Jason Calakanis: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all-in podcast. With me again, the core 4, the original quartet, David Sachs, David Friedberg, Chimath Polyhapatia. I'm Jason Calakanis, and we have a very full docket today. All right, topic one, gentlemen. AI acceleration. It was a big week for AI. New study published on Monday, February 9th, in the HBR, Harvard Business Review, suggesting that AI tools intensify work but do not reduce it. Two UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months embedded at a 200 person tech company. So, this is one company's experience. What they found, employees who use AI worked at a faster pace, took a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day. workers reported feeling more productive, but they also felt a little more stress and burnout. Saxs, your your hot take here, your quick take on this study. Obviously, it's just uh one company, but it does track, I think, some of my experiences.

David Sachs: All right. Well, a few points here. Number one, as you may recall on the prediction show for this year, my most contrarian belief is that AI would increase demand for knowledge workers, not put them out of business. And I think you see in this UC Berkeley study, the reason why that might be the case is because the employees who use these tools, like you said, they worked faster. They took on a broader scope of task. They actually ended up working more hours in the day. So they did more work, not less, and even more effort rather than less. Not because they were required to, but just because they were more motivated. And I think they were more motivated because their work was getting upleveled, right? They're kind of able to offload uh more menial tasks to AI and it made their work more purposeful and meaningful. So I think we're kind of moving from what some people I think maybe Jensen has called um task-based jobs to purpose-based jobs. And I think a key skill of employees is going to be the ability to structure work for themselves and their AI agents. And the employees who can do that are going to be far more productive than those who can't. That kind of brings me to point number two, which is that I think there's a tremendous opportunity this year for employees who are early adopters of these tools, who are, you know, so-called AI natives, to demonstrate their value to their employers. They're going to be able to get a lot more done. They're going to appear to have superpowers. They're going to be the people in meetings who can take an assignment that would have taken days before and get it done in 2 hours. whether it's a presentation or a spreadsheet, people are going to be shocked at how quickly they can get these things done because they're going to be fasile at working with AI. So, I think there's a big opportunity there. And there was an article that went viral this week by Matt Schumer called "Something Big Is Happening" where he talked about this career opportunity that's going to be available to kind of AI early adopters. And I think that brings me to my third point, which is I think that you're going to see massive enterprise adoption of AI, not just chatbots, but agents this year. But I think it's going to be driven by the bottom up. It's going to be driven by these early adopter employees coming in to their workplaces, bringing in these kind of consumerized AI tools, start using them at work as opposed to top- down initiatives. I think there's a lot of top- down company transformation initiatives that are happening in large enterprises where the CEO has tasked a team with figuring out how to use AI, how to transform their business with AI. Those initiatives are going to take months. They're going to be studying what tools they should use. They're going to be doing RFPs. And I think it's ultimately going to be very slow. And while those things are trudging along, I think there's going to be these early adopter employees who just make the transformation of Feta Comple by again bringing these tools into the workplace from the bottom up. So, I think in the same way that you saw consumerized SAS tools spread from the bottom up in enterprises, I think you're going to see consumerized AI tools spread from the bottom up in enterprises. And I think it'll ultimately be one of the big themes this year.

Jason Calakanis: Couldn't concur or agree more. Nick, throw up that tweet I did. I I did a tweet and it got 2 million views. Basically, I said, listen, if you got laid off by Amazon or Microsoft over the last two years, just learn OpenClaw and automate your previous job. Show you know how to use these tools. go back to your boss and say, "Hey, I want to come back and automate everything or go to startups." Every startup I know is hiring for this position, which is somebody who knows how to build and manage agents. There is no job wreck for this yet or a title. We should come up with what this person does, but it it used to be called prompt engineer. It's no longer just prompt engineering. It's managing and educating and offloading work to an agent and then making sure they're actually doing it. And right now it feels like the people in my organization have four of them who are focused on this out of 20. I would say that their leverage is between 10 and 20x the other 16. So now I'm going down the slope of employees from you know most technical you know to least and trying to get each one of them to adopt and create an agent for them. We'll pro it will probably take six months but when we do I think our leverage versus a competing firm is going to be 10x. As an example, in the podcasting space, Sax, we now have it going through podcasts looking for the best moments or you can just give it a moment and it will clip the clip for you and put it in the Google Drive. So imagine we were all in, I don't know, our little group chat and you said, "Oh, from the last episode, can you get me a clip of minute 3 to minute 6?" And then it's just on your iPhone. It's just in the group chat. Boom. Nobody has to go find it. It just clips it. That's the kind of work it's doing. And then we have it looking at our YouTube stats. We have it looking at our Instagram or Tik Tok stats and then trying to tell us which clips are going the most viral, which ones have the most comments and then giving us strategies to how to make them go more viral. It's really weird because it's coming up with really great suggestions and taking eliminating all the reporting work that knowledge workers do. Chimat, you have a take on this? I know you've deployed the software factory which is I think um you know aligned with obviously this revolution happening in real time. Last couple of weeks have been pretty big with claude opus 4.6 coming out uh chat GPT codeex coming out lot of advances and obviously the open claw revolution that I've now done seven podcasts on in a row. What are your thoughts Jamal?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think there are two open questions that I find really interesting right now. The first question is, I tweeted it this morning, but is on-prem the new cloud, which is weird to think that that could even be possible, but we've spent since 2008 migrating everything to cloud because there were these economies of scale. And it created better margin and lower opex and lower capex because you could essentially share infrastructure with other companies. And that's how AWS and GCP have built such gargantuan businesses. The counterpoint to that though is that in the AI revolution, companies I suspect will be fighting for their lives. And I think it's very much unclear whether it makes sense for a company to allow the natural leakage of their edge and their confidential and proprietary information out into the wild versus the control that they would get if they ran on prim. That's a really important question. What do I mean by all that? Once you use these tools, it is very difficult for a company to be able to control how their data is used subsequently thereafter. Meaning if I gave you Jason a PDF of some really important strategy document or a PowerPoint deck or a really critical model and you're interrogating it with one of these models. If you're just using chat GPT the mainline instance of it you're leaking all of that prompt and response metadata back to Chat GPT back to Gemini back to Claude. And there's nothing a company can do about that. If you're using a set of agents to act on all that information, all those agent traces are going back to these model builders. That may or may not be a problem for some, but I suspect it is a deep problem for others and they just haven't uncovered it yet. When they realize that that is a problem, the enterprise will have to decide, do I just give up and keep running all of this stuff in the cloud in a shared experience or do I bear the incremental cost of running this stuff in a more coordinated manner that I control on prem and that would be a crazy shift just to completely go back to where we were 20 and 30 years ago. That's a non so obvious thing that may happen. So that's number one. And then number two, I also tweeted this. There was this really interesting ruling around what happens inside these cloud environments, which was a judge saying there is no attorney client privilege and confirming that once you start to use those tools, all of that stuff is complete public domain material. If you put these two things together, it creates a very interesting set of questions for enterprises. You will need AI to survive. But if you use the tools as they exist today at a public endpoint, you will give up all control, all security, all confidentiality that you today have and the ability to follow through and control what your employees do with it. The only solution is to have the pendulum swing all the way back and have private provision networks, which increases cost, but then if you save a bunch of money because of AI, maybe it all balances out. That is the big question that I'm wrestling with right now.

