Chamath
Appearances
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Hey everybody, Friedberg here. What you're about to hear is a panel discussion from our All In Summit recorded in LA on September 10th. We're going to publish some of the best conversations once a week over the next month. If you want to see all the talks, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash at all in and follow us on X at the all in pod.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Well, as an economist, can you talk about the impact of a cold or hot conflict with China from an economic perspective, given the trade relations?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
So why has it become so universal to assume that we are already in a state of conflict with China on not just party lines, but almost any spectrum you could kind of consider?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Two cities trapped.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
I know, but we only have a minute left. We've got to add five minutes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Let me just ask one, because we're a little bit, I know we were going to try and talk about Middle East for a good chunk of this, so I just want to scenario propose, or kind of give you guys a scenario, get your reaction, because it is kind of what feels to be the most imminent theater of conflict. The West Bank The Israelis are buttressing the settlements. There's a lot of checkpoints.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Things are getting very tense. They're running raids, and it's becoming a very difficult place to live for Palestinians, and there's a real concern that the West Bank collapses.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
And Israelis. But there's a real risk that the West Bank collapses and turns into a real conflict zone. If that happens, the Jordanians are sitting right there, and they're not gonna let Palestinians get slaughtered. They're gonna have to do something, and they're such a strong ally of the United States. Does that trigger a theater of response where what is Saudi going to do?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Are others going to be drawn to the region? Does the collapse of the West Bank or the conflict that seems to be brewing in the West Bank become this kind of tinderbox for everyone showing up and getting involved and create some sort of regional issue that we get drawn into in a bigger way?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
The reciprocal response.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
That question will be answered based on who leads the next administration.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
Is it some combination? Is there a philosophical entrenchment, or is it just this inertial issue that once a policy begins, it's hard to change, and the system's just working with 10,000 people working towards it?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
I've met them, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
So that's a values point of view, though, right? There are values that they hold dear, that many do hold dear, that liberalism, democracy does ultimately, I believe I've heard this, reduce conflict worldwide, that there's an importance that we've never seen two democratic nations since World War II go to war.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
And that there's a reason why we want to see liberalism kind of breed throughout the world. And it's our responsibility for global peace to make that a mandate.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs | All-In Summit 2024
And by the way, I'm... What do you call it where you pull the spirits of the voice of others? But I'm just trying to... Channeling. Channeling. That's the word.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
All right, everybody, let's get the show started here. Jason, why are you wearing a tux? What's going on there?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Sorry, guys. Oh, my goodness. All those losses. Wow. That is. Three in one day. Three in one day. My goodness. I thought OpenAI was nothing without its people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Are you using 01 Preview or 01 Mini?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, yeah, I mean, this is pretty impressive. And just to build on what Freeberg was saying about chain of thought, where this all leads is to agents, where you can actually tell the AI to do work for you, you give it an objective, it can break the objective down into tasks, and then it can work each of those tasks.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And OpenAI at a recent meeting with investors said that PhD level reasoning was next on its roadmap, and then agents weren't far behind that. they've now released at least the preview of the PhD-level reasoning with this O1 model. So I think we can expect an announcement pretty soon about agents.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Yeah, and so... And if you think about business value, we think a lot about this as like, where's the SaaS opportunity in all this, the software as a service opportunity? It's going to be in agents. I think we'll ultimately look back on these sort of chat models as a little bit of a parlor trick compared to what agents are going to do. in the workplace.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
If you've ever been to a call center or an operations center, they're also called service factories. It's assembly lines of people doing very complicated knowledge work. But ultimately, you can unravel exactly what the chain is there, the chain of thought that goes into their decisions. It's very complicated, and that's why you have to have humans doing it. But you could imagine that...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Once system integrators or enterprise SaaS apps go into these places, go into these companies, they integrate the data, and then they map out the workflow. You could replace a lot of these steps in the workflow with agents.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, it's interesting. We were having a version of this conversation last week on the pod, and I started getting texts from Benioff as he was listening to it. And then he called me, and I think he got a little bit triggered by the idea that systems of record like Salesforce are going to be obsolete in this new AI era. And he made a very compelling case to me about why that wouldn't happen.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Which is? Well, first of all, I think AI models are predictive. I mean, at the end of the day, they're predicting the next set of texts and so forth. And when it comes to like your employee list or your customer list, You just want to have a source of truth. You don't want it to be 98% accurate. You just want it to be 100% accurate.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
You want to know if the federal government asks you for the tax ID numbers of your employees, you just want to be able to give it to them. If Wall Street analysts ask you for your customer list and what the gap revenue is, you just want to be able to provide that. You don't want AI models figuring it out. So you're still going to need a system of record. Furthermore,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
He made the point that you still need databases, you still need enterprise security if you're dealing with enterprises, you still need compliance, you still need sharing models. There's all these aspects, all these things that have been built on top of the database that SaaS companies have been doing for 25 years. And then the final point that I think is compelling is that
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Enterprise customers don't want to DIY it, right? They don't want to have to figure out how to put this together. And you can't just hand them an LLM and say, here you go. There's a lot of work that is needed in order to make these models productive.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And so at a minimum, you're going to need system integrators and consultants to come in there, connect, hold on, just connect all the enterprise data to these models, map the workflows. You have to do that now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
They have to remove the profit cap and do the C-Corp.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, by the way, he said he's willing to come on the pod and talk about this very issue. But just with you? No, no, no, no. He'll come on the pod and discuss whether AI makes SaaS obsolete. A lot of people are asking that question.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, it was Bloomberg. It's not some article. It was Bloomberg, and it got a lot of traction, and it was re-reported by a lot of places, and I don't see anyone disputing it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
It looks like you're fighting back a tear.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
You could do that today. It's just that- That's an interesting point.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
When we can do a good bit, yeah. That's mine. No, I think that Bloomberg reported it based on, obviously, talks that are ongoing with investors who have committed to this round. And no one's disputing it. Has anyone said it's not true?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So let's wrap this up so we can get to the next thing. Yes, please.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So look, I think that on the whole, I agree with Benioff here that there's more net new opportunity for AI companies, whether they be startups or you know, existing big companies like Salesforce that are trying to do AI, then there is disruption. I think there will be some disruption. It's very hard for us to see exactly what AI is going to look like in five or 10 years.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So I don't want to discount the possibility that there will be some disruption of existing players. But I think on the whole, there's more net new opportunity. For example, the most highly valued public software company right now in terms of ARR multiple is Palantir. And I think that's largely because the market perceives Palantir as having a big AI opportunity. What is Palantir's approach?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
The first thing Palantir does when they go into a customer is they integrate with all of its systems. And they're dealing with the largest enterprises. They're dealing with the government, the Pentagon, Department of Defense. The first thing they do is go in, and integrate with all of these legacy systems. And they collect all of the data in one place. They call it creating a digital twin.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And once all the data is in one place with the right permissions and safeguards, now analysts can start working it. And that was their historical value proposition. But in addition, AI can now start working that problem. So anything that the analysts could work, now AI is going to be able to work. And so they're in an ideal position to master these new AI workflows.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So what is the point I'm making? It's just that you can't just throw an LLM at these large enterprises. You have to go in there and integrate with the existing systems. It's not about ripping out the existing systems because that's just a lot of headaches that nobody needs. It's generally an easier approach just to collect the data.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I just think that that's the cycle. Whenever you're dealing with a disruption as big as this current one, I think it's always tempting to think in terms of the existing pie getting disrupted and shrunk as opposed to the pie getting so big with new use cases that on the whole, the ecosystem benefits. No, no, no, I agree with that. I suspect that's what's going to happen.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Speaking of investing in late-stage companies, we never closed the loop on the whole open AI thing. What did we think of the fact that they're completely changing the structure of this company? They're changing it into a corporation from the nonprofit, and Sam's now getting a $10 billion stock package.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I've got enough money.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I'm paid enough for health insurance. I have no equity in OpenAI.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
No, Louisiana. That's Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana. He's a very smart guy, actually, with a lot of you know, sort of common folk wisdom. He got that simple talk. Yeah, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Yeah, he's very funny, but... He's very funny. If you listen to him, he knows how to slice and dice his opponents.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Look, I said on a previous show that this organizational chart of open AI was ridiculously complicated and they should go clean it up. They should open up the books and straighten everyone out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And I also said that as part of that, they could give Sam Altman a CEO option grant and they should also give Elon some fair compensation for being the seed investor who put in the first $50 million and co-founder. And what you're seeing is, well, they're kind of doing that. They're opening up the books. They're straightening out the corporate structure.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
