Brown or Columbia.

1:03:45 Okay.

1:03:46 Oh yeah, that's that's a good call.

1:03:47 I would say Columbia.

1:03:49 She Yeah, she might have gone to Vassar actually.

1:03:51 I think that would might have been her safety school.

1:03:53 It That's the best not Borat not Borat

1:03:57 um Bruno impersonation I've heard in a long time.

1:04:00 Sacha Freeburg, why are you so gay?

1:04:03 You think the straights [laughter] of homos

1:04:05 Are you Are you making your potatoes non-binary?

1:04:10 [laughter] It's like literally the Bruno.

1:04:14 You you got to do 10 minutes to Matthew.

1:04:15 You want to do your Bitcoin thing or you want to just break?

1:04:18 The Bitcoin thing was interesting because I think in the last couple of months,

1:04:24 what we've started to see is an increasing

1:04:26 amount of research that says that the scheduled

1:04:33 eventuality of a quantum chip a functional chip

1:04:40 is probably not 25 or 30 years away.

1:04:44 It's probably now in the next 5 to 7 years if I had to guess.

1:04:50 And I think that because that event horizon has moved in in these next 5 to 7

1:04:56 years for those that follow Bitcoin and care

1:04:59 about it my only advice on this topic

1:05:02 is that the leaders of the Bitcoin ecosystem

1:05:05 need to organize themselves and need to make sure that they have an answer

1:05:10 to the question of is this stuff quantum resistant?

1:05:14 Because if the answer is no, they are a very visible and obvious honeypot.

1:05:19 Now, there is the answer that then a lot of the Bitcoin community gives,

1:05:22 which is well, everything is screwed.

1:05:26 And my only advice is possibly, but if a non-state actor gets a hold of quantum

1:05:32 technology that can defeat crypto as we know it today.

1:05:37 SHA-256, you know, ECDSA, like the elliptical curve stuff,

1:05:40 the run-of-the-mill stuff that we all rely on.

1:05:44 A non-state actor's incentive will first be to drain the obvious honeypots,

1:05:50 and then tell everybody that it's broken,

1:05:52 so that then everything goes to all the prices go to zero,

1:05:54 and then they have all the money, and then they can buy stuff.

1:05:57 That would be the sequence of events if you were a non-state actor.

1:06:00 So, yes, you're right, the banks get hacked.

1:06:02 Yes, you're right, all this other stuff goes kaput.

1:06:06 But, I think you first go and you exploit the obvious places,

1:06:10 and I think crypto is the most obvious

1:06:11 honeypot in a world where you can defeat encryption.

1:06:15 Now, in fairness the crypto community, this was much,

1:06:19 much earlier, had to deal with this.

1:06:20 They had to migrate from different encryption

1:06:23 schemes in the early parts of Bitcoin.

1:06:25 And they were able to self-organize.

1:06:27 The difficulty here is you're talking about a big technological lift.

1:06:30 You're talking about all the wallets being re-architected.

1:06:33 You're talking about all the transactional flows, all the processing nodes.

1:06:36 These are complicated things that need to happen.

1:06:40 And I would just tell the crypto community,

1:06:42 you have 5 to 7 years to get your in order.

1:06:45 That's it.

1:06:45 Freeberg.

1:06:47 Quantum computing, just generally speaking,

1:06:49 you feel it's going to have a major impact in the short term?

1:06:53 Do you think it's actually going to become viable in the mid term?

1:06:58 Where where Where do you think about it?

1:06:59 Cuz it's always been 10 years out, but it feels like we're making some progress.

1:07:04 Yeah, there's a lot that's changed.

1:07:05 I mean, so the the primary mechanism of modern

1:07:09 encryption standards relates to factoring primes of a an integer.

1:07:15 Discovering the prime factors of an integer would

1:07:18 give you the ability to theoretically crack encryption.

1:07:22 There was an algorithm that was theorized by a guy named Peter Shor.

1:07:26 I think I talked about this in a prior

1:07:27 episode back in 1994 called Shor's algorithm.

1:07:30 Today, it's kind of the commonly well-known model for how you could do this.

