White House BTS, Google buys Wiz, Treasury vs Fed, Space Rescue

Freeberg had this great story. There's a machine there. I've never seen this machine in my life, but he knew the machine. There's a Coca-Cola Freestyle machine; there's a machine that's right by the Navy mess where we had lunch in The Situation Room, which dispenses literally—I've never seen this before. This is how out of touch you are. This is in every 7-Eleven, theater, McDonald's, every movie theater, everywhere. This is everywhere. You have not left. I was blown away by this machine—all Coca-Colas, all of the Gatorades.

Let me ask you a question: How much is a dozen eggs? $399? How much? Yeah, $399. He got it. $399. That's right. No, $3.99. $3.99. Pretty CL—depends; it's pretty much double that in the Bay Area where Whole Foods, but yeah, it's half that. Ask me how much milk is—how much is milk? $8.99 to $1.99, depending on what you buy. How much is a sweater, Chamath? My sweater is $4,000. All right, now we're back, everybody. We're back. Let your winners ride, Rainman, David, and instead we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with [Music] it.

All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All In podcast, with me again, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, and look at this, look at this—live from D.C. Our bestie David Sachs is back. He's suited up in the administration and in the fifth bestie seat for the second time. My long-term bestie, Sayan Bannister, hot on the trails of her new fund getting announced. Congratulations on that, Sayan.

Thank you. Thank you. It's exciting to be back, and I'm so EXC—I did not expect to see David, so like I'm over the moon. I'm like so excited.

Well, I just popped in to reminisce about this trip that Chamath and Freeberg just did—absolutely a trip of a lifetime, trip of a life. We had all the besties at the White House. It was really incredible.

Oh, wait, Jaq, was it there actually? It's interesting you say that. It's interesting, I um, I checked my spam filters, and my invite got stuck in the spam filters. But okay, yeah, it was a little bit of a problem, but I, you know, I had ski week this week, so I wouldn't have been able to make it anyway. But um, yeah, you know, I noticed there were some other invites stuck in my—a couple of other invites got stuck. Yeah, my Jeopardy invite. I see that uh, you guys are all going to be in the next Jeopardy, in the second round. My invite to Jeopardy somehow got lost. I have to talk to John, the CEO, so that kind of—that was kind of a bummer. Also, I uh, also I missed my uh, I missed my invite to the Bridgerton—you got a cameo in Bridgerton, there, I see.

Bri—yeah, guess I'm not going to be on the Netflix show Bridgerton. I miss that. I think we're in a bit—let's keep going, and uh, looks like my White Party invite here with Diddy—oh well, we cut it in—oh God, thank God the White Party—oh look, Ep's Island—oh no, I'm sorry, that was Reed Hoffman's invite. That's out, you bro. H—yeah, you're on a roll here. Keep going.

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

It was probably the most intense three days that we had. Nat and I were there to see the president, but obviously we were there to see Sachs as well, but there was a bunch of other things that happened—happened. Myself, Freeberg, NuMoney, Sunny was there, our bestie Elon Musk—obviously we dropped in with him. So to recap, on Sunday we got in; it was just like raining cats and dogs. Nothing to say there. Then on Monday, what happened was we basically had some meetings in the morning, and then David said, "Guys, let me just walk you around and just show you where I—" By the way, we camped out in Sachs' office for three days, which was awesome. So we we had the passes to be at the West Wing, in the Eisenhower Building—that's Sachs' office—and so we all kind of worked from there, and then we went and did our meetings from Sachs' office, and Sachs' incredible Chief of Staff, Tracy, escorted us around anytime we needed to go anywhere. So then we we started to walk through the West Wing. We dropped by—look at Sachs' office for a second. I love what you've done with the place. Were you allowed to put up a piece of art? And look at that desktop rig.

I think the most iconic part of the West Wing is the Portico, where you see that those very famous shots of all these very important people. In this case, it's just the four of us, but you can see Nick—there's the shot of all of us. Well, the Portico connects the West Wing to the president's residence. Tracy, Sachs' Chief of Staff, escorted us from The West Wing, after we did an amazing tour of the West Wing, over to the residence. I don't know if we were really supposed to do it, but she she has full access, so we were able to kind of go on the walk, and then we took a walk around the residence, all the rooms. But this is the entrance to the West Wing right here. So when you come in for for meetings, administrators—so we walk in. Pam Bondi's on our way out. We we got to meet Pam Bondi. I mean, it really is amazing, like members of the cabinet are coming in and out of this door, members at work in the West Wing are coming or leaders—yeah—and then we saw like leaders coming in. One of the most iconic things we were allowed to do was see The Press Room. By the way, the people that work—and we'll get to it in a second because we met some incredible people that work in the White House—but some of the folks that don't necessarily get a lot of flowers, like folks that work in like the upper Press Room and the lower Press Room—some of the kindest people—and what they did was they're like, "Oh, guys, why don't you come and see where they do the presidential briefings?" And the one thing about the White House is everything is just like in a nook and cranny away. So this is where obviously you see the presidential seal isn't there because the president is not there, but we were able to do that. We met some really—The Press Room here—this is the actual Press Room. This is the way it was—just like a little door. It's so small. It's a door off the side. This—the whole West Wing is like disarmingly small. You can walk for 15 seconds between the Oval Office and pretty much everywhere else in the West Wing. It really is a very tight—and Elon's got an office in there that we got to kind of drop in and say hi. The president, obviously. Chamath went over to the Oval. Then there's the Situation Room. I mean, everything is within a couple of steps of everything, and it really is—you're in these kind of historic moments as you walk through this. You just feel the—of everything that you've heard about and seen and all the history and legacy to every—everything—and it's just all right there, compact in one space. You're just overwhelmed. It really was overwhelming for me emotionally. It was overwhelming intellectually. You just kind of walk around, and you know it's just—you're you're part of it, and it was so—I was telling Chamath it was so emotional for me at the end of the day to just be like, "Man, like you come to this country, come to America, you know, from wherever you came from, and anyone can find their way into this historic space." That's the beauty of this country, and I—it never really hit me until we were in this moment. So let me show you—I kind of really got it—met some really incredible people. Nick, you can find a picture of myself and Freeberg and Sunny and Sachs. We're with Taylor Budowich, who's David—David, he's a Deputy Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff for communications and the White House. His office is is well placed because through that window behind us is the gaggle. There's this lawn out on the the White House called Pebble Beach, and all the networks have tents there, and they'll do recordings with White House officials, and the White House will be in the background. It's not like a green screen or an LED; it's the actual White House will be in the background. That's why it's all set up there, and it's called Pebble Beach. And then there's an area I think they call it like the sticks, which is basically just like a paved area where White House officials can go out there, and they get swarmed by all the media asking him questions. That's called the gaggle. So he can keep an eye on everything that's happening with the media through that window in his office. Is that where Marine One lands, and you see everybody yelling at the president and trying to like talk to the cops? Or that's on the other side?

That's on the other side. It's on the other side. But a lot of those reporters will just move over there when they have the opportunity to do that. But like when you see when you see Karine Jean-Pierre, who's the White House Press Secretary, or Steven Miller, who's the yeah, Deputy Chief of Staff for policy, they'll come out, and all of a sudden they're speaking into a microphone. It'll seem impromptu; there'll be a lot of reporters. That's usually the the sticks, or—and that's the the White House Gaggle. We saw Elon, obviously. Nick, you can just show the picture of all of us with Elon. And the incredible thing is here you have the most incredible entrepreneur of our lifetime dealing with so many complicated issues, and I'll tell you—Elon works in one of the smallest offices I've ever seen. All he has is a desk with an enormous screen and his phone, and you can see that there is nothing that matters except the task at hand, and that's really inspiring. Like it it just puts everybody on the same level. You feel this energy that all of these guys are doing incredible work on behalf of the country—to a one where there's no ego about some of these things, meaning what is the office size, what is this, what is that? They're just here to grind, and I don't think I've ever seen a workforce more happy. Like you get there, and the energy and the intensity—it's very much like the TV show West Wing. There's just this constant momentum every day, live a whole lifetime, and everyone is just like energized, and you—like I was talking to Sachs' chief of staff, and she's like, "There, you just never calm down. Like you never—you're never—there's never a dull moment here," and that's why everyone kind of has this grin on their face. They're just so happy to be doing this work. The intensity—I'm I'm going to describe to you a 45-minute or so experience in the Oval. So the next day, myself and Nat and Sachs go to see the president in the Oval, and there's this incredible meeting room, and you're kind of—you wait there, right, the waiting room. It's quite large; it's very beautiful, you know, beautiful sofas, etc. And then they say, "Oh, the president's ready to see you," and you get escorted into the Oval, and the one thing that strike—that struck me about the Oval is it's also much smaller than what you would think. Like it's a very good size, and it's a very natural size, but it's beautiful, and it's inspiring. And our experience was—Nat was in the front, I'm in the middle, and then David's beside me, and as we were walking through, you could hear that there was this like very important conversation happening between—and somebody else who I won't say—about something that I won't say, but this was really important. And we walk through the Oval, and we walk through the back, and we go into—to his private dining room, and that has all this incredible memorabilia sticking around. Nick, maybe you can show the picture of me and the president. So we had this conversation, and in the middle of the conversation, we had a chance to watch some Fox News together because the Dragon capsule was landing, and I texted Elon, I said, "Hey, we're in the Oval, do you want to come drop in?" He texts back, "Can't—Dragon capsule landing." I'm like, "Yeah, I know, we're watching it right now." So Nat, myself, the president, Sachs—we're watching this thing kind of unfold. Anyways, then we we have our meeting that ends, and we walk out into sort of like this area where Taylor's office is, like where that picture was, and we continue to just randomly sit there watching, and this is what you mean—Freeberg, Marco Rubio comes by. So now we're just standing around—there's Marco Rubio. You were talking about the the landing, and then out of the left-hand side, Shake Tanon comes in because he's there to say hi to the president. Then he comes in, obviously says hi to Marco Rubio, says hi to me. We talk for a few minutes; he leaves. So the intensity of the people just within two steps of each other—you you saw the CIA director walk in and out. It's just an—it's an incredibly mesmerizing place where, irrespective I think of your political ideology, the minute that you're there, I think it's hard to not be anything but Team America. I think it's impossible, actually, and it's really inspiring. And by the way, coming home, I feel like I'm crashing—meaning like there's such a level of adrenaline and dopamine, and you know, we are like these observers, so I can only imagine, Sachs, what it feels like for you when you're not in that environment. It's it's a really intoxicating, mesmerizing place.