Jason Calakanis: Good insights there. And I have some thoughts on the um onrem because I'm actually doing it right now. Freeberg, your thoughts on this moment in time when we have people uh saying it's happening faster and it's become recursive. Recursive obviously fancy word for those in the audience who haven't heard it before. Just these models and these agents can go out and improve their own work. So after they do some work or a job for you, you can have another agent say, "Hey, here's how to do it better or go learn these new skills. Go use this skill last 30 days to go find the last seven days or 30 days of best practices with this tool and make yourself better and do that every night at 1:00 a.m. What are your thoughts, Freedberg, on the moment in time we are in right now?"

David Friedberg: Well, I think the thinking historically was that it was going to be about recursive model development where we were going to continuously improve the actual model and we were waiting for a context window where you could feed the model back to itself. So, you're effectively retraining the model continuously and it may be the case that the output is recursive and that turns out is having the effect that everyone was waiting for. So, it's kind of a surprise. I saw a lot of computer scientists that have worked in AI for some time, I think, be a little bit surprised about this moment that we're in that we're seeing such incredible strides in model performance just by making the output recursive. So, let's see how far it goes. Are you still obsessed with OpenClaw, Jac?

Jason Calakanis: I am. We have now seen that every week 5 to 10% of the work we're doing inside of our venture firm is being moved over to OpenClaw. We call them replicants. You can think of them as personas. So we now have three or four of these. Uh we give them a notion account, a Slack account, and we give them a Google Docs account. They have their own email. And I think all of this technology was here all along. It was really or maybe for the last 6 months, let's say, really good models out there. But no company would give the keys to the kingdom to allow these agents to actually act on your behalf. Why? because they don't want to be responsible if it ships your Bitcoin keys or your passwords to somebody else. So, in order to use these, you have to trust them. And if you trust them and then you are monitoring them, the results are unbelievable. We uh have also to your point Chamath fired up Max Studios. We have Kimmy on them. We are moving all of the work onto these and then they'll use Kimmy for most of their easy jobs, which is free. Then they will use claude 4.6 opus to orchestrate things. We also now that we have four of them freedberg we've created openclaw ultron which is one meta replicant that is managing the other four and it checks their work. It talks to them all day long about what they're doing and then summarizes it. And we're building skills into each one of these. So one of the skills is like doing deep research. One of the skills is being able to go into our sales database which is in pipe drive. The gains we're getting I was able to go through everything my Athena assistant was doing and I was able to take about and I know Chimath you have an Athena assistant too. I was able to take maybe 30% of the Athena assistants work and give it to the replicant that let the Athena assistant work on higher level stuff. I would say on the average investment team individual, we now have probably 20% of their work being done by agents in real time. And the best part about it is they don't forget to do work. They don't make mistakes. So once you put this in, you don't need to have checklists. They just do it perfectly every single time.

David Friedberg: Crazy.

Jason Calakanis: And they work.

Jason Calakanis: It's nuts, Jamal. So now I'm building and I've been talking to Benny awful a lot cuz he's got Slackbot. Claude's got co-work, but none of them have the keys to the kingdom. So, what I'm doing is I'm upgrading to the enterprise version of Slack. Shamat, you're I think probably your number two investment in your career. What an amazing investment that was. Um, it's number four.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Number four.

Jason Calakanis: Okay. Listen, keep grinding. Top five investment for you. I'm upgrading to the highest level and I'm ingesting every single Slack message and then I'm upgrading and giving the API key for every single email in our organization to Ultron. They will know everything going on in the organization. It is mind-blowing how fast this is going. And then finally, just a plug, I'm investing in 10 startups in OpenClaw space, 125K each to come to the accelerator. If you're doing work on this openclaw.co, email me what you're doing cuz we want to invest in in at least a 10 or 20 of these companies right now. Uh this is the 100% focus of our firm. It is insane. When do you guys think enterprises have a huge freakout around all of this and say, "Wow, we're leaking all of our most important information out into the wild." But Sachs, to your point, the industrious person trying to get ahead all of a sudden is using an open endpoint to like make a deck better. and somehow all of that stuff is out in the wild. They find out people are going to have a freakout moment here soon.

David Sachs: I think there's a big opportunity to take something like OpenClaw and make it enterprisegrade and secure and all that kind of stuff. One of my partners at Craft actually created a new tool called Lobster Tank, which is a version of Open Claw that's got some enterprise security wrapped around it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: This is what I mean. On-prem is back. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. It's cost savings plus do I want to give all of the secrets in our organization, every piece of intellectual property to Sam Alman who's got to make a billion dollars a year to keep up with his spend, right? He's going to build every application.

David Sachs: Let's not make it about Sam. Do I, if I'm GEIGO,

Chamath Palihapitiya: want to have all of my actuaries using all of our proprietary, private, and confidential data on risk pricing in an open instance of an LLM? The answer is no. That's obvious.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So now the question is how do you adapt to that? How do you actually generate tokens in that kind of a situation? How do you reason in that kind of a situation? That is a very expensive technical problem. It's not necessarily complicated, but it is technical. That will bloat the opex because you're going back to a place that you had said didn't make sense anymore. It felt very antiquated if you ever heard a company was on prem. But AI may be the reason where you can't afford to be not on prem.

David Sachs: Yeah. And it's it's going to be on your desktop, too, because one of the solutions to this is just giving each employee a really powerful desktop that is capable of running a local large language model, which right now takes a Mac studio with 512 gig or or daisy chaining two of them. And that's what people are doing.

David Friedberg: Remember these vax terminals? I think that you could actually see a resurgence of that idea. So you have a centralized computer and you have a bunch of dumb terminals

Jason Calakanis: y

David Friedberg: and you have a CLI and so you can interact with it that way

Jason Calakanis: but again it keeps everything inside the

David Friedberg: but you could also you could also fire up your own instance in the cloud and just run it

Chamath Palihapitiya: too expensive at scale like for example 8090 is a top 20 customer bedrock

David Friedberg: it's too expensive already as it is because of all this overhead

Chamath Palihapitiya: because of their margin

David Friedberg: because of all the nonsense that's inside of AWS that you have to pay for in order to just get access the bare metal. So then you go to Cororeweave. Okay, fine. But what does Cororeweave tell you? They're an excellent business. A, it's all training. B, you have the situation where too much of what you have has to be guaranteed into the future because for them, it makes no sense to price it on spot. And if you buy on spot, you just get these surges. You can't deal with it. So there is no solution today that makes any sense.

Jason Calakanis: It's absolutely correct, Jam. I'll just put some numbers behind it briefly. We with our agents hit $300 a day per agent.

Jason Calakanis: using the uh Claude API like instantly and that was like doing maybe 10 or 20%. That's a h 100,000 a year per agent. We're getting to a place where we have to basically now say what is the token budget that we're willing to give our best devs and then if you aggregate it across all people you can clearly see a trend where you're like well hold on a second now they need to be at least 2x as productive as another employee that is actively happening inside my business because otherwise I'll run out of money. Yeah, this is a very interesting trend that I you you're not going to hear anybody else talk about, but when do tokens outpace the salary of the employee? Because you're about to hit it. I'm about to hit it. I think superstar developers are already there.

