Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!

so we had a dinner where me and freeberg and J Cal were invited to have dinner with the folks from and their and their other top podcast off the Record dinner let's talk all about it there was an interesting moment which even Friedberg had to recognize which was we went around and said hey what what podcast you listening to which ones are your favorites we went out in the room and I gotta tell you you know what your podcaster favorite podcast is bingo Allin podcast well the funniest thing is my wife thinks I'm bullshitting all the time I say this is a mine too pretty reasonably success F and well she doesn't believe it she thinks we're all  why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for Allin all the ankle biters called and I said no I'm just going to wait I'm wait to the bestie's call can we just say it Nick you got to it up when podcast called you're like nope can't do it waiting sry I'm waiting for the real deal I don't need JV let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love queen of all right everybody welcome back to the number one business finance technology science podcast in the world this is the place where we call balls and Strikes where we tell the truth where there is zero censorship every week we tell you about the truth behind the most important stories we point out who the heroes are and who the villains are who are the delightful ones and who are the disra with me again on this week's program the cackling chairman dictator my guy mouth poly Hoppa how you doing how was your Victory La how was your Victory really really really fun you look like you were in your Afterglow and I have to say that was looking pretty good uh we have some pictures don't worry we're going to go through behind the scenes Armani came through for Amore the amort collection from Armani coming this fall by the way I mean Armani Couture is like firing on all cylinders the the other the other one which you'll see is a great picture of this incredible jacket Louisa beia two shout outs Armani and Louisa bear you know I was just thinking that Armani really has been making it happen now that we've talked about that we'll talk about my wardrobe when the time comes just get through the rest of the interest all right all right and of course here is your Sultan of science David Friedberg Move Along J let's go let's go had a wonderful he's very bitter today he's got a lot of anger he is the Barista of bitterness today he's serving up bitterness all day long and he had a great time at the um maybe he's a little upset about the Lex fredman triangle we're in right now I think that could be part of it and we have a special guest here Thomas leant is the co-founder of kou management they got a 50 Billy under management uh public private yada yada before that he worked at creative artist Agency for seven years after he he went to college so he does have the college degree he signed Captain America which is freeberg favorite avenger Chris evris Evans Chris EV and um Hasa client by the way yes and you're still in touch with him I am not you're not but I watched with Wonder at uh what he's achieved after I left being his agent it's been incredible great career now now behind you we see this incredible uh you're missing the one you're missing the one part which is that Thomas was one of the highest rated speakers that we had at the all in Summit yeah that's true actually he did really great last year really crushed it crushed it crushed it of course and I think I'm I'm in the seventh best de position and and hoping potentially after the podcast to at least move up by one okay so there you go let's see what happens here now what what's this view behind you this is uh Los Angel definitely put you ahead of jcal Thomas so you're wow you're up a spot my God he really is serving up the bitterness today yeah so mad he's soad you know why you know why he's mad I'll tell you why because okay this is for the audience Jason is complaining all week in the group chat that he has influenza A he's sending pictures of him getting IVs and so freeberg the conscientious guy and co-founder of the Pod that he is says I will moderate and then he invests his time okay he's got he's got a lot of things going on he's got do three kids plus one on he's running a company strawberries he prepares and then you wake up after a dose of Tamiflu and decide no I'm ready to moderate of course and you can't just do that because it's not nice all right put hey Madame producer can you come on the horn for a second here are we really gonna do this yes we are we're gonna do it we're doing it Madam this is so stupid so stupidy did I tell you to get freeberg involved no no I did it myself okay you went rogue can I say why you can go Rogue I'm fine I said hey Jason how are you feeling you said horrible I have the flu I'm getting an IV tomorrow morning to me that was like oh okay there's like a 50% chance he misses the show so I reached sh to freeberg I said hey Jason's really sick with the flu maybe you should just prepare yourself to moderate tomorrow okay now when did I find out about this when did I I think that was a smart decision but you sir are a small bitter man and so what you did was you wanted to just yeah you wanted to blow up free Brook's preparation I found out about this this morning I found out about this like an hour ago how are you feeling I feel 80% of a normal jcal which is 110% of any other moderator I me get yourself Andrew rorin I'm sorry he's genu flecting at Davos to a bunch of mids well we're going to get lexon so we're going to get Lex oh that would be great hello I am Lex fredman welcome to the number one podcast in the world today on the program we have Thomas lefon investor in such great companies as all right listen enough Shenanigans we had so much fun we tore DC apart let's start with actually just Thomas did you watch any of it on TV did you think about going it was really like um there was so many tech people in Washington this weekend I saw the live stream I talked to saaks last night to get get the download and you know my takeaway just from watching especially the executive orders was you know democracy in action democracy self-correct yeah and dictatorships double down and to watch in real time a country of our scale and a democracy you know decide to make a change I think that's why we've been great for you know 250 plus years and will remain great so it was fun to watch I'm really curious to see what your takeaway was okay well let's just we'll just go behind the scenes first of all it's hard to see that this was me dressed up for Sax's ball I really brought the Heat this is by the way Luca rubac is the tailor here it's hard to see is blue Co so this is what I'm saying I think the picture is very hard to see but it's a very refined green pap gley o subtle hard to bring it out now I will say this was the most popular shirt over the entire weekend this is just a simple Bion tuxedo shirt it was 200 versions of it I felt bad when I saw because normally I don't like to wear things that other people are wearing correct yeah what did Michael salor think of this when you saw Michael salor at the um at the you know I met I met Michael CFO wonderfully nice guy so this is us at the this is us at the crypto ball I went for white tuxedo on the first night I've never had three tuxedos before but David looked David looked really great I really love and saaks had this incredible tux which was more crypto themed it sort of looked like the opening scene from The Matrix so there was like this cool print you can see my green in there a little bit Thomas in this okay yeah yeah got it there's sky and new money Sunny the president of grock suep madra x.com here the besties here the besties I was let's be honest guys even in all your bitterness freeberg you felt the love at this moment when we were all back together did you not well minutes before this when the three of us took a a video a photo it was great yeah yeah okay great so bit let you moderate you can moderate if you want if you're that BR you're doing a great job j keep we're 18 minutes into this and we're doing fashion still Vin Sky Diego berkin the co-founder of cloud kitchens so handsome that this was the crypto ball yeah this was the crypto ball this was like this was Sox's event it was incredible it was a large number of people there I was shocked at the number of people at the crypto oh it was it was huge hug here's a little poker after behind the scenes with pink TK Travis Clinic the co-founder the founder of uber oh look that's on we got to see who who's got the biggest stack look it's the founder of uber next to the third investor Uber uh and the founder of cloud kitchens next to the investor in Cloud kit Peter Teal's house this is Katie Han and Kyle Sani my wife and's wife amore amore this is at Peter's house Peter had this Peter te had this person going around taking pictures this not good lighting for you there better oh this was great also Peter Teal's house yeah that was great I have to say shth putting aside Jason likes being a republican here's a here's a here's a dinner that we had there's Lex fredman Julius Janikowski who's the former chairman of the FCC little known the uh former uh former roommate of Obama by the way following this dinner all those streets were blocked off and there was no way to get around you see it there look you see the it was like 10 degrees Fen so we walk out yes it's terrible it was like you were going to die after two seconds out there it was C start walking to try get our car and after walking for like half a mile we're like dude there's no way out of this downtown area and Vinnie was shaking he's like I'm going to die I'm going to die I'm gonna die he turns around he goes running back to the restaurant jumps in and basically like huddles down in the restaurant and then after about 10 minutes there's no way out he's like you know it's sort of like you're in a military zone he's like I'm gonna go for it he runs out jumps on a scooter and he disappeared into the distance and I swore I would never see Vinnie again I'm like that's it I think it's very smart that Lex wears the same outfit the black suit with the white shirt with the black tie I really like the the consistency of it actually it looks really he this is it was incredible he was getting stopped here here's every two minutes it was unbelievable here's the jacket this is Louisa beia and then here's the box from Armani thank you unboxing whoa wah wa wewa oh look there's a little side boob there with that I didn't notice that that's uh this is I'm wearing Tom Ford shout out Tom Ford shout out perfect mail for oh here's a huge shout out to two guys that I had really wanted to meet in person I finally got the chance to meet this is at zuck's party this is Brendan Carr who's the incoming chairman of the FCC actually this picture was taken right after he had gotten confirmed so this was his first day as the chairman and then this is a guy who I've been following for a couple of years Jared isman who is now going to run NASA he's the founder and CEO of shift for payments but both of these guys are pretty epic you should should follow them on Twitter he did a space walk the first civilian Space Walk he did he's he's he's really really Bron was really nice I met him at Peter's uh event and he told me he's a big fan of the Pod he listens to show every amazing I mean by the way if you want to see like some really amazing tweets he had some real bangers he's a very smart guy he's um I've had Brendan on this week St a couple times he's the guy who fought for Starling that's right over wasting five $20,000 per home to install Broadband I mean this guy's a hero uh and and he did that when he was in office under Biden and all that crazy corruption and grift this is a picture of Mike Johnson and his wife it this is a crazy story so there was a G7 Summit in Italy and Mike and his wife had was seated beside my father-in-law Nat's dad at a dinner they got to know each other he as a proud grandpa showed Mike and his wife pictures of natad and myself and our kids and how we actually met in this moment was his wife was like oh my God I recognize you you're Sergio's son-in-law you're Sergio's daughter it's amazing and then we had a cool conversation so that was cool and then this is Bill py who is nominated to run fhfa which for folks that know will be in control of the conservatorship of Fanny May and Freddy Mack and really great guy also a co-investor with with me in Mr Beast not oh you're an investor in Mr Beast there you go this is Mr I did the series a this is the first time I think you've said the here's this thing so this is where jcal is at his Peak go ahead just play I don't even know what this is go what what is that what did you order all right um I've given it some thought and I'm going to order the $95 do Soul the $95 D soul your tips included in I mean we were just having such a great time uh tearing it up I did order the $95 do this is a oh sorry oh that's that's me and Bobby Kennedy but this is a this is walking into the capital for the inauguration oh wow so you basically you have to get off all these buses were taking us in because of the security and then you walk underneath and underground to get into the and this is Bobby and the guy right there c means another great American make America healthy again all right here's a couple of my picks this is um me with somebody who's going to be in the administration I'm not big on politics but um telsey gabard is Gab she's so strong she went she came to our party this is the picture of our party she is incredible well she came up to me and she you know you can always tell who a real fan is and she up I just want to tell you J C I am a huge fan of the Pod I love what you do I love the you know balance should bring to the program she really liked new details about the podcast and so I wanted to get a picture with her so as a joke I said to her do you want to take a selfie I said I'm okay with the selfie she goes I was going to ask I was like no I'm preemptively asking we took it together funar she I think she's gonna be great I like her a lot she's such a star oh well yeah this is hello I am Lex Freedman today with love and peace in my heart I am interviewing dictator ID Amin who has eaten half of his enemies we will share love kindness and a fatty liver enjoy so yeah that was us just tearing it up after the YouTube party where we hung out with Sundar and Neil from YouTube they've been very good to us and then here's one more I guess one more and golfer Bryson dambo oh there's me and the uh Presidente uh Twitter and yeah this is the podcast crew at the Free Press party okay let's talk about key takeaways Chamas what is your big takeaway from the weekend I think my biggest takeaway is that if you look in the past there was a very tight coordination I guess I would say between Private Industry