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Trump vs Powell, Solving the Debt Crisis, The $10T AGI Prize, GENIUS Act Becomes Law Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
So, Gavin, were you at the, Coldplay concert in Boston last night? Or
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sadly, I missed that.
Good. Who are you? Exactly. I was at home with my wife, but yeah. Wow. How insane.
There’s just so many layers to that story. It’s impossible to get away from. It’ll be seventy two hours of memes. Dave, were you at the Coldplay concert sai Boston last night? And if so, were you with Woody, your astronaut friend? Did you take Woody to the concert?
No, counselor. I was here in Santa Cruz last night.
Oh, you were in Santa Cruz on a business trip? Okay.
The funny thing is, if they had not reacted the way they did, the camera would have just panned away. Yeah. Yeah.
Nothing. No one would have ever known. There is some great irony to the head of people and human resources being in an affair with the CEO, apparently. Alleged Don’t jump to conclusions, Jason. No. It
could’ve I he could’ve been cracking her back, you know, ai, when you get baptized
Yes. Ai could’ve been a chiropractic.
Ai my god. Let your winners ride.
And it said we open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it.
Bobby West. I think queen of quinoa.
Alright. Let’s get to work. It is, the saloni, slow news weeks of summer, and we are delighted delighted to have fan favorite super intelligent bestie, Gavin Baker, with us from Matreaties. How are you, sir? How’s your summer shaping up?
Fantastic. It’s been awesome.
Stock market is back. That’s good for you because you invest in both public and private companies. Yeah?
Yeah. Gavin, let me ask you a question. How do you price tariffs today? So where do you think this ends up? Obviously, there’s a lot of back and forth and, you know, everyone’s trying to make a read on what the end game is. What’s your market take as you’re making investments right now and where we end up on the tariff front?
It is a good question. It’s it’s open. We’re gonna see what happens with sectoral tariffs. I think it’s it’s hard. You’re doing the winning AI summit. It’s gonna be hard to win an AI if we put, tariffs on semiconductors. But for a lot of what I do for now, tariffs are not super relevant.
But, you know, for for the market, for the economy, they are relevant. But for AI, they’re maybe a little less relevant because I think everyone is is maybe a little more sophisticated about the downsides of tariffs for constructing data centers here in The United States.
Mhmm. And, ultimately, don’t we look at the tariff situation and say, despite the shock and awe of the opening salvo, it’s quite a boring position now. It just seems to be reciprocity and reasonable reciprocity at that. Yeah? That’s how we would sort of categorize the end game here?
say for everyone but China. You know, it is and, you know, we’re we’ve clearly reached some sort of deal with China, you know, rare earths for h twenties and meh I three zero eight x’s. But it’s interesting and one of the the trade deals that has been finalized is Vietnam and there’s a special carve out for goods that were transshipped from China through Vietnam.
So they arya clearly focused on China more than almost in, you know, any other country, rightly or wrongly. But yeah. And I do think there is, you know, there was maybe three months where where Trump said he did not care about the stock market, but now he’s back to quoting the market at all time highs.
Yes. He clearly cares and is clearly very sensitive to market feedback. So I think that that will be a, dampening mechanism on tariff volatility. But, you know, they passed the bill, and he immediately went back to tariffs. And, you know, we’ll see where we land in August.
But I just think the most important thing in the market by far is AI. It kind of overwhelms everything else.
Absolutely. And, I guess the other big story with, the market and we’ll get into the h twenties. David Sachs will be joining us in a moment, so he’ll be jumping in halfway through it. But let’s start with maybe this, soft launch of the firing of Jerome Powell. On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg reported that Trump was likely to fire Powell soon after talking with Republican lawmakers.
Shortly after that, The New York Times reported that Trump had actually drafted Powell’s termination letter. Market instantly reacted negatively, dropped 1%. Bond yields rose about 10 basis points. You can see the blips here on these charts starting around 11:30AM when the article was published.
Polymarket reported Jerome Powell out as Fed chair in 2025 speak up to, 30% on Wednesday before dropping back down to 20%. Trump, quickly squashed these rumors. Markets rebounded. And Trump sai, we’re not planning on doing anything regarding Powell. Some people speculating maybe this was Trump testing the market reaction.
As you talked about earlier, Gavin, he, he does seem to care about the market as most presidents do. If you remember, Trump nominated Powell as Fed chair 11/02/2017, and he has gone on a tirade the last couple of months calling Powell stupid, numbskull, stubborn, low IQ, a knucklehead, mentally average.
