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Unknown A
All right, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast. Our incredible comedian celebrity guest got sick at the last minute today and didn't make it. We won't say who it is, but my lord, when he comes on this show, you are going to laugh your ass off because he's awesome.
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Unknown B
I like the comedians. I think that their takes on society and culture are pretty interesting.
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Unknown A
Do you think it will work in our form? What's your prediction here? We've never done it.
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Unknown B
I think the quality of the show is best when it's less just people doing takes and it's more the back and forth banter.
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Unknown A
So yeah, that's what I'm always trying to do is get the ball to go around the horn and get some real dialogue going here. But you know, sometimes people feel passionate with me. Again this week on the All In Podcast, David Freeberg and Chamath Polyhopto. My name is Jason Calacanis. You can follow me on x.com Jason.
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Unknown C
He'S why can't I make fun of you in the replies on Twitter anymore?
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Unknown A
Oh, because no, what I did was my replies were so many MAGA lunatics and crypto scams that I had no choice but to like had to do something because I would have like 500 replies to every single one and I put it on subscription and I said, if you want to reply, it's $3 a month now. 1500 lunatics signed up.
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Unknown B
I did, so I could troll it.
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Unknown A
Thank you for the $3 every month. It's all going to chat Rain Man David Sack. And it said we open source it.
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Unknown B
To the fans and they just got reasonable.
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Unknown A
You want to enter the show or get some warm up? Enter by Jeopardy or do you want to go right into Epson?
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Unknown B
The letter from Pan to Cash is crazy. Dear Director Patone, before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response to this request, I received approximately 200 pages of documents. Late yesterday, I learned from a source that the FBI field office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files. When you and I spoke yesterday, you were just as surprised as I was to learn this new information. By 8am tomorrow, February 28, the FBI will deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office. Regardless of how such information was obtained, there will be no withholding or limitations to my or your access. My question to you guys is, do you think that this is much Ado about nothing and then that the FBI needs to have the discretion to be able to say no.
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Unknown B
Or do you think this is one of these things where you're not allowed to do what they're doing?
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Unknown A
It's above my payment. I don't know the law of like FBI investigations. And then what if they investigated a bunch of people, they were not guilty and then they were in the files. Maybe they need to look at them before they do a document up. Maybe there's informants in there. I'm trying to think of what happened with like the whistleblower papers from.
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Unknown B
This is something different. This doesn't say let's negotiate what we should release together so that we protect people. This says, we're just going to lie.
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Unknown C
To you about these. We're going to lie to you and.
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Unknown B
Tell you that, you know, here's, here's.
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Unknown A
Her side to the story. Maybe they have another side. Maybe they have a different side. We have to hear from them.
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Unknown C
Right. Is this just like people are intrigued by the gossip angle of it, or is it because they want to prosecute people for hurting people or is it because they want to cancel people and this is a nice opportunity to cancel. Like, what's, what's the.
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Unknown A
I think this interesting question because this thing's been going on for 20 years. I think this actually has more to do with conspiracy. There is. And now the deep state. Like, is there a deep state cover up is the question.
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Unknown B
I think the question is if the chain of command requests something, are you allowed to withhold it because you decide in your own judgment that the person above you doesn't deserve to know it? I think that's an important question.
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Unknown A
Yeah. The thing about the FBI is the FBI can withhold information from the president, from other folks. If there's an ongoing investigation. Sources are like secret. They would be in jeopardy. And national security concerns, I'm reading here.
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Unknown B
So I'm very excited to see these next two days unfold.
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Unknown A
Listen, it's a breaking news story. We'll have more to say about it next week when we get the facts. All right. It has been an amazing 24 hours for my guy, David Friedberg. I am so proud of you. If people don't know David Freeberg was on. I'm sorry, Celebrity Jeopardy. This week and he had a great Jeopardy.
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Unknown C
You can't say that. I can't say it. You're right. Bleep it out.
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Unknown B
Bleep it out.
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Unknown A
So you were on celebrity, quote, unquote. Jeopardy.
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Unknown C
Shows you how much of a Bar there is.
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Unknown A
The bar was pretty. Well, they're now inviting podcasters, apparently. But Jeopardy's watched by like 10 million people every episode, right?
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Unknown C
Yeah, they have like a huge audience on regular Jeopardy. I think it's like 9 million a night or something.
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Unknown B
7.
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Unknown C
7. 9 million night. Yeah. I think celebrity Jeopardy. Because it's like later. It's got a smaller audience, but it's still a couple million people watch this thing, which is crazy.
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Unknown A
So you were on and for the last four or five months, we've all had to like, bite our tongues. And you've been in a full scale. I don't say panic, but you've been hand wringing about your performance. And spoiler alert, Freebird won. Not only did he win, he crushed it. I was like watching this. This was like better than watching the World Series of Poker or a Knicks warriors game for me. Here is my favorite moment. The all in call as a tribute. He gets the daily double and I'm.
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Unknown C
Going to go all in 10.
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Unknown A
Oh, yeah. Okay. How dare you. 12,800 per day. But you have to be correct. In African geography. Known for its snows, this Tanzanian peak is both Africa's highest and the world's tallest freestanding mountain.
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Unknown C
What is Mount Kilimanjaro?
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Unknown A
That is correct. What are you doing at that moment? He goes all in. And these people, they think that they're going to get Freeberg by giving him a question about Africa, not knowing that he's African American.
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Unknown B
Honestly, like a six year old. A six year old should know that category.
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Unknown C
No, because that category, African geography. I was at dinner the night before with our friend Xander and his wife, and we started talking about their son was taking a quiz on African geography. And they started giving me all the questions. And we were actually quizzing at dinner the night before on African geography. It was like a Slumdog Millionaire moment. And I was like, in my head, I'm like, there's no way that's real. That actually we literally were just talking about African geography theater the night before. And I'm like, the judges had to have been listening or something. But.
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Unknown A
But you were nervous. You talked about being nervous and your techniques. Our friend Jason Kuhn, the. We actually are lucky enough to play with one serious professional poker player in our game. Jason Kuhn comes to the game and he cuts you a bit. What was his advice to you?
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Unknown C
Well, I was a little wound up because I watched Jeopardy. My whole, like, since I was a kid.
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Unknown B
Right.
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Unknown C
I mean, I don't watch it regularly, but a Couple months ago, I was kind of watching the show. I kind of reached out and was like, hey, you know, do you guys know anyone on the show? And stuff like that. Like, hooked up. So. And I'm like, wait, I'm really going on. That's awesome. Okay, I know I can go on Celebrity Jeopardy. I watched the Celebrity Jeopardy episodes from last season and I figured I could get like 60% of the answers. But you get there and you don't realize how hard it is to buzz in in time. Because if you buzz before the light turns on.
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Unknown A
I heard this over and over. How does it work? Because you bought, I understand, an actual buzzer to practice with. Am I correct? You did this?
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Unknown C
Well, yeah, I bought this cheap buzzer on Amazon pressing, but it didn't do anything. So I'm watching the TV at home watching old celebrity debris episodes from last year. I'm like, oh, buzz in, buzz in. But the problem is when you're there, you're not allowed to buzz till the light comes on. And if you buzz too early, you get locked out for a quarter second. And that quarter second makes a huge difference. So I was actually behind the people. I was against most of the show. I felt when I was buzzing in, like, I know the answer. And I kept missing. I kept missing. So I still did. Okay, obviously.
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Unknown A
But wait a second. Let me ask you a question about that buzzing thing. A light goes on. When does the light go on? When the question is finished, when the answer casts.
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Unknown C
So they show. They show the question on a huge screen. So the whole screen gives you the question right away.
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Unknown A
So you can read ahead.
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Unknown C
So you can read ahead. Just read the whole thing. Boom. Then you have to wait for Ken Jennings to finish. As soon as he finishes enunciating the last syllable of the last word, the light turns on. But here's why I stand out. There's a delay of about 150 to 200 milliseconds. Difference between your eyes and your ears. You actually hear stuff before you see stuff.