1:07:34 And it's a You could watch a YouTube video on it.

1:07:36 There's some YouTube videos that explain it pretty clearly.

1:07:39 Takes a bit of time to understand it.

1:07:41 And then, a couple years ago, I think in 2023,

1:07:44 there was another computer scientist named Oded Regev

1:07:49 from NYU who published another paper that showed a faster,

1:07:54 different approach to Shor's algorithm.

1:07:55 It was an improvement on Shor's algorithm that basically reduced

1:07:59 the number of quantum operations required

1:08:02 to factor a large integer significantly.

1:08:05 So, there's kind of Yeah, we

1:08:06 Sorry, we went from 28 million of those operations down to 500,000.

1:08:11 Yeah, and so, there's this a lot of work going on right now,

1:08:13 even before we have industrial scale quantum computers,

1:08:19 a lot of work going on in quantum

1:08:20 computing theory and building models and algorithms.

1:08:24 And a lot of this is rooted in in pure mathematics and statistics and whatnot.

1:08:27 That work is making progress in building

1:08:30 better algorithms even before the compute comes online.

1:08:33 And then, there's the separate set of things that you can track,

1:08:36 but you know, the market, if you want to trust the market,

1:08:39 is betting that we are within spitting distance

1:08:43 of quantum computers reaching the industrial scale at this moment.

1:08:46 So, those two things intersect at some moment in the near

1:08:49 term where you have algorithms that are low demand,

1:08:53 low latency, that can crack modern encryption standards, and then,

1:08:57 the computing comes online, and someone is going to execute.

1:09:02 The The real thing is what do you do about it?

1:09:04 There's a whole bunch of research that's been going

1:09:06 on for 20 plus years on quantum algorithms quantum encryption standards.

1:09:11 And so the to Chamath's point, these things exist.

1:09:15 It's just a heavy lift.

1:09:16 And so there's going to be this heavy lift.

1:09:18 Probably, you know, pretty good business to be made

1:09:21 in the next couple of years in uh all of the changes

1:09:24 are going to need to happen across all encryption standards across

1:09:26 the whole internet across how we do communications and so on.

1:09:30 In a crazy way freeburg crypto's in the same place as all these software socks.

1:09:33 Meaning if AGI and ASI are real,

1:09:36 these software companies are not what we thought they were.

1:09:39 Yeah.

1:09:40 If quantum is real, a bunch of these crypto

1:09:42 projects are not what we thought they were.

1:09:44 And so you can't have both guys.

1:09:46 You got to choose.

1:09:48 Mhm.

1:09:49 [clears throat] Pick one.

1:09:50 Yeah.

1:09:51 All right everybody.

1:09:52 This has been Oh hey we listen um you know I have an incredible EA.

1:09:57 Executive assistant.

1:10:00 It's a really been like, you know,

1:10:01 everybody talks about like agents agents agents agents.

1:10:04 And this was the pre-agent agent.

1:10:07 Mhm.

1:10:08 You know, my my EAs averaged around 188 to 200k a year.

1:10:15 And then People are right now their heads are exploding in middle America.

1:10:18 Let's tell the truth.

1:10:19 I was paying 188 to 200,000 dollars a year.

1:10:21 They were wonderful, okay?

1:10:22 Right.

1:10:24 And then I Jason was like try this try this thing called Athena.

1:10:27 Athena Athena.

1:10:28 I'm like what is it?

1:10:29 So I called the guys and they're

1:10:30 like yeah we have these really well-trained folks.

1:10:33 They're like geniuses that work in the Philippines.

1:10:36 It's 3,000 a month and we're building all this tooling.

1:10:40 And so as all these agents get better and all these AIs get better,

1:10:42 they'll get the advantage of that.

1:10:43 I said, "Okay, I'll give it a try."

1:10:46 This is the first time I've had a male assistant.

1:10:48 His name is Lei.

1:10:50 Lei's fabulous.

1:10:50 He's a math grad math and computer science in the Philippines, okay?

1:10:55 And he's excellent.

1:10:57 I love Lei too.

1:10:59 Uh somebody just put it in the chat.

1:11:00 I love Lei.