It’s a long list of descriptors of the person he placed. House term ends May. White House officials have confirmed Trump is in the process of selecting his successor. PolyMarkets says that could be Kevin Warsh. 22%. Kevin Hassett. 19%. Scott Bessen, 15%. This hasn’t actually ever happened, right? We’ve never had a Fed share ai.
But we have inflation coming back a bit. If you all remember, there’s a dual mandate for the Fed to keep unemployment low. Check. That’s pretty good. And keeping inflation under control, that’s been going very well since our massive inflation spike over the past couple of years. And, here we go.
CPI ticked up 10% ram 2.4 to 2.7%, 30 basis point increase over May. So any thoughts, Gavin, on these macro issues around inflation coming back a bit, meh the stock market at an all time high, and unemployment. If you believe the unemployment data, and we’ve had a bunch of debates here about that, you know, how how correct is it being at, close to an all time low in our lifetimes?
Yeah. I wouldn’t read too much into the CPI bouncing up a little bit. There’s base rate effects, I think, on a month over month, basis. And if you looked at, you know, what what economists call core, super core, different, you know, ways to maybe smooth out Sai, I think inflation is still relatively contained as far as but, I mean, a lot of very smart people are convinced that tariffs will lead to inflation.
We’ll see. There’s certainly sound theoretical arguments for why they will, but it does look like maybe the, overseas exporters are eating a little bit more of the tariffs than than people thought that they would, which is which is good for US inflation. But, you know, the combination of a very weak dollar and tariffs, theoretically, should lead to a little more inflation.
Firing Powell, I worry that the market only went down 1%. I do think the market would go down quite a bit more if Trump did fire Powell. I think it would be a mistake. I hope he doesn’t do it. And, you know, there are very sound reasons for the Federal Reserve to be independent, and I hope he does not read from that trial balloon down 1% that that’s all that would happen.
Look. The world would continue spinning. America would go on, but it would be a mistake.
Freeberg, we have, this idea that there would be a couple of rate cuts and maybe we get monetary velocity going again. People will be able to take more loans out, invest more in business. But with the stock market tearing it up, there’s a lot of wealth being put into the system with the big beautiful bill.
There’s a lot of spending in there as we’ve talked about here. Putting that aside, it feels like the economy is in really great shape. Chances of a rate cut has now flipped. No change is now the favorite option for September, whereas a week ago, the favorite option was 25 bps.
So this idea that we’re going to cut or the Fed’s gonna cut, that seems to be changing as well. So your thoughts on the, the macro picture here?
So I’m not sure, like, the firing of Jerome Powell necessarily solves The US fiscal challenge, which is rising interest rates on the long end of the treasury curve. So if you look at the the thirty year treasury yield over time and, Nick, maybe you could pull this up while I’m talking.
But as of today, we’re at exactly 5% on the thirty year. And you can see that this 5% yield, which is what the market is demanding the United States government pay in order to be loaned the money to make the bill payments that the US government has to make every year is the highest it’s been.
The borrowing cost is the highest it’s been since going all the way back to 2007 as of today. And I think this is the real story for The United States. We have $36,000,000,000,000 of debt. The average interest rate we’re paying on that debt today is 3.3%. That’s the average of all the treasuries that the federal government has issued, the treasury department has issued to borrow the money that it is using and has used to pay all its bills.
And if you look at the 5% number, that’s a 1.7 hike. At 3.3%, which is the current average rate we’re paying across $36,000,000,000,000, we’re we have a run rate interest expense. So just the money we’re paying each year on the interest of the outstanding debt is 1,200,000,000,000 a year.
And if this spikes up to 5% from 3.3, we’re talking about nearly $2,000,000,000,000 a year in interest expense. And that number is only gonna get bigger as we borrow more money each year and the loan balance goes up, the outstanding debt goes up because we are still running a deficit.
The government is spending more than it’s making every year. So the crisis that America faces is a more profound fiscal crisis where the rates that we’re having to pay are a function of what the market is telling Us. The market does not want to loan The United States money over a thirty year period for less than 5% as of today.
And so making adjustments to the short end of the treasury curve, making overnight loans cheaper, which is what the Meh can do, will stimulate the economy and make more money flow easily because now you’ll be able to borrow money overnight to do stuff like build a building and then sell the building next week or next month, or take out a car loan and pay it down and use your car to go drive for Uber and grow the economy and other things.