They're giving Sam his option grant, but they didn't do anything for Elon. And I'm not saying this as Elon's friend. I'm just saying that it's not really fair to basically go fix the original situation. You're making it into a for-profit. You're giving everyone shares, but the guy who puts in the original seed capital doesn't get anything. That's ridiculous.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And what they're basically saying to Elon is, if you don't like it, just sue us. I mean, that's basically what they're doing. And I said that they should go clean this up, but they should make it right with everybody. So how do you not make it right with Elon? I haven't talked to him about this, but he reacted on X saying this is really wrong. It appeared to be a surprise to him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I doubt he knew this was coming. So the company apparently made no effort to make things right with him. And I think that that is a bit ridiculous.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
If you're gonna clean this up, if you're gonna change the original purpose of this organization to being a standard for-profit company where the CEO who previously said he wasn't gonna get any compensation is now getting $10 billion of compensation, how do you do that and then not clean it up for the co-founder who put in the first $50 million? That doesn't make sense to me.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
No, I saw a comment. Somebody commented like, oh, wow, it's like amazing to hear Chamath expand on topics throughout the constant eruptions by J-Cal.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And when Reid was on our pod, he said, well, Elon's rich enough. Well, that's not a principled excuse. I mean, does Vinod ever act that way? Does Reid ever act that way? Do they ever say, well, you know, you don't need to do what's fair for me because I'm already rich? That's not a principled answer.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Reid made that argument, and I think it's the best argument the company has. But let's think about that argument. Maybe Elon was busy that week. Maybe Elon already felt like he had put all the money that he had allocated for something like this into it because he put in a $50 million check, whereas Reid put in $10 million. We don't know what Elon was thinking at that time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Maybe there was a crisis at Tesla and he was just really busy. The point is Elon shouldn't have been obligated to put in more money into this venture. The fact of the matter is they're refactoring the whole venture. Elon had an expectation when he put in the $50 million that this would be a nonprofit and stay a nonprofit. And they're changing that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And if they change it, they have to make things right with him. It doesn't really matter whether he had a subsequent opportunity to invest. He wasn't obligated to make that investment. What he had an expectation of is that his $50 million would be used for a philanthropic purpose, and clearly it has not been.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, you have to go back pretty far for Joe Rogan to be a nobody. I mean, he had a TV show for a long time.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
He was more like a stand-up comic for a while. He was a stand-up comic. Stand-up comic, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I think it does look pretty impressive. I mean, you can wear these Meta Orion glasses around And look like a human. I mean, you might look like Eugene Levy, but you'll still look like a semi-normal person. Whereas you can't wear the Apple Vision Pro. I mean, you can't wear that around.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I mean, it seems like a major advancement, certainly compared to Apple Vision Pro. I mean, you don't hear about the Apple Vision Pros anymore at all. I mean, those things came and went. It's pretty funny. It seems to me that Meta is executing extremely well. I mean, you had the very successful cost cutting, which Wall Street liked.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Zuck published that letter, which I give him credit for, regretting the censorship that Meta did, which was at the behest of the deep state. They made huge advancements in AI. I don't think they were initially on the cutting edge of that, but they've caught up. And now they're leading the open source movement with Lama 3.2. And now it seems to me that they're ahead on augmented reality.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Ever since Zuck grew out the hair, Don't ever cut the hair. It's like Samson.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Sax hurts your feeling when he's playing chess and not paying attention. Yeah, I'll be playing chess on my AR glasses while pretending to listen to you.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
One point I want to just hit on is that the reason why these glasses have a chance of working is because of AI. I mean, Facebook initially made these... That's exactly my point. That's exactly my point. Facebook made these huge investments before AI was a thing. And in a way, I think they've kind of gotten lucky because what AI gives you is voice and audio.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So you can talk to the glasses or whatever the wearable is. It can talk to you. That's the five things. Like perfect natural language. And... Computer vision allows it to understand the world around you. So whatever this device is, it can be a true personal digital assistant in the real world.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, why don't we get into the topic?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Sam Altman is reportedly... I thought they're converting to a C-Corp, no?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
B-Corp doesn't really mean anything.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Oh my God, I'm like so sick of this topic of job loss or job disruption. I got in so much trouble last week. You asked a question about whether the upper middle class is going to suffer because they're all going to be put out of work by AI. And I just kind of brush it off, not because I'm advocating for that, but just because I don't think it's going to happen. Hmm.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
This whole thing about job loss is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of job disruption. But in the case of coders, just as an example, I think we can say that coders, depending on who you talk to, are 10%, 20%, 30% more productive as a result of these coding assistant tools. But we still need coders. You can't automate 100% of it. And the world needs so many of them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
The need for software is unlimited. We can't hire enough of them. At Glue, by the way, shout out if you're a coder who is afraid of not being able to get a job, apply for one at Glue. Believe me, we're hiring. I just think that this is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of disruption in the knowledge worker space. Like we talked about the workflow at call centers and service factories.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
There's going to be a lot of change. But at the end of the day, I think there's going to be plenty of work. for humans to do. And some of the work will be more in the blue collar space. And I agree with Jamath that this is a good thing. I think there's been perhaps an over emphasis on the idea that the only way to get ahead in life is to get like a fancy degree from one of these universities.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And we've seen that many of the universities, they're just not that great, they're overpriced, you end up graduating with a mountain of debt, and you get a degree that is, you know, maybe even far worse than computer science, this is completely worthless. So if people learn more vocational skills, if they skip college, because they have a
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
a proclivity to do something that doesn't need that degree, I think that's a good thing and that's healthy for the economy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Let's hear it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
It's not a bit.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
It could be a bit. I'll write you a song next week.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Wait, these are all OpenAI employees? Yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, I think Freeberg's right that we're at the beginning stages of, I think what will soon be referred to as the third Lebanon war, The first one was in 1982. Israel went into Lebanon and occupied it until 2000. Then it went back in 2006, left after about a month, and now we're in the third war. It's hard to say exactly how much this will escalate. The IDF is exhausted after the war in Gaza.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
There's significant opposition within Israel and within the armed forces to a big ground invasion of Lebanon. So far, most of the fighting has been Israel using its air superiority overwhelming firepower against southern Lebanon. And I think that if Israel makes a ground invasion, they're giving Hezbollah the war that Hezbollah wants.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
I mean, Hezbollah would love for this to turn into a guerrilla war in southern Lebanon. So I think there's still some question about whether Netanyahu will do that or not. At the same time, it's also possible that Hezbollah will attack northern Israel. Nasrallah has threatened to invade the Galilee in response to what Israel is doing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
If Hezbollah and Israel are in a full-scale war with ground forces, it could be very easy for Iran to get pulled into it on Hezbollah's side. And if that happens, I think it's just inevitable that the United States will be pulled into this war. So yeah, look, I think we are drifting, and we have been drifting, into a regional war in the Middle East that...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
you know, ideally would not pull in the US. I think the US should try to avoid being pulled in, but I think very likely will be pulled in if it escalates. And then meanwhile, in terms of the war in Ukraine, I mean, I've been warning about this for two and a half years, how dangerous the situation was. And that's why we should have availed ourselves of every diplomatic opportunity to make peace.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And we now know, because there's been such universal reporting, that in Istanbul, in the first month of the Ukraine war, there was an opportunity to make a deal with Russia where Ukraine would get all this territory back. It's just that Ukraine would have to agree not to be part of NATO, would have to agree to be neutral and not part of the Western military bloc that was so threatening to Russia.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
The Biden administration refused to make that deal. They sent in Boris Johnson to scuttle it. They threw cold water on it. They blocked it. They told Zelensky, we'll give you all the weapons you need to fight Russia. Zelensky believed in that. It has not worked out that way. Ukraine is getting destroyed. It's very hard to get honest reporting on this from the mainstream media, but...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
The sources I've read suggest that the Ukrainians are losing about 30,000 troops per month. And that's just KIA. I don't even think that's wounded, that on a bad day, they're suffering 1,200 casualties. It's more than even during that failed counteroffensive last summer that Ukraine had. During that time, they were losing about 20,000 troops a month. So the level of carnage is escalating.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Russia has more of everything, more weapons, more firepower, air superiority, and they are destroying Ukraine. And it's very clear, I think that Ukraine, it could be in the next month, it could be in the next two months, it could be in the next six months, I think they're eventually going to collapse. They're getting close to being combat incapable.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And in a way, that poses the biggest danger, because The closer Ukraine gets to collapse, the more the West is going to be tempted to intervene directly in order to save them. And that is what Zelensky was here in the U.S. doing over the past week, is arguing for direct involvement by America in the Ukraine war to save him. How did he propose this?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
