Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO

Brian Johnson: That's so funny. I, I need… who knows? I am the king of nighttime erections. I go to bed thinking about myself, when I make up, thinking about myself. So there’s a big erection in between.

Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world! Man, we’re starting off with three of the four original band members: Chamath Palihapitiya, he’s your chairman dictator; the sultan of science, David Friedberg; and, of course, I’m your host, Jason Calacanis. David Sax from the original band will be on the second half of the show. We’re gonna do some of the classics. Yes. We’ll get some of the classics, including Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, coming up on the second half of the show in our greatest hits revival tour.

But with us again, sitting in the red throne is the one, the only Joe Lonsdale! He’s back. He is, if you can imagine, further right than Keith Rabois and Sachs. They tell him to pump the brakes. Welcome back to the program, Joe Lonsdale. How you doing, brother?

Hey Jason. Doing great here in Texas today.

Yes. I see you right over the hill on the ranch. Our ranches are within twenty minutes of each other. Joe Lonsdale and I are shooting guns at our ranches.

Are you on a ranch, Joe?

Well, I bought a bunch of the homes and connected them, so it’s kinda like a ranch, but it’s actually a suburb.

Yeah. It’s more like a compound.

He has a compound. Suburb. Suburb. That creaking sound you hear are the libs rolling in the guillotines. Yes. He bought the small town he lives in.

Joe Lonsdale’s here. Of course, he is a venture capitalist, the founder of 8VC. They’ve got $6,000,000,000 in AUM, cofounded Palantir, OpenGov, and Andreessen Horowitz. Three billion-dollar-plus companies he cofounded and an early investor in Andreessen Horowitz. I’m in the market for secondary shares. You know how to reach me, folks. If you’re selling your secondary in Andreessen Horowitz, I’m building a position for obvious reasons. And Oculus, Wish, Oscar Health, amongst his other investments.

Hey. What was the feedback, Joe, on your first appearance here on the All In Pod?

People loved it. You know, you guys gave me no warning, so I was, like, on a mobile phone sideways, but it worked out. It was great. Everyone saw it.

I guess that looks like people actually watch your show, Jason.

I was surprised. Apparently, people tune in from time to time, and that’s why we call it the number one podcast in the world.

How are you doing, Chamath Palihapitiya? How are you doing, brother?

I’m doing really well. Okay. Once again, giving me a ton to work with there. And Freedom… Wait. What would you like to know? Why don’t you ask me a question?

Oh, well, I asked you how you’re doing. Maybe you say, “Oh, I had a great time with my kids. I took them to Disneyland,” or “I… I don’t know. Chef made an amazing arugula.” You used to give me some… some color to work with here.

So Nat was in Rome all last week. Great. What was she doing in Rome?

She had to go see her factory. She also had to go and renew her visa at the US embassy there.

Okay. So she’s renewing her visa. Hopefully, she’ll be able to get back in the country. I know we’ve tightened up the borders.

Well, she’s on an EB-2 visa. She’s already… but she should switch to this EB-5 as soon as it’s announced.

Oh, yes. You can get the golden visa. And I think you already put a down payment on…

Freiburg, how was your week? What… how’s everything going on at Valhalla? You… you having a productive week?

As one of my management team members told me today, “It’s a very complex business.” That’s usually not a good sign when the conversation starts with that.

Is that a way of saying everything’s…?

No. No. We… we… we were good. I was on the road this week. I just got back. I mean, it’s hard. Running a business is hard. You hire the smartest people you know, and what happens? They bring you all the problems they can’t solve. So it’s… it’s never easy.

We’ve got an incredible docket today. Let’s just start with… I’ll give you a quick recap, boys, of the week since we last taped… To say the zone was flooded, in the words of Steve Bannon, would be an understatement. Here’s your Trump tsunami for the week:

Thursday, when we taped, the Epstein file dump fiasco. You remember that, Joe. Right? Big zero, big nothing burger. Then Friday, Zelensky was dressed down and kicked out of the White House by the vice president and president. Markets collapsed. They rebounded. On Saturday, we got a beautiful day off. Video of Trump dancing down a catwalk to YMCA. Maybe he played some golf. He was at the White House, South Mar-a-Lago. Sunday, 9:24 AM Eastern, the president pumps three specific cryptos—Solana, Cardano, XRP—to be in the first government strategic crypto reserve. Joe Lonsdale starts tweeting. I start tweeting. Everybody’s tweeting. He quickly retweeted himself, included Ethereum and Bitcoin, some decentralized coins. Reaction was, “Wow, crazy.” You had a little bit of a spicy take, Joe. We’ll get into that later. And I’m sure our friend David Sacks will have much to say in the second half of the program. But it was pretty negative. Cardano ripped 70%. XRP, 32%. Solana, 25%. And then there was this crazy trade. One whale went 50 times long on BTC and ETH, a $200,000,000 position on just a $4,000,000 investment. Everybody trying to figure out who that was. I’ll leave it to you to speculate.

Then we start the week. Monday, Trump says significant tariffs with Canada and Mexico, the market collapse. He walks back tariffs a couple of hours later, and the market starts to rebound. Then at 2:38 PM, Trump announces a $100,000,000,000 investment from TSMC in American fabs. Huzzah for that! And our boy, David Sacks, gets dragged out to the podium for a quick fifteen-second cameo. Very nicely done to our boy, David Sacks. And then Tuesday, we have the most chaotic State of the Union I’ve ever seen. Highlights include an angry man shaking a cane and getting kicked out. There were some auction paddles from the libs. I don’t know what they were bidding on. There were 13 Biden mentions and one Pocahontas. Wednesday, we have news that the Doge blitz might slow down. Supreme Court chimed in with a 5-4 decision backing the federal judge who ordered the Trump admin to pay out $2,000,000,000 for USA Contractors. Then there was a closed-door meeting with the Senate, with Elon. Maybe they discussed an approval process, maybe some voting type things. And then here we are today, Thursday, when we’re taping. Markets down 2% on more tariff news. Breaking news drops at 11:30. Trump announced tariffs are off for Mexico. Markets aren’t rebounding. We might be leaving NATO.

Can I…? Hold on. I’m almost there.

Yeah. Breaking. We might be leaving NATO. Breaking. We’re shutting down the Department of Education. Psych. We just found out we’re not.

Okay, gentlemen. That’s the weird… that was… No. There’s… there’s three things that are also kind of interwoven in all of this. OpenAI dropped GPT-4.5, and I think it was not really that well received. I didn’t even know. Nobody’s talking about that. Quen, which is the open-source Alibaba, dropped Rev, which seems actually really best in class. So that was really interesting. Okay. Then there was a story that said, Llama is going sideways. Facebook’s open-source LLM. Yeah. And then the markets have just been going, I think, the craziest I’ve actually seen in twenty years of following the markets. And, specifically, you’re seeing the MAGA seven compressed towards the rest of the S&P 500, and then you’re seeing this insane trade away from Europe. So there’s a ton that happened this week.

I mean… Yeah. I don’t remember a more eventful week, Joe. Is this a little too much maybe?

You guys missed the Shalom Hamas tweet by Trump too, which for a lot of us is a big deal. He said, “I don’t know if this is hello or goodbye,” but he’s threatening them really strongly. So for people who care about that part of the world, it’s interesting to watch what’s gonna happen. So that also happened.

Yeah. Oh my lord.

Well, and Shalom is hello and goodbye. Right? Just to clarify, as a word, you would say both. Right?

Shut up.

Yeah. It’s ambiguous. And… and peace.

Ambiguous word. And peace.

Well, maybe he’s leaving it to interpretation. Maybe they get to pick. Maybe it’s hello.

No. That’s what… that’s what he wrote in the tweet.

Oh, he did?

Yeah. It’s your choice.

Okay. It’s a choose your own adventure, Hamas, from the president of the United States. But I think we should probably get into tariffs. This is confounding to most people. Maybe since I just did the whole rundown, I won’t go into all the details about tariffs again. But just looking at it from first principles, Joe, I asked a couple of group chats—you’re in one of them, in fact—and I have about, I would say, about 400 people total in these four group chats. What’s the strategy here? What do you think Trump is trying to accomplish? And, man, I got a range of answers. Let me ask you. What is Trump, in your estimation, trying to accomplish with the tariffs on, the tariffs off, the tariffs ons, the tariffs offs? As Chamath said here, this is creating more chaos than any of us have ever seen in markets.