and the private sector and the public sector meaning the president and then people who were in charge of managing huge vast swats of resources in America and somewhere along the way that became either unfashionable and uncool particularly under Democrats and what I saw was a very broad-based Embrace of business people because I think that the president understands how important it is to make sure that economically America is just firing on all cylinders the one thing to remember like for example in the inauguration I know that you saw the picture and it was basically like meta Google Apple Amazon Tesla kind of CEOs Etc Founders Arno was there mukash Amani was there so it's just business people from the entire world were there and so I think what it says is America's G to basically turn a totally new page we're not going to ostracize people we're not going to play favorites that's the other thing you know Elon was there right at the beginning but if you saw all the CEOs of the you know major companies were there it's not like he excluded Zuck because of his past issues or anything or Sam Alman or Sam Alman that was the biggest more notable one yeah to exclude yeah that that the president doesn't play favorites that this is like Team America kind of thing and it was a projection of tremendous power to the rest of the world this is what America is about I loved every minute of it and I think that this is exactly how the American government should be working which is hand inand with Private Industry to basically set the pace for the rest of the world Thom did you have a takeway after the weekend I did I'm curious what you guys thought but to me what was notable from Scott Besson the new treasury secretary he was asked in one of the exchanges about the green Energy race with China and he reframed the debate I thought incredibly well where he said we're not in a green Energy race with China we're in an energy race with China that's right right and he made the point that China is adding 100 coal plants it's adding nuclear and to me it was kind of just 137 gwatt Hydro facility which is exactly unbelievable and it was such a good framing of the debate because I think chamath to your point it's about reframing the right issues right and I think that just that little piece of dialogue to me is exemplified you know and was a really important takeaway and I think more of what we'll see over the next coming year freeberg did you have a takeaway coming out of this there was just so much it was so impressive to be there I definitely Echo the sentiment about seeing the strength of America represented between the entrepreneurial engine that has driven this country for 250 years and the government that's meant to serve the people working together to try and take America forward it was just really inspiring um the one thing that was the biggest kind of observation for me which was a bit of a disappointment unfortunately is I feel like Doge and cost cutting is going to be a lot harder to realize than folks assume uh nearly everyone I met with who works in government or is entering government had this if not disdain for Doge a concern that it doesn't really align interests with the political objectives of politicians that they need to get more stuff for their constituents in order to get reelected and that they're not going to vote programs away they're not going to vote themselves out of a job which is effectively what they would do if they cut programs in fact I was watching Brook Roland's secretary a confirmation hearing this morning and Mitchell Connell was given the opportunity to ask her questions you know what his question was he said in the last farm bill I was able to get $60 million to build an a research lab at the University Kentucky and it hasn't started being built yet it's been four years what are you going to do about that this is literally the intention of so many of these conversations if you sit and watch and then I watched a similar conversation with a senator from Minnesota who you know I I won't get into all the the statements but every single conversation you hear and we even talked with Ted Cruz about this is all about great by the way I love Ted Cruz it's all about excellent It's all about what can I get for my constituents how do I get more jobs and how do I get more money and ultimately that incentive is what gets people elected and I don't think it's going to change and so that was the biggest kind of shock for me I thought that there was a moment of the importance of cost cutting the importance of deficit reduction the importance of debt reduction and I was just a little saddened to kind of see that that there's no stop in the train so that was my takeaway it's a little bit bitter I hope I'm wrong I really do hope doge is effective and I really do hope that policy makers start to recognize the importance by the way R Doo has a new book coming out we'll talk more about his book once it's released publicly but it speaks very clearly to the challenge the United States is now facing with respect to spending so I know I've talked about this I know we all felt like there was a big reprieve with this election but for me it was a little bit Bittersweet can I I say a little bit on that first topic that I I just want to double down on that because one of the things that some folks said and I guess it makes sense now that you think about it but when you look at the confirmation hearings there are certain folks For Whom the resource allocation is relatively modest inside of America they tend to just do much better in general and if you saw Marco Rubio's confirmation process there was you know it was like 99 to zero right and to your point what what they say is that folks that actually allocate the internal spending in the United States gets a lot more scrutiny because there's all of this horse trading because they want some of this money to get allocated into their specific area it is going to be a very complicated thing the the one thing though that changed I don't know if you saw but Doge was meant to be outside the offices of the government and it wasn't actually a government department and it'll be interesting to understand when it's explained but in the 11th Hour the EO that established Doge established it actually as a governmental agency yeah we're going to get into that uh in just a moment and um you know to build on your point there Dave Senator Sanders uh had a tweet today Nick I just sent it to you already the discussion of like who should take the brunt of these Cuts is starting to happen and he's pointing out you know as he should and you know hey what's going to happen with the VA and you're you're putting a freeze on hiring people we have to make sure our vets are taken care of we have a shortage of doctors a short of of nurses but we do have people you know responding to him saying hey how are we going to pay for all this so even if it's going to be hard to do it's going to take courage because you're going to be faced with situations like this where does anybody want to see va's budget cut and these veterans who are coming back they should get all the services in the world and these hard discussions are now happening and it's not taboo so the Overton Windows wide open now to discuss even the budget of the VA and where is the money going to come from so I think we're actually going to make progress on it the this was like a sacred cow and now we're we're talking about it uh to the to Bernie Sanders point I don't know if you saw there was a note on there Nick community notes pointed out that Trump put that none of the cuts should impact vets and so I thought that was um a good use of community notes there the one comment I'll say about burn Bernie Sanders is when Russ vote who is the nominee to run om went through his confirmation yesterday Sanders asked a similar question around Medicare and Medicaid and what was interesting is Russ tried to actually answer the question and give the details around where they can be waste Fraud and Abuse Sanders really didn't want to hear it he just wanted a sound bite so I think these confirmation processes are performative they're hugely performative yes I do think that and this applies I think to both sides Democrats as well when when they are eventually in power I think that when you're given a very clear mandate as a president I think you should be able to get to pick your team because it's clear that the American people have voted an agenda it's not like he hid that agenda and so the people that then want to implement that agenda should be put on the field it seems like the point of these should be if somebody could get compromised or there was something really gnarly in their background like but otherwise yeah let people build their team and then they have to own their results tell us about your feelings and takeaways about the weekend well you know it's obviously mixed I was a never Trumper and uh now I'm rooting for him wholeheartedly to do great work hon you kind of like him come on you do kind of like anybody who met anybody who interacted with Trump before you go your diet tribe just say it just say you like him there are aspects I like about the platform I like probably 80% of the platform and I will tell you today that 20% I don't like I'm always gonna call balls and Strikes but you you kind of like him just say you kind of like him you do like him I like 80% of his platform this time around him him as a person you know I there's things I really don't like and I'll talk about them today but anyway let's put inside the the personal thing doesn't matter what matters is what he does for the American people and like you I know you can't say it yet but they're deep down inside you like Jak to be there you had I have to say I had a lot of fun Republicans are fun I will say Republicans are fun fashion was off the hook off the hook lot of great fashion and it was great America beautiful again my gosh I mean listen I no more jogging pants and and white get rid of it Burn It To The Ground B what I'll say my takeaway was you know as somebody who had concerns and you know I'm just I'm not going to make the show about me but the important thing for me is who is Trump going to lead with this time around is it going to be the people from the sort of 1.0 movement or the 2.0 movement there was not a 1.0 person couldn't be be couldn't be found couldn't be found and so to like on the margin one or two and and they were not the focus and who you put in the front row speaks volumes who do you put in the front row Sundar Elon Zuck Lauren Sanchez he's got his priorities straight here Lauren Sanchez the priorities were very clear as to what's important for this Administration and I'm fully behind all of his priorities both of those priorities all those priorities seem incredibly important to me you're such troll I mean I don't want to troll too much but that's the big takeaway for me and if that is you know indicative of where he wants to go with this which is business first we're proud of our leaders we're proud of innovation I think he's sticking to it did you see him on at Davos today he did a a I mean this guy's got you know just crazy energy who mle Trump zoomed into Davos and just dunked on them for 45 minutes he did yes and he just destroyed everybody at their dying conference in their irrelevance as they genuflected begging him to come next year did you see the photo of the half empty conference room to yes you know most of the events were were just empty chairs crazy it's it's irrelevant I mean these people are irrelevant now Thomas you guys remember when Davos used to be a really big deal is it debt I think it's worse trth I think it's a counter indicator now it is and there was a good conversation yesterday greme Allison who spoke at our Summit was on this panel and they basically said we lost they won do like our group here at davo is lost it's over yeah and they're no longer to your point on the right side of History they said we had a point of view on the future we believe we were going in the right direction and everyone told us in this last couple months that we were wrong the gentleman by the way that spoke after Grant was was also very good this is incredible this is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician and then therefore he thinks he can do anything we need to also factor in not only who won which is Trump but who's lost which is to say us and then he has a whole the guy has a whole long monologue on why they lost and what they lost which I think is pretty relevant that that you know kind of elite if you will has been replaced with a populist vote and a populist leader all right let's get to our docket today and just want to give a special shout out we did our Inauguration live stream and it was awesome and fun special thanks to air call Abra and hyms Thomas if you've ever got an issue with weight or you know other issues that men have you can go to hymns and use the code Allin to get something hs.com Allin I want you to write that down Thomas okay in case you have have any any issues uh that's what makes you think I haven't already I well it's anything's possible like I mean maybe we could talk I mean are you on the chws or the pills which one anyway we'll talk about it offline but that's a full head of hair it is a really incredible head of hair thank you all natural baby it's great it's great do you put what product do you put in it yeah you put sea salt or you got pomas what are you doing allinone allinone PR shampoo plus conditioner one bottle easy no but you don't you don't use any product afterwards none Jesus do you blow yourself or do you have it blown a question both but in this case it's you know like Cuba Gooding and Jerry Maguire I air dry baby oh air dry gotta so when you're dry driving to that Santa Monica office you just put the top down on whatever convertible living that full lifestyle okay yeah this is where I I do have to admit unfortunately after the after you appeared on the summit I had all these women they were like oh my God Thomas lefont is so good-looking and I was like no he's not because I'm very competitive in Zero Sum when other men around me get but you were the Smash Hit and then I figured out it must be the hair and also the glasses I think the glasses were a huge hit it looked very Clark ksh are they are they real glasses or you wear the clear ones to get the extra intelligence points only time I've ever been stopped in the street in my life in the Presidio a very nice lady tapped me in the shoulder and said I loved your all-in talk that's never happened before so that says more about all-in than me but the reach is increasing it's a little bit by shout out to Akash Singh who joined us on the um live oh yes Akash was hilarious thank you AOS filling in our Dei Department we lost Cham and they sent AOS so he did great get him back to gessos absolutely yeah there's a moderator slot open so he's