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Unknown A
And.
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Unknown C
Which is really interesting, like for your brain to register it and people are different delays. But for me, I'm like waiting for the light and then I buzz in and it's too late because the people next to me. Anyway, I was a little. I was a little wound up going into this. I called Jason Kuhn because I realized there's no upside. By the time I show up, I'm like. I'm like an absolute idiot for saying some stupid stuff. Getting answers wrong, which, of course, everyone texted me last Night being like, how'd you miss Hoosiers? How'd you miss this? All right, here we go.
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Unknown A
Ring off. The big miss. 16,000. Crushing. Crushing their soul.
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Unknown B
Crushing their souls.
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Unknown C
Not my best category. I'll do 4,000.
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Unknown A
You look great, too.
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Unknown C
Climactic moments in sports movies.
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Unknown A
Jimmy Chitwood buries the jumper from the top of the key to win. The Hickory Huskers, the Indiana State Championship.
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Unknown C
What is hoops? Sorry, what am I doing?
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Unknown A
Come on, dude. Hoosers.
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Unknown C
I know Hoosers.
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Unknown A
I mean, come on. Gene Hackney died today, and no one.
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Unknown C
Said to me, like, oh, I can't.
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Unknown A
Believe you got that answer.
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Unknown C
Great job. Everyone just sends the text, how did you not get Hoosiers? How did you not get cream? It's always like, oh, I knew the answer. And I realized as I'm walking in jeopardy, I'm like, you know what? There's no upside. Because what will happen is everyone just call you an idiot for the things you missed. Which is. Yeah.
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Unknown A
I mean, and let's face it, you're the sultan of science. You went to school, you worked at Google, so there's an expectation you should run these people over. You did run them over.
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Unknown B
You know who you're facing in the semi final?
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Unknown C
We don't know until all the quarterfinals are over, and that'll be in the next couple weeks here.
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Unknown A
When you see a category come up, like the Hoosiers one, Right? I think that one was about sports movies, right?
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Unknown C
Yeah, that was sports movies. Like, big.
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Unknown A
So don't you. When you see sports movies in your head, catalog probable answers like Rudy and, you know, Field of Dreams and just. Yeah, so you had all those ratings there.
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Unknown C
Like, look, I'm not a guy who gets very nervous. I don't get, like, stage fright or, like, wound up. But for Jeopardy, it's so weird if you're up there and you can't focus or concentrate like you normally can't. My brain had these, like, weird brain parts where I'm like, I know the answer. Why is it coming out? Or I buzz in and I said, like, Beethoven instead of Demi Scene. I'm like, why did that come out.
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Unknown A
For Claire de Lune? You don't have to.
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Unknown C
I mean, dude, don't get me started. So there's weird stuff that happens up there that's really hard to explain. And then you're angry about the buzzing. You can't buzz in time. And you're on the set of Jeopardy. And it's like, oh, my God, I'm actually on the set of Jeopardy. It's also real. And you're like watching scores. It's very overwhelming.
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Unknown B
You have an audience. Yes, there is an audience.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
How many people? Like 100 people there that 100 people.
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Unknown C
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Yeah. That's nice.
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Unknown C
Yeah. Before you go on the show, they have you do a practice round in front of the audience. Just so you get. Everyone gets used to it. And I deliberately answered wrong. And I was like acting like an idiot. Acting like I couldn't buzz. Acting like I didn't know the end. I tried to be like, I don't really know what I'm doing here.
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Unknown A
Ooh, short elbows.
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Unknown C
Yeah. And then I came out swinging and I felt like I had to kind of get aggressive out the gate.
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Unknown A
And you've done that before in a bar fight once I was like, guys, guys, we don't need to get in a fight. Bang. It's anyway, we're so proud of you. You won. You trounced them. I have to say the one from.
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Unknown C
The Humane Society of the United States, all the money with the charity Humane Society of the us how much did.
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Unknown B
You make for them?
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Unknown A
In the end, if you win the.
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Unknown C
Whole tournament, it's a million dollars. And then I talk food. As the winner, your charity gets more and the losers, their charity gets less. But it's a six amounts like 30,000 or 50,000 or something like that.
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Unknown A
I think they should put the three of us on together normal episode. That would be crazy. Oh my God.
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Unknown C
I would. The three of us were on wreck your ass.
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Unknown A
No, you would not. I will play you heads up, Jeopardy. Anytime from us.
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Unknown B
Let's play poker. Yeah, I say we play poker. We'll play for all of the all in profits. I'll give you two retards 2x the chip stack and let's see what happens.
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Unknown C
Oh my God. Yeah.
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Unknown A
That sounds so compelling.
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Unknown C
Would you do it? Actually, Jaco, would you do that?
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Unknown B
Would you do it?
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Unknown C
All the profits.
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Unknown B
All the profits.
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Unknown A
I do it for all the profits. But I would carve out 25% of the profits for a four way tournament. I was televised live. If we could get 2 million in sponsors, then we'd be up no matter what.
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Unknown C
Grifting.
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Unknown A
I'm thinking like a business.
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Unknown B
The whole business, man. I want to do this so that I inflict pain on one of you or both.
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Unknown C
What gives Chamav? Happiness is hurting others. That's exactly that. That's his love language. The people he loves.
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Unknown A
I don't like me just hurting the people who love him.
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Unknown B
I like putting you two to the test and I like to see you two break.
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Unknown C
Okay, this one makes him feel good anyways.
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Unknown B
Did you guys see Brad's tweet?
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Unknown A
No. What did you say?
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Unknown B
Friend of the pod. Brad Adcock, who's the CEO and founder of Figure. He just announced today that he's moved his timelines up by two years. He's going to be beta testing robots in the home by. By the middle to end of this year.
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Unknown A
That's crazy, crazy, crazy.
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Unknown C
I mean an investor in his company.
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Unknown B
I don't talk about my investments. But in this case. But in this case, no, I'm not an investor.
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Unknown A
So we're not talking about book here. I do think optimus and this a figure on the other. This is about a dozen of these doing incredibly if they can make these for watching my 20 grand. When you think it becomes something a middle class household, you know, dual income household would buy one of these five years from now, ten years from now. How could they be?
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Unknown B
Well, I think the issue is bounded by two things. One is that I'm not sure that the generalized AI is good enough yet. And what he did was he had a deal with OpenAI which he pretty publicly canceled a few weeks ago and he announced his own model. And I don't know the details of it to know whether he rolled it himself or this is just like taking some open source based model and iterating from it. But I think the model is not perfect yet to be general purpose. That's one. And then the second is a practical issue with the robots which is that the actuators themselves are good, but they're not great. And you can see it in the demo where it's an incredible demo because it shows the value and the power of the model, where there's sort of this master slave orientation that has to happen where one model is actually doing most of the computation and the second model and the second robot isn't feeding off of it.
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Unknown B
And the demo that they do, Nick, you can probably find the video is of them sorting a bag of groceries for the first time totally unsupervised. Which it's an incredibly cool demo.
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Unknown A
It's a cool demo.
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Unknown B
The thing that you notice though is that the actuators are good, they're not great. And so the physical dexterity is still relatively limited. And I think that that doesn't allow these robots to be super functional in the next couple of years. But when they get that figured out, then I think it could be really useful. Because if you have a robot like this that could sort the groceries, make food, do the laundry, mow the lawn, so to speak. It just requires a level of dexterity that's not yet totally possible. But see, in this example, what you're seeing are the two robots basically figuring out how to communicate semantically between the robots. And that's incredibly powerful. And it's yet another sort of breakthrough that we need. So I don't know, we're probably like a couple years away. But see, look at the dexterity there. He's taking the Pepperidge Farms and feels like he's crushing the Pepper Charms or she, or whatever you call this robot.
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Unknown A
Please don't misgender the robot.
