White House BTS, Google buys Wiz, Treasury vs Fed, Space Rescue
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Freeburg had this great story. There's a machine there. I've never seen this machine in my life, but he knew the machine. There's a machine. It's the Coca-Cola freestyle machine. There's a machine that's right by the Navy mess where we had lunch in the Situation Room, which dispenses literally, I've never seen this before. This is how out of touch you are. This is in every 7-Eleven. 90 different movies. Every movie theater. Every McDonald's. Every movie theater. It's everywhere. This is everywhere. You have not left.

I was blown away by this machine. All the Coca-Colas, all of the Gatorades. Timoth, let me ask you a question. Timoth, let me ask you a question. How much is a dozen eggs? $399. How much? Yeah, $399. He got it. $399. That's right. No, $3.99. Close. $3.99. Pretty close. It's pretty much double that in the Bay Area or Whole Foods, but yeah, it's half that. Ask me how much milk is. How much is milk?

$8.99 to $11.99, depending on what you buy. How much is a sweater, Timoth? My sweater is $4,000. All right, now we're back. We're back. Rain Man, David Sack. We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Love you, man. Queen of Kinwa.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All In Podcast. With me again, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and look at this, look at this, live from D.C., our bestie David Sachs is back. He's suited up in the administration and in the fifth bestie seat for the second time

My long-term bestie, Cyan Bannister, hot on the trails of her new fund getting announced. Congratulations on that, Cyan. Thank you. Thank you. I'm excited to be back. And I'm so excited. I did not expect to see David. So, like, I'm over the moon. I'm, like, so excited. Well, I just popped in to reminisce about this trip that Chamath and Freeburg just did.

Absolutely. Trip of a lifetime. Trip of a lifetime. We had all the besties at the White House. It was really incredible. Oh, wait. Jay Cut wasn't there? Actually, it's interesting you say that. It's interesting. I checked my spam filters and my invite got stuck in the spam filters. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was a little bit of a problem. But I had ski week this week, so I wouldn't have been able to make it anyway. But yeah, I noticed there were some other invites stuck in my... A couple of other invites got stuck.

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

Also, I missed my invite to the Bridgerton. You've got a cameo in Bridgerton there, I see, Friedberg. What is this? I'm not going to be on the Netflix show Bridgerton. I missed that. I think we're in a bit. Let's keep going, Jericho. And looks like my white party invite here with Diddy.

Oh, well, it's kind of. Oh, God, the white part. Oh, look, Epstein's Island. Oh, no, I'm sorry. That was Reid Hoffman's invite. That was you. Keep going. You're on a roll here. Keep going.

All right, all right. Let's get back to it. Let's get back to it. It was a triumphant week for our besties. There were like little schoolgirls giggling on the group chat. Oh my God, I'm in the White House. Oh my God, look, I'm getting closer to power. What was it like, Chamath? Your dream has come true. You came here to America from Canada. You built all this from nothing and you wound up at the White House. Give it to me. It was probably the most intense

intense three days that we had. Nat and I were there to see the president, but obviously we were there to see Sachs as well. But there was a bunch of other things that happened. Myself, Freeberg, New Money Sonny was there, our bestie Elon Musk, obviously we dropped in with him. So to recap, on Sunday we got in, it was just like raining cats and dogs, nothing to say there. Then on Monday, what happened was we basically had some meetings in the morning and then David said, guys, let me just

walk you around and just show you where I were. By the way, we camped out in Saks' office for three days, which was awesome. So we had the passes to be at the West Wing and in the Eisenhower building. That's Saks' office. And so we all kind of worked from there. And then we went and did our meetings from Saks' office. And Saks' incredible chief of staff, Tracy, escorted us around anytime we needed to go anywhere. So then...

We start to walk through the West Wing. We drop by. Look at Sax's office for a second. I love what you've done with the place. Were you allowed to put up a piece of art? And look at that desktop rig. I think the most iconic part of the West Wing is the portico where you see that

Those very famous shots of all these very important people. In this case, it's just the four of us. But you can see, Nick, there's the shot of all of us. Well, the Portico connects the West Wing to the president's residence. Tracy Sachs, his chief of staff, escorted us from the West Wing after we did an amazing tour of the West Wing over to the residence. I don't know if we were really supposed to do it, but she has full access. So we were able to kind of go on the walk. And then we took a walk around the residence and

and saw the rooms. But this is the entrance to the West Wing right here. So when you come in for meetings, administrators, so we walk in, Pam Bondi's on our way out. We got to meet Pam Bondi. I mean, it really is amazing. Members of the cabinet are coming in and out of this door. Members that work in the West Wing are coming in. Or leaders. Yeah, and then we saw leaders coming in. One of the most iconic things we were allowed to do was see the press room. By the way, the people that work, and we'll get to it in a second because we met some incredible people that work in the White House.

But some of the folks that don't necessarily get a lot of flowers, like folks that work in like the upper press room and the lower press room, some of the kindest people. And what they did was they're like, oh, guys, why don't you come and see where they do the presidential briefings? And the one thing about the White House is everything is just like in a nook and cranny away. So this is where obviously you see the presidential seal isn't there because the president is not there. But we were able to do that.

So you're in the press room here? This is the actual press room? It was just like a little door. It's so small. It's a little door off the side. The whole West Wing is disarmingly small. You can walk for 15 seconds between the Oval Office and pretty much everywhere else in the West Wing. It really is very tight. And Elon's got an office in there that we got to kind of drop in and say hi to.

The president, obviously, Chamath went over to the Oval. Then there's the Situation Room. I mean, everything is within a couple of steps of everything. And it really is. You're in these kind of historic moments as you walk through this. You just feel the resonance of everything that you've heard about and seen and all the history and legacy to everything. And it's just all right there, compact in one space. You're just overwhelmed. It really was overwhelming for me emotionally. It was overwhelming intellectually. You just kind of walk around and

You know, it's just, you're part of it. And it was so, I was telling Shamad, it was so emotional for me at the end of the day to just be like, man, like, you come to this country, you come to America, you know, from wherever you came from, and anyone can find their way into this historic space. That's the beauty of this country. And I, it never really hit me until we were in this moment.

So let me show you that I kind of really got it. You made some really incredible people. Nick, you can find a picture of myself and Freeberg and Sonny and Sacks. We're with Taylor Budowich. Who's that? David, he's a deputy chief of staff, chief of staff for communications in the White House. His office is well placed because through that window behind us is the gaggle. There's this lawn.

out on the White House called Pebble Beach and all the networks have tents there and they'll do recordings with White House officials and the White House will be in the background. It's not like a green screen or an LED. It's the actual White House will be in the background. That's why it's all set up there and it's called Pebble Beach. And then there's an area, I think they call it like the sticks, which is basically just

like a paved area where white house officials can go out there and they get swarmed by all the media asking him questions. And that's called the gaggle. So he can keep an eye on everything that's happening.

with the media through that window in his office. Is that where Marine One lands and you see everybody yelling at the president and trying to like talk over the copters or that's on the other side? That's on the other side. Yeah, it's on the other side. But a lot of those reporters will just move over there when they have the option to do that. But like when you see Caroline Leavitt, who's the White House press secretary, or Stephen Miller, who's the deputy chief of staff for policy, they'll come out and all of a sudden they're speaking in a microphone. It'll seem impromptu. There'll be a lot of reporters.

that's usually the sticks and that's the White House gaggle. We saw Elon, obviously. Nick, you can just show the picture of all of us with Elon. And the incredible thing is here you have the most incredible entrepreneur of our lifetime dealing with so many complicated issues. And I'll tell you, Elon works in one of the smallest offices I've ever seen. All he has is a desk with an enormous screen and his phone. And you can see that

There is nothing that matters except the task at hand, and that's really inspiring.

It just puts everybody on the same level. You feel this energy that all of these guys are doing incredible work on behalf of the country, 201, where there's no ego about some of these things, meaning what is the office size? What is this? What is that? They're just here to grind. And I don't think I've ever seen a workforce more happy. You get there and the energy and the intensity, it's very much like the TV show West Wing. There's just this constant momentum. Every day you live a whole lifetime

And everyone is just like energized. And I was talking to Sax's chief of staff and she's like, you just never calm down. Like you're never like, there's never a dull moment here. And that's why everyone kind of has this grin on their face. They're just so happy to be doing this work. The intensity, I'm gonna describe to you a 45 minute or so experience in the Oval. So the next day,

myself and Nat and Sax go to see POTUS in the Oval. And there's this incredible meeting room and you're kind of, you wait there, right? The waiting room. It's quite large. It's very beautiful, you know, beautiful sofas, et cetera. And then

They say, oh, the president's ready to see you. And you get escorted into the Oval. And the one thing that struck me about the Oval is it's also much smaller than what you would think. Like, it's a very good size and it's a very natural size, but it's beautiful and it's inspiring. And our experience was Nat was in the front, I'm in the middle, and then David's beside me. And as we were walking through, you could hear that there was this very important conversation happening between

and somebody else who I won't say about something that I won't say, but it was really important. And we walk through the oval and we walk through the back and we go into his private dining room. And that has all this incredible memorabilia sticking around. Nick, maybe you can show the picture of Meenat and the president. So we had this conversation and in the middle of the conversation,

We had a chance to watch some Fox News together because the Dragon Capsule was landing. And I texted Elon. I said, hey, we're in the Oval. Do you want to come drop in? He texts back, can't, Dragon Capsule landing. I'm like, yeah, I know. We're watching it right now. So Nat, myself, POTUS, Saks, we're watching this thing kind of unfold. Anyways, then we have our meeting. It ends. And we walk out into sort of like this area where Taylor's office is, like where that picture was.