going to be absolutely if you know anybody who knows science all right in our first topic president Trump smashed the record for day one executive orders 26 in all beating the prior record of nine by Uncle Joe Biden and no other president signed more than one EO in day one since the Federal Register started tracking this in 19 1937 let's go through them if you want to comment on one we'll stop and pause or we can just run through them gentlemen Doge officially was established and uh people are making note of the Doge SWAT team Doge will assign an agency head to each Federal agency the agency head will build a four-person team this will include an engineer an HR specialist and an attorney it was separately announced that v um was leaving Doge to run for governor of Ohio fascinating interesting I don't know if anybody's got a take there they suspended the Tik Tock ban for 75 days there's a lot more to get into this so we're going to break that down a little later TI to yeah okay we'll go right to that in a minute the January 6 pardons they pardon, 1500 January 6 participants including some that savagely beat cops very controversial we'll get back to that in a moment ending Birthright citizenship this is a controversial one that is being fought legally those born in the US to illegal immigrants would no longer be considered citizens if this holds up the birthright citizenship is codified in the 14th Amendment and 22 state attorney generals have already sued over this executive order so it might be a performative one energy unleashing American Energy we're going to dump into that one jump into that one for sure and then federal employees a hiring freeze and a full return to office and the hiring fee doesn't apply to military immigration enforcement or Public Safety and then a regulatory freeze on regulations gentlemen where do we want to start Jan 6 Tik Tock Doge TI Thomas you're our guest where do you want to start I'm happy to chat about Tik Tok okay as we mentioned earlier Trump extended Tik tok's grace period by 75 days Trump said he wants to get a deal done he also said at a press conference that he'd like the US to own 50% of Tik Tok and that it could be a trillion dollar asset that's unique and interesting he was also positive about the idea of Elon possibly buying it or maybe Larry Ellison or anybody so he wants to make a deal what are your thoughts Thomas on what should happen with Tik Tok and what will happen I don't know what will happen but I do think it'd be interesting um to share you guys we were in we are investors in Tik Tok okay we invested back it was obviously just a Chinese company and investing in China was very different back then but what resonated to me when I met the founder and he just had a very simple idea which is his view was if I have a piece of content and it's a great piece of content how can I have it be shared and his view was that if you share it on Instagram the only way people see it as if you had you know a lot of followers and so he just had a really simple idea and he said what if I take every piece of content that's uploaded into the system and I show it to at least one other user so no matter what that content is at least one person will see it even if you have no followers and then based on whether that person views it or how long I might show it to another user and then a third and a fourth and it was such a revolutionary idea and it really resonated with me at the time and it just goes to show how we're in an idea business and when you have a truly revolutionary idea it can get really big and so the the whole Genesis of Tik Tok came from that really simple concept of your content will be shown and if people like it it'll be shown to a lot of people so obviously I mean if you look at Tik Tok in the US we can just kind of very back of the envelope look at the math right so if we look at daus mother blue or meta as we love to know the Facebook hat roughly right has about 200 million daus in the active users for folks who don't know the terminology yeah correct right so if you look at Facebook blit Instagram you'll see it's about 200 million daus and you can look at the time spent what's interesting about Tik tok's time spent is the daus are about half of combined meta in insta so we get about 100 million daus in the US but the time spent on the platform is the equivalent of Facebook plus Instagram so obviously um incredible not just scale in terms of daus but also on time spent so if we think about okay well what what would that mean the business is worth so if we look at meta today the market cap is roughly 1 and a half trillion I think internet investors generally assume that roughly half the market cap is us so if we take the one and a half trillion maybe that's 750 billion right now we know that the time spent is equivalent but the daus are half so maybe we cut the 750 in half right that would tell you that the max value would po you know if you monetize the way meta does and ranted the way zck does might be 3 75 billion for the US asset alone I think from that point you know you kind of start to apply a couple discounts right one is if that's my kind of long-term value what kind of return would an investor want potentially to get to that 375 you know is it 50% so maybe you cut that by 50% and then I think the devil would be in the details what are exactly are you getting are you just getting users are you getting the algorithm are you getting data right so maybe you also so want to apply kind of a more kind of severe discount to that but I think you put it all together you know is 100 billion a reasonable scenario you know I think the math proves it and then could it be a trillion dollar asset the way Trump has mentioned I mean in a world where Facebook's one and a half right and the penetration of Tik Tok in the US is 50% of what meta is I don't think it's unrealistic so let's see what happens I don't have any particular Insight on what will happen but what I do know is that it's an incredibly valuable franchise so let me ask you the the obvious question people are looking at this and saying wait you're going to take 50% of your shares and in this case we actually have somebody here who has shares so are you comfortable with the government seizing 50% of your shares I guess is one way to frame it well I don't know I mean first of all there's there's kind of no deals so it's a little bit hard I can tell you that he proposed so if in that scenario would you yeah we never attributed much value to the you know the Tik Tok us asset in the sense of our our analysis was always based on the value of the Chinese business specifically because it's just hard to know what the you know the Tik Tok asset ex China would be worth right is it worth zero because it's so compromised regulatorily is it worth a lot more it's just very very difficult to know so we always took a very kind of conservative view of really looking at kind of the Chinese and you know some of the other assets as the core value of B Dan the holding company ultimately what Tik Tok happens I mean it's the classic when you try and sell a company what's the value where it depends is there one bidder or five biders right is the government the only uh bidder for that asset in that case it kind of will indicate a value of x or are there other companies that potentially could be an acceptable bidder to both sides well the Trump deal though is he's saying the government the United States government the citizens of America would get half of the company so that would be the equivalent of you get shares the US company yeah so what do you think of this proposal because this seems like unique in all the world so if in order to have it spin out and maintain half your shares would you be willing to give all of us the government the citizens of the United States half your shares well I mean if you think about it what what what did we we learn that it might just get shut down and be worth zero right so in one sense anything that's greater than zero by definition is kind of better right I think ultimately it will kind of come down to does the government want to be the only bidder for the asset or would the comfortable would the government be comfortable with either Elon owning it and merging into to X or Microsoft owning it or you know what let me ask you a question can you just tell the audience a little bit about because you guys have been involved as investors in China for a long time I would love for you to share behind the scenes what has gone on with respect to being an investor in China in technology over the last couple of years what has changed and why and what goes on today you guys made a fantastic investment in by dance which is the parent company of Tik Tok you've made other incredible investments in China are you still investing in China if not walk us through what happened and why I think if you look Dave at most of our virtually all of our investments in China were Chinese companies catering to the Chinese market right right and there was a massive trend of a very significant economy that was adopting technology right and so we can think about whether that' be smartphones companies like you know Huawei whether it was companies like Matan that were doing food deliver or 10 cent that were doing gaming and so you know all our approach was basically based on these companies and by the way a lot of them were public which is what people don't remember shath you may remember but 10cent at one point was a public company listed in Hong Kong the market cap was 200 million yeah I do remember so wow what was interesting about it Dave is a lot of that played out by do was an early IPO right so a lot of that trend of Chinese companies catering to the Chinese market really kind of played out across public and private markets for over 20 years y I think to me what's significantly changed over the past five years is technology really became a matter of National Security and I don't think that when we were early investors in Matan right that we necessarily viewed that as a national security threat as an example right and I think as you know companies got bigger as AI kind of came to be it became pretty obvious that there were National Security implications and you know our view as investors is we don't set the rules of the road we rely on government and Regulators to do so it was pretty clear I think to obvious that the regulatory regimes were changing in both countries and so for us as investors you know we were just well we're just going to follow what what the rules are and what the governments are so my only kind of regret through this whole thing is and I don't know any you know if you guys had kind some exposure to this but the quality of the entrepreneurs that came out of that era was unbelievable strong cohort yeah absolutely when you think about the the founder of Matan Wanga and just how brilliant he was and what he's done with that franchise and not just doing food delivery but also the software operating system for restaurants right is truly incredible Pony ma from 10cent right it it was such an incredible group of entrepreneurs they were a lot of fun to be around they were excited and passionate about bringing technology to their country and you know I and is it over yeah hard to know I mean if you look at the capital markets I mean you can see we've not seen a tremendous amount of innovation right or or new companies kind of coming out so I think the key question is you know is it a pendulum and you know does the Chinese regulatory regime kind of move one way and then it kind of moves another way or is it kind of fixed in this state is it your Reed is it correct to say that the CCP wanted to stop this extraordinary wealth creation by a subset of individuals in the country that this was kind of becoming too much of a capitalist enterprising system and challenge some of the foundations of the CCP is that what was going on and why this all got throttled back I mean is there or is there something something else some other kind of you know security I don't really know Dave because as an investor it's you know it's not a regulatory regime that you have any interaction with right you're really talking to the entrepreneurs and you're kind of reflecting off of their energy and their business ideas right so we would meet businesses and we would meet Founders and if if the idea was kind of interesting to us we would kind of fund it right so it's a black box in some ways you know in terms of a market to invest in you only have a limited amount of information and after Jack I mean you got to think after Jack ma kind of disappeared for a couple years if you're an entrepreneur and you want to like the message was sent the message was sent message received and then you start thinking about chamama you know what Trump just did anding just did you put those two things together Trump put all of our top guys Top Dogs on stage here they are it's the exact opposite of China the message is very clear and it's what Thomas said like technology is a national security imperative and so we're going to embrace these guys we're not going to play favorites we're not going to pick one and not the other we're not going to have Summits and have you know the founder of an entire category not be invited that's just it's honestly it's patently stupid and immature and that's what the Biden Administration did picked favorites yeah and that is dumb based on the implication and importance of technology I just want to go back to the Tik Tok thing I want to make three points one is from the past I'll give you my sense of the Tik Tok thing and I'm going to make a prediction for the future in 1984 the way that lvmh began was through a deal that Bernard Arno architected there was a business owned by the French cotton King Marcel busac and inside of that Empire was Christian Dior long story short his Empire was crumbling and Arno did a deal where he bought that dying business essentially from the French government for one Frank fast forward now 40 Years of very hard work and tremendous execution that's a $350 billion public company now imagine back then in 1984 if the French government actually had done a deal where they said we'll sell it to you for 50% of whatever you build take it for a dollar but we're going to own 50% of The Upside and you know they would have an extra $175 billion today I think that that's very important in terms of what is possible today I like Thomas's math I believe it I do think it's about hundred billion asset but at the end of the day the president was very clear that it is completely and entirely worthless without his permit and he wants to own 50% of this asset now if you're a buyer of something you're not going to pay1 billion do if you control whether it can exist or not you're basically going to pay today's equivalent of Frank which would be $1 now I'm not saying that it is going to be a dollar but if the United States Treasury