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Unknown B
But it's really incredible. They're figuring the coolest part of this demo, by the way, which I loved, was they take an apple and then the second robot figures out that it should go in the fruit bowl, pushes the fruit bowl to the first robot, and then the first robot.
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Unknown A
Oh, that's cool. There it is.
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Unknown B
But that level of semantic awareness and understanding between two models working dependently is very cool.
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Unknown C
Look at that.
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Unknown B
That's very cool.
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Unknown A
They're collaborating with each other. So since I can tell you here on the ranch, I would love to have an all purpose robot going out there and using the weed whacker and trimming the bushes and the hedges and getting me wood and collecting chicken eggs. Like there's a million things they could do on a ranch. It'd be immediately applicable for ranch work. And if they're 24 hours a day, it doesn't matter if they go slow. But I think this is the category people are sleeping on. And I don't know who on the, on our prediction show said this will be the year of robots, but it's been this is the year of robots for 30 years in the industry and does feel like this is it. Friedberg, you stick with your prediction, I assume? Yeah, I am, Yeah.
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Unknown C
I think it's also. It's not just this kind of dexterous automation, but I do think drones, autonomous vehicles, I put them all in the same category. Whether there's some. It's some combination of mechanical response to a machine vision system that I think has become like accelerated this year.
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Unknown B
You need a lot of rare earths to make robots.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Where can we ever get those from? Hmm. Does anybody owe us a little money? Anybody behind on their payments? Maybe the vid could be a little, you know, taste. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but there was a company in the 90s that was all the rage Called Segway. They were going to absolutely change cities and everything. And they never did. But it was basically like a school you could walk on and had a balancing kind of system to it. But they made robots and here they're making these lawn mowers now. And these lawn mowers are really like cheap for a thousand bucks. And they work here in Austin. I have seen two or three of these on people's lawns. This could be like, you know, what was the one that you did in your house? Roomba. So your point? Freebird Dolby purpose driven ones to deliver you a burrito, do your lawn, et cetera.
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Unknown A
And Roomba's like three or four hundred bucks I think. And this thing's a thousand bucks, man.
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Unknown C
Yeah, I think it's a lot harder to create one of these general purpose systems and automation then create like vertically or kind of utility specific automation system. So a device that just does one thing, delivers something to you in the air or drives your food to you, or loads and unloads your dishes. You know, I'm not sure if that's the whole, the whole idea of a humanoid is it's ambitious. Yeah, it is a general purpose device and it makes a technically very hard roadmap.
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Unknown A
I gotta imagine some of the bulldozers out there are also now becoming remote controlled. So you can get like a bulldozer that you have to put in a dangerous situation and they're remote control and they're going to have AI. So I got pitched on a startup one time that was going to go up into Tahoe hills and allow humans with remote controls to drive them off little bulldozers and make firepower. So imagine some fire breaks out, you send in or helicopter in the bulldozer, no human in it. It's got a 5G connection or a Starlink connection and zip, zip, zip. You're doing fire roads in the middle of this smoke dense area. It's going to be really interesting when these things get dialed in and they're getting done every day.
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Unknown B
I'm going to ask Brett to be a bait alpha tester of one of these robots in my house and then we'll go and do it. We'll do a segment.
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Unknown A
That'd be great. Excuse me, robot, can I get some more Morales? Too sweet Morales.
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Unknown B
Let's talk about Stripe. I thought the report was really good.
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Unknown A
We had the Collison brothers on last week, they crushed it. Great job to them. And then here's a quick summary. So in terms of processing volume, again, 1.34 trillion. Stripe at 1.4 trillion. I mean, that's incredible that they're both in almost the same exact space. One's growing, 33% tripe, 38% valuation. Adyen 56, they're public. Stripe Private, 91.5 billion. I guess that's the private market. Premium employee account. Very interesting here since we've been talking about Jamie Dimon's ramp last week. Adyen 4.3 thousand, stripe over 8,000, and both are profitable. Adyen's got a billion in EBITDA, which is extraordinary. But Stripe has a higher margin, which will take on Patela. Two cities here.
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Unknown B
I thought there was three takeaways. The first takeaway for me was the value of Stripe's ecosystem is probably underappreciated. I think Patrick mentioned it, but he just kind of said it as a passing fact and none of us picked up on it. But in the report, they talk about all the additional products that they're able to build around core payments, and one of them is the billing products. Half a billion dollars a year of arriving. That's just incredible. And I think if they figure out network effects inside of the Stripe ecosystem, that's interesting. So that's first, which is the hub and spoke of payments being at the center of and all of these other incremental services. I think that that's really interesting and underappreciated for Stripe. That probably speaks to why there's such a difference in valuation, because Adyen has less of that ecosystem, or at least it's not nearly as well described, maybe as Stripes is.
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Unknown B
That's number one. Second is, I go back to what I've been saying for a while now, but the, the rise of these stable coins is really interesting. The stablecoin infrastructure globally, the push for a bunch of these national governments to embrace them inside of India, inside of Brazil, slowly it's happening inside the United States. So I think that that was really interesting. And then the third takeaway, Nick, I sent you this tweet was just the nature of the AI ecosystem relative to the rest of SaaS. And what this is was from Stripe's report, which showed the time to get to 5 million of annualized revenue and the average SaaS company took 37 months. And by 2024, the top 100 AI companies got there in 24 months.
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Unknown A
I mean, that's efficiency in the market, right? I mean, that's why we're all looking at AI saying we could see a lot of our economic issues come from growth. And the growth is very Clear. You can do more with less and you can generate more revenue with AI. So it's pretty clear the trend.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I think it's really clear. I mean, I can give you a little factoid. From 80, 90, you know, we got to 5 million of revenue in three months. Really crazy.
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Unknown A
Couple of wells in there. Yeah. Couple of big ones.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And so it's just a very different selling motion than. Than I've historically seen, where the ROI is just so obvious in terms of the efficiency that it creates and the cost savings you can generate relative to traditional enterprise software. It's a more straightforward sale. The ROI is clearer, the revenue is bigger, it happens faster.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
So there's also.
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Unknown A
I don't know if you're seeing, but there's a sense of urgency in the market right now. People feel like they have to adopt this new technology fast because there's competition, because the gains are so clear. Because in a slowing economy, this is maybe a way to accelerate revenue.
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Unknown B
I'll be honest with you. At least with the. Our 80, 90 customers, I haven't seen that yet. You know, we're in, I don't know, eight or nine segments of the economy. Big segments of the economy. It's more still about the frustration that they have with what I would call the software industrial complex. There's a big. And you can see it with what's happening to Salesforce and other big companies is that these renewal cycles are getting harder and harder to justify. And so people are willing to take some bets and see if there are different ways in dealing with this problem. And I think that's the real opportunity is if you can find a repeatable pattern to help these companies replace that big software spend that they have.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
That scales really quickly. And the only way to do that really, is using AI in two ways. AI inside the machinery of what you're using yourself to make the things. Right. So those are things like cursor and whatnot to just fully accelerate and then AI within some very specific products that the customers actually need that also create efficiency. So there's two different places. But the problem with using it in both of these two different places is in the first one, you can manage the errors.
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Unknown C
It's very.
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Unknown B
It's very straightforward. At the end of the day, code either compiles or doesn't. So even if you're using something like cursor, which is an incredible product, there are no errors at the end of it because the thing actually works. Or does it? The problem is actually when you use these models in actual work. And if you're in a regulated environment particularly, it gets very complicated. Because if you generate a hallucination in a healthcare business and it causes a patient record to be incorrect, there are huge consequences there and that we haven't solved yet. That exists in regulated finance. It exists when you're dealing with real estate and construction. It exists when you're dealing with power. It exists in aerospace. Right. Imagine if an LLM helps you design a plane better, but if there's a tolerance error, and that's not well understood, that could have, you know, horrific consequences downstream.