1:11:00 From Nick.

1:11:01 Oh, yeah, Nick.

1:11:01 Nick, you love Lei.

1:11:02 Coming to NBC this fall.

1:11:03 These guys are incredible.

1:11:05 They do everything for me.

1:11:07 It's like the most incredible hack and arbitrage I've ever seen.

1:11:11 Then now then I can direct a bonus to Lei at the end of the year,

1:11:14 which is great because then it allows me to feel like I'm giving him really,

1:11:19 you know, good support.

1:11:20 He works my hours from the Philippines.

1:11:23 Have not looked back.

1:11:25 Go, Athena.

1:11:26 Yeah, that's great.

1:11:27 I I I use it as well.

1:11:28 I was the first investor in it.

1:11:30 You're the first You're the first How many Athenas you have?

1:11:32 One or two?

1:11:33 I have one.

1:11:34 two for a long time.

1:11:35 second one.

1:11:36 And uh then that person moved on.

1:11:39 You split it between like work and personal or no?

1:11:41 Yeah, it's work and personal.

1:11:43 As an example, like there's an incredible bakery where I live,

1:11:48 uh like out in Dripping Springs, uh called Abby Jane Bakery.

1:11:51 They don't take orders.

1:11:52 But every Thursday, uh my Athena assistant calls at 8:00 a.m.,

1:11:57 asks them what's on the menu cuz they change the menu every week.

1:11:59 [laughter] And then they send me the menu, I order the bakeries,

1:12:05 and then he calls an Uber courier to pick it up

1:12:07 and drop it off cuz they're not on DoorDash or UberEats.

1:12:09 Just a stupid example of something that made

1:12:11 our lives incredible to have the best

1:12:13 bakery in all of Austin in the house every weekend for the girls and everything.

1:12:17 And um Everyday problems.

1:12:20 Yeah.

1:12:20 Everyday problems.

1:12:21 Anyway, it's it's a silly example, but I was having to go make that run and I

1:12:25 did it every like fourth or fifth week as a treat.

1:12:28 Now it's every week.

1:12:29 So you just look at what you're doing.

1:12:31 The other thing we're doing is they've been able to We we

1:12:35 had Americans who were researchers sorting

1:12:38 through the inbound applications from founders.

1:12:41 We were able to put an Athena assistant on that and then

1:12:43 define it and then we they're learning how to use Open Law.

1:12:46 So the Athena Open Law merger is kind of happening in real time.

1:12:50 Yeah, no, I have I have doing a bunch

1:12:52 of advanced tasks that I typically wouldn't give to my EA.

1:12:56 And then he also deals with sort of this the more practical day-to-day tasks,

1:12:59 scheduling, all that stuff.

1:13:00 Anyways, it's been it's been an incredible eye-opening

1:13:03 thing because it sets a very good example where,

1:13:06 you know, you can be cost-effective and still get your work done.

1:13:10 Um and it was really bothering me actually because like the the amount

1:13:14 of cost inflation for that role because I don't think I've ever needed an EA.

1:13:18 I'll just be honest, I'm going to put it out there.

1:13:20 I think I've always needed an AA.

1:13:22 And I would title them differently and sometimes I would call you know,

1:13:26 the I I mean I've said this before but like you know,

1:13:28 even like roles like chief of staff, they just don't make sense.

1:13:30 Like the chief of staff should be the second most powerful person

1:13:33 in the world because they work for the president of the United States.

1:13:35 Yeah.

1:13:36 Everybody else should not have a chief of staff, in my opinion, okay?

1:13:40 It's um it's a major unlock and the problem

1:13:42 is we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes

1:13:45 and it's just people don't want to take

1:13:46 the EA or the administrative assistant position in America.

1:13:49 They just don't.

1:13:50 There's they want to do something higher up

1:13:53 the stack but the people in the Philippines, you know, they do want that job.

1:13:56 Lay's crushing.

1:13:57 I love Lay.

1:13:58 Uh RJ's my guy and uh yeah, first time got a guy, too?

1:14:02 I got a guy, too, and he is also very technical.

1:14:05 Uh so anyway, shout out to Athena.