Listen. Trump’s negotiating. Right? So I… I actually ran into David Sachs. Each senator gets one guest. We were both guests in the Senate dining hall, hanging out with a bunch of these guys. Multiple of the guests, some of them were spouses of the senators, multiple of the guests were people who had lost kids to fentanyl. Right? And so it’s actually… it’s a very serious issue. It’s a big thing on the populist right, as it should be for all Americans. We’ve lost, you know, tens of thousands of young people recently to fentanyl. And… and… and Canada has done nothing about their border. And so, you know, you just reported breaking news. I hadn’t even heard yet that Mexico might be off. Canada’s still on. He’s using this to negotiate. So I talked to the senators and I asked him what’s going on because obviously I import things all over the place. I’d like to know what the hell the rules are. But he wants people to actually crack down on this stuff and save American lives. And I think it’s a reasonable thing to use to negotiate and force them to do that.

Okay. So you believe it’s negotiation because of the fentanyl issue.

Chamath, let me go to you because many people are saying this has more to do with some great reset and maybe the ten-year. Do you think this is about fentanyl at the border or something else?

I think that this is the first week where I’ve seen the first real schism in how people are interpreting what’s actually happening. I think that Trump and Elon were very much in a honeymoon period until this week, and I think there was the benefit of the doubt. But what I saw on X was a real divergence where, on the one hand, there were people that were basically saying, “Doge is deranged, Elon is crazy, Trump is lighting the world on fire,” in one camp. Yeah. And the other camp saying, “He’s sticking to the plan.” And when I thought about this a little bit, if you went back to November, I do think it’s important to remember that we were at this moment where you had this fork in the road and you had all these important issues where I think the best way to generalize it was that the Democrats believed that the lines should continue to be blurred. So whether that was on gender or race or merit versus some other immutable trait or fiscal and monetary policy, things were just getting more and more blurred. And then Trump and Elon basically showed up and said, “Actually, we want to refocus and we wanna make the lines very visible and clear on all those dimensions.” And a majority of Americans voted that in. But I think what you’re starting to see now is the difficulty in actually implementing that plan. And what I mean specifically is tariffs are very nuanced and complicated. On the one hand, there’s the short-term wins. There’s these impacts. You could deem them positive or negative to the dollar. There’s impacts to US bonds. There’s impacts to US bond markets. There’s impacts to how countries deal with foreign reserves. And then there’s this impact that happens when the markets react to a tariff and then Trump takes that off the table and then they snap back. So you have this weird set of boundary conditions right now. So I think right now we’re in the very difficult part of sorting through what the long-term implications are. And I can get to some of them later, but I think that’s where we are.

I think it’s really interesting. The goal of tariffs in your mind for Trump is fentanyl?

No.

Finance related?

No.

No. No. It’s… Give me your definitive what you think this is about.

I think what tariffs allow us to do is rebase the long-term reliance on the US dollar. It allows us to rebase our ability to fund our own deficits, and it allows us to rebase the long-term ability for American companies to be economically vibrant.

Okay. So Friedberg, we got one person with fentanyl at the border negotiating. We got one person on trade. Some portion of this I hear, and I… when I asked in these four group chats, I got, “He’s throwing stuff at the wall,” the border. He’s trolling the ten-year note, and he doesn’t care about stocks. And then I got onshoring and manufacturing as a possibility. We’re gonna make it more expensive to bring things in. So why don’t you consider making stuff here? Do you think that third possibility is what’s going on here? Does David Friedberg pick one of these three choices or another? What’s going on here with tariffs specifically?

I don’t sit inside of Trump’s head, and I don’t have any direct line of communication to folks that are constructing the theory and the policy. If I were to say, what’s the most masterful plan in an optimistic way of what could be going on here? What’s the master plan? I would kind of craft it as follows: Tariffs aren’t being done in isolation. They’re being done along with a coordinated policy effort to reduce income taxes and another policy effort to reduce government spending. So those are three actions, three legs on a stool. So tariffs… Mhmm. Reduced income taxes, reduced government spending. And they are related to each other. They’re related to each other because if we increase tariffs, one element of that is that to import product is more expensive. For example, I buy LED lights in my greenhouse. And the price of the LED lights just went up by 25%. This week, I actually spoke with the CEO of an LED company and I was like, “Why don’t you guys make the LEDs here?” And there starts to become a crossover point where it actually makes economic sense for the company to make the LEDs here instead of sourcing them from Asia. And there’s a hundred thousand examples of this. When the industrial supply chain goes to the lowest part of production, it’s gonna end up offshoring when there’s no tariffs. And if there are tariffs, then you start to do production here. So you’re increasing both kind of security for the US supply chain but also increasing demand and creation of a workforce. Now I think that the income tax piece is critical here because in order to make the capital available to build that industry here, we need to unleash capital. And reducing of income taxes, the economic theory would be, that capital will now flow into these entrepreneurial activity, these opportunities that have emerged where suddenly it makes sense for me to make textiles, to make metals, to make materials, to make cars, to make all the stuff here in the United States that I otherwise wouldn’t be making. So both the corporate and the personal income tax, by reducing it unleashes capital. Then instead of going into the government, it now goes into the private sector into building businesses. Okay. I think that there’s another theory about this, which is as you drop the income tax, one of the kinda key theories that I’ve heard spoken about a lot lately, and I think we’re gonna hear about it a lot more this year, is trying to get the United States to move away from an income taxation model to a consumption taxation model. So effectively, what the tariffs do is there’s a tax for you buying certain things. So now instead of getting taxed when you earn money as an individual, you get taxed when you spend money. And some people think that that’s both a more fair system and a more kind of economically vibrant system because that will drive investment in the things that people want to… to produce because the money’s going into production.

So… Do you think that… do you think that, Friedberg? I’m curious. I… I don’t know. It’s a really interesting economic theory. I mean, I am not opposed to seeing some sort of an experiment play out where we look at a shift from income taxation to consumption taxation and see if it actually does have an effect on economic growth and productivity. It has not been done in 150 years. There’s a lot of economic theorists on both sides of the equation saying this does work or it doesn’t work.

Okay. And let me just say one last thing. By reducing government spending, we are moving workers from the government into the private workforce. So as those new industries pop up, as those investments start to get made in building new industry onshore, where are the workers gonna come from? Remember, the government’s 30% of the US GDP today. So if that’s not a great way to invest money, maybe the private industry is better at investing money and employing people that will unleash the workforce, and it will counterbalance the inflation that we’re experiencing. So there’s a lot of inflation because of tariffs. And by reducing government spending, that’s the offset to inflation. So those three actions, I think, are three legs of a stool, and they actually are all interrelated to one another. So that would be my grand master theory of what might be going on.

This is an interesting triangulation theory that people have been speculating about. And there are a couple of caveats here, Joe. Number one, we do have lowering income tax and lowering services experiment. It’s called Florida, Texas, and a couple of the states where they have lower income tax and more consumption tax. We pay a lot more in real estate taxes here, something we consume. Putting that aside, the really interesting issue is we’re at the lowest unemployment of our lifetime, 4%. Where are all these workers gonna come from?

What do you think, Joe, now that you’ve heard the two other panelists here discuss it? What are we trying to get to? Where is the destination? At the end of this term, Trump’s lame duck. He can go wild here. He’s not running for reelection. And, you know, what… what do you think he wants to see? Do you think he just wants to cement some sort of legacy? And if so, what’s that legacy, and how do these actions equal his goals and legacy?

No. Listen. I agree with what David… with what David was saying, Jason. And… and it’s… it’s a really important point also that we should mention is that the last four years, the economy’s looked okay, but part of that is because government’s been hiring like mad. And so the point he made is that actually, you know, having twice as many people, you know, harassing me—I just got back yesterday. No action on an audit that they’ve been harassing me on for three years. They found nothing—having twice as many people doing things like that and… or, like, you know, running TSA or pushing papers around in the Department of Labor, doesn’t actually add output to the economy. And so, you know, it… it does seem like it makes a lot of sense. Let’s take a million workers out of the consulting class around D.C., out of the, you know, paper pusher class around D.C., and let’s actually deploy them to the actual productive economy. Elon and Trump have both been saying that. I think David’s a % right. It is true. A lot of my companies, thanks to the tariff stuff, are looking to build stuff here. So I’m not a huge fan of tariffs personally, but this… they definitely make sense for things in defense. They definitely make sense for negotiating with countries. And it is true. It is pushing certain people, including me, to build some more things in America.

