All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
DOGE kills its first bill, Zuck vs OpenAI, Google's AI comeback with bestie Aaron Levie
Fri, 20 Dec 2024
(0:00) Bestie intros (3:07) The Besties welcome Box CEO Aaron Levie! (5:40) Thoughts on Sacks's new role, what areas he can have immediate positive impact on in crypto and AI (18:42) DOGE's first casualty and its paradigm-shifting potential (48:25) Conspiracy Corner: What are the drones over New Jersey!? (57:36) Zuck joins Team Elon against OpenAI, AI's competitive landscape and downstream impact on business software (1:27:29) Google's AI turnaround, future of AI physics and video models Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Aaron Levie: https://x.com/levie Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/government-shutdown-continuing-resolution-march-14 https://x.com/Jason/status/1869816646954823916 https://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20241216/CR.pdf https://www.cbsnews.com/news/government-shutdown-house-vote-continuing-resolution https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1869730547851051029 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/continuing-resolution-government-shutdown-2024 https://x.com/VivekGRamaswamy/status/1869407887983821089 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed58.asp https://x.com/patrickc/status/1869422495985750459 https://x.com/chamath/status/1869773044832718917 https://x.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1869871681830879256 https://x.com/RepJayapal/status/1869823494588162475 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1869485580276629975 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1869482581181554704 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1869487359420727338 https://www.wsj.com/politics/biden-white-house-age-function-diminished-3906a839 https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/19/faa-drone-flights-are-temporarily-banned-new-jersey.html https://x.com/KanekoaTheGreat https://x.com/AutismCapital https://x.com/Geiger_Capital https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-this-year-on-3point7-billion-in-revenue.html https://www.axios.com/2024/12/19/openai-bret-taylor-nonprofit-restructuring https://openai.com/index/scale-the-benefits-of-ai https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/technology/mira-murati-openai.html https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-openai-lawsuit-sam-altman-chatgpt-36bc55dbb8b4f9e1e5675ff7564e5fa0 https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/13/24320880/meta-california-ag-letter-openai-non-profit-elon-musk https://x.com/DailyPalantir/status/1869097046889882057 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-28/openai-cfo-says-75-of-its-revenue-comes-from-paying-consumers https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/1868703624714395907 https://x.com/_philschmid/status/1869639246434246966
J. Cal, what just happened? Did you just have a moment, an emotional moment? I don't know. You know, I've been trying to get over sacks and it's hard to get over your ex.
Even when they didn't treat you well? We were in a codependent relationship and we were working on it. You have no one to fight with anymore. Who are you going to fight with, J. Cal? That's the emptiness you feel inside. Because you're a fighter. You're a street brawler. And you have no one to brawl with anymore. So you feel... Well, you're the first guy to jump under the table in a bar fight.
I mean... There you go.
There you go.
As I was saying.
It's always worse to start a fight. No, I feel like if shit goes down, I feel like Sax and I would have like... We would have thrown down. We were bulldogs. We would have fought like tooth and nail.
Okay. I have this image. It's like we're in a bar. Okay. And all of a sudden. You talking to me? A fight is about to break out. Four thought bubbles appear. Okay. J. Cal's like, J. Cal's like, let's go get him. Sax is like, this guy, this guy's a dipshit. Let's roll. I'm like, look at that chick. She's so good looking. And then Freeberg's like, what will happen to my invite to duck?
Freeberg's like, how do I get out of this unscathed duck?
Rain Man, David Sack.
All right, everybody, welcome to the number one podcast in the world. With me again today, for better or worse, your Sultan of Science, David Friedberg is back. How are you doing, Friedberg? I see you're a pawn, only a pawn in their game. What's going on with the pawn background? The imposter syndrome. Pawn or queen? Hmm. What is that film? Is that from a movie? What movie is that from?
It's called The Imposter Syndrome. Bye. So it's like some French new wave I'm not aware of.
I've learned that Friedberg's backgrounds is some like weird secret communication language. There's a small but fervent group of people that are really into these backgrounds. They're always trying to figure something out.
Of course, with us again, Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator. How are you doing, Chamath? Nice to meet her. Thank you, sir. Good to see you. You ready for- Excited to see you. Oh, look at this. Three or four besties will be hitting the slopes. Three or four besties will be skiing together.
Aaron might be there. Aaron, where are you going for the holidays? Oh, actually, we'll be in **** next week.
What? Well, there you go. Oh, new bestie in ****. Aaron, are you staying in the town?
Just at the hotel.
Okay, this is perfect. We're all going to be there, bro.
$2,000 a night. How many rooms you got with the kids and the fam? You have three? Bro, boxes at all-time highs. Take it easy. What did you do? Did you start buying Bitcoin with your treasury? What do you mean boxes at an all-time high? Are you doing a Michael Saylor or something?
You know, it turns out if you didn't get crushed during the post-COVID period, you can just keep cranking. So that's what we've been doing.
Oh, you've been building a real business, of course, with us now. Our new fifth bestie, Aaron Levy. He is the CEO of the publicly traded company Box, which means he's got the most to lose by coming here. So welcome back to the program.
Centrisex. Based on what you guys were just talking about before this recording started, I have no idea what we're in for.
Yes.
Listen, we're living in an age of meme stocks and people selling convertible notes to buy Bitcoin for their treasury and then becoming a Nasdaq 100. It's that simple. Aaron, when you see a company buy billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin and get added to the Nasdaq 100, what method of suicide do you think of taking your own life with?
There was a brief week in 2021 where the thought kind of crossed my mind. Yes.
Sapuku, you're just going to use the sword, the short blade?
We have a very sophisticated audit committee that prevented the action. Will you do this for me? Yeah.
Just do this for me. How much cash does Box have on the books, ballpark?
We just did a convert, so we're probably $600 or $700 million.
