Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google's Gemini Problem, China's Thorium Discovery

David Sacks 0:00 Okay. Welcome back to the All-In podcast. J-CAL is not here this week. He is off in Detroit at the Knicks game. Congrats to the Knicks. Here's a photo of our boy J-CAL hanging out with... Who's that? Ben Stiller?

Jason Calacanis 0:16 Man, what happened to Ben Stiller?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 0:17 That looks like, uh, Chalamet right next to him.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:20 Timothée Chalamet.

David Friedberg 0:20 That's Chalamet.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 0:21 Is that Chalamet? I think so.

David Sacks 0:23 Chalamet. Chalamet. Chalamet.

David Friedberg 0:24 Chalamet. Chalamet.

Jason Calacanis 0:26 You know, Ben Stiller was once referred to as the Jewish Tom Cruise.

David Sacks 0:30 (laughs)

David Friedberg 0:31 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:31 But he, he has not held up like Tom Cruise, I gotta say that.

David Sacks 0:34 He should have joined the Church of Scientology.

Jason Calacanis 0:35 Come on, man. Keep, keep it up. You gotta-

David Sacks 0:37 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 0:37 ... represent for us a little better.

David Friedberg 0:40 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:40 (laughs)

Narrator 0:40 I'm going all in. Let your winners ride.

David Sacks 0:45 Rain Man, David Sacks.

Narrator 0:47 I'm going all in.

Jason Calacanis 0:49 And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

David Sacks 0:53 WSI.

Jason Calacanis 0:54 Queen of quinoa.

Narrator 0:55 I'm going all in.

David Sacks 0:57 Sitting in this week is our boy, Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist, author extraordinaire. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:06 Longtime listener, first-time caller. Thank you for having me.

David Sacks 1:09 Andrew, I'm gonna do just a couple of quick plugs and I'm gonna give it over to the pro to do his work, take us through the docket today. I think this is gonna be really fun.

David Friedberg 1:19 The world's greatest moderator.

David Sacks 1:21 The world's greatest moderator is here today.

Jason Calacanis 1:22 Ooh.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:23 That's fighting words.

Jason Calacanis 1:24 Shots fired.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:25 We'll see. We'll see. Ho- hold your tongue. You can tell me when it's over.

David Friedberg 1:28 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:28 Before we kick it off, I just want to give a quick plug, the All-In Summit, if you haven't seen the video, check it out on YouTube and Twitter. Going into our fourth year. The 2024 recap will kind of give you a high- set of highlights from last year. It's September 7th through 9th in LA, trying to have the world's most important conversations. Andrew, I know it probably competes with one or two of your conferences, but let me just tell you, this one's way better. We're gonna be blowing it out this year with parties. All-In dotcom slash summit to apply to join us at the summit this year. Awesome. Andrew, thanks for being here. We're excited to have you.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:04 Okay, boys, here we go.

David Sacks 2:05 Yeah. All right.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:06 I, I'm curious what... I wanna get your take on all this stuff because I'm fascinated by-

David Friedberg 2:09 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2:10 ... by what's going on in these markets this week. Let's start on the markets because we got a rally. The question I think behind the rally is, is this a Besant put? Is this a Jay Powell's in the job, he's got a put on this thing? I don't know what you think is going on. We're, uh, up three to 7%, uh, for the week. There's been a she loves me, she loves me not situation with what Trump's been saying about China and whether there's a deal or not a deal. China's saying nobody's talking. He says everybody's talking. What do you guys think is really happening? And then we got to get into Alphabet, we got Tesla, got a lot of earnings here that's also moving this around.

David Friedberg 2:42 I think that the most important piece of financial logic that we have to break is this idea that there is always a put. A put is this weird thing, just for the folks that don't understand it, is that when the market goes down, somebody can belly ache and cry (laughs) and somebody in the government will say, "Okay, we'll buy your shitty securities at your bad prices." So that's what the put is. So typically, what's happened is, you can cry to the White House and they'll call the Federal Reserve and they will buy it. That's the Fed put. And in some very rare cases when things get really calamitous, like in 2008, Treasury will set up a program and start to buy things. That's what was called TARP back in the GFC. So the question is, is there a put here? I mean, my honest answer is no, and the simple reason is, if you look at where we are, the stock market's back to where we were in like May or August of last year. And if you had said that we would have upended 50 years of economic policy and the markets would only be off 500 or 600 basis points, I would have been shocked. So there's no reason for a put. Maybe the more interesting question is, w- who's asking for the put? The ones that have suffered from the volatility and a lot of those are the active market traders. So if you trace the feedback, who has been the most negative? Ackman's been negative. Ken Griffin recently turned negative. And that probably comes from the fact that they're not monetizing the vol the way that they used to monetize the vol. More than the market has speared down to such a degree that the world is coming to an end because it isn't.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:22 Okay. Stacks.

Jason Calacanis 4:23 Can I build on that? So-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 4:24 Please.

Jason Calacanis 4:24 ... there was a tweet two weeks ago when all this started by Nick Carter that I retweeted because I thought it was really interesting, which was, if you think a market sell-off delegitimizes Trump's presidency, you're going to give him unconditional credit when it rallies, right? Because those are the rules now. And that's exactly what's happened is that the market has rallied. Like you said, it's up 7% this week, but the media doesn't want to give Trump any credit for it. So it's kind of created this narrative of a Besant put. In other words, Besant is entirely responsible for it. Look, Scott is a very smart man. He understands markets. He understands the bond markets. And he is a sh- reassuring voice to those markets and I think he's doing a great job. But I think part of what's going on with this Besant put narrative is that no one ever wants to give Trump or his administration as a whole credit. So what they do on any particular week is valorize a particular member of the administration that they can then say, "Well, this is the person who's really responsible for this, not Trump," because they don't want to give Trump that credit. Next week, they'll be tearing Scott down and there'll be some other member of the administration they'll be trying to valorize to basically prevent the administration as a whole from getting credit for doing something good. So again, I think Scott's doing a great job. I think he's doing a great job making these deals and he's saying a lot of correct and reassuring things to the markets. But I think if the media is going to tear Trump down every time the market goes down, you have to give him credit when the market goes back up. And I think there's just a general reluctance to do that.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 5:52 Where do you land, Dave?

David Sacks 5:53 I think that there is, is he crazy enough to let it all fall apart signal that kind of got wiped out this week. That's really what it was. It was the fact that everyone realized that Besant, Trump are not gonna let-

David Friedberg 6:09 ... trade come to a standstill. They're not gonna let the whole global economy grind to a halt, that they're gonna have to do something. And I think that the read is that they're making the indications that they're gonna get deals done, which means that their intention is to make sure that the market doesn't tank, that the-

Jason Calacanis 6:29 But, uh, Dave, Dave-

David Friedberg 6:29 ... and more importantly that the economy doesn't tank.

Jason Calacanis 6:30 ... three weeks ago, uh, uh, roughly-

David Friedberg 6:31 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 6:31 ... three weeks when we started talking about this, I think I made the point, Chamath made the point that part of the art of the deal here, so to speak, is an opening salvo-

David Friedberg 6:41 Right.

Jason Calacanis 6:41 ... which is bold and some people would say maybe it's too extreme, but it's, it's basically an opening bid to shift the conversation completely.

David Friedberg 6:51 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 6:51 And that, that would create tremendous leverage to get deals done. And isn't that exactly what's happened? Isn't that the way it's played out?

David Friedberg 6:58 Yeah. I remember there was a guy from Harvard who used to teach a class on negotiation. He put out all these videos. And what he always said is, like, "Set your anchor point as far away as you possibly can if you wanna get maximal leverage in a negotiation." I don't know what's farther away than 145% tariff. So it's clearly, you know, a point for, as Sachs said, for negotiating to a deal that seems like one that would've been impossible or implausible if you started from a 0% tariff beginning point in negotiating and there was some percentage of the market or some probability that people were assigning to the fact that this administration could be crazy enough to tank the global economy by leaving tariffs really high and letting this kind of run. And I think that that's kind of being taken out of the market now.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:41 Right. But now that it's-

David Friedberg 7:42 And that's why.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:42 ... out of the market, that means that the leverage, uh, th- there's less leverage. There's less-

David Friedberg 7:47 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:47 ... leverage in the conversation. And if the goal is to-

David Friedberg 7:50 No, that's not true. That you're saying a critical thing, and that is not true.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 7:53 Well, hold on. I- if, if, if the goal is to effectively pressure China, which I think is the ultimate goal, I think as the bond market has spoken and as Trump and Best in a- administration has said, "Okay. We understand where the, where the floor is here, what we gotta, what we gotta do," I assume if you're Mark Carney, if you're the EU, name your place, India, Japan, you say, "I'll make a deal with you, but, you know, if you thought you were, if you thought I was giving you the world before, no, no, no, no, no. (laughs) You need me as much as I need you, and you sa- you seemingly need me even more now."