wants to hold 50% of an asset that could be worth a 100 billion or 500 billion or you know maybe a trillion it would make sense for the United States Treasury and the United States people to own that at effectively zero so I think that the incentive is there and I think he has essentially said that he is going to do the best deal in his interests which is the United States interests which I suspect means a price that is as low as possible approaching $1 and ultimately won't this be the Chinese government's decision because they could always say you know what let it die maybe but my my point is it may not be a dollar maybe it could be 25 billion maybe it could be 10 billion but my point is I find it very hard to see how it gets to the actual value that it is today so then I think let me just make a prediction for the future future there's a question that this raises which is does it make sense for the American government to be a little bit smarter going forward about how it allocates incentives and resources the American government is still the largest single land owner in America we give concessions to private companies to drill to build things and it just turns out that if you apply this example more broadly wouldn't it make sense where when you create incredible economic incentives and upside for private investors and investment for some portion of that gain to go back to the American people is that a bad thing I don't think so for example if you said we're going to accelerate permitting for all these data centers we're going to make any form of energy which was the opposite of what the Biden EO said on his way out the door he had all these conditions but if the president president Trump's CEO on data centers says any kind of energy but we want to own a 5% Royal and we allow you to put it on federal lands or 10% or 15% would it really change the underwriting that Blackstone and all these other companies will do I don't think so would it enrich America I think so would it make it easier for people to feel like they're participating in all of these incredible gains I also think so so my prediction is that this becomes more of a template for the future it'll be less about permitting it'll be more about creating incentives allocating those incentives for a share of The Upside and I think that there is a really strong economic argument for America to do that you know trath to build on that people don't remember but Tesla got $465 million from the Department of energy that was called the atvm program which was the advanced technology Vehicles manufacturing that was a very Visionary program at the time Visionary but it but it took no equity but it didn't take equity and that was dumb so dumb they should have gotten some portion of equity some portion of a loan Tesla did so well thanks to Elon and the team hard work they paid it back early they paid it back early that's how well they did if they had owned 10% of Tesla but 10% yeah I think the president has has has sniffed this out by the way this but and and you may not think that these are related but when he said that he's considering eliminating federal income tax and funding this thing from tariffs and he just had a press conference today where he's inviting every single company to come and make things in the United States because he will create economic incentives to make it here cheaper but if you make it abroad and bring it in here he's going to charge money and a tariff all of this are part and parcel of I think this broader economic realization and unlike 20089 and 10 when we were allocating money or 2020 and 21 and 22 where we were just sending money out the door with frankly no consequence and no accounting this time around I think he's got some incredibly sharp business people this is by the way the upside of having folks that have actually been successful in the real world working inside of government is they're going to help them get to this realization and I think it's a really good one I don't think Tim Tim Walter my only push back to you chamoff on that would be I just think it's a dangerous game for the government to start picking winners you know I wouldn't for example if it owns 50% of a Tik Tok does does a disadvantage a meta as an example right and I do wonder is the value capturing mechanism for the government taxes essentially right so the the the way you capture the the right the portion of the value creation of these companies is through a tax system and I do think we just have to be careful of the government all of a sudden picking different companies to win you know I do think having a good set of incentives a Level Playing Field let the competitive dynamics of different companies fight each other and then capture the value through taxes I think you're right and I think that that part is absolutely fundamental but I think there is a way to architect this for example you have these rfps that by Design have to be published in the open source and available for anybody to bid on my only point is just to say that when there is an ultimate winner why not have a small stake in the upside look at the amount of money that the doe gives in Grants I'll give you an example you know one of these companies that I helped start a few years ago to make Advanced Battery materials we got a $150 million Grant I'm very appreciative of that Grant but if they also asked for five or 10% of the equity I would have still said yes of course you would have yeah it's a great deal and why not give a little upside to the taxpayers I agree with that by the way a parallel to that would be Spectrum right if you think about Wireless right kind of got built the government auctioned off spectrum and then allowed public you know private companies to kind of come and bid on it and you know so there there's a lot of different interesting mechanisms you can bring to that yeah freeberg which would you like to go to next well I'll just wrap on the Tik Tok sure I do worry a lot about the predent being set here with respect to foreign government actions on us companies in their in their local countries imagine the CCP tells Tesla they have to sell their Chinese operations and give 50% of the Chinese operations to the Chinese government because of their concerns about security where Tesla is now able to track Chinese citizens driving around and where they are and you can see very quickly how this whole kind of overall I think presentation of the security risk that we face with Tik Tok and therefore we will shut it down or own it creates I think a counter that could really hurt American companies you could see this going to Google to Apple to Tesla even food manufacturing companies that have operations overseas where local governments say hey we need to for local security purposes we need to take ownership of your business I think one of the things that's really benefited Americans in global trade is our ability to sell and Export our technology our goods and our services around the world through open trade and I do think that we've used this kind of Tik Tock security thing to say this is a rationale for us doing this as a one-off but it also opens up a lot of other people to say this is a oneoff and so I'm just generally very wary about this whole Tik Tok situation opening up a can of worms you're 100% right and by the way the ccp's done it already they did it to Apple and if you follow what happened when they introduced iCloud I don't know if you remember gcbd gcbd is the Chinese state-owned data company the cloud provider there and they just told Apple we get all the data and they just had to roll over and all citizens in China who use an iPhone in order to use an iPhone in China your data is owned by the government period full stop and apple had no choice but to do that so you want to if you want to play in a certain Market you got to play by the rules the thing the thing to keep in mind here is I hear all of these kind of like theoretical qualms about how it's unfair but this stuff happens all the time and it's just that we don't benefit from it so Jason brought up an excellent example with Tesla the other example just to remind you guys is during the pandemic the Federal Reserve stepped in and started buying commercial corporate bonds they own a ton of like Ford bonds so that these things wouldn't default there's all kinds of action all the time where the federal government is involved in private companies my point is if you're going to be involved have some Legacy ownership on the back end of it so that in case this stuff really works that it's broadly value creating for more Americans I think it would create a way to deescalate this Sensation that a people are winning and everybody else is just kind of staying still we should talk about Stargate and the AI project because I do think it tees off on one of the Jan 6 though okay but it does tee off of one of the other kind of key things that I heard a lot about in DC and I know Thomas is passionate about like I am which is energy electricity capacity buildout in the United States because it's critical and like building AI infrastructure means that we need to build energy infrastructure all right and so anyway yeah we'll go we'll go right to that after we wrap up these um we wrap up these executive orders and I too wanted to talk about January 6th uh just to give people the update here JD Vance had said that the people who committed violence on January 6 quote obviously shouldn't be pardoned and this's a parade of people who are on the Republican side who are coming out against how president Trump handled this I think you you all know where I would fall on the side of it what are your thoughts on this where do you where you fall on it you know I come from a family of cops and I feel like he's betrayed the blue on this one and you know if there are people who I think he should have taken his time with this it is possible that some people had sentences that were too long uh the justice system you know is imperfect in our country and the pardon power is there I think specifically to do a very granular job of looking at each case right and so I think we have to look at pardon power generally after what we saw the Biden family do and now we see Trump doing this so I think the the pardon power is not being used as it's intended it's being used politically Now by both parties so I'm trying to call balls and Strikes here but you know as somebody who's in law enforcement a family that's in law enforcement and My Chosen career was to be a cop and an FBI agent and you know just looking at it it's just heartbreaking to see people beat cops and then be Trea as Heroes treated as Heroes and some of these people are very dark people you know the the the oathkeepers and some of these people are extremely violent and they're coming out now after this has all been said and saying that they're going to double down they're going to buy more guns and that they're going to get their retribution and so I think you have to be really careful with violent people that you give them you know this coronation and that they were Justified because they'll go do more violent things and so I understand he made this promise to people I think he should have been very granular in doing this I totally understand there could be people who got sentences that were too long and I would would have liked to seen him do this thoughtfully this was not done thoughtfully I have a certain amount of Goodwill towards the new president and this has lowered it I knew that this would be really important to you so I took a few minutes to try to collect my thoughts I've been kind of walking myself through it since yesterday this is not an explanation other than to you Jason my friend about how I think we got here okay so I just wanted to take a few minutes to EXP explain that to you I think that before you can look at January 6 I think you got to go back to what happened during the covid lockdowns and what we started to see in a bunch of these liberal cities talking about BLM riots the BLM riots the antifa riots what happened in San Francisco Los Angeles Seattle Portland the lawlessness that you see in places like New York the decarceration movement and I think that what started to happen was a sensation that for the same weight there were different measures so for example if you start to look at some of the deportations that are happening now it's really quite shocking I sent Nick a clip of them Nick you can just maybe show the first few seconds but you are talking about some incredibly incredibly violent offenders that were just walking randomly down the street I'm not going back to Haiti one of those threats is this illegal alien from Haiti I says he's a gang member with 17 criminal convictions in recent years you feel me yo Biden forever bro thank Obama for everything that he did for me bro there's more after this but there was like a rapist that they picked up in Boston there's a person that was charged with assault so there was this sensation Jason that was building up for a long time that all of a sudden the law was being applied in very odd ways where depending on what you did you would get adjudicated in totally different ways based on your political affiliation or your leaning or based on the desire of a district prosecutor to go after one thing or another let me just pause so that's that's sort of like the thing that was sort of building and cascading I do agree with you that I think January 6 is kind of like a stain I I think there's nothing to be proud of there but I think what we found out since January 6th is somewhat important I think the first thing we found out was that there was a bunch of these folks whose convictions were very speculative I think the Supreme Court already ruled that in June of last year it was like a 63 vote that said at least 350 of these convictions should probably just be thrown out so there was one body that was that then there was a whole bunch of them where to your point you took a misdemeanor you trumped it up to a felony you had all kinds of you know things where procedural motions were denied for the defense approved for prosecution and you had sentences that didn't match the crime and then you have a president who frankly was the subject of lawfare himself so I think that what would have been better was a more methodical approach to this I agree with you but I do think that What's Happening Here is essentially a moment where we can close this entire chapter and we can get back to a focus on observing the law and adjudicating it equally for everybody and I think that that's probably the best way that we can all deal with this because I think that there was a bunch of Pardons that were 100% obvious and then there was a bunch that were just you know had to be done because the court was perverted in how they dealt with some of these folks then there was a small number and I don't know the exact number to be fair Jason where these folks