I think that's well said, Chamath, and every day there's something new, you know, every day you discover something new. One day it's the the Navy—where you didn't mention that, but we got a chance to cut over to that, Nick. Yeah, we had lunch there; it was incredible. Did you get a photo of the burgers?

I did. I sent—make a a photo of the burger. I got the veggie burger. Famous, right? It's got the seal on the top. Yeah, it's got the seal. They must use some sort of gr—tool to burn the seal—the president of the United States—onto the burgers. Think a nice touch. By the way, you want to know something? They didn't do it on the veggie burger. What's that—sending—they're sending you a message—a message. Yeah. By the way, what's incredible about like the the narrowness and the smallness—there's just a door that does not look all that—assuming—it's very unassuming, and there's just a small sign that says Situation Room. There's a little corridor off of the the West Wing lobby, which by the way, like you said, if you're hanging out in the West Wing lobby, you're going to run into all sorts of interesting people, but you go down this little passageway—it's so small—the header of the door is so small that SRI, you know, does AI policy; he's 6'6"—he almost concussed himself once because he hit his head at the top of the door. I think the door frame is about 6'6"—2" is the clearance, maybe it was made over a hundred years ago. He he literally has to duck his head every time he walks by. But any event, if you walk to the end of that passageway, there's a little kiosk to get a coffee, or you turn the other way, and you're in the Situation Room. I mean, be—you could be whacking a terrorist from 4,000 miles away, or you can get a mocha. You could do both. Why choose? Sayan, you have a question? What do you—you're taking all this in—uh—yeah, I I want to know from David what his favorite piece of art is there and whether or not David and Chamath saw the Declaration of Independence.

Yeah, actually, yeah. Well, go ahead. We—yeah, we saw it. I mean, so this is the problem, Sayan. I I feel like I want to redo that moment. I mean, David gets to do it every day, but I want to redo it 50 times because we didn't necessarily stop there. He has to open and close the curtains because they want to keep the sun off the Declaration of Independence—probably a good idea. I didn't think to like, "Oh, sir, can we just stop?" It's just such a whirlwind that I want to redo.

I think you'll get a chance to. I think you will. Well, when I run and I'm president because I'm the only one here who can—I will definitely—you—oh wait, Sayan, you're an American.

Yeah. Yeah, you're you're way to dial up the misogyny. Good, good for you. Yeah. Well, no, I was talking about the the besties here. I forgot for a second—she best. All right, listen, amazing. I was wondering about the choice of the double-breasted, Chamath. This is a strong, strong choice here to go double-breasted to the White House. Take me through the thinking.

So first of all, big shout out to uh, Luca Rubinacci, my tailor. I did double-breasted on Monday and Wednesday. Whoa, two in this—you so you quadded it in one week. But then I I went I went single-breasted to see—I did notice that. Yeah, it's a little gratuitous to go triple double.

Yeah, you don't want to triple double. No. By the way, so we're we're hanging out at the White House, and we got the random—it was like 1:00 in the afternoon, Chamath, on Monday, when they said, "Hey, would you guys like to sit down with Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen?" And so then—special bonus episode—they're like, "At 5:30 today," and we had a dinner at 7—7:30, so it was pretty tight, but we were like, "Yes, that sounds good." So then we got to go over to Treasury later in the afternoon. We had a camera guy come and set up. So yeah, here's this this this beautiful room in Treasury. I forgot the name of the room. Yes, it was like the something Chase room, I think. We got to find this beautiful room. So we set up the interviews on YouTube, obviously on X and on the Main feed—it's on the Main—and on the Main feed. And then we got a call after we did the Yellen interview, and—and it, you know, I think folks that were there from press that that were—that was great. Howard Lutnick, who Chamath was going to be doing a meeting with on Wednesday morning right before we were flying home, said, "What if I come in early before our meeting, Chamath, and we do a sit down?" So we said, "Let's do it." So then we got to go to the White House Press Auditorium. They have a special Auditorium just outside the West Wing, and you guys will recognize the stage obviously from many Biden press interviews. Here's the the stage, and so then we did this interview with Lutnick, and my God, this is going to be a barn burner of an interview when it comes out. I ran into him after he had done this interview, and he was he was excited about it.

Sounds like you guys were on fire. He was on fire, Sachs. I mean, this guy, I think it's going—there's going to be so many clips out of this interview. It was incredible. It was like over an hour and a half.

Wow. And he just kept going and going. He—yeah, after—afterwards we went to his building. By the way, you know that he's a Secretary of Commerce—Howard's office is the War Department office, the old War Department office. So we jumped in his car, and we went to his office. It is the most beautiful—I I—this is again, I didn't think to stop and take photos. I should have taken more photos, but his office is outrageously beautiful. Sachs, I don't know if you've been over there.

Yeah, I have. Yeah, I—let me let me just say one thing. I want to say that politics and policy aside, these individuals from the White House, Deputy Chief of Staff to these members of the cabinet to all the staff that work in the West Wing were incredibly open and transparent. There were no press people intervening or involved. It was very random, very ad hoc that we got to have these sit-down conversations, and they were just so open, and I just want to say like that was really refreshing and really incredible, and and I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to kind of sit through this. But you know, I I was not expecting this on this trip at all. I think that when you work in the White House, and and you have been successful in the private sector, like as Janet Yellen or Howard Lutnick or myself or Doug Bergman or Doug Beram or Elon especially, I would describe it as a money-for-purpose trade. You're giving up money, but the sense of purpose you feel working for the White House for this President is just incredible, and I think you guys kind of picked up on that. And in my view, that's a trade that you should be happy to make any day of the week because it is really an honor to to work at the the White House and for this President because he actually wants to get things done on behalf of the American people. The default state of Washington is just that nothing gets done, right? You guys know that—the bureaucracy and the the entropy and the inertia just basically rule the day. And so it takes a President who, number one, has a mandate for the American people, number two, has a tremendous sense of mission and purpose, and number three, brings tremendous energy to the job. And then I think finally assembles the right team around him, and those are the conditions under which you can actually make change, positive change for the country. And we have that, and it's kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If we don't get this done now, if we're not able to cut the deficit and debt now, when are we ever going to do it? This is the—you know, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I think everybody there feels that. I think everyone in the White House is really proud to be there and and excited to be there, and and it's fun. And you know, part of it is that the—you know, you can tell that the the president—he makes his job fun because he's having a great time.

Yeah, he was really—I think born to do this job. I mean, in so many ways, he just brings so much energy to it. He's indefatigable. There's so many—he's empowering. He's like—everyone we met with, Sachs, to your point, they've all been successful in another part of life and in business and whatnot, and they're generally post-economic people, but he's letting everyone run. We got to meet with several other members of the the cabinet, and they were all sharing with us that they're being given autonomy and authority; they can just run. And I think that that's really important. If you want to bring in high-impact people, you need to let them have an impact and let them do their thing.

