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All-In PodcastAll-In Podcast

Why the datacenter backlash could cap America's AI lead

Ratepayer groups, doomer activists, and local politicians are blocking permits; Allbirds' AI-pivot stock surge shows how scarce compute has become.

Jason CalacanishostChamath PalihapitiyahostTravis KalanickguestDavid Sackshost
Apr 17, 20261h 30mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:42

    Bestie intros: Travis Kalanick joins the show!

    1. JC

      All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We've got the core four here, and dare I say-

    2. CP

      The king of atoms

    3. JC

      ... the king of atoms, yes. Captain Travis Kalanick is here. How you doing, brother?

    4. TK

      I'm pretty good. Pretty good. I'm, uh, sitting here doing the podcast just next door to David.

    5. JC

      Ah, yes. There you go.

    6. DS

      Don't reveal our locations.

    7. JC

      Please don't dox.

    8. TK

      I didn't put my address out there, dude.

    9. DS

      No, that's true.

    10. JC

      Don't worry. Mondami did. He's outside your houses right now [laughs] asking them to foreclose on them.

    11. DS

      Oh, he's trying to collect 3.9% or something?

    12. JC

      Yeah. He's, he... They decided-

    13. DS

      The, the pied-à-terre tax

    14. JC

      ... there's no rich people left in [laughs] New York, so he's looking for other cities to tax.

  2. 0:42 – 11:23

    Mamdani taxes the rich: new pied-à-terre tax coming to NYC

    1. CP

      Sorry. Is it, is it, is it 3.9% a year? Is it per year, or is it one off sum?

    2. DS

      I don't know if the percentage has been released yet, but the speculation I've seen is 3.9%, but I don't think that's final. But yeah, it's a pied-à-terre ta-tax, so if you have a-

    3. JC

      But every year?

    4. DS

      ... second home. Yeah, every year.

    5. CP

      Wow.

    6. JC

      And by the way, it's for any home over five million. [scoffs] There's no homes under five million in Manhattan. This is not a rich person tax. [laughs] This is within 15 miles of Midtown Manhattan, you're paying an extra tax. Uh, I don't, I don't even-

    7. DS

      But only... But J Cal, only if it's a pied-à-terre. So what it means is-

    8. JC

      Right

    9. DS

      ... that the most-

    10. JC

      Second homes

    11. DS

      ... Well, yeah, but the most elastic part of the market is what they're targeting for this tax. So in other words, people who don't live in New York, who just have it as a second or third home, who could buy that property anywhere-

    12. JC

      Yeah

    13. DS

      ... are now being taxed the most. So what do you think that's gonna do? It's gonna have a massive impact on demand for second homes in New York, which will crash the whole market.

    14. JC

      Yes. Congratulations, Mondami.

    15. CP

      But in a weird way, that'll be good for housing affordability in New York.

    16. DS

      Well, that- that's sort of the, the claim, but I don't think it'll be good for it because there'll be no incentive to build more.

    17. JC

      Yeah. All units matter. Every time you add units, people upgrade, and it's not like these are gonna be low-income housing. Like penthouse on 57th Street or, you know, in Gramercy, it... That's not low-income housing. You'd have to break it into seven units. Makes no sense. But by the way, I don't know if you guys saw the video, not to get too serious, but he's doxing a certain billionaire who owns a certain place, and he's literally pointing at his home.

    18. CP

      No, I said that to you, Jason. He's not doxing because everybody's known for years that Ken Griffin bought that place. Everybody knows that address. Everybody knows that unit. We all knew it. It was marketed widely. I don't think that's really doxing. He doesn't live there, and everybody knew he owned it. It would be-

    19. JC

      Okay

    20. CP

      ... very different if it was a place where somebody was keeping their primary residence and you didn't know and they stood in front of the house. That I would agree with you. I think this one is a little bit more tenuous.

    21. JC

      Okay, fair enough. But what I will tell you is it's a dog whistle. Crazy people, and this thing's been seen by 30, 40, 50 million people now. It's a dog whistle to say-

    22. CP

      That's true. That's true

    23. JC

      ... that's the next UnitedHealthcare CEO, and in the week that a fire... a, a Molotov cocktail and a bullet get shot into Sam Altman's house, it's deadly serious. And if you reversed it... I always reverse it. What if a Republican sat outside of Bernie Sanders' second or third home and said, "We should... This is his pied-à-terre. This is his summer home. We should add, you know, taxes to it." And I'm sure you could look up Bernie Sanders' home pretty easily. So it... Just before you point at people's homes and say, "This is the villain," be careful, folks, because then if something does happen to that person, like, you know, what happened to Sam Altman this week, and you feel however you want about him, but nobody deserves to have their house fire [beep] bombed or shot at, period, full stop.