did some really bad stuff now it's also mixed with this thing where there was a bunch of informants then there was a bunch of folks that were the informance stuff have to wait for that to come out because that's in conspiracy cor for now my point is I just went and I collected that as a way to try to explain to you how I appreciate you understanding my passion on it and and want to how we got here I think it's sort of like I'm well aware of it yeah I think we got to put a pin in this and say both sides should now have enough experience to say we're going to apply the law equally to everybody forward from this moment out let's just go forward and not look back I think that's the best thing that we can all do let's hope I'll just leave you with this the the proud boy leader Enrique Terio this is his quote on getting out I'm happy the president's focusing not on retribution and focusing on success but I will tell you that I'm not going to play by those rules they need to pay for what they did these are some seriously bad ombre the proud boys and the oathkeepers and so don't be surprised if they do something worse I want to talk about the citizenship thing and I just want to just provide a little color for people I'm sure that there's a lot of folks that are listening who have people that work for them that you know maybe the birthright thing if you came here illegally and had a child you get to be a citizen just to be clear this is going to the Supreme Court and just to put a little bit of color on it in the 14th Amendment there's this very important part that says Birthright citizenship is is applied to people who are subject to the jurisdiction of America and for a long time that phrase was not really considered in how the Supreme Court administered the 14th Amendment I think what this EO did and the lawsuits that happened almost instantaneously as a result will now send this back to the Supreme Court very quickly yeah and people will opine on what that means so if it means nothing it means that if you are here however you're here and you have a child they're going to be a citizen of America if that qualifier is now part of the administration and the interpretation of the 14th Amendment I think what president Trump has written is what will happen which is if you are here illegally it doesn't apply if you are here under a Visa that necessarily means you're still subject to the jurisdiction of somebody else it may not apply but I think the Supreme Court is going to get to decide this in pretty short order okay a couple more issues I want to get to on the docket sorry let me just make a quick comment on the um oh sure Dave go ahead the uh January 6 I I'm I just generally don't like this power of Pardon agreed we saw what Biden did he gave I mean how many thousands Nick you could pull the number up but 000 8,000 Pardons and I feel like the original intention of the power of Pardon which is in the Constitution was meant to kind of protect the the civility in the Union at times of you know we need to kind of come back together and realign ourselves and it has been so far abused beyond that original intention it's almost like feels like an extraordinary Injustice it almost gives the president the ability to rewrite the law that many of the kind of actions from the executive branch can simply supersede the actions of the judicial branch which is really meant to protect and execute the law of the nation and I think it's gone too far it feels like there's a necessary amendment to address this that these presidents can come out and preemptively pardon people for things that might be found in the future because they're close with them it has nothing to do with the original intention if you go back to the arguments for the pardon being in the Constitution you can see that Alexander Hamilton wrote deeply about it in Federalist Paper number 74 and in that paper he talked a lot about and emphasized that the justice system which is designed to be fair May occasionally result in overly harsh or unjust outcomes and the pardon allows for acts of Mercy to correct these situations there a lot of these sorts of actions that we saw happen with with Biden do not fit the bill for that definition I will tell you there's a quote from Federalist Paper 74 from Hamilton it goes as follows in seasons of insurrection or Rebellion there are often critical moments when a well-timed offer of Pardon to the insurgents or Rebels May restore the Tranquility of the Commonwealth so to counter my point Hamilton's argument is that when the nation is divided the act of the pardon may actually help bring the nation back together as may have been the case with respect to the January 6th but it may not necessarily be about or Justice or Nixon and it may not necessarily be about justice but is much more about restoring Tranquility of the union and allowing the nation to move forward even even though it may not seem just it may be the right thing for the nation so I'm not trying to defend the action or defend the pardon I really don't like the act of pardoning as a kind of tool that's being used in aund different ways and it certainly seems like it requires change so yeah and just um programming note here research note 6,500 people of those 8,000 seem to be convicted of marijuana possession uh possession or they were paron then then then the law should have been changed and the courts should have overturned all of those convictions it does not necessarily need to fall and it shouldn't fall on the executive branch to take that action the courts need to do their job and the legislators need to do their job I don't disagree but I think there is some compassion in the Parton concept for how long do they have to wait for that yeah how long do you have to wait for that you know and then like the people who were you know convicted of selling dime bags or having an ounce of weed on them were black and brown and then all my white friends who started weed companies are now taking them public in Canada so shout out trau all right let's keep moving here I think we we we've we did some good job here on the reconciliation on the Pod where do we want to go next Stargate project Stargate Stargate starg Stargate Stargate and energy yeah Stargate energy so here we go and I'm gonna go to to Our Guest here Thomas Thomas anything on January six are controversial topics like smoking weed but you want to jump in on there no okay great sure L your LP just breathed hey you're coming on the all-in podcast when is LPs they they're going to be so happy but then when when they hear the j6 they're just going to be clenched waiting for to end oh wait hold on my mic went out oh never mind I missed it okay all right it was well said honestly I don't have anything to add you guys you guys summed it anything on Lauren Sanchez's uh outfit okay let's continue another big story from week one we are literally not even three or four days into this it's going to be a crazy four years according to open ai's press release the Stargate project is a new company which intends to invest 500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for open AI in the United States freeberg we got to find out what's going on here with the Stargate movie and TV series if they got IP permission to do this SoftBank and open AI are the question I mean I'm just thinking out loud and we have to talk about where this ranks on your list of great sci-fi and top 40 top 40 sci-fi okay right up there with the Star Trek original series and the Next Generation SoftBank and openi are the lead partners with Oracle and mjx also participating Oracle Nvidia and openai will build and operate the infrastructure Microsoft is sort of involved although we'll see about that Mas yoshian was at the announcement he's going to be the chairman however Gavin Baker and Elon both called cap on X saying they don't actually have the money Gavin did some back of the envelope math and of course as always Sam and Elon have been spicy in the replies Sam is hurt Elon is dunking it's it's just their relationship is so fluid Microsoft CEO Satia nadela jumped into my thread with Elon saying he was good for the 80 Bill and then he was ready to build other products and services and that was what was important what do you think here Thomas is this uh are you an investor in open AI I guess let's get that out there or in xai just so we know where you're coming from here if you're talking your book but uh I am an investor in open Ai and uh okay so there's three points I want to make here go Point number one going back to the origins of the of this podcast and you know sitting watching both Public Market investors and Venture investors you know one notable difference is you know I think Venture invest ERS tend to be very tribal so if you're in One Tribe You Are by definition not in another and you know I think there's a lot of kind of domain specific reasons for that you know for me as my legacy as a public market investor I'm very comfortable being both you know Pro open Ai and pro Tesla and Pro X and so I just kind of caveat that kind of you know as a first point my second point is can we do a slight detour on masa for one minute and I'm curious to get your guys's opinion but yeah is Mas the goat because when I started in the growth business I met with Yuri Milner and he said Thomas you get in the Hall of Fame if you can have one deal that gives you a billion dollar return I.E you know whatever you invest plus what you take out is a billion dollars or more and he actually kept a Tracker in his mind of who had made those deals and what share he had and Etc so let's go to masa for one minute Masa is the hundred billion dollar Club yeah okay and not only that he's actually done it twice he did the first time with SoftBank and Alibaba which at its peak was a $200 billion win and I think he ultimately netted like 80 plus billion out of it so that's one he did it again with arm that he bought for 30 and now is sitting on a gain of 100 I think 35 billion and he could have done it a third time with Nvidia if he hadn't sold I mean guys there's nobody like him there's no incredible you're 100% right you got to give the man flowers he is so I'll tell you what chath I am never betting against Masa ever because you got to give the man credit for what he's done and so now let's go to kind of open AI you guys mentioned we we do own some open AI I am bullish on open AI which I guess is now a uh counter Against the Grain kind of view but guys my point of view on open eye and the reason I'm so bullish is really kind of chat GPT and I do think when open a gets you know we do conf it does have different businesses right it's got the model business it has the API business and then it has the chat GPT business right and if you look at the downloads maybe Nick bring up the charts but it is really interesting to watch the market share of Chad GPT versus Google uh Gemini and grock this is both in the US and international it really is a dominant kind of franchise right it is maintaining 80% plus market share you know J Cal if this was right sharing right would say wow this this company is the winner right so to me I think the the quality of the chat GPT franchise right I think they disclosed 300 million weekly actives over a million Enterprise users it has become a core part of my own workflow you know I have it on my phone I have it on my desktop I use it all the time I can't even quantify the value that it brings it's so important for what it does for me so and I do think that it just keeps getting smarter every query that I ask uh it learns more about me it learns more about our system so I do think the chat GPT franchise inside of open AI is one of the great most successful fastest growing kind of stories so that's kind of the underpinning of my kind of open AI thesis you know on Stargate specifically look I think the real question to me isn't whether they have the 500 billion right because we know that the 500 billion could come from Equity it could come from Masa if you look at Gavin's tweet by the way he does caveat it right saying that assumes that Masa doesn't want to sell arm and soft bank right so I'm not sure just Le up and use debt correct so you have debt I I think to me the real question guys is do we ultimately believe that you can get an Roi on that 500 billion because if you can there will be people that will want to fund it right you can do data center by data center you can do it actually at the GPU level right so the financing is there to me the the 500 billion doesn't scare me from an absolute number I think the question we you know really have to ask ourselves is do we believe that the market is big enough that the opportunity is big enough that investors can get a return on the 500 billion I think I think you so to me that's the real question I think you framed it perfectly and since you bring up ride sharing and the 80% there I you know I really think that's an important thing to to take a moment to um to settle on because in that case you didn't have Uber being challenged by Google Microsoft and Elon Musk you know at the same time in a digital product as opposed to a real world product and so you know when I use gemini or xai and chat GPT and I use them all daily and Claud the difference the difference between the products right now is really narrow and I think you know if the equivalent would be somebody who had a 100 million cars on the road already competing against Uber which you know doesn't exist or didn't exist at the time so that that I think is the the way I look at this as a slightly different type of race I do believe the chat GPT franchise has some is worth something but I think Enterprise folks when I talk to them want the open source product most of all so anyway I think it's still anybody's um I think it's anybody's game right now and I don't know how you get a return on 500 billion invested in this that that's the other thing and I don't know if that's the real number free BR what do you think I don't know yeah this is out here in some crazy I think guys the way these things happen right is you don't you don't fund it all Equity UPF front right I think these things get funded Facility by facility data center by data center across four years right and to Chamas point it's not just equity it's you know sight level debt and Etc right it's a complex capital structure to these things but look we live also in a world right where I was just kind of looking at this chart the kind of cloud capex chart right and we know that in total 2025 capex for the top five players in the US is going to be 312 billion right so that's this year that's in one year so we can also kind of frame this and saying hey does that number make any sense versus what others are spending um it's at least kind of in the order of magnitude right when you think about it's over four years by the way another really interesting kind of coral are on this point is the US internet companies