OpenAI's Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani's First Tax, Swalwell Out

Okay, fair enough. But what I will tell you is, it's a dog whistle. Crazy people, and this thing's been seen by 30, 40, 50 million people now. It's a dog whistle to say, that's the next UnitedHealthcare CEO. And in the week that a fire, a Molotov cocktail and a bullet gets shot into Sam Altman's house, it's deadly serious. And if you reverse it, I always reverse it. what if a republican sat outside of bernie sanders second or third home and said we should this is his pia de terre this is his summer home we should add you know taxes to it and i'm sure you could look up bernie sanders home pretty easily so just before you point at people's homes and say this is the villain be careful folks because then if something does happen to that person like you know what happened to sam whitman this week and you feel however you want about him but nobody deserves to have their house fire bombed or shot at period full stop i just think that it's gonna kill the demand for you know maybe people already have a home in new york like ken griffin they probably are just gonna suck it up and pay the tax and keep whatever they have but if you were a person who was thinking about buying a piada tear in new york there's no way you would do it

now yeah because you don't know what the tax rate is going to be and it's going to keep going up After a decade with interest and... inflation, you've effectively almost doubled the price of your unit. So if you're going to buy a $10 million unit, you're probably then looking at a $20 million purchase price just to break even after about 10 or 11 years. That's crazy. The math doesn't work. And what is the downstream effect of these individuals not coming to New York, going to a Knicks game? Nothing. Going to a restaurant? No, they spend money. They spend money in New York. They have their birthday party in New York. They do all kinds of things. I'm not a big fan of the Pieta Terra culture. I own one house. I don't like this whole multiple houses, you flitter flattering everywhere. It ruined London because when, when you look at London, where do you vacation? Shamath, where do you vacation?

I go to a hotel. Okay. So my point is this, that I think the way that it works is it's not just pied-à-terre. If you, if you own a home that you fully rent out, but that is not the primary residence of the person who is renting it. It's also a problem. So this is any, even like a, like a, you know, you had a two week rental or a one week rental or a 30 day rental, or even a five year rental. And it was somebody else's second home. The owner still gets, gets hit. So the rental, the sort of rentals of like folks who want to come to that city or who don't want to own in that city. But it's a second place.

The second place thing goes away. So maybe this is just good for hotels. I think it's good for hotels. But if you look at London, it's probably the best example where there was a lot of people who used London as a place to store assets. Real estate became the primary way in which they would do that. It hollowed out parts of London where it's not as if it was unlivable. It's just that it was unlived. Nobody was there. you drive around chelsea you drive around certain parts of london and it was like a ghost town on like a thursday night or a friday night that is an issue it's the land banking it's like your bitcoin is hollowing out a neighborhood and there is something there but you know what the whole uh housing thing is complete cap and utter bullshit because if you move to a place like austin where you are in nevada or florida you see what happens when you allow people to build units in austin three years in a row rents and housing prices have gone down while net migration has gone up but that's been good right for austin you guys would say that's incredible yeah amazing austin has like roughly doubles the city over the past decade and yet the rent for you know whatever one or two bedroom apartments gone down that's incredible so in other words if you let

people build to satisfy the demand you won't have this problem and then who's stopping the building it's democratic cities it's nimby people and then in a republican town they're actually building units for an affordability so you have one group saying they care about affordability and they're doing nothing about it and they're stopping it and in another place they're like we're just gonna let you build because it's your right to build because it's your land that's the approach in texas it's your land you have the right to develop it go by the way the high end of the market in london has basically turned over and collapsed sacks to your point They introduced the stamp tax, which I think is equivalent to this tax that the New York City mayor is proposing.

And if you look at London as a guide, the real estate market just bid it at the high end. I don't think that's going to be good for that city or even the UK as a whole. There's a handful of cities where people do what you say, which is kind of park money there. The reason why they do that is because they believe that that city, A, has the rule of law, and B, is a unique, world-class city that's going to keep appreciating. and if you have new management that doesn't really believe in the rule of law that basically keeps imposing all these arbitrary taxes that money is going to flee and find other kinds of investments people aren't going to park their money there that has to be a bad thing for the city it's like you know who cares if the top floor of that building where ken griffin lives is owned by one guy who isn't there that much. It's not going to affect the city that much. But having all these billionaires from all over the world decide to park money in that American city has to be good for the US, just like it's good for the UK. And if you give that up, then again, the money will just go somewhere else. Well, the other thing is they're already paying taxes on the property. And because they're not there very often, they're not using

city services. So they're paying taxes on the property. They're not using city services. They're profitable to the city. Yeah. Think about a developer who's underwriting some new project. The fact that a whale like Ken Griffin is willing to overpay in the sense of price per foot for that top floor might make that whole project pencil. And this is what contributes to the vitality of New York is there's constantly development going on there's constantly cranes and so you take out that part of the market that in effect was price insensitive and was subsidizing all these projects and i think development's going to dry up to a large degree he's paying he must be paying three or four million in taxes every year and getting no services to your point travis good point like all profit for the london also did something else which is that they essentially crippled what's called non-dom status, which is the big tax arb if you're moving or parking assets in London. And to your point, Sax, what did all the rich people do? They just redirected themselves to Zurich, to Lugano, to Milan, and they took advantage of more hospitable tax policy in other places. Now, what the people in Britain would tell you, I actually met with the UK government