David Friedberg: Yeah, I think the rank and file is probably 10 20% max. More than likely, they're spending a few thousand. The average non-technical employee is probably in the hundreds to low thousands. But to your point, the trend is what matters. Yeah. So unless we have some gigantic leap forward in generating output tokens at onetenth the cost of what they are today, which I suspect we will have. So bear with everybody for a while because I think Nvidia and Grock and Google and AMD, they're all incentivized to massively ramp up the energy density and massively push down the token cost. That's going to happen, but it doesn't change the trend and it doesn't change the incentives on confidentiality.

David Friedberg: Let's talk about prediction markets, gentlemen. They hit critical mass this past weekend at the Super Bowl. More than a billion bet on Kshi, 700 million on poly market, almost two billion dollars in wagering. The media has been obsessing a bit about market manipulation, insider trading, and all these issues that are totally valid to discuss around prediction markets, which are something new in the world, at least at this scale. two specific examples uh from the halftime show. A day old anonymous Poly Market account correctly predicted 17 out of 20 halftime show bets, including the special appearances by Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, but it only profited 17K, a tiny amount. And then another account created less than 24 hours before the game correctly bet on Bad Bunny set list. Wall Street Journal this morning with an article titled, "Israeli soldiers accused of using PolyMarket to bet on strikes. Israel arrested several people, including Army Reserve, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations." Quote, "The account in question rad in more than 150,000 in winnings before going dormant for 6 months. It resumed trading last month, betting on when Israel would strike Iran." Poly market data shows the name of the account Rico Suave 666.

Jason Calakanis: Rico Suave. The name of the account Rico Suave 666. I think that's also the alias that you were using in Vegas for a little while there uh at your hotel. Rico Suave 666. The platforms are regulated of course by the CFTC. But you know, questions here uh about society getting used to this new platform. Here's Kali's CEO uh talking about this on CNBC.

Kali's CEO: Let's say there's a a cameraman happens to be in the stadium during the rehearsals. You could argue that would be like somebody at a at a hotel who sees a rehearsal of a CEO given a presentation prior. Those guys would have normally probably had to sign NDAs by the company because they would be worried about these issues. But in the context of this, they probably wouldn't.

Jason Calakanis: It's either one of two cases. Either this information can be public and that's okay. Or it's information that cannot be public beforehand and that's communicated to the staff, right? The cameraman or the dancer. The reason why you don't know what song is going to be played first that's not public and not everybody knows beforehand. It's a little bit of a surprise Super Bowl.

Kali's CEO: Yeah. But but it's not nonmaterial. It's not im it's not material information that can't be shared. you're making it that by putting it on this betting platform, but they have no obligation to say we're not going to tell anybody our opening lineup because there might be money made on this other place that's now betting on this. That's not the responsibility is not on them.

Jason Calakanis: Your thoughts just broadly on what I consider society getting used to these new platforms and what they represent in the marketplace of ideas.

David Friedberg: I think the question is, is it really insider trading? If you and I were making a side bet and I knew something about you and I had some edge or some advantage and I made a bet with you, is that fair? Should the government have a role in regulating that? This kind of goes back to securities regulation that everything needs to be registered and then there's this concept of insider information. It's a real challenge and a real question on keeping the open platform of opportunity for trading on anything while also trying to mitigate the risk of what people call insider information in these trades. There's a good chart that I think we talked about in our group chat that shows the distribution of accounts. There's a few accounts that have a huge amount of money and make almost all the profits and then a lot of accounts that have very little amount of money and they get burnt through very quickly. They actually don't have an edge. So the the accounts that have a lot of money, they generally only trade in things where they have an edge where they make markets. They actually have an arbitrage or yeah sharps and they eat up all of the the capital. So if you're a marketplace like this, you probably also want to be thoughtful about the fact that over time you could burn and churn through all of your customers, all of the users on the platform if they're constantly going to be making uh trades where they simply don't have an edge and all the capital, all the liquidity is coming from the accounts that do have an edge and effectively trade off of inside information. So just be that these things end up eating themselves up. I don't

Jason Calakanis: Shabbath man, we had in trade. I'm sure you remember that in I don't know if that was in the early 2000s. This idea has been out there but it has clicked right now for some reason. What are your thoughts broadly speaking on the value of these platforms to society?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Let's define some terms first. So in betting there are two kinds of people. There are the sharps who know what's actually going to happen with a better edge and then there are the squares which is everybody else and they are grist for the mill. And in a traditional market like a sports betting market there have been edge cases where you try to throw a game or throw a fight or shave points and the sharps are involved in that. But it's increasingly harder and harder to do because the sports leagues analytically are studying these things so closely to make sure that that never happens. But what you get are people with a smarter sense of what's going to happen and people with less of a smart sense of what's going to happen. The thing with prediction markets is it's not just that. There will be those things. But then there are going to be these fundamental markets that are purely about inside information. And the question is what can a regulatory body or a society do about that? And I think the answer is not much. And the reason is is that if you try to regulate this, it looks like a securities market. And I think the problem there is that these things are too fluid and too dynamic and too ephemeral for them to be legislated like a security. And so why are these things happening? It's because there's too many of these prediction markets that can be manipulated this way. Somebody knows something that somebody else doesn't know. And there's no way to arbitrate that. This used to exist in the securities market, too. And this is where now I'm going to get a lot of people really upset with me. In 2000, we introduced the law called REGGG FD. And what was the point of REGG FD? It was basically that if you're a CFO, you cannot talk to an individual stock manager and tell him something that you then don't tell everybody else. Essentially, inside information that used to be not illegal. I won't say that it was legal. I would just say that used to be not illegal. You call your buddy, he says, "Hey, how you doing?" He goes, "Man, Quarter was a blockbuster. You would go and buy the stock." And starting in the 2000s, it became illegal. And there used to be these networks of information arbitrage that that took advantage of this. Now, this is an example of Warren Buffett's returns pre and postreg. Now, what do you see? His returns were double the market returns when this kind of information sharing was legal. And the minute that it became illegal and you had to basically act on the same edge as everybody else, his returns went to the market return. He generated zero alpha. In fact, he probably on the margins lost a little bit. So this is the single best investor in the world. This is what happens when you have information symmetry. So it's just meant to explain that markets thrive when there's asymmetry. billions and billions of dollars will be made in asymmetry. The prediction markets today unless they are regulated out of existence or shut down will look like the stock market free and there's nothing we can do except choose not to bet it because otherwise what you're going to have are a ton of sharps taking advantage of a ton of squares and I think that's the end state.

Jason Calakanis: Jim, why is it good or bad for society that these exist? You have a take on that? There are a certain percentage of these prediction markets that are about the well functioning of society and the use of inside information gets to the truth faster and I think that has value especially if it uncovers corruption or misdeeds and so if people make money along the way and that's the incentive that it takes for folks to work around what would otherwise be whistleblower laws or something else to get to the truth and get it out there faster. That probably benefits society. Now, there's a bunch of other things where some people will just set up a market that they know about and that they can control that other people aren't unaware. That's not good. But unfortunately, there's no way to discern when a prediction market gets created whether it's A or B. And so, you have to decide whether it's more important that you can understand these current events faster with more accuracy or not. And I think that's where this decision has to come to and that's what politicians need to decide and society needs to decide.