    24. DS

      I just think that it's gonna kill the demand for... You know, it, it... Maybe people who already have a home in New York, like Ken Griffin, they probably are just gonna suck it up and pay the tax and keep whatever they have. But if you were a person who was thinking about buying a pied-à-terre in New York, you... there's no way you would do it now.

    25. JC

      Yeah.

    26. DS

      Because you don't know what the tax rate's gonna be, and it's gonna keep going up.

    27. CP

      After a decade with interest and inflation, you've effectively almost doubled the price of your unit. So if you're gonna buy a $10 million unit, you're probably then looking at a $20 million purchase price just to break even after about 10 or 11 years. That's crazy. The math doesn't work anymore.

    28. JC

      And what is the downstream effect of these individuals not coming to New York, going to a Knicks game-

    29. CP

      Nothing

    30. JC

      ... going to a restaurant? No.

  3. 11:23 – 27:28

    OpenAI's identity crisis: Leaked memo, enterprise pivot, Anthropic valuation flip

    1. JC

      All right, let's go to topic number one. OpenAI is apparently suffering from a bit of an identity crisis. On Sunday, OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser sent a four-page memo to employees. Obviously, it leaked immediately, probably the point of it, and she called out Anthropic. She said their $30 billion run rate is cap inflated by 8 billion due to a revenue share and some accounting with AI model providers. Chamath, you pointed that out in the last couple weeks. Also, she said Anthropic's story is built on, quote, "Fear, restriction, and the idea that a small group of elites should control AI." Obviously, she's a fan of the pod. She also laid out OpenAI's pivoting, and she said they are going hard after business customers, and they want to winThe agent platform layer. If you remember, they hired the architect of the open source project, OpenClaw. They didn't acquire OpenClaw, so Peter, uh, Steinberger is working at OpenAI. Cynical people said, "Hey, maybe they want his next set of innovations to go inside of OpenAI's products as opposed to the open source one." I kind of agree with that directionally. There's obviously Perplexity Computers doing really well. They quadrupled their revenue. And, uh, I was over at xAI earlier this week with Elon, and I can tell you, he's got some very cool stuff coming. And this new model, Spud, is coming, uh, from OpenAI. Here's your Polymarket seventy-five percent chance Spud is released next week. Additionally, and we'll go to the panel in just a second, on Tuesday, two days after this memo came out, obviously people write these memos to go directly to the press, so they're obviously trying to undercut Anthropic's valuation, and they feel that's a threat. That's my take. The FT cited anonymous OpenAI investors who are frustrated with the company's lack of focus. Here's the anonymous quote, quote, "You have ChatGPT, a one billion user business growing fifty to a hundred percent a year. What are you doing talking about enterprise and code? It's a deeply unfocused company." And, uh, we talked about this. ChatGPT's market share is going down as the number of users is going up because Gemini and Claude gaining significantly. And Meta just last week released their first proprietary model, and Apple doesn't have a product in market yet, but they do have a lot of users. So here's your GenAI website traffic. Let's start, uh, Chamath, with you, your thoughts on OpenAI. Should they be pivoting straight into business developers and getting focused on that, or should they stay focused on the consumer where they are the verb?

    2. CP

      As it relates to complex long-horizon coding tasks, what I can tell you from my team at eighty-ninety is Codex is better generally than Anthropic. And so what happens is for m- the more day-to-day work, I think it's more reliable to use the Claude ensemble of models. But when you're dealing with something that's very tricky and very complicated and a little bit more long horizon, Codex is really functional and really good. So I think if you're looking at it through the lens of OpenAI, what they're probably saying is, "Hey, hold on a second. If we allocate our resources and just double down and crush consumer, that's probably three or four trillion of enterprise value. And then if we slowly refocus the company with the rest of the resources and double down on Codex and do something meaningful in enterprise, we can probably capture two or three trillion there." And now all of a sudden, you can paint a picture for a seven, eight, nine trillion dollar market cap in the fullness of time, not tomorrow, obviously. But Codex is really good, and there's a business to be had in both. You have to separate the two businesses. You can't have a lot of overlap because there's too much context switching. You gotta let the consumer team run, and then you gotta isolate the enterprise team and let them do what they think is right.

    3. JC

      Travis, uh, there's a big debate going on amongst the investors. The FT piece also questioned the eight hundred and fifty billion dollar valuation of OpenAI. Secondary m-markets have now priced Anthropic higher than OpenAI for the first time. This is the flippening that people predicted. One investor said OpenAI would need to IPO at a valuation of one point two trillion for the last round to make any sense, but there's no buyers currently at the eight hundred and fifty billion dollar valuation that OpenAI just closed, according to Bloomberg. Travis, how do you, uh, handicap this race between these two leading frontier models?