yesterday. They don't see a meaningfully enough measurable impact yet where they think it's a five alarm fire so the real question is is it more of a slow bleed and a slow melt and at some point it's just hollowed out and it's very hard to reverse because there's not going to be a cataclysmic acute moment where people say oh my god we need to reverse these policies it doesn't seem like that's in the offing you know la did something a little different but similar as they introduced that five percent mansion tax it's on like all the areas except for like beverly hills and san francisco has that too yeah san francisco got that too i think it's actually like 6% in San Francisco. Yeah, San Francisco, it's 6% over $25 million and it starts at $5 million. So there's a transfer tax, an excess transfer tax above $5 million properties that scales up above $25 million to an extra 6% on top of your brokerage commission. So when you sell a house in San Francisco, you're paying 13% now. Which is why you look at the transaction volume in the LA real estate market and it's just completely dried up. You know, people aren't doing the house flipping anymore like that kind of stuff because the transaction costs are too high

but it just shows i mean again this tax was imposed retroactively for example i had my house at sf and then they just take you know a couple of rooms of it and we talked about this on the show when it happened but my point is just your property is not safe in blue states and wealthy people who have a choice of where to park their money are going to increasingly realize that and they're not going to buy. I think real estate in blue states is dangerous because the political class thinks that they can take a chunk of it. And, you know, wealthy people are going to react to that and they're going to move their money elsewhere. All right, let's go to topic number one. OpenAI is apparently suffering from a bit of an identity crisis on Sunday. Open AI's chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, sent a four-page memo to employees. Obviously, it leaked immediately, probably the point of it. And she called out Anthropic. She said their $30 billion run rate is cap, inflated by $8 billion due to a revenue share and some accounting with AI model providers. Jamapi pointed that out in the last couple of weeks. Also, she said Anthropic story is built on, quote, fear restriction and the idea that a small group of elites should

concerned AI. Obviously, she's a fan of the pod. She also laid out OpenAI's pivoting, and she said they are going hard after business customers, and they want to win the agent platform layer. If you remember, they hired the architect of the open source project, OpenClaw. They didn't acquire OpenClaw. So Peter Steinberger is working at OpenAI. Cynical people said, hey, maybe they want his next set of innovations to go inside of OpenAI's products as opposed to the open source one. I kind of agree with that directionally. There's obviously Perplexity Computer is doing really well. They quadrupled their revenue. And I was over at XAI earlier this week with Elon, and I can tell you he's got some very cool stuff coming. And this new model, Spud, is coming from OpenAI. Here's your Polymarket 75% chance Spud is released next week. Additionally, and we'll go to the panel in just a second on tuesday two days after this memo came out obviously people write these memos to go directly to the press so they're obviously trying to undercut anthropics valuation and they feel that's a threat that's my take the ft cited anonymous open ai investors who are frustrated with the company's lack of focus here's the anonymous quote quote

you have chat chippity a 1 billion user business growing 50 to 100 a year what are you doing talking about enterprise and code it's a deeply unfocused company and we talked about this chat gpt's market share is going down as the number of users is going up because gemini and claude gaining significantly and meta just last week released their first proprietary model and apple doesn't have a product in market yet but they do have a lot of users so here's your gen ai website traffic. Let's start, Chamath, with you, your thoughts on OpenAI. Should they be pivoting straight into business developers and getting focused on that? Or should they stay focused on the consumer where they are the verb? As it relates to complex, long horizon coding tasks, what I can tell you from my team at 8090 is codex is better generally than anthropic. And And so what happens is from the more day-to-day work, I think it's more reliable to use the Claude ensemble of models.

But when you're dealing with something that's very tricky and very complicated and a little bit more long horizon, Codex is really functional and really good. So I think if you're looking at it through the lens of OpenAI, what they're probably saying is, hey, hold on a second. If we allocate our resources and just double down and crush consumer, that's probably three or four trillion of enterprise value. And then if we slowly refocus the company with the rest of the resources and double down on Codex and do something meaningful in enterprise, we can probably capture two or three trillion there.

and now all of a sudden, you can paint a picture for a $7, $8, $9 trillion market cap in the fullness of time, not tomorrow, obviously. But Codex is really good. And there's a business to be had in both. You have to separate the two businesses. You can't have a lot of overlap because there's too much context switching. You got to let the consumer team run. And then you

size. So Freeberg, when you look at this race between these two giants, maybe your thoughts on the flywheel as it relates, as Travis is pointing out, to advantages in compute reinforcement

reinforcement learning, and then also the ability to fundraise. One of the great things that Travis and the team did was, as they were pulling away, they just sucked all the oxygen out of the room by using capital as a weapon. So your thoughts, Dave, on this high-stakes game? Because there's also a point at which, and I'll just end on this, there's a point at which you could run off the cliff. You raise so much money, and you deploy it so fast, and the revenue doesn't catch up to it, and then you go public, and the markets don't believe the story. So your thoughts, i don't know the financials of the two companies well enough obviously sam has no problem raising money the guy didn't he just closed like 150 billion dollar round or something 20 122 billion 122 billion largest round ever raised in any market i think private or public yeah probably yeah i mean that's crazy that doesn't seem to be an issue what i've noticed is just the the pace of innovation at anthropic is from my experience unprecedented i mean their release cadence is extraordinary. They've basically supplanted OpenClaw already with this release they did a few days ago. And then today, the new Opus model got dropped. So there's something about

the momentum, not in necessarily just in user growth, but in how they're operating this business that just seems to be head and shoulders above everyone else in the cadence of upgrades. If I look back six months ago, I think we were pretty heavy on Cursor and Gemini. And now I I think we're probably 90% anthropic in just the last six months at my organization. There's something very powerful about the flywheel they have going on. Yeah, but here's where I go. Just real quick, Dave, is mad respect on a $120 or $130 billion raise. I mean, this is obviously next level. But you can use capital and investment to acquire scale and network effects associated with it.

