All-In PodcastE140: LK-99, Sclerotic establishments, Fitch downgrades US debt, Trump indicted... again
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,129 words- 0:00 – 0:53
Bestie intros!
- JCJason Calacanis
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sachs found the gel.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh my God.
- JCJason Calacanis
This guy, he's running for office. If he shows up with a red tie next week, we're fucked. (laughs) That's the end of the show. He shows up with a red tie and a blue shirt. Are you coming out of your law retirement? Are you gonna be an active lawyer defending Trump?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Sachs, you look really good, I gotta say, with the, with the gel. That looks... That's a really good look for you.
- DSDavid Sacks
Just got out of the shower, used a comb.
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, the weekly shower in Italy? (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Good look, right?
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, it's not a bad look.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Did you use soap?
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Did you, uh, did you (beep) or no?
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh, no.
- DSDavid Sacks
I didn't have time.
- NANarrator
You don't even gotta get-
- JCJason Calacanis
Didn't have 90 seconds?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, I didn't wanna keep you guys waiting another two minutes. (laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- NANarrator
We're going all in. Don't let your winner slide. Rain Man David Sachs. We're going all in.
- DSDavid Sacks
And it's, uh-
- NANarrator
We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Love you,
- NANarrator
... a queen of kinwah. I'm going all
- 0:53 – 24:39
LK-99 breakdown
- NANarrator
in.
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All-In Podcast. It is August, and we just might have had the most consequential week in terms of politics and science in a long time. Could be, could be the week of the year. Friedberg's been going nuts inside the group chat because everyone is trying to replicate this LK-99 room temperature semi-conductor experiment.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Superconductor.
- JCJason Calacanis
Superconductor, yes. So, God, I, I mean, this has been... Uh, what has it been, like, 10 days? And now everybody is on Twitter trying to recreate this. Maybe I should just let you cue this up, Friedberg, since this is the first time, perhaps the last, that we're gonna start the show with Science Corner. So, Science Corner takeover week. Tell us, i- is this legit? 'Cause you flipped from, "This is a fraud," to, "This is changing the world." Like, every day, you, you seem to have a new piece of evidence. Where, where are you today with this? Is this the real deal?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I mean, it's probably, it's probably somewhere in the middle, but it leads to a path that could get us to the Holy Grail, which is room temperature superconducting material, which we've talked about twice on this show before, and I encourage folks to go look at the episode we did. A couple ago, after the original claim was made a few months ago that turned out to not be true, but the description in the paper that came out on how to make this material was chased by hundreds of labs around the world over the last few days. Folks have been live streaming it on these Chinese websites, BiliBili and Twitter and Twitch. Everyone from Russian scientists to Chinese to Korean to American to European. I will say one thing that I think is really profound, which it is, it... This is the first time in a very long time that I've seen so many people share a unified voice about optimism about an abundant future, optimism about a big breakthrough, rather than get on social media to share a voice about fear and anger at someone or something, and to hear everyone around the world get together and be excited about the potential of this discovery and its applications. It's really profound to see and it's really amazing and wonderful to see. Now, where we are, a bunch of labs took the described chemical structure of this material, LK-99, which has lead and phosphorus, oxygen, and some copper in it, and put it into these modeling systems, these computer modeling systems, to try and understand where do the electrons flow, where do the electrons sit in this material if this material is made the way it's described. And, um, five different labs have now published papers that show that the way that this material is supposedly produced, it should create these pathways or these energy states with the electrons that theoretically could enable superconductivity at a very high temperature. And so that's an, um, a very confirmatory signal that computer modeling of the electron clouds... 'Cause remember, electrons, even though they move around the nucleus of an atom, we only kind of have a probability statement of where they are. So, if you look at all the probability statements of all the, uh, atoms stuck together and you try and figure out what's the aggregate probability of where electrons are, it indicates that there are these pathways that theoretically could allow for electrons to move freely through the material and be completely void of any sort of resistance, which is superconductivity. And, and, and so that's what's really profound a- about the modeling outputs from five very separate independent labs.