David Friedberg 8:31 So the part where I agree with you is that last part. Like, I think too many times you look at the stock market and think that that's reflective of what's actually happening. And it's not. The stock market, I think the best way to think about it is it's an estimation of what the future would look like at a rate of return. You're superimposing a view on reality. So what is actual reality right now is if the United States w- was running negative $2 billion a day of trade deficits, right? If our current account balance was minus 2 billion on March 31st, the day before Liberation Day, the real question is what is that number mathematically after April 1st, right?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:13 Right.

David Friedberg 9:13 Because you're ratcheting it up tariffs, okay, and you're implementing a scheme that should take that negative 2 billion that's going out the door-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 9:21 Yep.

David Friedberg 9:21 ... out of America shores. It would've flipped it positive. How positive? We don't know. But I'm sure that the government knows, and I'm sure the White House knows what that number is. That's, that's important fact number one. And then separately, the country that matters the most on the other side of that who was very positive, right? Let's say China was plus three or four billion a day, where did they go to? And I suspect that it's probably break even or possibly even negative. So if you think about what the new reality is today, April 25th as we tape the show, we've gone from minus two to maybe plus one, and China's gone from plus four billion a day to maybe zero or minus one. And I think that's what instills the leverage that is required to get the deal done. Then, then we can all debate whether the four PE of the S&P should be 16 times or 22 times. I don't think that that matters, but the actual cash flows have materially changed.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 10:22 By the way, uh, uh, I think long term, the, America's got leverage here. Everybody wants to inve- is ultimately gonna want to invest in America, including China. There's no question that we, we have the advantage on a long-term basis. The question is do we have the patience?

David Friedberg 10:37 Well, if you go from negative two to plus-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 10:39 Given our democracy, given our-

David Friedberg 10:40 Sure.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 10:40 ... bond market, given everything that goes on, we're such an ADD society that-

David Friedberg 10:44 Okay, then you're, then I, but then what I would say, Andrew, I think that that's a very good point. What I would say to that is then we need to communicate better. It needs to be a single point that's repeated by everybody in the Cabinet. And what they should probably focus on is, "Hey, guys, we just flipped cash flow. We went from negative cash flow to positive cash flow. Here are the actual numbers, and don't deviate from that." Because then I think Americans would say, "Hey, this thing is working. Let's let it play out," to your point.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 11:12 Hey, Sachs, here's my question for you. So we hear, you know, the president say he's talking to President Xi. We hear Scott Bestun say that he's, he talks with China or that they're, talks are gonna begin. And then you hear China say, "No, no, no, we're not talking. There's no talks happening. We don't know what you're talking about. Stop saying these things." What are we all supposed to believe?

Jason Calacanis 11:33 Well, look, first of all, let me just say that when I'm on this show and I'm not talking about AI or crypto, I'm just a civilian, right? So I'm not a spokesman for the administration on anything but the two issues that I work on. So I don't wanna come across as someone who has special knowledge 'cause I'm just, I'm not part of the trade conversation. So I can't answer your question directly, but what I would say is that with respect to the China relationship, I think what's happened over the past few weeks has been a very important stress test, and it's basically flagged some serious weaknesses or dependencies that have evolved in this relationship over the past few decades. You know, I flagged this in a, a previous episode that we did with Larry Summers where I said that 25 years ago, it was a huge mistake to walk China into the WTO. And I think that, just to build on, on that thought-One of the problems with walking them into the WTO is that they got what's called developing nation status.

David Sacks 12:26 Yep.

Jason Calacanis 12:26 So, you know, you can either be a developing nation or a developed nation in the framework of the WTO. And maybe there was something legitimate to that in 1978, you know, when Deng Xiaoping began his reforms and the average Chinese person was making $2 a day. By the year 2000, it was much more questionable and it certainly makes no sense in the year 2025. And still to this day, China gets developing nation status. Now, what is the benefit to China of that? Well, they have a whole different set of rules. They're allowed to have tariffs, they're allowed to subsidize their industries, they have all sorts of different timetables for doing things, they're allowed to do things that the US simply can't do. Now, how have they leveraged that? They have identified strategically certain industries that are choke points in the global supply chain and they have taken them over, and the best example of this is rare earths. So there was some- some good stories in the New York Times about this over the past couple weeks, which I think were largely accurate. China identified this as an- as a critical industry and the rare earths, the ore itself is distributed all over the world. I mean, China has some advantages there, but they're not huge. It's the processing of the rare earths-

David Sacks 13:37 Mm-hmm.

Jason Calacanis 13:37 ... that's very expensive, very complicated, and they decided to dominate th- that industry, and they're responsible today for over 90% of the processing of ra- rare earths. And then the next step in the supply chain is that those rare earths get cast into rare earth magnets, which are a critical component in pretty much every electric motor, and so they're a critical component of the automotive industry, but not just cars, lots of different products. And I think China makes something like over 90% of the cast rare earth magnets. Well, by the way, this issue still has not been resolved. China has now cut off the United States, and so as part of this trade negotiation, we're gonna have to, you know, resolve that issue. And I trust that it will be. I mean, what you've heard from the president and the Treasury secretary over the past week is that they're- they've indicated a desire to engage in bilateral negotiations with China and to essentially deescalate this trade war. But I think it's been very useful, again, as a stress test to reveal our critical dependencies on China that we've exposed. We never should have let this happen. Just from a national security standpoint, we worshiped at the altar of this, like, free trade god to the point where we became dependent on China for these critical components in our supply chain. I think that was a catastrophic mistake, and I think that it's exposed these dependencies we've created on a nation that is not our ally and that we can't count on them, it's a country of concern. So I ultimately think that w- we're gonna need to learn from this experience and very rapidly make some major corrections here.

David Sacks 15:09 Andrew, let me just highlight what I think is one oft not talked about point about the discussions that are underway. There's a lot of conversations about tariffs and about trade deficits, but very little about regulatory parity, and I think that this is really critical for these trade negotiations to actually resolve to a positive outcome for American businesses and American enterprises, because there is not parity in how American businesses can do their work overseas relative to how foreign companies can do work in the US. So if you're a Indian company and you wanna sell something in the US, you set up an LLC, you set up a bank account, you set up a store, take a lease, and you sell your product. There is not a lot of hoops and challenges to that business operating in the United States. I'll tell you a story. In, uh, 2005, 2006, Monsanto, which was a seed company that doesn't exist anymore, launched in India cotton seed, seed for cotton farmers that basically had a trait in it that would prevent worms from eating the cotton. And so Indian farmers were paying 450 rupees an acre for cotton seed before. Monsanto basically put this cotton seed, the yields went through the roof, the farmers made 5,000 rupees per acre of incremental profit, and they charged 1,500 or 1,400 rupees per acre for the seed. So it was more expensive seed, but it had a 5,000 profit improvement, and it took off, took the whole market. 90% of farmers bought the seed, not because they had to, but because it was better. And what ended up happening was the Indian government stepped in and said, "You gotta lower prices. You gotta go back to the price of 450 'cause that's what's fair for farmers." And the farmers were like, "We d- we're doing great. We don't need to have this kind of price control." But the government put it- price control in, and ultimately sued the company, went to court, and stole their IP, and they left the country. And this was a company that had invested, you know, well over a billion dollars in developing and launching this product. The same is true, by the way, in pharmaceutical companies, in software companies, in hardware companies. If you wanna go do business in China today, you have to set up a 51% JV where some local company owns 51% of your equity and your IP. The stories around the world, I think, start to paint a picture of why American businesses find it so hard to develop international markets and sell into those countries when in the US we make it so easy for companies based in foreign countries to come and sell in America. And that's a big part of where the trade imbalances arise from, it's not just because Vietnamese people- Right.

Jason Calacanis 17:40 ... can't afford expensive American goods. It's because it's so much more regulatorily difficult to do work in these countries, they can come in and take your IP. And so I think that this is, like, a really important part of the trade discussions and negotiations that a lot of people miss, that American businesses will see massive revenue growth and massive market adoption if we can get regulatory parity in some of these, uh, key- key trade deals that are being

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:02 Okay.

Jason Calacanis 18:03 ... requested.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:03 Let me ask you a different question.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 18:04 Chamath raised, uh, the issue of Ken Griffin, who made some comments this week about the brand that is America, and effectively said there was sort of a Sell America situation going on. And my question about the brand that is America is whether you think after these tariff, whatever deals get done...

David Friedberg 18:21 ... that you can put the toothpaste back in the tube, that you can get the trust back, that there's not gonna still be some kinda toothpaste on the rim of the tube that you, that you can't stick back. It gets all nasty-

Jason Calacanis 18:32 Right.

David Friedberg 18:32 ... and crusty, right? That, to me, is a fundamental question. I wanna read to you what Ken had to say. I think Ken was probably a, a bit of a reluctant, uh, Trumper the second term, but nonetheless, uh, he's been outspoken on a couple of things. He says, "If you think of your behavior as a consumer, how many times do you buy a product with a brand on it because you trust that brand? In the financial markets, no brand compares to the brand of US Treasuries, the strength of the US dollar, the strength- the creditworthiness of US Treasuries. No brand comes close. We put that brand at risk." What say you?