I observe that—can I give you one quick anecdote maybe to wrap this segment up? So when we're sitting in—when we're at the private dining room, Steve Witkoff, who's another incredible entrepreneur, was dealing with something sensitive, comes in, tells the president—he's like, "Okay, great, great job." Then there were three other issues—Sachs had something, then Sergio had something, and then on top of all of that—so there's this bang bang bang, and then he's also like, "Guys, listen, for this dinner coming up, I really want to make sure the acoustics are right, so everybody has an opportunity"—it's like the level of detail from the most important thing all the way down to literally the acoustics in the dining room. He is on top of all of it, and I was just like—and that was again just in my small little brief observation—I was like, "This is crazy." To your point, like the energy and the the indefatigability and the desire to get every little thing right—it's pretty rare. It's—I I kind of feel like America's in good hands, to be honest. You saw it just in those few minutes when he's being peppered with so many decisions, so many actions, so many decisions—you just realize what a demanding job it is, and you really need a person who just is special in that way that they're just somehow cut out for that that type of job. It is—yeah—very difficult. Totally agree. I think Freeberg is totally right. If we can create a pattern where people with high executive—let's just say that because that's less of a loaded word than businessman or successful—whatever—people with high executive function that have proven it should at some point in their career step into government and replace money for purpose—if that is a trend that this Administration creates, I think America is in incredible hands eventually, which was how the founding fathers operated the government originally. There'll be a moment, guys, where the rats win, right? There'll be a moment when the Republicans return to power; there'll be a moment when all the ideologies flip, but if in all of that you can find people who are willing to pause their private lives, have demonstrated executive function, and can make the trade—we're going to just kick ass and give back. It's great, David. Thank you. I really honestly thank you—like you are—yeah—thank you, Dave. Awesome. You're awesome. Thank you for giving us a window into that, and shout out to Tracy as well; she's incredible. Chamath, what do you think of the Yellen interview? Did you see it?

I did watch the Yellen interview. Yeah. I mean, listen, I would have loved to ask him a couple of questions. Obviously, I would have probably done a couple of fastballs, curveballs—would have gone a little bit harder—but he is so impressive. And you guys did like an hour with him, and I haven't heard—what did we miss that you would have asked?

Yeah, I mean, you know, you got to get a little bit into the chaos—being—it's a good time for me to drop off. Yeah, I'll drop off—a better job he would do. Okay, we'll see you later. You can tell everyone now what a great job you would have done. Love you. Love you. See in the commissary. What a guy. No, I thought it was really good to hear from him long form. I think there's a little bit of chaos going on with the terrorists and stuff like that, but you know, I don't think the country knows how great he is. This guy is a powerhouse. He has an incredible track record. And by the way, like Trump picking him—I'm going to give Trump a little bit of flowers here. Obviously, folks know I'm an independent and an never-Trumper who is, you know, supporting the administration to do the best they can. What does it mean to be independent but also have another label that says you refuse to consider somebody? I don't understand.

Keep options open. Well, no, I mean, I I I didn't—I had my own issues with, you know, what Trump did on January 6th, and we don't need to get into it—overturning Roe v. Wade—we don't have to get into the things that I don't agree with—what he did. Putting all those things aside, I think he's done a great job with the team he's putting here, and this is, you know, my message to I think some of the Americans or the people on the left is I would look at what he's doing and some of these individuals—these are really high-functioning individuals. The last time I think he had a cast of characters around him who I think were kind of dark and and I didn't care for a lot of them. With Yellen, this guy is like a—by—I think he, you know, was previously a Democrat who gave to a ton of Democrats, and he is a powerhouse, and I think he really understands—financial—was a big donor to Hillary, and then RFK was a Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard was a Democrat, Trump was a Democrat—I mean, my point—I was a Democrat.

You were a Democrat. Yeah. So I think that's, you know, Yellen is—I came away from it saying, "This guy's super qualified," and the chaos that I think Trump has been creating with like back and forth—

With the tariffs and his communication style, it made me feel better to know that there was somebody who was Rock Solid like him in there and who’s really thoughtful. Because right now, when you talk to 50 people who are knowledgeable about the markets and say, “What is the strategy here that Trump has?” you get 10 different answers, five different vectors for it. People are trying to figure out exactly what he’s trying to do, and there’s a lot of nonconsensus. But hearing that he’s got somebody like him there, and you talking to him for an hour, I felt much better about the situation and that maybe there is a—I think yeah, it was it was a solid interview.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the access level—you know, most of the time he’s on something like Meet the Press or Face the Nation, and it’s 11 minutes, and the guy can’t breathe totally. And for him to go an hour, and you kind of—you did a good job chth of sort of giving his history with I, which I think the context most Americans don’t have, so I was very proud of the job the two of you did. I wish I was there.

Did a great job, by the way, because chth. He had a very incredible Chim, by the way. I got to give you flowers for having good intuition on some of the questions you asked, both Letnik and Bess, that I think revealed a little bit more about their character and who they are as people, which I was not on—I’m all about like, what are the hard—what are the questions I want to ask related to policy and agenda—but you did a great job bringing that out on them, and that actually I think created a lot of texture for both interviews that I was not pre—I was not thinking about. A great job. I’m looking forward to the next one. I don’t know when that drops, but that should be really good.

Oh my god, dude, the Letnik interviews like—I mean, he’s a hardcore New Yorker, and like he really—you guys talki—let me tell you. Yeah, we did talk about—listen, the thing—the thing you need to know about Howard Lutnick is he is an incredibly resilient and resourceful businessman. This guy has built himself up literally from nothing. Good human. I’m a little biased, but he’s a great guy, and you’re going to hear some really incredible stories. But again, another one who traded money for purpose.

Look, I just want to say real quick, we don’t do—on the show, but we did have three sponsors that actually helped fund our DC trip and set this thing up for us, so I really want to say thank you to Hims, hims.com, and ForHims, Gemini, and iTrust. Everyone listening to the show, please go to the description, whatever player you’re in, check them out. These three sponsors help make this trip happen. We’re really appreciative. Please take a look at their websites, give their products a shot. Thank you to Hims, Gemini, and iTrust. Uh, you guys are the best. We really appreciate it.

All right, everybody, we got a full docket today. Lots of docket. And you know, just—hey, welcome back to the show, Sayan. I just wanted to start—you had a really great announcement this week. Long Journey Ventures, your Venture Capital firm, announced a $180 million fund. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, 181—181—181. And 18—18 stands for life to people who are Jewish, and my partners are Jewish, and it was something that was very animportant uh to them and to me uh to stand up after October 7th and you know, take a very public stance. And so we announced our funding announcement on Bloomberg yesterday, and uh—and our office is on 18th Street.

Oh, congrats. Yeah, that’s awesome. What is the mission of the Venture fund? What—what—what stage are you going to—you and I started as Angel Investors together 14 years ago.

Yeah, so we focus on early-stage seed checks, first checkin, and you know, this—this fund um is our fourth fund. We institutionalized more—in the beginning it was high-net-worth individuals, and then now we’re—you know, going to kind of what chth was speaking about earlier is aligning what we do with our higher purpose. And so now we’re helping, you know, institutions help people go to school, solving cancer, and things like that. So every day that we get up in the morning, you know, we’re—we’re aligning what we do. Our mission is to chase the magically weird. We’re looking for Alpha in things when everybody is consensus investing and they’re doing the same thing and talking about the same things. We’re thinking six to eight years in the future. You know, when our fund three, we invested in a company in the chip space, and you know, we were thinking ahead about what’s going to power AI and crypto. And now that everybody’s, you know, investing in the application layer, we’re going into the next thing, which is like, what is that going to enable and what’s coming down the road, and looking for Founders that are thinking differently that most other of my peers would look at and say, “That’s crazy. I don’t want to put any money into that.” So that’s—that’s what we focus on.

This is such a hard thing for people to get their heads around—the non-consent is BET, and why that’s so important. I’m—you know, I’m training, you know, new Associates at our firm, and they always are going to safety. So they’re looking at a vertical, they’re looking at a startup, and saying, “Well, this makes the most sense.” And then they look at the ones that don’t make sense, but that are like intriguing, and they are like, “Yeah, I don’t know if I want to place a bet on that because I have—I’m like—that’s where the gold is—non-consensus bet. When you and I did Uber, it was a room of 21 people, three people decided to invest, 19 didn’t.

Yeah, that was a magically weird company at the time, if you remember. I sent it around to multiple investors, and they came back with the stupidest excuses I ever heard. But it was their excuse, which is—you know, not everyone wants a black car; the car doesn’t come to my house yet; uh, no one wants to get into a stranger’s vehicle. The list goes on and on. But it takes a vision of seeing the future and seeing how it plays out and believing in all the Miracles that are going to happen, and getting in early is where all the alpha is, you know, before the thing is defined as a category. So that’s where I like to play is I don’t want it to even have a market name yet.

Such a great observation. Like when—when a—when an Associate or some research company says, “Oh, it’s the on-demand economy,” that’s when you know that opportunity’s gone. You can let—that’s where like all of my peers can go lose all their money in an ocean of dead bodies, because like I don’t want to play there.

Yeah, and you had a price Advantage too, right? Like if you enter early before it’s a defined category, you’re taking on a lot of risk, and so—you know, I’m getting deals anywhere from like five to 10 post, while all of my peers are playing in the 20 to 30 range. And so obviously it’s literally—you and I are the product of, you know, our early bets and like what the lessons we learned, and like one of those lessons was to be in early. Um, it’s literally what I’m doing—Founder University now is just trying to do 100—it’s just like a pre-accelerator. If I find two or three Founders who I like, I give them their first 25k check or 125k check where they can just come, you know, do it with me. We’re starting next Friday, so people want to come—Founder.University—but it’s just like what we used to do in the old days—trying to get in. Congrats. Be the first investor, and it’s—it’s really working and it’s super fun.

Hey, listen, there is great news I think for the Venture industry—this Google acquiring Wiz. I think this is—this could be the starter’s pistol.