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Unknown B
So we're working with all these people to try to figure it out. It's a very difficult technical challenge. But I just thought the Stripe data was really interesting because it validates what we're seeing, which is the growth in this industry is. It's not like anything I've ever seen before.
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Unknown A
Back to the stable coins, here's a look at tether. They're at $143 billion in tethers out there. Who knows what's reality there? They've got a little bit of shaky history. And then USDC Jeremy Allairs is at 56 billion already. And that's only been in existence since, like, really in earnest, like 2021. I do think Stripe's main business could be for sitting here in five years, could be sitting on $300 billion and getting whatever it is, 3, 4 or 5% on some coupon.
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Unknown C
Right.
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Unknown A
They could be making 10, $20 billion in pure profit if they have a stablecoin out there that gets widely adopted.
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Unknown B
Yeah. And I think the best way for Stripe to actually do this is just to build it and to actually facilitate payments between existing Stripe customers. Because again, it's sort of what I said last week. These are all ultimately ledger entries. And I think that the more that you can commoditize these things to be a simple ledger entry inside of two systems of record of two companies, that's a much better product feature. I think Stripe has the scale to do that now. And to your point, they could have an enormous stable coin business. At the same time, they're probably better off just embracing what's already been built. It may be disruptive to try to launch yet another one. I don't know.
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Unknown A
They bought that other company, so I got to think they'll launch their own.
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Unknown B
But Bridge is the facilitation.
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Unknown A
It's the rails. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, this is where brand comes in. If you have a trusted brand amongst developers and there's three choices. Are they going to take tether? Which people go? Eh, maybe it's a little sorted. It's offshore. I got some challenges there. Am I going to use usdc? Okay. I haven't heard of it, but okay. Yeah, they sound interesting. Oh, Stripe. I'm going to go right to Stripe. It's kind of like the IBM, you know, or Microsoft of payments. Nobody gets fired for picking Stripe. I would say so.
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Unknown B
Not anymore.
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Unknown A
Not anymore. Let's go to the market update here. A lot of people are trying to figure out are we going to have a market collapse, a boom? Let's just look at some of the numbers and have a first principle discussion here. S and p up almost 2% so far this year. Nasdaq 100 flat, Dow up 3%. So pretty good start to the year in those index numbers. But if you look at the Max 7, some of them have had some serious compression. Tesla down 27%. I do think that they had a big Trump Elon Spike. Google down 10%. Amazon 9, Microsoft about 8% meta. Apple, Nvidia or up to varying degrees. And then coming into our taping this week, Bitcoin down 15% over last month. That too got the Trump bump. And then adding to all this confusion, unemployment is still at historic lows. We're at close to 4%.
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Unknown A
And if you look at the deportations that were promised, they've been modest to start. Obviously they're just getting started. They need some money to deport folks, but they've only been deporting 500 people to a thousand a day. And we haven't heard many numbers about the last couple of weeks as Doge has been sort of the center of attention. So they'd have to get to two or three thousand people a day to have low millions, let's say Jamaica, 2 or 3 million people deported for it to have any impact on unemployment. Finally act three and then we'll get everybody's feedback on this. CPI up 3% year over year we had dipped down to that nice 2% handle and now it's back a little bit. If you remember, in September it bottomed out around 2.4% just in time for the election. Interesting how that happened. That same month The Fed cut 50bps.
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Unknown A
Then it cut another 25 in December. And since inflation's been growing modestly but steadily, not insignificantly. So put it all together, Chamath, and what do you think? And then Freebar, what do you.
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Unknown B
I tend to be sort of in the Stevie Cohen camp. It's not like the bottom is going to fall out, but there's like a lot of room for concern, I guess is the best way to put it. Nick, I don't know if you can find that clip that at fii, but he had a very precise summary of how he saw the world. And I frankly disagreed with everything that he was saying. So he probably can say better than I when you take a brew of tariffs. On top of that we are slowing immigration.
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Unknown C
And in addition, now you have Doge.
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Unknown B
I mean, that's austerity. We think growth is going to slow to 1.5% from 2 and a half percent in the second half. And so I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while and it may only last a year or so, but it's definitely, I think the best gains have been had and wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction. I think a couple of very specific thoughts. The first is that you're starting to see this compression of the Mag 7 towards everybody else. So this is the forward PE of these guys. And so what you're starting to see is everybody else starting to capture back some of the ground people are processing what the real upside of the Mag 7 IS. Now, if you go to the other chart, what this starts to show you though is that Mag 7 is really priced to perfection.
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Unknown B
And so you have to believe that the world kind of stays the way that it is, otherwise you're going to have some amount of mean reversion. So I think the stock market on the margin is a little expensive and not particularly that attractive. Second, the bond market has basically said, okay, we are going to give you credit, that Doge is going to work and that tariffs are going to work. So we've had some pretty meaningful compression in the 10 year, which I think is really interesting. I think it's very good for best intent for Trump. And I think I've mentioned this before, but we got to go in and, you know, refinance $10 trillion in the next six months. So you could see this thing maybe even get under 4% if we get a good string of data. The real problem I think though is that if you look back and say, what does this look like?
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Unknown B
The example that I would give you guys is in 2010, in the United Kingdom, the deficit as a percentage of GDP was 10%. And the UK government embarked on a multi year austerity plan and they said, we're going to get the deficit as a percentage of GDP back in line. And ultimately by 2016, it got to 3%, which is where we are trying to get to. And right now we're a little bit under 7%. We're trying to get it to 3%. So it's interesting to ask what happened? And there the bond market gave the UK government a ton of credit, so they kept rates relatively low and they brought them back from where they were. That seems like what's happening here.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
The stock market. The stock market kind of went sideways to a little bit down. Let's see what happens here. But the real big thing is, in the uk, all of this created tremendous dissatisfaction and you had Brexit. So I think the question that I have is if we go through a prolonged austerity program and the frustration amongst the American populace builds, what's the release valve there? The release valve was voting to leave the EU here. It's not quite. It's not obvious to me.
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Unknown A
Electing Trump was step one. And I don't know if there's something even more populous than Trump.
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Unknown B
No, I think he is the mechanism of implementing the austerity. I think people want this austerity. Just the question is, what happens when the actual byproducts of that austerity are felt by people for six or seven years? I don't know what the answer is.
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Unknown A
Certainly people are in favor of Doge and downsizing the government more than I think anybody anticipated. People are. The statistics are showing. The polls are showing Freeburg that it's incredibly popular. When you look at this, I don't say conflicting, but it's a lot of different conflicting data here as to what's going on. What do you. What do you see in the numbers here? What does your instinct tell you? Because part of this, I think, is getting used to Trump again.
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Unknown C
Right.
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Unknown A
Like he says, a lot of stuff, some of them are scary, some of them are just trolling and everything in between. So what are your thoughts here? Are markets just adjusting to the new. The new team back in town?
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Unknown C
The big question in the Trump actions is around tariffs versus the tax cuts that are being proposed versus the spending cuts. Those are kind of the three levers. And there's a very serious sensitivity to the economic outlook for growth and inflation as a function of how far each of those three levers are pulled and how they relate to each other. Is Trump actually going to pull forward the cuts that he has talked about or that Elon's talked about? How real is that? There's a whole spectrum of opinions on that right now. On one end, you're looking at the House and the Senate reconciliation process for the budget proposals that they've put forth. And you're going to scratch your head and be like, are we really cutting enough relative to what the economists are telling us we need to do? Meanwhile, you've got Elon and Trump saying, hey, we're cutting, we're cutting, we're saving, we're going to get to a trillion dollars a year.
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Unknown C
But that's not showing up necessarily in the budget, is it? Showing up in the actions out of Doge dvd? So there's a whole spectrum of opinions on the cuts. On the tariff side. There's a spectrum of like how far these tariffs are going to go. You know, the United states up until 18 something was entirely tariff driven in our federal government's revenue and it was a way of being kind of protectionary to the industry here. And then over time the terrorist rates came down, down, down as we introduced an income tax which started I think at 3% right after the Civil War and went to 5% for high income earners. And then obviously in the 20th century that's totally flipped. Now we have like no tariffs and a 50% income tax, the highest bracket. So can we actually revert back to a tariff driven income model for the federal government?