Jason Calacanis 19:09 Well-

David Friedberg 19:09 Who won?

Jason Calacanis 19:09 Look, I, I think there's a fundamental question here about whether you think there's a problem with the status quo or not. Ken Griffin is one of the biggest winners in our economy under the current status quo and I don't think he sees a big problem that needs to get fixed. But I think, like we just talked about, I think there are some big problems. I mean, Friedberg just laid out the way in which trade with China is non-reciprocal, like our companies cannot participate in their markets the same way that they can participate in ours. But it's worse than that. Like I talked about, these WTO rules gave China the opportunity to strategically annihilate our core industries that are critical in the supply chain. And there's one other piece of this, which I think is really important, which is the race to the bottom. I mean, if you're an American company and you are still producing in America and your competitor is able to go to China and undercut you, obviously you have to do the same thing, because, I mean, those are just the rules of the game. And so we've had this race to the bottom where if you're an American company operating under these rules, you have no choice- It's worse. ... but to export your manufacturing, your supply chains. So, you know, we've had these rules that, again, under the status quo, I, I would say they're not free trade, it's unfair trade, it has all these perverse consequences, is bad for middle America and this manufacturing belt of the country, and it's created massive strategic dependencies on an American adversary.

David Friedberg 20:31 I'll say- I'll say three things. Lemme just say three things quickly. Number one, I think Ken is massively long Pax America. I mean, he's built a $42 billion empire, he owns a billion dollars of American real estate. So, I don't see him investing in Ecuador anytime soon, relative to the opportunity set in the United States. And I think that's what speaks to the second point, which is investing is always a relative exercise. On Wednesday, I had a meeting with a Brazilian multi-deca billionaire, very, very, very successful guy, and we were talking about the tariffs and the investing posture, and he's like, "There's still no other country other than America that I can really put my money to work and that makes any sense." And I kind of pushed him, "What about China? What about India?" And in all of these markets, there are, as Friedberg mentioned, ??? in China, there's different problems in India, there's different problems in these other markets. Europe is roughly uninvestable. So, the more generalized answer is, is on a relative basis, the United States is still the shining beacon on a hill. There is no investable alternative for scaled capital except the US. The, the last thing I wanna say is, just to build on what Zach said, Andrew, the, the thing that we keep forgetting is when economic leverage spills over to political leverage, what happens to the United States. And specifically what happened this week was on the rare earth side, not only did China constrain rare earths into the supply chain, what they then did was tell South Korea what they could do with the rare earths that they gave them. And now all of a sudden you have this geopolitical spillover where it's not just a country constraining supply, it's a country now dictating-

Jason Calacanis 22:14 Right.

David Friedberg 22:14 ... the political and trade practices of another country. So let me ask you a question. How do you think America is in the best position to make its own decisions? For example, let's say that there's a China-Taiwan situation and we need to decide one way or the other, and I'm not saying which way is right or wrong, but for the purposes of this, the thought exercise is China and Taiwan get into some spat, we have to take a side, and China says, "We're gonna constrain all the pharmaceutical APIs into the supply chain, we're gonna constrain all the battery cathode into the supply chain, and we're gonna constrain all of the rare earths to anyone who doesn't take our side." Now, how is America in a position to actually decide for ourselves what is in our best interest if that's looming over us? And I think that this is the big problem that this has exposed. This rush to globalism, the race to the bottom, has actually created a level of dependence that doesn't allow you to do what's in your best interest. So real quick, I agree with you in so many ways. I think the question that I have is not in what the ultimate goal is, it's how you get there, and is there a way to do this with a, a velvet glove, if you will. And maybe there's no way to do it in a- in a- in a better, in a better way.

Jason Calacanis 23:35 But what is to say... No, but what is to say this isn't the velvet glove?

David Friedberg 23:37 But I'll tell you, it should-

Jason Calacanis 23:38 This could be... It's that the stock market is down 6%. Like it's not down 60%. But this- this is what I think is so interesting, Andrew, is, is the way that Trump has already shifted the conversation. Because the truth of the matter is that before Liberation Day on April 2nd, just three weeks ago, no one was talking about the unfair trade practices, no one was talking about the dependencies on rare earths, no one was talking about the race to the bottom, and Trump has shifted the conversation. 100%. When Jared Kushner was on the show, he talked about how the Trumpian approach is controversy elevates message, and we said at the beginning that by having this Liberation Day, by planting this flag in the ground, Trump was creating leverage to then have these negotiations, and he completely shifted the conversation. Now where I will agree with you is that the administration has to stick the landing here, right?... Bessen, and it's not just Bessen, also Lutnick, these are all smart, talented people. They do have to then negotiate these deals and we have to basically stick the landing. But I think the fact that you're saying that you don't disagree with where Trump is trying to get to, but it's mostly just tactical, is a huge shift in the conversation.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 24:45 You know, because I think it should. It may, it may raise the issue the way you're describing, but at some level it's also undermining a semblance of trust. I just wanna, uh, relay two stories. One is, you know, I've been talking to a whole number of, of multinational CEOs who do business in China, I'm talking about the McDonald's of the world, the Starbucks of the world, the Nikes of the world, and so many of them now talk about not just how consumers, uh, aren't going necessarily in their stores the way they used to, but really about the American dream, the American brand. And they talk about the idea that, you know, if you were a young kid and you got a job at Starbucks, you used to go home to your family in China and say, a- and your family would go, "Wow, that's amazing." They're not doing that right now. Uh, so many of these companies are even trying to reestablish how they market and advertise their companies almost as if they're a local business, not an American brand. And I don't know what that ultimately means, but I also was talking to this, uh, a Chinese CEO who made a, I thought it just a fascinating comment to me, which was, you know, "We're cool with the US being the leader. We were always cool with that. We're okay with that. We don't love it, but we're okay with it. It gets a lot more complicated when you have to be the winner." And I think that's an interesting sort of construct, this idea that we're first and we're, we have to win. And I know we're telling, it's, you know, Trump is telling, you know, citizens in the US that we're gonna win, but he's also telling the world that, and I think that's a-

David Friedberg 26:08 I think that Chinese CEO should have written that memo to Xi Jinping and see if he agreed because I think he would say, "No, we are the winner." Look, you gotta remember, in 2003, three years after China was admitted to the WTO, Hu Jintao became premier. He had this incredible speech, and in it what he said is, "There are these 10 boxes, and I've written inside these 10 boxes all the critical industries that in 25 to 30 years from now will dictate supremacy in the world. We are going to create national champions," he said, "in those 10 areas." And what's interesting about Xi, despite the ideological differences to Hu, he followed through with it. This is a group of people, so we can say what the CEOs are gonna say, but at the end of the day, the CEO of China Inc is one man, and he and his C-suite have been pretty resolute, which is even when he inherited a political ideology that he didn't completely agree with, he followed through with it, which is these guys in these 10 areas now own the critical inputs that make the world go around. And I think it's pretty reasonable to do a risk assessment to say, well, how do you stand up to that and actually have your own point of view if you don't have your own method of having access to those things? I think that is the most important question. Everything else about, you know, brand and all of this other stuff I think comes after this question. This is the critical question because if they can tell you what to think, that is not winning.

Jason Calacanis 27:48 Yeah, I would just add to that-

David Friedberg 27:49 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 27:49 ... that you hear this criticism of Trump a lot, which is that, "Okay, he's right on the issue or his instincts are correct, but there should be a, a nicer way of doing it." And I guess I would give that story more credence if the people making that criticism had actually been advocating for a change in the status quo prior to Trump, and they weren't. I mean, we had this bipartisan globalist consensus that pretty much all trade practices with China, no matter how unfair they got, was basically good for the United States, and no one was really doing anything about it until President Trump made it this issue-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 28:24 Right.

Jason Calacanis 28:24 ... and made the unfair trade practices conspicuous. So if somebody else had been willing to take that on, then I maybe would give credence to this idea that there's some non-Trumpian way of doing this, but I just don't think that's the way our political system works. I think that the way our political system works is that you have to completely shift the conversation first to create a new consensus, and then you work out the deals, and that process can be a little bit disruptive.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 28:51 Okay, one tiny follow-up. So I don't know if you guys saw the news this morning, a report out that Apple is gonna move its manufacturing of iPhones that are exported to the US or imported here in the US, but they're gonna manufacture all that stuff in India, not in China anymore. So they're gonna move all the manufacturing to India. What do you think-

David Friedberg 29:16 See you in 20- See you in 2035.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 29:18 They say they can do it supposedly in 18 months by the end of '26.

David Friedberg 29:22 Bet.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 29:24 You say no way.

David Friedberg 29:25 Bet.

Jason Calacanis 29:26 Well, if- I think this is geopolitically smart.

David Friedberg 29:28 Yeah, they should do it, but I'm just saying that's a, it's very smart. It's not gonna get done (laughs) in 18 months.