Jason Calakanis: All right. We're really excited that we're doing another event. Yes. A new event from your friends at Allin. The besties are hosting a new conference uh a retreat, a summit in uh wine country May 31st through June 3rd. It's called liquidity. This is for capital allocators and LPs and GPS. Chamatop, maybe you could talk a little bit about the vision we have here for the event.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There are a handful of conferences that happen every year where money is made. I'll give you a couple of examples. All the top market traders have been invited to this thing called Iris every year where you go in front of a large audience, present your best long or short idea and you can be a debt trader, a credit trader, you can be an equities trader. I've done it several times. Aman has done it. David Einhorn has done it. Cliff Robbins has done it. These are incredible places and you pay like $10,000 a ticket and if you take those portfolios, they tend to do really well. Separately, there are conferences that investment banks organize that are off the record, not publicly accessible where they ask their biggest traders to come to a room, and they'll give them each a few minutes to present their best long and short ideas of public stocks. Then there are these equivalent conferences that investment banks do for private companies where the best fast growing private companies show up and the CEOs get on stage and they give presentations. All of these things have been closed. I would like to blow that wide open. So what will we do? We will convene the best investors in public markets, the best hedge fund managers, the best private market investors, the best growth investors, the best credit investors, and the largest cohort of LPs representing trillions of dollars of capital, and the CEOs of the fastest growing and most important companies in technology. And what we will do over the course of a few days is we'll have some presentations. We'll have best ideas. We'll build relationships. There may be some investments that may happen as a result of that. We're going to shut down all of Yianville. We're going to shut down the French Laundry. We're going to shut down all of it. And it'll be ours for a two-day playground where we will build relationships, allocate capital, and maybe make some money as a result. So, you need to apply. We will make some allocations to some folks that may not otherwise get in. We'll make some allocations to emerging managers who may need to raise capital and scale up but can show us good returns. And over time, we'll find a way to increase a lot of this and make it more and more publicly accessible. We But we are going to essentially take all of these things that I've been a part of that have been in closed rooms and we're going to put them together and open it up.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah. Well said. Well said. It's going to be a wonderful event. Freeberg, uh, anything you're excited about in terms of the event?

David Friedberg: No, I love Yfville. We're going to Yanfell, so I'm looking forward to that. It's going to be great.

Jason Calakanis: I mean, beautiful location and I think there's going to be ample time for meetings, networking.

Jason Calakanis: Jal, if you're an investor, you can go to the website to allin.com/events and you can submit your application. We can't have everybody there and this is not like a general admission type event. It is specifically for this group of people, capital allocators. So apply at the website allin.com/events. It's going to be wonderful. And Shimoth is putting his focus on it. I can tell you because I brought him my first five ideas and he was like, "No, no, no. Yes, but better." Yes. Yes. So he is engaged and he's going to make it super tight and tight.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I'm being judgy.

Jason Calakanis: Good. I like it. I like it. You know, all great events, all great art is has some perspective behind it and we're excited to have your sharp perspective behind this one. Liquidity May 31st to June 3rd. allin.com/events. Okay, let's move on to our next topic. The new CBO report is out. Freeberg, you said we are in a debt death spiral. The Congressional Budget Offer released its long-term budget forecast on Wednesday, February 11th. Here are the numbers. 2026 deficit is 1.9 trillion. And that's nearly 6% of GDP, much higher than the 3% GDP target we heard from Scott Besson on this podcast. Social Security, I talked about that before. Freeberg Trust runs out in 2032, uh, one year earlier than previously expected. That's obviously going to trigger all kinds of discussions around austerity measures that folks will not like. The debt will now grow from 31 trillion today to 56 trillion in 2036. So, it is not stopping, folks. We are looking at an average of 2.5 trillion per year from 2026 to 2036. Also, currently we're at 120% debt to GDP. House Committee on Budget expects it to be 135%. So slightly up in 2036. For comparison, Japan is 237, Singapore 176, Venezuela 164, the Greeks 154, UK 94. 20 years ago, our debt to GDP was but 60%. Here's a direct quote from the report. The fiscal trajectory is not sustainable. Okay, Dr. Doom, what do you think? Freeberg, this is your story, your chance to shine.

David Friedberg: Well, there's no outlook to 3% deficit to GDP.

Jason Calakanis: There he is.

David Friedberg: And if you look at the assumptions, one of the key assumptions is that the short-term interest rate, which is largely how a lot of the debt is getting refinanced, is modeled to be around 3.1%. But if rates climb closer to 5%, as I mentioned in the past, just using the current debt levels, it adds another $650 billion a year of interest expense, which takes interest expense almost up to$2 trillion a year just paying the interest on the past debt. And because we're running a deficit, that new interest expense increases the debt every year. So the debt goes up and up and up just by adding interest on past debt. And so this becomes the death spiral that we've kind of highlighted many times. So there's nothing in this report that I think changes the outlook. It's pretty scary. Um, I'll say that the trigger point that I'm getting more and more concerned about, if the Democrats win the midterms and you end up with a Democrat in the White House in 2028, I think that there's a bigger problem at foot, which is all of the state and local obligations. We've talked about Social Security looks like it's going to run out of money in a few years here. And so, they're going to need to print a lot more money to fund Social Security obligations. uh it's very unlikely they're going to make a massive cut to social security because no one will get elected if they did that and no one will get elected if they promise to do that. Um and there's a similar problem at the state and local level which is that there's pension obligations. We've talked about this extensively. California has nearly a trillion dollars of unfunded pension obligations to its public retirees or public employees that are going to retire. If you end up with a Democratc controlled House and a Democrat president in 2028, you'll very likely see a federalization of that obligation, meaning that the federal government will step in to bail out or support those state and local governments because otherwise there's going to be a real kind of economic crisis a foot. So when you add that liability coming to hit this CBO report, which doesn't include any of that in the next 5 to 10 years, I think that could be not just the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the concrete that breaks the camel's back. And that's the thing I'm most worried about. There is a deep connection between what's going on with the socialist movements at a city level and now increasingly at a state level and what we should expect to happen with the US dollar and how it relates to federal spending and federal deficits and federal debt and these are going to be dragging each other into a bad place in the next couple of years one way or the other. So, you know, that's kind of what I'm more worried about at this point. It seems if it's very hard to cut spending or get Congress to approve budget cuts that we need to save ourselves from this debt death spiral, imagine how much worse it's going to be in the next couple of years if we have to bail out or federalize state and local uh debt and state and local pension obligations. It's going to be really nasty. So, that's the thing I worry about the most. Yeah.

David Friedberg: In my Dr. Doom hat.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah. And I think that that's one of the things that no one talks about at the federal level and everyone ignores it because they assume it's a state and local problem

David Friedberg: as we've talked about and I'll bring it up again and I'll ask my colleague who works in the administration to think about this idea that you know if we can find a way to declare bankruptcy to restructure the the fiscal obligations or the the pension obligations that sit at the state and local level we may have a way out but short of that uh that's going to pile onto this this federal problem. Sax, your thoughts on the CBO report and this uh death spiral, debt death spiral.