So the theory is that if we can, you know, drive rates down on the short end of the curve, we’ll grow the economy such that we’ll be able to make those payments on the long end of the curve. But there comes a point where, again, you’re only gonna be able to move the market so much until the more important fiscal situations are gonna be addressed, which is spending, taxation, and some of the other key policy issues.
So I think what the market is saying is it’s not as much about Jerome Powell. And, frankly, getting rid of a prudent individual may be more challenging than it is beneficial when the real challenges facing The United States need to be more arya addressed. So I think that’s my sana take on this whole ai.
yeah? Go ahead, Gavin. Build on it.
So point number one, the thirty year has gone up since Powell started cutting rates. So that is just empirical proof that what David is saying, I think, is right. And second the deficit has been a feature of American politics dating back to Ross Perot’s, you know, nineteen ’92 presidential run.
His independent third party run.
His independent third party run.
But yes. But it the deficit never really mattered because interest rates kept going down such that even as our debt grew, interest expense has kind of a percentage of the government’s budget stayed relatively low. Now that rates have gone up and don’t seem like they’re, you know, going down anytime soon, the deficit does matter, and it really matters.
And you you can kind of run a a couple of scenarios, but, like, pick your pick your metric. If the deficit kind of continues at current levels and we were to refinance the debt at the prices that, you know, David was talking about, You know, it’s it’s only a few years before spending on interest is significantly larger than spending on Medicare and Medicaid or Social Security or the military.
So pick something you care about. But, you know, our current course and speed, it’s it’s in the not too distant future where interest expense is the biggest line item for the government, and that is not healthy. And that’s why the deficit finally matters. It’s just that rates are higher. But the great thing is is there is a virtuous cycle here.
As you close the deficit, rates should theoretically come down, and then those both feed on each other to kind of help the problem. And it is possible. There’s no silver bullet here, but some combination of slowing government spending, extra revenue, and, you know, tariffs are effectively we’ve never had a consumption tax here in America, which I think is a good thing because consumption taxes are very regressive.
But the reality is, like, even when Obama controlled the house, the senate, and was the most popular Democratic president of our lifetime, I don’t think federal government tax receipts has a percentage of GDP, got above 19%. So that’s kind of the ceiling. And it for income taxes saloni. And tariffs are really just a consumption tax that kind of incense domestic manufacturing.
I mean, there’s all sorts of reasons they’re bad ideas. You know? David Ricardo, the theory of comparative advantage, 100% correct. Free trade is a good thing. But introducing some sort of a consumption tax, growing the economy a little bit faster through deregulation, and slowing government spending
I think there is a way out of this for America. Yeah. But it’s important to find the way because the deficit finally does matter after really never mattering in my political lifetime.
It is interesting. We’ve never had to worry about our debt. It was always manageable because it wasn’t that large. And even when it got large, it wasn’t compared to GDP because the country was doing so well. We had the PC revolution. We had the Internet boom. I mean, we’ve had boom after boom after boom in efficiency that we’ve led the world.
And these companies like Google or Apple take over the world and all those tax receipts and income comes into our country, that does sort of, make you not look at it. I guess I you know, I haven’t been talking to you, Gavin, and not to make this super political, but both parties have proven that they have no interest historically, and in in the current one, with cutting spending.
It’s just the nature of it. So we can sit here, whether you’re a Biden fan, Trump fan, put it all aside. Both parties love spending, and they’re not stopping. One of our friends has proposed, hey, maybe in the midterms, we have a couple of, these House positions, couple senators, maybe we try to flip them and create a new party that cares about this issue.
What are your thoughts broadly on that if a couple of more Joe Manchin types were in the House, the Sana, could this country maybe start to make this the, the deciding issue? And maybe could we see some movement on the other two parties, some pressure on them by a third party, an America party perhaps?
Yeah. Well, I think a few things. I do think there is room for a much more centrist party in Meh. You know, the way the primaries work, it, you know, leads to more maybe extreme candidates than anyone would actually want, you know, be being each party’s candidate. So I think a third party would be helpful, you know, and, you know, I think there’s plenty of room for a party that is, you know, kind of a, you know, fiscally conservative, you know, reasonably socially liberal, pro American energy production, all kinds of energy production, including solar, importantly.