Jason Calacanis 29:36 I don't know how long it's gonna take, but look, I think one of the big lessons here over the past 25 years is that you have security first. Security has to be worked out first, then you have trade. If you build your whole, um, supply chain and all your trading relationships with countries that are fundamentally adversarial to your interests, and we can get into that part of the, the US China relationship, but I think most people would say that we're in some version of a new cold war with, with China, obviously you're gonna have to revise your trade relationships because again, we can't be dependent on an adversary for core components that then go into our military-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 30:13 Mm-hmm.

Jason Calacanis 30:13 ... for example. So security always has to come first, then you work out trade. And I think that India is fundamentally extremely aligned with us on security because they view their biggest potential threat in adversaries being China, and that is basically the, the way that the US sees the world as well.And so I do think that the US-India relationship is just very aligned, and I think therefore, the investments that get made and the trade relationships that get forged will be very stable over the next couple of decades. Whereas, you know, if you make a big investment in a country that could be your adversary, you should expect that that relationship could get disrupted.

David Sacks 30:53 I don't think the Apple deal is from a standstill. My understanding is Foxconn and others have been working with Apple to actually stand up manufacturing capacity in India for some time now, and I do believe that they probably have one or two model runs already active in the country. So I don't think that this is necessarily from a standstill, let's go recruit the people, figure out the processes, find the builders, stand up the facilities, but there's probably a model system already running that's now about replication and scale-up, which is why they have confidence in the sta- stated goal. It's not often that Tim Cook will stand up and say, "I'm gonna do something in 18 months," and then be delayed by years. He's not Elon. He's gonna come out, he's gonna be very clear. He's, he's always been very clear. So in my understanding is this has been thought about for some time. Andrew, I think you've been to a lot of conferences where, for three years now, you've been hearing people banging the table saying, "Get everything out of China as quickly as you can."

Jason Calacanis 31:48 Yep.

David Sacks 31:49 Tim Cook's heard that message. He's been thoughtful about it. He's been planning for this day. I don't think he wanted to be declarative about this until the day came. Well, the day is here.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 31:58 And how do we feel that it's gone to India? It's not coming to America. I think we knew it wasn't coming to America.

David Friedberg 32:03 Well, India has one massive advantage over China, which is that it has one-fifth the labor cost of China, which has one-fifth the labor cost of America. So India is a natural place for a lot of this next-generation labor to end up. Plus, they have a very educated workforce, plus they have a young workforce. In many ways, you could say that it's, it's China circa 2003. I mean, you have to remember, right, like China from 2006, I think, to like 2012 (laughs) , their GDP grew at like 10% a year. I mean, can you imagine what that must have been like when a country that big is growing that fast? So India is gonna have that moment over the next 20 or 30 years. I, I ... The, the only reason I scoffed at what you said-

David Sacks 32:44 Would you invest in, in, in India? Would you?

David Friedberg 32:46 I have a large rare earth mine in India. Yeah, I have ... It's one of the largest supplies of rare earths outside the United States. We negotiated that deal with the PMO and they gave us a great deal to compete with the Chinese. Our specialty chemicals processing is on the ground there.

David Sacks 33:02 Yeah.

David Friedberg 33:02 And then the idea is then to import all of that specialty chemical into the United States and then do all the-

David Sacks 33:08 I like the macro.

David Friedberg 33:09 ... last mile.

David Sacks 33:09 I just... Uh, there's something about China where there's a lot of accounting fraud still and you can't really trust a lot of the numbers. But if that all gets cleaned up, the macros all right. It's exactly where it should be for-

David Friedberg 33:19 You mean India?

David Sacks 33:20 India, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I ...

Jason Calacanis 33:23 I just think the structure, the, the structural realities just make it a good place to invest 'cause I just think that India and the US are gonna be very aligned for, for a long time.

David Friedberg 33:33 Agreed.

Jason Calacanis 33:34 Again, their main security threat is China, and our main security threat is China. And this is not gonna change for probably the entire 21st century.

David Friedberg 33:43 A couple weeks ago, Saxon and I sat down with the Indian Ambassador, and it's very clear, they're fundamentally aligned with the United States, and I think exactly what Sax said is true. Everybody knows who needs to cooperate in order to have a reset of global trade policy and political leverage.

Jason Calacanis 34:01 Right.

David Friedberg 34:01 So I don't know.

Jason Calacanis 34:02 Right.

David Friedberg 34:02 I, I'm pretty pro-India. It's a very difficult place to invest, I agree with you, Sorkin. I've never made money there. I tried my hand at tech investing. Over a decade, I maybe have returned 50 cents on the dollar.

David Sacks 34:13 Why?

David Friedberg 34:13 So then, so then for-

David Sacks 34:14 What went wrong? Like what's the macro reason?

David Friedberg 34:17 The market was far too immature. My mental model was about how American success look like, and when I tried to impose that on the Indian market, it all just blew up. So a lot of the Indian entrepreneurs, how they raised money was not from Indian VCs, it was from American VCs. And you can't tell an American VC an idea that just makes no sense to you because your frame of reference is the United States. So what turned out to work was a couple of very large bets that were copies of American businesses, so like the Indian Amazon worked, the Indian PayPal kind of worked, the Indian DoorDash kind of worked, but everything else didn't work. So then-

David Sacks 35:01 Why? Because ... Is it the consumer market's not there or the like-

David Friedberg 35:03 No, no, because, because th-

David Sacks 35:04 ... capital markets aren't there?

David Friedberg 35:05 No, because we have these mental biases that, that will never allow us to believe the way that they would construct the business would work. So for example, if they're like, "Hey, here's a business where we're going to buy food from the local farmer, then we're gonna put it in a warehouse, then we're gonna drive around on rickshaws and deliver it to people," and you think, "Well, this business can never work." Well, actually, that business turned out to be a ginormous success. Nobody in the United States would have ever funded that. Now, what happened four years ago, though, was after a bunch of meetings, I pivoted to these other areas, because when you talk to the Ambanis and when you talk to the Adanis, they're like, "Dude, st- stop beating your head against this wall. Like build infrastructure. It just works." And, uh, it was true. They've been right.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 35:51 Okay. One geopolitical question. How do you feel about India buying as much oil as they do from Russia? I know we'll get into the whole Ukraine thing later.

Jason Calacanis 35:58 Smart.

David Friedberg 35:59 Smart.

Jason Calacanis 36:00 Look, India is a country that has two great powers in its neighborhood, China and Russia. It has a contested border with China. They've had border skirmishes. When you have a country that is much more powerful that's actually a security threat to you, you then seek good relations, even possibly an alliance with the other great power in the neighborhood. That has been India's philosophy. They've had good relations with Russia for a long time, even going back to the Cold War. That is what makes sense for their security standpoint. By the way, the exact same thing is true with the United States. We just haven't realized the strategic reality. China is the peer competitor. I mean, Mearsheimer made this point at our All In summit.China is the peer competitor. It's the only country in the world that is a peer of the United States. It's the only country that's really capable of threatening our security. Russia is a distant number three in terms of the great power rankings. What you wanna do if you're in a sort of heads-up competition, where there's two superpowers, is you wanna make an alliance with that number three. And what we've done is, we've pushed Russia into the arms of China. What we oughta have been doing is the reverse Kissinger. We did this during the Cold War, by the way. We had the Soviet Union and we had China, and in that case, the Soviet Union was the big threat to American security. So what did we do? We had Nixon and Kissinger go to China and make a deal with Mao. China was just as communist as the Soviet Union. Mao had blood on his hands to a degree that is much greater than someone like Putin has, and yet we were willing to shake hands with him and make an alliance because that was realpolitik. And I think in a similar way, this is what our strategy should've been with Russia for the last two decades, and instead, we've been foolishly pushing them into the arms of China.

David Sacks 37:49 Well, Sorkin, what's your read? I mean, what's your opinion on the... idea of India.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 37:53 I think India's a t- I, look, India's, E- India's a tough place to invest. Every- everybody I know who's been talking India for the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years has been talking it up as the next great utopia, and it may very well be. It probably will be. It's just a question (laughs) of when.

David Friedberg 38:08 I think you have to end, you have to be-

David Sacks 38:09 Right.

David Friedberg 38:09 ... specific about the end market, you know? Like, there are people that have made a ton of money there, but it's not the way classical Western economics has played out by any means.

Jason Calacanis 38:18 Andrew, w- I mean, what do you think about this sort of what I would call balance of, of powers logic 101?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 38:24 I get, I get the idea that you, you go to your, you know, least, uh, I don't know, uh, if the, their, your, your-

Jason Calacanis 38:32 Your least path. (laughs)

David Friedberg 38:32 Enemies, friend's friend, your f-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 38:34 Right. (laughs)

David Friedberg 38:34 ... your enemy's enemy is your friend. Is that-

David Sacks 38:36 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 38:36 No, the enemy of your enemy is your friend or whatever it is. Yeah, no, that is balance of power logic.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 38:40 Whatever it is, um... W- I, I get, I get where you're going with this. I just think that Russia, given all that they have done, I'm not... it's hard, it's hard to look at Russia and China, and maybe Russia, on the margins, e- on a relative basis in life is better than China in certain ways, but in other ways, it's not. And so it's very complicated to sort of, for me to look at it and go, "Okay," um... It's actually interesting. Who, I mean, there's a, I was gonna use a real loaded word. Who's more evil, right? Is China more evil or is Russia more evil?