But if somebody is getting that scale with revenue and let's call it contribution margin, contribution profit, efficiency will outstrip subsidy. And you can't just keep raising $100 billion things forever. The train will stop. And if Anthropic is funding theirs through revenue and other folks are funding it through investment, that's a short-term solve. But the long run is whoever is scaling their actual usage and system and ultimately with contribution profit that then soaks up the need for investment. That's a very scary machine if you're competing against it. which is exactly, Sachs, what the legacy MAG-7 are doing.

You have massive profits from Meta's core business, Google's core business that are being redeployed into infrastructure, and even Tesla, which has a lot of profits, and SpaceX, which has a lot of cash on hand, and they're building out Colossus and other assets, including Elon is working on building a fab, as folks have been talking about. So, Saks, is there a chance for the legacy companies, the Mag7s, to compete in this? Or are we looking at OpenAI and Anthropic are one and two, and then everybody else can fight for third place and the bronze, as it were? Well, I think Google's clearly in the mix.

I mean, DeepMind has an outstanding team. And I think Elon's still in the mix with XAI. And then you've got Meta also has the resources. and they seem to be further behind, but they're going to compete. Look, let me just go back to the central premise here. I agree that there's some valid criticism that OpenAI has been unfocused and should be moving forward more focused in what they do. I have no idea, for example, what they're doing buying a podcast. That's not us. So I don't know what that was about. But if you were going to buy a tech podcast for a few hundred million dollars, I mean, we're here.

We're here. We're here. Dario, reach out. Small potatoes for you guys, those small potatoes. They couldn't afford you. They can't afford you guys. They thought we were too expensive. Little did they know. We would have sold out. Punch the ticket, Dario.

I think we have to remember, if you keep these agents on task, and they're guard railed properly, this stuff is a force multiplier. The problem is nobody knows how to do this really well yet. Nobody has built real products of scale, largely using agents yet. Nobody knows how to give an example of how an org structure should be redefined. Nobody knows how to budget properly. We have the CTO of Uber say, I give up. I've hit my token budget. The problems I see it are twofold. The first is just to build on Sax's point, all of these frontier labs have a very serious issue, which is both OpenAI and Anthropic are growing so fast that they're at a point now where they need their own infrastructure. It's kind of like when you first start building any kind of company, you're just much easier renting capacity from the hyperscalers.

And it's a dependency. Yeah. but then it becomes a dependency exactly and now when you're so big it's actually strategic a huge mistake to not have your own compute supply why because if you look at who's leading the frontier labs are leading and sacks to your point you mentioned this on x you're like there was all this dumerism but maybe it was tied to compute capacity because when bedrock opened up more capacity for anthropic all the dumerism went away you're left wondering like is it really tied to just the fact that they were just trying to throttle usage so if you're a frontier lab you don't want to have to go through Amazon and GCP and Azure and tin cup for access and capacity, what you'd much rather have is go straight to your customer. On the other side, if you're Gemini or Microsoft or meta, and you have all this compute, because I saw a stat this week, the hyperscalers control 60% of all the compute. So the game theory there is if you kneecap the frontier labs, it'll give you some chance to catch up. And it gives you time to catch up, because no matter what the demand is on the upside you remember you guys remember like in social networking when friendster was the cat's meow yeah that's me out remember what the biggest

problem friendster was slow as a dog yes yes and what happened then myspace came in and took all the share then we came in facebook and we took all their share so there is a way where you can handicap and kneecap these companies by throttling compute access to them so a they are forced to now go and get in the game which is weird because look open ai has tried to displace some of the stargate spend i don't see any path except they're gonna have to do it themselves and anthropic will have to do it themselves but then separately the other problem is when you change the subscription model in enterprise and you say hey we're not going to subsidize any more tokens what's going going to happen is all these token budgets are going to go crazy. And what Freebrook said is going to happen where he's like, Hey, guys, why are you spending all this money? What are you making? And you inspect the code and you're like, what is this slop? And you're not going to add 3040 50% OPEX to produce nothing. So I think that that's an open question. And that question will become more amplified over the next year as they push the cost off of them. So as Travis said, no more subsidy from the capital. You have to grow into it, but you're not going to support

negative gross margins. So you're going to pass through the token costs. So I think it's a very dynamic moment right now for these. And if you look at the ranking of these clusters and who has the most, right now, people have forgotten about Colossus, which Elon's been building. He's expanding to 555,000 GPUs across three buildings, $18 billion in investment. And then if you look at prometheus met as planned 2026 that's 150 000 gpus so this is uh well elon just announced a deal he announced a deal this morning with cursor so elon's elon's renting a bunch of capacity so he's now getting effectively into the data center business he's going to be a hyperscale so he's he's going to use as much as he can for xai and whatever's left over he'll give to well in this case he's giving to cursor to train their model he could you're saying is you might as well over build capacity because that way your own models will be in a privileged position and you can sell the rest to your competitors. But Chamath, to your point about the thing I was saying on X, I actually, I think I was retweeting Marc Andreessen, who pointed out that one of the reasons why Anthropic might've wanted to hold back Mythos is they simply didn't have the compute