And we continue to just randomly sit there watching. And this is what you mean, Freeberg. Marco Rubio comes by. And so now we're just standing around. There's Marco Rubio. We're talking about the landing. And then out of the left-hand side,

Sheikh Tanoun comes in because he's there to say hi to the president. Then he comes in, obviously says hi to Marco Rubio, says hi to me. We talk for a few minutes. He leaves. So the intensity of the people just within two steps of each other, you saw the CIA director walk in and out. It's just an incredibly mesmerizing place where irrespective, I think, of your political ideology, the minute that you're there, I think it's hard to not be anything but Team America.

I think it's impossible, actually. And it's really inspiring. And by the way, coming home, I feel like I'm crashing, meaning there's such a level of adrenaline and dopamine. And we're like these observers. So I can only imagine, Sax, what it feels like for you when you're not in that environment. It's a really intoxicating, mesmerizing place. I think that's well said, Chamath. And every day, there's something new. Every day, you discover something new.

One day it's the Navy mess where you didn't mention that, but we got a chance to eat lunch. Oh yeah, cut over to that, Nick. Do you have a photo of that? Yeah, we had lunch there. It was incredible. Did you get a photo of the burgers? I did, yeah. I sent Nick a photo of the burger. I got the veggie burger. The burger's famous, right? Because it's got the seal on the top. Yeah, it's got the seal. They must have used some sort of grill tool to...

burn the seal of the president of the United States onto the burgers. I think it's a nice touch. By the way, you want to know something? They didn't do it on the veggie burger. What does that say? They're sending you a message. They're sending you a message, yeah. By the way, what's incredible about the narrowness and the smallness, there's just a door that does not look all that assuming. It's very unassuming. And there's just a small sign that says, Situation Room. Right. Right next to the mess. There's a little corridor

off of the West Wing lobby, which by the way, like you said, if you're hanging out in the West Wing lobby, you're going to run into all sorts of interesting people. But you go down this little passageway. It's so small. The header of the door is so small that Sri Ram, you know, does AI policy. He's 6'6". He almost concussed himself once because he hit his head at the top of the door. I think the door frame is about 6'2", is the clearance. Maybe. Well, it was made over 100 years ago. He literally has to duck his head every time he walks by.

In any event, if you walk to the end of that passageway, there's a little kiosk to get a coffee or you turn the other way and you're in the situation room. I mean, it's really. You could be whacking a terrorist from 4,000 miles away or you can get a mocha. You could do both. Why choose? Cyan, you have a question. What do you think? If you're taking all this in. Yeah, I want to know from David what his favorite piece of art is there and whether or not David and Chamath saw the Declaration of Independence.

Yeah, actually, yeah. Well, go ahead, Jamal. Yeah, we saw it. I mean, so this is the problem, Cyan. I feel like I want to redo that moment. I mean, David gets to do it every day, but...

I want to redo it 50 times because we didn't necessarily stop there. He has to open and close the curtains because they want to keep the sun off the Declaration of Independence. Probably a good idea. I didn't think to like, oh, sir, can we just stop? It's just such a whirlwind that I want to redo. I think you'll get a chance to. I think you will. Well, when I run and I'm president because I'm the only one here who can.

I will definitely. Cyan can, can't you? Cyan can. Oh wait, Cyan, you're an American. Yeah. Way to dial up the misogyny. Good for you. Yeah. Well, I was talking about the besties here. I forgot for a second. She's a bestie. All right. Listen, amazing. I was wondering about the choice of the double-breasted Shema. This is a strong, strong choice here to go double-breasted to the White House.

Take me through the thinking. So first of all, big shout out to Luca Rubinacci, my tailor. I did double breasted on Monday and Wednesday. Whoa. So you quadded it in one week? But then I went single breasted to see POTUS. I did notice that. Yeah. It's a little gratuitous to go triple double. You don't want to triple double. By the way, so we're hanging out in the White House and we got the random, it was like one o'clock in the afternoon, Chamath, on Monday.

When they said, hey, would you guys like to sit down with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson? And so then we... Special bonus episode. They're like at 5.30 today. We had a dinner at 7, 7.30. So it was pretty tight, but we were like, yes, that sounds good. So then we got to go over to Treasury later in the afternoon. We had a camera guy come and set up. So yeah, here's this beautiful room in Treasury. I forgot the name of the room. Do you remember? Carpet.

Yes, it was like something chase room. We got to find this beautiful room. So we set up the interviews on YouTube, obviously on X and on the main feed. It's on the main and on the main feed. And then we got a call after we did the best in interview. And, you know, I think folks that were there from press said that work. That was great.

Howard Lutnick, who Chamath was going to be doing a meeting with on Wednesday morning, right before we were flying home, said, what if I come in early before our meeting, Chamath, and we do a sit down? So we said, great, let's do it. So then we got to go to the White House Press Auditorium. They have a special auditorium just outside the West Wing. And you guys will recognize the stage, obviously, for many Biden press interviews. Here's the stage.

And so then we did this interview with Lutnik and my God, this is going to be a barn burner of an interview when it comes out. I ran into him after he had done this interview and he was, he was excited about it. It sounds like you guys were on fire. He was on fire sex. I mean, this guy, I think it's going to, there's going to be so many clips out of this interview. It was incredible. It was like over an hour and a half.

And he just kept going and going. Afterwards, we went to his building. By the way, you know that he's the Secretary of Commerce. Howard's office is the War Department office, the old War Department office. So we jumped in his car and we went to his office. It is the most beautiful. This is, again, I didn't think to stop and take photos. I should have taken...

taken more photos, but his office is outrageously beautiful. Sax, I don't know if you've been over there. Yeah, I have. Yeah, I had a meeting over there. Okay, so let me just say one thing. I want to say that politics and policy aside, these individuals from the White House Deputy Chief of Staff

to these members of the cabinet, to all the staff that work in the West Wing were incredibly open and transparent. There were no press people intervening or involved. It was very random, very ad hoc that we got to have these sit down conversations and they were just so open. And I just want to say like that was really refreshing and really incredible. And I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to kind of sit through this. But

I was not expecting this on this trip at all. I think that when you work in the White House and you have been successful in the private sector, like Scott Besson or Howard Lutnick or myself. Or Doug Burgum. Or Doug Burgum. Or Elon especially. I would describe it as a money for purpose trade.

You're giving up money, but the sense of purpose you feel working for the White House, for this president is just incredible. And I think you guys kind of picked up on that. And in my view, that's a trade that you should be happy to make any day of the week because it is really an honor to work at the White House and for this president because he actually wants to get things done on behalf of the American people. The default state of Washington is just that nothing gets done, right? You guys know that. The bureaucracy...

And the entropy and the inertia just basically rule the day. And so it takes a president who, number one, has a mandate for the American people. Number two, has a tremendous sense of mission and purpose. And number three, brings tremendous energy to the job. And then I think finally assembles the right team around him. And those are the conditions under which you can actually make change, positive change for the country. And we have that. And it's kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. If we don't get this done now, if we're not able to

cut the deficit and debt now, when are we ever going to do it? This is the, you know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. And I think everybody there feels that. I think everyone in the White House is really proud to be there and excited to be there. And it's fun. And, you know, part of it is that the, you know, you can tell that the president, he makes his job fun.

Because he's having a great time. He was really, I think, born to do this job. I mean, in so many ways. He just brings so much energy to it. He's indefatigable. There's so many... He's empowering. Everyone we met with, Zach, to your point, they've all been successful in another part of life, in business and whatnot. And they're generally post-economic people. But he's letting everyone run. We got to meet with several other members of the cabinet.

And they were all sharing with us that they're being given autonomy and authority. They can just run. And I think that that's really important. If you want to bring in high impact people, you need to let them have an impact and let them do their thing. I observe that. Can I give you one quick anecdote, maybe to wrap this segment up? So when we're sitting in, when we're at the private dining room, Steve Witkoff, who's another incredible entrepreneur, was dealing with something sensitive, comes in, tells the president, he's like, okay, great, great job.