So I think there’s room for that, and I think it is right that if you just target a few races, you can have a big impact. But I would just say Yeah. Humbly, I think the American party is a great idea. Ai just don’t know that it is the highest and best use of Elon’s talents
At this moment in time with what’s happening with Ai. And just, you know, to the extent, Elon is a friend of the pod Yeah. I just think staying focused, AI, Mars, that might be the highest and best use of his particular talents.
Hasn’t that been the case for for some time, Gavin? And anytime there’s something, whether it’s Neuralink or Boring Company or some other new project that there’s these claims that this is a distraction away from the highest priority work that should be done. I mean, is the political stuff unique?
And then his point of view on the political stuff, just like it was with Twitter, is that it’s existential to society and civilization and our ability to function and to do, you know, to achieve the progress that he aims to achieve and his core function.
So, obviously, he is succeeding being the CEO of many different companies. But, you know, I think a big part of what makes him kind of exceptional as a CEO is the perfectionism, the ai, and, you know, politics is not a game of perfection. It’s a game of compromise. So I am sure if he sets his mind to the America party that he will succeed, but I think there are other things for him to focus on.
And, you know, The Boring Company, Neuralink, these are games of perfection. These are you know, this is about engineering. This is about solving a problem. It’s not, you know, ai the art of the possible. So I think he would succeed.
I just think that there are other things that meh be a higher calling for him.
Meh. Yeah. I meh, and the the cost of being away from his businesses this last time around, as he said very publicly, was severe. It was intense, and he’s had to really regroup. But we got this incredible news when GROC four came out, and I think we should maybe talk a little bit here about what that big prize is.
The big prize, I think, is most well, it’s actually gonna be an open question, Freyberg. I think the big prize is whoever wins general intelligence, superintelligence, or the biggest cluster, or the most power to power the biggest cluster that powers general superintelligence.
So where do we sit on the language models today, Gavin, and Elon’s bryden, let’s just call it what it is. I mean, incredibly dominant release of Grok four. I don’t think people expected that. They didn’t expect him to be able to leapfrog everybody. And and let’s be honest, people are leapfrogging each other every four to six months.
So I I fully expect Gemini will leapfrog rock and OpenAI will have their time in the sun again as well. But this was pretty impressive. Right?
I’d say this is the biggest leapfrog we’ve seen in quite some tyler. And I think the benchmarks that matter are RKGI two and humanity’s last ram. Where it did in in the case of RKGI two, it’s called semiprivate, which is important because it means that some of the questions were held back because the criticism of these models is they ai the answer.
And so RKGI two had not seen the questions before, and it did roughly twice as good as, you know, the state of the art Google Ai and anthropic models. And then on humanities last exam, you know, we can call it 50 to 75% that are, you know, exceptional humans score 5% on that. It scores in the forties.
So this is incredible progress, and I think it’s worth mentioning this model was trained on Hopper. So this this model is probably about as far as you can take the last generation of NVIDIA GPUs. The next models we see, you know, GROC five, you know, o five from OpenAI, whatever they’re gonna call Jim the next Gemini, they will be trained on Blackwell, and I think that will be a really big step function.
But I do think the ultimate prize here is, artificial superintelligence. Like, I think artificial general intelligence will create a lot of economic value, but, you know, and, you know, maybe we will be able to work less as humans. But I think ASI, artificial superintelligence, is what is really exciting, you know, in terms of maybe, you know, being able to live longer, you know, really ai of fundamentally kind of change the fabric of our lives.
Can you take a stab at explaining that difference in definition to the audience who they hear these terms and we ai bundle them into either a transcendent intelligence that we haven’t seen before that we sai humans can’t comprehend. It goes beyond human intelligence. Or this is the smartest human on the planet. And where we are right now in this journey.
Because I think these terms are all getting muddled together and I think we have an interesting conversation here if we parse them.
I think artificial general intelligence, I would define it as an AI that can take economically useful actions in a variety of domains and be better than the average human in most domains, all domains. But that’s very different than superintelligence. K. You know, being, you know, being able to draft a contract, that’s not superintelligence, but it is useful.
Being able to do a medical diagnosis is not superintelligence, but it is useful. You know, being able to book my travel, so on and so forth. Superintelligence means exactly what you sai, that it is smarter than any human, but it has, you know, access to all of human knowledge.