to serve it. The model was huge and very expensive to serve, something like maybe even 10 or 20 times the token cost of, say, Opus, they knew Opus 4.7 was coming out, right? So they hold it back knowing that they don't have the compute to serve it anyway. And they save their compute for the next iteration of Opus. And then by holding it back, they create this impression of scarcity and altruism. And it turns into this gigantic marketing event for their product because everyone in the government's like, oh, wow, they're holding it back because it's so amazing. Now look, I think it may have been genuinely altruistic as well in the sense that Mythos does reveal coding vulnerabilities that people didn't know about before. And it does make sense to give time to companies with large code bases to patch these dormant bugs and vulnerabilities. But it's looking more and more like Anthropic could not have offered that model commercially anyway, because it was just too big and expensive and they need to create space for opus 4.7 so it's an interesting theory on what actually happened there all right guys before we go to our next story some breaking news here uh here's your polymarket gentlemen i don't this is i don't know if you're placing some insider

bets here uh friedberg but looks like the all-in podcast uh anthropic now 37 chance of buying the all-in podcast this is live what time from polymarket yeah this is by the end of the year by end of the year okay by end of the year so it's this isn't real is it yeah absolutely they've been people have been trading on this this is heavily traded it can't be this is not 92 million dollars of line this is the number three largest there's no way this is real dude there's no way it's breaking news guys i don't i don't control the news flow this is jacal slop this is no way this is real that's anybody can create a prediction market i guess hey what's the what's the volume with that thing. 92 million. It's not real.

Is there only two dollars behind it? There's no way that's real, guys. Come on. Guys, it's all good. Guys, time to upgrade the planes. I just... Hey, guys, I don't need the PC24. I'll take somebody's G650. Whoever's got a G650, go up to the 800. It's going to be trickle-down to J-Cal. Let's do it. I'm giving up my United Platinum status. Trickle-down economics. Trickle-down avionics. All right, listen. Story number two. Trickle-down. this is pretty good okay number two all birds speaking of data centers all birds just pivoted from ugly sneakers to scratchy odd to ai and the stock has ripped talking about peak bubble behavior podcasts getting bought by frontier models and sneaker companies uh pivoting to data centers all birds as you know is the ugliest sneakers on the planet and uh this became a massive delusion in our industry that this company was worth billions of dollars they went public in 2021 this might be one of the peak zerk moments raised 350 million dollars in their ipo sacks were you an investor in this thing all birds all birds back in no no no you're thinking about the scooter company so that's right that's right Don't remind me of the investments that didn't work, but no.

Bird was crazy. This reminds me of the late 90s, where all you had to do was change your name to whatever.com. Yeah. Yes. And you get a huge pop in your valuation. And you could spin it out. Barnesandnobles.com became then Barnes and Nobles. And so the stock crashed and never looked back. There's your stock chart. They sold off all their brand assets for $39 million, about 10% of what they raised. in the IPO. Congratulations to whoever owns those ugly ass sneakers. Why were they worth 4 billion? They sold sneakers? Collective delusion. Collective delusion. People in Silicon Valley liked them and they just thought it was the next Nike. Tulips. It was tulips. Well, I think that was an era in Silicon Valley where people rewarded rapid growth without really looking at gross margins or cost of goods sold. People didn't really make the distinction between software and everything else, right?

Right. Software, you never really had to worry about COGS or gross margin because the incremental cost of serving a customer with software is like almost zero. So people in Silicon Valley weren't really trained to look at gross margin. And there was this rash of physical world companies that all of a sudden started getting crazy valuations. Travis, quite frankly, you might. The success of Uber might have ushered in this era of these physical world companies that started getting valued like software companies, even though obviously they didn't deserve it. David, thank you so much for that shout.

new bird ai they bought eight h100s i think with 50 million dollars in a convertible note and the stock has gone up eight stop eight really no it's not it's a joke obviously the stock's now at 14 dollars a share it's up 450 in the last week shout out to wall street bets for staying can i say

more than the shorts can stay solomon can i say something serious yes please there are a handful of transactions that have happened in the last few days, that if you look far away, are head scratchers. So this is one. I don't know if you guys saw recently, but Jane Street did a billion dollar investment in essentially a new Neoscaler, and then also did a $6 billion compute deal with them. That was like a little interesting. So what would I like to say about this? I think the thing that the capital markets are getting right is that we are massively compute-

To David's point, they'll probably ban data centers in 30 states. Data centers can output and input at the speed of light, so they can be anywhere. I mean, you know, the reason you put data centers in different states is cheap power, low latency. So maybe you get a couple of milliseconds of latency so the data centers can go anywhere so as soon as all the states start banning the data centers the data centers will just go to space to iceland to texas to wherever and then and then the data set and then everyone will be forced to move on travis they'll basically find the next target for populism which will be something else the pierre the data center what's You know, this is this is part of what's going on right now, private where we've got this kind of level of debt from the I always bring it back to this because I do think this is that the root cause of populism is the fact that the government promised so much is so inefficient.

And as a result, it's destroyed the value of the dollar, not given anyone anything that they thought they were getting. And we do have the ratepayer pledge, Sachs, to address the energy issue. That was a big win, I think. And you worked on that, I believe. Yeah. But hold on. Can I just say something? i think that ratepayer pledge is important it doesn't change the business model of the utility meaning what the utility is allowed to do is every year build the budget and the way that they decide how to charge you is that they are allowed to make investments right and then they're allowed to earn 10 roughly on the amount of investment that they make what do you think their incentive is. Their incentive is to find ways to keep investing and upgrading the infrastructure. So I suspect what you'll see is independent of what the data centers do on site, which I think is smart and good, and I'm glad you guys did that. It doesn't slow down the actual fundamental business model of the utility because those are local monopoly licenses that are granted at the state and county level. And so when you go inside and you look at those utilities, what they're allowed to do is say well i'm going to bury the lines underground because there's a