Okay, here's what I want to do. A little experiment for next week. Just put 5% of the treasury, 30 million in Bitcoin. And then we'll invite you back in two weeks and we'll see what happens, okay? Just put 5% of the treasury in Bitcoin. Hey, everybody. Here's another announcement, a little housekeeping. As you know, we successfully got the allin.com domain. That was a big victory for us.
And we now have an email list. So four years into this, Meshugana, we now have the ability to take your email address and spam you with all kinds of great information, like a notification when the pod drops. Wow. So compelling. Insights from the besties, who you've had enough of. And first dibs on overpriced event tickets to come hang out with us. Wow.
This is the compelling pitch we have for giving us your emails. So if you'd like to give us your email and get spammed, go to allin.com and let the spam begin. All right. That's out of the way. Saks is out again this week. I don't know what's going on. We've been trying to figure out where he is. He's MIA. If anybody knows.
No, he's in D.C. this week.
Yeah. Oh, is that what's going on? Did you see all the meetings? I know. I'm being facetious. He's in meetings. Mr. Sachs went to Washington. He's creating waves. But Mr. Sachs is in Washington. Have you guys seen the photos?
Aaron, what do you think of Sachs in this role?
I think it's a strong pick. So... Let the genuflecting begin. Go for it, Aaron. So Crypto, I'm a little bit indifferent on. You know, I haven't, you know, we haven't spent much time there, leaned in much there, but on AI... I think is a very strong pick. And I think you want somebody that has a general deregulation, anti-regulation bent at this stage in the evolution of the technology.
I think there's risk of slowing down too much progress right now. And I think he'll provide some good... parameters and principles around how to avoid that. So I think very strong. And then crypto, again, don't know too much about. And then we'll see the rest of the topics.
As a software CEO of a public company, when the Biden administration was putting forward their proposals on how to regulate AI and have definitions on the size of a model and what the models could or shouldn't do and the regulatory authority they would have over the software that's written. What was your reaction? And you were supporting Harris at the time, I believe, or Biden at the time, right?
But like, how did you react to that when you saw those proposals?
And just to be clear, are you talking about the EO that went out?
Yeah, there was the EO, but then they were also drafting. They published a lot of detailed drafting. And then obviously California had its bill, which you probably saw as well, which specified like the number of parameters in a model, the size of a model, and had all these kind of constraints.
In reverse order, was against SB 1047... It felt like, you know, you had two big issues. One, you probably don't want state-by-state legislation on this topic. That's going to be, you're in a world of hurt if every state has a different approach to this.
And then secondarily, if you just look at how it evolved from the very first proposal to the final proposal, and unfortunately, the kind of underlying philosophy that was in the bill, it was very clearly a sort of like viewing, you know, basically AI progress as inherently risky right now. And so it just ratcheted up the different levels of consequence for the AI model developers.
And the risk is sort of the second or third order effects of that, which is like, does Zuck then want to release the next version of Llama if you're taking on that much risk? And even the incremental updates, the liability you have In terms of any of the model advancements. And so right now we're benefiting from just an incredibly competitive market between five or six players.
And you want them running as fast as possible, not having to have sort of this, you know, a whole council before every model gets released because they're, you know, in fear of getting sued by, you know, the government for hundreds of millions of dollars if one person does something wrong with the model. So that was the problem with SB 1047.
That's been the problem with some of the proposals on national legislation. I felt like the first CEO, it didn't have a lot of teeth in it. So it kind of was more like, let's watch this space and continue to study it. The actual current head of OSTP, Arti Prabhakar, a lot of folks in Silicon Valley know her. She's actually very strong, very technical.
understands the valley well, does not lean into overregulation. So I actually think OSTP has had a pretty good steward, even under Biden. But I think the efforts that Sachs would clearly be leading, I think would lean even more toward AI progress and sort of not accidentally overregulating too early in this journey.
So let me ask you a question then about crypto. You're not into crypto. Crypto is a little bit harder to regulate. So with Sachs being there, what do we think the one, two or three things he could do to actually make crypto not a scam, not have consumers get left holding the bag?
Obviously, sandboxing projects, maybe having people know your customer, some basic regulation there, the sophisticated investor test comes to mind. Chamath, what do you think SAC should do in terms of crypto regulation in the short term, in the near term?
That's a really good question. I think that today there are a lot of really valuable use cases that can sit on top of crypto rails. I think the most obvious one is how you can have real-time payments using stablecoins. I think the United States government is already using some of these stablecoins for a bunch of purposes.
The number of companies that are beginning to adopt and use stablecoins is actually growing very quickly as well. Take a second to define stablecoins for the audience just to catch people up. Let me define what a stablecoin is, which is that you put a dollar into a wallet somewhere. And in return, you get a digital token of that dollar. There are two big purveyors of stablecoins.
There's Tether and then there's USDC, which is this company called Circle. I think the easiest way to disambiguate them is Tether is abroad. I think it's run out of somewhere in the Caribbean. And USDC is American. It's run by this company called Circle. The other difference is that there is some ambiguity around how these assets are secured.
So what a stable coin is supposed to do is when you give them a dollar, they're supposed to go and buy some short-term treasury security so that that dollar is always guaranteed, right? Because if you had a billion dollars of stable coins, but only $900 million of assets to back them up, there's an insolvency risk there. There's a run on the bank risk, right?
So theoretically, a billion dollars of stable coins should have a billion dollars of cash in some short-term fungible security. What's incredible is at the scale in which these stable coins operate, that has turned out to be an enormous business. Why? When you give them a billion dollars and get a billion dollars of stable coins in return, they just go and put it into the bank.
And when interest rates are 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, they're making billions and billions of dollars. They get the float. They get the float. So these businesses have turned out to be incredible, but that's beyond the point. The point is that a lot of companies that you would never think, so for example, SpaceX uses these stable coins. How?