He said, we want to be directly admitted to NATO immediately. That was his proposal. request. And he called this the victory plan. So in other words, his plan for victory is to get America involved in the war and fighting it for him. But that is the only chance Ukraine has.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And it is possible that the Biden-Harris administration will agree to do that, or at least agree to some significant escalation. So far, I think Biden, to his credit, has resisted another Zelensky demand, which is the ability to use America's long-range missiles and British long-range missiles, the storm shadows, against Russian cities. That is what Zelensky is asking for.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Zelensky wants a major escalation of the war because that is the only thing that's going to save him, save his side and maybe even his neck personally. And so we're one mistake away from the very dangerous situation that Chamath and Freeburg have described.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
If a President Biden, who is basically senile, or a President Harris agree to one of these Zelensky requests, we could very easily find ourselves in a direct war with the Russians.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And the reason why this could happen is because we don't have a fair media that's fairly reported anything about this war. I mean, Trump is on the campaign trail making, I think, very valid points about this war, that the Ukrainian cause is doomed and that we should be seeking a peace deal and a settlement before this can spiral into World War III. That is fundamentally correct.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
But the media portrays that as being pro-Russian and pro-Putin. And if you say that you want peace, you are basically on the take from Putin and Russia. That is what the media has told the American public for three years.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Jeffrey Sachs said it perfectly. You don't get a second chance in the nuclear age.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Chamath, you're right. I mean, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of America was huddled around their TV sets, worried about what would happen. There is no similar concern in this day and age about the escalatory wars that are happening. There's a little bit of concern, I think, about what's happening in the Middle East.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
There's virtually no concern about what's happening in Ukraine because people think it can't affect them. But it can. And one of the reasons it could affect them is because we do not have a fair debate about that issue in the US media. The media has simply caricatured any opposition to the war as being pro-Putin.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Yeah, they're protesting too much. How can you say it's not a risk?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Too short. Too short.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
We lost Mira too?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
Well, so the whisper numbers I heard was that their revenue run rate for this year was in the $4 to $6 billion range, which is a little higher than that. So you're right, if it's really more like 3.4, this valuation is about 50 times current revenue. But if it's more like 5 billion, then it's only 30 times. And if it's growing 100% year over year, it's only 15 times next year.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
So depending what the numbers actually are, the $150 billion valuation could be warranted. I don't think 15 times... Ford, ARR is a high valuation for a company that has this kind of strategic opportunity. I think it all comes down to the durability of its comparative advantage here. I think there's no question that OpenAI is the leader of the pack. It has the most advanced AI models.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
It's got the best developer ecosystem, the best APIs. It keeps rolling out new products. And the question is just how durable that
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
The enforcer? He left too?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
advantages is there really a moat to any of this for example meta just announced llama 3.2 which can do voice and this is roughly at the same time that open ai just released its voice api so the open source ecosystem is kind of hot on open ai's heels the large companies google microsoft so forth. They're hot on their heels too, although it seems like they're further behind where Meta is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war
And the question is just, can OpenAI maintain its lead? Can it consolidate its lead? Can it develop some moats? If so, it's on track to be the next trillion dollar big tech company. But if not, it could be eroded and you could see the value of OpenAI get commoditized. And we'll look back on it as kind of a cautionary tale.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. The channel's been active. We're in the afterglow. We're in the All In Summit afterglow. It's so glowing that Friedberg couldn't make it. He has been riding a high.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
and kind of broken when short rates go above long rates the yield curve inverts and it's always been the prelude to a recession but the recession doesn't come when the yield curve inverts it usually comes when the yield curve D inverts and the reason for that is because the Fed now sees weakness and dramatically cuts the short rates so in other words it jacks up the short rates to control inflation that works it trickles through the economy the economy cools down and
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And then the Fed says, oh, maybe we've overcorrected. They slam on the brakes and then they cut rates to basically make up for the effect on the economy. So the yield curve has finally de-inverted. And the question is just, do we now get that recession or did the Fed manage this to a soft landing? I don't think we know. I'm not
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I'm not like calling a recession, but this is the thing that people are concerned about. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, Sax, we were talking about AI in the group chat, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah. I think it's now becoming really clear that call centers are going to be the first really big disruption caused by AI. Yeah. I mean, all the level one customer support is going to get replaced by AI. I mean, LLMs plus voice because, you know, OpenAI just released their audio API and You saw that at the All In Summit, we released a Mearsheimer AI where we trained it on all of his work.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And you can go to Mearsheimer.ai and ask it questions. And it will tell you the answers in his voice because we cloned his voice using Resemble AI. Anyway, so AI can do voice now. And it can be trained extremely well on large data sets to give you answers to questions, which is pretty much what customer support is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, that's how it should go. You know, when you create something in the world, Chamath, what you want to do is you want to hand it off to professional management to then scale it, right? Not everybody can do the creative act of actually forming something. You need to have these operators to go and then execute your vision.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So I think it's now becoming clear that I think within the next two to three years, you're going to see a massive disruption in that industry.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I agree with that massively. And I think there's another underreported story, which is People don't like to call and talk to a customer service agent, like an actual human, if they can avoid it. They would much rather go on YouTube and say, how do I fix this? Or ask ChatGPT, how do I fix this? It's like, I don't want to waste another person's time. Just give me the answer as quick as possible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And AI will give you the answer quicker. YouTube will give you the answer quicker. I've had so many times where I have people who work for me who are like, I don't know how to do that. And I literally would walk up to their computer and load YouTube and type in, how do I blank and there's a video there, watch it on two speed, you can do it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That's what's, you know, gonna also kill this, like, I don't want to talk to a human, just change my flight, just You know, answer my question.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, I mean, you talk about disruption. Call centers are a very big part of the economy in certain geographies. Denver, Salt Lake, I mean, parts of Florida. Yeah, exactly. It's a really big deal. If like half the cost gets ripped out of those call centers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Where would you move those people?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
If you had your choice, could they move to sales? Well, I think sales will be the one that's disrupted after customer support. But I don't know. I think it's going to be very disruptive. One of the reasons I think this is, in the early days of LLMs, people were saying that legal services would be disrupted. And you saw some very highly valued startups rocketing up based on that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think the problem with that is the error rate. So when you think about AI applications, you have to think about what is the tolerable error rate that the industry will allow? Because we know that AIs get things wrong, they can hallucinate. And you're never going to be able to make it perfect. I mean, you can improve the quality, but it's still going to have some errors.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And when you're dealing with like legal services, for example, you just can't have mistakes. This is not tolerated. However, customer support is different. Customer support is already organized into levels. Level one, level two, level three, based on difficulty. And there's already, in a sense, a mechanism for failover.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
If like the level one customer support person can't answer the question, they kick it up to level two. So... There's a place for... LLMs to start in customer support, which is replacing all the level one and then working their way up the chain to level two as they get better and better.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And so what I'm saying is that the level of accuracy now, especially with the new PhD level reasoning models is good enough. We don't need to wait for like some perfect LLM model. And I think this is why this is going to be a big, big disruption. Millions of people potentially are going to have their jobs disrupted or at least transformed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, it could be the end of the entire career as well, Chamath, if you were to look at this four by four sort of quadrant chart that Sachs is describing, which is the cost of an era, you know, and the actual complexity of the job, perhaps, or the cost of the job. How do you look at this? I know you're working on software that kind of does this with your startup as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And I just want to give Free Breakfast Flowers for executing incredibly well. We all play a role, Chamath. Saks launched a tequila company. I want to say thanks to Friedberg. He did all of these great speakers. Big thank you to our CEO, John, who put together all the operations. Nick did incredible. Nick did incredible, incredible job with those opening graphics. They went viral.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's really... Have you guys worked with the O1 preview yet? I just literally have been using this new reasoning engine that... OpenAI released, and it is extraordinary. And it's kind of thinking about the next three or four prompts you would do. And I literally just got this while we're on the show. I've hit the limit for my paid account because this thing is so intense on compute, I guess.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
One of the reasons why I'm bullish on this customer support use case is because there's a very large data set to train on. You've got all of the product documentation that companies have already created. You've got all of the previous email support. And calls. And calls, yeah. The calls have been recorded, so you can now train the AI on that. So there's a very large...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Zach helped with the graphics. You had young Spielberg chipping in. You had Laura did an amazing job with stage management. And of course, you know, I focused on the moderation. I got a lot of great things. So everybody plays a role. You got Saks with the tequila, Friedberg, Laura, Zach, Spielberg, Nick, John, everybody brought something to the table. So congratulations to everybody.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