David Sachs: Well, we all agree about the problem of federal spending and the deficit and the debt and we're all concerned about that. With respect to the CBO study, however, I'll just note that one of the key assumptions here is that CBO projects that real GDP will only grow by 2.2% this year in 2026. That's a very low assumption given that we grew by over 4% in Q3 last year and the preliminary number for Q4 was over 5%. And I think all of our predictions for GDP growth this year when we did our predictions episode was 5% plus. So 2.2% is a pretty low number. And then they predict that it's going to slow to 1.8% after 2026. So again, these are very meager anemic growth assumptions. And if you believe that all of this capex that's being invested in AI infrastructure is going to have a payoff then the growth rates could be a lot higher. And that ultimately I think is the way to get out of the debt spiral is we need strong growth. Without that we're not going to get out of this problem. So look I think that if you believe in growth then the situation is not quite as dire. You know what would I do? Well, I mean, if I could wave a magic wand, the two key charts you want to look at are federal net outlays as a percent of GDP. This is from Fred, right? And then you want to look at federal receipts, which is tax receipts as a percent of GDP. And you just don't want those lines to be more than call it 3% apart. I think that's what Secretary Besson said is try to reduce federal deficits to 3% of GDP. Historically, tax receipts have bounced around 17%. And the federal net outlays have bounced around 20%. So, if you get back to that, we'd be in pretty good shape. And we were before CO our federal net outlays, which means spending as a percent of GDP was around 20%. But then with CO, it bounced all the way up to 30% in 2020 because of both a function of all the stimulus, but then also the fact that the economy shrank because of CO and we've never quite gotten back to that magic 20% number. Right now, it's trending around 23%. So, we're doing a lot better than we did under CO, but it's still just a few percent higher. I mean, if it was up to me, I would just freeze federal spending until the economy grew to the point where federal spending as a percent of GDP is 20%. And then you could let federal spending continue to grow as the economy grows. And we're not even talking about cuts here. We're not even talking about shrinking the size of the government. We're just talking about limiting the rate of growth until the overall size of the economy can catch up with it. But look, as we know, it's very hard to get Washington to go along with that because there is just a lot of spending pressure in Washington. One thing I will say though, I mean, just to give some credit to the administration here, is that the level of federal employment is at the lowest level since 1966. So during uh President Trump's second term here, we've gone from roughly 3 million federal employees to a little bit under 2.7 million. So, you know, over 300,000 federal employees have been cut. I think that is a good start. I mean, you

Jason Calakanis: 10%

David Sachs: is a good start for you,

Jason Calakanis: by the way. I think that's I think that's really important to just pause on just so people understand this isn't like some hurtful thing about firing people. They lose their jobs. But when people move from the government workforce into the private workforce, they become productive. They're making things that grow the economy. And theoretically, they should also make more money. So this is positive from an economic point of view to move the workforce from public to private. It also to my point historically I think it's very important to avoid the socialist spiral that if you have too many people employed by the government it becomes impossible to not employ people by the government and that becomes ultimately deacto socialism. Shimath your thoughts here obviously great thing that we're shrinking the size of the government those people becoming more productive going into the private sector. That's a big win. We all agree 10% great job in the first year. Hey, maybe 5% the next two or three years would be even better, but the debt continues to be a problem. Uh, are you worried? Do you think there's a solution here? What would you do if you were running the show?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think you have to take a broader historical context to this. Does debt to GDP matter? It depends on many things, but mostly I would say it doesn't matter. And it's very easy for people to get agitated about that. Now, there are things that matter when you print too much money, which is the value of the dollar, the value of exports, the cost of imports, and how to actually protect your earnings and your wealth. That's a different question. This is a historical look back from about 300 years of debt to GDP of the largest functioning economies in the world. Now, what do you see? What you see is the trend where you, you know, if you smooth it out for wars, which by the way has this weird effect of first escalating the debt to GDP, but then severely impacting it in a positive way. The Napoleonic War, the FrancoRussian War, World War II, these things all had positive effects on bringing debt to GDP once the war was over. But the general trend since 1700 to now is up and to the right. And the key observation is that it moves in unison that these things are relative problems. So if the entire world moves in unison like this there is an argument to be made which is that you could end up at 300 250 200% of debt to GDP. But if everybody is there nothing really changes that much. The real question is if one country is able to decouple itself and its economic output is so meaningfully different than everybody else's. So my first take on this whole debt to GDP thing is I think you have to look at it together as a group. Separately, is it important to contain the debt? Absolutely. But for these other reasons, for earnings, for inflation, for all of those very practical reasons that impact your daily lived life. And what do we know there? We know that President Trump was elected on a massive mandate to secure the border on one hand, but to look at waste, fraud, and abuse on the other. And on that side, what did he do? He drafted the most important and prolific private businessman in the history of the world to be his tip of the spear. And what happened? They identified hundreds of billions of dollars. But when it came down to it and Congress had to act to solidify these cuts, they haven't done much of anything. Which is a way of saying that if the most conservative Congress in the history of the United States has not done much to solidify these cuts that were identified by the White House and Doge, then as Freeberg said, it'll only get worse if there's ever a Democratic House and Democratic control. So what do we have to do? I think we have to just acknowledge that if debt to GDP continually moves in unison, the music isn't up for a very long time. That's just an observation. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. It's just the observation. But you got to find ways of hedging and owning real durable assets because the underlying currency that is used in these economies even on a relative basis will fluctuate wildly and just fall off of a cliff which will mean that it will erode the value that you have created for yourself and your family. That I think is the most important takeaway from all of this, which is we probably see things like gold do much much better over time because people will be afraid about the durability of their dollar denominated resources. But it will also be true for all these other denominated resources. But I think debt to GDP quite honestly if I had to be a betting man will trend into the 2 3 4 5 600 on a relative basis for all countries because I just think the governments of these countries are addicted to spending and there is no reason to stop safe of some other planetary species invading planet earth.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah. A black swan event. Yes.

David Friedberg: Yeah. There's also a question of what Fed action will do to the capacity for excess deficit spending. So if Kevin Worsh really does want to tighten the Fed's balance sheet and the Fed is effectively the first in line buyer of treasuries, meaning they are printing money to fund the government spending and they slow down or actively slow down and stop doing that, then there is a real um kind of question on what action will Congress and the administration need to take because what will happen as you know if the Fed stops buying treasuries, Treasury yields will go up. And if Treasury yields go up, that means the interest on the existing debt will start to go up. And if that lasts for a period of time and you start going from 3 to 4 to 4 12 to 5% on the short end of the the yield curve, then it starts to become way too expensive to fund this level of deficit spending because the interest expense will just start to climb and eat it all up. So I think like the Kevin Worsh question is if he really is going to reduce the balance sheet, what's that going to do to rates? What's that going to ultimately force Congress, force the administration to do with spending?

Jason Calakanis: Jason, what do you think?