Here’s where tariffs make a lot of sense. If you have markets where there are domestic alternatives and/or where things are fundamentally commodity, there’s no reason why tariffs can’t work to create the incentives to redomicile economic productivity inside of the United States. That’s a… that’s a slam dunk, I think. And… and, Chamath, there’s another twist on that too, which I think we should all acknowledge is that America does have some really tough environmental laws. Despite what Jason may think of me, I actually don’t want my daughters growing up with, you know, messy air, messy water, you know, screwed up country.

Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know that you’re a nature guy.

But here’s where… We’re like a classic Bush nature guy. But… but here’s the thing. In China and Indonesia and all these other countries, they are just over the environment as they make things. I think tariffs are very reasonable on that case. Like, it’s not fair to make it more expensive for us because we’re doing it well, and then we outsource it for them to destroy things. Right? So… so there are some things there where it does make sense. And… and what I would say is the other… the other side of the… of the tariff knife is that if there are markets though where you’re making something that’s fundamentally innovative, where you are… but one maker, the problematic part of where tariffs really affect the US consumer is then the price of that product of which there are no competitive alternatives can go very, very high. And that’s inflationary. And I think that that slows down consumption. And then if… if that consumption is not just of something that’s a nice to have, but a must have, then it becomes problematic. And so you could see where tariffs could impact certain industries. For example, if there are innovative drugs, I think that that’s problematic. If there are innovative technologies of which there’s only one vendor, that’s problematic. So all of those need to get sorted out. But on balance in commodity markets, like look at autos. Autos is a perfect example. There are so many purveyors and providers of autos. There’s OEMs all around the world. And so to have a compensatory system doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing where it’s a tit for tat tariff. But in other markets where if you need, for example, a specific piece of equipment from ASML to build a chip, and now all of a sudden that… that machine is 25% more expensive or 30% more expensive, and they pass that cost downstream, it becomes very speculative and it becomes a little bit more fragile, I think.

This is dangerous though, right, Chamath? Because I agree with you in theory, but then there’s something where, you know, if everyone’s lobbying for their thing to be an exception, you end up getting this very crony system that’s… that you don’t necessarily want. Right? So you have to be very careful how you define these things.

Exactly. So this is why the… I think, like, sector by sector, it’s probably… you can probably go and pass the smell test and say, if there are multiple providers and/or if it’s somehow commodity. I think it’s easier to absorb the tariff in the short term. Maybe that’s the right way to say it, which is if you believe… if Trump believes everything should be tariffed, then instead of debating if, to your point, maybe the right thing to debate is when. And you have to put some things on a much longer glide path so that you don’t just create inflation out of nowhere and/or you don’t hold back American business or American consumers.

Well, this is a key point because you do need to have predictability to make investment and reciprocity. So really two important points Chamath’s making here. One on reciprocity. These things haven’t been looked at for a while. I’m not sure how they got so out of whack, but just putting some facts to this, Chamath’s exactly correct. We get slapped when we send cars to the EU, they get a 10% tariff. But when we get their cars, it’s a 2.5% tariff. Who let it get out of whack? I’m not sure. But why not make the reciprocity perfect and just, “Hey, you say 10, we say 10. You say 2.5, we say 2.5.” And that would make, I think, a lot more sense. Just to put some numbers here on government employees. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of our spending is non-employee related, but it is… if you look over the last two administrations, we have added 1,200,000… 1,300,000 additional employees added. This does not include contractors. And so we don’t know what USA was doing with NGOs and contractors. And I think that’s where we do need to get some clarity. And to Chamath’s point, this has all gotta become predictable. You cannot put tariffs on… off every week or else how does your friend Dave who wants to do the LED lighting or you’re encouraging to do it LED lighting know if they should build a factory and invest $10,000,000 in that?

You disagree with the number of employees. You wanna address that?

Yeah. Look. Okay. Go ahead. The… the government accounts for 30% of GDP in the United States. That’s an extraordinary sum. So just…

Yeah. I was talking just about the employees. That’s a much smaller percentage. But that doesn’t matter. The direct employees of federal agencies is a fraction of people that are employed indirectly by government spending. This is super important.

Sure. Because as we all know, many government agencies write checks to large contractors, subcontractors, and third-party service providers that do the work for them. So the money gets transferred. They then employ the people, and they do the work. So it doesn’t technically show up on federal government payroll registers, but these are people that are indirectly employed by federal spending. That’s super important to… to acknowledge that a large percentage of the US workforce is indirectly supported by federal dollars.

Yeah. And it’s gone up… it’s gone up massively with the NGOs too. So you have about 4,000,000 people employed by contractors in D.C., 1,600,000 more at the states actually by federal… by federal spending. And then you have the NGOs. No one knows the NGOs. Biden administration took down the data I used to see things in 2020, so we don’t even know how much money, but we know it was hundreds of billions. And so it’s pretty crazy. The number one thing about how DOGE is not being done fully is that Elon is doing an amazing job, you know, whether or not he cuts $500,000,000,000 or trillion or a lot more. But the senators and the congressmen are not willing to take it out of their bill. The reconciliation bill right now, they’re talking about cutting $1–$2,000,000,000,000. So rather than… like, this is over ten years. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. If it was equal to what Elon was doing, it’d be at least $5,000,000,000,000. And I push a bunch of them, and they say, “Oh, the Congressional Budget Office and all these things.” And I’m sure there’s some tough things there, but, like, this is crazy. We need to see what these cuts need to be on DOGE, and we need to cut $5,000,000,000,000. And none of these people have the balls to do that. It’s not the political will to do it is my interpretation. And… and… and… just… just… just cojones.

Let me just show you one chart to back that up. I have my new discraciad.com for the week. Look at this, Chamath. We wanna talk about software and waste. 35,855, according to Doge, breaking news, ServiceNow licenses on three products only being used by 84 people.

Oh my god. Are you kidding me?

11,000 Acrobat licenses with 0.0 users. Absolutely abhorrent. And I’m saying it right now. I want an investigation into procurement. Who sold this? Who bought it? This could be a crime. This could be fraud. There could be kickbacks. I’m saying it could be. I don’t think it’s that. Number two. But I do think you have to look at the earnings of these companies and question where’s all of it.

Totally correct. Number two. Totally correct. If ServiceNow ever wants to work with the government again, Mr. President… Mr. President… our president… I want them to pay us back for the unused licenses and I want a full order for those last ten years. If they don’t pay us back that money and give us a credit…

Hold on, hold on. Listen… Banned forever. Hold on. It’s not… Thank you, Mr. President. This may not be ServiceNow’s fault. This may be the ineptitude of the people that bought the license. Of course, but they should still give us a credit. I want the money back to the American people. I do think Adobe has the worst. Have you guys ever done Adobe subscriptions? They’re impossible to cancel. I think Adobe… 11,000… zero users per hour. The only thing harder than canceling an Adobe license is trying to cancel Wall Street Journal.

I was about to say Wall Street Journal. That’s the worst.

Wall Street. Wall Street. Wall Street. Wall Street. Wall Street. Wall Street. Wall Street. I’ll just say it again at the sake of being redundant.

We’re getting to the phase where the details are complicated and they now matter. So we’ve talked about repealing the IRA in its totality. Right? So that was a statement and there’s… there’s theoretically a lot of money there. But the details now all of a sudden become complicated. FERC published a report just this past week. And what do you think it said was the percentage of incremental electricity that was generated from renewables versus non-renewables? I’ll… I’ll tell you the answer. It was almost 91% in December. So if you now tie two huge initiatives together, which is how do we find a budget that saves money and how do we continue to win an AI? Maybe you would have thought those weren’t related. Well, guess what? We know that AI needs a tremendous amount of power. And whatever you thought you knew actually, you had to re-underwrite because what Elon has shown is actually you need to now create these mega clusters, 100,000 GPUs going to 1,000,000 GPUs. All of the power forecasting that we have is miscast. It doesn’t even account for this, number one. Number two, there are 35,000 applications into FERC to get approved to generate electricity. 35,000. That’s gonna meander through some administrative rigmarole. There is a five-year delay to get a gas turbine into America and online. Okay. If you ordered one today, the fastest that you can get it turned on is 2030. The fastest that you can get nuclear turned on is 2035. So we don’t have the ability to generate incremental electricity very quickly, but for renewables. But then if you rip out the IRA, there’s many parts of the IRA by the way that are just trash. Nick, I don’t know if you can find it, but Barry Weiss found this insane thing that made me so angry, which I’m happy to talk about, which was like a thirty-day grant process that resulted in a $7,000,000,000 grant to some shell engine.