Then there was three other issues. Sax had something, then Sergio had something. And then on top of all of that, so there's this bang, bang, bang. And then he's also like, guys, listen, for this dinner coming up, I really want to make sure the acoustics is right so everybody has an opportunity. It's like the level of detail from the most important thing all the way down to literally the acoustics in the dining room, he is on top of all of it. And I was just like,

And that was, again, just in my small little brief observation. And I was like, this is crazy, to your point, like the energy and the indefatigability and the desire to get every little thing right. It's pretty rare. I kind of feel like America's in good hands, to be honest. You saw it just in those few minutes when he's being peppered with so many decisions, so many actions. So many decisions. You just realize what a demanding job it is. And you really need

a person who just is special in that way that they're just somehow cut out for that type of job. It is very difficult. Totally agree. I think Freeberg is totally right. If we can create a pattern where people with high executive, let's just say that because that's less of a loaded word than businessman or successful, whatever. People with high executive function that have proven it

should at some point in their career step into government and replace money for purpose. If that is a trend that this administration creates, I think America is in incredible hands. Which was how the founding fathers operated the government originally. There'll be a moment, guys, where the Democrats win, right? There'll be a moment when the Republicans return to power. There'll be a moment when all the ideologies flip.

But if in all of that, you can find people who are willing to pause their private lives, have demonstrated executive function and can make the trade, we're going to just kick ass. And give back. It's great. David, thank you. I really, honestly, thank you. Like you are awesome. You're awesome. Thank you for giving us a window into that. And shout out to Tracy as well, who's an incredible, amazing job. She's incredible. J. Cal, what'd you think of the Besson interview? Did you see it?

I did watch the Besset one. Yeah, I mean, listen, I would have loved to ask him a couple questions. Obviously, I would have probably done a couple of fastballs, curveballs. It would have gone a little bit harder. But he is so impressive. And you guys did...

like an hour with him and I haven't heard what did we miss that you would have asked? Yeah. I mean, you know, you got to get a little bit into the chaos being created around. I think it's a good time for me to drop off. Yeah. I'll drop off and Jake Al can pontificate and tell us what a better job he would do. Okay. All right, Jake Al, we'll see you later. You can tell everyone now what a great job you would have done. Love you, Zach. Love you guys. Love you, bro. Thanks for the invite. See you in the commissary.

No, I thought it was really good to hear from him long form. I think there's a little bit of chaos going on with the terrorists and stuff like that, but I don't think the country knows how great he is.

This guy is a powerhouse. He has an incredible track record. And by the way, like Trump picking him, I'm going to give Trump a little bit of flowers here. Obviously, folks know I'm an independent and a never Trumper who is supporting the administration to do the best they can. What does it mean to be independent but also have another label that says you refuse to consider somebody? I don't understand. Even options open. Well, no, I mean, I didn't. I had my own issues with what Trump did on January 6th. We don't need to get into it. Overturning Roe v. Wade. We don't have to get into the things that I don't agree with what he did.

Putting all those things aside, I think he's done a great job with the team he's putting here. And this is, you know, my message to I think some of the Americans or the people on the left is I would look at what he's doing and some of these individuals. These are really high functioning individuals. The last time I think he had a cast of characters around him who I think were kind of dark and I didn't care for a lot of them. With Besson, this guy is like a by I think he was previously a Democrat who gave to a

And he is a powerhouse. And I think he really understands financial markets. Ludwig was a big donor to Hillary. And then RFK was a Democrat. Tulsi was a Democrat. Trump was a Democrat. I mean, you know, a good chunk of the- Well, this is my point. I was a Democrat. You were a Democrat, yeah. So I think that's, you know, Besant is-

I came away from it saying this guy is super qualified. And the chaos that I think Trump has been creating with like back and forth with the tariffs and his communication style, it made me feel better to know that there was somebody who was rock solid like him in there and who's really thoughtful. Because right now, when you talk to 50 people who are knowledgeable about the markets and say, what is the strategy here that Trump has?

You get 10 different answers, five different vectors for it. People are trying to figure out exactly what he's trying to do. And there's a lot of non-consensus. But hearing that he's got somebody like him there and you talking to him for an hour, I felt much better about the situation. And that maybe there is a plan here. So we did a good job. I think, yeah, it was a solid interview. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the access level, you know, most of the time he's on something like Meet the Press or Face the Nation. And it's 11 minutes long.

And the guy can't breathe. Totally. And for him to go an hour and you kind of, you did a good job, Chamath, of sort of giving his history, which I think the context most Americans don't have. So I was very proud of the job the two of you did. I wish I was there. Chamath did a great job, by the way, because Chamath, he had a very incredible, Chamath, by the way, I got to give you flowers for having good intuition. Yeah.

on some of the questions you asked both Lutnik and Besant that I think revealed a little bit more about their character and who they are as people, which I was not on. I'm all about like, what are the questions I want to ask related to policy and agenda? But you did a great job bringing that out in them. And that actually, I think, created a lot of texture for both interviews that I was not thinking about. It's a great job. I'm looking forward to the next one. I don't know when that drops, but that should be really good. Oh my God, the Lutnik interview is like...

I mean, he's a hardcore New Yorker. And like, he really, I tell you, let me tell you, yeah, we did talk about the thing you need to know about Howard Lutnick is he is an incredibly resilient and resourceful businessman. This guy has built himself up literally from nothing.

Good human. I'm a little biased, but he's a great guy. And you're going to hear some really incredible stories. But again, another one who traded

money for purpose. Look, I just want to say real quick, we don't do ads on the show, but we did have three sponsors that actually helped fund our DC trip and set this thing up for us. So I really want to say thank you to HIMSS, HIMSS.com and 4HERS, Gemini and iTrust. Everyone listening to the show, please go to the description, whatever player you're in, check them out. These three sponsors helped make this trip happen. We're really appreciative.

Please take a look at their websites, give their products a shot. Thank you to HIMSS, Gemini, and iTrust. You guys are the best. We really appreciate it. All right, everybody. We got a full docket today. Lots of docket. And, you know, just, hey, welcome back to the show, Cyan. I just wanted to start. You had a really great announcement this week. Long Journey Ventures, your venture capital firm, announced a $180 million fund. Tell us a little bit about that. Well, 181, 181, 181, and 18.

18 stands for life to people who are Jewish and my partners are Jewish. And it was something that was very important to them and to me to stand up after October 7th and, you know, take a very public stance. And so we announced our funding announcement on Bloomberg yesterday and in our offices on 18th Street. So. Oh, congrats. Yeah, that's awesome.

What is the mission of the venture fund? What stage are you going to do? You and I started as angel investors together 14 years ago, 12 years ago. Yeah, so we focus on early stage, seed checks, first check-in. And this fund is our fourth fund. We've institutionalized more. In the beginning, it was high net worth individuals. And then now we're going to kind of what Chamath was speaking about earlier is aligning what we do with our higher purpose fund.

And so now we're helping, you know, institutions help people go to school, solving cancer and things like that. So every day that we get up in the morning, you know, we're aligning what we do. Our mission is to chase the magically weird. We're looking for alpha in things when everybody is consensus investing and they're doing the same thing and talking about the same things. We're thinking six to eight years in the future. You know, when our fund three, we invested in a company in the chip space and

And, you know, we were thinking ahead about what's going to power AI and crypto. And now that everybody's, you know, investing in the application layer, we're going into the next thing, which is like, what is that going to enable? And what's coming down the road and looking for founders that are thinking differently that most other of my peers would look at it and say, that's crazy. I don't want to put any money into that.

So that's what we focus on. This is such a hard thing for people to get their heads around, the non-consensus bet and why that's so important. I'm training new associates at our firm and they always are going to safety. So they're looking at a vertical, they're looking at a startup and saying, well, this makes the most sense.

And then they look at the ones that don't make sense, but that are like intriguing. And they are like, yeah, I don't know if I want to place a bet on that because I'm like, that's where the gold is. Exactly. Non-consensus bet. When you and I did Uber, it was a room of 21 people. Three people decided to invest. 19 didn't.

Yeah, that was a magically weird company at the time. If you remember, I sent it around to multiple investors and they came back with the stupidest excuses I ever heard, but it was their excuse, which is, you know, not everyone wants a black car. The car doesn't come to my house yet.

No one wants to get into a stranger's vehicle. The list goes on and on. But it takes a vision of seeing the future and seeing how it plays out and believing in all the miracles that are going to happen. And getting in early is where all the alpha is, you know, before the thing is defined as a category. So that's where I like to play is I don't want it to even have a market name yet. Yes.

Such a great observation. Like when an associate or some research company says, oh, it's the on-demand economy, that's when you know that opportunity gone. That's where all of my peers can go lose all their money in an ocean of dead bodies because I don't want to play there.