    4. TK

      Growth is king right now in this, in this world, uh, i-in this segment. Growth is the whole damn thing. And if Anthropic is growing faster than OpenAI by a significant clip, the investors right now are gonna play it forward. And they're, it, you know, you start to get network effects around compute, network effects around the number of tokens you're pushing out for various customers, enterprise or consumer. And ultimately, you know, it's not great today, but how that plays into reinforcement learning and the things getting smarter over time. There's so many... There's so much upside to volume and scale that if they are growing faster at the same size, even if OpenAI is still growing, but if they are half the growth rate, a third the growth rate, a fifth the growth rate, I would be, I'd be worried.

    5. JC

      And you saw this at Uber specifically when you accelerated away from the competitors like Lyft and DoorDash, yeah?

    6. TK

      Yeah, you had to. Y- Network effects was the whole thing at the end of the day, and network effects was based on scale. So yes, I'm, I'm [chuckles] sort of, like, coming from my very specific experience, but if you believe there's network effects with the scale of data that you have and the scale of customers and the revenue, that's just cash, that's coming in that you redeploy into compute, and so say there's network effects of large compute, I'd be very worried, uh, if I'm OpenAI and, uh, seeing somebody growing faster at the same size.

    7. JC

      So, Friedberg, when you look at this race between these two giants, maybe your thoughts on the flywheel as it relates, as Travis is pointing out, to advantages in compute, reinforcement learning, and then also the ability to fundraise. One of the great things that Travis and the team did was, as they were pulling away, they just sucked all the oxygen out of the room by using capital as a weapon. Uh, so your thoughts, Dave, on this high-stakes game- Well, I think- ... because there's also a point- Yeah ... at which, and we'll just end on this, there's a point at which you could run off the cliff. You raise so much moneyAnd you deploy it so fast, and the revenue doesn't catch up to it, and then you go public, and the markets don't believe the story. So your thoughts, Reber?

    8. SP

      I don't know the financials of the two companies well enough. Obviously, Sam has no problem raising money. The guy... Didn't he just close, like, a hundred and fifty billion dollar round or something?

    9. JC

      Twenty.

    10. SP

      How much was it?

    11. JC

      A hundred and twenty-two billion.

    12. SP

      A hundred and twenty-two billion?

    13. JC

      Largest round ever raised in any market, I think, private or public.

    14. DS

      Yeah, probably. Yeah. I mean, that's crazy.

    15. JC

      Private and public, yeah.

    16. SP

      So that doesn't seem to be an issue.

    17. DS

      [laughs]

    18. SP

      What I've noticed is just the, the pace of, uh, innovation at Anthropic is, uh, from my experience, unprecedented. I mean, their release cadence is extraordinary. They've basically supplanted OpenClaw already with this release they did a few days ago, and then today the new Opus model got dropped. So there's something about the momentum, not in necessarily just in user growth, but in how they're operating this business, that just seems to be head and shoulders above everyone else in the cadence of, of upgrades. If I look back six months ago, I think we were pretty heavy on Cursor and Gemini, and now I think we're probably ninety percent Anthropic in just the last six months in my, my organization. There's something very powerful about the flywheel they have going on.

    19. DS

      Yeah. But here's where I'd go, just real quick, Dave, is mad respect on a [laughs] a hundred and twenty or a hundred and thirty billion dollar raise. I mean-

    20. SP

      Yeah

    21. DS

      ... this is obviously next level, but you can use capital and investment to acquire scale and network effects associated with it, but if somebody is getting that scale with revenue and let's call it contribution margin, contribution profit, efficiency will outstrip subsidy, and it will... You can't just keep raising hundred billion dollar things forever. That's where the train will stop. And if Anthropic is funding theirs through revenue and other folks are funding it through investment, there's, like, a short-term... That's a short-term solve, but it... The long run is whoever is scaling their actual usage and system and ultimately with contribution profit that then soaks up the need for investment, that's a, that's a, that's a very scary machine if you're competing against it.

    22. JC

      Which is exactly, Sacks, what the, um, legacy Mag Seven are doing. You have massive profits from, uh, Meta's core business, Google's core business that are being redeployed into infrastructure and even, uh, Tesla, which has, uh, a lot of profits, and SpaceX, which has a lot of cash on hand, and they're building out Colossus, uh, a- and other assets, including, uh, Elon is working on building a fab, as folks have been talking about. So, Sacks, is there a chance for the legacy companies, the Mag Sevens, to compete in this, or are we looking at OpenAI and Anthropic are one and two, and then everybody else can, uh, fight for third place and the, and the, and the, and the bronze, as it were?