wildfire threat that's going to cost 10 billion and they present that the puc has to say yes and they're allowed to make 10 on 10 billion so the business model of the utility has to be looked at because it is independent of all of these other things and they have an incentive like insurance companies to just walk prices up over time it's true that's why i think behind the meter so so important there for sure but look i mean this idea that that data centers don't create jobs is wrong. I mean, it's been a huge boon for blue-collar jobs and the construction industry. While they're building the data center. Yeah, but that construction could be a wave that goes on for a decade or two decades. I mean, the CapEx is not going down. It's increasing. Listen to, for example, what Jensen says about his projections. I mean, it's not like the CapEx is a one-year thing. We're seeing tens of thousands of new construction jobs being created and 25 to 30% higher wages for electricians, carpenters, the guys who hang drywall or pour concrete, create roads, install equipment. I mean, these are blue-collar jobs, and it's creating, again, not just new jobs, but also wage increases. It's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. I think the

issues... It's not a bad thing, but it's not the same as a fab where the jobs are permanent and they're there. We can debate it all we want. There's about 100 data centers right now that are being contested. The data is for every 100 that are contested, about 40 get canceled. That number is increasing for this year. It's more than doubled already from what the number was last year. And the total economic value of those 100 data centers right now is about $162 billion. Jason, the thing is, is that there are permanent jobs, because what where's the energy that's powering that? Where's the semiconductors? It's powering that, you know, there's a lot.

And it's a cell phone in many ways. If you think about who are the top two spokespersons for our industry and what they're communicating to Americans versus, say, how the Chinese view AI, which is incredibly positive. We've got Dario, who says it's the end of days. Everything's going to be hacked. All your files are going to be hacked. All your accounts are going to be hacked. And then on the other side, everybody's losing their job. That's our top spokesperson in Dario Adanthropic. The other top spokesperson just had a 70,000-word piece written about him where Ronan Farrow said, I had a dozen people tell me, unprompted, Sam Altman's a sociopath.

Those are the top two spokespeople. Those people cannot be the spokespeople for this industry. And this industry has got to get focused on fixing the big three. Healthcare is going to be dramatically improved by AI. Housing could be dramatically improved. I'm not sure who's working on that. And obviously, education, the cost of education. We need somebody out there, a Michael Dell, you know, Jensen, Elon, just explaining how world positive this could be. Because right now, AI is as popular as is less popular than ICE, the Democrats, and the government of Iran. Joe Limon at Alpha School. On the education side, I think you just have to look at Alpha School.

It's working. All right. So that's your story, uh chamath that's the story of all birds the most overvalued startup but uh we're gonna play a little uh cue the music here we're gonna play a little game show for everybody this is the price uh david sacks is wrong yes this is the price is wrong the price of the startup travis is wrong and this is the game show where we guess which overvalued disaster are we talking about first Helling from Austin, Texas, an enforcer in the PayPal mafia. It's Mr. David Sacks. Welcome to the program, David Sacks. Are you ready to play The Price is Wrong? I'm ready to play. Let's do it.

You're ready to play. Okay. All right. Here we go. The Price is Wrong. This startup was once valued at over $13 billion. Their main business model, selling JPEGs for fake internet money. People lost their minds and started spending millions of dollars on monkey images. Play the thinking music please david sachs can you name that startup once billion 13 billion for is it is that like the board apes thing okay you're closing in remember form it in the name of the question i know i know i know it's selling jpegs for fake internet money me me me pick me pick me oh wait people you'll get your chance chamif oh i think i know what you're talking about okay all right let them off do it i can't remember they're so Ending millions of dollars.

Can I say it? Can I say it? Can I say it? Chamath, it's your turn to steal. Chamath with the steal. Open scene. Correct. 100 points for Chamath Palihapitiya. Okay, an amazing steal. An amazing steal. I had the board apes, but. Okay, here we go. He puts the dick in dictator, hailing from Palo Alto, California. It's your favorite door dasher. Okay, let's go. Chamath Palihapitiya. How long have you been door dashing there, Chamath? Nine years. Nine years. You like that? What do you like about that? Is it the interaction with the people? Is it the tips? is it's stealing a couple of French fries. What do you like about being a doordisher there?

I typically take four fries. I lick the burrito. Okay, licking burritos. Did he just say licking burritos? This is why we need robot delivery drivers. I mean, it's just- It's coming, okay. We don't want our French fries being licked. Let's get the music going here. This startup, once valued at 4 billion, allowed you to talk to other people on your mobile device during COVID and you could listen to mid-VC. Yes, yes, yes, I got it. it. I got it. It's called generic start advice. Can you name that overvalued startup? Oh, my God. It's called Clubhouse. Oh, my God. He's on a heater. That's 200 points for Jamal Poliapatiya.

Hey, that's a lot of door dashes. He's going to do very well here in the final round. That's an amazing memory. How soon we forget? I couldn't replace any of these names. Okay. Finally, streaming in from a potato field at an undisclosed location in Idaho. It's Dr. David Friedberg. You're in the potato sciences, correct? Mr. Freeburg. That's right. Potatoes. That's right. You like the potatoes. You have a favorite potato dish. Is it the scallops? What do you like to do with your potatoes mash? What is your name, mister? What is the host's name? What is your name, host? It is me, Jocular J-Cal. Let's go.

Here we go. Jocular J-Cal here at the helm. You like a certain type of potatoes there? Javicular? Javicular. Javicular. It's Javicular Calacanis. And what do you like there on the potatoes? What's your favorite there? You like a creamy mash? A little grotten, a little cheesy. You're liking the cheese. Okay, very good. Okay, David, this startup was once valued at $270 million. This is your favorite. I understand you're a vegan. They sold juice. These juice packages went into a juice machine. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. They were branded as the next iPhone, the iPhone of juice.