Yeah. And you get a price advantage too, right? Like if you enter early before it's a defined category, you're taking on a lot of risk. And so, you know, I'm getting deals anywhere from like five to 10 posts while all of my peers are playing in the 20 to 30 range. And so obviously- It's literally, you and I are the product of, you know, our early bets and like what the lessons we learned. And like one of those lessons was to be in early. It's literally what I'm doing, founder university now is just trying to do 100-

It's just like a pre-accelerator. If I find two or three founders who I like, I give them their first 25K check or 125K check where they can just come do it with me. We're starting next Friday, so people want to come. Founder.university. But it's just like what we used to do in the old days, trying to get in. Be the first investor. And it's really working and it's super fun.

Hey, listen, there is great news, I think, for the venture industry. This Google acquiring Wiz, I think this could be the starter's pistol. Unbelievable. Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic. Google has acquired Wiz for $32 billion in cash. If you don't know what Wiz is, just imagine you have cloud services like Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google's cloud, Oracle's cloud. You need to have security between these things. They help do that.

It's the largest deal in Google's history. David was there, I think, for some of the other big acquisitions. There haven't been a lot of acquisitions. Obviously, we know the wrath of Lena Kahn was pretty acute for the last four years. But looking back in history, Salesforce, buying Slack, which

Our bestie Chamath here was an early investor in for $27 billion. That occurred in 2020. And then we had a couple of things get blocked. HP was a juniper, I believe, for $14 billion last year got blocked.

And so- Adobe Figma. Adobe Figma got blocked. Blocked in the UK. Blocked in the UK. Blocked in the UK, but they assumed it was going to happen here. And this is actually, we talked about this on episode 189, Shamath. Wiz turned down $23 billion from Google. They said at the time it was because they wanted to IPO, but now reporting is saying- No, I mean- It was because of the antitrust stuff under Biden, plus the UK, obviously. Go ahead, Shamath, you can take it from there. I think this is the Trump premium. I mean-

The problem when that deal was being looked at back then was there was still a chance that there could be a Democrat administration, and it was very clear that they were anti-MNA.

and anti-tech, quite honestly. And when Trump won, I think it basically said, okay, we can now look at these deals. There's another important part of this though, and this was part of our interview with Howard Luttnick. I'd love to just play this quick clip. What I'm doing is I'm saying, okay, I got to collect tariffs, right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth and I say, I want you to give me

You're going to build for me for America. You're going to build the greatest customs processing ever. But what's incredible is you're convincing these companies to basically do right for America and build this software for you. You think that's going to be a movement throughout the government? Here's the idea. I say, build it for me for free. I put it in for free. I don't know. What other countries in the world do you think are going to buy now?

Right. If it works for us. Well, remember, you have to connect to me. Yeah. So every country's going to lie. Right. This is awesome. What he's really saying is there are all kinds of companies that are doing all kinds of work

who Google famously has this 20% time. Could you imagine if some of this 20% time was allocated to rebuilding the core infrastructure of America and giving back to the country that gives you the ability to have a multi-trillion dollar company? That's but one example. So when you connect the dots, the way that I interpret it is that I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it's what you've been asking for. I think you're going to get it

And I think the reason why you're going to get it is you're going to have a very open-minded administration that will let the M&A happen. But also, there are ways where you can build goodwill by doing the kinds of things that Howard is talking about. I mean, could you imagine if somebody volunteered, let's say Palantir, and said, hey, we can build the following software for the IRS so that we can just completely automate tax returns?

And it's okay for Palantir. It's still a $200 billion company. They could allocate a small amount of time and get that done if Oracle stepped up and said something. And all of that goodwill will then allow America to just grow faster. And then under that economic umbrella, a little consolidation is not necessarily a bad thing. So I'm really interested in how all of these pieces move together. That's the one thing I get. But I'd like to say something else very narrowly about Wiz, which is

Wiz does not do something that's necessarily unique, meaning there are other products in market, but they have done one thing better than everybody else. And I think it's really worth rewarding, which is they have incredible taste. So if you use it, and all my engineers at 8090 live inside of this regime, when I ask them, hey, we need to implement something,

They all picked Wiz. And if you ask them why, and if you ask our sysadmin, why did we implement it? Not only is it good, but it is the most beautiful, it is the most intuitive, it's the most well-integrated. And it's just an incredible lesson where even when other people do this other thing,

You can build $32 billion of value by just doing that thing in a more coherent way. I mean, design matters, right? I think having taste and having taste matters. Having a perspective. It's so great that that was rewarded.

- Cyan, what do you think of what I'll call LUTNIC's Lighthouse Customer Approach? In other words, make this piece of software for the US government will become your first customer, the lighthouse that pulls in other customers. - For free. - And for free.

So we get it for free. We help you set the standard and then you get to use us as your reference client. Let's start with that. Thoughts on that and then we'll get into M&A. I think that the government has long relied on private industry to solve some of its biggest problems. And that's what sets us apart from other countries in the world. And so, you know, you look at some of the best companies like SpaceX, Anduril, etc.,

We need more companies like this if we're going to compete. And so doing this absolutely makes sense. And it's just going to help the sales cycle to get that sort of stamp of approval that, you know, our government is using that software. Freeberg, your thoughts on Letnick's lighthouse strategy? Could it work? Yeah, I think this is what makes it good to have, you know, as we talked about earlier, folks with high executive function and business experience and acumen.

in key leadership positions in the government so they know how to drive kind of better economic outcomes, negotiating the price of a contract down and saying, in this case, give it to us for free. One of the things Lutnick said in the interview, which you didn't see in this clip,

is that the government can actually accept four free contracts, these gratis contracts, and you don't need to go get approval to do it. So they can operate in the executive branch. Oh, that makes total sense, right? You don't need an approval if it's gratis. That makes total. That's right. Yeah, that makes sense. That's also a big unlock. Yeah. Well, then I guess we can contrast this, Chamath, with Tim Waltz.

you know, VP, potential VP candidate. I have a real problem with this clip, Jason. This was the most infuriating thing I've ever seen from a politician. I mean, Tim Walz,

gets on stage, pulls out his stock app and starts mocking the greatest American car company ever created and that its stock is down. This is Disgraciad.com to me. Play the clip, Nick. I know some of you know this on the iPhone. They've got that little stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. $225 and dropping. So, go ahead.

And if you own one, if you own one, we're not blaming you. You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take out- I mean, Chamath, you want to talk about this communist scumbag and what he did there? No, I'm not going to say anything personal except to say that I think that it is incredibly lowbrow. At the end of the day, he represents the American people. He needs to be firmly on Team America.

I don't think he understands this because he's never actually had a real job, but the auto industry is a vibrant part of how many, many, many Americans earn their living. Tesla employs 125,000 plus employees.

There is no reason a politician should be wishing any American company to fail, period. I just think that should be the price of entry. And so to lack the basic decorum and understanding, and then to whip people up into wanting any American company to fail. There are many American companies, sure, I like or dislike, whatever. It's not the point. There are some that I'll buy the stock of. There are some that I will not. That's not the point. You cannot openly and actively be cheering the

as a politician, at least, for these things to fail. That, I think, is just incredibly lowbrow. I think it's the bottoming out of the Democratic Party. That moment will be looked at as the bottom. Cyan, any thoughts? I think it's incredibly lowbrow. I agree with Chamath. And I think it's just so distasteful

for a public official to do something like that, especially for an American company. And if you hear the people cheering in the background, it's obvious that there's a base that supports this. And that frightens me even more because he's saying these things because his constituents believe it. And a politician says these things because they think it's going to motivate them to vote for them in the future. And that really frightens me.

You know, that we are riling people up to cheer on the destruction of American company and possibly go out and burn cars. You know, I think that's the that's the outcome. Yeah. But because whenever you incite like this kind of aggressiveness and by the way, both sides do it.

you get a contingent who takes it too far, Freeberg. Maybe we wrap up on this and then we can jump back to Wiz. Sorry for the diversion. I think the Democratic Party has split into two parties. There's the Democratic Party with beliefs and there's the Democratic Party without beliefs. I think that the Democratic Party with beliefs is the one that's very far left and their beliefs are fundamentally rooted in concepts of socialism, Marxism.

And they're very clear about those beliefs that traditional power structures need to be dismantled and assets and influence need to be commonly redistributed. The rest of the Democratic Party, which people call the moderate part of the party, actually don't really know what their beliefs are.