body of data to train the AI model on. And it's not necessarily the most proprietary. It's not like dealing with people's medical records or even confidential legal documents, something like that. So the data is readily available. And then the foundation models are getting really good.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think there's a big question here about value capture, which is there's a number of startups now that are becoming very highly valued that are chasing this disruption, this sort of customer support agent disruption. And they're getting into very high valuations, even unicorn valuations already.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And the question is, well, wait, if the foundation models are advancing at such a rate, like a year from now, why couldn't a developer, just a startup of a few guys, take next year's model and train it and then commoditize the
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's just too easy. You'll be able to do it on a local computer. I mean, you'll just download the entire database of every call on a MacBook with an M3 and just run it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah. I mean, to restate it, watch people use a piece of software and then based on what they do, you could write the code, which you could take a video of a video game today, like Angry Birds. And somebody did this. You give the Angry Birds iPad game from 15 years ago to AI, it's going to back into the code. just by watching it. So why not just watch people use Salesforce or Workday?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That's it. Scale through people. That's it. Nobody got the joke. Chamath, everybody contributed. You understand? Saks, new tequila company. John, operations. You have Freebird content. Me with being the world's greatest moderator up there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, I saw the Klarna story where they said they were going to rip out Salesforce and Workday because they were able to write their own bespoke code using AI. I mean, I have to say I'm a little bit skeptical of that story for a couple of reasons. One is... If that's their goal, why wouldn't they have open-sourced these products they created?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
You might as well get the whole ecosystem working on it because they're not trying to sell this product that they've internally created. They're just trying to rip out the cost, so why not let the whole ecosystem see it? The other thing is, if it's so easy to do, why hasn't the market already been flooded with new startups that are effectively able to reverse-engineer
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, look, I think that if you're only using a few use cases of these big, complicated software packages, then yeah, it's probably easier than ever to deprecate them, you know, eliminate them from your stack and just have your own internal engineers build specifically what you need in a more tightly integrated way. I think that is possible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, but the product's garbage. I mean, look how ridiculous this is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's built on top of Oracle's PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customize without an extra 400 million to hit 1 billion. New Yorkers got the image below and pay 5 million plus a year for hosting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Look, this is egregious government waste. I mean, that site looks like it's pathetic. I mean, honestly, this looks like it could have been done with a SharePoint site and you pay some consultant to stand it up for 1% of the cost. And there are more modern platforms than that. So this is just incredibly wasteful and inefficient government spending.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That was Chamath's contribution.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Oh, yeah. Chamath showed up. Chamath looked great. He showed up and looked great. I brought my two votes and I brought my vision. Absolutely. I would also say... Fan favorite. What you really did that was amazing was you took a lot of selfies. I was very proud of both of you with the fan service. The fans were very pleased that you guys took so many selfies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
They're going for retro. They were going for retro. They wanted to harken back to the 90s.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Right, but that 600 million that was wasted on that crappy portal, that shouldn't have happened even without AI, right? Because there's like much better ways. You could buy a much better product for 1% of the cost, or 0.1% of the cost.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
There must be some regulatory capture going on here where somebody's got a record. No, I think it's relationships. That's what I'm saying. Like a 10-year relationship with somebody in Albany that, you know, worked at Oracle previously.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's waste, fraud, and abuse. It's the same thing that's happening with rural internet. Do you see that story? Paradoxically, it's our next story.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So let's go for it. In related news of our government burning our money, Raw broadband, rural broadband and EV charging, $42 billion and $7.5 billion, almost $50 billion combined. Let's just go over these two programs real quickly here. Both were part of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
$42 billion carved out to provide high-speed internet to people living on farms in rural locations. $7.5 billion carved out to build 500,000 EV chargers over 10 years. It's been 1,000 days since the bill was passed, so let's check on the progress. Zero people have been connected, according to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. And eight.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight EV chargers have been built as of May, according to AutoWeek magazine. What's even crazier, private industry already solved these problems. United Airlines just announced they're putting Starlink on a thousand of their planes and they're going to offer it for free. And Starlink now has 2,500 planes under contract. with a bunch of other airlines.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And in the second half of 2023 alone, the private sector built over a thousand charging stations in the US. These are two problems that have already been solved, Sax. Why are we burning $50 billion in the future with On things that have already been solved. We've solved for this. I own electric cars. I have Starlink.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Graft. Keep going. I mean, you tell me. Corruption, graft, buying votes from your constituents?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Incompetence, yes. Yes.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, there's a couple of things going on here. So one is typical government waste, fraud, and abuse, where they've allocated 42 billion for rural internet, haven't hooked anyone up, and we could spend a fraction of that giving people Starlink. and allowing the private sector to do its job.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And why even pay for its tax? Why are we paying for it if it's available for 100 bucks?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That's the baseline. But it's worse than that. Because on top of the waste, fraud, and abuse, and the fact that the government is grossly incompetent and inefficient, you also have naked political retaliation going on here.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, exactly. And Brendan Carr, who's an FCC commissioner, pointed this out. He said that in 2023, the FCC canceled or revoked an $885 million contract with the company by claiming Starlink is not capable of providing high-speed internet. Then a year later, of course, that was a lie.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And then a year later, the FCC is now claiming that Starlink provides so much high-speed internet that the word monopoly should be tossed out. So, look, this is just pure… It's pure naked retaliation. The Biden-Harris administration doesn't want to admit that Elon has the best solution for rural internet, just like they couldn't admit he made the best electric cars.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
You know, we got a lot of feedback too coming in. So... It was pretty great feedback.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Remember when they did that EV summit and they didn't invite him? That was just nakedly political because he's not on their team. Right. So look, I mean, the Biden-Harris administration, look, it's blue no matter who. And Elon has drifted from being sort of independent and not aligned to- He was blue. He was blue. Let's call it what it is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, he voted for Hillary and Obama, he said.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
He's no longer team blue. And so they're punishing him for this. Yeah. And it's costing taxpayers a huge amount of money. I think this is one of the worst decisions by the current administration. And if Trump gets in there, he should reverse it on day one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, we need to investigate. I mean, I think how we got to the point of wasting $50 billion- That requires an investigation, I think.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, that's such a good point. I remember back in the day, 60 Minutes used to do these segments on waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon, different parts of the government. $42 billion just spent on something that really taxpayers could have for free or without the government getting involved.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Oh, my Lord.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Do you think that you did better as moderator because you finally let go of just the conference organization?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And $42 billion that was lining someone's pocket when the service doesn't even work, that would have been a scandal. And the media would have covered it. But the media doesn't even cover it these days. And again, it's because the media has become so tribal that it's better dead than red and blue no matter who.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And so because the media would have to admit that Elon's already solved this problem, they just can't go there. They won't even cover this. And so we have no accountability. There's no accountability on the government.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
What do you think?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah, I think that you were able to focus on your unique value add instead of immersing yourself in a bunch of details that could be handled by the team.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And buying votes by giving this money to other vendors who are giving them donations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And the incentives really matter. If you look at a private company, if you were at Klarna, and to our previous story, and you go to the boss and say, I know how to get rid of these, this wasteful spending we're doing here, we can get rid of all tier one calls with AI and save that money, you get a promotion. If you're in the government, he
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I agree. It was absolutely fantastic.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
You can't, if you're a politician and you cut this program, your constituents get upset, you don't have that stuff being built in your district, there's a perverse incentive that you can't buy the votes, which is why these folks are constantly trying to buy votes. And then the second-
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