    23. DS

      Well, I think Google's clearly in the mix. I mean, DeepMind has an outstanding team, and I think Elon's still in the mix with xAI, and then you've got Meta also has the resources. Uh, they're seem to be further behind, but they're gonna compete. Look, let me just go back to the central premise here. I agree that there's some valid criticism that OpenAI has been unfocused and should be, you know, moving forward, more focused in what they do. I have no idea, for example, what they're doing buying a podcast that's not us. So I don't know what-

    24. JC

      [laughs]

    25. DS

      ... what that was about. Um, if you were gonna buy a tech podcast for a few hundred million dollars, I mean, um, we're here.

    26. JC

      We're here. [laughs]

    27. DS

      We're here.

    28. JC

      Dario, reach out. [laughs]

    29. DS

      [laughs]

    30. SP

      Small potatoes for you guys, though.

  4. 27:28 – 33:53

    Big Tech's compute dominance: How will this impact frontier labs?

    1. CP

      budget." The problems I see it are twofold. The first is just to build on Sacks' point, all of these frontier labs have a very serious issue, which is both OpenAI and Anthropic are growing so fast that they're at a point now where they need their own infrastructure. It's kind of like when you first start building any kind of company, you're just much easier renting capacity from the hyperscalers.

    2. SP

      And it's a dependency, yeah.

    3. CP

      But then it becomes a dependency, exactly, and now when you're so big, it's actually strategically a huge mistake to not have your own compute supply. Why? Because if you look at who's leading, the frontier labs are leading, and Sacks, to your point, you mentioned this on X. You're like, "There was all this doomerism, but maybe it was tied to compute capacity because when Bedrock opened up more capacity for Anthropic, all the doomerism went away." You're left wondering, like, is it really tied to just the fact that they were just trying to throttle usage? So if you're a frontier lab, you don't wanna have to go through Amazon and GCP and Azure and Tin Cup for access and capacity. What you'd much rather have is go straight to your customer. On the other side, if you're Gemini or Microsoft or Meta and you have all this compute, because I saw a stat this week, the hyperscalers control 60% of all the compute. So the game theory there is if you kneecap the frontier labs, it'll give you some chance to catch up, and it gives you time to catch up. Because no matter what the demand is on the upside, you remember... You guys remember like in social networking when Friendster was the cat's meow?

    4. JC

      Yeah.

    5. SP

      Cat's meow. [laughs]

    6. CP

      Remember what the biggest problem with Friendster was?

    7. SP

      Cat's meow.

    8. CP

      Friendster was slow as a dog.

    9. JC

      Yes.

    10. SP

      Yes. Yes.

    11. CP

      And what happened? Then MySpace came in and took all the share. Then we came, and Facebook, and we took all their share. So there is a way where you can handicap and kneecap these companies by throttling compute access to them. So A, they are forced to now go and get in the game, which is weird because, look, OpenAI has tried to displace some of the Stargate spend. I don't see any path except they're gonna have to do it themselves, and Anthropic will have to do it themselves. But then separately, the other problem is when you change the subscription model in enterprise and you say, "Hey, we're not gonna subsidize any more tokens," what's gonna happen is all these token budgets are gonna go crazy, and what Friedberg said is gonna happen, where he's like, "Hey, guys, why are you spending all this money? What are you making?" And you inspect the code, and you're like, "What is this slop?" And you're not gonna add 30, 40, 50% OPEX to produce nothing. So I think that that's an open question, and that question will become more amplified over the next year as they push the cost off of them, so as Travis said, no more subsidy from the capital. You have to grow into it, but you're not gonna support negative gross margins, so you're gonna pass through the token costs.I, so I think it's a very dynamic moment right now for these companies

    12. JC

      And if you look at the ranking of these clusters and who has the most, right now, uh, people have forgotten about Colossus, which, uh, Elon's been building. He's expanding to 555,000 GPUs across three buildings, 18 billion in investment. He... If... And then if you look at Prometheus, Meta's planned 2026, that's 150,000 GPUs. So this is, uh, a good bit of scaling here.

    13. CP

      Well, Elon just announced a deal, he announced a deal this morning with Cursor.

    14. JC

      Yeah.

    15. CP

      So Elon's, Elon's renting a bunch of capacity, so he's now getting effectively into the data center business. He's gonna be a hyperscale.

    16. JC

      Well, he-

    17. CP

      So he's g- he's gonna use as much as he can for xAI, and whatever's left over he'll give to... Well, in this case, he's giving to Cursor to train their model. He could give to others.

    18. DS

      So what you're saying is you might as well overbuild capacity because that way your own models will be in a privileged position, and you can sell the rest to, to your competitors.

    19. CP

      100%.