How do you think they collect payments from all the Starlink customers when they aggregate them in all of these long tail countries? They don't want to necessarily take the FX risk, the foreign exchange risk. They don't want to deal with sending wires. So what they do is they'll swap into stablecoin, send it back to the United States, and then swap back to US dollars.
So it's a very useful utility. So number one is I think we need to make those rails the standard rails in the United States. And what that does is it allows us to chip away at all of this decrepit infrastructure that the banks use to sort of slow down and tax a process that should never have been taxed.
So there's a good competition in a way, Chamath. It's incredible. Now the banks have somebody to challenge them for money transfer and money storage, and it could be regulated and stable.
But I guess the question that, yeah. But that's the first thing. But then the second thing it allows you to do is you start, you can see a world where now you can have real competition against the traditional rails, specifically Visa, MasterCard, American Express. Because when you look at great companies like Stripe, I use Stripe, I pay them 3%.
If I use stable coins from Stripe, I don't pay zero, but I don't pay 3%. It's kind of somewhere in the middle. If I was technically adept at implementing stable coins through the entire stack of my product, So I use it for this learn with me thing where we publish research. I would save a lot of money.
So the idea that you can take that 300 basis points you pay to these companies and crush it to zero would be a boon to global GDP because that's 3% on many tens of trillions of dollars.
Aaron, you're shaking your head. This is something that you're experimenting with at Vox or you're aware of or a problem that you recognize.
No, no, just the, I mean, the credit card rails is, I mean, the tax on transactions is obviously insane. So the stable coin being the intermediary for that in the future makes total sense if you could get everybody to kind of coordinate against that. So, yeah.
Well, in regulating, it would get people off of Tether, hopefully, which has a checkered, colorful, sorted pass. You can go look it up. But they've had many, many legal passions against them. I'll leave it at that.
Yeah, but in fairness to them, I think, again, both of these two companies look, as of today, again, you have a jurisdictional issue, difference. But as of today, it looks like they're both pegged one for one. But anyways, the point is, if Sachs can really push the adoption of stablecoins, number one, And then number two is to incentivize
much, much cheaper transactional rails, then I think he can go to Bitcoin and these other more long-tail crypto projects off of a back of momentum. Because these first two things, I think everybody will embrace and he won't get caught in a political quagmire.
These other things, you have these opponents always coming into the system and they have, even Bitcoin, like when I said this thing about encryption and quantum, and even though I thought, I was very clear. The crypto community on the internet went absolutely crazy all last week. Yes, they piled on. But the thing is, some of the maxis piled on.
Then when they actually took time to understand the technicalities of what I was saying, other people realized I was right, that they were tweeting it. My point is, That world is so animated and energized that I think it's hard to use them as the first place where you find progress. So I would tell Sachs, go to stablecoins, then disrupt the Visa rails, and then go to the other stuff.
I would go stable coins and I would go even before that, the accreditation test that I've been talking about because the SEC has that mandate. People were educated, Aaron. They could buy crypto and know they're going to lose their money or know that something's a fugazi or fugazi, whatever it is.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure we want to move on, but I guess, so there's a parallel universe where, so no matter what, like obviously Gensler did not get his arms around this whole thing. So that was a big mistake. But there's sort of like DeFi slash financial crypto where almost everything is deflationary. It improves the rails. If you believe in Bitcoin as this store of value,
and digital gold, all of those things can actually kind of make sense and be a bit rational and improve things. And then, unfortunately or not, depending on your views, there was this other sort of fractal event that happened, which was, oh, let's also use these things as a means of kind of creating a virtual currency and equities and tokens for anything, where that then runs into
basically the sec remit of like are these things securities or not and is there insider trading or not and can anybody issue them at any time and promote them on twitter or not and so so you know i think to some extent if you get back to like crypto 1.0 which was like this is a this is a financial infrastructure i think you would have avoided a lot of the the sort of noise and challenges with with crypto now i don't know you can't put the you can't put it back in the bag
But, but there's like, I don't think you could get 10 crypto people to agree on how you regulate that second category because some people, some people believe I should be able to issue an NFT on anything and I should be able to trade that.
And, and, and at the same time, they would obviously, they would sort of claim, well, that's just the same as a, as an aftermarket, you know, a seat to a concert. And yet another group would, would be treating this as, as effectively, you know, a security. And so I don't know how you're ever going to reel that in without some people being upset, you know, within the crypto community.
All right, well, more to come, and Saks will be back. Saks will be back, and we will be rotating the fifth seat amongst, you know, friends of the pod and newsmakers.
Sorry, did I already get rotated out based on? Well, yeah, basically.
The energy was a little low, but, you know, I mean, it's just, I think, well, what's your- You already had to warn people that this is a- What's your resting heart rate versus we're boys, and then we'll just make a decision.
Okay, I got it, I got it.
All right, listen, Doge is fully operational. Elon and Vivek have helped kill the last-minute omnibus spending bill. Wednesday night, the bill had been killed, and we were looking at the government shutting down starting Friday, December 20th.
Today, when you were listening to this, for some quick background, in September, Congress approved a bill that would keep the government funded through December 20th, the day this episode published. Keep that December date in mind for a second. This Tuesday, December 17th,
Three days before the deadline, leaders in Congress unveiled what was presented as a bipartisan stopgap bill that would keep the government funded through March 14. That kind of bill is called a continuing resolution, basically give you more time for the incoming GOP majority to reach an agreement on the funding.
for the government but there are two major problems with the bill it's a rushed job it had to pass the house in the senate by friday night after being presented on tuesday it's absurdly long 1500 pages with 340 billion dollars in spending including pay raises and better health care benefits for the members of congress my lord read the room gentlemen and ladies
funding for a global engagement center for another year that's the disinformation watchdog group that was wrapped up in the twitter files 130 billion to renew the farm bill for another year 110 billion dollars in hurricane disaster aid just money being thrown everywhere a billion three to replace the francis scott key bridge in baltimore they had some spicy comments on it congress has known about the deadline since they created it in late september he said the urgency
is 100% manufactured and designed to avoid serious public debate. But serious public debate is exactly what's happening on Twitter. People are screenshotting and using ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini to work their way through these documents. And it looks like this is not going to happen. Freeberg, your thoughts.