Oh, this was… thrown the gold bars off the castle over the last day. But the other part of the IRA, this narrow part is what it did to reinforce tax incentives and tax equity, which is a $200,000,000,000 market that incentivizes that 90% of energy generation. So my point is that when you start to get into the details, when the House Ways and Means Committee has to figure out what part to put back, this is gonna be hard because it’s like, “Hold on, if you got the whole thing, now all of a sudden you take 90% of the incremental energy generation incentives out of the market, you don’t have enough electrons. There isn’t enough electricity. So then you lose the AI race. So you start to lose it.” I think the point is that we’re now in the hard part where the details really matter.

Listen, you gotta start with the chainsaw. We saw that at Twitter. And by the way, Trump just tweeted it, maybe you do like… When we started this, he just tweeted this out. He said, “Guys, now it’s time to get surgical.” He then… he said this.

Perfect. Yes. That was the metaphor I was about to use. It’s like, you know, you start with… you cut out the goddamn ServiceNow and Adobe subscriptions and then you work on something, you know, more depth and maybe that’s where we are.

IRA… just for the audience… Inflation Reduction Act.

Can I just do a rant on this, on this pop-up NGO thing? To me, this is like the worst of America and it makes me so angry and I’ll tell you my lived experience. So I’m on the other side of this. I started a company with these guys from Tesla to make battery materials in the United States in 2/2019. We grind, we grind, we put in tens… I put in tens of millions of dollars. We get a deal with a big OEM and then you see these DOE grants. We spent millions of dollars. We file a very detailed plan to build battery metals and battery capacity in America. We got rejected. Okay? It was an entire year-long process. We got rejected. We put it past us. We kept working. We found more deals. We found a way to survive, raise a little bit more money. And then we applied again on some success and we got a $100,000,000 grant. Okay? That was… that’s what just happened this year. But then yesterday I read, and Nick, maybe you can throw this tweet up, this Barry Weiss investigation. Somebody in thirty days who was connected to the Democratic infrastructure had some

We have a very clear process, focused on outcomes, not inputs, and it's a contest. It's obvious who wins; we're not slightly better, we're shaming them. They can only stop us by playing these games because we're so much better.

I think there's a perception of impropriety or influence peddling in government, whether you're a full-time employee, GSE, or volunteer. It comes with the territory. How do you avoid it? Joe is right; when the administration formed, we worked on proposals for large government organizations with huge spending. We focused on creating open standards for clear competition, preventing manipulation by people moving between government and private industry or those with strong lobbying ties. This perverts the process, leading to undesirable outcomes.

Therefore, we need transparent open standards. Publish every RFP, spec, and evaluation criteria. Make it mechanistic. For example, drone data should be published like FAA flight test data, allowing for escalation if deals seem manipulated. This combats potential winning and losing sides, promoting open and transparent government. Every decision and money allocation should be measurable and known.

Transparency, oversight, whistleblowers, and press involvement act as safeguards, with public engagement. Doge’s Twitter handle, for example, promotes this transparency. Finally, we must address campaign finance, a source of the appearance of impropriety.

If preferential opportunities arise, the incentive is to seek these roles. Why do people sit on committees or volunteer? Open standards change the incentive to genuine patriotism and helping the country. I think many people get involved for the right reasons. However, historically, there's an implied sense of favoritism; for example, Goldman Sachs' CEO often became Treasury Secretary, benefiting Goldman Sachs.

The best solution is open source and open standards. Joe trusts our friends to do the right thing; we know them. For those with significant wealth, incremental money doesn't matter. David Sachs wouldn't sacrifice four years of income for a potentially negative impact on his balance sheet. People don't believe this narrative; the kleptocracy and revolving door to companies like Raytheon persist. We need whistleblower protection, investigative journalism, and stronger whistleblower laws. We also need to limit campaign contributions and eliminate super PACs, as these create the appearance of impropriety. Trump's meme coin announcement exemplifies this.

The appearance of impropriety is significant. Trump's tweets endorsing specific coins, along with donations received at crypto events, look terrible.

There are many ways people influence politicians. Celebrities influence public opinion, as do unions and the American Medical Association. Super PACs are a form of free speech. Wealthy people influence things through this speech, but it's one of many forms of influence. Restricting this limits the influence of Elon and Joe, but increases that of celebrities, doctors, and union members. It's a complicated situation with various forms of power.

I was frustrated by Trump’s posts mentioning specific coins. It looks bad, undermining our moral high ground. The question isn't whether wealthy people should influence politics, but how they do it and the degree to which they should be allowed. I think speech is important.

I believe my ability to speak out against corruption is valuable. I've passed laws by convincing people, not by making money. That's a good thing.

The Supreme Court's ruling on super PACs wasn't just about money; it's about free speech. Elon's $300 million spending was partly about expressing his views.

I favor hard caps on Super PAC donations, whether it's $5,000, $10,000, or $25 million. A fund could be established for candidates to receive government funding for campaigns, as in other countries. The pendulum has swung wildly since Citizens United. There are various factions: George Soros, liberal Democrats, the Koch brothers, and Elon. Should Citizens United have allowed this level of spending? Are we better off as a democracy?

I'd favor returning to the pre-Citizens United system because of gerrymandering's influence on state and local elections. Federal elections have reasonable competition, but lower-level elections are sclerotically stuck. Eliminating Citizens United would improve local and state elections.

The Supreme Court sides with me on this one, so you're in trouble. However, we need to defend our opinions. What does spending money on a political viewpoint mean? It means publishing a book, paying people to engage the community, creating a website. It's hard to delineate between political parties, candidates, and expressing a viewpoint on an issue. I should be able to express my views on animal welfare, regardless of how much money I spend.

Would I spend money to redistrict to get ideologically aligned people elected? Not through ads, but by influencing elections or forming coalitions. Trucking people to vote should be illegal. For every dollar spent on politics, a small percentage goes to ads; the rest goes to various "shady" activities. Defining "shady" depends on one's point of view. Using dollar incentives to incentivize people is already allowed.

We can define specific political actions, such as the timing of spending and targeting specific votes or candidates versus issues. We can set limits on fundraising for explicitly political actions. Animal welfare is an important issue, not just a means to score points with an audience. The boundary cases are tough, creating the need for censorship. A book about communism could be considered political speech if distributed to voters. A cap, such as $10 million per year for political activity, could be implemented. However, this is still complex. Grok’s analysis shows that 56% of spending is on ads, and 44% on other activities. If we cap spending on ads and canvassing, I'd support that.

Let's move on to CoreWeave. CoreWeave, a NeoCloud provider, uses GPUs to build data centers. They have a lock on many NVIDIA GPUs, with 32 data centers and 250,000 GPUs. They're going public, projected to raise at least $3.5 billion, with a $30 billion valuation and a $23 billion secondary offering. They have incredible revenue ($1.9 billion in 2024) and amazing growth, but are unprofitable with almost a billion dollars in losses (largely interest payments on $8 billion in debt).

Why didn't AWS, GCP, and Azure acquire them? They didn't use hypervisors, allowing direct bare-metal access, giving them traction. A simple technical decision can build a successful business. The key question is the amortization period and useful life of NVIDIA GPUs. Their losses are interest payments; if their calculations are correct, it's a killer business. If wrong, it's deeply underwater.

The bet is on continued technical engineering, but also on the useful life and technology curve. GPUs have a shorter useful life (3-5 years) than servers. Brandon, a founder, is a smart commodities trader. They locked down supply chains: data centers, power, and chips. Their low-latency throughput is crucial for efficient trading. 60% of their revenue comes from Microsoft, possibly related to OpenAI or Azure.

What about a business with 60% dependence on one client? One client can grow fast. They have an orchestration framework called Sunk and bought Weights & Biases. Microsoft may not use them long-term.

I worry about this type of business. There are several companies investing heavily in similar infrastructure, potentially making CoreWeave's service obsolete. It's like the speed doublers of the early 2000s. Broadband rendered them unnecessary. Due diligence should assess future capacity, demand, and potential bundling with GCP or AWS. An economist is needed to map this all out. The founders retained control and sold some shares; time will tell.

I avoid speaking negatively about businesses. The ratings for this week in startups and All In are positive.