Yeah, it’s absolutely fantastic. Google has acquired Wiz for 32 billion in cash. If you don’t know what Wiz is, just imagine you have cloud services like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google’s Cloud, Oracle Cloud—you need to have security between these things. They help do that. It’s the largest deal in Google’s history. David was there, I think, for some of the other um big Acquisitions. There haven’t been a lot of Acquisitions. Um, we know the wrath of Lena Conan was pretty acute for the last four years. But uh, looking back in history—Salesforce buying Slack, which our besti shth here was an early investor in, for 27 billion—that occurred in 2020. And then we had a couple of things get blocked—HP and was a Juniper, I believe, for 14 billion last year got blocked. And so—and Adobe Figma—Adobe Figma—bled—blocked in the UK—blocked in the UK—blocked in the UK. But they, you know, assumed it was going to happen here. And this is actually—we talked about this on episode 189, shath—Wiz turned down $23 billion from Google. They said at the time was because they wanted to IPO, but now reporting is saying—I mean, it was because of the Anti-Trust stuff under Biden, plus the UK, obviously. Go ahead, Jam, you can take it from there.

I think this is the Trump premium. I mean, the problem when that deal was being looked at back then was there was still a chance that there could be a Democrat Administration, and it was very clear that they were anti-M&A and anti-tech, quite honestly. And when Trump won, I think it basically said, “Okay, we can now look at these deals.” There’s another important part of this though, and this was part of our interview with Howard Lutnick. I’d love to just play this quick clip.

“What I’m doing is I’m saying, ‘Okay, I got to collect tffs, right?’ So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth, and I say, ‘I want you to give me—you’re going to build for me, for America—you’re going to build the greatest Customs processing ever.’ But what’s incredible is you’re convincing these companies to basically like do right for America and build a software for you. You think that’s going to be a movement throughout the government, or is that—here’s the idea—I say, ‘Build it for me for free.’ Yeah, I put it in for free. I don’t know what other countries in the world you think going to buy now, right? If it works for us. Well, remember, you have to—you have to connect to me. Yeah, so every country, right? This is aw—”

What is he really saying? What he’s really saying is there are all kinds of companies that are doing all kinds of work—who Google famously has this 20% time—could you imagine if some of this 20% time was allocated to rebuilding the core infrastructure of America and giving back to the country that gives you the ability to have a multi-trillion dollar company? That’s but one example. So when you connect the dots the way that I interpret it is that I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it’s what you’ve been asking for. I think you’re going to get it. And I think the reason why you’re going to get it is you’re going to have a very open-minded Administration that’ll let the M&A happen, but also there are ways where you can build Goodwill by doing the kinds of things that Howard is talking about. I mean, could you imagine if somebody volunteered—let’s say Palantir—and said, “Hey, we can build the following software for the IRS so that we can just completely automate tax returns.” And it’s okay for Palantir—they’re still a 200 billion dollar company—they could allocate a small amount of time and get that done. If Oracle stepped up and said something—so—and all of that Goodwill will then allow America to just grow faster, and then under that economic umbrella, a little consolidation is not necessarily a bad thing. So I’m really interested in how all of these pieces move together. That’s—that’s the one thing I get, but I’d like to say something else very narrowly about Wiz, which is Wiz does not do something that’s necessarily unique, meaning there are other products in Market, but they have done one thing better than everybody else, and I think it’s really worth rewarding, which is they have incredible taste. So if you use it—and all my engineers at 8090 live inside of this regime—when I ask them, “Hey, we need to implement something,” they all picked Wiz. And if you ask them why, and if you ask our sis admin why did we implement it—not only is it good, but it is the most beautiful; it is the most intuitive; it’s the most well-integrated; and it’s just an incredible lesson where even when other people do this other thing, you can build $32 billion doar of value by just doing that thing in a more coherent way. I mean, design matters, right? Think—having taste—and having taste matters—having a perspective point—great—that—that was rewarded.

C, what do you think of what I’ll call “Letnik Lighthouse customer approach”—in other words, make this piece of software for the US government, will become your first customer—the lighthouse that pulls in other customers for free—and for free. So we get it for free, we help you set the standard, and then you get to use us as your reference client. Let’s start with that—thoughts on—on that, and then we’ll get into M&A.

I—I think that the government has long relied on Private Industry to solve some of its biggest problems, and that’s what sets us apart from other countries in the world. And so you know, you look at some of the best companies like SpaceX andal Etc.—we need more companies like this if we’re going to compete. And so doing this absolutely makes sense, and it’s just going to help the sales cycle to get that sort of stamp of approval that you know our government is using that software.

Freeberg, your thoughts on Letnik Lighthouse strategy—could it work?

Yeah, I think this is what makes it good to have—you know, as we talked about earlier—folks with high executive function and business experience and acumen in key leadership positions in the government. So they know how to drive kind of better economic outcomes—negotiating the price of a contract down and saying, in this case, “Give it to us for free.” One of the things Letnik said in the interview which you didn’t see in this clip is that the government can actually accept free contracts—these GRUS contracts—and you don’t need to go get approval to do it. So they can operate in the executive branch.

Oh, that makes total sense, right? You don’t need an approval if it’s GRUS. That makes total—that’s right. Yeah, that makes it—that’s also a big unlock.

Yeah. Well, then I guess we can contrast this chth with Tim Waltz, you know, VP—potential VP candidate. I have a real problem with this clip, Jason. This was the most infuriating thing I’ve ever seen from a politician. I mean, Tim Waltz gets on stage, pulls out his Stock app and starts mocking the greatest American car company ever created and that its stock is down. This is disra ad.com to me—play the clipnet.

“I don’t—some, you know, this on the iPhone—they’ve got that little Stock app. I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day—225 and dro—so—and and if you own one—if you own one—we’re not blaming you—you can—you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know, and take—”

Shath, you want to talk about this communist scumbag and what he did there?

No, I’m not going to say anything personal except to say that I think that it is incredibly low-brow. At the end of the day, he represents the American people. He needs to be firmly on Team America. I don’t think he understands, cuz he’s never actually had a real job, but the Auto industry is a vibrant part of how many—many—many Americans earn their living. Tesla employs 125,000 plus employees. There is no reason a politician should be wishing any American company to fail, period. I just think that should be the price of entry. And so to lack the basic decorum and understanding and then to whip people up into wanting any American company fail—there are many American companies—sure, I like or dislike whatever—it’s not the point—they’ll some that I’ll buy the stock of—they’ll some that I would not—that’s not the point—you cannot openly and actively be cheering, as a politician, at least for these things to fail. That I think is just incredibly low-brow. I—I think it’s the bottoming out of the Democratic Party. That moment will be looked at as the bottom.

Sayan, any thoughts?

I think it’s incredibly low-brow. I agree with chth, and I think it’s just so distasteful for, you know, a public official to do something like that, in—especially for an American company. And it—you know, if you hear the people cheering in the background, it’s obvious that there’s a base that supports this, and that frightens me even more, because he’s saying these things because his constitu—his constituents believe it. And you know, a politician says these things because they think it’s going to motivate them to vote for them in the future, and that really frightens me, you know, that we are riling people up um to cheer on the ruction of American company and possibly go out and burn cars, you know, I think—well, that’s the—that’s a s—yeah, that—because whenever you incite like this kind of aggressiveness—and by the way, both sides do it—you get a contingent who takes it too far.

Freeberg.

Yeah, maybe we wrap up on this and then we can jump back to Wiz. Sorry for the diversion. I think the Democratic Party um has split into two parties. There’s the Democratic Party with beliefs, and there’s the Democratic Party without beliefs. I think that the Democratic Party with beliefs is the one that’s very far left, and their beliefs are fundamentally rooted in concepts of socialism, Marxism, yes, and they’re very clear about those beliefs—that traditional power structures need to be dismantled and assets and influence need to be commonly redistributed. The rest of the Democratic Party, which people call the moderate part of the party, actually don’t really know what their beliefs are. When you talk to anyone in the Republican Party and a leadership position, you hear very clearly what their beliefs are. We saw it this week in DC—every member of the Cabinet that we met with, and there were quite a number of them, had the exact same message and the exact same set of beliefs of what this Administration stands for and what they’re trying to do. You may agree with those beliefs or you may not, but they have stated their beliefs. The problem is that because the moderates in the Democratic Party have not stated a set of beliefs, a set of objectives, a vision for the country, a vision for their party, the party is effectively being represented by this part of the party that does have beliefs—the deeply socialist Marxist beliefs—and they have basically subsumed the message. And as a result, this is why people have lost interest in the Democratic Party because the moderate aspect has not been really clear on what their beliefs are. There’s an opportunity for some of these moderate leaders in the Democratic Party, like Dean Phillips, like—and people may not like me saying this—but like Gavin Newsom, who I don’t think is all the way over on that far left side of the—the Spectrum, to be really clear and paint a pet vision and really state the beliefs of the party and what the beliefs are that differentiate them. And those beliefs—recently the only thing that underscores what that party stands for is, “We’re not the other guys—we’re not the Republicans,” and that’s it. And so people that don’t like the Republicans are like, “Well, I don’t know, because then I’m subsumed by the Socialist Marxist rhetoric, so I don’t know if I want to be a part of that either.” And that’s why I think a lot of people feel left out, and that’s why I think the recent polling data—if you pull it up on the Democrats—is like 23% or something in this country now—it was like 30s or something.