spend 20x what the Chinese companies spend on capex really interesting as we think about our competitiveness right uh Dave to your point it's not just power it's also kind of compute I mean pretty powerful that you're spending 20x what your competitor is on these kind of Advanced Technologies Jam how do you how do you how do you look at this I think that value and money are correlated in some Industries like real estate or heavy industry but I don't think that it's very correlated in Tech and I tried to say this in my tweet I don't know Nick can you find this tweet where I was just talking about the Deep seek model so what did we see last week we saw a model that got released by the Chinese under by the way a totally you know open source MIT license that you can run on a laptop and it turned out to be as good as open ai's 01 model so a couple of versions old but the point is that this model cost millions of dollars and was able to compete with a model that took billions of dollars to train so my take away from that was that these costs are falling really precipitously so that's sort of my one observation is spending more money doesn't necessarily get you further along if the goal is progress and I think that that's very true in what we're learning about AI because we're learning as we go along so then I think it just brings up this question of what is the point of saying all these grandiose numbers and this is where if you look at a different industry like if you if an oil company came into the oval and said they were about to spend 500 billion you kind of know that it's real because you know what these things cost and you know what the entire infrastructure will be and you know so we know we know what goes on yeah so the deeper the oil is in the ground and the harder the rock is that you got a break through to get there the more you have to spend so those numbers become very grounded in reality if you were a rocket company and you wanted to build a rocket and send it to Mars you can also be very detailed in what the costs are and you can assume some amount of reductions of scale if somebody said you'd have to spend 500 billion the thing is that when in this world it seems that there are these advances that are are happening that allow you to do things cheaper and cheaper almost overnight by spending 1 1,000th of what you spent even 6 months ago I think the spending money part to be honest is more of a gimmick than it is a technical commitment so I guess if they want to spend the money go ahead but it doesn't actually tie to whether they're going to be able to make custom vaccines whether they're going to cure cancer so I kind of thought that these things were just joint and so my takeaway was entirely different it was not a commentary on mosa or Larry or Sam I think all of those three companies are frankly very good it was more a comment that you have to be very careful to protect the president's Legacy if I were them to make sure that the things that get announced are actually further down the technical spectrum and are actually going to be real because if they achieve these things but it costs you a billion dollars and you only hire 50 people there's going to be a little bit of gone the face and so that was sort of my own takeaway I think that the things were decoupled it just seemed more marketing and Sizzle and kind of hastily put together it was definitely yeah put together mean yeah you got that sense but I think it would be great if if open AI Builds an another incredible model whatever comes after 03 04 05 but it's not clear that you have to spend 500 billion to do it you know I think people are playing to what Trump likes which is a big number and which is his influence on growing the number so there was specific details where Masa said you know you I I told you 100 billion you challenged me to get two I came back with five right and so this is the sort of trump ethos is hey we're going to swing for the fences in a way you know you could be critical of it and be like well Trump's a BS artist or whatever or if you're from Silicon Valley you could say Hey listen he's moonshot it he's going to just shoot for the stars and get the moon so if these guys wind up spending 50 billion or 100 billion and more competitive more power to the question I had was you know was did Elon have any insight that this was happening probably not from from the reaction on I bet he did you know I think you're I have no Insight either but I do think if you were going to be critical of trump that he was putting his thumb on the scale for any one company or individual this shows that he's not it's an open platform the the Trump Administration is an open platform highest bidder gets to come to the White House whoever spends the most whoever buys the most military you know buys the most ammunitions from us you're going to get your time in the white house it's uh this is a capitalist country this the greatest one in the world equal opportunity anybody one of the obvious the obvious consequence of this data center and Chip infrastructure effort which is obviously going to happen with or without government involvement is an increase in electricity demand Thomas I know you've got some slides do you want to pull those up and and show them because I think they're something I've talked a lot about on the show which is the difference in uh electricity production capacity in the US versus China historically and then prospectively going forward ultimately as I've talked about in the past right the us today is paying roughly you know call it one and a half to 3x the price per kilowatt hour for electricity in the United States over what China's paying we have I believe half of the electricity production capacity of China they're adding more the cost to add is is on10th of what our cost to add is call it 1/10th to 1 half our cost to add per new gwatt of production capacity everything is in the wrong direction and ultimately if Ai and automation are the critical factors for economic growth going forward and electricity is the critical input to that we are hugely disadvantaged and aren't going to catch up it seem like you've pulled this analysis together which kind of indicates the same if you think it makes sense to walk through this now yeah yeah I'd be happy to I mean Dave you're 100% right if you think of the GPU as the atomic unit of the future right and and the key competitive advantage and and the key kind of uh ingredient you can't power a GPU without a Data Center and you can't use a data center without power so I do think at the end of the day it really comes down to the grid and it comes down to power so I think that's kind of constraint number one I other you know the other thing Dave that I think is really important is in an inflationary era you do not want to increase or have this industry be perceived to be increasing electricity prices for the consumer right so somehow we need to add capacity we need to make it so the consumer kind of doesn't go uh Bonkers by having their bills go higher and um we can Nick run through a couple of the slides but the data shows exactly kind of your point Dave right which is we basically did not invest for a very long period of time right in our grid and China did and if you keep going we can kind of run through these a couple of times but that wasn't always the case you know during kind of like the postor War II boom era during the information age you know we did invest and we did a lot of it and then suddenly in 2000 we just kind of stopped and this is globalization you're saying is why we stopped exactly right we start to of that that we didn't have factories we didn't have factories so we didn't need as much power what's the reason we didn't invest or we didn't need to I think we just outsourced a lot of our hardcore manufacturing you know indust the USD industrial correct that's no equals no need for additional electricity now the new factories are h100 factories we need back or AI factories right and um and by the way the way to think about it is almost like a subscription business on a net ad basis right yeah so this this makes it even more Stark right because this is kind of net additions and it just kind of speaks for itself right and just just read the numbers out so the audience that's listening can can get a sense here yeah I mean you can see I mean since 1985 right the Delta roughly between China and the US is what's the quick math like it's almost 7x right in 2000 the US and China were both roughly a th000 ter hours today the US is 1600watt hours and China is 9,000 tatt hours yeah and this is just an extraordinary ramp up relative to correct on AI side the there was a Biden EO last week I spoke about this on Tucker because it happened the day I went on Tucker but the EO basically said we will allow the permitting of power plants on federal lands to power these AI data centers which started off like a very intelligent EO but right in the second paragraph started to talk about Dei and all this other stuff and how you have to have a certain percentage of it from certain sources but just today it looked like President Trump overturned it and now it's full steam ahead if you have it permitted then it's all about just get the power however you need the power which I think is the smart decision back to your earlier Point like we are we are in a race here in your analysis Thomas can we do this without nuclear no can we catch up without nuclear okay in fact we can't and uranium I think you can speak to that better one of the really interesting parts I mean you can see by the way just the the percentage of nuclear it kind of needs to go higher I don't know if you guys have been following this stock in the public market guys called Constellation Energy oh yeah it's a really interesting idea what's interesting of what Amazon and Microsoft is they're actually signing deals directly with these companies right to do what's called back behindth meter right types of deals so they have Direct Energy access to your point shth on the Biden administration at the end of last year a deal got announced publicly announced that federal agencies were also Contracting directly now with ceg to power some of their um facilities and even though the in total the number was small we took it and I think the market took it as a clear indication right that the government even under Biden was acknowledging that nuclear is the best path forward so you know we expect and we think just the trend generally towards nuclear energy is going to continue it's been proven in China it's been proven in Europe I think it will show to be a key part of the AI kind of arms RS you know over the next 10 20 years yeah this is to me kind of the story in one slide right which is if you look at basically the nuclear capacity in the US it's basically been flat for 25 plus years right ridiculous 90s yeah right and so when Scott Besson was asked are we in a in a you know Green energy arms race with China he was thinking about chart number on the right right which basically shows how much nuclear China has added right over that time period and so I think it's it's pretty clear what the answer is I think China is leading the way in that measure and I think we need to follow yeah well and I think what's really important to note is over that same period of time Thomas we're in a different era on nuclear than we were when we had Three Mile Island and you know prior to that Chernobyl we have new uh Gen 4 technologies that are meltdown proof that have a totally different architecture where there isn't a setup where you have runaway heat and ultimately a collapse of the uh the reactor and a release of radioactive material which is what happened at Chernobyl these new systems which we highlighted on the show a couple of months ago like the pebble bed reactor that's been in production making electricity in China are incredible new te technology architectures and they're here and they're running and China's rolling out dozens or hundreds of these and the United States is rolling out zero and that needs to change and I think we only have a couple of months to get the engine stood up that will allow us to make the material that will allow us to make the production technology needed to actually deploy these stations to try and have a shot at catching up and if we don't we're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an energy cost basis we're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an ability to actually deploy AI technology competitively that's Key by the way you also can look at France right my my home country uh not known as a technology leader but 70% of its energy of its electricity comes from nuclear but France held the line right when Europe tried to really deprecate its use of nuclear Germany did but France held the line yeah it's too important jamat you know it's 70% plus so I I think it's there's examples it's doable and I think now with AI it's a matter of National Security National Security and that du tail into Fabs right which is obviously another key component which is a short term for Semiconductor manufacturing facilities right which is another in my opinion keyst strategic area that we need to to ramp up in the US the thing that I noticed about that chart is the trend line I mean look at how fast they're building these and this is where you know I don't know what government incentive we need to create or what tape has to be moved here but if we can't build you know multif family housing in some states like this nuclear is g to really need to we're going to have to figure out a way to change that trend line freeberg yeah I mean what what would it take to to build these nuclear power plants at an accelerated rate I will tell you that there is a lot of capital and I we mentioned this last time a lot of intellectual capital in the United States that's eager hungry and ready to get moving on buildout the only thing that's challenged and the only thing that's holding it back is regulatory challenges regulatory roadblocks and if those get removed through emergency action I I view this to be more of a national security threat frankly than the Border I think we need to get energy increased in this country in an accelerated way for the United States to even be in a position to be able to challenge China with respect to manufacturing and AI in the decades ahead and the United States needs to consider this an emergency emergency declarations may be needed to drop the regulatory road blocks that are keeping the proliferation of electricity production in the United States at Bay I think it's time for that sort of action so I think that's the only thing that's getting in the way so we have the tech we have the physics we have the will we have the talent we have a blocker and the blocker is regulation and that regulatory blocker needs to have leadership in government to remove it am I summarizing correctly here that's right and