When you talk to anyone in the Republican Party in a leadership position, you hear very clearly what their beliefs are. We saw it this week in DC. Every member of the cabinet that we met with, and there were quite a number of them, had the exact same message and the exact same set of beliefs of what this administration stands for and what they're trying to do. You may agree with those beliefs or you may not, but they have stated their beliefs. The problem is that because the moderates in the Democratic Party have not stated a set of beliefs, a set of objectives, a vision for the country, a vision for their party,

The party is effectively being represented by this part of the party that does have beliefs, the deeply socialist Marxist beliefs. And they have basically subsumed the message. And as a result, this is why people have lost interest in the Democratic Party, because the moderate aspect has not been really clear on what their beliefs are. There is an opportunity for some of these moderate leaders in the Democratic Party, like

Dean Phillips, like, and people may not like me saying this, but like Gavin Newsom, who I don't think is all the way over on that far left side of the spectrum, to be really clear and paint a better vision and really state the beliefs of the party and what the beliefs are that differentiate them. And those beliefs

Recently, the only thing that underscores what that party stands for is we're not the other guys. We're not the Republicans. And that's it. And so people that don't like the Republicans are like, well, I don't know, because then I'm subsumed by the socialist Marxist rhetoric. So I don't know if I want to be a part of that either. And that's why I think a lot of people feel left out. And that's why I think the recent polling data, if you pull it up on the Democrats,

It's like 23% or something in this country now. It was like the 30s or something. Did you see the crazy clip that did the racial demographic split on some key issues like things like DEI? Is this the one that says white college age women are just like this weird? Anyway, I think Tim Walz, like a lot of others, because there's no other beliefs to stand for, you end up being subsumed by the part of the Democratic Party that does have beliefs and you don't have anything else to say to state and to show what you're for.

- Here's an idea too. - It's a really good framing. I really like that. - Well, and here's another framing. Is it so hard to agree on something? I think this is one of the brilliant things that Trump did was he's like, "Here are some things we can agree on." And he just subsumed those, like fighting for the working class person, saying no tax on tips. These were democratic positions.

I think this just proves that meme where it's like, we're all standing here and the left just went too far left. Yeah, they left everybody. Let me give you a piece of advice to the Democratic Party leadership that might be listening. The advice I would give you is basically take away the opportunity for the distinction that the Republicans have right now, which is a more efficient government, a more fair government where money isn't wasted, where your taxpayer dollars aren't being destroyed.

The Democratic Party has an opportunity to stand up and say, we don't want to have things like regulatory capture or this pork or inside stuff going on. They have an opportunity to make that the core set of beliefs that still aligns with reducing government and increasing efficiency in government. Efficiency in government should not be a party issue.

By allowing the Republicans to say we're for efficient government, it implies that the Democrats now to be opposite of that are saying we're for inefficient government. And if the Democrats want to win this, they can actually take that message and say, you know what, we're for more efficient government. And the way we're going to do it is get rid of things like regulatory capture and inside deals and all the other sort of stuff. It may, you know, that may not kind of go, but there's an opportunity for the Democrats, I think, to really stand up

and take the country in the direction that we all as Americans needed to go to, which is to have a sustainable federal government. And that's gonna require some degree of fiscal conservatism and action, but they could take a different point of view on how they do it. And they could have core beliefs around that. - It's really, and by the way, Dean Phillips, we're inviting back on the program, Ezra Klein, Sam Harris. We wanna have some more people on the left come on here and maybe talk about this very issue. It's really three things they could work on. Number one, build 10 million homes in this country that are affordable.

That's a really key issue. Rich people should pay their fair share of taxes and reform the tax code. And then third, healthcare for everyone. Those three would get this party back on track. We're gonna make a more efficient government. You're gonna be able to buy a home. You're gonna get healthcare and rich people are gonna start paying their taxes, which they're not. And we're gonna stop with these crazy Trump tax breaks. That would be the perfect positioning. And it's not personal.

It's just, hey, we're a rich enough country that people should get health care. Why shouldn't people have health care in the modern world? Why can't these rich people who are donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump just pay some more taxes and make sure poor people have basic health care? Cyan, your thoughts? And then let's get back to the docket. Well, I disagree with all those points, obviously, but.

Sure, they could run on them. They have tried. They've definitely said we're going to have, you know, healthcare for all, you know, selling the American dream of homeownership, I actually think is flawed in many ways.

We're putting people into debt and for things they can't afford and they get screwed. And so I just actually think they need to find a unifying, figure out who their moderates are. And there's also politically homeless people. We didn't include them. You know, there's these people who are just like, well, I can't vote right and I'm not left either anymore.

So we've got to bridge this divide somehow, and they've got to figure out the messaging. But I don't think going back to what they used to do is going to work because they promised universal health care and it hasn't happened. And they had plenty of opportunity to do so. All right. Let's get back to the whiz deal and the docket here. Let's see if there's anything we didn't. Well, I think we should just talk about the price they paid and we should talk about the strategic rationale and how others are going to respond.

All right, so looking at this, the deal got sweetened massively over the year between when the first offer was made for $23 billion and then went up to $32 billion. The revenue roughly doubled since the time of the first offer.

And then there's some really interesting things in the details. There is a huge breakup fee. We saw the breakup fee with Adobe and Figma. This one is tremendous. It's 10% of the deal size, $3.2 billion in cash. They don't get an investment. If this deal doesn't go through, Google has to give Wiz $3.2 billion in cash. Let that sink in. This company is massively undervalued.

high growth, zero to 100 million in 18 months when they started. And last year, they passed 500 million in ARR. That puts the deal at roughly 60 times their run rate, and that is a high price. However, they're supposed to hit a billion in ARR this year, which would put it at 30 times

forward looking or 32 times, which isn't outrageous, because Google probably has Freeberg some concept or alphabet rather, some concept of how they could increase the velocity of that, of that revenue. Yeah. Or that it would be a defensive position. One of those two. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just to put it in context, right, Google's cloud revenue is about 40 billion a year. And Microsoft and Amazon's are both kind of plus or minus a little bit around 100 billion a year.

And so Google has kind of been, as we know, lagging a little bit in the cloud market. The thing about kind of enterprise sales is there's a common strategy, which is you kind of land with a beachhead and then you kind of expand from there with additional products and services. This has been the reason so many enterprise software companies over time from Oracle to Salesforce to Microsoft have been acquisitive and can make acquisitions very, very

synergistic. What that means is you can acquire a new product or a new service and then sell it into your install base or acquire the customers and then cross sell your existing products or services into their install base. And so you can increase the overall revenue by putting the two together and combining sales teams and being able to offer a combined offering. And so the theory here, and I think this is something I don't understand well enough, is that security has become such a kind of top

requirement and product category that it now effectively enables a beachhead type model to be successful, meaning you can cross sell the security into all of your existing customers, or there's enough new customers that Google might be acquiring from the Wiz acquisition that they can now bring new GCP services to and cross sell into. Now, to figure out how this actually has to make sense. So Google's ROIC is about 30%.

That means that when they make an investment, a CapEx investment or a capital investment, they expect to see about 30% of incremental profit per year

come back at some point from that capital investments, the capital investment they're making here, again, this doesn't hit their income statement goes on their balance sheet, it gets marked mostly as goodwill. So Google's going to have a 32 billion move from cash down to goodwill. So now they've got this asset on their balance sheet. And they've got to make an incremental $10 billion a year profit. So you kind of got to do the math $10 billion a year of incremental profit against 40 billion of cloud revenue.

And against $1 billion of Wiz revenue, there's a lot to be kind of built here to make this make financial sense. So then it becomes, okay, well, that's a really hard one to kind of think that they're going to get there very soon. But remember, Google's made some investments. I think it's a very tricky, you said it earlier, actually, it's a Trojan horse into the other clouds.

The reason WIS exists, and Jason mentioned this up front, is because of the value that it creates in a multi-cloud, multi-tenant environment across Azure and GCP and AWS. And when the deal was done, one of the things that WIS said is, hey, don't worry, we're not going to prefer GCP.

And it was interesting because I thought, wait, people actually thought that they would just prefer GCP. No, it's the exact opposite of why Google would want this. Because now what you have are your tentacles. Like think of any other service that any cloud provider provides where most of your revenue is coming from the other clouds. Can you name one?

Well, it didn't exist until now. And so I think the strategic rationale is quite clever, which is you start to gain customer traction and workloads in all of these other environments. And I suspect that TK is smart enough to try to pull these workloads back into GCP.

So that's like, I think, probably like- Because they were, you're saying, Shabbat, they would have the data they would be able to see from Wiz, like, hey, look, 90% of this type of job is existing on Oracle or it's over here on AWS or Azure. All three of you would do that if you're running Google Cloud. Of course, of course. And Thomas Kurian is smart enough and they're not going to pay. And David, by the way, the other thing that I would say is, I think this is where bankers get this totally wrong as the observer watching a deal like this is-

It's never about the rate of change when you're trying to do a deal. It's always about the rate of change of the rate of change. And the most incredible thing that Wiz had going for itself was that they were basically doubling in months. So the time to double at that scale

You can do any kind of fantastical model with that kind of raw input because when that boundary condition is true and you're trying to deescalate or scale down or weigh down a model, you're still going to get crazy gargantuan numbers that when you discount them back, gets them to this price. So, I mean, congrats to these guys. I would love to find out how does Wiz, because this is, I mean, I'm sure you guys have this question too.