Can you name? Oh, I know it. I know it, I know it. This overvalued startup, David Friedberg. I know it, I know it. Pick me. You'll have a chance to feel it. Juice zero, juice zero. All right, that's 100 points. He's on the board. Wait, are you searching? It looks like he's searching. Did he search? Oh, my God. Are you on your device? He looks like he was on his device. Internet-free. Internet-free here. He's on his device. All right, folks. There you have it. A clear winner, Chamath Palihapitiya. Tell him what he's won. He's won a trip to Temptations 2 in Cabo. You're going directly to Temptations 2, an adult resort.

That's for you and two of your friends, okay? Enjoy Temptations 2, Chamath Palihapitiya. Two of your friends. What a fun game this is. You can bring your throuple. I think this is going to need to become a regular feature of the pod. Great game. Everyone forgets the unicorns that don't work. They just disappear into the ether. All right. All right. There you go. You won a pied-a-terre on a fishing trawler. You won a tax bill in New York. You got a pied-a-terre available to you as your first place winner, Chamath Palihapitiya, a door dasher from Palo Alto. all right listen uh there's been a lot of shenanigans going down in dc the most boring city in the world where apparently everybody's uh getting a little frisky after hours tmz launched a news bureau eric slowel is out of the governor's race there's a lot of dark stuff that's been released he is innocent until proven guilty but it's not looking good he also resigned from congress jaco and he resigned from congress as well and friedberg our investigative journalist now working as a stringer for tmz friedberg what have you learned? What's in Freyberg's DMs? I haven't learned anything.

Okay, you have an analysis then, maybe. My anecdote on this is back in December, when

who's controlling it who do you think like is there like a meeting is there like a a council the queen, Nancy Pelosi. Jesus Christ, it's so... I don't know if that's true. Well, not just her. I'll tell you my sense of it. My sense of it is that there are certain insiders, and he's not an insider. And those insiders are like the Katie Porters of the world. Katie Porter, I think, is who the Democratic establishment wants to be governor. She's an insider to National Democrats. She's an insider to California Democrats. And I think that she's the preferred candidate tom steyer she's a spousal abuser i don't know that katie porter is like this ultimate insider but i think there are look there are clearly insiders the democratic party is a machine that exists to siphon off as much money as possible from the public till to the interests that support the party and it's their gravy train and they're not going to let anyone stop that i don't know if it's just the damn second they're not going to let that gravy train stop for one second now the democratic party had a huge Thank you.

problem in this California governor's race, which is that the Democratic field was very fragmented. And so the two Republican candidates actually were polling the highest. And so just so the viewers have context, California has this weird jungle primary system where the top two go to a runoff. They don't have a Democrat lane and a Republican lane. They just take the top two jungle primary and then they go to the runoff. Even today, still, Hilton and was it bianca or whatever they are polling at both around like 14 or 15 percent if the election were held today you'd have two republicans in the runoff so the democrats needed to winnow the field down and have fewer candidates in addition to that they must have been concerned that all this oppo on swallow will come out once it was him versus say steve hilton and they didn't want it to come out later when they could lose the election so the powers that be made the decision to lance the boil probably there was a conversation with him to tell him to get out of the race he didn't listen and by the way remember this feels a lot like what happened with joe biden when he had to drop out of the presidential race it does sound surprisingly like that the whole democratic

establishment and all the mainstream media were saying that biden was sharp as a tack okay and then he had that disaster debate performance with trump and it became clear yeah and you could just see, the text messages were flying during the debate between the Democratic Party insiders. And by the time that debate was over, they had congealed on a new position, which is that Biden had to step aside. And then Nancy Pelosi was reported as having gone to the president and said, we can do things the hard way or the easy way. Imagine that, like telling the president of the United States, we can do things the hard way or the easy way. And then Biden disappeared for a week and magically he stepped aside by tweets. Remember that he published a statement that appeared to be done by an auto pen. People were speculating whether he was even behind this or the staff pushed him to do it. The whole thing was extremely weird, but he, you know, was clearly muscled out of it just a few days before he had said, I'm not leaving the race, no matter what. I mean, it was like straight out of that Wolf of wall street meme. They're not getting me out of here. And then a few days later, he's resigning by tweet. And again,

Nancy Pelosi appears to be the figure at the center of both these things. She was, hold on, hold on. Pelosi is reported as having been Swalwell's mentor. I guess she found him roughly 20 years ago to run for Congress in the first place when the Republicans wanted to kick Swalwell off of the Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, for allegedly being involved with that Chinese spy Feng Feng. It was Pelosi who protected him. So she's sort of been a central figure in his career. I'm not saying she approved of anything he did, but there's no way that that button gets pushed without going to Pelosi for the sign-off, right?

I mean, she's like the boss of this operation. And I think that the same thing happened to swallow that happened to biden is they went to him and said we can do things the hard way the easy way he was too dumb to listen and they did things the hard way yeah shout out nancy pelosi incredible day trader and uh shout out to a friend of the pod row uh row who's now beaten nancy pelosi i think his trades this year he's uh he's actually even beaten nancy pelosi that was the uh rocana has traded 600 million dollars of stock he trades more frequently than citadel securities What? I mean, it's incredible.