Did you see the crazy clip that did the racial demographic split on some key issues like things like DEI? Is this the one that says white college-age women are just—are like this weird—anyway, I think Tim Waltz, like a lot of others, because there’s no other beliefs to stand for, you end up being subsumed by the part of the Democratic Party that does have beliefs, and you don’t have anything else to say to state and to—to show what you’re for.

I—an idea too—really good—it’s a really good framing. I really like that.

Well, and here’s another framing—like is it so hard to agree on something? Like I think this is one of the brilliant things that Trump did was he’s like, “Here are some things we can agree on,” and he just subsumed those—like fighting for the working-class person, saying no tax on tips—like these were Democratic positions. I think this just proves that Meme where it’s like all standing here and—and the left just went too far left.

Let me give you a—everybody—yeah, let me give you a piece of advice to the Democratic Party leadership that might be listening. The advice I would give you is basically take away the opportunity for the distinction that the Republicans have right now, which is a more efficient government, a more, you know, Fair government where money isn’t wasted, where your taxpayer dollars aren’t being destroyed. The Democratic Party has an opportunity to stand up and say, “We don’t want to have things like regulatory capture or this pork or inside stuff going on.” They have an opportunity to make that the core set of beliefs that still aligns with reducing government and increasing efficiency in government—efficiency in government should not be a party issue. By allowing the Republicans to say, “We’re for efficient government,” it implies that the Democrats now, to be opposite of that, are saying, “We’re for inefficient government.” And if the Democrats want to win this, they can actually take that message and say, “You know what? We’re for more efficient government, and the way we’re going to do it is get rid of things like regulatory capture and inside deals and all the other sort of stuff.” It may—you know, that may not kind of go—but there’s an opportunity for the Democrats I think to really stand up and take the country in the direction that we all as Americans need it to go to, which is to have a sustainable federal government, and that’s going to require some degree of fiscal conservatism and action. But they could take a different point of view on how they do it, and they could have core beliefs around that. It’s—it’s really—and and by the way, Dean Phillips—we’re inviting back on the program—Ezra Klein, Sam Harris—we want to have some more people on the left come on here and maybe talk about this very issue. It’s really three things they could work on: number one, build 10 million homes in this country that are affordable; that’s a really key issue; rich people should pay their Fair share—share of taxes and reform the tax code; and then uh, third—health care for everyone. Those three would get this party back on track. We’re going to make a more efficient government; you’re going to be able to buy a home; you’re going to get health care; and rich people are going to start paying their taxes, which they’re not, and we’re going to stop with these crazy Trump tax breaks. That would be the perfect positioning, and it’s not personal—it’s just, “Hey, we’re a rich enough country that people should get health care. Why shouldn’t people have Healthcare in the modern world? Why can’t these rich people who are donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump just—just pay some more taxes and—and make sure poor people have basic healthare?”

Sayan, your thoughts, and then let’s get back to the docket.

Well, I disagree with all those points obviously, but sure, they could run on them. Uh, they have tried—they’ve—they’ve definitely said we’re going to have, you know, health care for all. You know, selling the American dream of home ownership I actually think is flawed in many ways—we’re putting people into debt and for things they can’t afford and they get screwed. And so I—I just actually think uh they—to find a unifying figure—out who their moderates are—and there’s also politically homeless people—we didn’t include them—you know, there’s these people who are just like, “Well, I can’t vote right, and I’m not left either anymore.” So we’ve got to bridge this divide somehow, and they’ve got to figure out the messaging, but I don’t think going back to what they used to do is going to work, because they promised universal healthcare and it hasn’t happened, and they had plenty of opportunity to do so.

All right, let’s get back to the Wiz deal and the uh—and the docket here. Let’s see if we—there’s anything we didn’t uh—well, we should talk about the um, you know, the price they paid, and we should talk about how to do that—the Strategic rationale and how others are going to respond.

All right, so looking at this—the DL got sweetened massively over the year between when the first offer was made for 23 billion and then went up to 32 billion. The revenue roughly doubled since the time of the first offer, and then there’s some really interesting things in the details. There is a huge breakup fee. We saw the breakup fee with Adobe and Figma—this one is tremendous—it’s 10% of the deal size—$3.2 billion in cash. They don’t get an investment if this deal doesn’t go through. Google has to give Wiz $3.2 billion in cash. Let that snc in—this company is massively high-growth—zero to 100 million in their—in 18 months uh when they started, and last year they passed 500 million in ARR. You know, that puts the deal at roughly 60 times they’re run rate, and that is a high price. However, they’re supposed to hit a billion in ARR this year, which would put it at 30 times forward-looking or 32 times, which isn’t outrageous because Google probably has Freeberg—some concept—or Alphabet rather—some concept of how they could increase the velocity of that—of that Revenue.

Yeah, or that it would be a defensive position—one of those two.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, just to put it in context, right? Google’s Cloud revenue is about 40 billion a year, and Microsoft and Amazon are both kind of plus or minus a little bit around 100 billion a year. And so Google has kind of been—as we know—lagging a little bit in the Cloud Market. The—the thing about kind of Enterprise sales is there’s a common strategy which is you kind of land with a beach head and then you kind of expand from there with additional products and services. This is has been the reason so many enterprise software companies over time—from Oracle to Salesforce to Microsoft—have been acquisitive and can make Acquisitions very synergistic. What that means is you can acquire a new product or a new service and then sell it into your install base or acquire the customers and then cross-sell your existing products or Services into their install base. And so you can increase the overall Revenue by putting the two together and combining sales teams and being able to offer a combined offering. And so the theory here—and I think this is something I don’t understand well enough—is that security has become such a kind of top requirement and—and product category that it now effectively enables a beach head type model to be successful, meaning you can cross-sell the security into all of your existing customers or there’s enough new customers that Google might be acquiring from The Wiz acquisition that they can now bring new GCP services to and—and cross-sell into. Now to figure out how this actually has to make sense—so Google’s ROIC is about 30%. That means that when they make an investment—a CAPEX investment or capital investment—they expect to see about 30% of incremental profit per year come back at some point from that capital investment. The capital investment they’re making here—again, this doesn’t hit their income statement—goes on their balance sheet—it gets marked mostly as Goodwill. So Google’s going to have a 32 ion move from cash down to Goodwill. So now they’ve got this asset on their balance sheet, and they’ve got to make an incremental $10 billion a year profit. So you kind of got to do the math—$10.

Billion a year of incremental profit against 40 billion of cloud revenue and against 1 billion of Whiz revenue; there's a lot to be kind of built here to make this make financial sense. So then it becomes, okay, well that's a really hard one to kind of think that they're going to get there very soon. But remember, Google's made some investments. I think it's a very tricky—you said it earlier, actually—it's a Trojan horse into the other clouds. There you know, the reason Whiz exists, and Jason mentioned this up front, is because of the value that it creates in a multicloud, multi-tenant environment across Azure, GCP, and AWS. And when the deal was done, one of the things that Whiz said is, "Hey, don't worry, we're not going to prefer GCP." And it was interesting because I thought, "Wait, people actually thought that they would just prefer GCP?" No, it's the exact opposite of why Google would want this because now what you have are your tentacles—like think of any other service that any cloud provider provides where most of your revenue is coming from the other clouds. Can you name one? Well, it didn't exist until now. And so I think the strategic rationale is quite clever, which is you start to gain customer traction and workloads in all of these other environments. And I suspect that TK is smart enough to try to pull these workloads back into GCP so that that's like—I think probably like—because they were—you're saying—jat—they would have the data; they would be able to see from Whiz like, "Hey, look, 90% of this this type of job is existing on Oracle or it's over here on AWS or all three." You would do that if you're running Google Cloud. Thomas Kurian is smart enough, and they're not gonna pay.

And David, by the way, the other thing that I would say is I think this is where bankers get this totally wrong as the observer watching a deal like this: it's never about the rate of change when you're trying to do a deal; it's always about the rate of change of the rate of change. And the most incredible thing that Whiz had going for itself was that they were basically doubling in months. So the time to double at that scale, you can do any kind of fantastical model with that kind of raw input because when that boundary condition is true and you're trying to, you know, de-escalate or scale down or—we down—a model, you're still going to get crazy gargantuan numbers that when you discount them back gets to this price. So I mean, congrats to these guys. I don't, you know, I would love to find out how does Whiz—because this is—I mean, I'm sure you guys have this question—to how do you build a sales infrastructure that can scale that productively that quickly? That's an incredible thing.

You know, yeah, I wonder if a lot of people are—I wonder if it's a lot of self-served to sign up and use it. It's got to be, yeah, some percentage of it. I mean, I'll tell you our experiences: we had a guy that had to come in and sell it into us, and we had a little bit of a bake-off. And I don't know, maybe we were unique, and there's a simpler, lower-scale product that's just more PGO consumption. Yeah, yeah, who knows?