How do you build a sales infrastructure that can scale that productively that quickly? That's an incredible thing. Yeah, I wonder if a lot of people are, I wonder if it's a lot of self-serve. People just sign up and use it. It's got to be some percentage of it. I mean, I'll tell you our experiences. We had a guy that had to come in and sell it into us and we had a little bit of a bake off. And I don't know, maybe we were unique and there's a simpler, lower scale product that's just more pay-go.

Consumption, yeah. Who knows? Sayan, looking at this, I'm curious your take on big VC because the Series A, $100 million round, we don't have the valuation for it. The B was at $1.7 billion a year later, so maybe we assume it was a $500 million valuation for 20%, something like that, I would guess. Maybe a $600 million post. Sequoia Insight Index, CyberStarts all did that Series A. When you look at the BCD&E,

Those same players all participated. This is another example of sometimes your best next investment as a VC firm is the highest growth outlier in your existing portfolio. Your thoughts on what this means in terms of venture capital and maybe the log jam that we saw over the last

four years, five years of no M&A. Because you and I came up when it was a golden era of M&A, and then the IPO market started to open up with Airbnb, Coinbase, and of course Uber. Now we're sitting here, if this is the starter's pistol, what could it look like for the VC industry, which has just been dead for the last 45 years? Yeah, I'm going to start with my thoughts on Wiz. I think...

This is really exciting for me because this is a great example of a contrarian investment. When this investment was initially made, there was not a lot of money going into security. There still isn't. It's an underinvested category. And with AI and the threat of the types of things that people can build and vibe coding and everything in between,

you're going to need better security. And so I'm excited to see that maybe this might become an investable category. I think this is the largest exit ever in the security space. Am I wrong? I mean, I think... I think you're probably correct. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of anything this large. M&A-wise, absolutely. Yeah, so how does this impact M&A? I mean, it's still pretty slow out there. Some action's better than no action, but Niantic was just bought by Scopely recently,

We're starting to see some- You were an angel investor in that, right? I was. That was the Pokemon Go folks. I remember you showing me Pokemon Go over a decade ago. Yeah. That's amazing. That's a Saudi company that bought it? It looks like a Saudi conglomerate. Yeah, that's a Saudi conglomerate.

And so that exited for $3.7 billion. And I think we're going to start seeing some movement, especially with the new administration. How long were you in that deal? How many years were you in that deal? Oh, my gosh. As soon as they spun out when Alphabet formed and spun them out as their own entity, there's a funny story for another time about how I got into the deal. But I...

I realized it was my only opportunity to get in as early as possible. And so I stalked the founder and sat at his door. Oh, tell us the story. Okay. All right. Well, permission granted. You can't say it's a great story. Yeah, it's a great story. So before Pokemon Go, they had this game called Ingress.

And I started playing it with my friends and I started noticing that my friends were doing some really unusual things. They were like charting helicopters and like traveling all over the world to cast these invisible triangles over the earth. Basically, it's a game of green versus blue and who can cast the biggest triangle. I was like, why are these people spending so much time? And not only that, but why are they going around taking pictures of points of interest?

for Google. Like, what is Google actually doing with this asset was my number one question. So I realized that Ingress was part of a bigger mapping

I mean, if you look at the team, you look at John Hanke, they all come from Keyhole and they're obviously part of the maps team and help build Google Earth. So this wasn't just a game. Pokemon Go was a joke. It was basically an April Fool's joke where the founder of Pokemon said, wouldn't it be cool if like we put Pokemon on the map and we just tried to find them? And John Hanke is like, yeah, like let's turn this into an Ingress like game.

I went around telling everybody, like, if I had a chance to invest in anything, it would be Niantic. And because they were part of Google, I thought there was no chance. And then I got a call one day and they said, hey, my friend of mine was like, did you hear Niantic spun out? I was like, oh, my gosh, I don't know anyone at Google. How do I reach John Hanke? And I realized I'd invested in this company called Hentwater and they were giving out game codes on the bottle cap.

And I was setting up her ticketing system one day and helping her out in her office. And I saw all these tickets coming in with the subject line that said Ingress Game Code. And I was like, what is this all about? And I just connected the dots and she introduced me to John Hanke. And then I went there with two engineers because I figured I got to show up with some value here. Two badass engineers who are players. We sat on the front stairs and basically sat there and said, please take our money. He's like, I don't need you. I've got Nintendo. I've got Google. I've got...

And we're like, no, you really need us. And he gave one of those engineers a job offer pretty much that day. He gave me a key card to the office. And so I can come and go from Niantic as I please, which is pretty awesome. But it's just a fun story, you know? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, this is what it takes to get in deals in Silicon Valley.

All right. The Fed held rates steady on Wednesday. Markets have been digesting this pretty flat. The second consecutive meeting, of course, where the Fed held rates steady. This is after the two consecutive cuts in September, 50 basis points in September, and then obviously 25 in December. And we had this high hopes that there would be, you know, four or five of these cuts this year, and there are apparently none right now.

Trump posted on Truth Social that he urged the Fed to cut rates to create a smoother transition for his tariffs. The tariffs are taking place, I believe, on April 2nd is that date. That's going to change the history of the United States forever.

And so, there were some other interesting takeaways. They lowered expectations on rate cuts. They expect two quarter point cuts for the rest of 2025. This would take us down to about 4%. Your thoughts, Shama? Let's add some color from Scott Besson. One of the biggest mistakes that I think Janet Yellen affected was this continued issuance of money on the short end of the curve to finance these deficits.

which gives you, you inherit an incredibly difficult challenge, I think, over the next nine months. I think there's like nine or 10 trillion that has to get refinanced. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, look, I thought that when rates were low, you're supposed to turn out rates. And instead, the Treasury for the past few years has pulled rates in. And I think part of that was to keep rates lower.

that they change the issuance schedule when rates move back up towards 5%. I have maintained that policy, but I'm maintaining it because, back to David's question, when are we going to see the results from getting the government spending under control? And I don't think the markets recognize it yet. Okay, translate it for us, Jamal. Yeah.

So he's saying a couple of things. He has inherited a problem that he hasn't quite yet changed. What is that problem? That problem is that when rates are low, you want to borrow for as long as possible, right? You don't want to borrow for the shortest amount of time. And now that rates are high, you're in this difficult position where you have to refinance all of it at a much higher rate. That's effectively the net of it. What I took away, and you can see more and understand more when you watch his whole interview

with Freeberg and I, but I think that there has been a fundamental disconnect and break from the Fed and the rest of Treasury and the government. And I think that Scott was very clear, like he views that as an independent organization and it should continue that way. But it was very clear to me that they are singing from their own hymn book.

And it just doesn't seem to me that Powell really understands the gravity of this situation. And I don't think that he's really willing to play ball. So he's probably on the margins. Again, this is my total interpretation of this. Would rather wait longer than necessary because I think it's almost like a political gambit. And I think that that's very dangerous. That's, again, just my own interpretation. I just do not think that Powell, A,

has the data to make a very clear decision, and B, will act unless it's totally necessary. So I think there's an overcorrection here that's happening, which I think is dangerous. And I think it's going to slow down the pace of cuts, which I think will then create a lot of other pressure in the economy.

Well, Dave, I'll drop it to you. The Fed's mandate as an independent organization is full employment and that 2% target, which we talked about before here, was just a number that was picked by an economist in New Zealand, of all places. It's not like it's some specific dosage that is perfect, but it is their mandate. They're not supposed to be a political organization. So what are your thoughts on this situation and these high rates?

which we have to pay for our debt. We've never been in a situation where in 100 days, a federal government is setting out to cut their spending by a trillion dollars.

which has a significant effect, a recessionary effect on the economy because there's less federal dollars flowing out, which goes as revenue into various businesses and income for a lot of people that are employed as contractors or directly by federal government agencies, coupled with, for the first time in 100 years, a significant change in the policy for tariffs for goods flowing into the United States.

and whether that will reduce spending by consumers or drive up the cost of products by consumers. And we talked extensively about both of these issues with Besant and Letnick in D.C. this week. And if I'm the Fed, I don't really have a great proxy historically for saying when this was done in the past, here's what the effect would be on GDP. Here's what the effect would be on inflation. Here's what the effect is going to be on inflation.

employment. In fact, folks like Glutnick are making the case that the current measure of GDP is probably not even correct, the way we measure it, the way we count it. And so the traditional economist's point of view on making rate adjustments as a function of

economic contraction or growth may be wrong. So I think there are quite a lot of these kind of confounding factors that the Fed is in a very wait and see mode. What I would look to is the bond market, which also seems to be in a kind of wait and see mode. So remember, right before the election, the bond market traded the 10 year up, so that rates went down to about 3.65%.

About a month ago, the 10-year was at 4.5%, and today it's at 4.22%. And so in the last month, we've seen rates on the 10-year decline by about a quarter point or about 30 basis points. And so the bond market is giving some kind of opening to the Fed saying, look, we expect that this is going to be deflationary, this is going to be recessionary. We are expecting you to cut rates to the Fed.