I've started dressing better, thanks to Eton and Tom Ford. Let's move on. Joe Lonsdale's outfit is made by Uighurs. I was recently sponsored by a company that sets watches to the correct time when you fly. This is just trolling. I'm trolling. My four-part billing: we should get rid of income tax.

Let's discuss Main Street versus Wall Street. There are three important markets: the US long end of the curve (10-year bond yield), the US equity market, and the European bond and equity markets.

I believe there's a secular shift; the MAGA base consists of working and middle-class people, pro-innovation/pro-tech individuals, and patriotic business owners. They don't prioritize the stock market; policies will be viewed through a Main Street lens. Bessent and Trump have expressed this focus on Main Street.

If the government's policies negatively impact equity markets, it's beneficial. Deflating asset prices deflates inflation. High stock prices lead to consumptive behavior; lower prices depress free cash flow. This causes a flight to quality in the bond market, lowering interest rates, beneficial for America's borrowing needs ($10 trillion in the next nine months).

Trump's risk-off approach to the Ukraine war shifts responsibility to Europe. The bond market reacts negatively, increasing borrowing costs for European governments. It's a unique market moment. Is refinancing our debt the end game? Depressing everything lowers consumption, breaks inflation, and potentially leads to job losses. Lower consumption and lower rates could lead to refinancing our debt.

Some percentage of it is coming up. What do you think of that theory?

Jason, Chamath has a lot of interesting thoughts here, and I think it's a very smart analysis. I'm not fully aligned. It is true; bottom markets hate war. War is expensive. War is inflationary. It's very clear Europe is going through this. War makes us more likely to spend money; that hurts them.

In the US, I think the number one thing Scott Bessen and Trump want is to fight for Main Street, but that's the populous energy we have now. So I think they are focused on lower interest rates. Lower interest rates help many people. Someone I work with, their spouse is a real estate agent, and they've had a tough couple of years because interest rates spiked. Lower rates would help so many—title companies, brokers, etc.—a trickle-down effect. It's not just trickle-down; it's a part of the economy that starts to turn on, enabling certain transactions. And it is cheaper debt, which is advantageous. So I think disinflation is very important, and we have to find a way to get there. Chamath may be right that hitting assets is worth it to get to disinflation. That's something Scott could be working on because of all the debt. It's the easiest, the easiest, the easiest. And we do need it. Hopefully, there are cleverer ways, but I do like that strategy.

We obviously don't want 8, 9, or 10 percent unemployment; that's another way to get there, but we don't want that because Main Street equals jobs. What are your other ways?

There are two positive ways. One is higher productivity through AI. I'm working on a ton of things, as is everyone else. Construction is much cheaper now. Government can't do that; that's up to us. We can make sure not to screw it up; many in government are trying to. David's job is very important to get AI started. Sam, what's not here, please. The second is cutting spending. Giving out hundreds of billions willy-nilly is very inflationary. Cutting spending is a very positive thing; we could do a lot more of that.

Freeberg, your thoughts on refinancing interest?

I give incredible leadership credit for pushing us three years ago to think about what would happen if the debt increased another $8 trillion, which it did. That influenced many. The president took that on when none of us thought any president would. How much pain is Trump willing to take with the stock market going down to refinance the debt? Is he willing to be unpopular and deal with criticism from Wall Street and equity holders? If the market goes down 20%, will he cry uncle?

I don't know about Trump. I'd say 60/40; I'd be right 60% of the time. That's a good ratio in poker. I'd say 60%; he's probably different than Trump 1.0 and less influenced by short-term market rumblings. He's probably listening to Bessen. I think their relationship is complicated. The administration, with Bessen and others, is trying to make the case that lower rates give us an opportunity to refinance the $10 trillion coming due in the next twelve months and get into a more sustainable financing position. The fiscal position—how we spend money—needs to be addressed. This is the central question.

You're totally right. Let's address that specifically with Ukraine. You're a bit of a hawk and American exceptionalist, Joe. We spent $175 billion—some other numbers Trump floated were incorrect—on a lease loan. Trump now has the upper hand with Zelensky, and he's a great negotiator, saying he wants $500 billion back. This is life and death, people's democracy, and sovereignty. But if he gets that $500 billion back from the $175 billion, that's a 42% IRR in three years. Even getting our money back would be fine.

How do you look at the war in Ukraine financially, in containing Putin, and in our NATO participation? Is it time for us to leave NATO, Joe Lonsdale?

Putin's a bad guy; he shouldn't have invaded. I think the last administration mismanaged it; he wouldn't have invaded with Trump as president, or with a competent person threatening him. But now we need peace. To get peace, both sides need to come to the table. I prefer peace through strength, being strong on Putin. Zelensky should have been more humble at the White House last week and focused on peace. Ukraine is a corrupt country; Zelensky and his cronies may have taken money. He hasn't signaled openness to peace, which might involve giving up some of Ukraine.

What's the NATO outcome? Should Europe go it alone? Maybe we bow out and let them arm up?

This is tough; people I care about live in places like Germany, and I want them safe. The UK-US relationship is valuable. Europe is in a very bad place, dysfunctional. I don't see European civilization going the right way in the next twenty or thirty years. JD is right to criticize their anti-free speech stances. Do I want to totally give up on NATO? No. But I want certain things fixed, and to use our foreign policy to fix them if we stay.

Chamath, Europe seems willing to go it alone. Should the US say, "Okay, go for it. We're out"? Sachs recently tweeted that. What are your thoughts?

When do transnational organizations outlive their utility? That's the question for NATO, the WHO, the UN, etc. There are competitive organizations: OPEC+, Five Eyes, BRICS. The world creates startups to challenge incumbency. Europeans need to acknowledge their individual governments are vibrant; the EU itself lacks teeth. They've passed too many laws, complicating things for companies and citizens. Is it about being Italian or European? Once they figure that out, other stuff is easier. We also have Interpol and the UN; maybe it's time to re-evaluate them.

Freeberg, what do you think?

There's a viable case for a peaceful transition to a multipolar power dynamic. Techno-pessimists believe limited resources necessitate influence. Techno-optimists believe AI and automation will create abundance—abundant housing, fuel, materials—eliminating the need for empire to access resources. The mining industry is a good example: a giant thorium reserve in Inner Mongolia could produce energy for 60,000 years. AI is identifying new rare earth deposits. Mining and discovery technologies are improving. In a world of abundance, do we need conflict with Russia and China over resources? Can we live sustainably? Maybe US exiting NATO and dialing down conflict is a reasonable, even techno-optimistic viewpoint. We might start believing it in the next few years. If so, we don't need to fight over what we're fighting over now, except for individual expansionist intentions. NATO in a multipolar world of abundance isn't as necessary as in the past.

I think what you're talking about is a Star Trek-like abundance. Energy independence changes how we view the world. We view the world differently now than under Bush.

I'm one of the most optimistic people. I'm the same American optimist. I'm the same American optimist. I'm the same American optimist. I'm the same American optimist.

We live together now. I'd love AI to accelerate growth to a post-scarcity world, but until we're at least at 5 or 6% growth, global trade and security still matter. Dave makes a great point that it's becoming less important over time.

Let's talk about ChatGPT 4.5; it was a dud. I've been using Grok, then Gemini, then ChatGPT. Grok has really caught up.

What do you think of 4.5, Jamal?

I use them in company building, especially at 8090. Anthropic continues to do an incredible job; Claude 3.7 kicks ass. We use it for code generation; its models are the best. As a consumer, I mostly use Grok 3 because it's elegantly integrated into x (Twitter). Clicking the AI button gives you full context; it's like deep research. Owning a social network equals instant context. There's a small tweak Elon and I discussed on x—analyzing a post's veracity—that will have a big impact. I use Grok for consumer apps, and Claude 3.7 for code generation. It's exceptional.

The thing with GPT 4.5 is that we're at the bleeding edge where benchmarks are useful. The media gets confused; they look at benchmarks like Sweebench, AIMO, and Amy, but model makers overfit to these evals, making them unreliable. They optimize for the test, like someone optimizing for the SATs. We need extremely difficult and always-changing third-party benchmarks, like car safety tests. Less about safety, more about capability. When Alibaba pushed Gwen this week, it was an exceptional open-source model. DeepSeqs is also good. There's so much abundance that people are overwhelmed; it's like a hundred Michelin star restaurants. Distribution becomes important; Google is adding an AI button to its search page. They're doing summaries in YouTube. Meta could do the same. Does anyone use google.com anymore?