    20. DS

      But Ch- Chamath, to your point about the thing I was saying on X, I actually, I think I was retweeting Marc Andreessen, who pointed out that one of the reasons why Anthropic might have wanted to hold back Mythos is they simply didn't have the compute to serve it. The model was huge and very expensive to serve, something like maybe even 10 or 20 times the token cost of, of say, Opus. They knew Opus 4.7 was coming out, right? So they hold it back knowing that they don't have the compute to serve it anyway, and they save their compute for the next iteration of Opus. And then by holding it back, they create this impression of scarcity and altruism, and it turns into this gigantic marketing event for their product because everyone in the government's like, "Oh, wow, they're holding it back 'cause it's so amazing." Now, look, I think it may have been genuinely altruistic as well in the sense that Mythos does reveal coding vulnerabilities that people didn't know about before. And, you know, it does make sense to give time to companies with large code bases to patch these dormant bugs and vulnerabilities. But it's looking more and more like Anthropic could not have offered that model commercially anyway because it was just too big and expensive, and they needed to create space for Opus 4.7. So it's an interesting theory on what actually happened there.

    21. JC

      All right, guys, uh, before we go to our next story, some breaking news here. Uh, here's your Polymarket, gentlemen. I don't... This is... I don't know if you're placing some insider bets here, uh, Friedberg, but looks like the All-In Podcast, uh, Anthropic now 37% chance of buying the All-In Podcast. This is live-

    22. TK

      By what time? By, by the-

    23. JC

      From Polymarket. Yeah. This is by the end of the year

    24. TK

      By, no, by, by end of the year.

    25. JC

      Yeah.

    26. TK

      Okay, got it.

    27. JC

      By end of the year, so it's, uh-

    28. CP

      This isn't real, is it?

    29. JC

      Yeah, absolutely. They've been, they, people have been trading on this. This is heavily traded on-

    30. CP

      It can't be. It says ni- $92 million of volume?

  5. 33:53 – 54:37

    Allbirds stock up over 400% on AI pivot, and what's behind the datacenter disaster?

    1. JC

      number two.

    2. CP

      That's good.

    3. JC

      Allbirds. Speaking of data centers, Allbirds just pivoted from ugly sneakers, the scrazzied, to AI. [laughs]

    4. CP

      [laughs]

    5. JC

      And the stock has ripped. Talking about peak bubble behavior, podcasts getting bought by frontier models, and sneaker companies, uh, pivoting to data centers. Allbirds, as you know, is the ugliest sneakers on the planet. And, uh, this became a massive delusion in our industry that this company [laughs] was worth billions of dollars. They went public in 2021. This might be one of the peak Zerk moments, raised $350 million in their IPO.

    6. CP

      Sacks, were you an investor in this thing?

    7. DS

      Allbirds? No.

    8. CP

      Allbirds, back in... No. It was too hot?

    9. DS

      No, no, no, you're thinking about the scooter company.

    10. JC

      Oh, that was Bird.

    11. CP

      The scooter company, Bird. [laughs]

    12. JC

      That's right, okay.

    13. DS

      Yeah.

    14. CP

      That was Bird.

    15. DS

      Don't, don't remind me of the-

    16. JC

      Please

    17. DS

      ... of the investments that didn't work. But no.

    18. JC

      Oh. Bird was crazy.

    19. DS

      This reminds me of the late '90s, where all you had to do was change your name to whatever.com-

    20. CP

      Yeah

    21. JC

      Yes

    22. DS

      ... and you'd get a huge pop in your valuation.

    23. JC

      And you could spin it out. BarnesandNobles.com became [laughs] then Barnes & Nobles. And so the stock crashed and never looked back. There's your stock chart. Um, they sold off all their brand assets for 39 million, about 10% of what they raised in the IPO. Congratulations to whoever owns those ugly-ass sneakers.

    24. CP

      Why were they worth four billion? They sold sneakers.

    25. JC

      Collective delusion. Collective delusion. People in Silicon Valley liked them, and they just thought it was the next Nike.

    26. DS

      Tulips. Tulips.

    27. JC

      It was tulips. Correct.

    28. DS

      Well, I think, I think that was an era in Silicon Valley where people rewarded rapid growth without really looking at gross margins or cost-

    29. JC

      Mm-hmm

    30. DS

      ... of goods sold. People didn't really make the distinction between software and everything else, right?

  6. 54:37 – 59:23

    The Price is Wrong: Name That Overvalued Startup ROUND 1

    1. CP

      working.

    2. JC

      Yeah. All right. So that's your story, uh, Chamath. That's the story of Allbirds, the most overvalued startupBut, uh, we're gonna play a little, uh, cue the music here, we're gonna play a little game show for everybody.

    3. DS

      [laughs]

    4. JC

      This is The Price, uh, David Sacks Is Wrong. Yes, this is-

    5. DS

      The Price Is Wrong [laughs]

    6. JC

      ... The Price Is Wrong. The price of the startup, Travis, is wrong. [laughs] And this is the game show where we guess which overvalued disaster are we talking about. First up-

    7. DS

      Oh, my God [laughs]

    8. JC

      ... hailing from Austin, Texas, an enforcer in the PayPal mafia, it's Mr. David Sacks. Welcome to the program, David Sacks.