Jason Calakanis: Uh, you know, we are in a consumer-driven economy and the employment rate in this country is absolutely fantastic. So, just three quick charts here. You know, this is the number of job openings. We still have, even after we burned off uh in 2022 from 12 million to 7 million jobs, we still have a ton of jobs available. Then if you look at our unemployment rate, it's still at historical lows for our lifetime. If you were born in 1970, this is as good as it gets. 4.456 is what it's been. It's ticking up modestly, but still lowest of our lifetimes. And then finally, the employment participation rate, number of people in our society who are working and able to work. It peaked at 68% or so during the Clinton years and this is still low 62%. We still have people who could be participating. So all of these problems will be solved if more people were to participate and take those jobs. Why don't they take those jobs? Sometimes it's a geographic mismatch. Sometimes it is a skills mismatch and but very often it is the jobs are not paying enough. So if you want to give uh Trump his flowers by closing the border, you've reduced the number of people taking the jobs uh off the books and then you have the businesses are going to have to raise their minimum wage. They're going to have to raise their offering wage, which then might get this 7% or so that are sitting on the sidelines to take their jobs. Crazy prediction. I wouldn't be surprised if we see Trump, who is obviously a populist, and I tweeted about this the other day, got almost a half million views or 400,000 views. What if um Trump decides he's going to raise the minimum wage? Not saying I endorse this or not, but it's incredibly low at seven bucks an hour. Obviously, in different cities and states, it's 15 to 20. But what if Trump said we're going to add a dollar to it or $2 to it over each year of the next three? this would be incredibly popular and it would get some of those people off the sidelines and maybe take these jobs. So, just a crazy prediction there, but I think it's a possibility and I think they're going to lose the midterms as it stands right now. It looks like I think that's the consensus opinion and they haven't been able to do something with this affordability. Well, I think most Americans would say if you raise the minimum wage uh that that would increase affordability. You can make the counter argument it's going to just be inflationary, but I think most Americans are going to believe in that. So, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw Trump take action there because he does take populist actions like this from time to time.

David Friedberg: You actually the economic literature on what raising the minimum wage does.

Jason Calakanis: Yes. It can increase inflation and it can lower the it can raise inflation and it can lower the profitability of businesses. Yeah. And move stuff offshore. No, what it does is it makes it illegal to hire someone whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage and so it is shown to create higher unemployment in those segments of the economy. It's like one of those core findings of economists. So yeah, it's true that some people will be a beneficiary of getting a higher minimum wage, but then there'll be other people who just lose their jobs and it creates an incentive for those employers to shift more labor towards automation. So if you're already worried about those people losing their jobs to automation, that's a downside. So anyway, if the minimum wage were a panacea and it just increased everyone's living standards without having downsides, why wouldn't you make the minimum wage $100 an hour? You know, why would you know, everyone would just keep raising it infinitely? Obviously, it doesn't work because if you raise the minimum wage too much, which is to say more than the value of someone's labor, then they just get unemployed. looking at what happened in the different cities or in Australia or other countries, they have a much higher minimum wage and they have much more happiness. Businesses and prices go up about 20% 10 to 20%. So in Australia, if you go to a restaurant or if you go to a Scandinavian country, things might cost 10% 20% more, but you have a happier population. Uh and yes, it could lead to more, you know, automation. We got rid of cashiers because it became too expensive in New York to pay 15 to 20 bucks for a cashier. Sure. But we have really low minimum. We have very low unemployment now. And the businesses can clearly afford to pay an extra buck an hour or two bucks an hour. So there's the theoretical academic argument which you are correct on and I understand it fully well. And then there's the reality on the field which is Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Australia, other places have a much higher minimum wage. they have higher happiness in the population. I don't actually think it will have any impact because I think it's artificially low, but that's just one man's opinion. I think it would change the game here in America and I think it would actually do something to your uh concern Freeberg about socialism. I think that if people felt that there was a, you know, kind of a backs stop against this low low cost of labor, it might actually make people pretty stoked, you know, that they could get a higher paying hourly job and it might take some of that edge off in the same way universal healthcare might do that. But again, just one man's opinion.

David Sachs: I got to say on all this economic data, I I think we're kind of missing the lead here, which is we are at the beginning of an economic boom. Again, we saw it in the GDP growth rates in Q3 and Q4 last year. Over 4% Q3, over 5% Q4. We just had a January job report where the economy added 172,000 new private sector jobs. This blew away the expectation which was around 70,000. At the same time, the government shed 42,000 government jobs. The net of this was to bring the unemployment rate down to 4.3%. So, I remember a few months ago, JCL, you were ringing your hands about the fact that the unemployment rate had ticked up. Well, now it's back down and you're seeing a lot of jobs being created in construction, especially non-residential construction. Has to do with the data centers, the AI boom that's going on. 33,000 new construction jobs in January. We've seen in President Trump's second term, you've had 615,000 new private sector jobs been created. While again like we talked about over 300,000 government jobs have been cut which increases the productivity of the economy and it does what Secretary Besson says which is rep privatize the economy. So I just think that the overall economic news is really good. Again we have this AI boom going on. There's a new chart showing that the capex for this year that's expected just from the four leading hyperscalers is $600 billion just from four companies. That's a roughly 2% tailwind to GDP growth right there. That is just the capex. That doesn't include all the ROI that you might get from that infrastructure on the software side, on the application side, the productivity side. So, we have a boom going on and I feel like everyone's kind of blackpilling about this. Uh, you know, they're focusing on this

Jason Calakanis: I agree

David Sachs: CBO report that has unrealistically low growth rates.

Jason Calakanis: We're going to print 6%.

David Sachs: Or they're doom scrolling about Epstein or what have you.

David Sachs: And I just think when we look back on this period, it could end up being a little bit like the late 90s. Remember when we had, you know, we look back on the late 90s, we're like, "Wow, we had like phenomenal economic growth.

Jason Calakanis: Golden age.

David Sachs: Golden age. Economic labor participation. the internet,

David Sachs: right? But if you remember what politics were like at that time period, all anyone talked about about was whether Bill Clinton got a from Lewinsky.

David Sachs: So my point is just again, I'm not sure we're focused on the right things. I suspect we'll look back on this time period as the beginning of a new golden age.

Jason Calakanis: I agree.

Jason Calakanis: I think you're correct. And just in terms of the hand ringing comment, anytime a statistic is 10 15%, I highlight it. I wouldn't use hand ringing. I would just say we generally look at that when we went from 4.1% which is where Trump inherited it went up to 4.5 it's about a 10% increase in one year if that trend were to continue that would be notable but to your point it's gone down and that is because the border I believe the southern border is closed and as you're pointing out we've got a lot of good news in the economy so people are hiring still and uh so we are in really good economic shape I would say it's hard to deny that yeah

David Sachs: all The job creation has been enjoyed by native born Americans as well. All the job loss has been on non-nativeborn Americans which is pretty remarkable. So that I think is is also going to acrude to the benefit of of more Americans. By the way, just on the unemployment thing, there was a slight tick up in October because of the October one buyouts. Remember Doge created the the buyout program

Jason Calakanis: and September or October? When did they hit?