- JCJason Calacanis
Just so we're clear, when electricity normally moves down an electric wire or in computers, in CPUs, GPUs, whatever, there is resistance. That resistance results in loss, it results in heat, and the only way we've been able to reduce that loss is by making it freezing cold. Like, significantly cold.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Totally right, yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
So, electrons- Now, if we were to do this when we didn't have to make it cold, that means that these superconducting experiments move from the laboratory, where it's forced to be cold, to the real world. Our desktop, you used an analogy in chat that I thought was really interesting of, like, a superconducting road where... And, and then you don't lose energy. Right now, how much energy do we lose transporting it-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
... to our houses?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right. So, you know, I would say on the order of 70% of energy we produce is lost to heat and friction.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Think about moving a car down the road. When you move a car down the road, you're having to put energy in to overcome the friction of the car hitting the road. So, if the car could hover above the road, the friction goes away and the energy needed to move the car goes way, way down. When you build a data center, the electrons that are moving through the copper and the semiconductors bump into other atoms. When they bump into the atoms in the material, they shake those atoms. When atoms shake, that is heat. So, that's why copper wire heats up when you put electricity through it. You're moving electrons through it, some of those electrons bump into the copper atoms, shakes the copper atoms, they get hot, and then some of the electrons make their way through. The rate at which electrons are bumping into other atoms is the resistance of the material.
- JCJason Calacanis
So, said plainly-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Um, and so, so all this energy-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... that's going into cooling down data centers and all this energy is lost in computing-... uh, to heat. And, uh, same in, in, electric motors could be reinvented, semiconductors, uh, integrated circuits would be reinvented. And like I said, if you had enough of this material, you could put it in roads, and because superconductors also reflect magnetic fields, you could put magnets on the bottom of cars and float them (laughs) above the, the ground and cruise around without any friction. So there's all these amazing applications.
- JCJason Calacanis
And if any of this is true, you, this 70% loss of... and then all this energy put into cooling data centers, we could be looking at doubling or tripling the amount of energy available, because we built a certain amount of energy infrastructure. So this would be all gains if we could figure out how to-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah. But yeah-
- JCJason Calacanis
... leverage this technology. Massive gains-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It would be a-
- JCJason Calacanis
... and massive abundance, it would lower the cost of electricity by 10%? 100%?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I mean, look, assuming huge infrastructure investments, which would take probably decades to do-
- JCJason Calacanis
Sure.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... you would, you would get there. But in the near term, there are these incredible applications. Quantum computers are built using little superconductors as the qubit, and so the superconductor holds the qubit state. So this idea that we could now have room temperature quantum computing is also a very-
- JCJason Calacanis
Game changer.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... profound one, game changer. Low cost and, and the first thing that would be changed is likely electronic components. So we would take electronic components and redesign them using superconducting material that would allow you to reduce heat loss and energy loss, and that would have a big transformative effect on, for example, the big effort right now to make more AI chips, GPU chips, to do matrix transformations.
- JCJason Calacanis
There is some precedent for this. People are now creating optical bridges between GPUs and CPUs in order to reduce the heat, so they're using optics, basically light, to transfer data.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Fiber optic interconnects, yeah. Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
That's been the big lift right now, from what I understand, in GPUs and data centers, is just-
- 24:39 – 46:04
Funding landscape for breakthrough science, sclerotic establishments, boomer incumbents
- JCJason Calacanis
we're gonna have a, a rash of VCs running into this next and start funding this stuff.
- DSDavid Sacks
Well-
- JCJason Calacanis
Material science. Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah. I mean, my attitude is kind of like wake me up when you know it's real.
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Because, Friedberg, it's nice that if this is real, then-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
... it's great that there's all this positive energy around it. But that's like a big caveat. Until we know that there's something real here, I think it's premature for everybody to say that this is like some wonderful thing. Now, if we find out that the science is real and then it's just a debate over commercialization of it, then yeah, I agree. That would be like a really positive moment.