And so that's what the bond market is saying. And now I think we're going to start to wait for the reports that are going to start to come out that are going to show the impact. I don't think we're going to know immediately. So I think the first hundred days of this presidency and this administration's actions are going to be pretty telling on what's going to happen going forward in terms of the effect on employment.

on inflation and on GDP contraction or growth. And then I think the market will know how to handicap those numbers in the future based on actions by the administration. Right now, we're still in a like, I don't know how when you put all these things together or what it does. And it's a lot happening real fast. And so wait and see. Yeah, Cyan, I'm not sure.

If the Fed and, you know, the people in the administration can't communicate the strategy perfectly well and the Fed can't interpret it, I don't know that we're going to solve it here. But any thoughts on this? I don't know if they're not communicating it well. Besson did that. It's the effect that it will have ultimately on the economy and over what timescale. That's what's uncertain right now. Sorry, go ahead. Specifically the tariffs. I mean, you know, if they're on, they're off. To what extent?

It doesn't feel like the entire administration is on the same page. That's just based on everybody I've talked to. The Fed is not part of the administration. Of course not. Yes, they're independent. And the quote today in the Wall Street Journal, Nick, you can look for it, is Powell's statement basically blamed rising inflation in the short-term period on exogenous factors. He said, our job was getting the job done.

And now there's exogenous inflation. And I think what he's pointing to are these potential tariffs or something. So I think it's less that they're not coordinated. I think that they are

on very different pages. And I don't think the Fed wants to play ball. Sorry, Simon. And then I have a story at the end. Just quickly, you know, one of the things that really concerns me is how we've been so high on cheap supply for so long. Like if you look at Shein and Timo before this podcast, I wouldn't looked up that their prices are up by 27% or something like that. And so when you used to be able to get a garment for $18, you're now paying $37 and Zara is like 75 for an equivalent.

And I think people really liked getting packages in the mail and feeling like their dollar went further. And it's not going far. And so when you have a bunch of people who can't buy anything, and consumerism is a big part of our, unfortunately, in some ways, our culture, you know, what does that do to consumers?

our country. You know, if you're looking around, there's urban blight everywhere in retail. And, you know, we can't fill our malls, we don't have brick and mortar stores, they're shutting down forever 21 just shut down. You know, these are the types of things that, you know, people really care about is whether especially in a time where, you know, you do have a recession, people want to buy a tube of lipstick or, or a dress to feel better about their life.

And right now they can't even do that. And so that's what concerns me is thinking about the retail future and the consumer landscape of how this all affects everybody. Yeah, and consumer confidence is not good right now. People are feeling like a little bit concerned about it and this pandemic.

immigration plays into this. We're supposed to be deporting 20 million people. Maybe it's only going to be a million. Who knows about that issue? Who's going to actually work in these factories? Are people getting laid off or are they not getting laid off? Like there's just a soup of issues here that makes the Fed's job difficult.

extremely difficult. So in an extremely difficult, confusing storm, what is the best thing to do when you're driving the storm is just maybe try to keep the car going straight, not hit the brakes or not hit the gas. And that's what they're doing. They're taking a wait and see. And let's see if the administration can be a little bit crisper, I think, in their delivery of what their plan is, because it does seem chaotic to me. People here might disagree. Chamath, you said you had an anecdote?

Well, I kind of disagree with you in one way. I just think the Fed has totally lost the script and I don't think they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. What should they be doing? What they should be doing is actually observing the fact that there's some very complicated money flows. The front end of the curve makes no sense. The back end of the curve hasn't gone down long enough. They sat around and they allowed Treasury to basically pump trillions of short-term paper

So they were complicit in what Yellen did. And it's inconceivable that they didn't understand that strategy. And so it's inconceivable. So what's the future? Yeah. So what do you do when you have a, is recalcitrant the right word? You know, like let's just say you just have an organization that refuses to play ball. Again, there was a really interesting anecdote where Besant talked, this is in the interview, about how he really wants to deregulate and loosen up

bank lending standards, particularly at the community level. And I think that this is one very interesting thing that is a workaround to the Fed. Why?

Because if you think about where money gets transacted on a 10 to 20 to 30 year duration, those are the big boys. They're making big capital plays, right guys? But where do you play for the two month to two year kind of thing? It's smaller stuff. It's the stuff that's required to get small businesses off the ground. It's the community lending standards that actually allow communities to thrive. And so I think Scott realizes that.

that if the Fed's not going to really play ball, how do you loosen credit? How do you make sure that that money's available, Jason, to make sure that you can fight off a recession? You have to give it to these smaller banks. And he was pretty clear about that. So I think that that's, so it's almost as if the Fed is just going to get relegated to this like random organization, like, yeah, they'll control reverse repo, but they just won't have any credibility. And maybe that's not a bad thing, actually, in the end. Freiburg, it's your chance to shine. We have not won.

But we have two amazing space stories in Science Corner. First up, SpaceX successfully rescued two astronauts, and when they landed, there were dolphins breaching around the capsule. It was absolutely magical to see. Congratulations to the SpaceX team on that. And then, Firefly Aerospace completed its moon mission after achieving the first commercial soft lunar landing mission.

Take it whichever way you want, Freiburg. Which one of these do you want to start with? And then maybe we'll open the discussion up to a little bit broader discussion about the moon itself. SpaceX was able to rescue the two astronauts that were stranded by the Boeing Starliner debacle nine months ago. We talked about it on the show. You can go back and

Episode 192, 192 in August. Episode 192. And so having spent far more on the Starliner program than on the Crew Dragon program, the Starliner program is gone now. It's basically done. And the Crew Dragon program has now done 16 crewed flights to space, 11 for NASA, four private commercial flights.

and continues to perform. So congratulations to the SpaceX team on making it to ISS and bringing the astronauts home. Another successful mission for SpaceX. You know, there's a lot of hand-wringing. Oh my God, you know, conflict of interest, Elon with SpaceX and Doge and being close to the...

administration. When we look at what SpaceX has accomplished, I'm not a shareholder, but I know you are, Chamath. I'm not sure if we have folks on the panel. You are as well, Cyan. I am as well. Okay. Congratulations, everybody. But putting aside our personal investments, when you look at how much they've reduced the cost, is anybody even close to matching their cost to getting to space? Great question. Because this kind of like takes out the whole...

The whole hand-wringing around the conflict of interest with SpaceX, both on Starlink and on this, seems ridiculous because their price is so cheap. It makes no sense to even complain about it. We should just be giving Elon a high five and saying, thanks for charging us such a low rate. That's a great question. Cyan, you want to take it?

Well, you know, obviously, Boeing is the big loser here. You've got to, you know, it's interesting to me how bad they just fumbled this. And then there's the political element. I don't know if we want to get into it about how we weren't able to save these astronauts and they were stuck up there. You know, we were seeing it landing in the water. But what you're not seeing is they couldn't walk when they got out and they were only supposed to be there for what, like 10 days? Yeah.

Yeah. Eight days and it ended up eight months or something like that.

And so, you know, I think hopefully this is a message that's loud and clear. And one of the things I'm so excited about is little kids watching this and seeing this and what it means for the future of our country, because they're looking up to people like Elon and they're going to be the next political class in the future. And that will matter. You know, this is the equivalent of the moon landing.

And to see somebody in private enterprise do what Elon has done is just outstanding. So that's basically my comment on it. Any thoughts on the cost versus conflict of interest, I guess, hand-wringing? Look, there's a couple of startup alternatives. I'll put alternatives in quotes because they're not really GA. They're not generally available. They're not really launching. They're still in this early experimentation phase. One is Blue Origin and the second is Relativity Space. The problem with

Both of those two approaches, well, the feature of both of those two approaches is theoretically that there's a different economic model there. But the reality is that SpaceX is the only company that has consistently been able to take these costs and just crunch them down to more than one launch a day this year, I think. It's just an incredible scale and pace. So no, there is no economic alternative. They are the absolute cheapest in the market.

I'll tell you a very quick story. I was also an investor in Relativity. I think I owned about 10% of the company. I just got recapped out of that business because they needed a lot more money than folks were willing to give it. Then Eric Schmidt just stepped up and offered

I think $3 billion to the business. And I kind of said, no, I'm done. I'm out of here. So, you know, I took- Recaps are painful. You put all that money in. I mean, I think I took like a $380 million loss. It was not a good week two weeks ago. But anyways, that's not the point. The point is SpaceX is the best. There is nobody even close

The next closest alternative is years and years away. Would we benefit from more capacity? Sure. But the reality is they are the only solution. And they're safe. And they're reliable. And what Sayan said is so true. When the hell does America just abandon people? Why do you do that? Especially in space, of all places. Of all places. Yeah.

I mean, that is really dark. You would think this would be a Mark Watney story, like the Martian. Look, you have WNBA players that get put in Russian jail. We're willing to swap them for arms dealers in the last administration. That's pretty good insight. Fine. So we didn't abandon her, but then we let these two people flounder. I just think it's really inexcusable. That makes no sense. There definitely needs to be an investigation into what happened there. A lot of speculation.