Facebook is launching a competitor to ChatGPT and Grok—a standalone app. They'll get it to a billion people. This leads to so much abundance. I was the first investor in Superhuman; they're composing email replies in real time using AI. This was cost-prohibitive six to twelve months ago.

Joe, your thoughts on abundance?

I'm building something on email that works with your team to automatically plan and create reports and route emails. As a CEO, you become a traffic cop; email will do it for you. I'm invested in Grok 3 and biased towards Elon, but many companies build on multiple models. I'm using many; I love the competition because it makes things cheaper and better. It's not slowing down; it's getting better—scary.

There's an interesting ripple: journalists losing jobs are being hired by data aggregators to answer questions and refine AIs. This could be a $50,000-$100,000 a year job.

Freeberg, your thoughts on LLMs and the pace of AI?

I used to agree with Jamal. It's changing every week; new models come out weekly. It's like the early internet. It's impossible to predict what will win.

What are you obsessed with in AI?

I use ChatGPT research a lot—the deep research where it fires up web pages. I find it very good. We build everything at Ohalo on GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and run many models; they're incredible.

We're following our muse; we're doing a media summit at South by Southwest (sold out). Chamath is an F1 fan; we're throwing a party at F1 on Saturday, May 4th. Allin.com/events for details. We're throwing a big party in Miami around F1 with a stage show beforehand; it's also my birthday celebration.

Can I wear my Apple Watch?

You're not allowed to wear an Apple Watch to F1. I want a watch that costs $25,000-$75,000. What's a good starter watch for Jay Cal? You can get a decent Patek for $100,000 now. Get a good mechanical watch, not an automatic. Anyone wants to sponsor me for watches and get a mention? jason@calacanis.com.

I got a text from Swatch and Tudor. I used to wear Swatch watches in the eighties. Freeberg had Casio watches; I had a calculator watch. My daughter stole my G-Shock. What calculator do you have? HP 17B. T-89. I was in McKinley Park getting to second base. Allin.com/events.

My Trump grade for the week is C for chaos, A for effort with Doge. Let's try to get back to a B, President Trump. We'll see you all next time on the All in Pod. Love you, boys. Thanks, John. Thanks, guys. Have fun. Bye bye.

Alright, everybody. We're suited up because David Sacks is here. We were trying to get you on to talk about the crypto news coming out of the White House. It was an intense week, but you're here to talk about the crypto reserve. Welcome back to the All in Podcast, David Sacks.

Good to be back. I see that you've suited up.

I figured for people who weren't here for the preshow, I got on. Sachs is wearing a white shirt and tie. I'm wearing a blazer and a white shirt. So I gotta go put a tie on. He's like, Jake, I wore a blazer, I gotta go get a blazer. So then we came back, and here we are. And, well, look, I just have to correct one thing. I think it's been a very smooth week at the White House. The president has lived up to one of his campaign promises. This is not something new. I remember you go all the way back to his national speech during the campaign, and he reiterated this many times that he wanted to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Sometimes he called it a digital asset stockpile. What we've ultimately done here is both. He also, in his week one EO on crypto, you guys remember I came on the show to talk about that, he asked our president's working group on digital assets to evaluate the idea of a reserve or stockpile, and we made a recommendation and this administration is moving at tech speed. It's really great to work for an administration where you could actually get things done and things move quickly. We made our recommendation, and then we worked with the lawyers to implement it, and the president signed it last night. But this is fairly consistent with everything he's always said.

Agree on that. The criticism you'll get from the media is the order of things. Trump is expressive on social media, which is better than the previous administration. The question is: he announces something, then you explain it. Is that optimal? Should you release more official stuff? That's the "move fast and break things" mentality, but maybe things are different now in the White House.

Have you considered that maybe you had an overreaction to a tweet?

The original crypto OGs were like, "Why is he picking these three and not these three?" Is he picking favorites?

We're not picking favorites, except Bitcoin is special.

Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency. It's the first one, the only one without an issuer. It's decentralized; they call it the immaculate conception. It's the most valuable, with a $2 trillion market cap, and the most secure; it's never been hacked. Fifteen years in, there have been ups and downs, but it keeps going. I bought Bitcoin in 2011 at $120; now it's at $90,000. The $2 trillion market cap is like a $2 trillion bug bounty. There's every incentive to hack it, but it hasn't been compromised.

I don't know if it's a miracle; it's exceptional design. It's been tested robustly; there's been every incentive to break it. The price has gone up as the protocol gained acceptance; Bitcoin is widely accepted as a store of value. We believe it should be treated specially. But we're also creating the digital asset stockpile. The difference? There's a digital asset stockpile, and a strategic reserve for Bitcoin. We acquire Bitcoin when we seize it from terrorists and criminals; we often make the mistake of liquidating it when we should be holding it. We had about 400,000 Bitcoin; we sold half for $360 million. If we had held it, it would be worth...

Worth over $17,000,000,000. So we made this mistake of prematurely selling Bitcoin when we should have held it. We don't want to make that mistake with regard to the rest of it.

We think there's around 200,000 coins left on the federal balance sheet, but the truth is that nobody knows because we've never done a proper audit. So part of what this executive order provides is that we're going to do, for the first time, a government-wide accounting of the digital assets that we actually have. And if digital assets emerge in some department—I don't know, the FBI sees some, the CIA sees some, I don't know which organization winds up having them—they're going to be legally required to report that and then put them in the reserve. They'll be legally required to report it, and then they'll go in the reserve if there's a final adjudication. So, obviously, if those coins could go back as restitution to victims, or if the person who they were seized from wins their court case and gets them back, they're not going into the Federal Reserve. But if there's been a final adjudication and a final forfeiture, yes, those will go into the Reserve. But anyway, that's Bitcoin.

Okay. So then you got the stockpile. Let me just talk about that. So first of all, like I said, we don't know exactly what digital assets the federal government has. I've seen reports that it might have, for example, 50,000 ETH, which is Ethereum. But again, we need to get to the bottom of that. When we figure out exactly what the assets are, we're going to move them into the digital stockpile. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship. It's a place for safekeeping. It's a centralized, you could say, account under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Secretary of the Treasury will figure out how to maximize the values of these holdings.

Now, there's a couple of important differences between stockpile and reserve. So one is the reserve; the executive order actually provides that the Secretary of the Treasury will not sell the Bitcoin. We're prohibited from selling the Bitcoin. There's no such prohibition with respect to the stockpile. If the Secretary of the Treasury decides that's in the long-term interest of the U.S. to rebalance the portfolio or change the portfolio, the secretary has the discretion to do that. Which makes sense because there's a long tail of crypto. We might see something that we don't have the ability to predict—predict the future—and we don't have the staff to sit there and look at these assets every day like a fund manager would and say, "What do we do with these? What percentage should it be of the overall stock pot, of the overall holdings?" So maybe the decision with Ethereum is, "Hey, this thing's waning. We just put it into Bitcoin because we know that's the more solid one."

That's what I'm reading into it. Yeah. I mean, I think that that's largely fair. I mean, look. I think that the stockpile should be subject to good portfolio management. Right? And, fortunately, we have a Secretary of the Treasury who is an extremely successful former hedge fund manager. So he's going to figure out the best way to manage these assets, and we give him the flexibility to do portfolio management. We live and die with what he does. He has to make those decisions, and that's going to be, you know, part of how he's evaluated by the president. So hopefully he's going to be sharp about that. Right. But the reserve is different, right? The reserve is just digital Fort Knox.

Now there's one other important difference between stockpile and reserve. So with respect to the reserve, the EO provides that the secretaries—that I'm talking about, Treasury and Commerce—they're allowed to figure out strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin for the reserve if those strategies are budget neutral and don't cost the taxpayer anything. Okay? So it's possible that we could—I'm not saying that we will—but it gives them—it authorizes them—to acquire more Bitcoin if they can figure out a way to do it that doesn't impact the federal budget or the deficit or taxpayers.

Right. Okay. Well, I had a very simple suggestion for this, which I'll—Mhmm—float up the flagpole here to see what you think. You probably—we've talked about it on previous All Ins before—you're on it. How about a simple crypto tax? You know, crypto wants to be legal. You're the crypto czar. Crypto wants to be regulated. They want the rules. They want the rails. Simple suggestion from your bestie. Why don't we charge every transaction in the United States 0.01%, just one bip, in that native currency? So you want to trade some Solana for Ethereum, for XRP, whatever, you know, put in whatever names you want there. The government says, "Hey, you want to have a great vibrant system here? We're going to need to take just the most modest of taxes, de minimis in fact, in the native crypto and put it in the stockpile."