- JCJason Calacanis
I just love the fact that when something positive in the world happens or when something negative happens, we have this amazing platform for everybody, social media, X.com, formerly Twitter, where everybody can get together around this campfire and just start discussing it and speculating. Now, some people don't like speculation. Obviously, if there's a school shooting or a tragedy, a building burns down, uh, the fog of war as we've seen in the constant Ukraine coverage, you know, y- you can have... It's very easy to make mistakes-
- DSDavid Sacks
I don't, I don't mind-
- JCJason Calacanis
... when you're hashing this stuff in real time. But I love the real-time nature of the world-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
... and the pace we're moving at. It's, it's kind of delightful to me.
- DSDavid Sacks
I, I don't have a problem with the speculation and there is a fun element to it. But when you start talking about investing in it, like I said, wake me up when you know it's real. There's a really funny meme that VC Braggs posted. Nick, you wanna throw this up?
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, VC Braggs. Shout out to VC Braggs. (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
This is good. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
It's, this is a famous meme of a kid drowning-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's so good. That's so good.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... while the mom is playing with another kid and not paying attention to the drowning kid-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh.
- JCJason Calacanis
It's sort of like the guy who's holding hands with his girlfriend, but looking over his shoulder and whistling at the other woman by. And superconductors is the happy little kid. VCs is the mom, and generative AI is drowning.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
But then they show him underwater, yeah, somebody who's tied to a chair with chains and skeletons.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's gotta be the last hype cycle. Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
The last hype cycle, creator economy, crypto, Web3.0.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's good.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, it's pretty funny. It's pretty, it's pretty great.
- 46:04 – 1:09:12
Fitch downgrades US debt rating
- DFDavid Friedberg
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I was thinking a lot about the fiscal spending problem in the US. And we should talk about the Fitch rating downgrade that happened this week. I've got some, uh, data I'd like to share. One thing I was thinking about was how tied the age of Congress is to our fiscal spending problem. If you think about someone who's young, they're gonna want to invest for their future and think about the future. If you're someone who's old, you live for the day and you don't think about the future. And I worry so much that the aging of the establishment that makes the decisions about how money is spent creates a, a psychological barrier-
- JCJason Calacanis
It's a perverse incentive. Yeah, they-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... or positioning that's all about giving away all the money today instead of making the right decision to make sure that we have a prosperous tomorrow. And that's why I think so many of these things kind of slip through. If you put a 20-year-old in charge that was well-informed, in charge of some of the fiscal policy, environmental policy, energy policy decisions, defense policy, it would be a very different set of decision-making than someone who's in their 80s.
- JCJason Calacanis
Inheritance tax.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah. I mean, pensions.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So anyway, we should talk ... Like, you wanna talk about the Fitch downgrade? 'Cause I think it's a really important story this week.
- JCJason Calacanis
Fitch, the rating agency, downgraded the US's long-term debt by one notch from AAA to AA+. Only nine countries have AAA ratings from the top three rating agencies, S&P Global, Fitch, and Moody's. Those are Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Singapore, and Australia. What you can take from that is you gotta have a good balance sheet and you have to have high functioning governments. The m- highest functioning governments in the world are the Nordics. That's why you see Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway there. According to NPR, the negative reaction hasn't been as strong as, uh, 2011. That was the first time the US was downgraded from AAA to AA+ by the S&P. That also had to do with the debt ceiling. The markets kind of shrugged off, largely shrugged off the Fitch downgrade. Main reasons for the downgrade is obviously higher interest rates, aging population, the debt-to-GDP ratio, which we've talked about here. But government kept coming up over and over again and how dysfunctional our government is. And the debt ceiling is one of the key manifestations of that. Your thoughts on this? For the first half of the show, Friedberg, you're an optimist. But are you now going to switch to declinist?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I wouldn't say declinist.
- JCJason Calacanis
Are you gonna switch to declinist mode now? Or are you still in optimist mode?
- DSDavid Sacks
I mean, in J-Cal's view, unless you're a cheerleader for every-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I know.
- DSDavid Sacks
... stupid government policy-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's so silly, J-Cal.
