All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
New SEC Chair, Bitcoin, xAI Supercomputer, UnitedHealth CEO murder, with Gavin Baker & Joe Lonsdale
Sat, 07 Dec 2024
(0:00) Bestie announcement! (2:53) Gavin Baker and Joe Lonsdale join the show (4:14) State of the Trump Bump: Debt focus, Deregulation, America's lucky position (20:08) Trump nominates Paul Atkins as SEC Chair, replacing Gary Gensler: What this means for crypto and other markets (41:07) Thoughts on Michael Saylor's Bitcoin play, state of defense tech, and the US/China AI competition (49:25) xAI's massive GPU cluster, expanding to 1M GPUs, how Grok 3 will test AI scaling laws, and what's next (1:08:28) UnitedHealth CEO murdered, reactions Get virtual tickets for The All-In Holiday Spectacular!: https://allin.com/events Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Gavin Baker: https://x.com/GavinSBaker Follow Joe Lonsdale: https://x.com/JTLonsdale 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://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113603133222686186 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/business/trump-sec-paul-atkins.html https://x.com/davidmarcus/status/1862654506774810641 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-05/convertible-bond-arbs-are-making-microstrategy-wall-street-s-hottest-trade https://www.ft.com/content/9c0516cf-dd12-4665-aa22-712de854fe2f https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/nyregion/brian-thompson-uhc-ceo-shot https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-shot-chest-midtown-manhattan-masked-gunman-large/story?id=116446382&cid=social_twitter_abcn https://nypost.com/2024/12/06/media/taylor-lorenz-defends-unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-jokes
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the Trump Bump?
Pretty exciting. Pretty awesome. I have no announcements. The rumors about me becoming press secretary are obviously premature, but if asked to serve, I will serve my country. Okay, let's get to it. Don't worry, besties, All In isn't going anywhere. We'll be here every week for you, except maybe Thanksgiving or a holiday now and again. All right, let's start the show.
Humphrey Barrett, great episode. Let's go. All right, everybody, welcome to the All In podcast. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. How are you doing, Friedberg?
I'm hanging in there. I'm waiting for the tsunami to hit. It's gonna, we're about 40 minutes away. I'm a little anxious right now.
More anxious than normal is what you're saying. Like on a scale of one to Freeburg, this is like as anxious as you get with the tsunami? I don't know what's going to happen.
This current warning shows a five foot water rise or five meter. I can't tell. God, I really hope we don't publish this episode and there's like a total disaster. That would be historic.
We're not going to make light of it. We get warnings once in a while just to give everybody a little perspective here. I'm at David Sachs' house. I've taken over. As you can see, I got my Montclair hat on, Freeburg. I found Sax's robe. It was Sax's robe, but I got a red sharpie and I just crossed it out and I just put J-Cal on it. And then I went down and I was talking to Chef.
Does Sax know that you're staying at his house? He knows I'm staying here, but... Does he though? He doesn't know that I found the actual caviar.
Let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Saxon. Love you, Wesley.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of Paul Atkins being nominated as SEC Chair?
Thank you, J. Cal. Happy to be here. Great to see everybody.
Yeah. We are experiencing a huge Trump bump. The election is over. The cabinet is being assembled, and we're seeing Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, as well as maybe regulations being pulled down and we'll get to our first topic about our new SEC chair.
But just generally speaking, Gavin, as a market participant for a living, what's your take on what we've seen over the last three weeks since the election results came in?
So if they execute unstated plans and there are some of the world's greatest execution machines involved, Elon generally does what he says he's going to do. This is going to be awesome for America, for markets, for the world. And the analogy I keep coming back to is Satya Nadella taking over as CEO of Microsoft. Microsoft was a monopoly, incredibly advantaged.
It had just been horribly mismanaged for years. All he had to do to start winning was stop doing really, really dumb things. And that's an incredible place to be. America, we're the greatest country. We've got oceans on two sides, peaceful neighbors, incredible natural resources, completely can produce our own food and energy. In many ways, most privileged country on Earth.