Yeah. Where's his P out of terror? I want to get in on it. The congressman you've been supporting for years, Saks, is a great stock trader. Yeah. Apparently, we should have been talking to him not about taxes. We should have been talking to him about trades. There were things I liked about Ro Khanna. I mean, he did support freedom of speech with the whole Twitter thing. You know what it was is that the... Overton window shifted so much. You supported him. Yeah. When I supported Ro Khanna, freedom of speech was a big issue. And he was one of the only Democrats to support that. He was also, I think, the only member of the Progressive Caucus to support a diplomatic track for Ukraine, which I supported. And I gave him credit for that. And yeah, I knew that he was in favor of wealth tax, but I thought that was just a very unserious proposal that it wasn't in play in any way. Well, the Overton window shifted so much that now the wealth tax really is a possibility.

so you know things have changed here it is shout out to our boy Ro Khanna look at this right about now Chamath's thinking about making a managing director offer here I mean Ro if it doesn't if you get booted out of office you could become a managing director at Alt Capital or something statistically like even if you had insider information making that much money is like very hard holy cow Nancy Pelosi is gonna shiv Ro Khanna next for not giving her the inside track on whatever he's betting on. What did he bet on? Well, look, as we all know, any investor can have a good quarter or a year. But to put up the kind of returns that Nancy Pelosi has done over decades is nothing short of miraculous.

It's generational. It's a generational run. Give her her f***ing flowers. She's substantially better than Warren Buffett. I mean, it's Warren Buffett, Stan Druckenmiller, and Nancy Pelosi are three of the most accomplished investors of all time whatever you did to the poor buffett fans they are incredibly angry at you for desecrating his legacy i didn't desecrate his legacy i pointed out one unavoidable fact which is his returns are bimotally distributed pre and post reg fd when you have to follow the rules of disclosure everybody's returns got kneecapped when there was no disclosure rules his returns were off the charts that's just the mathematical truism now what's interesting to note is the reason why nancy pelosi's returns are so consistently good is reg fd does not apply to people in congress that it should be the takeaway they can learn we gotta stop them they can learn things in their committee meetings in fact there are situations where things are disclosed and then they are trading in real time shout out to the skiff Yeah, get out of the skiff quick and get that trade in.

So I have enormous respect for Warren Buffett and what he's done. He's the goat of goats. But the returns post-Reg FD, they are just materially worse than they were pre-Reg FD. What's he going to do with that cash position, Jamal? Speaking of Buffett, they have, what, $300 billion sitting there? The market is in a very complicated moment right now. If you look at historical indicators of value, so if you look at Shiller, as an indication of value, it's peaking. If you look at the Buffett index, it's peaking. So there are things that when you look at it, look like all-time highs. And the problem with that is you would say, oh, man, but there's this weird dispersion happening in the market.

Dispersion means literally a few companies are hitting all-time highs. I think it's like eight or nine, and everybody else is not. So it's a really complicated moment. It's hard to understand what's going on, but he's got a lot of cash. If he's sticking to his knitting, he's looking at the Shiller index, and he's looking at his own indicator, which shows all-time highs, and he's waiting for a correction. He's not really in charge anymore. Like, Berkshire Hathaway is not Warren Buffett anymore, even though he's a big owner. He's not really doing it. But, I mean, the fact that they're sitting on that massive pile of cash says something, that they're not putting it to work in the market, says they don't see an opportunity yet.

Sachs, Travis, I'm curious your takes. Either one of you can go in whichever order you want. on how is the market crushing it while we're in week seven of a war and we put a hundred billion dollars or something into this military activity in iran and And the market is pricing it in, shrugging it off, and we're hitting all-time high sacks. I don't know if you feel comfortable. Axe you first. Yeah. I mean, look, I think it's pretty straightforward, which is that in the wake of the meeting in Islamabad, that the market is feeling confident and pricing in that the war is going to get resolved. The president also recently said that it's very close to being wrapped up.

the military objectives are close to being achieved. And he's made it sound like it's going to be resolved. Yes, a deal was not signed in Islamabad. I always thought that was an unrealistic expectation that these two countries, which are at war with each other and in fact have had hostile relations for almost 50 years, are going to resolve all their differences in 24 hours. It's not realistic. But the impression that the market, I think, has and clearly is trading on this, is that that war is going to be what Donald Trump said, which is an excursion and something that is on its way to being resolved, that they've made progress. And J. Cal, you're right. The whole week has just been incredibly strong. I think by Tuesday, the market had recovered all of its losses since the start of the war. I think it made a new high yesterday on Wednesday, and it's making new highs, fresh highs today on Thursday.

so you just have to say that at the present time the market thinks and i would consider the stock market to be the ultimate prediction market that this war is on its way to being resolved just to qualify i'm not speaking as a member of the administration of course i'm not saying that i know something okay don't know i'm just interpreting what the market is no clipping i'm not representing anyone and i don't know anything different than what any of you know I'm just saying that I think this is what the market is clearly pricing in, and I'm paying attention to what the statements are of the president and vice president.

And this, Travis, you and I were talking the other day while you were slaughtering me in backgammon when we won our eight-point match. You're almost caught up about the taco trade, not Trump always chickens out. You have a theory about Trump always cares about optics. Unpack it for us, Travis. Yeah. So while I was beating you back, Ammon, I sort of had it. You know, there's like the, because J. Cal asked me, and the insight is, is like, and I think this maybe is just the more simple view of things, which is Trump's weather vane is the stock market. Like we see vol is up. We see the VIX is really high, but you know what?