- DSDavid Sacks
... you're a declinist.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I know. It's, it's a ... J-Cal, listen, it-I want to be honest, I don't think so. I think he, like... and I concur. I think you can highlight that there are concerns with US fiscal policy-
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... that are putting us in decline in our spending spiral-
- DSDavid Sacks
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... with the US currency reserves, which there are now diversification efforts underway, and I'll talk about this in one second. And that doesn't mean that the US isn't the most exceptional place to do engineering and entrepreneurism and have freedom of speech and thought and so on, but there are elements of the US that put things at risk. So let me just point out these two charts. If you guys pull the first one up, this is a pretty striking chart that I think I showed this before. This is federal government interest payments that are being made. We're now up to, you know, a trillion dollars. The chart, as you can see, a year, has spiked. And by the way, that number is spiking further, and we'll talk about this in one second. As a result of rising interest rates and increased fiscal spending. So this is now becoming a pretty sizable part of our budget. And as of now, paying the interest on our debt is a larger capital outlay for the federal government than defense spending. The second chart shows what happened in the last week, which is that 30-year treasuries have been sold off. And as that's happened, treasury yields have climbed. So there's been about a 10% decline in pricing and a, you know, concurrent nearly 10% increase. And Bill Ackman, you know, basically said today that he's shorting 30-year treasuries, he thinks we're going to go to five and a half percent long-term rates. Currently, the 30-year treasury sitting at 4.3. And remember I told you guys this, after this thing I went to a few weeks ago, that there were two prominent economists who shared that they think we're going to be facing long-term rates in the five to 7% range, very long-term rates for a very long period of time. That it is a new fiscal regime. And then if you pull up the last link I sent, Nick, this is a report made by the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee of the Treasury Department. And I just want to read a couple of quotes from this report. This just came out today and it was published... it was sent over to the Secretary of the Treasury yesterday, and it said; "Since the advisory committee convened in May, two-year treasury yields are about 100 basis points higher, while 10-year treasuries have increased by about 40 basis points. The bank holdings of non-mortgage backed government securities, mainly treasuries, have actually declined by 146 billion so far this year." So that means banks are selling off their treasuries. The committee goes on to say, "At the same time, treasury investors have noted the treasury supply will need to increase to address the rise in public deficits as tax revenues have come in weaker and government spending has increased. Issuance needs will be additionally impacted by the timing of a recession," so on. Then they said, "Based on the marketable borrowing estimates published on July 31st, Treasury..." This is crazy. "Treasury currently expects privately held net borrowing of $1.007 trillion in this quarter with an assumed end of September cash balance of 650." And then they said, "We expect another $852 billion of borrowing next quarter." That means Treasury is going to try and issue and sell $2 trillion worth of treasury bonds in the next two quarters. That's $2 trillion of new borrowing by the federal government to pay our bills. At the start of the year, they were estimating 1.6 trillion for the year, which was an insane number. Now we're talking about 2 trillion in just two quarters. So rates are climbing. As a result, we need to borrow more. And this is a perfect manifestation of the debt spiral problem that we've talked about multiple times. Our fiscal spending outlay and the rising interest rates combine to create an insurmountable debt spiral that is now manifesting in the fact that we need to sell $2 trillion of treasuries. And here's the crazy statistic that they said; "In reviewing recent demand for US treasuries in auctions, the committee noted that an increasing percentage of supplies being absorbed by investment funds while foreign participation has remained range bound." That means as we're trying to sell more treasuries, governments... foreign governments are buying fewer of them, which means that the US currency as a reserve is no longer the place that everyone wants to plow their money as much as it used to be. It is in decline. Now, the other thing I want to share, which I think is absolutely critical, is how do we address this gap? Well, the one way is these entitlement programs. And so several Republican presidential candidates, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Mike Pence, have all publicly stated on the campaign trail that they're promoting programs to cut Social Security benefits for people that are 30 and 40 years old. And here's the response to that. So they've gone out and they've started saying that. A poll was done, and on that poll, 82% of voters oppose the push to cut Social Security for Americans under 50. 82%. So where is this going to take us? This is what is so scary to me, J Cal. I'm not an American declinist. I believe in the American system, it benefited me and my family. But I do worry that we find ourselves in a whirlpool that it's very hard to get out of because the populous says we don't want to make the cuts that are necessary in order for us to save ourselves. That's what's so scary to me, and I've said it before, I think it's worth saying again. That's it. I'm done.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's not a problem with populism. I mean, the elites are saying it too. There's no appetite in the DNC to cut or reform Social Security. Are you kidding?