But I think it was a process to get you to let go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And we have to celebrate it. That's the key. If we can celebrate people saving money again, like Malay is getting a lot of credit. And that's up to us, leadership and podcasting or the media, or influential people have fallen. So if you point out, hey, this is a waste, go save this money, and somebody does save the money.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, it's a fair point. People did say my moderation was dialed in, and I appreciate that positive feedback from everybody. And yeah, there is something to having people you can trust with the content.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, why don't we start celebrating people saving the money and doing the right thing here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Remember she was the AI czar? I mean, the administration did put her nominally in charge of various technology initiatives.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Here's an idea, save money, get the best solution at the lowest price and then reevaluate that as you go. And I just wanna point out with the, this is a subtle point, but Elon also open sourced his patents for the superchargers and let anybody do them. And he opened up the superchargers to other vehicles, which he didn't have to do.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And when they gave him a loan back in the Solyndra days and the Fisker days, remember they gave these incentives in the form of loans? He's the only guy who paid it back. Everybody else failed. So now you're punishing the guy who actually built the infrastructure for both of these projects.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So the reward for actually doing the right thing, which Starlink did, SpaceX did, and Tesla did, is to be punished. And then you're giving a leg up to somebody else who's building these charges. Who's more qualified to build these charges at scale? Or a satellite network at scale? The person who's already done it. He's already done it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, we're talking about laying fiber lines, cable modems to people who are hundreds of miles into the countryside. That makes no sense when you can just beep, put a satellite dish up today. What are we even talking about here?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, government has never been particularly efficient, but there was a period of time where people would at least care about wanting to make it more efficient.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And it would be a scandal if there was political corruption to try and bias the result in a way that actually deprived the intended recipients of the program from getting the services they were supposed to get and cost the government way more money than it needed to. We're so far beyond being that country anymore. Where we actually debate the best policy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Now it's just like we're warring political tribes. And the objective of the party is to punish its political opponents, to engage in retaliation, and to basically loot the public coffers as much as possible on behalf of their constituents. And that's what's basically happening. You know, it's completely dysfunctional.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, let's use this podcast. If you see government waste, tell us.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And no one really cares because the media doesn't really shine a light on it because they're completely tribalized as well.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
No, no, I meant their donors, their donor constituents, not the citizens of the country.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
For sure. How do you think these contracts get awarded?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, that would be... So they're giving the money away and they're so incompetent they're not getting the political benefit from it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
No, they're so incompetent they can't get it out of their own way. But somebody's getting that, call it 50 billion, that we don't need to spend. And the way that money is awarded is going to be political. You don't think that they're going to turn around and give big political contributions?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Let's start a running list.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
On this program, we'll do it at the end of the show. Every time we'll have a running list at all in.com of just every one of these scandals and we'll feature it. So leak it to us first. Send it to us. My DMs are open. All right, listen, early stage investing has always been hard. There was a tweet storm this week that Y Combinator might be having a hard time replicating their early success.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
We'll discuss it now. A thread this week from ex-user Molson Hart caught a couple of people's eyes. He made the case that it's been a rough decade for YC based on the accelerator's top companies page. YC lists its top companies by 2023 revenue there.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And you'll notice there's not a lot of companies from the recent cohorts out of the 50 companies featured, only three are from the classes after 2020, most of them being from the early 2010s. Obviously, that's because they've been around longer, but it sparked a big discussion that there were so many winners from the 2009 to 2016 era, and that maybe the class size at YC has expanded a whole bunch.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And maybe that's part of the problem. But there's a bigger problem in VC that we've talked about here. Here's a chart from Carta that just shows the percentage of VC funds that have made a distribution since 2017. Over 40% of 2018 vintage funds have not made a single distribution yet.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And it's getting to the point, year five, six, or seven, where you probably should have had some distributions occur. Obviously, a lot of this has to do with maybe M&A and those early wins being taken off the table. We've talked about that a whole bunch, but here's the chart that kind of gets really interesting.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
An explosion in fund managers occurred, as we all know, and this chart shows from PitchBook, the first-time VC managers that raised a second VC fund as a share of all first-time VC managers, and it's now down from above 50% to below 50%. gosh, 15%. So what are your thoughts here, Shama?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And that was M&A in year, what, five or six sacks?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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I do agree with that. I was talking to Jade about it and she said, and Nick also pointed out, you were really dialed in, Jake. What's up? And I said, I'm not worrying about the party and the vendors and the front desk and the sponsors. And it is actually, you're able to focus. Did you have some favorite moments yourself there, Sax?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, and thank God for the secondary markets even emerging, because at the same time that the secondary markets emerged and people were willing to buy venture assets going into their second decade.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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Yeah. And I took advantage of almost every time I had one of those opportunities to sell some shares, pair some positions. And that's how we got our DPI as well, because let's face it, Melina Khan and the anti-tech sentiment has led to these large companies not buying startups. And instead, they compete with them. They just say, we'll build it in-house because you're not letting us buy it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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And it's broken the entire ecosystem now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Any favorite moments for you or panels or things maybe that exceeded expectations for you?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, Saks, right now we're seeing people do things like selling their early SpaceX or their early Stripe, whatever it is, to other VCs, to later stage funds, a lot of ways to try to secure DPI. What's your thoughts on the state of venture today, given all this data that we're looking at today?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, two points. So first, I agree with Chamath that the amount of time it takes to generate an outcome for, I'd say, most startups is longer than the 10-year period of these funds. And these funds can be extended up to 12 years usually, but then what do you do after that? This takes a lot longer than that in a lot of cases to generate a meaningful outcome.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, I thought the Mearsheimer Jeffrey Sachs panel was great. I thought it would be, which is why I helped organize it. But I was just glad that the audience, so many people in the audience reacted and said that was the surprise hit of the conference.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I just had two companies that I invested in in my second fund. So in 2019 and 2020, so four years ago and five years ago, just got marked up. And it was a big markup of the company's doing well. I call them late bloomers. It took four to five years for them to accomplish what they wanted to in terms of like building out the tech. I mean, I invested at like the earliest stage.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
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So that's how long it took. And now they just did growth rounds and they're kind of off to the races. But I could easily be 10 years from here to get to a liquidity event. So you're talking about more like 15-year funds. So I agree with that point. The second thing, though, is that The big thing that's happened in our industry is we had a bubble in 2020 and especially 2021.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And we just had a ton of capital come into the industry because the Fed and the federal government airdropped $10 trillion of liquidity onto the economy in reaction to COVID. And not all that money went into VC. It went into a lot of places. But the VC industry was flooded with cash. And you see this in the deployments.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, in those bubble years, there was something like $200 billion a year of capital deployment when normally it's $60 to $100 billion. So if twice the amount of money is going into the industry and is being deployed, and rounds are now twice as big, and valuations are twice as big, that has a huge effect on returns. So for example, the average venture fund is like a 2x return.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
But if the entry prices were artificially double, then there goes your return right there. You get 2x times 1x. This is such a key point. Look, I think we're just in the hangover of this massive liquidity bubble that didn't originate in the venture capital industry. It came from, frankly, the federal government. But we're just downstream of that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Now, what I would say is I do think we're at the tail end of working that out. And the good news is that we now have maybe the most exciting tech wave ever, which is AI. Definitely the most exciting tech wave since the internet. came along in the mid to late 90s. So the hope is we're finally going to have really exciting things to invest in again.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
amount of reach yeah and that's just youtube we're not doing it on the podcast feed right now youtube and x well hopefully we get it on the podcast feed we get another 50 million uh but uh freeberg's in his afterglow couldn't make it but he's very busy right now look how happy is the summit went well is that marijuana I think he's making potatoes. I think that's his farm.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I would say that was my favorite of the event. One of the best panels I've ever been part of. It's the most viewed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
But yeah, look, I think we're at the tail end of the last cycle and the beginning of a new cycle.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And vintage distortion is so real. It's very hard to understand how each of these vintages with your late bloomers or overpriced things, companies getting $100 million rounds at a billion dollar valuation before they have product market fit. And those distortions,
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
were just so pronounced the last five to 10 years that we're now sorting them out like a house of mirrors where you don't know who's tall, who's fat, who's skinny, what the reality is here. And the other big thing is this peanut butter effect that I tweeted about today. During peak Zerp, you had all these exceptional team members
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
You know, the number two, three, four, five person at a company that was doing great, they would leave to start their own company. So the talent got spread. Then you had so many of these founders rushing into the same vertical. So you'd have 20 startups because there was too much capital pursuing the same opportunity. You pursued the same opportunity. What happens to earnings?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