David Friedberg 39:14 I mean, I think it's very-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 39:14 I think there would be a big debate about that in the world.

David Friedberg 39:17 Well, I think it's-

David Sacks 39:18 Depends who you ask.

David Friedberg 39:18 ... it's unnecessarily judgmental. Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 39:21 Right?

Jason Calacanis 39:21 I think it's dangerous to look at foreign policy, eh, from, eh, uh, a position of extreme moralism because ultimately the purpose of our foreign policy is to ensure American security. And we can't rectify every injustice in the world, and over the past 25 years, we've become hyper-interventionist, you know, in an attempt, th- so we've claimed, to do that, right? We keep saying that we, we've gotten involved in all these places 'cause we wanna promote our values and spread democracy. And by the way, we did the opposite. I mean, you look at the forever wars in the Middle East. We had interventions and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. How did all those things work out? They did not promote our values or spread democracy. So, my point is just, I don't think we should look at foreign policy from an i- a position of extreme moralism. I'd prefer to think of neither of those countries as, as quote-unquote "evil," and I would prefer to think of them as countries which have their own interests. I think that with respect to China, the real issue is that it is a revisionist great power. It has made clear that it wants to basically annex Taiwan. It wants to turn the South China Sea into, effectively, a Chinese lake. It does not respect international waters. It has territorial disputes with Japan, and if we don't play a role in containing China, then China will revise the balance of power in East Asia in a major way. And I think that would have, I think, profound consequence for United States.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 40:47 That may be there, but I don't know if the Chinese are gonna throw you off a roof in-

Jason Calacanis 40:50 I just, I just don't think Russia-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 40:50 ... one day and you won't even know it. I mean, that's the difference. And I don't know if that's a moral argument or-

Jason Calacanis 40:54 I'm not worried about-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 40:55 ... something else.

Jason Calacanis 40:55 The United States is not gonna be thrown off a roof by, by Russia, and that's the level at which we should think about these things. If you look at Russia's behavior, Russia actually is not a revisionist great power. What it wants is just security on its borders. The revisionist power actually in Europe over the past 25 years was the United States because we pushed NATO right up to Russia's borders despite the promises that were made to Gorbachev in the '90s. So, we're the ones who've revised the balance of power in a way that was profoundly threatening to the Russians. And I think it'd be far better from the American standpoint to just work out a security architecture for Europe with Russia that gives the Russians the security they-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 41:35 Right.

Jason Calacanis 41:35 ... crave on their western border and gives Europe the security it craves. And I think if we had had that mentality as opposed to this highly moralistic mentality where we basically wanna spread American-style democracy everywhere-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 41:46 You don't think that American-style democracy, though, has helped the world in some way? I'm not saying we did it right everywhere.

Jason Calacanis 41:51 I bel- I believe, I, I beli-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 41:52 Eh, I think we've lost a lot of, lot of wars that we should not have attempted. But-

David Sacks 41:55 If it could be done, you're right. But the problem is, Andrew, the failure rate is too high. Look at what happened in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq. As we've gone in to make, you know, regime change, we actually a- put those people in a worse condition than they were before. They don't end up with American democracy.

Jason Calacanis 42:13 Right.

David Sacks 42:13 After a trillion dollars in Afghanistan, the Taliban is back in charge doing-

Jason Calacanis 42:16 Two trillion.

David Sacks 42:16 ... awful, brutal things.

Jason Calacanis 42:18 Right, two trillion, and-

David Sacks 42:19 And I would be, I would be-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 42:20 And-

David Sacks 42:20 ... a proponent of, and th- by the way, this was also part of the promise of the open internet, and I think, eh, from a fundamental point of view, the regulatory regime we had in the United States with the internet was driven by this notion that the freedom of information would actually allow democratic proliferation. You know, we were talking about the Arab Spring, as you'll, you know, recall, like-

Jason Calacanis 42:36 Agreed.

David Sacks 42:36 ... that was gonna be this big moment. But at the end of the day, it turned out that didn't work either, that there's something much more complex in the history of a people, in a geography, the deep ties that those people have, that this idea that turning on a screen or showing up with a tank-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 42:51 ... is gonna flip the switch to democracy turns out not to be true.

Jason Calacanis 42:54 And look, just to be clear, I mean, I thank my lucky stars that I'm an American and we do have the type of government we have here. And my parents immigrated to the United States in 1977 for political reasons because we have the type of government we have here. So, look, I'm a strong believer in American-style democracy. The problem is our efforts to promote it or impose that style of government through regime change operations simply has not worked. I mean, this is-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 43:19 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 43:19 ... should be one of the big learnings of American foreign policy-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 43:21 All I'm suggesting is that-

Jason Calacanis 43:22 ... over the past 30 years.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 43:22 ... I think it's better to model it, right? It's better to-

Jason Calacanis 43:24 Yeah. So how do you model it? I think you model it by being the shining city on the hill, by setting a good example, by focusing on our own country, and making America the best it can be so that people all over the world look to us and say, "Oh, we wanna do that." And I actually think th- that, what I'm describing is American soft power. If you go back to the 1980s, we had that soft power. I mean, the people of places like in Russia, they love buying American blue jeans and American music, and we had that soft power. We were inspiring to the world. But it all changed, I'd say starting th- in the '90s, but then really in the 2000s. When we started going into these countries with our militaries and occupying all these countries-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 44:02 Right.

Jason Calacanis 44:02 ... we soured them on America. We made them hate us. And this is the problem with this hyper-interventionism, is what we should be doing is setting an example, not trying to occupy these countries.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 44:15 Let me read something to you. This is, this week, this is Trump condemning the strikes going on in Kiev. This is, "I'm not happy with the Russian strikes in Kiev. Not necessary. Very bad timing. Vladimir, stop!" 5,000 soldiers a week are dying. "Let's get the peace deal done." How is this deal gonna get done? I should also say that Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly skipping a meeting on a ceasefire talk on Wednesday after Ukraine refused to recognize Russia's annexation of Crimea.

Jason Calacanis 44:50 Well, the reason why Rubio canceled that meeting is because the Americans put forward a peace proposal and Zelenskyy dismissed it out of hand. Before the Russians could do anything, Zelenskyy dismissed it. And recognizing Russian ownership of Crimea, if you will, should be the easiest point for Zelenskyy to concede, and he dismissed it out of hand. Now, why do I say that? The Russians annexed Crimea in 2014. So, this was not something that happened in 2022. It happened over 10 years ago. And if you look at what the people of Crimea want, and there's been a lot of Western polling on this. There's been man-on-the-street interviews by NBC. The people of Crimea, by something like over 80%, say they wanna be part of Russia. They're ethnic Russians. And I'd say the f- the final point on this is that Zelenskyy and Ukraine tried to get Crimea back in the summer of 2023 with the summer counteroffensive. Remember, the whole point of that summer counteroffensive was to sever the land bridge to Crimea, destroy the Kerch Bridge, isolate Crimea, and essentially lay siege to it. This was the whole point of that, and they got nowhere with that. They didn't even break through the first Surovikin line. So, my point is that it's militarily impossible to retake Crimea. The people of Crimea don't want Ukraine to retake it. They wanna be part of Russia. And yet Zelenskyy cannot give this up.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 46:07 Okay, so how do we get to yes? How do we get to yes? This was supposed to be done on day one, and here we are.

Jason Calacanis 46:13 The basic problem is that Zelenskyy doesn't wanna make a deal. I mean, he, he has rebuffed the Americans on Crimea, which should be the easiest point to give on. He's been completely unrealistic about their prospects on the battlefield. He was insulting to the White House when he visited the White House in his T-shirt or whatever. He was dressed inappropriately, and then got in-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 46:34 I think one of the great Rorschach tests for America, I think that meeting was.

Jason Calacanis 46:38 Well, I mean, he was insulting to the President and especially to the Vice President. He, he murmured under his breath a curse word to the Vice President. You remember that?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 46:47 Yep.

Jason Calacanis 46:47 I mean, it was really-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 46:48 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 46:48 ... quite something. And remember, he's biting the hand that feeds him. I mean, he has an obligation, I think, to be respectful to his patrons in a way that his patrons may not-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 46:59 (laughs) His patrons. Okay.

Jason Calacanis 47:01 ... in a way that they, we may not to him. And he has demonstrated, I think, that he's unrealistic in every possible way. He's unrealistic about Ukrainian prospects on the battlefield, about retaking Crimea, and about who the, the hand is that feeds him. So, my view on this is quite simple, which is if Zelenskyy won't see reality, let him go, find new patrons. Let Starmer and Macron support him. They say they will. They say they have the ability to do this.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 47:27 But they can't, and you, they can't enough.