    9. DS

      [laughs]

    10. JC

      Are you ready to play The Price Is Wrong?

    11. DS

      I'm ready to play. Let's do it.

    12. JC

      You're ready to play?

    13. DS

      The Price is Wrong.

    14. JC

      Okay.

    15. DS

      All right.

    16. JC

      Here we go. The Price Is Wrong. This startup was once valued at over $13 billion. Their main business model? Selling JPEGs for fake internet money. People lost their minds and started spending millions of dollars on monkey images. Play the thinking music, please. [upbeat music] David Sacks, can you name-

    17. DS

      13-

    18. JC

      ... that startup? Once, billion.

    19. DS

      13 billion for-

    20. JC

      Yes. Give them-

    21. DS

      Is that, is that like the Bored Apes thing?

    22. JC

      Okay, you're closing in. Remember, form it in the name-

    23. SP

      Ooh, ooh, ooh

    24. JC

      ... of the question.

    25. SP

      I know. I know, I know.

    26. JC

      It's selling JPEGs for fake-

    27. DS

      Oh

    28. JC

      ... internet money.

    29. SP

      Me, me, me. Pick me, pick me, pick me.

    30. DS

      Oh, wait. Uh-

  7. 59:23 – 1:10:31

    Eric Swalwell drops out of CA governor race and resigns from Congress: Who knew what and when? Impact of the Democratic Machine

    1. JC

      uh, there's been a lot of shenanigans going down in DC, the most boring city in the world, where apparently everybody's, uh, getting a little frisky after hours. TMZ launched a news bureau. Eric Swalwell is out of the governor's race. There's a lot of dark stuff that's been released. He is innocent until proven guilty, but it's not looking good.

    2. SP

      He also resigned from Congress, JCal.

    3. JC

      And he resigned from Congress as well, and Friedberg, our investigative journalist, now working as a stringer for TMZ. Friedberg, what have you learned? What's in Friedberg's DMs?

    4. SP

      I haven't learned anything. I... Z- My, um-

    5. JC

      Okay. You have an analysis then, maybe.

    6. SP

      My anecdote on this is back in December when it was first rumored that Swalwell was gonna run for governor, I started making some calls to various folks to be like, "Hey, you know, what do we think of this guy? Is he gonna be a good candidate?" You know, obviously, I and a lot of other people before they eva- evacuate the state care a lot about the future of California. So I started checking around. I spoke to several people who independently told me that there's knowledge about this guy sending, you know, pics to employees and that this guy has a bunch of stuff that's gonna come out about himSo I heard all of this, not from one person, but from several different sources. This was back in December going into January. And I largely kind of dismissed it 'cause I was like, "If this is true, this would have all come out already." I'm like, "There's no way this is true. If it was true, like people would have talked about it. They would have made a thing about it." If multiple people are telling me about this, then I've got to assume that it's a rumor that's being used to block him from running for governor versus it being a real thing, because multiple people had this knowledge and this information. So this was December, January where I had these conversations and at that point nothing had come out, so I was like, "Okay, it doesn't seem like this is real." And then everything that I had been told started to come out in the last week. So the striking aspect of all of this for me was how much knowledge there was about these various incidents with the guy, how so many people had this knowledge, and how no one had actually brought the knowledge to bear, which begs the question: Why did they not do what was right by the victims? Or why did the victims sit on the sidelines waiting for the right moment to all come out together? Because this was broad knowledge within a community of people, and they made the choice not to bring it forward with that knowledge. And that's what was so striking to me about this whole thing. I had honestly dismissed the whole thing as just being rumor mongering to try and besmirch the guy, and it turned out that these were all being held back purposefully and deliberately for a very particular moment in time when they were all brought forward to be used.

    7. SP

      And let me just be clear. These are all allegations. Nothing's been proven in court. He does get his day in court. It-

    8. SP

      Absolutely. And, and, and again, like-

    9. SP

      Whether it looks good, et cetera, we just wanna make sure there's a bunch of allegeds here-

    10. SP

      Yeah, allegeds-

    11. SP

      ... no matter how bad it looks. Yeah

    12. SP

      ... and, and, and, and all that I'm saying is that people had told me about these supposed claims five months ago, four months ago, multiple people, and had chosen not to bring it forward, and that the victims had not come forward publicly with these claims. And then there was this coordinated effort to bring everything forward at the same moment. And that's what was so striking to me is just how coordinated all of this was.

    13. SP

      Who's controlling it? Who do you think, like... Is there, like a meeting? Is there, like a, a council of-

    14. DS

      The queen, Nancy Pelosi.