David Sachs: It was October 1st was the deadline for that. And so we had a tick up in unemployment related to that. But remember, all of those were voluntary buyouts. They all chose the Doge option. That's what created the tick up in unemployment, but again, it was all, I think, a good and voluntary tick up. And now the unemployment rate has ticked down. So again, the job creation right now is strong.

Jason Calakanis: And to just put a finer point on it, the top two areas where illegal aliens are working in the United States, most people don't know this, construction, number one, and the second one is leisure and hospitality. So you got two and a half million people working in those two categories. Which is why I said if you want to see more Americans take jobs and you want to see wages go up. If you went to those businesses and you find those businesses for hiring illegal aliens, which is the easiest thing in the world to do, you just show up at a construction site, you take pictures of everybody who is working illegally, which is what they used to do in the ICE agency. They would then do um you know surveillance of construction sites and then they would go and find the construction person and then they had to hire Americans or that construction company would get in serious trouble. There's been multi-million dollar fines done over the last 20 years specifically on construction sites and that would drive more people to raise the wages of construction workers which would even lower unemployment more and increase labor participation. That's where the big win is. Go to construction sites.

David Friedberg: You want you want ICE to randomly raid employers, construction sites.

Jason Calakanis: I would use the term raid. Raid is no. I survey

David Friedberg: and just check everyone's papers. You want I showing up everywhere. You want

Jason Calakanis: number one, they're doing this already, gentlemen. This is well within their purview. Look up the legal. They have been doing this for 30 years. This is actually the technique they used before raiding cities in a chaotic way. They went, they surveiled, which is their right to do. They have the right to do that. I didn't say raid. I said surveil. That is a peaceful, quiet thing to do. And then they find business owners. The business owners are the people who are causing this problem. The if there was not a job available in construction for 20, 30, 40 bucks an hour off the books and not paying taxes, those immigrants who are crossing illegally would not be here. If they couldn't get a $30 an hour off the book job, working at a hotel or as a dishwasher, they would not come. And the blame need to stop hiring them. What do you mean?

David Friedberg: Surveil surveile. So what is how do they how do they with a camera figure out if someone's illegal? What's the camera figuring out?

Jason Calakanis: Okay. So you guys, it's very simple. And I

David Friedberg: Oh, you have to scan first and so then you'll know who you guys are.

Jason Calakanis: No, I want to hear I want to hear I want to hear you want to hear the answer and how misinformed the three of you are and biased. I will tell you you're all misinformed and biased.

David Friedberg: Surveil someone to figure out they're illegal.

Jason Calakanis: It's super simple. You go to the construction site. Everybody checks in their morning. They have a truck. This has been done for decades, gentlemen. They take pictures of everybody. Then they go in at the end of the day after surveilling for weeks, Chama. And it's they have done this already. This is all facts. They've had multiple cases where they go to the construction site, they take pictures, they take a video, then they go to the business owner and say, "Show us these people's payubs." And the business owner goes, "I don't have payubs for these people." And they say, "Okay, here's a video of them working for 8 hours a day. Where's their payub? Show us their taxes. The businesses are paying people off the books. That is tax evasion. And then they got multi-million dollar fines. Here's a very important case. This is from back in 2017. The Justice Department and ICE went after a group which was hiring illegal aliens. This is the largest payment ever in an immigration case. 95 million recovered, 80 million criminal forfeite, 15 million in civil payments. That represented, according to our Justice Department in 2017, the largest ever levied immigration case, we can solve almost all of the immigration issues with the exception of maybe criminal gangs. just by doing basic surveillance, basic, you know, detective work, asking these businesses to show the payubs of the people working for them. And ICE has been doing this. They've already been doing this.

David Friedberg: Your suggestion is to do this for every company in America.

Jason Calakanis: Okay. So again, you're being hyperbolic and you're not negot

Jason Calakanis: I said I said this at the top. You pick the number one employer of illegal aliens, 2.5 million people working construction. You start with the largest construction sites and then you work backwards. Then you start with the largest restaurant and hotel chains.

David Friedberg: If Stephen Miller were doing this, you'd say he's not compassionate enough. You call him a fascist.

Jason Calakanis: I have Nope. Incorrect. Once again, incorrect. I have stated publicly here on the pod and I have stated publicly on Twitter that this is actually what Steven Miller should do because this would go after the people who are causing the immigration problem. The people immigration problem are the people. Let me finish. Let me finish that. The people causing this problem are the business owners. They are providing the incentive to come here. Steven Miller should stop doing the crazy raids and he should go and just

David Friedberg: You don't think it's the government benefits that are incentivizing people to come.

Jason Calakanis: I think that's like far down the list. Two, three, four.

David Friedberg: Far down the list.

Jason Calakanis: Yes.

David Friedberg: Is the free healthcare and the free food and the free.

Jason Calakanis: Actually have statistics. I can give you a statistic on. According to this LA Times survey, 75% of immigrants come here for better job opportunities. People coming to America illegally are coming here for economic reasons. They are not coming here to commit crimes. They are not coming here to get benefits. That is way down the list. That is a small percentage.

David Friedberg: How is this going to deport all the gang bangers, the rapists, the murderers, the ones who aren't working on a farm? They're not doing

Jason Calakanis: That's a totally separate issue. They should go do that. That's a separate issue. They should go do those and go after

David Friedberg: that is what ICE was doing. They're trying to round up the known criminals for whom they get warrants and then they capture them and deport them. That's a separate problem.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah, those are two separate problems. I'm not talking about the problem of gang bangers. You can do gang bangers. I'm talking about if you actually want to move big numbers. The gang bangers are small number. The people working in construction working at hotels are a big number. Yeah, they're both equally important. Saxs, we're in agreement. Okay.

David Sachs: Yeah. The the thing we're not doing at scale is going after the businesses that are creating the incentive for the majority of people who come here.

Jason Calakanis: Ferrari has a new car coming out. It's going to be their first all electric vehicle. Very polarizing. Here's an illustration of the vehicle from Car and Driver. This is not the accurate one because it's going to be revealed in May, but this is what they think it's going to look like. 1,000 plus horsepower, four electric motors, 0 to 60 in under 2.5 seconds. Uh 330 mi range. It's the heaviest Ferrari ever, 5100 lb compared to the iconic F40, which was but 3,000 lb. It's going to launch in May of 2026. But we got to see the interior, and this is what everybody's buzzing about. It's gone viral on the interwebs. former Apple design chief Johnny IV uh on his team with his partner Mark Nuome who also designed the iconic Ford 021C concept car were involved in this.

David Friedberg: Wait, what is that?

Jason Calakanis: Uh it's this is like if you're a car nerd, this was like this incredibly innovative moment in design that never happened that Ford did it. It looks very similar to an Apple product.

David Friedberg: Here's the key for the new looks like an animated character in cars or something like that, you know. You have this beautiful square glass key like an iPhone. You put it in and the yellow Ferrari yellow drains out and goes into the shifter. That was one nuance that people thought was very beautiful. The screen looks very Mac inspired except unlike Tesla which is uh no buttons and removing buttons. They're adding buttons here and making the buttons very tactile. All the sports car enthusiasts love tactile memory based buttons that you can just have fun with and flip and feel like you're a fighter pilot. Finally, the uh turning the car on is like starting up a jet. You have a launch button you twist and press and it makes the whole car turn Ferrari orange or red. And uh yeah, that's the inside sachs. You buying one or not? You like it?