- JCJason Calacanis
It's very unpopular. How do you get elected saying-
- DSDavid Sacks
I don't know why those Republicans-
- JCJason Calacanis
How do you get elected saying...
- DSDavid Sacks
I hadn't seen that article. I would advise all those campaigns not to touch that rail. They're going to electrocute themselves. I think Trump has the right political instincts on this point, which is you cannot touch Social Security as a single party effort. It has to be bipartisan, and there is no bipartisan will to do anything. So I think you're right about the larger point.
- JCJason Calacanis
Chamath, your thoughts on Friedberg's manifesto that 80% of the public does not want to cut spending, they're in favor of Social Security for people under 50 years old, and we have a trillion dollars in debt payments, and we're in a death spiral because we don't have the will?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And we're borrowing two trillion... In 180 days, we're borrowing an extra two trillion.
- DSDavid Sacks
That's the real point.
- JCJason Calacanis
... that this is the, the, yeah-
- 1:09:12 – 1:12:04
Trump's newest indictment
- JCJason Calacanis
So in other news, the GOP's lead candidate for the 2024 race-
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... Donald Trump has been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election and stop-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Or it-
- JCJason Calacanis
... the peaceful transfer of power.
- DSDavid Sacks
... transition.
- JCJason Calacanis
The indictment has four counts and is the third criminal case, for those of you playing along at home. Four counts include conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights. Trump campaign not shockingly called it fake news. The indictment feels like it's got him dead to rights. And this is on top of-
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
... the Oath Keepers founder, Stewart Rhodes, getting 18 years and a bunch of other cases. In addition to that, the DOJA prosecutors also accused Trump of ordering employees to delete security videos in the classified documents case. The cover-up, of course, being worse than the crime. Looks like they got him dead to rights on that one as well. All of this against the backdrop of DeSantis spending tens of millions of dollars and falling in his percentage. Sachs, explain to the audience why this is Hunter Biden's fault and, uh, it's a deep state conspiracy. I kid. What are your thoughts on this?
- DSDavid Sacks
When you say they have him dead to rights, like, what, what do you mean by that?
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
What's your basis for saying that?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, exactly, what do you mean by that?
- DSDavid Sacks
D- d- dead, dead to rights on what charge?
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. So in this, uh, indictment, the 45 pages, uh, if you read it, you will see that they put up fake electorates and they knew that it wasn't going to work and they did it anyway after losing 60 cases. So tha- that's the belief of why this is such a serious case. And then also the cover-up, obstructing justice, and it looks like some of these maintenance workers are potentially flipping. And Mark Meadows, they claim has flipped as well. So... but, you know, hey, listen, everybody gets their day in court.
- DSDavid Sacks
The documents case is, is sort of separate. I mean, I think we should just stick to this, the, the big news here is-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, I mean, what do you think of the fact that he tried... this allegation that he tried to delete the videos? Do you think it's real or do you think it's made up on a deep state?
- DSDavid Sacks
I, I don't know. That, that's a, that's a detail about a piece of evidence in that case. I do think the documents case is on a sounder legal footing than the January 6th case.
- JCJason Calacanis
More dangerous to him, you're saying. More dangerous to him.
- DSDavid Sacks
It doesn't involve as many novel legal theories. Now, is it really dangerous? I think the American people think that, at the end of the day, that documents case is sort of a paperwork case and there are many other people who violated the classified requirements rules, like Sandy Berger, like David Petraeus, like Hillary Clinton, never prosecuted. So I think if they have him dead to rights on any of the cases, it's the documents case. But I also think that in the minds of the American people-
Episode duration: 1:29:55
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