    15. SP

      Jesus Christ. It's so-

    16. SP

      I don't know if that's true.

    17. DS

      Well, I don't... Not just her.

    18. SP

      I'll tell you my sense of it. My sense of it is that there's certain insiders, and he's not an insider, and those insiders are like the Katie Porters of the world. Katie Porter, I think, is who the Democratic establishment wants to be governor. She's an insider to national Democrats. She's an insider to California Democrats. And I think that she's the preferred candidate. Tom Steyer-

    19. SP

      She's a spousal abuser.

    20. DS

      I don't know that Katie Porter is, like, this ultimate insider, but I think there are... Look, there are clearly insiders. The Democratic Party is a machine that exists to siphon off as much money as possible from the public till to the interests that support the party, and it's their gravy train, and they're not gonna let anyone stop that gravy-

    21. SP

      I don't know if it's just the Dems, Sacks. I don't know if it's just the Dem Party.

    22. DS

      Hold on a second.

    23. SP

      Yeah.

    24. DS

      They're not gonna let that gravy train stop for one second. Now, the Democratic Party had a huge problem in this California governor's race, which is that the Democratic field was very fragmented. And so the two Republican candidates actually were polling the highest. And so the... Just so the viewers have context, California has this weird jungle primary system where the top two go to a runoff. They don't have a Democrat lane and a Republican lane. They just take the top two, jungle primary, and then they go to the runoff. Even today still, Hilton and, was it Bianca or whatever-

    25. SP

      Chad Bianca. Mm-hmm

    26. DS

      ... they are polling at both around, like, 14 or 15%. If the election were held today, you'd have two Republicans in the runoff. So the Democrats needed to winnow the field down and have fewer candidates. In addition to that, they must have been concerned that all this oppo on Swalwell would come out once it was him versus, say, Steve Hilton, and they didn't want it to come out later when they could lose the election. So the powers that be made the decision to lance the boil. Probably there was a conversation with him to tell him to get out of the race. He didn't listen. And by the way, remember, this feels a lot like what happened with Joe Biden when he had to drop out of the presidential race. So remember-

    27. SP

      It does sound surprisingly like that, yeah

    28. DS

      ... the whole Democratic establishment and all the mainstream media were saying that Biden was sharp as a tack, okay? And then he had that disaster d- debate performance with Trump, and it became clear that-

    29. SP

      Hot swap.

    30. DS

      Yeah. And you could just see the text messages were flying during the debate between the Democratic Party insiders. And by the time that debate was over, they had congealed on a new position, which is that Biden had to step aside. And then Nancy Pelosi was reported as having gone to the president and said, "We can do things the hard way or the easy way." Imagine that, like, telling the President of the United States, "We can do things the hard way or the easy way." And then Biden disappeared for a week, and magically he stepped aside by tweet. Remember that? He published a statement that appeared to be done by an auto-pen. People were speculating whether he was even behind this or whether the staff pushed him to do it. The whole thing was extremely weird, but he, you know, was clearly muscled out of it. Just a few days before, he had said, "I'm not leaving the race no matter what." I mean, it was like straight out of that Wolf of Wall Street meme, "Uh, they're not getting me out of here." And then a few days later, he's resigning by tweet. And again, Nancy Pelosi appears to be the figure at the center of both these things. She was al-

  8. 1:10:31 – 1:26:31

    State of the market: Confusing indicators, pricing in Iran peace, AI's mixed results, inflated valuations

    1. CP

      they were pre Reg FD, and that's just the truth.

    2. JC

      What, what's he gonna do with that cash position, Chamath? Speaking of Buffett, they-

    3. CP

      The market-

    4. JC

      Have what?

    5. CP

      The market is-

    6. JC

      300 billion sitting there

    7. CP

      ... the market is in a very complicated moment right now. If you look at historical indicators of value, so if you look at Shiller as an indication of value, it's peaking. If you look at the Buffett Index, it's peaking. So there are things that when you look at it, look like all-time highs. And the problem with that is you would say, "Oh, man," but there's this weird dispersion happening in the market. Dispersion means literally a few companies are hitting all-time highs, I think it's like eight or nine, and everybody [laughs] else is not. So it's a really complicated moment. It's hard to understand what's going on, but he's got a lot of cash. If he's sticking to his knitting, he's looking at the Shiller index, and he's looking at his own indicator, which shows all-time highs, and he's waiting for a correction. He's not really in charge anymore. Like, Berkshire Hathaway is not Warren Buffett anymore, even though he's the big owner. He's not really doing it.

    8. JC

      But, I mean, the fact that they're sitting on that massive pile of cash-

    9. CP

      Yes, agree

    10. JC

      ... says something.

    11. CP

      Yes.