Jason Calacanis 47:29 Well, they appear to.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 47:30 They can't enough. They say they can, but then they, they-

Jason Calacanis 47:31 My point is, Zelens- Zelenskyy has made his bed. Let him sleep in it. This is my point of view on it. He refuses to listen to the Americans. He refuses to recognize that this administration even has leverage over him.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 47:45 And you don't think that, uh, ultimately, if Putin takes Crimea plus, plus whatever, that he's going after Poland next? Or, I mean, the, y- that's, it's the domino-

Jason Calacanis 47:54 Poland?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 47:54 ... theory that becomes the complicated part.

Jason Calacanis 47:57 No, I don't think so. I don't think there's any evidence that he wants Poland. I don't even think he wants the part of Ukraine that is chock-full of Ukrainian ultranationalists because you would have a massive insurgency there. He doesn't want a Gaza-type situation. And by the way, just another point on Crimea, where is the insurgency? If Crimea really wanted to go with Ukraine as opposed to Russia, why has there been no uprising there over the past 10 years? So, in any event, my point is there's no evidence that, that Putin wants Poland. Poland's part of NATO. That would start World War III. I don't, I think Putin has shown that he's a calm, rational decision-maker, and I don't think he wants World War III. Now, the Russians have said what their terms are. They said it last year. They said, they basically in, in this root cause speech they gave in-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 48:42 Right.

Jason Calacanis 48:42 ... I think June of last year, and, and basically what it comes down to is they want Istanbul plus. There was a deal to end this war in the f-, in the first month, the Istanbul deal.... and it required Ukraine to basically sever its- its security relationship with the West and to recognize that it would not become part of NATO.

David Friedberg 49:01 Mm-hmm.

Jason Calacanis 49:01 And th- they had to give up Crimea, basically. That was the deal back then. What Russia has said is that's still the deal, plus realities on the ground. So in other words, the Russians have lost, I don't know, 100,000 plus, hundreds of thousands of soldiers now taking this territory in the east, and obviously they're not gonna give it up. So, I think that the Ukrainians could have had a better deal in the first month of the war. The Biden Administration rejected that. Now, there's a different deal. It's Istanbul plus. And I- I think that the American proposal is pretty close to that, so I think this administration recognizes the wisdom and just reality-

David Friedberg 49:35 Mm-hmm.

Jason Calacanis 49:35 ... of that deal, but the Ukrainians aren't. So, look, my view is simple. If the Ukrainians are unwilling to take the deal that's on the table and they wanna find new backers with the Europeans, let them. But why should we continue to support this?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 49:49 Okay, let's pivot. Let's talk markets, and let's specifically talk a couple of stocks 'cause there's some interesting-

Jason Calacanis 49:53 But Andrew, do you disagree? 'Cause I wanna hear your disagreement.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 49:55 No. No, no, no.

Jason Calacanis 49:55 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 49:55 I- I- I could, but we're gonna-

Jason Calacanis 49:57 (laughs)

Andrew Ross Sorkin 49:57 ... we're- I think we're gonna run out of time.

Jason Calacanis 49:59 Okay.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 50:00 I wanna talk Alphabet. So, everybody thought the Blue Lake economy was dead. OpenAI, Perplexity, all of it was, you know, gonna take the search market. They come out with earnings. Sundar, uh, does way better than everybody expected. Revenue up $90.2 billion. It was up 12%. Net income was up, up almost 50% year over year, and you got the cloud still ripping. You got a big buyback program. He starts talking about Waymo on the call for the first time in a long time, if ever. Uh, stock's up about 5% on the news. What do we think?

David Friedberg 50:34 Buy. Buy. What an incredible business, my gosh. Oh. (laughs) There's- there's a lot of resiliency in Alphabet that I don't think people-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 50:41 (laughs)

David Friedberg 50:41 ... have given the company credit for. First of all, I'll just highlight, with the dividends they're paying, plus the share buyback, you're basically getting a 4 or 5% yield on the stock. So, the dividends are like 10 billion a year, and they're announcing 70 billion backed on 2 trillion in market cap. So, you're making 4% a year just by owning the stock and the dividends and the buybacks. Then if you look at the revenues, 90 billion, 77 in services, 12 in cloud. So the 90 billion, about half of it was ads on search. And a lot of people have been talking about the decline in search due to AI, that's the end of- of Alphabet. Here you can kinda see the breakdown. What this shows is that there's such significant growth, nine billion in YouTube, seven and a half billion in non-Google ads, 10 billion in subscriptions with 270 million subscribers across subscription businesses, 12 billion in cloud revenue, which is growing 30% year over year. There's a lot of resiliency even if you take out search. And so the question is, what's the downside? What's the upside? Well, the downside is, what's the worst that could happen to search? What, they lose half of the market due to- uh, to ChatGPT? If they lost half the market to ChatGPT and the rest of the business keeps growing the way it is, you get back to parity pretty quick. What's the upside? Well, the upside is they're able to use AI to actually reinvent search, retain the audience, and create an entirely new search experience that's chat-based or has some chat integration into search. So, it seems to me trading at 18 times free cash flow, which is where this thing's at right now, plus the 4% yield on dividends and buybacks, plus the kind of seemingly pretty significant gap between the downside and the upside here, it's just such a powerful business. It just seems like it highlighted that this is not a business that's in decline and is about to die as everyone's been kinda proclaiming. There's enough growth engines here and there's enough resilience, and the price is so good. I don't- I feel quite good about the company.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 52:39 I think there's $100 billion of hidden value called Waymo in this business. It-

David Friedberg 52:43 And Waymo, 250,000 rides a week now, growing like crazy, and they're only in like four cities. It's crazy.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 52:49 And I think it's-

David Friedberg 52:49 Have you taken-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 52:50 ... I think the market's giving them-

David Friedberg 52:51 Have you taken a Waymo-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 52:52 ... zero for that right now.

David Friedberg 52:52 Have you? Zero.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 52:54 Zero.

David Friedberg 52:54 Yeah. I think the most interesting stat that I saw from the earnings results- And they own 10% of SpaceX, by the way, (laughs) which is crazy. Yeah, sorry. The most interesting stat in the earnings was that I think they said that they had 270 million total paid subscriptions across YouTube and Google One. And my initial thought was, "Well, when are you just gonna stick Gemini as the most obvious interface in front of it?" Like, I think that these companies now need to confront that this OpenAI behemoth is growing at a rate that was probably a hindrance before, and now it's a real strategic risk. And so if you have 270 million paid subs, come on, guys. Stuff Gemini right in front of these guys. That's- that's- that was- Totally. ... my first takeaway. But it's, again- Totally. ... they're doing it from a position of strength, but they need to get going 'cause they're- they're probably hemming and hawing, and there's probably all kinds of people, all kinds of cooks in that kitchen, but- I've heard a lot of stories about this question. Yeah, I think Sundar, Larry, and Sergey just need to take the equity and the political capital they have as the CEO and the two largest shareholders and just stuff the decision down people's throats.

Jason Calacanis 54:01 Yeah.

David Friedberg 54:02 So that's- that- that's number one. The other thing that I think about actually relates to what I spoke about last week about NVIDIA. So, just to give you guys a little bit of a cleanup, you know, after we spoke about NVIDIA, the NVIDIA team reached out to me and they were like, "Hey, Chamath, here's a bunch of stuff that will help you unpack what you spoke about in a little bit more detail." So let me tell you what NVIDIA told me, and then it- I think it relates to GCP. So, what they told me, when you look at the SEC filings for NVIDIA, and you add up all the revenue, it says that about 47% of the revenue goes to China, Singapore, Taiwan, I think it was. And what these guys educated me on is that they've been trying to refine how this is described, but it's not what it seems. Meaning, they report revenue on what's called the Billing...... or the invoicing address. So meaning you are an entity, you'll buy a huge amount of chips or compute power, and you issue the invoice out of Taiwan or Singapore or China. That's what represents 47% of NVIDIA's reported revenue. So, it turns out that that's actually not where the silicon gets shipped. So there's a Singaporean office that handles the invoicing. So then I said, "Well, who are these companies that are using these, these places?" And it turns out that it's a bunch of major U.S. companies, including U.S. OEMs and clouds that use Singapore for invoicing their suppliers, but that the, you know, what industry sources have told us is that all of these products are almost always shipped elsewhere, including U.S., Mexico, Taiwan, et cetera, all over the place. So why is this interesting? There was a study by Artificial Analysis, Nick, I will send you the link, but basically what it showed was that the clouds were not doing any real form of KYC on who was using their stuff. So now I think we get to this next place which is like, I think the Google business is profoundly amazing. I think they need to do something with the subscriptions that they have and put Gemini right in front and really do a head-on attack against ChatGBT. Those are the pluses. The minuses or the risks that I think now will get uncovered is are the clouds doing enough to make sure that China and other folks aren't getting access to compute that they should not get access to? And that could have an impact on some of their revenue. So that's a GCP problem, I think it's an Azure problem, it's an AWS problem, and that's gonna need to get sorted out in the next couple of quarters because if Western governments basically say to the clouds, "Hey, you need to KYC your customers," so that it's not somebody distilling the best of our models into a place we don't agree with, I think there could be some blowback.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 57:10 All these numbers obviously backward-looking. Do we think, and I know we've been talking too much about tariffs, but do we think that the tariff story is gonna impact, uh, Google next quarter? Do we think it's gonna impact, uh, Meta next quarter? And to the extent that Google are saying, "Look, we're gonna keep our big infrastructure spend, $75 billion, you know, full steam ahead," which is great for the ecosystem, great for NVIDIA, great for, great for everybody in that world, do we think that holds up if we think there's a hiccup between now and whenever all of this tariff stuff gets sorted, if it does?