This seems to me like a very—That's always how taxes start is that they're very—they're described as very—being very modest. You know, when the income tax started, it only applied to, like, a thousand Americans. Yes. And the legislators swore up and down that it would never be applied to middle-class people. So I don't particularly like the idea of new taxes even if it's promised that they just won't affect people very much. That sounds burdensome to me. But look, we have very successful—Well, this would—and just so you know, this would be more like a sales tax that would be handled by Coinbase, would be handled by Robinhood, by—would be handled by those platforms. They would administer it. It would be a transactional tax, not an income tax. So if you have a bunch, it's not a wealth tax and a season tax, but I'll let you pertain on it.

Yeah. If you can convince—if you can convince the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Treasury to run with your idea, then great. It could potentially happen. I mean, they have the flexibility to figure out budget-neutral ways to accumulate Bitcoin. I don't know what those ways are going to be, but they're creative. They're very successful businessmen. And if they figure out a way to do this, then it can be considered. That's the point.

Okay. Well, I'll be in the commissary later having lunch with you. You can introduce me. So let you—let me just give you a fastball here. Well, we'll see if it—if it gets in the strike zone. The appearance of impropriety is what people are concerned with, the picking of winners and losers. President Trump was the crypto president. He went and he gave that famous speech, "I'm going to get rid of Gary Gensler. We're going to make it legal." And to his credit, he has fulfilled that promise, which means, "Hey, the donor class on that side said we're going to back the crypto president, not the anti-crypto team," which means a lot of people who are on Twitter and the socials have donated a lot. They have a lot of holdings. So this appearance—which you've now, I would give you credit, have cleaned up here—"Hey, there's two different things going on here, and we're not using taxpayer money." We get all that. But the appearance here is, "Hey, maybe somebody's going to benefit." Of course, they came after you first for that without the facts. You were very clear. You cleared all your positions. You sold everything. You divested. So let's make that clear to the dum-dums who are just trying to say that you are personally going to be a threat to that. That.

Yeah. I mean, look. Please. Because this is ridiculous. Yeah. Well, people came out right away and were saying that somehow I was engaged in a scheme to pump my bags or to basically create exit liquidity for myself and billionaire stuff like that. You have to understand that those accusations—I mean, they're accusing me of a crime—and a serious crime. And yeah, a serious crime. And they're doing it with no evidence whatsoever. So these things are basically—it's borderline slander. Slander and definitely—it's slanderous. Yeah. I would say so. In any event, what they didn't know and what I then proceeded to put out there is that I sold all my cryptocurrency prior to day one of the administration because I didn't want to even have the appearance of a conflict. And by the way, I could have waited. I didn't have to do it like that, but I decided to do it and take it upon myself to do that because you just know that when it comes to crypto, there's going to be a lot of fluctuations in the market. You never want someone to be able to point at one of those fluctuations and say somehow that the cryptos are benefited from that and create a conspiracy theory, which is exactly what basically happened. So first of all, I got rid of all my cryptocurrency prior to day one. Craft also sold all of the—is the venture firm that you funded that's done a lot of great work, supporting founders here in Silicon Valley. So we basically sold, I think it was around $200,000,000 of crypto, of which around $85,000,000 was personally attributable to myself. And we cleared that before day one, paid taxes on it, and basically, so there wouldn't be a conflict. So then the sphere shifted in another direction. It was, "Okay, well, maybe he doesn't own crypto. Okay. But he's in crypto funds, okay?" And so they pointed to, you know, Bitwise and Multicoin Capital and I was also in Blockchain Capital. And so then the fund managers came out and one by one all said, "Actually, David called us over two months ago and said he's going to need to divest from our funds." And so we also did that. So yeah. You know, I think basically they've kind of given up on this. But look, it's very easy for me—Why let the facts get in the way of a good slander? Seriously. You know?

Full disclosure, you know, you, when you saw me doing the Sequoia Scouts program, said, "Hey, why don't you do a fund? I'll be the anchor. I'll be your first LP." And I mean, one of the most generous things you've done in our relationship. And I had to have a call with you, you know, weeks ago and say, "Hey, okay, you're going to divest. Okay, fine. No problem." No, it's not—not a problem for me. You sell the assets to somebody else. So the way people understand how this mechanically works, when you're in a fund, you have no—Sachs cannot tell me what to do in the fund. He just put money in it, like I put money in other people's funds. They go and invest and ten years later you get a return. And hopefully that return in a venture firm or private equity firm beats the markets, the public markets or whatever. But then you can also sell that interest to somebody else. So mechanically, and then this takes time. And you have to sell it at 50%, 25% off. And it's painful. You will lose—I estimate you're going to lose—you know, I don't want to be gratuitous here, but $8.09 figures by serving the country for a couple of years. And not only that, the great irony of this is the one thing holding back the industry is regulation, overregulation of AI and no clear regulation in crypto. You're going in to fix the two things that were number one and two on all of our agendas in Silicon Valley in terms of getting returns the next four years. So the sacrifice you're making is extraordinary, and you're making it a better environment, a regulated environment for the rest of us to do commerce. So I just want to point out that you're losing, like, double here. Right.

Well, let me—let me just underscore something you said because service. And I don't know how much—should I pay? How much are they paying you for this job? What do you get paid? Like, $50, $100,000? I'm an unpaid consultant to the government. Really? Is that actually accurate? You're giving me no money. No. I don't want—I don't want anything costing you money. No. Of course, it is. But it's—yeah. It's—it's an honor to serve, and it's an honor to be asked to serve. And in particular, it's an honor to serve this president because he really wants to make the country great again. So that's why I'm doing it. But, yeah, look, I think it's a—it's a lazy and stupid narrative to say that the reason why someone who's already successful in business goes into government is to somehow make more money. I was making money before. This involves a substantial disruption of my business interests, and I have to divest a lot of those business interests. And in divesting, I have to be either a taxpayer or I have to take a significant discount, and it costs you money. So, you know, it's—it's just a lazy narrative that people create, but it's—there's no truth to it. And just to underscore a point that you made a second ago, you were one of the funds I divested from, not because you're a crypto fund, but because you might have a crypto position. We went through, I think, the Launch Fund's holdings, and I think there was something crypto-related in there. And so one or two that pivoted into crypto. Yes. Right. So I just didn't want to have any problem there. So listen. It's—this is the nature of the politics we have. People are—you know, it gets very personal. You know that better than anybody. And so, you know, that's why you're here. And, hopefully, we can clean this all up and let people know that, "Hey, the intent here is good."

So just—just to go back to one other point you said about not picking winners and losers, I—I think that's a very important comment that you made that I see as fundamental to my job. I mean, look. I think we do think that Bitcoin is special for the reasons I said. Beyond that, we do not want to be in the business of picking and choosing winners in the space. And, again, if some other digital asset could prove that it's as decentralized and as secure and as widely accepted as a store of value as Bitcoin, then maybe it could be elevated in the same way that Bitcoin has. I mean, I'm laying out the criteria for you. But, look, beyond that, we don't want to be picking winners and losers in the space, and that's not my job. I mean, my job is not to be a regulator or to anoint which ones are good or bad. It's to basically be a policy advisor for innovation. And I'll just tell you the way that I see the, you know, all the digital assets in this space is that what's fundamental is disclosure. If you're an issuer of a digital asset, you need to disclose, you know, all the material facts about what you're doing, and those facts have to be accurate. You can't lie. My view is that if you—if you, the issuer, lie about something, the government should come down on you like a ton of bricks because that's fraud. Okay? But as long as you do this in an honest way, people should be able to trade these things. I understand that you think a lot of them are garbage. You might be right. You could express that view in a trade. But as long as everyone has been above board in terms of disclosure, people should have the right to trade these things. And some are going to make money, some are going to lose money. It's about the freedom to basically—to trade, to hold these assets. The government doesn't want to get in the way of that. It just wants to make sure that the information is out there, that it's honest. And if people lie in order to profit, I'm all in favor of going after them.