Say, looking at this, I'm curious your take on big VC because the uh Series A, $100 million round—we don't have the valuation for it—the B was at 1.7 billion a year later, so maybe we assume it was a $500 million valuation for 20%, something like that. I would guess maybe a 600 million post. Sequoia, Insight, Index, Cyberstarts all did that Series A. When you look at the BC, D, and E, those same players all participated. This is another example of sometimes your best next investment as a VC firm is the highest-growth outlier in your existing portfolio. Your thoughts on what this means in terms of venture capital and maybe the logjam that we saw over the last four years, five years of no M&A, and because we—you and I—came up when like it was a golden era of M&A, and then, you know, the IPO market started to open up with Airbnb, Coinbase, and of course Uber. Now we're sitting here: what could—if this is the starter's pistol—what could it look like for the VC industry, which has just been dead? Yeah, I'm start with, you know, my thoughts on Whiz. I think this is really exciting for me because this is a great example of a contrarian investment. When this investment was initially made, there was not a lot of money going into security; there still isn't. It's an underinvested category, and with AI and the threat of the types of things that can—people can build—and Vibe coding and everything in between, you're going to need better security. And so I'm excited to see that maybe this might become an investable category. I think this is the largest exit ever in the security space. Am I—am I wrong? I mean, I think I—I think you're probably correct. Got to be. I don't think I've ever heard of anything this large M&A-wise. Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, how does this impact M&A? I mean, it's still pretty slow out there. You know, some action's better than no action, but like Niantic was just bought by Scopely. We're starting to see—you were an angel investor in that, right? That was the Pokémon Go folks. I remember you showing me Pokémon Go over a decade ago. Yeah, that's amazing. That's a Saudi company that bought it. Look like a Saudi conglomerate. That's a Saudi conglomerate. And so that exited for 3.7 billion. And, you know, I—I think we're going to start seeing some movement, especially with the new administration. When—how long were you in that uh deal? How many years were you in that deal? Oh my gosh, as soon as they spun out of Alphabet uh formed and spun them out as their own entity, I—there's a funny story for another time about how I got into the deal—uh, but I—I realized it was my only opportunity to get in as early as possible, and so I stalked the founder and sat at his door. Oh, tell us the story. Okay. All right. Well, permission—permission granted. You can't say it's a great story. A great story. So before Pokémon Go, they had this game called Ingress, and I started playing it with my friends, and I started noticing that my friends were doing some really unusual things. They were like charting helicopters and like traveling all over the world to cast these invisible triangles over the Earth. Basically, it's a game of green versus blue, and who can cast the biggest triangle? I was like, "Why are these people spending so much time?" And not only that, but why are they going around taking pictures of points of interest for Google? Like, "What is Google actually doing with this asset?" was my number one question. So I realized that Ingress was part of a bigger mapping plan. I mean, if you look at the team, you look at John Hanke, they all come from Keyhole, and they're obviously part of the maps team and help build Google Earth. So this wasn't just a game. Pokémon Go was a joke; it was basically an April Fool's joke where the founder of Pokémon said, "Wouldn't it be cool if like we put Pokémon on the map and we just tried to find them?" And John Hanke's like, "Uh, yeah, like let's turn this into an Ingress-like game." I went around telling everybody like, "If I had a chance to invest in anything, it would be Niantic," and because they were part of Google, I thought there was no chance. And then I got a call one day, and they said, "Hey, my friend of mine was like, 'Did you hear Niantic spun out?'" I was like, "Oh my gosh, I don't know anyone at Google. How do I reach John Hanke?" And I realized I'd invested in this company called Hint Water, and they were giving out game codes on the bottle cap, and uh, I was setting up her ticketing system one day and helping her out in her office, and I saw all these tickets coming in with the subject line that said "Ingress game code," and I was like, "What is this all about?" And I just connected the dots, and she introduced me to John Hanke, and then I went there with two engineers, 'cause I figured I got to show up with some value here—um, two badass engineers who are players. We sat on the front stairs and basically sat there and said, "Please take our money." He's like, "I don't need you; I've got Nintendo; I've got Google," and we're like, "No, you really need us," uh, and he gave one of those engineers a job offer pretty much that day. He gave me a key card to the office, and so I can come and go from Niantic as I please, which is pretty awesome. Amazing. Congratulations. Fun story, you know. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, this is what it takes to get in deals in Silicon Valley.

All right, the Fed held rates steady on Wednesday. Markets have been digesting this uh pretty flat, the second consecutive meeting, of course, where the Fed held rates steady. This is after the two consecutive cuts in September—50 basis points uh in September and then obviously 25 in December. And we had these high hopes that there would be, you know, four or five of these cuts this year, and there are apparently none right now. Trump posted on Truth Social that he urged the Fed to cut rates to create a smoother transition for his tariffs. The tariffs are taking place, I believe, on April 2nd. Is that date? That's going to change the history of the United States forever. And so uh there were some other interesting takeaways: they lowered expectations on rate cuts; they expect two quarter-point cuts for the rest of 2025. This would take us down to about 4%. Your thoughts, Chamath? Let's add some color from Scott Bessent. One of the biggest mistakes that I think Janet Yellen affected was this continued issuance of money on the short end of the curve to finance these deficits, which gives you—you inherit an incredibly difficult challenge. I think over the next nine months, I think there's like nine or 10 trillion that has to get refinanced. Do you want to talk about that? And yeah, look, I—I—I thought that it—that when rates were low, you're supposed to lengthen out rates exactly. And instead, the Treasury for the past few years has pulled rates in, and I think part of that was to keep rates lower that they—they changed the issuance schedule when rates move back up towards 5%. I—I um have maintained that policy, but I'm maintaining it because it's going back to David's question of when—when are you going—when are we going to see the results from this—the getting the government spending under control? And I don't think the markets recognize it yet. Okay, translate for Jamal. Yeah, so he's saying a couple things: he—he—he has inherited a problem that he hasn't quite yet changed. What is that problem? That problem is that when rates are low, you want to borrow for as long as possible, right? You don't want to borrow for the shortest amount of time. And now that rates are high, you're in this difficult—PO—position where you have to refinance all of it at a much higher rate. That's effectively the net of it what I took away. And you can see more and understand more when you watch his old interview with Freeberg and I, but I think that there's been a fundamental disconnect and break from the Fed and the rest of Treasury and the government. And I think that Scott was very clear: like, he views that as an independent organization, and it should continue that way. But it was very clear to me that they are singing from their own hymn book, and it just doesn't seem to me that Powell really understands the gravity of this situation, and I don't think that he's really willing to play ball. So he's probably on the margins again. This is my total interpretation of this: would rather wait longer than necessary because I think it's—it's almost like a political gambit, and I think that that's very dangerous. That's again just my own interpretation. I just do not think that Powell A has the data to make a very clear decision and B will act unless it's totally necessary. So I think this—there's an overcorrection here that's happening, which I think is dangerous, and I think it's going to slow down the pace of cuts, which I think will then create a lot of other pressure in the economy.

Well, Dave, uh, I'll jump—drop it to you. The Fed's mandate as an independent organization is full employment and and that 2% target, which we talked about before. Here was just a number that was picked by an economist in New Zealand of all places. It's—it's not like it's some specific dosage that is perfect, but it is their mandate. They're not supposed to be a political organization. So what are your thoughts on this situation and these high rates which we have to pay for our debt? We've never been in a situation where in 100 days a federal government is setting out to cut their spending by a trillion dollars, which has a significant effect—a recessionary effect—on the economy because there's less federal dollars flowing out, which goes as revenue into various businesses and income for a lot of people that are employed as contractors or directly by federal government agencies, coupled with—for the first time in 100 years—a significant change in the policy for tariffs for goods flowing into the United States and whether that will reduce spending by consumers or drive up the cost of products by consumers. And we talked extensively about both of these issues with Bessent and Lutnick in DC this week. And if I'm the Fed, I don't really have a great proxy historically for saying, "When this was done in the past, here's what the effect would be on GDP; here's what the effect would be on inflation; here's what the effect is going to be on uh employment." In fact, folks like Lutnick are making the case that the current measure of GDP is probably not even correct—the way we measure it, the way we count it. And so the traditional economist's point of view on making rate adjustments as a function of economic contraction or growth may be wrong. So I think there are quite a lot of these kind of confounding factors that the Fed is in a very wait-and-see mode. What I would look to is the bond market, which also seems to be in a kind of wait-and-see mode. So remember, right before the election, the bond market traded the tenure up so that rates went down to about 3.65%. About a month ago, the tenure was at 4.5%, and today it's at 4.22%. And so in the last month, we've seen rates on the 10-year decline by about a quarter point or about 30 basis points. And so the bond market is giving some kind of opening to the Fed, saying, "Look, we expect that this is going to be deflationary; this is going to be recessionary; we are expecting you to cut rates to the Fed." And so that's what the bond market is saying. And now I think we're going to start to wait for the reports that are going to start to come out that are going to show the impact. I don't think we're going to know immediately. So I think the first 100 days of this presidency and this administration's actions are going to be pretty telling on what's going to happen going forward in terms of the effect on employment, on inflation, and on GDP contraction or growth. And then I think the market will know how to handicap those numbers in the future based on actions by the administration. Right now, we're still in a—like I don't know how—when you put all these things together what it does, and it's a lot happening real fast. And so, wait and see.