Jason Calacanis 57:42 I think it's gonna hold up. I mean, look, I just think that this investment in- in CapEx and the data center build-outs is so strategic right now. I mean, I think that the hyperscalers, it's only good for their- their businesses, but I think they see it as so strategic to their survival that they just have to do it, no matter what. In other words, I think they're totally inelastic on this. But let me just go back to Google. Nick, can you throw up this chart? I mean, I think the problem that Google has with respect to ChatGBT is that Gemini's just not getting the usage and ChatGBT's just growing like crazy. If you look at how these models perform, according to the benchmarks, Gemini's actually really good. I mean, Gemini has made substantial progress-

David Friedberg 58:22 It's accident. It's accident.

Jason Calacanis 58:22 ... catching up to ChatGBT.

David Friedberg 58:24 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 58:24 But they have not caught up on the usage side. Now to Chamath's point, you could just make Gemini the default interface in Google Search, but that is true innovator's dilemma because if you do that, you could be giving up more than half the search revenue. So, I do think Google is- is in a really tough spot, and the longer they wait to make Gemini front and center, the worse this usage problem gets. I mean what's-

David Friedberg 58:47 I mean-

Jason Calacanis 58:47 ... basically happening right now is users are learning a new habit. I mean they're-

David Friedberg 58:51 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 58:52 They're learning to go to ChatGBT to get their questions answered or just their searches-

David Friedberg 58:57 And-

Jason Calacanis 58:57 ... answered in a completely different way.

David Friedberg 58:58 And let's be honest, they make using Gemini impossible. And they can do a, just a much better job, at a minimum give the best leading-edge Gemini model to the 270 million people that are already paying you for a subscription. Just do that. Do something so that you can start to blunt the growth of- of OpenAI. Otherwise, you're gonna look back in four years and regret hemming and hawing today.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 59:22 So Chamath, you're the CEO of Google. You've got a $200 billion run rate ad- search ad business. What's the right kind of integration of Gemini such that you don't massively disrupt the search ad business overnight? Or do you not care and you're just gonna do it? I think that's the conundrum they're dealing with.

David Friedberg 59:41 That's not a conundrum. If you don't understand how to value a dollar today versus a dollar tomorrow at a discount rate to disambiguate the emotional-ness of that decision, it's not a hard decision to make. I think the diff- the- the more difficult question is what does the integration look like? And if you are already paying for a YouTube subscription or a Google One subscription, what should your experience be? That's a key question. The second question is today they're already inserting Gemini in all kinds of uncomfortable ways. So for example, if you use Gmail or if you use Google Workspace, what happens today is all these random Gemini pop-ups come up all over the place. That is an implementation that happened at way too junior a level by people that have no product taste. So if you just stop that, it's not hard.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:00:29 (laughs)

David Friedberg 1:00:29 But right now you have a bunch of, you know, h- honestly people that don't have taste and are a little too junior creating a very cluttered experience. And if you use the products every day, it would be hard for you to disagree with me.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:00:42 They have infinite capital and infinite access to talent.

David Friedberg 1:00:46 Capital doesn't buy taste.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:00:47 Right, so what do you think's wrong?

Jason Calacanis 1:00:49 I agree that the Google interface trying to incorporate Gemini into the 20 blue links or whatever is very kludgy, but I don't know how you fix that without just getting rid of the blue links.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:00:59 Right.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:59 I mean, I guess you can do a hybrid experience, but it doesn't compare to ChatGBT which is all-in on the AI experience. So-I think it's a real innovator's dilemma for them.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:01:07 And look, the truth is, the market was killing them already because people thought that that first little AI summary thing was actually going to kill the blue link economy, right? Like, that was, that was their worry. And so it's this ter- I mean, I think it- it is a terrible conundrum if, if, if you're Sundar. How, how do, how do you, how do you do both things at the same time? Chamath, I think you're right. There's a design way to do it, but they're not doing it.

David Friedberg 1:01:29 This comes down to taste and I think you can't have group think drive creativity and taste. You either have it or you don't. And you need to find the one or two people and then you need to use the strength of your leverage as a CEO and the ownership that Larry and Sergey have to impose one person's taste on the decision. Otherwise, you're right, it will lose.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:51 Well, Chamath, let me ask you a question. When, w- the Google home page where they just have the search bar and the, you know, you can basically submit your search, or I feel lucky or whatever. Would you replace that, with that search bar with an AI chat bot?

David Friedberg 1:02:05 No. Here's what I would do. I would first go to the critical other points that are around that today do not cannibalize the blue links. So, the obvious insight should be, if you look at the traffic patterns almost as a Sankey diagram, right?

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:02:19 Yeah, we just showed, we just had one up.

David Friedberg 1:02:21 Show a Sankey. Okay.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:02:22 There we go.

David Friedberg 1:02:23 So, who cares about revenue? What the real thing you should be looking at here is where are the entry points into Google that then result in a clickable link? And what you would have is a very different Sankey. And what it would show you is that there are certain places that are highly de-optimized today for revenue-generating events. They happen as a byproduct, but they don't happen as the use case. So, in that example, you would put Gmail as a critical place, the YouTube One, the Google One subscription, and there's, like, five or six other places. That's where I would put Gemini as the front door and start to habituate 300 to 500 million people a week in using that. I think then you can figure out over time how much money you can make from all of that, or how it directs derivative revenue and figure out what to do with google.com last. But my point is, the experience in Gmail should be done today. The experience in YouTube should be done today. The experience in Google One should be done today.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:25 Would you... Okay, Nick, can you put up this... Here's their home page, right? This is the famous shot. I just checked and this-

David Friedberg 1:03:31 This, I would, I would leave this alone.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:31 ... this hasn't changed in 25 years or whatever.

David Friedberg 1:03:33 I would leave, I would leave it alone because I think it's too disruptive and it's, it's too politically fraught. I mean, you could do some A/B tests-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:40 But what if, what if they replaced "I'm feeling lucky," which is kind of antiquated now, with AI? I mean, Gemini, basically.

David Friedberg 1:03:45 I, I mean, you, you, I would need to look at the Sankey to understand how many people are actually generating monetizable events or behavior from "I'm feeling lucky" in 2025.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:56 I would just-

David Friedberg 1:03:56 I'm not sure it's the novelty it was in, you know, 1999.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:59 No, it isn't the novelty. I don't, I think it's just there as, like, a whimsical thing. I don't know if it drives revenue for them or not. If it takes the user off site, I don't see how it drives revenue for them.

David Friedberg 1:04:08 Here's a... I'll tell you a great Facebook story just to explain this and why I get so animated about this. I was telling this to my 8090 team yesterday because we're dealing with this one product implementation issue. And engineers always end up fighting about whether things should be opt in or opt out. Okay? And it's, it's almost like this religion where people feel like, oh, you cannot force people to do something. You, you should always make things optional. And I remember at Facebook, we bought this little company for a few million dollars that made contact importers, which essentially means if you're using any other email service to sign up for Facebook other than, like, Hotmail back in the, you know, early 2000s, we could import your address book. Anyways, long story short, I remember getting into a huge fight about whether that thing should be opt in or opt out and I remember telling the guy, and I'm not going to say who it is because you guys all know him, and I, and I was literally like, "Honestly, just shut up and enjoy the success that will come from keeping this as an opt out." (laughs) And it just reminds me that at some point, somebody needs to impose their will to make very difficult product decisions.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:18 Right.

David Friedberg 1:05:18 And if you leave it to a team, you'll end up with... By the way, go to Gmail today with 95 Gemini pop-ups. It's not what will allow them to win with what they have, which is a better product, which I will agree. It is a meaningfully-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:32 Right.

David Friedberg 1:05:32 ... better model on multiple dimensions than anything else.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:05:35 Okay, I know Sachs has to go. Before you go, David, I just want to hit Tesla for half

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:05:40 a second. Tesla's out with earnings this week. Stock is up 8% on the back of that, back of that news, 23% up in the last five days, in large part because Elon basically said, "I'm getting out of Doge and I'm going back into Tesla." So, the question is, what can he actually do to fix Tesla at this point? What does he have to do? And is he really out of Doge?