But sometimes with great privilege comes great stupidity. And California, to me, would be a leading example of that. In many ways, most privileged state in America. And it's printed away with bad policies.
And I do think one thing that everyone of all political stripes agrees on is there are too many regulations that result in far too many administrators, far too much complexity, and an inability to build things in America. So-
It was used very effectively, as it should have been against the Harris administration, that they'd approved $42 billion for rural broadband, hadn't built anything, had approved $40 billion for EV chargers, whatever it was, hadn't done anything. And it's not that they didn't want to dig trenches and do broadband. They didn't want to make EV chargers. Their own regulations prevented them.
So I just think... deregulation and simplifying regulations and the tax code is going to lead to an immense amount of growth, which is something that all Americans should be happy about.
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Chapter 4: What is the role of AI in the US and China competition?
You could actually have a process that like naturally trims things, naturally makes things fight for itself. And that way it doesn't get as dumb ever again.
Why not just make them automatically sunsetting after five years if they're not renewed? Exactly. But make the process to renew them difficult and data-driven. Exactly. So if you fought for an allocation. The process of renewing them will take so much time that it will slow it down. Exactly.
I wonder where we got to the place, Friedberg, I will bring you in on this, since really, I think it was maybe two or three years ago, you started to point out exactly the debt spiral we're going to get in.
I want to give you your flowers here on the pod, because from this pod and your obsession and your harping on and on about this national debt problem, you saw it early, you talked about it constantly, you brought a lot of consensus on board, and now we're seeing it as the issue of the transition is the debt.
And we were sitting here for the past year or two saying, when are politicians going to even pay attention to this? And now they are paying attention to it. So first, here's your virtual flowers. Second, how are you feeling about the transition today?
Well, I mean, I think, first of all, there's like three layers of the problem, which I've been trying to harp on for almost four years. Number one is the inefficiency and lack of accountability, which Joe and Gavin are obviously talking about. And that leads to excessive spending. And that leads to the debt problem.
And the debt problem creates this kind of arithmetic debt death spiral, which is something you don't want to find yourself in. So that's the inevitability that I've been kind of really worried about. And I think that, you know, look, there's
The first derivative and second derivative can kind of get addressed, and then hopefully you don't get to the absolute point where you have this breaking point. I think right now everyone's banking, number one, on can we deregulate in a way that can unlock growth? And by unlocking growth, the kind of arithmetic argument is grow GDP because you're not going to be able to shrink debt super fast.
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Chapter 5: What are the challenges facing the US in energy production?
In order to grow GDP, there needs to be some unleashing happening. And so if you can get GDP to grow 4%, 5%, And you can minimize the excess spending, meaning you can minimize the deficit, the federal deficit, and therefore minimize the increment in the debt level. The debt to GDP ratio becomes more manageable because ultimately you can only tax so much of GDP.
So, yeah, I feel like this is important in both senses. One is just cut the inefficient, wasteful spending, get rid of the regulations, and that'll unleash debt. the necessary growth.
One of the proxies I look to, and I think that this is going to be kind of the critical motivating factor for the United States, whether it's this administration or the next or on a continuous basis, there's going to be this kind of moment where we're going to look across the water at what China has. And you can see what China's getting, what China is making, what China is doing.
I've talked about this a lot as well. And I do think this is the most critical metric that no one talks about as much as I think we should, which is the increment in electricity production capacity in China compared to the United States. And so we are going from one terawatt to two terawatts. They're going from, I think, two to eight over the same time period. And they're doing it at a price.
Why is that so important for the people who are listening who think that you're saying is very esoteric?
I'll let Joe answer that.
Joe, go ahead. Just unpack it for the audience.
I mean, I obviously understand why this is important, but I want you to... The number one thing I'd say is it's usually correlated to how well the working class... doing in your country to per capita GDP to cost of goods. I mean, obviously, I care about it, because we want to scale AI for all the things we're doing, and we want to be able to do it effectively.
But if you just look over time, it's really clear the relationship between how well is your average working middle class person doing and their quality of life, their cost of life. and the cost of electricity and cost of power. And it's crazy we're not just like ramping up and cutting things to do this.
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