look you have an energy Zar that I think is very aligned with that intention in in Doug beram obviously we have this big AI arms race that's underway we have an Automation and Manufacturing demand which will massively increase energy demand in this country and we have I think a deregulatory Administration the the stars are aligned and I think that this is a moment where this could happen sh or Thomas what's the downside to removing the regulation and going for it and building this extra capacity can can we Define any possible downside yeah the downside is the the amount of time it takes to adequately build these things properly the thing that China has had as it's as Thomas's chart shows is Decades of practice in building things safely and quickly we can build things but we haven't had the practice to build them either safely or quickly because we haven't built any so that's a complicated thing to just that's a valid concern if there is any resistance resistance to this Thomas what would be on the top of that list just theoretically how could anybody want to block this what would be the resistance one other element guys I think you know that we are blocking the ability of China to get access to the latest gpus right and the whole point is we don't want them to use to develop systems that could be used against us but if China if one day China had 10xr power capacity it won't even matter right because they'll just have so many more whether they're not quite the same Advanced gpus or not they'll just have so many more of them their industrial AI capacity will be so much larger that even if we have the best h100s and the latest technology that Jensen and others can provide it won't matter so in order to make our strategy effective we need to be able to to build this power base I think it's a very astute Point hey um chth I don't know if you've been watching Netflix but I am a shareholder and I am delighted I don't know what's going on over there but they seem to getting be getting their subs right and that disra of a fight seems to have somehow driven the stock price up and there's some strategy that's working over there maybe you could just um Riff on it for a moment I have the opposite take okay yeah I mean it's obviously a very good company I think it's been incredibly performant but I think it has like a little bit of a dark commentary on American society and productivity so I asked Nick to just put up these three charts I'll show you the first one so this is the Netflix stock price from 2010 to 2020 and it's only gotten up since 20124 okay okay the only reason I did it at 2020 was because the the other data I went to the CDC and I said well show me the percentage of people Americans taking ssris over that same period for depression depression anxiety Etc and what you see that it's also gone up and then the last chart I went to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and I said what has happened to the labor participation rate over the same period so I'm not blaming Netflix but I think that this is a bit of a commentary on sort of what's happening in society it's a little bit of a leading indicator where as the company does better and better the reality is that that company wins by being a sync for people's time it's where you go to Netflix and chill it's a phrase that that we all understand but the the the dark underbelly of it is that there's just a lot of people that are a little bit more dejected there's a lot of people that just opt out and and just don't decide to work I think you could graph the fertility rate and it's gone down ratably as well so it's it's all of this soup that is about people living in a life that that unfortunately just doesn't exist so I mean it's a well-run business and I wish them all the best at some level but at some other level I think it's a commentary that as this company does better and better there are more and more people that are that are living a shell of what their life could be so cause and correlation uh aside obviously correlated these is not causal you know yes Netflix is not causing depression but it's just a it's just a thing and there's other things that obviously you can put on this plate sure but that was my reaction is I I just think that the more time people are sort of detaching and and plugging out the more that you're going to see these companies that provide ways of distracting yourself do well I'm not sure that Society benefits what do you think Thomas opio for the masses or just the golden error of television what I'm curious chath is you know how much of it is a substitutive effect right away from kind of traditional media right I mean I've kind of looked at it different ways that at least the way it's measured you know time spent watching television has not really increased over 20 years to me it's more a reflection of I could overlay the stock chart of you know Fox and Comcast and you know CBS and just have all of those have imploded I think people have been kind of substituting right away I I think the the question then that you have to ask is is there a reason that maybe the Netflix product is fundamentally more unsafe or detrimental to someone's Health than the prior broadcast well you know the one thing that I would say is and this is not a Netflix commentary but a general commentary which is online products versus linear products have the power and the benefit of this algorithmic targeting and personalization and I think that what Netflix has successfully figured out and a bunch of other products have successfully figured out is that you can hypertune to what people think they want but what people think they want is not necessarily what they need I think when you had linear television you kind of had to take what was given you didn't love cheers but you watched cheers you didn't love saying elsewhere but you watched it now it's that you can go into a place where the thing really feeds you and it gives you a very visceral feedback loop and you can stay there binge watching something for an entire weekend and what didn't I think the question is what didn't you do yes necessarily didn't work out necessarily didn't eat well didn't spend time with friends and by the way I'm not saying that I don't do it I've done it as well like our group chat one of the interesting things when Jason like he he's very good about television and stuff he says this series is amazing our other friend Goldberg does the same thing it's hard for me to not start to start it and then not end it it's addicting yeah but I have to really check myself because then for those two days I'll be tempted to not leave my bedroom my my kids are like where's my father and so I I I think it's it happens to all of us yeah it's just a thing that again I'm not trying to pick on Netflix I'm just trying to say societally I think we want people that are vigorous and engaged in the real world and you know there needs to be a balance yeah I uh wholeheartedly agree and I think you have to schedule these things you have to make it a permanent part of your life playing poker on a certain night of the week doing certain things on the weekend with your kids having certain rituals you know the the the real damage to our kids is not that the screens are damaging them it's that it's replacing time I think which you you were alluding to there Thomas this this anxious generation as Jonathan hate and we we had a great interview with him myself and B in the Allin interview series that is what's happening kids are substituting whether it's Tik Tok or Netflix or YouTube time for time with their friends time doing physical activities so you really just have to limit the screen time so that those other things in the boredom can emerge and we will be having a talk in the coming years about dopamine it is something that these algorithms have gotten really good at doing which is firing your dopamine every time you swipe that Tik Tok every time you get to the Cliffhanger in a series or you know Mr Beast video not singling anybody out he's just a master of it as well they're just all really good at giving you that hook that amazing moment uh and music musicians are doing this now too with the hooks and then the hooks go on Tik Tock the dopamine addiction when you get burnt out late at night getting those dopamine hits the next day you feel depressed then you go to a doctor and the doctor said oh you have uh you know depression so here's your Wellbutrin or here's what whatever the I don't know what the the the the things are of the moment I'll just tell you what I focus on and what I focus on with my family sleep hygiene diet exercise meditation do these four things and you will reverse these Trends you don't need it and listen I don't want to tell you what to do medication's hard for kids but I get the first three you know what try it get the and listen I'm not talking about book here app it has for kids when I was growing up I grew up bud my father would make us sit there at 9:00 every night and my sisters and I would have to say this Buddhist prayer and then he would make us close our eyes for 15 minutes and he said meditate and I was like I don't know what meditation is but I was forced to just keep my eyes shut and I would just Daydream but I I suspect that there was like some reasonably grounding value in that so I get what you're saying I just have such a negative connotation from it I've never been able to come back to it because of that experience but I would just Daydream and by the way what I dreamed of was getting out of that house I was like I got to be you got a vision Vision came to you I I got to manifest some success here because this sucks Hey Thomas thanks for coming on the show great first appearance here as zesti would' love to have you back unless the king returns at some point you're the best you should come back and you should also come back to the all in Summit come back for both and I know we still have some some great topics like hotan and others that I want to get to someday so well that's actually when you come back which we will do at some point in the next few months I would love for us to double click into hwk T so what for folks that are listening wait what we were going back and forth Hawken is the CEO of broadcom and the reason when he when Thomas brought this up hey guys let's double click into broadcom and the CEO the reason why I was excited is that it is the only trillion dollar company that nobody talks about everybody knows Nvidia everybody knows Amazon meta but broadcom is a 1 one two trillion doll business and it started basically through a whole series of rollups anyways we'll double click into this with you because I think it's this is not the broadcom we're all thinking of from the Telecom era is it it is yeah Henry Samui yeah correct I will leave you guys with a with a teaser to tease the next episode when we talk about it and I'll tell you the story that when Hawk bought broadcom jcal to your point broadcom is the priv of Orange County founded by Henry Nicholas and Henry Samui kind of Legends and semiconductors a legendary name so it meant a lot to them that the combined company aago was buying broadcom keep the name broadcom and so Hawk being who he is you know got a little bit of a price discount to name the company broadcom to him that was a great deal that's who Hawk is he's a great businessman but what is the ticker of this particular company avgo and so I said hawk why is the ticker still avgo and you know what he said to me turn to me said Thomas they forgot to negotiate for the ticker oh never forget the ticker interesting I mean when when he started it was what was the market capup 3.5 billion chath it was an Not only was it an orphan because it was it was a spin out of HP it was a spin out of a spin out of HP it was a double orphan 300X look at this yeah is Last 5 Years the market Cap's grown by 8X nvidia's grown by 20x but you know Intel over the last five years is what down 70% so you know I think there's a big Divergence Thomas do you think this is a function of well I don't know if it's directionally investing in the right things or is it about like making long-term Investments and thinking down the road I mean obvious the compounding Advantage he's an m&a Master this this is less about there was a product that won and more of a portfolio approach and portfolio construction but did he buy did he buy well ahead of the the curve did he buy Over the Horizon Thomas like that where Intel really missed I think Intel really missed it's a complete abdication of corporate governance at the board level and the co level hey guys breaking news story coming across my feet I don't know if you can pull this up Nick but there's a video trending on the internet apparently an executive order has just gone across the president's desk and it was delivered by none other than a gentlem David Sachs I now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time EO we're going to be forming a internal working group to make uh crypto to make America the world capital and crypto under your leadership which is really going up right absolutely here we go whoa look at this what he's using a Sharpie there to sign these executive orders oh sax gets to keep the pen there it is an executive order I love how he holds them up it's so great I wonder if s gets to keep that they might not be excited but we're going to make a lot of money for the country thank you sir and so is David oh you're reaction jaman I think this is great so we're going to make crypto great again I'll be a little bit more specific so I think that there are a handful of ideas that if we can Implement them correctly are really revolutionary I think that it's good to have a stockpile of crypto I have less of an opinion on that I think a set of stable coin rails that makes payments instantaneous and Costless is an enormous acceleration to GDP it would cut fraud and I think that David's going to go and figure that out and he's you're talking about stable coins specifically stable coins I mean I I talked about this at the beginning of the year as my sort of one of my predictions but I do think that the United States stable coin rails will be hugely disruptive and value added he's going to have help from the head of the SEC and the head of Treasury to do it I just think it's great I think saaks is already off to a a hugely fast start the entire country knows that we need to win the AI race the the numbers are the numbers you put up a chart like that Thomas there's only one way for us to win and that's to build more nuclear power plants and so I think he's just got to hammer this through and let's see who tries to stop it I don't know if AOC or Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas Bernie Sanders who wants to jump in front of this Trump train right now but I think you get slaughtered if only there was somebody who could comment on this executive order that's what I need you know chamath if I had