And I think one of the most interesting questions is what will the economic returns to superintelligence be? And they’re definitely unknowable because we have never seen superintelligence before. If as humans, we have kind of, pushed the limits of physics, biology, chemistry, the laws of the universe, then maybe the economic returns to superintelligence won’t be that high.
But if superintelligence is curing cancer and inventing warp drives, then the returns are gonna be really, really high, and it’s fundamentally unknowable. Yeah.
Okay. So we’re at general intelligence. Hey. Your lawyer, your tax, your accountant’s gonna go much faster. They’ll have a copilot. This is all gonna be great for business. Every business gets 10% more efficient a month. Seems like a reasonable bogey, which means every seven, eight, nine months, every business is gonna get twice as efficient at these ai of chores. Yeah?
I think that I wouldn’t say that’s a reasonable bogey. I think that might be a little aggressive. It’s, you know, the world the world always it’s you know, I think it’s a a Bill Gates quote. You know, the the world always changes less than you expect over the next one, two, three years, but way more than you expect over ten years. Yeah.
Just takes time for technologies to diffuse. You know, maybe really nimble startups will see some of the gains, you you know, that you’re talking about. But, I mean, if we doubled productivity, I mean, that would be like an economic revolution.
I mean, we’re seeing it in programming. Ai I I I For sure. You talk to the average developer, they, I think, would say they’re getting five to 10% better a month. Better being defined as faster, shipping more code. Rule of 72. Hey. You know, every year, at least, you’re gonna you’re gonna be twice as good. I think that actually seems to be happening with developers.
I think it is happening with software. I think software is the first area where you’ve seen a real true kind of economic productivity impact. Generalized, a lot of companies are having incredible success with AI for customers, you know, support for sales. I think you see it more in startups than big companies, but it the impact it has had on coding is undeniable.
Freeberg, let me swing this around to you. We’ve got the superintelligence out there. We’ve got AGI out there. One of the things Gavin said was, by definition, you can’t quantify the gains of superintelligence. That is the big prize here. That’s why people are putting this much money into these ai of data centers. Yeah. In your mind, it’s not just the general intelligence. That would be the silver medal.
People are going for the gold here. Not general intelligence, superintelligence. Breakthroughs that we can imagine. Am I would you say that’s a fair way to, sum up the massive interest in investing in these projects?
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s something where everyone has identified this asymptotic return moment where if you get to that moment, you’re limitless in terms of the upside. Is there one winner? I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I I would also kind of reframe this as being some binary condition that I think we’re talking about it as being, quote, general intelligence, superintelligence sai being on a spectrum of leverage towards complexity.
Complexity meaning, like, I can do a simple task, like, instead of writing a letter and putting it in an envelope and having some guy carry it to my mom, you know, and she gets it the next day, I can digitally get her that message instantly over email. That creates an incredible amount of leverage and solves a lot of the complexity of getting her that communication from me.
So if I, as a human, sai, I would like to harness fusion power similar to what the sun uses to make energy, and I wanna do that on Earth. Today, we’re in, call it, year forty or fifty of a research cycle of humans trying to solve that particularly complex problem. It’s a scientific problem. It’s a discovery problem.
It’s an engineering problem. And this idea of superintelligence is that it could give us immense leverage in solving that complex problem that we otherwise meh be challenged to solve over decades or hundreds of years, or think about one day solving a problem that would take humans thousands of years to solve.
I I don’t think that humans are limited in our ability to solve problems. I think we’re limited in terms of ai. And what intelligence what digital intelligence gives us is leverage on time so that we can now tackle ever more complex tasks that as you think about these tasks, the amount of time isn’t just an incremental one year or two years, but it becomes a hundred years or maybe a thousand years.
So this relates to, I think, projects around physics, around chemistry, around transportation, around ai, where we’re probably fundamentally scratching the surface today and where the superintelligence is an enormous leverage crater for us. And so I don’t view it as some, like, species or race that independently persists in its own intentions, but it is a tool that provides leverage in a way that is orders of magnitude greater than the leverage we got from yesteryear’s digital tools and probably today’s the AI tools and probably tomorrow’s general intelligence tools is kinda how I would I would think about it.
And, you know, maybe it’s because one model does so much stuff better than any meh. You can call it superintelligence. But I think, functionally, leveraging into complexity is is where this becomes super compelling for humans. And it’s why Sai think we can and should be highly optimistic about living very long lives and traveling anywhere we want and having abundance in food and having abundance in resources and having abundance in recouping our time to do the things we wanna do instead of the things that we have to do today because we don’t have access to this incredible leverage.