1:14:07 Uh shout out to Athena.

1:14:08 Thank you, guys.

1:14:08 Thank you.

1:14:08 Thank you, Athena.

1:14:09 Awesome.

1:14:09 Yeah.

1:14:10 Friedberg, yeah, I know you're making great progress.

1:14:12 You showed me some pictures of potatoes from Ohalo.

1:14:16 Um how's that going?

1:14:18 Shipping seed this week to farmers all over North America.

1:14:21 So, we're getting going.

1:14:22 Are you sending seed to our friend Roger the Dirt Farmer?

1:14:25 He is.

1:14:26 His son, yeah.

1:14:26 He's going to Oh, that's so great.

1:14:28 And [snorts] Roger?

1:14:29 Mhm.

1:14:29 Yeah, I love it.

1:14:31 Roger the Dirt Farmer is a phenomenal poker player.

1:14:33 He and Keating often play in the game together.

1:14:35 Uh-huh.

1:14:36 How'd they do a couple weeks ago?

1:14:37 They came up.

1:14:38 They came and visited me the next day.

1:14:39 Both of those two goofballs ran over the game.

1:14:41 It's so frustrating.

1:14:42 It's frustrating playing with Keating.

1:14:44 Roger is much more of a tag, you know, a tight aggressive player.

1:14:48 So, it's no picnic.

1:14:49 There's no free lunch when both of those two guys are in the game.

1:14:52 And then on top of that, you know,

1:14:53 Helmuth Koon, Robo it's like it's not a winning game.

1:14:57 It's murder's row.

1:14:58 I got I made a late trip to the valley.

1:15:00 I'm like, "Hey Chamath, Oh, Jesus.

1:15:02 town.

1:15:02 I get to play." Chamath's like, "Uh I got some bad news for you.

1:15:05 You're no longer [laughter] on the list and I filled the game up plus two.

1:15:10 So, I squeak into the game.

1:15:13 I run up a quick 20 25 times skis and then Helmuth passive aggressive

1:15:18 Helmuth who who cannot handle the fact that I'm more famous than him now.

1:15:22 It's just totally tweaked him that Chamath and I

1:15:25 and you Reeboks are so much more famous than him.

1:15:28 It's broken his brain.

1:15:29 He's like, "Uh okay, a car dealer?

1:15:33 Car dealer, you're supposed to have a seat and Jake

1:15:35 out doesn't." And I've literally just doubled up at that point.

1:15:38 Chamath's like, "Okay, I guess you can book the win, Jake out, cuz you know,

1:15:42 it's like poor taste to double up and then leave." How much you doing?

1:15:44 40 50k?

1:15:46 It was only like 25 times.

1:15:47 It was It's like a used Model Y.

1:15:49 Yeah, yeah.

1:15:50 Hey Chamath, uh we're here at the end of the show.

1:15:53 I just wanted to make sure people

1:15:54 know that the liquidity event that we're hosting,

1:15:57 uh you can go to allin.com/events has sold out and we've started a wait list.

1:16:02 So, this is the quickest we've ever sold out.

1:16:04 I asked Kimbra and Lisa to try to find another 100 seats.

1:16:08 I think there's like 7.7 trillion dollars of money that want to attend.

1:16:15 We can't get everybody in, so we're trying to get everybody together.

1:16:19 We announced Bill Ackman and Andre Carpathy last week.

1:16:21 Incredible.

1:16:22 We're going to do an I Russell like pitch competition.

1:16:24 There's like four whiz-bang hot fund managers.

1:16:30 is for folks who don't know, yeah?

1:16:31 I know a bunch of these guys,

1:16:32 but four of them in particular are running super hot right now.

1:16:35 Like taken 50 million, run it up to a billion to three billion.

1:16:40 They're just ripping.

1:16:41 And, uh uh they're going to go on stage

1:16:44 and they're going to give us their best ideas pitch.

1:16:46 And, the three of us plus I think as many

1:16:48 of the guests that can do it will vote.

1:16:52 And then, maybe we can even publish these ideas

1:16:54 so that folks can can try to follow them.

1:16:57 They can vet them, right?