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Unknown C
And what is the economic effect on growth for corporate America in that world where taxes get cut for the companies and for individuals, but we make all of our money from global trade. Does the increased cost of global trade hurt companies more than the benefit of paying fewer taxes, lower taxes? That's the big economic argument that's underway right now. And it's funny, it kind of seems to fall along political lines, believe it or not, much like everything else, you know, like economists that are Democratic aligned.
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Unknown A
Are you doing. I agree with that.
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Unknown C
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the Democrat aligned economists will say the tariffs don't make sense, they reduce economic growth, they have a negative effect. We shouldn't be doing that. And then the Republican aligned economists are saying the tax cuts will more than make up for the reduced, the reduction from the tariffs. And that's the big unknown right now. So I would say that the spending cuts, wide spectrum, the income tax cuts, big spectrum on what's actually going to get done here. And then the tariff, big spectrum on wild cards. And so those three things, you got like three very wide ranges of things that all interplay, that ultimately determine inflation, economic growth, government deficits over the next decade. And we don't really have a clear picture yet of how those three things interplay and they're all being highly debated. And by the way, there's high variability.
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Unknown C
They're changing day to day, every day. Trump's like, this tariff, that tariff. Yesterday there's a whole bunch of confusion on tariffs. Today there's a whole bunch of like, discussion on how far the tax cuts extension is going to go in the reconciliation process and on and on and on.
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Unknown A
So TBD, I encourage people to use my 72 hour rule and look at what happens 72 hours after Trump says something spicy. Because a lot of times he's just, he says a lot of things. And you.
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Unknown C
Yeah, but the House and the Senate, they both put forward their, their budgets. Right. And now they go through this reconciliation process and there's a lot in there that leaves a lot to be desired. If you're, if you're an absolute, like, you know, fiscal conservative and you're trying to get us to 3% deficit as a percentage GDP, you're like, wait a second, does this do enough?
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Unknown A
And the tax cuts are 4.5 trillion over 10 years. So, you know, it's approximately 450 billion a year. If you're trying to catch up, how are we doing Tax cuts?
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Unknown C
But jt, remember, you can't make those statements as fact because a lot of those over 10 year projections are projections based on someone's estimate of the economic effect of the tax cuts. So there's also a lot of debate on that, which is, hey, some people are saying if we make these tax cuts, the economy will grow faster than this particular. The CBO economists will estimate. The CBO economists are trying to be conservative. So there's a whole lot of debate going on right now on, like, how much is this really going to cost? And people like, oh my God, Trump is talking about raising our deficit so much over the next decade. But then there's a different point of view, which is, wait a second, if you assume that the economy will grow because of these cuts, then that's actually not true. And then there's all these wild cards around the golden Visa card.
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Unknown A
Yeah, we're about to get to that. Yeah.
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Unknown C
Are the terrorists going to be a trillion year? Are they going to be $2 trillion revenue or.
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Unknown A
No one really knows. It's just a negotiating position.
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Unknown C
No one knows.
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Unknown A
Yeah, no one knows. So that's my main, is this, this administration is all over the place. You know, the cuts are great.
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Unknown C
The bond market tells you a lot. The fact that the tenure peaked at 5% two weeks before the election and then it peaked again the second week of January of 4.78% now. It's down 4.26 today. So it's come down by a full half a point in the last month, which tells you a lot about the expectations on inflation and growth over the next decade. And it's actually a reasonable like sign that we don't think there's going to be rampant inflation over the next decade based on some of the policy decisions and actions that are being taken by this administration. So I would say there's some indication that if, if you were kind of try and decode the enigma of the three things that we talked about going on, you know, it's generally kind of deflationary to some extent or it's not inflationary.
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Unknown A
Are you optimistic? Just net.
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Unknown C
Net.
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Unknown A
Dave, you optimistic about this next four year period?
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Unknown C
I'm honestly pretty uncertain and I'm pretty unhappy with both the Senate and the House budgets. Personally. I don't think.
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Unknown A
Too many cuts.
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Unknown C
Yeah, I don't think there's enough action in there. I don't think that. And it's weird because you hear Elon talking to all the members of the cabinet and he's pretty clear cut, hey, we've got to save this government is in a debt spiral. We have to fix this problem, yada yada. And then it's sort of like business as usual. Which like I said, that was exactly my observation. For every senator, representative member of Congress that we met with, that I talked to at cocktail party, it was the same. It was like, I got to get this for my people. That's the goal. And we turned this federated republic into a whole bunch of elected representatives showing up in D.C. scrambling and grabbing money for their constituents. That's what they were hired and elected to do. And it's a really unfortunate circumstance that no one looks after the better interest of the US dollar over time and says, you know what, we've actually got a limitation on us and that limitation should be less than 3% deficit to GDP.
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Unknown C
That's our budget, that's our max budget. And start from there and then do a build up. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
I mean chamath. I think collective action aside, you've been talking a little bit about this. I don't know if it was a couple weeks ago you were tweeting about the great Reset theory and there's, you know, whatever that is, the third or fourth turning people have been talking about. You want to maybe encapsulate your thoughts.
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Unknown B
I think you have to figure out what the goal is. So one goal is, you could say that the Republicans want to have consistent political power. Right. That's a reasonable goal. The Democrats want that too. Right. A different goal would be to do what Freebird said. We're going to go and take the lumps because we are going to defend the dollar and the credibility of the United States. We're just going to make sure that structurally it's sound and take the pain that's necessary to reset. That could be a goal. I think the reality is something in the middle where you can't be in one camp and you can't be in the other because I don't think you can get anything done. And somewhere in the middle, I think the thing that I have been thinking a lot about is when will somebody sniff out what the great coalition is that preserves political power, Whether that's the Democrats or the Republicans.
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Unknown B
The reality is that you will have a consistent majority if you get three cohorts of people together. Cohort number one are the people that frankly don't have many assets and are the working in middle class, meaning they don't necessarily own homes, they don't necessarily have investments in the stock market. So they don't particularly care about what's happening there. Okay. That cohort dominates. There was a clip of a discussion at Harvard just this past week about the different political coalitions that voted for Trump versus Kamala Harris. The most important takeaway that I took from it is that if you make $100,000 or more a year, you're a reliable Democratic voter. If you went to college, you're a reliable Democratic voter. Everything else is a reliable Republican voter. But the thing to remember is that bucket of everything else is growing faster than that first bucket. So you have this coalition of the asset light working in middle class and then you have other people, patriotic business people and patriotic business owners and technology people that care about innovation that MAGA has been able to corral into a coalition.
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Unknown B
My point is if that is the consistent, reliable thing that cements political power, multiple elections from now, and we've seen this before in the past where Republicans can go on a three term run or you know, a four term run, Democrats have as well in the past it is bad news for the stock market and it is bad news for asset owners because it doesn't reward the constituents. Back to free Brooks point. So if you are going to feed your constituents and your constituents don't own stocks and your constituents don't own homes or they are so wealthy that they can be inoculated from a massive drawdown in those asset categories, what do you think the winning strategy is? That is my rough working version of what our version of Brexit is. Right. So if you have many, many years of austerity, what does it really result in?
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Unknown B
I think if you want to cement political power, I think it requires a walking down of these asset markets in a meaningful way that stocks and that's real estate and I just don't see any other way around it.
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Unknown A
Fascinating. The good news is, I think from my perspective is.
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Unknown B
But by the way, so last thing I would say, that's a total theory and I could change my mind as I get more data. But I'm just saying, like, I'm just trying to work through the possibilities and in the distribution of outcomes. That's sort of where my head's at.
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Unknown A
I think it's like a good mental model because politicians want to stay in power. How do they stay in power? The populace has to want to continue to back and they have to understand.