So the proposed bill made no real change to the current spending level of the federal government at roughly $6.2 trillion on an annualized basis, which, by the way, is roughly, call it, 23% of GDP. Just to give you some context, in 1860, nearly 100 years after the founding of the United States government, federal spending to GDP was less than 1%.
And it took off during the Civil War for a couple of years. But, you know, we're at these kind of like unprecedented levels year after year now, really speaking to how the federal government has grown, as we talked about many times, so much in our life.
Our roads were really bad back then, though.
Yeah, our roads were really bad back then. Lots of problems, yeah. But remember, the objective of the republic was to have the states make local decisions about how to take care of their infrastructure. The national highway effort obviously changed that in the mid-20th century. But this was kind of the original intention of the Republic.
It wasn't to have the federal government come in and employ people, provide insurance to people, provide energy markets to people, own football stadiums, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you go through the list of things in this bill, I think the $100 billion of natural disaster relief, everyone says that seems very reasonable. That's something the federal government should do.
When we have a natural disaster, we need help, we need support. That's a great thing for the federal government to do. But think about the incentive it creates. It distorts markets. So we've talked about this in the past.
in areas where you have a higher probability of natural disasters and people have paid a lot of money for their homes, pay a lot of money for infrastructure, should the federal government come in and rebuild those homes and provide capital to those individuals and those businesses to help them rebuild those homes if there's a high probability of natural disaster events happening again in the future?
It means that the cost of insurance doesn't matter and the cost of real estate doesn't matter because the federal government effectively can come in and support those prices. In the same way, the federal government comes in and supports the prices in agricultural products through the work in the Farm Bill and through the biofuels mandates, which were also proposed to be extended in this thing.
So the federal government's playing both a market role and also kind of this role that I think fills the gap where people want to have a customer where there isn't a customer and an employer where there isn't one. So how did we get to this point? So from a first principles perspective, we've kind of, I think, lost the narrative on what the federal government was meant to do.
If you think about the simple rubric in a bill, like just go back some period of time and someone says, hey, I want something. I want to have this in this bill. And you're the representative that's supposed to vote on that bill and say yes or no. It's very hard to just say, no, we are not going to spend that money. What's the incentive to say no?
The alternative is you say, yes, but give me X as well. There is an incentive in that response. And the incentive there is to get something for your electorate, the people that voted you in as a representative of the House, which is how we ended up at this point where everyone says, I want something if you're going to get something.
And eventually the government, the federal government swells to spending roughly 24% of our GDP. Now, the biggest mistake I think the founding fathers made was that they didn't create constitutional limits on spending and enrichment. And this was because they had these deeply held philosophical beliefs that relied on the House of Representatives to provide a check by the people.
If you read the Federalist Papers, and I went through a couple of these recently, and I used ChatGPT to help me kind of, you know, bring out some of, I think, the key points. But in the Federalist Papers 10 and 51, James Madison emphasized that the structure of government was meant to ensure that both state and federal governments would limit each other's excesses, including their financial ones.
And then in the Federalist Paper No. 58, he said, the House of Representatives has control over the, quote, power of the purse, which gives the people's representatives authority over taxation and spending. But they also warned, along with Alexander Hamilton,
of the dangers of unchecked government power through burdensome taxation and excess spending, which would ultimately erode individual freedoms. So they recognized that there were going to be limits, but their expectation was that the House and the individuals that were electing people to the House that were members of this republic would come in and say, we're going to keep that from happening.
And clearly something went wrong along the way that we got to this point where, again, spending is 24% of GDP. And I think
that the biggest thing they got wrong was that they didn't create these constitutional limits on federal spending or taxation through either a balanced budget structure, spending as a percentage of GDP, no federal debt or term limits or all of these other mechanisms that could have been introduced at the beginning that could have created some structural limits.
Instead, they assumed that there was this natural limit that would emerge as a function of the democratic process because of how they formed the government. But unfortunately, I think they failed to realize that the electorate would eventually not want the freedoms of the people of the time.
Back then, in 1776, this was a pioneering country where everyone wanted to come here to have freedom to do anything they wanted, everywhere they wanted, to build a business, to homestead, to be rugged individuals.
It was entrepreneurial, yeah.
It was. And over the last 250 years, we've gotten used to an increment in lifestyle every year and discovered that we have a mechanism to force the increment in lifestyle through the actions of government. And so the electorate has stood up and said, I want more each year and I want the government to provide it for me if the free markets are not doing it.
And that's really where we kind of got to this point where I think we elected people to the House who ultimately had this incentive that said, if I give you this, I need to get this. And we ended up swelling this. So I don't know if it cracks with Doge. I really don't know if people step up and recognize the limits of government and what the limits should be of the federal government.
on an electorate basis. It's an amazing moment to see that Elon went on Twitter and said, hey, guys, this is nuts. And everyone said, this is nuts. We're not going to elect you if you do this.
If that momentum and that transparency can keep up, I hope that people start to connect the dots that this isn't a free lunch, that the federal government spending is not limitless and it's not unaccountable.
Aaron, I think we have enough people who are notable now speaking up about this excess spending and the out of control debt, that it's now in vogue to talk about austerity, to talk about inefficiency. And that really all comes back to Doge. And dare I say, you know, the conversations we've been having this podcast for two years, that this is becoming acute.