    12. JC

      That they're not putting it to work in the market says they don't see an opportunity yet. Sacks, Travis, I'm curious your takes, uh, either one of you can go in whichever order you want, on how is the market crushing it while we're in week seven of a war, and we've put $100 billion or something into this military activity in Iran, and the market is pricing it in, shrugging it off, and we're hitting all-time highs. Sacks, I don't know if you're, feel comfortable-

    13. CP

      Sacks, you first. Yeah

    14. JC

      ... going.

    15. DS

      Yeah.

    16. JC

      Yeah.

    17. DS

      I mean, look, I think it's pretty straightforward, which is that in the wake of the meeting in Islamabad, that the market is feeling confident and pricing in that the war is going to get resolved. The president also recently said that it's very close to being wrapped up. The military objectives are close to being achieved, and he's made it sound like it's gonna be resolved. Yes, a deal was not signed in Islamabad. I always thought that was an unrealistic expectation, that these two countries which are at war with each other, and in fact have had hostile relations for almost 50 years, are gonna resolve all their differences in 24 hours. It's not realistic. But the impression that the market, I think, has, and clearly is trading on this, is that that war is gonna be what Donald Trump said, which is an excursion and something that is on its way to being resolved, that they've madeProgress. And J. Cal, you're right. All week has just been ex- incredibly strong. I think by Tuesday, the market had recovered all of its losses since the start of the war. I think it made a new high yesterday on Wednesday, and it's making new highs, fresh highs today on Thursday. So you just have to say that at the present time, the market thinks, and I th- I would consider the stock market to be the ultimate prediction market, that this war is on its way to being resolved. Just to qualify, I'm not speaking as a member of the administration.

    18. JC

      Of course not.

    19. DS

      I'm not saying that I know something, okay?

    20. JC

      You don't know anything.

    21. DS

      I'm just interpreting what the market is-

    22. JC

      Do not aggregate this. No clipping

    23. DS

      I'm not representing anyone c- and I don't know anything different than what any of you know. I'm just saying that I think this is what the market is clearly pricing in, and I'm paying attention to what the statements are of the president and vice president.

    24. JC

      And this, Travis, uh, you and I were talking the other day while you were-

    25. TK

      Yeah

    26. JC

      ... slaughtering me in backgammon when we won our eight-point match. You're almost caught up.

    27. TK

      [laughs]

    28. JC

      About the taco trade, not Trump always chickens out. You have a theory about Trump always cares about optics.

    29. TK

      Yeah.

    30. JC

      Unpack it for us, Travis.

  9. 1:26:31 – 1:30:53

    The Price is Wrong: Name That Overvalued Startup ROUND 2

    1. JC

      Hey, guys, we gotta wrap. Travis, you didn't get to play, uh, The Price Is Wrong. I have two more. You guys wanna do a bonus round of The Price Is Wrong?

    2. CP

      Yeah, do it.

    3. TK

      Do a Price Is Wrong.

    4. CP

      Do it. See if, see if Travis gets it.

    5. JC

      Okay, two more.

    6. TK

      All right. Here we go.

    7. JC

      But you guys can steal. You guys can steal here. Let me get my background music.

    8. TK

      Play the music.

    9. JC

      I gotta... Give me the music. Travis, you're gonna get to do the bonus round here.

    10. TK

      Let's go.

    11. JC

      Hello, everybody. We got Travis Kalanick. He's here. He is a professional water sports player from Tallahassee, Florida. H- how is it down there in Tallahassee, Florida? I h- understand you do a little handy work, uh, to pay the bills, but you spend your, most of your time out there on the lakes and the oceans doing water sports. Yeah, you like the water sports.

    12. TK

      I love the water sports. I, I, I'm-

    13. JC

      Okay

    14. TK

      ... doing water ski lessons, uh, on the weekends, anybody who's interested.

    15. JC

      All right, I'll be out there, uh, c- at Tallahassee, Florida. Okay, now, here we go. It's your job to figure out the price is wrong. The Price Is Wrong. Here we go.

    16. TK

      [laughs] It's so funny. Okay.

    17. JC

      The Price Is Wrong here. Here we go.

    18. TK

      The Price Is Wrong.

    19. JC

      This is your bonus round.

    20. TK

      Yeah.

    21. JC

      All right. This startup raised $900 million-

    22. TK

      Wow

    23. JC

      ... at a $9 billion valuation.

    24. TK

      Wow.

    25. JC

      This is a big one. This is a big one. Before dissolving in 2018, and their famously deep-voiced founder CEO-

    26. TK

      Oh

    27. JC

      ... is currently serving an 11-year sentence-

    28. TK

      Got it

    29. JC

      ... in a federal prison.

    30. TK

      Yes.

Episode duration: 1:30:56

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