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Unknown B
What backing strategies that reward asset owners, when asset owners are a shrinking minority is not a good idea.
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Unknown A
Well, there's 60% of the country owned assets, but 80% of those assets are in the top like 10%. So it is definitely weighted heavily. People do have some, I guess through the 401ks in some cases. And yeah, 60% people own a home. 61%. But yeah, I think it's a good framework. The good news is if you look at every time we have a great technological revolution, whether it was the iPhone or the Internet, now AI that tends to make the most impact on the economy. And so based on what I'm seeing in the streets, entrepreneurship is on fire right now.
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Unknown B
But that's not true. I think you're confusing that with how certain people, like everybody has an iPhone. That's true. But you're the one that's talked a lot about this. A lot. It hasn't lifted average hourly earnings that much. In fact, we've had massive wage suppression. It has rewarded the employees and the stockholders of Apple or Google or Meta. But that's not everybody.
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Unknown A
Well, I'm talking more about. Yes, you're correct. It does polarize the win in Apple shareholders. Right. In the case of the iPhone or Google, in the case of the Internet. But it does make the entire populace more efficient and the United States more efficient. Since we led both of those revolutions.
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Unknown B
I don't think it does. I think it benefits supremely a small cohort of people. That's why the denominator goes up. But does it affect individual people? In measurable ways on a broad based basis. I think that's been statistically proven. It's not to be true. That's why we have the populism we have today.
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Unknown A
It's disproportionately rewarded equity holders. That's obvious. And wage earners, you know, have not had the same escalation. But I'm talking about the United States and our place in the world in our economy when compared to other countries. So I still think if we lead AI, we will still have the best standard of living, the best overall economy in the world.
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Unknown B
But I love this. What do you guys think about the golden visa? I love that.
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Unknown A
Well, this is incredible because I literally tweeted like six months ago, you know, we should just sell citizenship for $500,000 a pop. And he added zero.
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Unknown B
I'll give you a prediction. I'll give you a prediction. I will predict that within the next few months after this gets announced, you are going to hear about founders taking $5 million of secondary in a round to make sure that if they are non Americans to get their visas.
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Unknown C
Check out this prediction. Nick. We now have a poly market to trade. How many gold cars will Trump sell in 2025?
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Unknown A
Poly market, well done. I think. What is the bet?
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Unknown C
Well, so you either can have zero.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown C
You can have one to 100, 100 to a thousand. Here's the different levels. 1000, 2500, 25,000. So you can basically buy the level that you think. There's an 8% probability right now, poly market, that by the end of 2025 there will be zero of these golden visas sold. 25% chance of 1 to 100. 17% chance of 100 to 1000. And so on. The most probable level is actually 2500 to 5000, which is sitting at 29% probability right now.
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Unknown A
I'm taking them way over.
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Unknown C
So what do you think this is by the end of 25? JTAL so you got to get. They basically have to get the program.
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Unknown A
They still have to get this program up and running.
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Unknown C
And then people buy the. So it's by the end of 25 is the.
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Unknown A
Okay, so people are really just betting when can he get the first one done?
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Unknown B
And then.
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Unknown A
Yeah, how many does he get done? Yeah, I know I'm going to take the top two. I think I might take 5,000 and above here.
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Unknown C
You put real money on that. You should do that. Oh, you can't.
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Unknown A
It's not available to Americans. But if there was a way to do it, I might do it. Well, this Is not unprecedented. By the way, there is something called the EB5 which I talked about before on the show where non citizens can invest a bunch of money. But it's a bit of a scam I got pitched on it. People said oh we can get you LPS for your fund. Here's how it works. They invest in some, you know, you.
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Unknown C
Have to create 10 full time jobs is.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So there's a bunch of scams going on about this 25. I said as your president I'm going to sell these citizenships. I get 100,000 people to do 500k each, right. And I said they would sell like tail surf tickets. I got to tell you, I think out of the gate Apple Meta, Microsoft buy, you know, 1 to 10,000 of these. So let's say you were able to buy these and you could swap them out. Like if somebody left and went back to their country could still use it. You still have the visa. These are become incredible for recruiting talent. If you got to get the CEO of a company over here and you can offer them that, you could buy their company.
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Unknown B
Is that how it's going to work or is that, is it going to be tied to a person, do you think?
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Unknown A
We have two different things here. One is, could you swap these between another person? The president could make it like that if they wanted to for corporations to give them essentially what is a season pass that you could swap between users. Those things exist in the world as a concept. So we could decide to do that. The second piece is how valuable they are. Are they worth 5 million or are they worth a million? Which, which would sell the most?
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Unknown C
The way this is proposed by Trump and Lutnick is it's $5 million for basically a green card. You get permanent residents in the United States. You get to live here permanently. Yeah, they're getting rid of the EB5 program after this. That's their proposal. And so here's the map. Let me ask you guys a question. How many people in the world have a NET worth above 100 million?
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Unknown A
Oh, above a hundred. Well we know that there are like 5,000, four or five thousand billionaires is the estimate. I think globally. So a centimillionaire.
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Unknown B
Well, I think that there's a lot, there's a lot of hidden billionaires. So I would.
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Unknown A
Russia and China, even America, I would.
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Unknown B
Guess that there's at least 10 or 15,000 billionaires in the world.
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Unknown C
100 millionaire.
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Unknown B
And so then as a century probably 50,000.
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Unknown A
That's massive.
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Unknown C
28,000, 40% of whom are in the US which means there's 700,000. Who knows that?
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Unknown B
Numbers real.
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Unknown A
Come on.
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Unknown B
These numbers are all made up. So I don't know how many Russian.
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Unknown A
Oligarchs have $100 million.
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Unknown C
Okay, so whatever fudge factor you want. 17,000 is the reported number of 100 millionaires outside the U.S. do you think that that's the cutoff for people that would spend 5 million and then what percent of them would buy a U.S. green card for $5 million?
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Unknown A
I think people with 20 million who are overseas in Venezuela or the Middle east would spend 5 million on it if it was a path to them becoming a US Citizen. You amortize that over a lifetime. You could make twice as much money living here. So I think the numbers, like, if you had $20 million, you would give 25% of your current net worth to get into the U.S. of course you're gonna buy a house here worth 10 million.
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Unknown B
And Donald Trump said that you would not have to pay any tax on foreign assets.
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Unknown C
Right, Right. Easy peasy. It's a true green card.
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Unknown B
That is. No, no, no. A real green card is what I had, which is your global income is taxed.
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Unknown A
That's right.
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Unknown B
So it's worse. Meaning the green card is worse than this. This is way better. So if I had to do it.
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Unknown C
Again and this was available, I'm not.
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Unknown B
Sure I would spend 5 million bucks.
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Unknown C
I'm not sure there's a million buyers. I think there's probably 10,000 max buyers of this thing.
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Unknown A
I'll take the over of 10. I wouldn't take the over of a million. I think you're right on the million number. Is that what Trump said?
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Unknown C
He said there's a million people in the market, Nick. The Most probable is 1 to 2500. I think that's probably right.
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Unknown B
But you didn't ask in year one.
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Unknown C
And I mean, it takes six months to get into.
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Unknown B
This poll is dumb. The real question is how hard will they be vetted? Because I think the point is there's a lot of gray money around the world. So the question is, can you bring it into the light? Right, so how many? Like, look, I. I know of many people in India, many who are extremely wealthy in ways that we don't understand, and their wealth is literally, like, in cash. It's in gold. How are they supposed to kind of, like, if they wanted to, like, raise their family in America, because now it's possible. How do they do that? How do they. How do they take their assets? Do you Go to JP Morgan and all of a sudden like you show them this golden visa and they say great, we're gonna. If there's a workaround to like the KYC AML laws honesty freebie. You could sell 2 million of these things.
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Unknown C
Don't think so.