The S&P is trading in this band that's actually fairly tight given the crazy shit that's going down. And everybody's nervous, but actually he moves in the policy space. He does not let the S&P go down too low. People also get the sort of the panicking thing now, which is like he gets people nervous, he makes moves, and then he comes back to sort of reality and gets things done as practical and probably the better parts of what he might be, you know, what he does well. And people are pricing that in. So there's, there's all the things Sachs is saying about the nuances and the details, but the sort of super high level, like I'm in low earth orbit view is like the stock market is Trump's weather vane. And he's like, we'll go to the place that makes the stock market come up. And if he's going, and if it's up and it's too high, he almost feels like it's too easy. So he makes it hard on himself again. And then he brings it back up and the traders are getting used to it, I think. Yeah, it's like playing poker with Alan Keating. It's just like, how is this guy solvent? He's literally playing every hand of poker, he's losing tons of money. And then all of a sudden, by the end of the night, he gets two big pots, and he's got

the nuts both times and he pulls out of the stall. What's your take on them?

First is when it comes to big companies, I think the big thing about, let's call it the autonomous enterprise, is change management, is the big boy. And change management actually is about all the people. People that already work there, the middle managers, the technocrats, the bureaucrats, the whatever, the crats and getting the change management going, the change management going there is it's a human thing. And it's very tricky with very complex processes, many of which are not even documented. And in theory, it's just all going to happen real fast.

But in practice, like that's hard. So that's part one. Part two, what I'm seeing with true tech companies, real companies, public, I would say public, like hardcore public companies. I mean, like, you know, founder led, you know, folks that are really cranking public companies and tech companies that are sort of up and comers. I talked to CEOs across the board and they're like, they're fired up about the development, the sort of the productivity and deployment schedule and like the new features they were able to roll out much, much, much faster because they've pivoted their culture sort of very pro AI development. And I'm getting like almost at this point, a consistent feedback from real founder CEOs that this stuff's real and it's not just hype. Now, there are folks selling their book that are like, oh, we're at AGI and all this. Anybody who's worked with these agents and done the AI dev stuff, there's a lot of good stuff, but they're not that smart yet.

They're just not that smart. Anybody who's done... I've got a side quest where I'm just investing. I have agents investing and betting on Kalshi and Polly and, you know, these other places. And it's silly how dumb the agents are, even their best agents, to be honest. Yeah. The agents are what you, you have to be human in the loop with the agent. The agent has no taste. The agent can do repetitive tasks. The agent is not going to do something novel and they quickly can get lost in the forest. We had to spend a lot of time with our investing agents, getting them on board with the idea that if you want to make money investing, you can't be on both sides of the same bet.

Yeah. You know what I mean? There it is. It's just like, that's where we're at. The AGI is not here and it's kind of silly for folks, I think, to sort of suggest it is. Absolutely. Hey guys, we got to wrap. trap travis you didn't get to play uh the price is wrong i have two more you guys want to do a bonus round of the price is wrong yeah do it do it see if travis gets it okay two guys can steal you guys can steal here let me get my back the music i gotta give me the music travis you're gonna get to do the bonus round here let's go everybody we got travis kalanick he's here he is a professional water sports player from tallahassee florida how is it down there in Tallahassee, Florida. I understand you do a little handiwork to pay the bills, but you spend most of your time out there on the lakes and the oceans doing water sports. Yeah, you like the water sports. I love the water sports. I'm doing water ski lessons on the weekends.

Anybody's interested. All right. I'll be out there at Tallahassee, Florida. Okay, now, here we go. It's your job to figure out the price is wrong. The price is wrong. Here we go. That's so funny. The price is wrong here. Here we go. This is your bonus round. Yeah. All right. This startup raised $900 million at a $9 billion valuation. This is a big one. This is a big one. Before dissolving in 2018. And their famously deep-voiced founder CEO is currently serving an 11-year sentence in a federal prison. Yes. Can you name that mispriced startup? Can you name the mispriced startup? it I'm with Schmarinos.

Schmarinos, okay, you're closing in here. Be careful, you have to formulate a question. You could lose to a steal. Final answer, Theranos. Theranos, okay, very good. 100 points, you're on the board. And here is your next one. This is your next one. Okay, this is the overtime. All three players get to play this one. Whoever zooms in first and says it, this is your final. That's the mispriced startup here. The price is wrong on this startup here. Come on, Chamath. You can do this. Come on, Chamath. You got this now. Here we go. You can do this, Chamath. This short-form, mobile-first streaming platform raised $1.7 billion from top investors.

Jeffrey Kassenberg's... What is it called? You got to yell it out. Top investors across Hollywood and Silicon Valley and shut down in just six months. Quickie, Quickie, Quickie. Quickie? Wrong. David Sacks, wrong. No, no, I know. This was the... Jeffrey Kassenberg's company. Jeffrey Kassenberg. Quibi, Quibi, Quibi. Quibi! Yes, there's your champion, everybody. Let's tell him what he won. Apparently, he's won a Pierre de Terre in downtown East Austin. A Pierre de Terre in East Austin by the airport. God knows what shenanigans are going down there. I think if you need methamphetamine or a date, you're going to have an easy time there, Chamath.

Okay. Oh, hey, Chamath, I'm getting hammered with people who want to come to the sold-out liquidity. 500 was the cap you put on it. you've been dicking around as dictator can we add 50 seats i think we can add 50 or 100 i don't know lisa can we add 100 get a simulcast room going all right we'll see you all oh and uh the all in summit tickets are on sale go to allin.com uh and yeah don't get shut out of the summit folks because this happens every time you guys email me two months out the tickets have been sold out for four months so get your tickets now uh at allin.com another amazing episode and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

We should all just get a room And just have one big huge orgy Because they're all just useless It's like this sexual tension But they just need to release somehow Wet your feet Wet your feet We need to get merch I'm going all in I'm going all in You