They get spread then. What happens to customers? They get spread across 20 different products competing for the same customer. And then what happens with, you know, ownership stakes for us as GPs and LPs, Chamath, the ownership stakes, because the valuations went up so much, they got spread like peanut butter. And instead of a Series A getting you 20% of a company, it got you 10.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Elon's slightly ahead, but yeah, it's still like growing. It's like finding an audience.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Instead of a C-check getting you 5%, it got you one.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I don't know what it is, but we need to do something because the status quo doesn't work. I think there's so many good points that we're hitting here. I'll just say the other thing to build on your point about, hey, these take less capital. You have to look at what does your ownership, after you've been diluted half by 50% as a seed or series A investor, you're going to be down to half.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So if you own 10%, you own five. If you own seven like YC or we do in a company, you're going to own three. You're going to really have to model out, is the valuation you're looking at, what does it pencil out to for an outcome?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And when I did this with our investments, I saw a leak in my game, which was, hey, I'm putting $100K into a $25 million round or a $50 million round as a follow-on investment to support the founder. okay, what does that do for my LPs? Well, that 100K would need to hit some extraordinary outcome, five, 10, 20, $40 billion in order for us to return the fund.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So now my team understands, hey, take that 125K, that 250K, that 500K, do four more accelerator companies with it because those could return the fund. And that fund math, people stopped doing. I think all these fund managers who are getting wiped out, they never penciled out What does this company I'm giving a million dollars need to hit in order for me to return my fund?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And now they're finding out that it doesn't work.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, it's basically the capital deployments gone back to where it was in 2019, let's call it. So again, we had this bubble. The foam started building in 2020, but you had COVID, people didn't know what to think. So there was some restraint, I guess. And then 2021, it just went wild.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That was nuts, man.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
If you could return capital, you're going to look like a Euro. Also, Chamath, I remember, I don't know if it was Michael Moritz or Doug Leone, but I was talking to Sequoia about the time dispersion of your fund, like over what period of time are you deploying a fund? And man, people started deploying funds in 18 months because they can raise the next fund so quick.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So like, screw it, I'm gonna deploy this fund in 18 months, 24 months. And LPs were saying to me like, what period are you gonna deploy this? And I said, well, you know, I was taught by Fred Wilson and this person, 36 months, 48 months would be a good, window to deploy capital because, you know, it smooths it out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Just by the way, I feel better about those late – bloomers in my portfolio because i know the marks are real because if they're getting marked up now then it's very very solid compared to frankly some of those marks that we got in the bubble year like 2021 i call them tiger marks whether it was tiger or not
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's just less real, quite frankly, and a lot of those companies are retrenching and have issues. So a mark now, it just means something different than a mark then. But look, just so we're not totally beating up on VC, you remember that in this bubble period of September 2021, everybody thought that this party would just continue forever.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And this is a good example from the Wall Street Journal, where it's talking about how university endowments were minting billions in golden era of venture capital. So The bubble wasn't just in VC, it was in the public markets too, because we had ZERP, right? Like interest rates were zero, liquidity was just flowing.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And so it was very easy for companies to get liquid, they IPO'd, and then the valuations were stratospheric. So the distributions to LPs were massive in 2021. And then that led to, again, more funds, being able to raise bigger funds. Everyone was just kind of paying it forward and thought the party would just keep going. So-
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
this is what happens in a bubble is everybody thinks that it's just gonna keep going like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
This is why it's so important as a fund manager or an entrepreneur for you to get great advice from people who've been at this for a long time and focus on the process. You cannot control all these outcomes. You cannot control all these meta events. What you can control is your relationship with your customers, building a team, making great bets, supporting late bloomers.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
That's the critical part of all this is the process and you can make your process better. And so with my team internally, I'm constantly talking to them about our selection of companies, how we help companies get pulled through and get downstream funding. Literally, our big effort this year is how do we introduce our companies to the top VC firms?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And we've been working on that as an internal project, right? Of just getting our great breakout companies to the best investors to increase our pull through. It is a process and you have to trust and focus on the process. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, look, ironically, just to end on sort of a positive note, if these interest rate cuts are real, like if we just got 50, if we get another 50 this year, if inflation's really tamed, and interest rates are never going to go to zero, but if they go down substantially... And we have this new AI disruption, this new AI tailwind. We could be back in another golden era.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, give us your thoughts. You know, there's an all in Twitter handle and he's Chamath David Sachs. And I'm at Jason and Freeberg's at Freeberg. Just tell us who you think would be great. But, Sachs, I know you're super excited and want to give Biden his flowers. The Fed just cut rates 50 bips and the stock market is tearing it up right now.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's not going to be a bubble, but it could be another golden era. So we'll see.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
All right. Chamath had to go do work, apparently, starting this new concept, SACS, where Chamath is actually going to work at a company. We never got to talk about the debate because we were busy doing the summit and we took the week off from a new episode. People wanted to hear your take. What did you think of Kamala and Trump, the one and only debate we're going to hear, apparently? Any thoughts?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think that Kamala Harris performed better than expected. She did that, I think, mostly through having canned answers to topics. And she was able to kind of memorize those answers and say them. And she was never knocked out of her preparation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
She was well-prepared, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think she was well-prepared. However, we now know that these were canned answers because in subsequent press interviews, she gives the exact same thing. It's like a jukebox where you just push the button and you get the same answer. Exactly. So she's memorized a certain number of talking points, and that's all she's going to give you no matter what the question is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And if you saw that, it's become a meme now where You saw that question when she was asked about inflation. There's a pause when she's figuring out which greatest hit she's going to play. And then, you know, she, I guess, pushes B26 in her head and then it begins. So I was born in the middle class.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And it's working apparently, right? It seems like it's helping her.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think what you saw is that she got a bounce out of the debate, but now it's sort of like a lot of these... bounces, there's been kind of effervescence to it, and then it kind of settles down back to the recurring pattern. And so I think the election is extremely close, but I don't think... Oh, yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, every day it's like a poll going one way or the other. I mean, this is the closest of our lifetime, maybe. Or that I can remember. I mean, it's nuts how this thing has flipped over and over again. What did you think of Trump's performance? Were you disappointed? There were some rumors, people were a little upset that he doesn't prep as much as he should. What's your advice there?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, look, I mean, I think that he was in a very difficult situation. You basically had a three-on-one situation where he was up against not just Kamala Harris, but the two debate moderators. It turns out that Lindsay Davis is Kamala's sorority sister. David Muir was fact-checking him constantly, and some of those fact-checks weren't even correct.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
For example, we now know that the Springfield city manager has acknowledged complaints about pets being eaten. Oh, here we go. I was wondering if we were going to get through the episode. As far back as March, there are videos of him talking about the complaints.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Now you can, you can say that you don't believe those stories or whatever, but those reports were real, but David Muir fact-checked in real time saying that Trump was wrong. And there was like this effort to kind of gaslight and make him sound crazy during the debate when there are in fact sources for what he was saying.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
On Wednesday, Fed cut interest rates by a half a percentage point. Taking them down off of a 23-year high. We've been talking about this, God, for two years here on this podcast. First rate cut since March of 2020, which is about when we started this podcast. Jay Powell basically said the Fed thinks inflation is coming down to around 2% nicely.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And it might've thrown him off a little bit. I noticed like, it was like, he, I agree. They going into it, I think they need to negotiate in the future. You know how they're negotiating the microphones on or off, audience on or off. I think they should negotiate. Are we fact-checking in real time or are we not fact-checking? And who's doing that fact-checking?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, totally. And they only fact-check one candidate. For example, when Kamala Harris repeated numerous hoaxes like the Very Fine People hoax, the Bloodbath hoax, the Suckers and Losers hoax. I mean, these are things that were already addressed in the last debate. And You know, even left-wing sites like Snopes have said the whole verified people thing is totally made up.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yes, for people who don't know that, there's been selective edits. I mean, there's been selective edits forever, but that one is particularly egregious.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's really egregious. The bloodbath one is really egregious, too.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, because he was talking about the bloodbath and EVs. Yeah, and just make it into a January 6th extension, which it's not.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Right, so she was able to say these things and never got fact-checked once, which meant she never got knocked out of her preparation.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And let's also be honest, like Trump is hyperbolic. So if you are going to say, you know, oh, we're going to fact check Trump, like there's a lot of material there. And he just he's a hyperbolic guy. That's kind of his shtick, right? I mean.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
But here's the thing, is that in the wake of that debate, look, I think a lot of people scoring the debate on technical debater's points would award her the win for that night. Clearly she won, yeah. I don't deny that. However, what I think has been surprising is that in the wake of the debate, you're seeing her support sort of return more to its previous level.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And so what I'm saying is the effect of that's wearing off. And I think one of the reasons why that's wearing off is because Trump still has the killer issues in this election. He's got the border, and he's got inflation and the economy. And Harris may have done well, again, on debaters' points, but what substantive answer did she give in that debate, except to say, I'm not Joe Biden, which...