What are your thoughts on this vibe shift, this complete pivot Where we've gone from my lord, everybody's saying, I got to get mine. You got yours. I'm getting mine to name and shame. They're naming and shaming now very specific pieces of pork in these bills, you know, including stadiums for the NFL. And people are like, why is the NFL getting this if they're worth 20, 30, 40 billion dollars?
two just quick thoughts. One, Patrick Carlson had a tweet yesterday that basically said this sort of this, this big misinformation kind of created by, by people that want to be slow is that you, you have to sort of choose two of fast, good and cheap.
And, and I think basically, you know, Elon's companies have sort of always effectively kind of proven the opposite, which is, which is actually, if you just like start to ask the question, like, why does that thing have to cost as much? You know, if you're building a rocket or designing a car or developing batteries, like why, you know, if you just do ground up, why does it have to cost as much?
And so so it's interesting is that that probably if most people looked at what the government was spending on, they wouldn't even feel like like, you know, it's not even helping them in the disaster relief sense of, you know, I think like that. There are probably actually people that actually do experience the benefits of disaster relief.
It's actually just all of the overhead that we've created to getting anything done in the government that could actually make the government better serve all of the constituents. I was talking to you know, sort of a nameless individual in the government the other week, where by Congress, they have to hire contractors to do work.
And the contractors, the contracting firms charge them two and a half times the sort of cost of an individual employee that they could otherwise hire. And so now they have to outsource the work and they don't have any accountability mechanism for that contractor. And so I think there's not a single American that could look at that and say, this is like actually working well.
Yeah, we are spending more money to do less. And the ultimate outcome is actually lower quality. And so so you have to at some point just kind of do a little bit of a reset moment. And that's obviously the upside of Doge is like, it's like, it breaks every rule of us thinking about how, how you would actually go and attack this problem. We thought you'd attack it through meetings.
And we would do it through congressional, you know, sort of processes and research. And it's actually just, it is, you know, obviously a much more sort of founder startup oriented way to approach this. There's gonna be lots of things that are broken glass around the edges. There's no question. But I think what's interesting about this week's event is,
I think that there's been this underlying kind of notion of like, you know, Elon and whatnot at all, you know, don't understand the government enough to be able to change it. And it might actually be the case that the government doesn't understand Elon in the sense of like, he will just see this thing through.
And the tools at his disposal and Doge's disposal is sort of, you know, completely unprecedented in terms of the ability to put anybody in Congress on notice if you know, if basically they are promoting things that are not making the country better. So the thing that we saw this week was actually that playing out.
Everybody's been wondering, well, what are the actual, you know, what are the formal mechanisms Doge has to accomplish and enact change? And it's like, you just saw it. Like they can just create enough visibility and spotlight on the problem that it causes a level of discomfort in supporting moving forward with whatever that thing is. And so I think it's interesting.
No opinion on the actual elements of the bill other than from a process standpoint and a new kind of case study of how this is going to play out is I think we're seeing some early indication of what Doge will be able to do.
Aaron, how do you feel about this Doge effort as someone who is a public Harris supporter? So you've come out, I think you've been public about this, but I want to understand why people... wouldn't be supportive of this effort, right? Like, like, what is like, what is the motivation for people saying this isn't a good thing?
We shouldn't be doing this, because there's a lot of folks that have gone on these shows. It's like they blast Elon, they blast Vivek. But like, aren't these principles, like, shouldn't they just be universal that we should not be wasting money and stuff? Sure, of course.
I mean, so to give some credit, you know, you have Ro Khanna supporting it. You have Fetterman supporting it. Bernie Sanders, you know, everybody. Yeah, Bernie Sanders had a good call out for Elon. You have everybody has their thing in the government budget that they don't like. So assuming that they see that as something Doge can contribute to, you could probably get actually broad support.
You know, there's a classic, you know, sort of reflex within within probably Democrat Party on at this point, just because of Elon's support of Trump. That if something is an Elon project, they're going to instantly respond no matter what the thing is as a negative without kind of actually saying, does this actually support actually something I do agree with?
It's all partisan, none of its first principles, right? I mean, for these people, for this group of people, which isn't everybody.
That's going to be true of both sides. Michelle Obama was like, let's get kids healthy. And all of a sudden, now it's in vogue to do that. So I think we're just in an environment where anything will become partisan.
What's interesting is that because of the, you know, some of the cross-party elements of Trump and now his cabinet is it might pull in more of the Democrat Party than would usually happen. And I think because of Elon and the people that are surrounding Trump, you probably have a bit more air cover for the Rokanas of the world to also step up.
Because if it was like Steve Bannon and Trump doing Doge, it would be like, okay, maybe this is not the thing to lend credibility to for pure political reasons. If you have some of the best entrepreneurs that are out there actually literally in the cabinet driving this, at some point, it is an IQ test if you're on board or not.
Shabbat, this is a sea change that we're seeing. And to Aaron's point, this administration gets to pick their priorities, but everything can't be a priority or it's not a priority. Therefore, they've picked the priority of smaller government, more controlled spending over, say, mass deportation or removing more rights from women to choose when they have an abortion, etc.
So this seems like a distinctly different focus for Trump 2.0, the second term. What are your thoughts on what we saw this past 72 hours with relation to this bill?
It was the most incredible change in how politics will be done going forward. I think that people are probably underestimating what happened here. This was a multi hundred billion dollar grift that was stopped on a dime over 12 hours of tweets. You would have never thought that that was possible.
The point is to put a dagger in something that big, that had so much broad support just a few hours earlier, I think it's so consequential in how the United States can run going forward.
So building on what you said, Chamath, also very interesting here is the fact that Trump hasn't taken office yet and they're having this huge impact. This is occurring a month before he's even in office. If they can stop this, what will they do when they actually are in power?