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Unknown B
If you literally have to go through the existing set of frameworks on like ofac, aml, kyc, all that stuff, it's probably in the tens of thousands.
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Unknown A
All I have to say is this is one of the greatest proposals ever.
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Unknown B
And oh, it's great.
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Unknown A
It's fan freaking tastic combined with doge. Okay. If he gets this done, if he.
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Unknown B
Gets but I grant you, by the.
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Unknown A
Way, accredited investing done. If he gets the three things done, I'm voting for his third term. We're going to redo the your personal.
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Unknown C
Interest in credit investing. What's the grift connection? I'm not sure I'm fully correct connection.
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Unknown A
I feel like there's a bunch of people stealing money doing crypto scams and that all of that would be solved if people could just take a test to become an accredited investor which is like currently 6 or 7% of the country and then they would understand diversification and you know how different devices were, convertible debt, whatever. And if they did understand that you could take people who are gambling in the stock market and allow them to invest in private market companies. And I believe that would create more decision. We brought up in the last segment about poor people not being able to become rich people and upward mobility. Upward mobility could be very easily. Hold on. Upper mobility could be so much better. If a person who's an Uber driver or an HR person working, you know, at a company could put 500, a thousand dollars instead of betting on the Knicks or the Jets.
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Unknown A
God forbid they could put that 500 into this new product or service they're using, LinkedIn or this new product or service they're using and then that would allow more startups to get created. There are so many people who contact me after reading my book and say I want to invest in stars.
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Unknown C
They can't.
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Unknown A
And I will tell you, I think they would be so much better off putting 100 or 500 into a startup than just wasting it at room.
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Unknown C
I'll take the opposite.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown C
And I'll tell you why I think you're right. It would be great. But they should buy the S and P. They should buy the S and P index. Proven, scaled, audited, profitable, well vetted, solid fiduciary responsibility with public board companies. Yep. If you're learning from that. The problem is most of these people, most people, even smart VCs, even intelligent people, make extraordinary mistakes in the startups that they back. I don't think that we have a shortage of startups. I think we have a shortage of good startups. And I think that's. But if you, if you flood the market with capital, you're going to see the same problem we've had with every venture capital cycle or every private cycle, which is you get a whole bunch of bull that gets funded, that shouldn't get funded, that ends up eating a lot of people's money. And unfortunately, when people are less sophisticated and they enter the private investment markets, they're not going to necessarily be left well off.
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Unknown C
They're going to end up getting scammed in a different way. Someone's going to give you crazy, fancy PowerPoint to them, take your money and they're going to get eaten up. Which won't happen if they buy the S and P. Go ahead.
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Unknown A
Okay, yeah, so let me counter all that. They should buy the S P. Sure. And they can do that today, right? They can get a Robinhood account, they.
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Unknown C
Can make 11 a year.
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Unknown A
Perfect. And that's the protectionist, paternalistic approach that we've had. What that doesn't do is it makes them nice and safe and then their thousand dollars becomes 1070 next year and 1150 the next year. Great. They learned one lesson, the rule of 72. And compounding interest, that's the only lesson they learn. But when you start betting on startups, you learn how entrepreneurship works, how product market fit works. And so sure, put 80 and put 20 into investing in private companies, they would learn more. And when Uber wanted to give Uber drivers access to buying shares, they're not allowed to. And so the rich can buy whatever they want. They can make whatever bets they want. They can be in private equity, they can be all these things that have the chance to 100x to 10x but poor people can't. All I'm saying is if they're educated and they take a course, let them do take a little bit of risk in an intelligent fashion.
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Unknown A
Let them learn about entrepreneurship. I grew up blue collar and I didn't have exposure to how private for company formation worked. I didn't understand any of this. I had to battle my way to learn all of it. If you had a course and people could go just as easily as they go to price picks, which I bet on every next game, and they could go just as easily price picks as they could go to Coinbase as they could go to a private market company invest that would be better for upward mobility. So you're right, people are going to lose money, but they're going to learn. What do you think, subtle difference between the two of us?
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Unknown B
I think that both are true. I think that we're all much better off just owning indices, or at least that was true. I think the problem with these indices right now is those are not really well balanced indices because the rules have changed. And the rules have changed because these companies have been smart enough to lobby folks like S and P and S and P has allowed these thresholds to creep up. And so now when you're buying the S&P 500, you're not doing that anymore. You're buying the S&P7 and then the rest of the 493 is, you know, 60%. So if that's what you want, that's fine. So we'd have to fix the ETF market to make sure that there was a little bit more transparency and there was more balance. But these weighted indices are basically just the Mag 7. That's neither good nor bad. I'm just saying that's what it is.
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Unknown C
And so, yeah, and I'm just saying.
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Unknown B
It just creates the same problem. People think they're buying diversification because you're like, hey, go here. And it's diversified and turn out not.
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Unknown C
Even diversification, just like vetted, like mature real companies versus what I think will happen, which we've seen time and again with people that are not sophisticated or experienced when they first enter a new market. Any market is this process of adverse selection, which is you have predatory practices, predatory pitches that show up and say, invest in this. It's a great deal. This is the new thing. Most people aren't able to vet that thing and they end up getting taken advantage of. And that's the problem they're going to.
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Unknown A
Take advantage of in every crypto thing right now. So all I'm arguing for is more education and a path for those people who want to do it to show five hours of education, 50 questions, that they have an above average, you know, knowledge of how private companies work just so they have the choice to do that.
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Unknown B
I think the balance that we will have to strike is there are a lot of people that are on the outside looking in with no assets. And then second, there are a lot of young people who want the high alpha opportunities like crypto represents. And so, Friedrich, it's easy for you to pull the ladder up from under you because you're already rich. But for people that are not rich, and if you went back to when you were poor, the question is, how would you have reacted? If somebody above you basically said, I'm going to tell you what you can invest in, and would you have said, okay, that seems reasonable. I know you're looking out for me.
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Unknown C
I don't disagree with that. I think there's a reason we have securities regulations and securities laws that public companies have to follow. The private companies are more lax on. That's, that's where there's this distinction.
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Unknown B
That's not, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying when, now that you're rich, you want rules for everybody else.
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Unknown C
What I'm saying is don't mischaracterize me tomorrow. That's not true at all. I'm obviously a free market guy. I don't give a. I'm so poor.
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Unknown A
People invest in you.
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Unknown C
I'm pointing out the consequence of what would happen. I'm not saying I disagree with notion.
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Unknown B
Okay, What I'm asking you is go back to when you were poor, how would you react?
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Unknown C
I would want to invest in everything. I'm not disagreeing with the notion. I'm pointing out what will happen, which is predatory ass will show up and they'll rip people off. That's what happens in everyone.
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Unknown A
And if you're educated, that's why the education component hits here, you'll learn something just like people are learning right now to not bet on the gym.
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Unknown B
What do you think the solution is?
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Unknown C
People can lose their ass. Did you think they're gonna lose their ass? I'm just telling you that's what's happening. And then you know what's happen next? Elizabeth Warren's gonna get on TV and be like, hey, we gotta fix this. Put a bunch of care. That's how this goes. I'm pointing out. This is what happens.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I agree with you. That is the cycle. But what I'm saying is how do we fix it then? How do you allow people that don't have assets to have assets that work for them? How do we, how do we even.
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Unknown C
As you guys know, we look at the data, even the best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley with the smartest, most sophisticated people investing in private assets, were not able to beat the nasdaq.
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Unknown B
That's true. What I'm saying is what you were saying before. This is what I'm confused. What you're saying before is people should only be allowed to invest in the asset.
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Unknown C
I Say that that is what you said. I said here's what's happened.