It doesn't look good. I'm going to take Elon as the word that he offered. I mean, I don't see any reason why he would. The astronauts even confirmed that he offered. Oh, they did? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I know that people were saying like unconfirmed if the Biden administration. They were like, that's their way of saying, come get me. Please come get me. They're like, I'm literally withering away in space. Please come get me. They put their thumbs up. Okay. Come pick us up. Freeberg, take us to the next story.

And then we'll get a wrap here. This is basically what I think is going to end up being the story over the next couple of years is the space race between effectively SpaceX's platform and technology versus China, which has effectively ripped off SpaceX, as this is kind of being described here in this article. So you can kind of take a look at the Long March 9 rocket is what they call it. Fully reusable first stage powered by 30 of their particular engines.

which is comparable to SpaceX's first stage being powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons compared to the Chinese at 200 tons. This is kind of a very kind of equivalent design. All right, here's a look at it. Yeah, there's the model of the reusable Raptor.

Yeah, so this is the Long March 9. This is their super heavy lift rocket that they kind of first started talking about, call it a decade ago. The rocket has three stages, solid motors. They've recalibrated the design and it effectively has now kind of become a clone of Starship.

And so this whole system is gonna be the big race. And as we know, the way the Chinese operate when it comes to kind of industrialization is they can move fast, they can move big, they can move heavy, they can dedicate resources, they can dedicate an entirely vertically integrated supply chain to achieving an objective. So this will end up being kind of, I think, the big race over the next couple of years. - Slave labor. I think they've got a lot of resources at their fingertips.

You can kind of say that, but I don't know. A lot of people use slave labor in China as kind of a hand-wavy way of describing their competitive advantage. But I think this is really important. China has actually much more of an advantage in automation. And so if you look at many Chinese factories that everyone assumes are cheap because they have cheap slave labor, which is kind of the Western general kind of media perception of what goes on over there,

there's actually a lot of automation and engineering that's gone into building these systems that allow them to have much higher throughput at much lower cost. And I think that this is a really kind of key point that the Chinese kind of industrial base and their manufacturing base is so superior to the United States in this moment in time

that the US has to figure out a way to build its manufacturing base up to be competitive in an age of automation, not on a kind of labor to labor system, but on a system of production to system of production basis. And so this is really where we are lagging deeply as a country. And it is part of, you saw JD Vance's speech this week,

on revitalizing kind of manufacturing in the United States, but it has to be advanced manufacturing. It's not just about opening a warehouse and putting a bunch of jobs online. - Which means robots, not humans in it, because we're, yeah. - It means both. It means both. But it's about smarter systems. It's about designs on how you do manufacturing.

It's about using new things like 3D printing, like automation, coupled with great labor, coupled with great people working. But it's about designing entirely new ways of doing manufacturing. And we've stalled out over the last three decades in the United States as we globalized and we handed off all manufacturing to the East.

and the United States basically just imported manufactured goods while they invested in all of the infrastructure to deliver advanced manufacturing at scale. And so we've got a lot of catching up to do. Otherwise, China will get ahead of us in any product faster than we will ever be able to kind of stay ahead of the game on. And I think we're seeing that in the space race now, and it's definitely worth taking note that this is kind of one core example of this advantage that they've developed for themselves.

I'm concerned about the cultural stuff of this. Like America is so ill-equipped, especially with this wave of the last eight years of DEI and how it's infiltrated all of our institutions and how we raise our children in this country. Like we taught them that math is racist while China is, you know, their kids are the leaders in AI. You know, deep seek should show us that, you know, we have underestimated China every step of the way. And I think it's just a tragedy that,

I'm working on a book that's coming out called The War on Science, which will actually expose, a friend of mine wrote it. It's a collection of essays, exposes just how entrenched this became in every institution from medical, science, etc. Like, how do we recover from that is how we can compete with China, because otherwise we can't.

You know, I really honestly don't understand how we're going to do it if we don't. And part of it is seeing these space launches. You know, obviously the next generation of children will be inspired by that. But we have a gap of about eight to 10 years where we lost that advantage. I mean, in San Francisco, we saw it up close and personal, right? They banned AP math. I mean, what lunatics are they?

could ever, I mean, I guess the lunatics in San Francisco could literally justify that it was some massive inequality that the smart kids got to take harder courses. Flash the thing from NBC, Nick. We know who was responsible for it. Are you blaming white women, college-educated white women? I'm just saying look at the data. Okay. What is going on here? Like,

For those of you not watching, it's a voter's opinion. White men, no degree. White men, college degree. White women, no degree. White women, college degree. And yeah, DEI plus 50, no, plus 31 for white women in college. Yeah, NBC News poll. Yeah, this is not from a right-leaning organization here. Just to build on what you were saying, it's math that was told was racist

In one of the best private schools here in Silicon Valley, they taught the girls. These are girls in the best all-girls private school in Silicon Valley. That reading was racist. Could you imagine? There was a spreadsheet that these kids had to memorize every day that had every other kid's pronoun.

And if you didn't get it right, you'd get in trouble. Well, not only that, but they are taught that you're either an oppressor or you're oppressed and there's no other option. And so like if you go to one of these private nice schools, then you're automatically an oppressor. So think about that. If you're a kid and you're born bad, inherently bad, evil from birth, what does that do? What does that do? What does that do to your self-worth? Yeah, your desire to actually...

do anything in society. We have to fix that. I actually think it's one of the number one issues in our country is to get kids excited about being Americans again. You know, we were talking about the Democrat Party.

They don't love America on the far left. They hate America and they're very loud and vocal about it. And so I'm glad that their, you know, their base is shrinking, but it needs to shrink further and we need to have more unifying messages. And I think SpaceX could be one of those unifying messages where we bring people together and we encourage kids to think bigger about the future. I'll tell you one anecdote. I have been hanging out at UT a little bit, the University of Texas, and

and Golden Longhorns. And I've had three or four people of means, I'll say, you know, people who could afford to go to any college ask me, do you have any hookups at UT? I want to take a tour. I want to check this out. And I'm like, oh, and they're like, yeah, I just don't want to send my kids to, you know, these, as Chamath has called them previously on the program, woke madrasas. I want to send them to the South to be educated,

In Texas or somewhere, you know, where they're not going to learn to be part of Hamas or, you know, Al Qaeda. So there you have it, folks. Send your kids. Yeah. Send them to a place that values free speech. Look there first. Look at the fire rating. And then that should tell you everything you need to know. Yeah.

It's a huge trend. It's a huge trend that people want to go to these schools. Getting back on track, I'll just give a quick shout out as well to Firefly, the Blue Ghost. Lunar Lander landed on March 2nd, lasted on the lunar surface for 14 days, launched on January 15th. They are launching two additional missions, Mission 2 and Mission 3. Mission 2 is going to launch in 2026. Back

Back to the Moon 28 for mission three, all of which are doing kind of geologic surveying of the lunar surface. Obviously, the long-term goal here is can we establish a base on the moon? You're a genius. Mission five is going directly to your dingleberries. They're going to go...

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

Would that be something you guys would be interested in? I'm going. I'm going. I talked to my guy. 100%. You got a guy? I'm going. I'm saying, would you do it? I talked to my guy. He said I could go out with him, so I'm going. Do you guys have an interest in that? Like, is that something that you'd be motivated to do? 100%. 100%. I am 100% going to do it when I'm 75. I'm not sure. It's a great question about a week. A week seems like a very, wow, 100%.

I would go for a month. What about a day? Like just a lunar day? Like a lunar picnic? Yes. A little picnic and then you come back? Yeah. What would you bring? What are you going to bring? You bring a little Chardonnay? What are you thinking would pair well with the dark side of the moon there? What are you going to bring? I'd bring like a- What should Sean make us when we go? 2020 LaFont. I'd bring like a white burgundy. Got it.

Nick, can you make an image of Chamath on the moon drinking wine? Can you figure out a way to do that, please? Thank you. What should we serve on the moon? Would you think we should go with fish, a little syrup and turf? Maybe a syrup and turf would be good. You know, people don't realize that white burgundy tastes great with me. I know that people think you should always drink a very heavy red, but it's not true. I just want everybody to know, the more you know.

The more you know. Thanks for tuning into the All In Podcast. She's Cyan Bannister. I'm Jake Howe. He's Chamath Bhai-Hapatia. And, of course, your Sultan of Science, David Friedberg. And, of course, thanks to CEO John and Producer Nick, everybody who put so much effort into it. And thanks to our partners for, yeah, supporting the show. We'll see you all next time. Love you, guys. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Rain Man David Sacks. And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Love you, Westies. Queen of Kinwad. Westies are gone. A dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh, man. The Dash.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow. You're a bee. What? You're a bee. What? We need to get merch. I'm doing it.