I think right now you're seeing the first order reaction, which is about the bill itself. And I think that misses the point.
The bigger issue is going forward, you will have the ability to, and part of it is because we have a set of tools now that allows us to do this, to read 1500 pages in a matter of minutes, to summarize it into the key essential elements, to really understand what's being asked and what's being offered.
And then to put it in a digestible format that normal people can consume, then all you'll have to do is just connect the dots and tell your congressman or congresswoman that you'd like or dislike this thing. And what you're going to see is a much more active form of government. And I think that's the really big deal. The fact that it really becomes the voice of the people.
Now, the alternative can also happen. Imagine there is a piece of legislation that is very controversial, but it turns out that people actually want it. then the opposite will also happen and can also happen now. So I think that it's a very nuanced and interesting way that governance can happen.
The other thing that I'll say though, which is funny, is we should have a segment called Today in Hypocrisy. And if I was running the segment, what I would say is today in hypocrisy, You have a group of people, i.e. the Democrats, who are very upset and who now point to Elon as sort of like some shadow cabinet minister or some shadow president-elect or some shadow first buddy, right?
First buddy. I love that.
Except then I thought to myself, well, hold on a second. Like there was like something untoward happening in the shadows. And I thought, well, actually, this is the exact opposite. The guy is tweeting in real time his stream of consciousness. You absolutely know everything that he wants because he just lays it all bare. And at the same time, I thought it was really interesting.
The same people who were saying that were the ones that finally admitted that they were hiding Biden for the last two years. And I thought, did we just miss this? Like the same people that are like, hold on, Elon, I don't like the fact you're telling us what you actually want on Twitter transparently while we hired our president of the United States in a box.
Well, yeah, so you're referring to a Wall Street Journal story that broke.
This week in hypocrisy, Jason, take it away.
Yeah, I mean, it was just, as we said on this pod, we knew that they were hiding him. Now the cover-up is worse than the crime, and the cover-up is a cover-up. They were not letting him take meetings. They were limiting access to him. Dean B. Phillips came on this program. Shout-out to him. Congratulations on a great run. He just told the truth here. He's not up for it.
He's sundowning, you know, terrible situation. People get old and people have cognitive decline.
The end. Question. Hold on a second. So just to contrast and compare, Trump is not even in office. You know, Elon is not a member of the cabinet per se. These are effectively today still private citizens. When there's all of this noise about what happened over the last two days to stop an absolutely ridiculous pork barrel bill.
But when are we going to double click into what decisions have been made in the last two years that were actually Biden's versus surrogates that just decided? And who gave them the authority to make those decisions?
If they're going to do, Aaron, and you and I are left leaning moderates, I think that would be the most accurate way to describe us. I mean, if they want to do an investigation, there should be an investigation to did they know that he was in massive cognitive decline and let him stay in charge of the nuclear codes? Do you agree or disagree?
This is this is sort of not not the part of politics I think about as much. So I'll leave that up to you as the other left leaning moderate.
So, yeah, no, I just wonder if like this is a crime that they like. What if it turns out he actually has Parkinson's or Alzheimer's like a diagnosis? It's not out of the realm of possibility that they covered up an Alzheimer's diagnosis. And if they did, is that criminal? I mean, it's unethical.
It's deeply unethical. It's very dangerous. Yes. Again, it just goes back to the people elected Joe Biden. He won fair and square. He ran on a specific mandate that the people endorsed. I just think it's devious, though, that certain figures in that White House... took a level of power and decision-making authority that they were never entitled to.
If they wanted that, they should have run and they should have been elected. That's what we all sign up for. And so I think that that idea that we let that happen or that that happened to the American voting public is, I think, very unfair. That's why I think you have to realize that, and you've said this before, we need these checks and balances going forward.
And I think the way that you have these checks and balances, again, is veer towards transparency. The more transparency there is. And again, this is where I'll say, You may or may not like Donald Trump, but the one thing you will never have to be worried about is whether you will not be able to hear from him in first person.
You're going to hear from him. That is absolutely true. I mean, simple suggestion here, Chamath.
If you're ever in doubt, you will be able to know very quickly where he stands on whatever topic is important to you. And I think that that idea is very important because then if it's filtered through somebody else, because of some health issue that's then covered up. We're making decisions that impact the entire world. We're making decisions that impacts the economy.
We're making decisions that touch hundreds of millions of American lives. Who are making those decisions?
Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I have a simple suggestion here with these bills, by the way, when they're 1500 pages, how about for every 100 pages you release, you have one day of review. So if you want to release 1500 pages, 15 business days review, Does that sound reasonable? Maybe three weeks? And then just stop doing 1,500 at a time. Break these things up into 200 or 300 pages at a time.
I just love the fact that people are motivated and they have the will and the desire to focus on these things Focus and desire because people have to have the will and people did not have the will to get in the weeds and examine the spending. And now it's becoming like in vogue. It's becoming a pastime to question the spending. This is a really great moment in time for America.
The other thing, Jason, that we haven't done is I think that killing the bill was step one. The thing that America has not yet seen, and I think Aaron brought this up with the Patrick Collison tweet, which is just excellent. Nick, if you just want to put it up there, it really is true. America still believes that the more you spend, the more you get. We do. At the core.
That's why there are 1,500 pages of spending in here. Because people want things because they want things to be better. What we need to train people to understand is actually that it's the lies that are told that make you think that with more money comes a better outcome. And we see it every day in Silicon Valley. We all start with next to nothing as a startup.
And we outmaneuver and we out-execute companies all day long with way more resources. So it has nothing to do with the resources.
Contraint leads to great art. Aaron, your thoughts?