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
is, I guess, true. However, what you're basically saying is you won't defend your own administration's record. You are the incumbent. You're not the change candidate. And you're saying that people should vote for you because you're not Joe Biden. Well, what is it about Joe Biden's record that, what is it about Joe Biden's policies that you don't agree with?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I mean, after all, you cast the tie-breaking vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. You cast it for the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan that set off the inflation. So the debate moderators never asked Harris, well, what is it about you that is different than Joe Biden on a policy level, other than the fact that you're different people?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Apparently she's pro-gun. I thought that was like a great moment for her. Objectively, I think, and I've said this forever here on this show, putting our feelings aside about the candidates, I think whoever comes across as the most normal or the most moderate is going to win. And I think she's done a great job of like... convincing those moderates that she's not crazy and he is.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
What are your thoughts on that? Because people looked at this very podcast and they've said to me, my God, that's the Trump I want to vote for, that Trump 2.0, the all-in Trump. And then people are like, ah, he's going back to the insult comic Trump, but I don't want the chaos. What are your thoughts on moderates specifically in the swing states and this sort of strategy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Let's talk about the Teamsters. So Biden, when he was still in the race, was plus eight among the Teamsters rank and file. And now that Harris is the candidate, Trump is up something like plus 26 with the Teamsters. Yeah.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And they don't want the job market to soften any further than it already has. He also mentioned immigration has helped soften the market, the labor market as well, obviously, with all those new people looking for jobs. So in the last two months, July and August, CPI has been at a two handle. We talked about that 2.9% in July, 2.5% in August. Here's the CPI over the last decade.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Why is that? Because she's, isn't she pro-Union as well? He was Union Joe. So, I mean, it was like in the name. I understand why they loved him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
There's something about her policies and I think her – look, I think within the Democratic Party – You think it's her personality. I think it's partly personality, but I also think it's policies and cultural issues. So within the Democratic Party, there's always been two tracks. There's the beer track and there's the wine track. And so, you know, Bill Clinton was classic beer track guy, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Beer summit with Obama. Yeah. Right. And I think Joe Biden was was beer track. Then there's kind of the wine track, which is the more it's the part of the party that cares about these boutique cultural issues, starting with DEI and equity and trans and things like that.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Limousine liberals is what they used to be called. But I like yours, wine liberals or the woke wine liberals.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Basically, the entire California Democratic Party is very wine track. I mean, Gavin is very wine track. Kamala Harris is very wine track. You can understand why a blue collar worker, it doesn't appeal to that. They want more of that lunch pail traditional Democrat. But that Democratic Party doesn't really exist anymore. I mean, the Democratic Party is
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
has evolved to be the party of the professional class, whereas the Republicans are more the party of the working class. And you're now starting to see it. I think Biden was the Democrats' last vestige of this working class party. He really worked at being appealing to those voters, you know, the whole Scranton Joe image. Yeah, Union Joe. Yeah, exactly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Whereas Kamala, when you get her talking in an unguarded moment, and it's not a canned answer, she's going to talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. And that's not what your typical teamster wants to hear.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Let me ask you a challenging question, because one of its likes when I ask you a challenge a bit. If Trump loses, what do you think will be the cause of the loss? If he loses, like strategically, when we look back on the last six months, what do you think you would change? What would cause it?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, look, I mean, the great asset that Kamala Harris has is not her likability. It's not her track record. It's not her policies. It's the fact that she's got the media behind her. And if you look at, like, for example, ABC News, 100% of the coverage by ABC News is positive, whereas something like 93% of their coverage on Trump is negative.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And you saw this, that before Harris replaced Biden as the nominee, she had very low favorability ratings. And then the media basically reinvented her as this transformative candidate. So look, when you've got the media willing to operate as de facto members of your campaign, that's tremendously powerful. If we had a fair media, this election wouldn't be close.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So that is the advantage the Democrats have. Now look, should Trump have... done the debate with ABC News? No, I think he should have chosen more fair moderators. I mean, to their credit, I think CNN played the Biden-Trump debate pretty fair and down the middle. But ABC, I mean, it was predictable that, like I said, I mean, one of the hosts was her sorority sister, they're friends.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So, you know, I think that if Trump loses, you could say that his willingness to walk into the lion's den, take on all comers, do every interview, you could say maybe that wasn't as strategic as what she did. But at the end of the day, I think that voters will appreciate that both Trump and J.D. are willing to do basically every podcast, every interview. They're not afraid to answer questions.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And when they do answer questions, you can see them thinking and they don't give you the same canned answer they've given 10 times before. including at the debate. So, yeah, I mean, that's my take. What's yours, J. Cal?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
On which aspect? Be more specific. Give me a specific question.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
What do you think, if she ends up winning, what do you think the reason will be?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, that's a good question. If she ends up winning, I think it will be that people believe that they, I think it will be that moderates in those swing states, and women, believe that it's too much chaos and that Trump will be too much, they want a calmer, same thing reason Biden won, right?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Obviously, massive boom in interest that you see there from 2021 to 2023. Many obviously think we're going to have more rate cuts, probably 25 every meeting for a little bit. And Dow's already at an all-time high, surged 300 points on the news. Here's some interesting data about the 50 basis point kickoff cuts. So this is where it gets interesting, Chamath.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Like that there's this like concept that the adults are in the room and it will be calm and it won't be chaotic. And I think people just still see Trump as a bit chaotic. And I think that's the big fear. And I think they've played the abortion card and the right to choose really well. Even though Trump said it here, I'm not gonna sign the abortion ban, I'm pro-IVF.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I think they have that really great win of saying, hey, you bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade. Probably wasn't smart to brag about that. And they have that clip that they can keep reinforcing. So if he does lose, and I don't know that he's going to lose, I think there's a lot of people who are going to go in there and vote for him
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
but not say it to pollsters and not say it to their family and friends because they're embarrassed because of the pressure against orange Hitler. Oh, you know, this whole rhetoric that he's going to, you know, overturn democracy. So I think it's a pretty good chance that he's going to win. Actually. I don't think that this, I mean, look, I think in a close race, right.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
They say the statistics in a close race favor him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, look, I mean, maybe we're asking the wrong question here, which is why would he lose? I mean, I think maybe the real question is why is he favored to win? Because I think the polls, including Nate Stilver, still show him favored to win.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And I think that when you look at what the big issues are in this campaign and what has people agitated and upset, why they think the country is on the wrong track, something like 65%, it has to do with the economy, it has to do with inflation, it has to do with the border. I think that on the cultural issues, the trans stuff drives parents crazy.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