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Unknown A
I said here's the predicting doom. Here's the other possibility for happens, eBay, Etsy, Airbnb, DoorDash, say to the people who are part of their networks, for every hundred rides you do, we're going to give you a hundred dollars in shares. For every 192 buck, we'll give you a thousand dollars in shares of Airbnb. And by the way, you can buy extra shares if you want to. And the government says you can spend up to 20 of your yearly income average for the past few years on investing in startups. And then some number of people who built those networks, whether it was Google's network or ebay's network or Uber's or Doordash's or a part of Tesla, some number of those people are going to hit massive home runs and they're going to move from the bottom third to the middle third. And then some number of people are going to say, you know what, I got really educated.
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Unknown A
I looked and I understood Tesla and I understood Uber. So now I'm going to bet on this AI self driving company and I'm going to bet on this other company that makes robots and delivers, you know, vetoes. And the entire group of people in our United States is going to get more savvy about entrepreneurship and capital allocation. That's a good thing.
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Unknown B
I think what's going to happen is not much of anything. I think the rules are going to stay exactly where they are in favor.
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Unknown A
Of the top 10%.
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Unknown B
Because I think this argument between the two of you is exactly the reason why it can never change. And I think that that now again. So then what is the alternative? Maybe it comes back to what I said before, which is then the only alternative left is just the debase assets. And then if you debase assets and make them much cheaper, then there's less money theoretically to lose for quantum of investment. So maybe that's, that's the right way to think about it.
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Unknown A
You got to get more people owning equities in this country. That's just high order bit because if you feel like you have more agency in your life and you're just smarter and savvier, that's the American dream and we've lost the American dream. To your point, in the early signage, half the country doesn't feel like they can ever get into the top half. They don't feel like they'll ever be able to buy a second home or even a first so you have this helplessness of one group of people who are like, I need a handout. And the other group of people are like, got any stock tips? Where are you making money? What can I place a bet on? We're sitting here at a rigged game. We all get to play in one casino and then everybody else gets to work in the casino. I just want people working the casino to be able to place some bets and maybe become owners in businesses.
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Unknown A
Hey, you know, I think talking about the US Postal Service is interesting. It turns out Trump is going to issue an executive order to dissolve the leadership of usps. And the Postal Service is going postal about this in some ways, not literally, but they're angry about it and they want to observe the absorb the agency into the executive branch. Just so you know, Post office been operating for 250 years. Trump plans to fire the governing board and place the agency under the control of Commerce Litnik Commerce. And for context, Postal Service has lost $10 billion last year on 80 billion in revenue. They can't figure out how to just make a simple profit margin or even break even. And it employs 635,000 workers.
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Unknown B
By the way, Howard did an interview with Fox News yesterday where he said one of the ideas that he went back to the president with was for the Postal Service to do the census which would save 4 billion a year. Give him another idea which is I think that non farm payrolls and gdp, that data should be collected by USPS as well because they touch every business you can actually get instead of sampling. With all this error and all of this craziness that we have, there has to be a way for then all of these feet on the street to get us much more accurate information so that the markets can actually function properly. I am surprised that we don't see even more dramatic revisions. And that probably again is like errors on top of errors. I really don't trust like, you know, you show the GP data, you show the employment.
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Unknown A
Now we all know this stuff is crazy.
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Unknown B
It's wrong. I just don't know how wrong it is.
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Unknown A
Yeah, and this is where stripes data might come in handy. I did a tweet about this and it's one of the most popular tweets are controversial. I got three and a half million views here without an Elon retweet or anything. I have a very simple concept here. Postal Service goes down to one time a week. Easy peasy, once a week. There's nothing coming in the US Postal Service that's that important to all citizens. Starting next year, have to opt into getting postal now by paying $1 a year. So you gotta sign up for it, you gotta give a credit card or something. I'm thinking 80% of people don't even bother because it's all flowers and garbage anyway. And what people don't know, because I was in the magazine business and I knew all about this, we had a magazine rate, a media rate, and all these marketers have, they're subsidized.
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Unknown A
So this is the ultimate marketing and publishing grift. Magazines, newspapers, anybody? Publications, advertisers, catalogs, they pay nothing. And I think they should just double or triple the rate or remove any discounts and then take all those buildings, put them into the new sovereign wealth fund, redeploy the buildings, get some money out of that, give every postal worker two year severance or, you know, whatever graduated down, full year severance, half year severance, quarter year severance while you retrain them. And just at the private market, sandal, let's do things. You want to make my suggestions.
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Unknown B
There was a tweet from this woman who got leaked some data from one of her friends or colleagues in the government where they broke down, I think seven or eight leases and real estate, things that were happening inside of, I think it was Veterans affairs maybe. The numbers are just astounding.
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Unknown A
Yeah, half the office space is not being used, the other half is being underutilized. It's bonkers.
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Unknown B
Bonkers.
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Unknown A
They're able to sell 75% of the stuff. So anyway, you know, don't blame me here, but I think it's like a really good opportunity. Our guy, Jeff Bezos. Come on the pod, Jeff. Sit in the sacks here one time. That'd be fun to have him on. He's making some big changes at the Washington Post. He's lost a fortune running this thing and it seems like he's getting engaged and in founder mode, dare I say, he posted to his X account and he emailed everybody that the editorial page is going to be running differently. He said that while newspapers once had a mandate to publish opinions from the broadest possible spectrum, the Internet now mostly covers that. He said, I'm confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinions.
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Unknown A
So he's going to focus on those two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. This seems awesome and I could get into why it's brilliant on a publication basis, but I'm just wondering what your thoughts are with him getting more engaged with the publication that he was incredibly hands off with.
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Unknown B
I was a little surprised that he wrote this. I think that if you want to write about personal liberty, one of the tenets of personal liberty is free speech. But he's effectively said that certain opinions aren't allowed anymore. I don't think that that's the solution to the Washington Post. So all I think it does is it polarizes the readership even more. I looked inside of Google Trends. The overwhelming majority of WaPo readers are in obviously Washington D.C. and then Maryland and Virginia, which are the two surrounding states. So I think it's very much a Beltway paper. I think he's trying to have a direct influence on the ideas that folks inside the Beltway read. And so in as much as he's the owner, he's allowed to do it. But I wasn't a fan of that idea because I think, I think that Elon plan is much better.
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Unknown B
Here's a fire hose. Go at it. You have to find the people. Despite all the conspiracy theories, I don't think he suppresses free speech in the least. In fact, I think it's a literal free for all inside of action.
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Unknown A
It is a free for all. And we've got Nazi diamond pendants coming from Kanye.
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Unknown B
The difficulty in X, which I think will be the next set of features that he'll have to figure out is how the curation happens.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Where you're curating. I'm curating. Other people are curating. How can then, for example, like when I go to an account that I like, there's no easy way where I can mass follow a bunch of their. The people that they follow as an example.
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Unknown C
Right.
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Unknown B
I can't just copy it. I can't sort of start with a profile. Those are all these things that allow you to just take on all kinds of opinions right away and filter from there. I think that that is a really useful feature. So I don't know. I didn't think that if I was the owner of Washington Post, I would have been even more extreme on the free speech part. I would not have sanctioned speech.
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Unknown A
So it's interesting point. You know, newspapers historically always had a point of view. They picked aside Fox, obviously, MSNBC now and cable news picked aside. This will make the publication, I think by picking aside and saying, hey, here's what we stand for, this is our belief system. I think we'll just make it viable in one way. And you're right, he wants to have a certain influence. That's why people buy these things. That's why they've historically owned them. And they have a point of view. And the idea that it didn't have a point of view previously was probably a mirage that some people felt there was like some objectivity. But I like it. I like it being more engaged in it and tightening it up. All right. For the sultan of science, Chamathpai Hapatiya, our sick friend, the comedian, get well soon. We can't wait to have you on.
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Unknown A
It's going to be a hilarious time. And for David Sacks, who's very busy, Raymond, in Washington, D.C. saving the world. I am the world trader's moderator and we will see you next time. Bye bye.
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Unknown B
Love you guys.
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Unknown C
Let your winners ride.
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Unknown A
Ray man, David Sack and I said.
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Unknown C
We open source it to the fans.
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Unknown A
And they've just gone crazy with it.