No, I mean, I can't add that much more to this. I think there's probably a little bit of a disconnect at times from the, let's say, the voting public and broad constituents from then those that have sort of seen this in real life being inside of a company having to do a startup and scaling up and just the perverse incentives to build bigger teams, spend more.
Your project then is more important the more dollars it gets. We have all of these systems in place, which is the stuff that gets attention are the things that you spent more on.
So you have all these weird incentives to actually have your thing literally cost more, to have more overhead because you've brought in more contractors into the project that then you're going to get some kind of future benefit from in some way.
So you have a lot that is sort of fully broken in this and there's no – it's hard to imagine any other way to veer off from that path other than something that does shake things up as much as Doge is doing.
All right. Listen, we can't do any worse than being massively in debt. So just let's have a culture of – Yes, we can. No, yes, we can.
You could have runaway debt.
Yeah. I think we already have that. I mean, this is for people who maybe are rooting against Trump in the audience or rooting against this because they're super partisan. All I'll say is I know these individuals around Trump. Root for them and root for this process, please, because this is a path to fixing the most acute existential problem we have, which is our debt.
You don't have to like Trump to like Elon, to like Vivek, and to like these other individuals, Sachs included. There are great people who are being called to serve. Let's judge them based on their performance. That's all I ask for the people who hate Trump, who hate these individuals, judge them on their performance. They've come out with a bold plan. Let them cook.
Once they've cooked, then judge their results. That is what I'm telling everybody who hates Trump and who hates this administration and who's partisan on the other side. Let them cook. Judge the results.
I'll just throw out one more thing on this because I think the branding of Doge is often the efficiency side, which people always go to the spend side. But the corollary to that is the regulations that obviously are expensive to maintain. And that's what creates layers and layers of overhead on reviewing everything that's coming in then to the government.
And, you know, unfortunately, we have great examples in California where literally we spend more to do less. And it's because we've ratcheted up these layers and layers of regulation. And I have friends literally doing climate tech.
In climate tech, you couldn't imagine something more probably left-leaning Democrat that they can't actually get things done in California, the state that you would imagine to be the most kind of climate-first friendly state because of the amount of regulation that prevents them from getting things done.
So, you know, there's actually this like, you know, total combination of actually fewer regulations. You'll spend less money in government. You'll actually grow the economy faster, which will create more jobs. Like all of the things get solved, the more efficient you get, you know, kind of writ large on all of the topics.
So this is spending, great point, Aaron. Regulations next. Let's see what they do there. I was in the room when Antonio Grossis was doing zero-based budgeting at Twitter, now X, and Sax and I were looking at roles for people
What this team can do in terms of making things more efficient, it's amazing what can happen when you do zero-based budgeting and when you just think from first principles, well, do we even need to do this? Does this need to exist? Take all these regulations, put a 20-year clock on half of them, a 10-year clock on the other half.
Can I just get one more random example? Feel free to edit it out. Chamath, you'll like this because it came out of Meta. Have you followed the Z standard compression library from Meta? No. So this open source library, kind of a next gen compression on data. And we finally, it took us probably too long, but the team worked insanely hard, implemented this compression algorithm.
We literally, our uploads and downloads got faster. we spend less money on networking and compute. And it took some re-engineering of the system. But that's just not a concept that people go into problem solving with, which is like, what if the thing actually was cheaper to run and it was better?
And so think about all the systems of government that could just be upgraded and then you would spend less money actually maintaining them. I mean, we spend... you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, way too much on legacy infrastructure, technology. We could automate more. You could spend way less money and then get better outcomes. So this is just happening everywhere.
And I don't think people realize the scale of the opportunity.
And I'll just give an example. When we went into Twitter, nobody was coming to the office. There were people who hadn't come to the office, who hadn't committed code in six months. So what were they doing, right? So you start looking at the data. Then they were spending an enormous amount of money on SaaS software that nobody had logged into.
And then they had desk software for route people around that was costing $10 per day, per desk, per location, whatever. Nobody was coming to the office, but they were paying for software to route people to the right desk in office suiting. The waste, when I tell you the waste and the grift, and I'll just call it what my interpretation is, stealing. They were stealing from those shareholders.
The government is stealing from taxpayers. It has to be fixed. Let our boys cook. Freberg, you get the final word before we go on to Conspiracy Corner. You got nothing? All right, let's go straight to Conspiracy Corner. Everybody put your tinfoil hats on. There are drones over New Jersey. Thursday morning, the FAA banned drones.
This is breaking news in parts of New Jersey until January 17th due to, quote unquote, breaking news, special security reasons. They also warned that the government may respond with deadly force against drones posing a threat. This thing is getting crazier by the day. There have been thousands of reported drone sightings in New Jersey and bordering states over the last week. Here's some examples.
Play the clip, yada, yada. Until Thursday morning, White House officials have been dismissive, saying repeatedly that nothing significant is going on. One of the theories was that the drones were looking for nuclear material, a.k.a. a dirty bomb, or lost radioactive material, or, the ultimate, a lost nuclear weapon. bomb from like an actual nuclear warhead from Ukraine.
On Tuesday morning, the mayor of Belleville, New Jersey suggested the drones could be looking for that radioactive material that went missing on December 2nd. That was radioactive material, germanium 68. We'll get details on that from Freiburg in a moment. And then, of course, conspiracy theories are going wild. It's Iran. It's UFOs.
And my favorite, Project Blue Beam, which is that NASA is using holograms and other technology to create a new world order and religion and projecting Jesus into the clouds. You can look that stuff up or we'll have Alex Jones on in Sachse's seat one week.
Okay, Freeberg, you're the genius here. Tell us what's going on. I think there are three likely explanations. The first is that the government's got some activities that can't be disclosed. So we don't know and they can't talk about it. No one can either, you know, say yes or say no to it. So, you know, that's kind of one that's pretty possible. The second is...