They don't want the government telling them what to do with their kids. So it's hard to think of a killer issue other than maybe abortion that Harris has on her side. It feels like all the issues cut Trump's way. But again, the thing that Trump doesn't have and there's no way to for him to fix this is the media is just so in the tank for Harris. Now, you raise a good point.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Look, could Trump be more disciplined? Yeah, absolutely. However, you know, I think that what amplifies that is the fact that the media is quick to jump on every little thing he says and distorts it.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And he sets himself up for it. You know, like part of what makes him activate the base is that erratic behavior, his shtick, you know, the comedy. And then I do believe that it gets weaponized by the press because it's like such so easy for them.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I agree with you that Trump could be more disciplined. However, I don't think it's as bad as what you're saying, because if it were, there'd be no need to make up these obvious hoaxes. There'd be no need to, you know, lie about the very fine people or what he said about bloodbath.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So if he was really saying that many outrageous things, why would you need to keep inventing things that he didn't say?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Oh, I think they're just stacking them. Yeah, the answer to that question is just throw everything you got at him.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, they're throwing everything at him. But look at Kamala's interviews. I mean, she hasn't given very many. But, I mean, her answers are just – I mean, just watch them. I'm not going to characterize them, but just watch her actual interviews.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And Megyn Kelly said it. I mean, Megyn Kelly thinks she's stupid and not bright. I mean – And she's not the most dynamic speaker, that's for sure. And she doesn't seem to be able to have a dynamic debate with intelligent people who are experts in their field, let's say. You know, she can't hold her own in the way you can see J.D. can. Right. And Trump can. So here we go.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And just on the on the second assassination attempt, I don't know if you even want to go there. But I mean, gosh, I'm so glad that. he didn't get shot at again. This is scary stuff, folks. This rhetoric's got to come down. I keep saying it. Nobody wants to listen to me, but man.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, let's look at the rhetoric that Ryan Ruth was literally quoting on his Twitter, was saying that Trump is basically an existential threat to democracy. He was quoting what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the mainstream media have been saying chapter and verse. So I think that if you want to ascribe motivation there. Where did Ruth get these ideas?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
They've been endlessly amplified by the mainstream media. And it's not like a one-off comment. It's been the central narrative for the last several years is that somehow Trump represents this existential threat to democracy. And one way or another, that threat must be eliminated. And I think Ryan Ruth simply took literally what the mainstream media has been saying.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
1% of your followers is what I tell everybody, high profile people you and I both know, is 1% of people in your following, and we all have large followings here, and there's certainly people who have extremely large followings, 1% are mentally ill. Like when I say mentally ill, I mean severely mentally ill. And if it's but 1% of your following, if it's 0.1%, this could be thousands of people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Fed only started publicizing their interest rate changes in 1994. Since 94, Fed has initiated a cutting cycle six times. Here's the chart. Take a good look at that. 95, 98, 2019, they started with 25 bps. 01 and 07, after the great financial crisis, they started with a 50 bp cut. So obviously, there was an emergency 50-bip cut in March of 2020 when COVID hit. 01, 07, 2020, very severe situations.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And this is what happened to John Lennon and other famous people who've been killed, tragically, is those mentally ill people interpret things in a very different way. And when you say, you know, a phrase that has triggers in it, threat to democracy, fight like hell, whatever it is, they interpret it differently. And so just please, folks.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, when you call the guy Hitler for years, and again, you create millions or billions of impressions around that. And it's not like a one-off statement, but it's something that's drummed into the public over and over again. It seems to me you're asking for trouble.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Stay safe. Please tone down the rhetoric, everybody. And we will see you next time on the All In podcast. Bye-bye.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And what happened in the markets is what I want to discuss with both of you today. In 2001, market fell 31% in the two years after that rate cut. In 2007, market fell 26% after two years. So And 2020, despite all the fears, market ripped 44% over two years. What's the more likely scenario, Chamath? Is this similar to the dot-com great financial crisis or similar to 2020?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
But I mean, the smile is incredible.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
He's in fantastic. That's Freeburg's Founder Mode. He's eating the bog. His Founder Mode gives him the munchies.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Sax, any thoughts here? Just balls and strikes?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, I think a lot of people are commenting on the fact that the only other two times where we've had a 50 basis point rate cut in modern history, it has been just before a recession. So I think this happened in 2001, 2007, right before the recession. And the Fed had to do a dramatic rate cut because they could see in the data that things were weakening.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So a lot of people are asking the question, well, is that what's going on here? Now, Powell's comments, though, are indicating that the economy is in good shape. He said the economy is in very good shape, basically indicating that they had tamed inflation and that they would look to cut another 50 basis points this year. So Powell's rhetoric is... in a way, at odds with the magnitude of this cut.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So why didn't they just cut 25 basis points? I think people are trying to figure that out.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Reading the tea leaves into why 50, because they could just do 25 a month for five months as opposed to 50.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Yeah, if the economy is hot, why wouldn't you tiptoe into rate cuts and just do 25 now?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
he is uh he's in the afterglow um and he won't be with us this week um but he uh he organized such a great conference don't you think jaco he did great uh i mean he really took charge of that and he crushed just an amazing job i would like to give him his flowers absolutely it is like at least a trillion times better than the first and at least 50 better than the second
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And I think so much of this has to do with unemployment. We had that period where so many jobs were available. Remember, we talked about it here, 11, 12 million jobs available at the peak. We can debate the numbers, of course, but we all saw it where you just couldn't hire talent in America. There was so few people available to take positions. And man, has that changed.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And you get to see it on the ground in early stage startups where This whole narrative, I don't know if you saw it in your board meetings, but hey, we can't find a person. Hey, we're looking. Hey, that search is still going. We're still looking for a director of sales. We're still looking for salespeople. We're still looking for developers. We're still looking for operations people.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Now it's the opposite. It's like, I just, I'm hiring producers here in Austin because I'm building my in-person studio. We had like... I don't know, a dozen viable candidates for this position. And I had a hard time picking between, you know, the top three. Now, that's distinctly different than my experience for the last five to 10 years, where you were like, how do we fill this role?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
So I think that employment has been broken. And that's the thing that has me concerned, because with all these people who came in through the southern border, and then you have people outsourcing to other countries, I wonder if Americans... are going to lose so many of these mid-paying jobs. And this will dovetail into our next story about Amazon making cuts.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I'm very worried about the hollowing out of the upper middle class, that elite group of $150,000 jobs that then employ nannies and spend money in the economy. I wonder, I don't know if you're seeing that in your company, Sachs?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
I'm not worried about the hollowing out of that class.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
You have disdain for them. But I mean, just in terms of the labor market, what do you see, you know, in companies right now, you know, hiring the talent pool, et cetera?
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
Well, I mean, in tech, things are pretty good. I mean, they're not as absurdly frothy as they were during the bubble of 2020 and 2021, but things are good. You have this huge AI tailwind now, and there's just a ton of investment going into AI. There's a little bit of a tale of two cities going on. If you're in AI, things are really bubbly.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
And if you're outside AI, they've returned to much more normal levels in terms of valuation and company operations, all that kind of stuff. Just to go back to the state of the economy for a second, the reason why a lot of people were predicting a recession, including me for a while, is that the yield curve inverting has been an almost perfect gauge of whether a recession is coming.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Big Fed rate cuts, AI killing call centers, $50B govt boondoggle, VC's rough years, Trump/Kamala
It's when basically the Fed raises short-term interest rates above long-term interest rates. Normally, long rates are the ones that should be higher because investors demand a higher rate of return to tie up their money for longer. So something's really
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon gets paid, Apple's AI pop, OpenAI revenue rip, Macro debate & Inside Trump Fundraiser
Yeah, by the way, they got their shares and then they voted to give Elon the next pay package. So it's just a full on grift.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon gets paid, Apple's AI pop, OpenAI revenue rip, Macro debate & Inside Trump Fundraiser
Above the table and below the table. There's two different tapings occurring.
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Elon gets paid, Apple's AI pop, OpenAI revenue rip, Macro debate & Inside Trump Fundraiser
Yeah.