Well, and, you know, we already have a regulated market as an analogy. And when you tell a lie and you sell a share in a company, whether it's a private or a public company, the SEC has a term for that. It's called securities fraud. And we, you know, have this new type of device. It's very innovative. It could be an NFT. It could be a trading card. It could be an actual utility token where you burn it in use of a service, or it could be anything. It could be whatever the person describes it as. But what's important is there's an entity with a group of people, I think you would agree, who have said, "We have ownership of this. We're incorporated here in the United States, not in Panama, not in the BVI, not in some, you know, other place where maybe they're a little faster or looser with regulations." You've gotta be here in the U.S. Maybe you have to be insured in some way. Maybe there has to be a board like there does in Delaware or in an LLC. There has to be some person where the buck stops. And if you lie while committing a transaction or taking money for an asset, it would be securities fraud. And, yes, people will come down on you like a ton of bricks. And if you promote things and you don't disclose it, well, we have rules about that as well. We saw many celebrities get pinched last time for tweeting about cryptocurrencies. And—and this is the stuff that I think has to stop. I think it should feel more like what we do in angel investing in private companies and in public companies. So that's your job. When are we going to see, you know, that framework emerge? Because here, you're only, like, 40, 50 days into this, I think. When will we see the actual bones of a framework? So if I want to do J Coin and I want to make an angel investing coin or I want to do something fun, an NFT collection for All In or something, when will we have the actual rules of the road? And that's going to be multiple agencies. Right?

Yeah. What you're describing is—is known in Washington or the—the—the area of policy that you're describing is known as market structure. And market structure is about providing a clear framework for market participants. It would define what is a security, what's a commodity, what's simply a collectible—you know, it's just property but it's not a security. And then what are the rules for each category? That's known as market structure. There is a bill that passed the last Congress in the House, but Biden basically—he didn't veto it, but he basically—he and the Democrats stopped it. He stopped it in the Senate, the Democrats did. It was called FIT 21, and it was authored by French Hill, who's now the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. So we expect that he will be introducing a new version of his bill probably in the next few weeks. I don't think I'm breaking any news by saying this. I think people expect it. And that's going to provide the framework for market structure, and it's going to provide a lot of the definitions that you're talking about. Now I—I agree with your sentiment, okay, but I will say that I might have a different view than you of what is a security, what's not. I mean, to me, collectibles are not securities, but if it's a collectible, you've gotta disclaim that, "Look, this has no intrinsic value." Right? That's a collectible. Think about a baseball card. A baseball card is a piece of cardboard. It has no intrinsic value, but the value comes from basically other collectors being willing to buy it from you. And you could just say that that's irrational or whatever. But so look. I think as long as people disclaim that this coin has no intrinsic value, they should be able to issue meme coins. It's a separate question why people would want to buy them. But look, that's—in my view—that's very different than someone who goes out as an issuer and says, "I'm issuing a token or a coin that has lots of functionality and has lots of value, and you'll hear some of these guys even say that, 'Hey, our token is more valuable than Bitcoin. You should value it more highly.'" Well, if you're promising that and you're saying that it's going to have certain functionality, you better be telling the truth about it.

Yeah. And then we start getting into how we test, and people can go look that up if they—if they want. What I will say is there's an educational process that has to come in here, which we've gone through as the United States. When people would buy interest in mines, people would buy interest in gold claims, oil fields. And that's when a lot of these regulations came out in the twenties around accreditation. We've spoken about this before. It's a pet peeve of mine, but I think there should be an educational framework here. And I think there should also be some nuance that you could work on specifically with this group of being clear that when you have a ticker symbol associated with something or you do charts associated with something, you know, it starts to smell like a duck, it looks like a duck, it's quacking like a duck. But then in the terms of service, it says, "Hey, this is a collectible." I think there needs to be some ground rules, which maybe it says, "Hey, these need to be presented in a certain way at the top level." So the nuance of disclosure is so important. When I tweet something, if it was an advertiser or a sponsor of All In or This Week in Startups or any influencer or you did the—would you do this? And you said, "I love, you know, this brand." You and I both were—well, you were an investor in H.C.I.M. If we were to tweet about that, as investors, we don't have to disclose. But if we were paid for that, the FTC has rules. You have to put, "This is a paid partnership." You cannot confuse consumers. And I think that's where you're going to have to do a little bit of cleanup work and structure as well, is the disclosure and how this appears, and then also maybe the educational system. So, you know, if you want to own a firearm, if you want to drive a car, if you want to be, you know, a beautician, and listen, we can talk about overregulation, you've gotta take tests. Man, it would just be so much better if consumers could take, you know, like a 50-question test just to say, "Hey, they understand what we're talking about here in—in terms of diversification so they don't YOLO their entire mortgage and house into one crypto." So what are your thoughts on those two issues? Disclosures, how it's presented, and then accreditation and maybe a path to accreditation, sophisticated investor test is how I refer to it, for all Americans because 90% of people can't participate in private companies. Your thoughts?

Well, disclosure is the key. Like I said, I mean, these projects should have to disclose certain things. I think, for example, the token cap table should be disclosed. Who are the—Okay. Great. Who are the insiders? How much do they have? When are they selling? You know, that's—that's information the market should always know, in my opinion. Easily done with the technology lauded by the crypto community, the blockchain. This could just be on the blockchain. This was always the problem we had as venture capitalists with, "Hey, this is a token project. Who owns the tokens? Where are they? When can—when can I sell? When can you sell?" The insiders. Yes. Yeah. And I don't think you have to disclose everyone who owns a token. That could be hard to comply with, but I think you should have to disclose percent. You should have to disclose the insiders and their—their sales plans and their lockups. And—and—and I would also say how new tokens get created. I mean, if this is a fully centralized token where they can just mint more, people need to know that because there's no scarcity. Right? But if there's somehow an enforcement mechanism and there's enforced scarcity, then that's a different story. So, yeah, these things have to be disclosed, and, by the way, I think the market structure bills will do that. There's a version of this in FIT 21 last Congress. I think it'll be in the next one. And moreover, the SEC is looking right now at these rules, and they're going to create their own frameworks. They're doing it in a nutshell. SEC chief—I—I was doing some research on him. He—he—he's a really pro—actually, more Americans being able to invest in privates, private equity, etcetera. And he's given speeches on it in the past. So the person who's been nominated for the new chair of the SEC is named Paul Atkins, and he—he has not been confirmed yet. The confirmation hearings still need to happen. Separately, Hester Peirce, who's a commissioner at the SEC, is in charge of—I know Hester. I've had her on This Week in Startups a couple of times. She's great. She's excellent. She's very well informed. And she's—very sharp—taking the lead on all the crypto-related stuff. So I trust her, and I trust the SEC to produce those detailed frameworks that you're talking about.

Yeah. I think that my role as—call it innovation policy advisor—is just to kind of make sure that we have the big picture right. And I'm—I'm very confident that the SEC, the CFTC, and the legislators, they're going to figure out the balance here. Sachs, you've gotta go. Really proud of the work here. Congratulations on filling this all up and presenting a really thoughtful plan that we can all ask you hard questions on. Appreciate you taking the hard questions here on the All In podcast. And, good luck when you do the rest of the media circus. I wonder if I'm going to be the hardest questioner of you. I—I hope so. And, for people asking, yes, I'm wearing a suit because I am now joining the administration. Big announcement. I'm the official podcaster, the official moderator of the Trump White House. I'm just kidding. People will actually believe you. Alright, man. Listen. I got—I got a—I got a good joke. But good to see you. Okay. Love you, brother. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Alright. Bye. Alright, everybody. I'm obviously super conflicted. Sachs is my friend of 20 years plus. We're partners here on the All In podcast. And, of course, I'm rooting for the administration. But, you know, I got that journalist blood in me. I always want to call balls and strikes. I'm going to, as you just heard, ask hard questions. So if you're wondering where I'm coming from, I'm going to ask hard questions to my friends because they're doing important work for the American people and for the rest of the people on the planet, candidly. These are important decisions that Sachs is going to have to make about crypto, AI, that Elon's making with Doge. I'm going to ask hard questions. That's the way it's going to be. And so I'm really excited that they're coming on here. They're going to take the hard questions from me, but they're done in a certain spirit, which is, yes, they're my friends, but they've got important jobs. So they do have to answer the hard questions for the American people. And I'm also curious, and we're all curious where they're coming from. So I feel so privileged that they're—they're choosing to come on All In to face those hard questions. We'll see you all next time. From the only problems. We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David Sacca. And it said we open-sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, guys. Queen of quinoa. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release—them out. Get Mercies are back?