Yeah, Sayan, I'm not sure if the Fed and, you know, the people in the administration can't communicate the strategy perfectly well, and the Fed can't interpret it. I don't know that we're going to solve it here, but any—any thoughts on this? Well, I don't know if they're not communicating it well. Bessent did—it's the effect that it will have ultimately on the economy and over what time scale that's what's uncertain right now. Sorry, specifically the tariffs. I mean, you know, if they're on, they're off; to what extent, you know, I don't—it doesn't feel like the current administration is on the same page. That's just, you know, based on everybody I've talked to. The Fed is not part of the administration, of course not; yes, they're independent. Quote today in the Wall Street Journal—Nick, you can look for it—is Powell's statement basically blamed rising inflation in this short-term period on exogenous factors. He said, "Our job was getting the job done, and now there's exogenous inflation," and I think what he's pointing to are these potential tariffs or something. So I think it's—it's less that they're not coordinated; I think that they are on very different pages, and I don't think the Fed wants to play ball. Sorry, S. And then I have the story at the end. Just quickly, you know, one of the things that really concerns me is how we've been so high on cheap supply for so long. Like if you look at Shein and Temu before this uh podcast, I wouldn't—looked up that their prices are up by 27% or something like that. And so when you used to be able to get a garment for $18, you're now paying $37, and Zara is like 75 for an equivalent. And I think people really liked getting packages in the mail and feeling like their dollar went further, and it's not going far. And so when you have a bunch of people who can't buy anything, and consumerism is a big part of our—unfortunately, in some ways—our culture, you know, what does that do to our country? You know, if—if you're looking around, there's urban blight everywhere in retail, and you know, we can't fill our malls; we don't have brick-and-mortar stores; they're shutting down. Forever 21 just shut down, you know, these are the types of things that, you know, people really care about is whether—especially in a time where, you know, you do have a recession—people want to buy a tube of lipstick or or a dress to feel better about their life, and right now they can't even do that. And so that's—that's what concerns me is thinking about the retail future and then, you know, the consumer landscape of how this all affects everybody. Yeah, and consumer confidence is not good right now. People are feeling like a little bit concerned about it, and this immigration plays into this. We're supposed to be deporting 20 million people; maybe it's only going to be a million; who knows about that ISS issue? Who's going to actually work in these factories? Are people getting laid off, or are they not getting laid off? Like, there's just a soup of issues here that makes the Fed's job extremely difficult. So in an extremely difficult, confusing storm, what is the best thing to do when you're driving the storm is just maybe try to keep the car going straight—not hit the brakes or not hit the gas—and that's what they're doing. They're taking a wait-and-see, and let's see if the administration can be a little bit crisper I think in their delivery of what their plan is because it does seem chaotic to me, and people here might disagree. Jamal, you said you had an anecdote.

Well, I—I kind of disagree with you in one way. I—I just think the Fed has totally lost its script, and I don't think they're—I don't think they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. What should they be doing? What they should be doing is actually observing the fact that there's some very complicated money flows. The front end of the curve makes no sense; the back end of the curve hasn't gone down long enough. They sat around, and they allowed Treasury to basically pump trillions of short-term paper, so they were complicit in what Yellen did, and it—it's inconceivable that they didn't understand that strategy. And so it's inconceivable. So what's the future? Yeah, so what do you do when you have a—is recalcitrant the right word? You know, like let's—let's just say you just have an organization that refuses to play ball? Again, there was a really interesting anecdote where Bessent talked—this is in the interview—about how he really wants to deregulate and loosen up bank lending standards, particularly—particularly at the community level. And I think that this is one very interesting thing that is a workaround to the Fed. Why? Because if you think about where money gets transacted on a 10- to 20- to 30-year duration, those are the big boys; they're making big capital plays, right, guys? But where is like the—where's—where do you play for the two-month to two-year kind of thing? It's smaller stuff; it's the stuff that's required to get small businesses off the ground; it's the community lending standards that actually allow communities to thrive. And so I think Scott realizes that if the Fed's not going to really play ball, how do you loosen credit? How do you make sure that that money is available, Jason, to make sure that you can fight off a recession? You have to give it to these smaller banks, and he was pretty clear about that. So I think that—that's—it's—it's almost as if the Fed is just going to get relegated to this like random organization, like, yeah, they'll control reverse repo, but they just won't have any credibility, and maybe that's not a bad thing actually in the end.

Freeberg, it's your chance to shine. We have not one but we have two amazing space stories in Science Corner. First up, SpaceX successfully rescued two astronauts, and when they landed, there were dolphins breaching around the capsule. Was absolutely magical to see. Congratulations to the SpaceX team on that. And then Firefly Aerospace completed its moon mission after achieving the first commercial soft moon landing. Take it whichever way you want, Freeberg. Which one of these do you want to start with? And and then uh maybe we'll—we'll open the discussion up to a little bit broader discussion about the moon itself. SpaceX was able to rescue the—the two astronauts that were stranded by the Boeing Starliner debacle nine months ago. We talked about it on the show. You can go back and—192—192—in August, episode 192. Yeah. And so, having spent far more on the Starliner program than on the Crew Dragon program, the Starliner program is gone now; it's basically done. And the Crew Dragon program has now done 16 crewed flights to space—11 for NASA, four private commercial flights—and continues to perform. So congratulations to the SpaceX team on making it to ISS and bringing the astronauts home—another successful mission for SpaceX. You know, there's a lot of hand-wringing: "Oh my God, you know, conflict of interest—Elon with SpaceX and Doge and being close to the uh administration." When we look at what SpaceX has accomplished—I'm not a shareholder, but I know you are, Chamath. I'm not sure the other folks on the panel—you are as well? Sayan? I am as well. Okay, congratulations everybody. But putting aside our personal investments, when you look at how much they've reduced the cost, is anybody even close to matching their cost to getting to space? Great, because this kind of like takes out the whole—the—the whole hand-wringing around the conflict of interest with SpaceX, both on Starlink and on this. Seems ridiculous because the price is so cheap; it—it makes no sense to even complain about. We should just be giving Elon a high-five and saying, "Thanks for charging us such a low rate." It's a great question, uh, S. You want to take it? Well, you know, obviously Boeing is the big loser here. You probably gotta—you know, it's interesting to me how bad they just fumbled this. And then there's the political element. I don't know if we want to get into it about how we weren't able to save these astronauts, and they were stuck up there. You know, we—we were seeing it landing in the water, but what you're not seeing is they couldn't walk when they got out, and they were only supposed to be there for what—like 10 days? Yeah, and eight days, and it ended up eight months or something. Yeah, eight months, which is horrendous because one of the things that I believe that America stands for is we don't leave people like that, and it's an American issue, not a political one. And so there's no reason why we shouldn't have engaged SpaceX sooner. It was offered, and they turned it into a completely political issue, and Boeing fumbled the ball really well. So, you know, I—I think hopefully this is a message that's loud and clear. And one of the things I'm so excited about is little kids watching this and seeing this and what it means for the future of our country because they're looking up to people like Elon, and they're going to be the next political class in the future, and that will matter. You know, this is the equivalent of the moon landing, and to see somebody in private enterprise do what Elon has done is just outstanding. So that's basically my comment on it. Any thoughts on the cost versus conflict of interest, I guess hand-wringing? Look, there's—there's a couple of startup alternatives—I'll put alternatives in quotes because they're not really GA—they're not generally available; they're not really launching; they're still in this early experimentation phase. One is Blue Origin, and the second is Relativity Space. The problem with both of those two approaches—well, the—the feature of both of those two approaches is theoretically that there's a different economic model there, but the reality is that SpaceX is the only company that has consistently been able to take these costs and just crunch them down to like more than one launch a day this year. I think like it's just an incredible scale and pace. So no, there is no economic alternative. They are the absolute cheapest in the market. I mean, I'll tell you a very quick story: I was also an investor in Relativity. I think I owned about 10% of the company, and I just got recapitalized out of that business because they needed a lot more money than folks were willing to give it, and then Eric Schmidt just stepped up and offered I think 3 billion to the business, and I kind of said, "No, I'm—I'm done; I'm out of here." So you know, recaps are painful. You put all that money in; I think I took like a $380 million loss; it was not—it was not a good week two weeks ago. But anyways, that's not the point. The point is SpaceX is the best; there is nobody even close. The next closest alternative is years and years away. Would we benefit from more capacity? Sure. But the reality is they are the only solution, and they're safe, and they're reliable. And what Sayan said is so true: when the hell does America just abandon people? Why—why do you—why do you do that, especially in space of all places? All places. I mean, that—that is really—think this be a Mark Watney story—like The Martian—like he would look—WNBA—you have WNBA players that get put in Russian jail; we're willing to swap them for arms dealers in the last administration. Pretty good. Yeah, yeah, fine. So we didn't abandon her, but then we let these two people flounder. I just think it's really inexcusable; that makes no sense. There definitely needs to be an investigation into what happened there. A lot of speculation; it doesn't look good. I'm gonna take Elon's word that he offered—I mean, I don't see any reason why he would—the astronauts even confirmed that he offered— Oh, they did. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I know that people were saying like unconfirmed. If the Biden administration confirmed, they were like, "That's their way of saying, 'Come get me.'" Yeah, please come get me. They're like, "I'm literally withering away in space; please come get me." They put their thumbs up. Okay, come pick us up. Freeberg, tell—take us to the next story, and then we get—we get a wrap here. This is basically what I think is going to end up being the story over the next couple of years is the space race between effectively SpaceX's platform and technology versus China, which has effectively ripped off SpaceX, as this is kind of being described here in this article. So you can kind of take a look at the Long March 9 rocket is what they call it—fully reusable first stage powered by 30 of their particular engines, which is comparable to SpaceX's first stage being powered by 33 Raptor engines, also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen, each with a thrust of about 280 tons compared—

To the Chinese, at 200 tons, this is kind of a very kind of equivalent design. Or here's a look at it. Yeah, there's the model of the reusable. Yeah, so this is the Long March N9. This is their super heavy lift rocket that they kind of first started talking about, call it a decade ago. The rocket has three stages, solid motors. They've recalibrated the design, and it effectively has now kind of become a clone of Starship. And so this whole system is going to be the big race.