David Sachs: I saw I saw everyone just, you know, all over this design and I thought it was a little bit unfair in the sense that I actually overall like the interior. I thought it found a compromise between, you know, let's call it the all glass cockpit of a Tesla versus a totally analog old Ferrari interior. Like you said, it it had a combination of screens, but then also buttons. And they made a point of showing that the buttons were not only nicely tactile, but they also made pleasing sounds and that kind of stuff. It seemed very heavy duty. So, I thought the interior actually was pretty good. Again, nice balance between kind of the interior of a race car, the simplicity of that iPad screen, but also having enough sort of buttons that you develop muscle memory around where all the controls are. You don't have to go hunting for them through a menu.

David Friedberg: I thought the missier wasn't on the inside. I thought it was on the outside. I hate the look of the outside of this car.

David Sachs: It looks to me,

Jason Calakanis: by the way, just to be clear, that look is what people are projecting. It's not the final version.

David Friedberg: I think this is terrible. This to me looks like a Corvette maybe or even like a Franazam. I mean

David Sachs: it looks like a Model 3. Yeah.

David Friedberg: I don't like the What's that like the black part of the front or even the

David Sachs: grill?

David Friedberg: The grill. It looks terrible and the things going on on the sides

David Sachs: and then the back almost looks like a hatchback or something. It's just, you know, uh a Ferrari should look swoopier. It should look curvier and there should be fewer different pieces to it.

Jason Calakanis: 100%.

David Sachs: So, I don't know. Doesn't look right to me as a Ferrari, but I thought the inside actually was was fine.

Jason Calakanis: I like it.

David Sachs: Yeah.

Jason Calakanis: Chimop, you buyer. When's the last time you actually drove yourself, Sax? Have you actually used a steering wheel in the last decade? When's the last time you actually used the steering wheel?

David Sachs: Full full self-driving has made me a driver again because I just set the full self-driving.

Jason Calakanis: Wow. And it's such a game changer. Yeah.

David Sachs: Well, with with FSD.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah. Okay. So, you're now driving around Texas. I like it

David Sachs: with FSD.

Jason Calakanis: Okay.

David Sachs: Because the Uber takes forever. So now I'm just like, you know,

Jason Calakanis: you you like uh you've always liked to drive Jamoth. I think you you drive yourself these days or you uh

Chamath Palihapitiya: I drive myself in a Model Y with FSD or I take a Whimo. One of the two.

Jason Calakanis: Yeah, Whimo's in the valley now. Yeah. On the piss.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I've had a Ferrari. What I would tell you is that there's just something that's very unique. There's a Ferrari experience that's different from every other car. And I think that the new CEO, Benedtovenia, is a very talented executive and I think that he's probably going to land something beautiful. The thing is that we are racing against time. And I've said this before, but FSD and autonomy is going to shift the number of people that even know what it means to drive. It will feel like when we look at somebody who really embraces thoroughbed racing, it's just going to happen in smaller and smaller places and less and less often. And that's not because these cars aren't beautiful, but it's because the risk will not make any sense for most people under most conditions. And I think that's the big thing that's going to change. Like the car culture in America was a profound part of the American culture. You know, driving from A to B on vacation, the sense of freedom, the building of the interstate highway system. These were huge parts of what made America great and the rails on which all this productivity sat on top of. And now I think it's all going to change. So I don't know. I mean, I think the car will probably be beautiful. Like Ferraris are beautiful. There's a Ferrari dealership in Redwood City. And whenever I drive by it, I slow down and I look out.

Jason Calakanis: Yum, yum.

Chamath Palihapitiya: They make beautiful cars.

Jason Calakanis: Piece of art. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And I think in places like China and India, they're always going to have a market. But I think in places like the United States, it's going to become so expensive to pay for the insurance if you are driving yourself

Chamath Palihapitiya: that the idea that you would buy any car is going to feel tougher and tougher just because I think the math is going to be tough. But the experience inside of the Ferrari is second to none. So it probably is that there's going to be a bunch of high-end cars like Ferrari where you pay for the experience, you're in a position to pay for the car, you'll pay for the insurance, the luxury, all of it, and then the rest of us will be using FSD or Whimo

Jason Calakanis: 100%.

Jason Calakanis: I we have two Model Y's and we have to get another car and it's like, well, what else can we buy? We have no choice. It's either buy one of the last X's.

David Sachs: I'm so mad the X well deprecating the X really bought I have a real problem now which is I have five kids so the X is the only car that can manage seven people so I need I need a new

Jason Calakanis: there is a three row by the way Model Y but it's a bit tight.

David Sachs: It's a bit tight. It's not

Jason Calakanis: it's a bit tight. I This is I I wish Elon would have made the minivan or the three row SUV and who knows maybe he does someday. When I was in Abu Dhabi, I saw my dream car. It is this Lexus minivan and the doors open and it's like first class airline seats.

David Sachs: Yes.

Jason Calakanis: And the front is completely blacked out. So you have total privacy. This car. Yes. This car.

David Sachs: Yes.

Jason Calakanis: This is not It's not for sale in the US.

David Sachs: It's not available in America. Why is this car or minivan, whatever, not available in the United States?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think it's the Lexus LM. And then there's the Alfred in Japan. My favorite cars.

Jason Calakanis: This is the interior.

David Sachs: Show the view captain's chairs. It's got a full screen and divider between the two with the drivers in the front.

Jason Calakanis: Um and then you have this luxurious. Those aren't the captain's chair. Show the captain. There's the captain.

David Sachs: See those beautiful captain's chairs? They're gorgeous. Basically like an executive van.

Jason Calakanis: These are like Etihad first class airline seats. It's unbelievable. Look at these. Look at these two seats.

David Sachs: Unbelievable. Gorgeous. And you have a full monitor in front of you, David. You press a button and the monitor rises and falls so you can talk to your driver or have CNBC on.

David Friedberg: I like getting in and out of SUVs or minivans. The height is good for me.

Jason Calakanis: So easy to get. And the Alfred is the other one. None of these are available in the US. These are the number one cars in China, Singapore, the Middle East for chauffeer driven cars. They're incredible.

David Friedberg: It's called what? An Alfred. What's that?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Alfred is the Toyota version. And then Lexus is obviously the higher brand of Toyota and they make I think it's called the LS is the name for these. Cannot get them in.

Jason Calakanis: All right, boys. I love you very much. That's another amazing episode of the Allin podcast. 261 weeks and counting. Strong.

David Sachs: Episode 261.

Jason Calakanis: I think it's 261. Yeah.

David Sachs: All right. Back at you. Let's go.

Jason Calakanis: Love you boys. Love you.

David Friedberg: Let your winners ride.

David Sachs: Rainman David

Jason Calakanis: and it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

David Friedberg: Queen of

David Sachs: besties are

Jason Calakanis: my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh man, my habitasher will meet up.

David Friedberg: We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

Jason Calakanis: Your feet.

David Sachs: We need to get Mercury's back.

Jason Calakanis: I'm going all in.