1:16:58 It's like a really brave thing to do to get on stage and say,

1:17:01 "Hey, I'm making this bet." Like, that's like I did it four times.

1:17:04 Yeah.

1:17:04 I mean, I just spanked it, but hopefully these guys can do the same thing.

1:17:08 But, listen.

1:17:09 We have a natural resources pitch.

1:17:10 We have something in health care.

1:17:12 We have something in tech.

1:17:13 We have something in genius.

1:17:14 It's great.

1:17:15 It's like all the big categories, right?

1:17:16 Something in crypto.

1:17:17 So, it's you're going to get every shade of every whippy big alpha market.

1:17:25 By the way, you created a bit of a storm

1:17:27 on the interwebs with your Tao mention in the uh Jensen interview.

1:17:32 I just asked Jensen a question.

1:17:33 I'm not long Tao.

1:17:34 He redirected it to something, which is folding at home,

1:17:37 which is I think if you don't know it, you should look it up,

1:17:39 but it's how you can allocate compute to helping solve health problems.

1:17:42 The point is these open source projects

1:17:44 or these distributed compute projects are the future.

1:17:48 The real question is what is the architecture and the incentives?

1:17:50 None of us knows that.

1:17:52 Yeah.

1:17:52 But, man, I think it's so important.

1:17:53 And then, all these goons went crazy.

1:17:56 went crazy.

1:17:58 Well, I mean, the reason is because I did place a bet

1:18:01 on Tao uh like a couple of weeks ago I went public with, "Hey,

1:18:04 yeah, I've got a small bet here because

1:18:05 I think these subnets are fascinating in distributed computing."

1:18:09 Your Tao maxing.

1:18:10 I mean, it's like I'm I might be five or six hundred thousand dollars.

1:18:13 A tiny bet.

1:18:14 Your syndicate maxing.

1:18:15 No, I did it myself.

1:18:16 I did it myself.

1:18:17 I made a small bet on Tao because I watched exactly This is syndicate maxing.

1:18:22 I'm it's not I'm not [clears throat] maxing here.

1:18:25 But, I am certainly not doing any introspection.

1:18:28 I am just doing deals on great founders and companies.

1:18:31 Andreesen has been rage tweeting about this guy that he watches A genius.

1:18:36 who posts these videos about maxing?

1:18:39 Yes.

1:18:39 I watched the videos.

1:18:41 It's incredible.

1:18:42 This guy is Fantastic.

1:18:43 What is the guy's name?

1:18:43 I don't know what the guy's name is.

1:18:44 but he goes on his back deck.

1:18:46 He's got a Weber grill.

1:18:47 Smoking a cigar, smoking a cigar, and he says, "Listen,

1:18:49 it doesn't matter." That may be the most incredible contribution of your life.

1:18:54 That's the most incredible contribution and reason may be

1:18:56 making to culture and society in America, not the browser.

1:18:59 That he found this guy.

1:19:00 I encourage you, Nick, find the video post the links.

1:19:04 This guy is incredible.

1:19:06 Because you're overthinking it, folks.

1:19:08 Just enjoy your life and work hard and don't

1:19:12 think it through because look what happened to Freeberg.

1:19:15 He started ruminating.

1:19:17 Love you, boys.

1:19:18 Don't ruminate.

1:19:18 Just go sell software and go make better potatoes Freeberg.

1:19:22 No more ruminating and therapy for you, Freeberg.

1:19:25 Come on the program anytime, Mark and Jason.

1:19:27 They'll max with us here on the All-In pod.

1:19:30 Love you, boys.

1:19:30 Bye-bye.

1:19:34 [music] Rain Man, David Sacks.

1:19:40 And [music] I said, "We open sourced this to the fans

1:19:42 and they've just gone crazy with it." Love you, guys.

1:19:44 I swing a king kong.

1:19:48 [music] Besties are back.

1:19:55 That is my dog taking a dump in your driveway, Sacks.

1:20:03 We should all [music] just get a room and just

1:20:04 have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless.

1:20:07 It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

1:20:12 [music] [laughter] We need to get merch.

1:20:17 Besties are back.

1:20:21 [music] [music]