And as we know, the way the Chinese operate when it comes to kind of industrialization is they can move fast; they can move big; they can move heavy; they can dedicate resources; they can dedicate an entirely vertically integrated supply chain to achieving an objective. So this will end up being kind of, I think, the big race over the next couple of years. Slave labor? They've got a lot of resources at their fingertips, you can kind of say that. But I, I don't know. You know, a lot of people use slave labor in China as kind of a handwavy way of describing their competitive advantage, but I, I think this is really important: China has actually much more of an advantage in automation.

And so if you look at many Chinese factories that everyone assumes are cheap because they have cheap slave labor, which is kind of the Western general kind of media perception of what goes on over there, there's actually a lot of automation and engineering that's gone into building these systems that allow them to have much higher throughput at much lower cost. Um, and I think that this is a really kind of key point: that the Chinese kind of industrial base and their manufacturing base is so superior to the United States in this moment in time that the US has to figure out a way to build its manufacturing base up to be competitive in an age of automation, not on a kind of labor-to-labor system, but on a system of production, a system of production basis. And so this is really where we are lagging deeply as a country.

And it, as part of, you saw JD Vance's speech this week on revitalizing kind of manufacturing in the United States, but it has to be advanced manufacturing. It's not just about opening a warehouse and putting—which means robots, not humans—in it, because it means both; it means both. But it's about smarter systems; it's about designs on how you do um manufacturing; it's about using new things like 3D printing, like automation coupled with great labor, coupled with great people working, but it's about designing entirely new ways of doing manufacturing. And we've stalled out over the last three decades in the United States as we globalized and we handed off all manufacturing to the East, and the United States basically just imported manufactured goods while they invested in all of the infrastructure to, to deliver advanced manufacturing at scale. Um, and so we've got a lot of catching up to do, otherwise China will get ahead of us in any product faster than we will ever be able to kind of stay ahead of the game on. And I think we're seeing that in the Space Race now, and it's definitely worth taking note that this is kind of one core example of this advantage that they've developed for themselves.

I'm concerned about the cultural stuff of this, like America, so ill-equipped, especially with this wave of the last eight years of DEI and and how it's infiltrated all of our institutions and how we raise our children in this country. Like we taught them that math is racist, while China is, you know, their kids are the leaders in AI. You know, Deep Seek should show us that, you know, we have underestimated China every step of the way, and and I think it's just a tragedy. You know, I'm working on a, a book that's coming out called *The War on Science*, which will actually expose—a friend of mine wrote it—it's a collection of essays, exposes just how entrenched this became in every institution, from medical science, etc. Like, how do we recover from that? Is how we can compete with China, because otherwise we can't. You know, I really honestly don't understand how we're going to do it if we don't.

And part of it is seeing these space launches. You know, obviously the next generation of children will be inspired by that, but we have a gap of about 8 to 10 years where we lost that advantage. I mean, it's San Francisco; we saw it up close and personal, right? They banned AP math. I mean, what lunatics could ever—I guess the lunatics in San Francisco could literally justify that it was, you know, some massive inequality that the smart kids got to take harder courses. Flash the thing. P from NBC, Nick, we know who was responsible for it. Are you blaming white women, college-educated white women? I'm just saying, look at the data. Okay, what, what, what is going on here? Like, for those of you not watching, it's uh, voter's opinion: white men, no degree; white men, college degree; white women, no degree; white women, college degree. And yeah, DEI plus 53, plus 31, by the way, for white women in college. Yeah, NBC News poll. Yeah, this is not from uh, yeah, like a right organization here.

Just to build on what you were saying, yeah, it's math that was told was racist in one of the best private schools here in, in Silicon Valley. They taught the girls—these are girls in the best all-girls private school in Silicon Valley—that reading was racist. Could you imagine? There was a spreadsheet that these kids had to memorize every day that had every other kid's pronoun, and if you didn't get it right, you'd get in trouble. Oh yeah. Well, not only that, but they are taught that you're either an oppressor or you're oppressed, and there's no other option. And so like, if you go to one of these private night schools, then you're automatically an oppressor. So think about that: if you're a kid and you're, you're born bad, inherently bad, evil from birth, what does that do? What does that do? What does that do to your self-worth? Yeah, your desire to actually do anything in society. We have to fix that. I actually think it's one of the number one issues in our country is to get kids excited about being Americans again. You know, we were talking about the Democrat Party. Uh, they don't love America. On the far left, they hate America, and they're very loud and vocal about it. And so I'm glad that their, you know, their base is shrinking, but it needs to shrink further, and we need to have more unifying messages. And I think SpaceX could be one of those unifying messages, yeah, where we bring people together and we encourage kids to think bigger about the future.

I'll tell you one anecdote: I have been hanging out at UT a little bit, the University of Texas, and go Longhorns. And uh, I've had three or four people of means—I'll say, you know, people who could afford to go to any college—ask me, "Do you have any hookups at UT? I want to take a tour; I want to check this out." And I'm like, "Oh," and they're like, "Yeah, I just don't want to send my kids to," you know, these, as Chamath has called them previously on the program, "WOKE madrasas." I want to send them to the South to be educated in Texas or somewhere, you know, where they're not going to learn to be part of Hamas or, you know, Al-Qaeda. So there you have it, folks. Send your kids, uh, yeah, yeah, send them to a place that values free speech. Look there first, look at the FIRE rating, and then that should tell you everything you need to know. It's, it's a, it's a huge trend; it's a huge trend that people want to go to these schools.

Getting back on track, I'll just give a quick shout-out as well to Firefly. The Blue Ghost lunar lander landed on March 2nd, lasted on the lunar surface for 14 days, launched on January 15th. They are launching two additional missions: Mission 2 and Mission 3. Mission 2 is going to launch in 2026, back to the moon. 28 for Mission 3, all of which are doing kind of geologic surveying of the lunar surface. Obviously, the long-term goal here is, can we establish a base? Mission 5 is going directly to your dingleberries. They're going to go to get those dingleberries, those vegan dingleberries. You shouldn't have heard that. We just say, fine, I don't care; it's our tradition to talk about an—I have a 13-year-old boy's sense of humor. I, it's fine. You do you. Always have. Actually, would, would you guys be willing to go to the moon for a week? Would that be something you guys would be interested in going? I talk to my guy. You got a guy? I'm going; I'm got a guy. I talk to my guy; he said I could go out with him. So do you guys have an interest in that? Like, is that something that you'd be motivated to? 100%, 100%. Going to do it when I'm 70. Sure. It's a great question. About a week? A week seems like a very—wow. I would go for a month. What about a day? Like, just a lunar day? Like you go there, like a lunar picnic? Yes, yes, a little picnic, and then you come back. Yeah. What would you bring? What are you gonna bring? You bring a little Chardonnay? What are you thinking would be, would pair well with the Dark Side of the Moon there? JTH, what are you gonna bring? I'd bring like a—what, what should Sean make us when we go? 2020 Leon. I'd bring like a white Burgundy. Got it. Nick, can you make an image of Chamath drinking wine? Can you figure out a way to do that, please? Thank you. And what, what should we serve on the moon? What would be, would you think we should go with fish? A little syrup and tur—maybe surf and turf would be good. You know, people don't realize that white Burgundy tastes great with meat. I know that people think you should always drink a very heavy red, but it's not true. I just want everybody to know. The more you know, the more you know.

Thanks for tuning in to the All In podcast. She's Cyan Banister, I'm Jake Har, he's Chamath, and of course, your soul of science, David Fredberg, and of course, thanks to CEO John and producer Nick, everybody who put so much effort into it, and thanks to our partners for uh, yeah, supporting the show. We'll see you all next time. Love you. Cast [Applause] Bye-bye. Let your winners ride, Rainman David, and instead we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, queen of [Music] K besties. Are that's my dog taking [Music] driveway. Oh man, my—it. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy, cuz they're all usess. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. What [Music] we need to get merch [Music] our—I'm going all in.