Jason Calacanis 1:06:01 No, I don't, I don't think he's out of Doge. He didn't say he was out of Doge. It was just a matter of how much time he could allocate to each thing. I mean, look, I saw this before when I was part of the Twitter transition, is that for the first three months or so, he was basically full time at Twitter HQ learning the business down to the database level. I mean, every nook and cranny of that business he learned about. Once he felt like he had a mental model and he had the people in place that he trusted, he could move to more of a maintenance mode. And I think that's the only way he can manage five companies is that he has these intense bursts where he focuses on something, gets the right people and structure in place, feels like he understands it, and then he can delegate more. And I think that he has reached that point with Doge but he was also clear that he's gonna keep doing it because if he doesn't, there's gonna be a huge backsliding where, you know, all the corrupt interests will basically put back all his corrupt spending. So, he's gonna stay involved, but as an SGE, he's limited to 130 days a year anyway and so it makes sense for him to kind of now ration his days a little more closely. But he's got the people in place. Remember, Doge...It wasn't just him, it was also the US Digital Service, which is basically the IT branch of the executive branch, which got put under Doge. So, my sense is that Doge is gonna continue, it's just that Elon is shifting to a mode where he can manage it one day a week or two days a week, as opposed to being there five days a week.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:07:25 Steve Bannon says he wants the receipts. He says, "There are no receipts, we don't have the receipts." He says, "We need itemized receipts to see what has actually happened." What do you think?

Jason Calacanis 1:07:35 Why wouldn't we wanna cut as much of this corruption as possible? I mean-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:07:38 Oh, I think we have to.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:38 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:07:39 We have to. The question is, should the public get to see exactly what's been cut and what hasn't?

Jason Calacanis 1:07:44 Why wouldn't they? Of course. And what we really need is for Congress to now embrace all of the corruption that Elon has found and eliminate it from the budget. Because at the end of the day, in order to capture the savings here, we do need those appropriations eliminated from the budget. And my biggest concern is not something that, that Doge is gonna do or not d- it's not up to Doge to do that. It's up to, k- frankly, these old bulls in Congress who control the appropriations process. Are they gonna basically backslide and just put the spending back in, 'cause it's easier to just do that, engage in this log rolling? Or do we take advantage of this, I think, incredible sacrifice that Elon has made? I mean, look, this has cost him enormously. One of the reasons why Tesla is down is 'cause you've had crazy leftists engaging in terrorism, firebombing Tesla dealerships. In any event, he's made this enormous sacrifice in order to expose the corruption. And look at what we've learned. We've basically learned that this whole NGO thing is a giant scam, where, you know, the people in government give enormous amounts of money to their friends, probably with the expectation that when they leave government, they're gonna be next in line at the trough. And I think Elon's done an enormous service exposing this. But, you know, it's not entirely up to him. In order for us to realize the benefit, we need Congress now to act on that.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:09:04 So what kind of, what do you think the-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:04 And I'm, I'm just afraid that's not gonna happen.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:09:06 What kind of total number do you think we get? I always say, "A dollar saved is a dollar made." And we should s- we should say amen to that. The question is, what do you think the total number's ultimately gonna be?

Jason Calacanis 1:09:14 Well, he says they're at 160 billion right now. I think that's, by the way, that's an annual number, as far as I understand it. So, you know, what I always hear with spending is, they always multiply everything by 10 because they assume it's gonna be 10 years. So, if it is 160 billion a year, that would be 1.6 trillion over 10 years, probably more because the spending always grows. And look, that's 160 billion that we weren't planning on saving before Elon got involved in the government. So, if that's all it is, that would be great. I think there could be more, and it really comes down to whether Doge continues to be supported by the political process. And, um, look, Elon can't, he can't force that, right? I mean, ultimately, it's up to legislators to take advantage of the work that he did, and ultimately, it's up to the people to put pressure on those legislators to embrace what he did. He's done an enormous amount, you know, but there's an old saying that you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. If the entrenched political interests, at the end of the day, aren't, you know (laughs) , if they're not gonna, uh, embrace the, the savings that Elon has found, I, I, you know, I don't know what we can do about that.

David Sacks 1:10:20 Yeah, I mean, there's, there's the administrative and discretionary aspect, but, you know, I've said for a while, it's gonna be necessary to have statutory resolve to actually fix the deficit problem in the United States, and that means getting Congress to act. And Congress has not shown a willingness to act. And every time I go to DC, I come back d- more disappointed. I share the stories on this show, and I talk about the fact that there are very few members of Congress that are standing up and saying, "At the end of the day, the first thing we need to solve is how do we reduce the deficit? Then we can address all of the policy issues that we wanna talk about." But if we don't solve the deficit problem, there is no policy. There is nothing-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:58 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:10:58 ... we're going to be able to do because the Treasury rates are gonna spike. There's gonna be no capital, there's gonna be no funding. We're gonna go through a debt death spiral. So at the end of the day, we really do need Congress to stand up and lead here. It is not on one man's shoulders. There's only so much Elon can do without statutory authority from Congress.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:18 Right.

David Sacks 1:11:18 And I think that's really important in this, in this budget reconciliation process, and it's really important for the president to also help lead Congress to where we need to go on this. Members of Congress are elected because they get stuff for their constituents. The more they get, the more likely they are to get elected. And next cycle, they gotta get their constituents more stuff. So it creates an escalating spiral staircase. It's a problem in how democracy operates.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:41 It creates a tragedy of the commons. There's a collective action problem, because like you said, each individual congressman or senator primarily wants to get stuff for their district or their state, for their special interests, and there's no one really looking out for the public interest, the overall common good. And these appropriators are basically engaged in log rolling, where they're willing to give, you know, their, their colleagues their pork if they get their pork, and this is why we have a $2 trillion deficit. It's a really hard thing to fix. I mean-

David Sacks 1:12:14 It's really hard. This is the problem with democracy-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:15 Uh, that's why we need a line item veto.

David Sacks 1:12:17 ... is eventually-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:17 I mean, people are calling-

David Sacks 1:12:18 Eventually you realize, you realize you can vote yourself all the money, and that's what you do.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:22 Well, I, I think, you know, this has been something that I remember, uh, Bush 41 in his State of the Union called for a line item veto. This was like 30 years ago, and we still need that, you know, because I do think that if the president had more authority over this process, it'd be less of a tragedy of the commons.

David Sacks 1:12:40 In my naive youth, I was very against that and I felt like it was giving too much power to the president, and I never really understood the wisdom of it until we find ourselves at the end of the cycle, which is where we are here. That's, you know-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:50 Yeah, and unfortunately, Congress will never, I think, change its ways until they're forced to by some sort of crisis, which, Friedberg, I think is your point about eventually we'll be in a debt crisis, and then Congress will finally see the wisdom-

David Sacks 1:13:04 As soon as this crisis, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:04 ... and they'll finally appreciate what Elon did. You know, there's all these entrenched...... political interests complaining about Elon. I mean, again, he undertook an enormous sacrifice to try and fix our fiscal situation, which is unsustainable, before there's a crisis. One day there'll be a crisis, everyone will see that he's right.

David Sacks 1:13:20 But to answer your question, Andrew, uh, Nick, you wanna pull up this Polymarket? So this is the Polymarket and how much spending will Doge cut in 2025.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:25 All right, guys, unfortunately I gotta go.

David Sacks 1:13:27 Yeah, we'll see you later, Sax.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:13:28 All right, see you.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:28 Bye, Saxapoon. Love you.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:13:29 Dave, that was great. Thank you.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:30 Yeah. Thank you.

David Sacks 1:13:31 Polymarket's showing an 84% chance of less than 50 billion being cut in 2025 and a only-

David Friedberg 1:13:39 I'm sorry, isn't-

David Sacks 1:13:39 ... 20% chance.

David Friedberg 1:13:40 Isn't the number on doge.gov right now, like, 160 or something?

David Sacks 1:13:43 160. That's what they're saying they've cut in contracts, so that means the annualized run rate of savings from cutting contracts, but what Polymarket's showing is what's the actual savings in 2025 from Doge, actually.

David Friedberg 1:13:57 Oh, oh, 'cause these are multiyear contracts.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:13:58 Multiyear contracts.

David Sacks 1:13:59 Yeah.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:13:59 But then there's also reporting that, like, 92 billion dollars of it, I think, isn't actually itemized so it's hard to understand what's actually-

David Friedberg 1:14:06 That's right.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:14:06 ... you know, on the list.

David Sacks 1:14:07 Okay.

David Friedberg 1:14:07 And they haven't, they haven't done anything yet in defense, right? So that's a big honeypot, I guess, if you wanna use that word, potentially, that could-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:14:17 Potentially.

David Friedberg 1:14:17 ... juice the system.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:14:18 Do you, do you think he's gonna go there?

David Friedberg 1:14:20 Well, I mean, there are people-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:14:22 I hope he does.

David Friedberg 1:14:22 There are people at, at DOD and at HHS but b- but I don't think we've had a readout from any of those-

Andrew Ross Sorkin 1:14:27 Right.

David Friedberg 1:14:27 ... people yet, right? I mean, all of this other stuff has been-

David Sacks 1:14:29 Oh, HHS is huge. It's the number o- if you look at their list-

David Friedberg 1:14:32 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:14:32 ... on the Doge,