These are just individuals with a bunch of drones messing around, having fun, trying to wreak havoc. Could be fun. Bunch of kids. I think we've all been there. The third is what I would call kind of a bit of a more nefarious, like, this is my conspiracy theory. I think it could be considered a psyop. Okay, so...
Right now, the US has a significant regulatory burden on drone utilization in a commercial setting. And it's very hard to use drones. You have to have line of sight to the operator. These things aren't supposed to go on their own. There's all these rules and restrictions and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, you've got countries like China rocketing ahead.
So I don't know if you guys know the company Meituan in China, you know, the food delivery company? Have you guys, did you know that they do a large amount of drone delivery of their food now? I was not aware of that. We're testing that here in the US. The drone delivery business in China is already $30 billion a year.
And they're also launching a pretty significant fleet of what we would call kind of the eVTOLs or flying cars. The expectation is that by 2030, there'll be 100,000 flying cars moving people around in China. And these are huge efficiency gains.
In fact, with Meituan, you can now order food while you're on the Great Wall at one of the ramparts, and the drone will bring the food to you while you're walking the Great Wall as a tourist.
And in the US, the reason that these things haven't taken off and the reason we don't have a large kind of drone industry, which is clearly emerging and is gonna be a huge economic driver for China and others around the world is simply the regulatory restrictions. And so if you were gonna try and mess with the US's ability to move forward with the drone economy,
you would probably try and wreak some havoc, stoke some fear, and get people to say, hey, this doesn't seem cool. What's going on? I don't like that there's all these drones in the sky. I'm freaking out. And try and get the regulators to come in and say, hey, we're banning drones. And set up everyone, including the people in the government, to say, we should take a beat.
We should think a little bit before we deregulate. Who would do this?
Who's the motivation?
Uber Eats and Postmates? No, no, no.
People driving?
No, no, no. It could be the other government. That's my PSYOP point. This could be a PSYOP.
Oh, you're saying this could be China doing this to try to slow down our economy?
Think about it. If you're going to pass a bill in Congress to make drones more freely roamable in the skies, you're going to reference back this crazy story in New Jersey. Everyone's freaking out about it. And you're going to say, hey, wait, what about all that stuff that happened in New Jersey? Maybe this doesn't make as much sense. People are kind of scared about it. We shouldn't rush.
We shouldn't rush. We shouldn't rush. That would be my PSYOP theory. That's my kind of conspiracy theory tinfoil hat. I don't often do them, but that's what I would kind of think about.
I think the first two are probably more likely. Alex Jones would be proud. Alex Jones would be proud. Aaron, why don't you jump the fence and tell us your best conspiracy theory of this?
No, no. Jump the fence. This is... That was all crazy pills when I just heard. There...
Yeah, take some.
I think there's like 10 higher psyops you would do if you wanted to get us to have a collapsing economy than going after drone deliveries. What would they be? Well, first of all, I think you'd have AI do a robot. I like conspiracy corner. I think you'd have a robot AI thing that runs amok. That's a good idea.
Rogue robot.
Robocop. Yeah. Yeah, I think that would be way sooner than you worry about food delivery.
No, you have 10 self-driving cars hop the curb and crash into a storefront. Self-driving is on ice for two years. That would be an example. Chamath, your thoughts? You got some conspiracies here? What do you think is going on here?
No. But I thought that the most credible thing was that they were looking for radioactive material. That somehow some got lost.
Why would they only look at night? Actually, it's interesting you say that. There was somebody on Twitter, X, who claims to be an expert in this field. And there's a startup, actually, that I just talked about. Which one? Kenkoa the Great? I think it might have been Kenkoa the Great. Shout out to Kenkoa the Great in his mom's basement eating pizza bites.
Why do you hate Kenkoa?
He's a nice guy.
I don't hate Kenkoa. I don't hate Kenkoa.
Kenkoa tried to get me bad because he said I was trying to dox him. You always...
Ken Kankoa.
He's great. No, I just think it's hilarious that people are retrading Ken Kankoa the Great as if he's like this great journalist and he's in his mom's basement eating Hot Pockets or he's working for Putin.
He's a really good journalist.
I don't know.
Do I want my news from J-Cal or Ken Kankoa? I don't know. I don't know. Who do you take?
I mean, your conspiracy theory is pretty good.
You like Ken Kankoa? I subscribe to Ken Kankoa.
Aaron Levy, you have a favorite? Who are you? Are you Autism Capital or King Koa?
Oh, I like Autism Capital too. I think he's really good.
Absolutely.
I'm liking Geiger these days. Oh, you're into Geiger.
Oh, Geiger Capital.
Geiger Capital is good. I read them all. PC Braggs? PC Braggs? I think the nighttime thing would be, it would be at least typical of this government to do a Streisand effect of of just like, maybe if we cover it up, nobody will see. And then obviously it's the biggest thing. So yeah.
But if they, there is a startup that makes, I, we really looked it up. And there is a startup that makes drones to do this specific task, to look for dirty bombs in ports. And ports obviously look for these things. It's a known threat. This is not rocket science.
And why only at night?
Oh, because that they can read the signatures better was the theory. That at night you can read the signature, which doesn't make sense to me. Science guy, you want to come in here?
I don't see how nighttime you'd get a better read on radioactive material. It doesn't make any sense.
That made no sense. That sounded like a crazy thing.
But anyway, we're living in crazy times. Speaking of crazy. By the way, that was my first conspiracy theory in 208 episodes of the All In Pod.
Very nice. I actually can participate in Conspiracy Corner now.
I'm coming back next week with a better one.
Okay, J. Cal, read us some more news. Go to Google News and read us some more news so we can do another topic.
Jesus Christ, man.
Read a article for us.
No, you do it. Go ahead. No, no, you get the docket in front of you.