the bat phone if I could call somebody who call phone a friend who would you call I don't know you know I had my Saxy poo was always on speed dial we used to hang in between we'd have these great battles here on the Pod then we go play chess together we go have some drinks at the battery but you know that was a different era and you know I don't got my boy anymore he's busy oh do we got right everybody thanks for tuning in to the Allin podcast I'm your host Jason calanis we will see you next time bye sorry what there he is there he is he's back back to reclaim his seat it's yours home we miss you buddy you look so handsome going to cry 61 days not my bestie we miss you were you just in the Oval Office I was just in the Oval Office first time in the Oval Office let me ask you a question was that your first time in the oval well technically it was my second but how was it sucks how's it been so far it's pretty incredible yeah it's really been pretty incredible well tell us what are The Vibes and what's it like to go in to the Oval Office and to have that executive order sign TI us tell us what the moment was like and then tell us what's in the executive order well we actually we did three executive orders today so we did one on crypto one on AI and then one on pcast which is the president's Council of advisers for Science and Technology the one on crypto I guess we can start there the main thing it does is it forms an internal working group with the goal of making the US the world leader in crypto so it's not one specific action it's basically authorizing and creating a working group with the goal of achieving that objective right and the members of this working group are going to be there's me there's the head of the SEC the Secretary of the Treasury and all the agencies and departments that have an interest in crypto so we formed this working group I'm actually chairing it or I will be and again the goal here is to to identify and make recommendations that the Departments would then take back and they could execute and just again with the goal of making America the world capital of cryptos the president of set of Davos today and then the other two sex yeah so that's crypto next one's AI so the the number one thing that that EO does is resend the the Biden EO which we talked about on this podcast I don't know how many episodes ago but remember it was this 100 page monstrosity of burns some regulation and the president had promised on the campaign Trail to repeal that and he did so it got rescinded actually there was a master EO on Monday that contained dozens of Biden era EOS that got M rescinded this one provided a little B more detail on it basically said that that EO was UN necessarily burdensome it said that we want to be the world leader in AI in fact it uses the word dominate you want we want to basically have Global dominance in AI and similar to what we're doing on the crypto side it directs the creation of a AI action plan and that study will be led by three people the National Security adviser who is Mike Waltz the director of the office of Science and Technology policy who will be Michael ctios as soon as he Senate confirmed and then the third person is me so the three of us are going to work together on this AI action plan and the idea is to figure out what is it that the industry actually needs to make us number one globally in AI so it's putting a little bit more substance behind like what this what this R ro means and the last one is to build a science Council I don't know if everybody's familiar with that so maybe you could just describe what that is generally for the audience well pcast has been around for a long time I mean I think it's you know been around for decades and the the goal of pcast is to assemble a group of top Science and Technology Minds to provide the president with advice so this was already announced but basically me and Michael ctios who I mentioned before is g to be the director of ostp we're going to be co-chairing that and this is an EO that provides the authorizing language to set that up and then it provides some direction around what pcast is going to do I think some of the language that freeberg may like is just it talks about the the need to return to kind of truth-telling in science and kind of getting away from from woke science the AI order discusses this as well we don't want AI models to be ideologically biased an agenda I don't know if it uses the word woke AI but that's basically what it's talking about we want AI models to be as politically unbiased as possible well if you need a recommendation for somebody for the council I know somebody who is extremely well versed on science he's got a broad array of science knowledge here here yeah I have an idea then we could have two besties in the in and around the White House hey well you know thanks for including us in in so many aspects of the weekend and the audience really wants to know what are the chance an we we get uh Sachs back on the Pod now and again in 2025 um and we do appreciate the sacrifice you're making we're doing it right now but the audience uh is you know not going to just accept this little drop in here they want to know what's the long-term plan for David Sachs in the Pod and what's happened like with media overall in the administration now that confirmation hearings are underway Sachs and closing out does that mean folks are going to be able to get back on social and things that they were kind of restricted by over the last couple of weeks sure but I I think that you know if you're working for the White House there kind of needs to be a reason for you to be out there because you don't want to be making news that you're not supposed to so in the case here today the president signed these executive orders on crypto and Ai and they want me explaining them so it makes sense for me to go out there I've got a appearance on Fox Business in about an hour to talk about the EOS as well so that might come out before this pod comes out but you guys are the first ones I'm actually talking to but so there's a reason for me to come out and do it and I think that there probably will need to be a good reason for me to come on the Pod but I'm going to try and come on the Pod every chance I get all right well this is our appeal to djt to let you come on and just chew the fat and and and maybe there's some upside to it for him do you miss being on the Pod sex oh yeah sure of course we miss you so much look I'll be back back don't worry some point are you a little emotional right now SX what are your favorite memories from the inauguration weekend well the inauguration ceremony itself was really pretty spectacular you were there in the capital jamat yeah it's funny Jack and I kind of took our seats and there were aunda like kind of in the back in the peanut gallery and I thought that's where I was going to be sitting and then somebody comes up to me and says uh Mr saxs we have a seat for you up up front and so they put me on the you were with the big boys yeah it was like the Secretary of State the Secretary of Treasury and then me you know and then we were just we were behind the the Trump family you may not have seen me because those Trump kids are pretty tall but um that whole family is very tall so I kind of disappeared a little bit but in any event they put me on the deas which was really pretty crazy I wasn't wow I didn't realize that yeah it was a huge honor there was a shot where David and Jacqueline were in the front they looked amazing and they were kind of looking around H for where to sit and I was like this can't be right because there he must have had like a name so it's good that it all got sorted out but what was the vantage point from your side basically you're looking out yeah I mean I was looking out and you know I could see the faces of the Democrats as the president came out you know President Biden and KLA Harris they didn't look too happy no I I wish they had a fixed camera on them the whole time I wanted to see their reaction shot side I've seen some of the reaction shots you know hey just just I mean that was really unique to have uh I I mean I thought that that speech was really incredible because well first of all it was completely consistent with everything the president had said during the campaign and so you really felt like he he has a mandate here because this is everything he said during the campaign it remind me a lot of there's that famous quote by by Abraham Lincoln that public sentiment is everything with it you can accomplish anything without it you do anything and it really felt like that inauguration speech was full of substance but it was substance that the president had delivered on the campaign Trail and so when he won this Victory where he only won the presidency he won the popular vote he won seven out of seven swing states he won the house he won the Senate it really feels like he has a mandate and I think he reiterated that mandate in his speech and then of course just the the cherry on top is just that you know the losers just to sit there and and listen to it well kudos to them for coming out and keeping the tradition yeah well yeah and when he's talking about the corrupt establishment that tried to put him in prison through this law fair I mean he's talking about some of those people who were sitting behind him I just thought it was remarkable a remarkable moment that was a crazy visual do you want to take us back sacks on how you because you haven't talked about this publicly but how did you end up I guess getting the offer for the role deciding to take the role anything you want to share anecdotally on on the the path to get here I don't know that there's that much to report you know I was helping with the transition I got offered the the role and decided to do it so I mean look it's not something I was expecting or planning as you guys know I didn't even know there was going to be such a role but when they they decided to create it and they offered it to me and so I decided to do it you know just one thing I should clarify just to make clear is there's still some things I can't do yet in the role because there's a whole government ethics process that you have to go through and I'm in I'm in the midst of that process so we've signed these it's given me certain responsibilities and authorized me to do certain things and that process is going to begin as soon as I complete this um I guess you call it onboarding so just to be clear about that there's things I can do there's things I can't do I can kind of be in listing mode I can't be necessarily shaping policy yet so that's all going to be worked through over the next couple weeks all right sax I got to ask first time in the oval what's going through your mind yeah great question my was on a swivel you know one of those moments you're like you can't really believe that you're you're there it does feel a little bit like you're on a movie set I mean it's so famous obviously to be in that it bigger in person or is it smaller in person how what is it I thought it seemed about the right size I know that's that one of the things people say about it is that it's smaller than you expect I didn't feel like it was smaller but it also didn't feel bigger it felt felt like you know the Oval Office that you've always seen the other people who are in there who've been in there the staffers who've been in there a 100 or a thousand times it's obviously it wears off and it's like just where they do their work but yeah I've got to admit the first time you go in there you're pretty pretty a struck there was a post that JD Vance now the vice president had where he actually do you guys see this Mike Johnson I saw the video Mike John pretty crazy walking in and he's in shock because he had never been in there I guess you know I guess he became a senator a few years ago and uh we've had a Democrat president so he never had and he said that he was honored and humbled to be there I mean that's the way I felt as well those comments by the Vice President resonated with me I think probably every American would feel this way the first time you're in the Oval Office it is pretty incredible you want me to repeat the words that the president said about you there's nobody like this guy they said how did you get David saaks how did you do that he's doing it for the country more than anything else we appreciate it David thank you very much he's been he's been really nice to me it's really incredible he's been just incredible to me and he he gave me the the pen from the from the signing uh which is pretty cool can we see the pen can we see the pen the brand of the pen well it's not brand it basically it says the White House on one side and it's got his signature on another and so look I wasn't expecting trophy Cas is it like a Sharpie what is it is it a Sharpie it is it is a Sharpie you you you've seen him s sign right yeah so it's what you know I assume it's what what he likes but so he gave me the pen which is pretty incredible have you guys seen that there's all these ASMR vide videos of the president's signing where you can just hear theen the pen on the paper it makes exactly there's like all these ASMR of that well freeberg wants to know if you could assign his new Tesla he wants you to sign it with that pen he wants you to autograph it so when you get back to the valley you can you can start doing autographs with that all around all around no I think uh I think only the presents allowed to use this pen only the presents allowed to use okay well put it in put it put it we're safe okay don't lose the pen you got to put it in a glass box or something and uh sax there's thousands of commenters who are just begging for you to come back do you have a message to your Legions of commenters well I I thank them and I'm back right now I know maybe it's not enough but soak it in it would help if you guys could just do a better job on the Pod so they weren't complaining all the time we do the best we can without you all right get back to work get back to work go come on this taxpayer you're on the tax clock here go go back to work here and save America make America great again listen we wish you great success we miss you greatly and uh we thank you for the service to the country we wish you uh all all all the best as you go um handle two of the most important issues for our country Ai and help advise our president on cryptocurrency as well love you suxy and pcast yes of course NP as well boys love you very very much David love you hopefully see you on Tuesday yes Thomas thanks for coming in and for the opp Thomas thank you very much you great podast you Thomas love you boys let your winners ride Rainman and instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you queen of [Music] besties are that's my dog taking driveway oh man myit we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] somehow be we need to get merch our [Music] I'm going all in