So that’s where I get kind of help.
I love it, Friedberg. I think it’s a great way to look at it. But Sai wanna go back to the silver meh here in this sort of competition. Gold being superintelligence, we start solving fusion and really big problems on deep research cycles and the velocity of that goes up. But just going back to the silver, you know, everybody in the economy becomes, I don’t know, single digits, more efficient every month, and, you know, some amount every year.
I’ve been trying to back of the envelope ai I think the value is for, a human being in the West, in the modern world, and what they should spend on AI per month. I’ve come up with a number of about 75, a $150. Somewhere in that range is a no brainer to spend on your AI per month as an individual working in the world. If that’s the premise, ai?
I think there’s a billion people in the developed world who could spend, let’s call it 100 a month. It’s 1,200 a year. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out this is a trillion dollars in revenue. Based on market cap. That’s probably $10,000,000,000,000 in market cap.
And then we just have to back into the spending of what it costs to build this. You’re doing these ai of calculations, I’m sure, at a treaties. Yeah? And and where this general back of the envelope that I’ve come up with in my mind for a mental model that there’s a $10,000,000,000,000 prize, a trillion dollars in revenue, just in the silver medal, does that jive with the spending we’re seeing today?
I think people are putting in $10,000,000,000 worth of equipment a year across five different companies. Right?
Well, I think they’re putting in quite a bit more than 10,000,000,000 per year.
Each Google alone is doing 70,000,000,000 this year. Each should put in
that is that 70,000,000,000 they’re putting in this year gonna be repeated for the next five years? So it’d be 350,000,000,000?
If you look at TPD? If you well, yeah, TPD, the future’s always uncertain. Yeah. But, you know, if there are economic returns to that, they will keep doing it for sure. There’s something interesting is, you know, AI is, you know, as we discussed in previous all ins, extremely compute intensive.
And it’s just at no point in my career as a tech investor except the very beginning, which was kind of the end of the PC wars, which Dell won by being a low cost producer, going direct, cutting out the working capital, you know, the components of the PC depreciate. So if you have to go through a store, where where it sits on the shelves, you’re at a big disadvantage from, you know, either a, you know, call it a cost or a quality perspective.
But at no point in the twenty five years I’ve been a tech investor, is being the low cost producer mattered? Being the low cost producer is really gonna matter in AI because, at some level, the amount of tokens you produce is intelligence because of test time compute, you know, post training reinforcement learning.
And so if you can produce those tokens at a lower cost, you’ll have a big advantage. You know, if for that 75,000,000,000 or 30,000,000,000 or 50,000,000,000 that you’re spending per year in CapEx, you can produce more tokens. That is a profound advantage. I don’t like your your calculations, like, just has a back of the envelope, you know, kind of scratch. They seem reasonable to me.
The trillion dollars a year in revenue because of AI seems quite quite reasonable when you frame it as a thousand dollars for a person to be, whatever, thirty, forty, 50% more efficient at work every year.
Yeah. And it’s just you we could probably go back and look at kind of like the early days of, you know, cell phones and what were people willing to pay relative to disposable income.
Your PC analogy would actually be the perfect one. A PC at back in the air that era was, what, $34,000 per person. They lasted for three years. So it sai exactly a thousand a year.
But this is why this is why creating such delineated distinction between different types of AI, I think, is is also, like, the equivalent of trying to create distinctions between other types of technology. So the the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, the computer, all of these technologies are tools that created leverage, leverage on things that were otherwise complexity and reduced them down to simplicity ram a human perspective.
Pick up the phone, make a call instead of getting up on your horse and going across the country to deliver a message or using a computer to do a spreadsheet that calculated everything for you rather than calculate it by hand and so on and so forth. Like, all of these tools reduce complexity to simple tasks for humans.
And the ever increasing complexity of what we can accomplish with digital tools is, you know, continuing on this kind of era now. But that’s why I think it’s very similar, Jason. Like, we this is not some new concept. It’s it’s the continuation of human productivity. It’s a continuation of the improvement of what humans can do, of what we can produce, what we can and and, yes, there’s a concept now that intelligence has become such a like, it’s caught up to everything.
But and, Gavin, I don’t know if you think that there is this concept of some moment of singularity, but it it does feel to me like there’s just extraordinary leverage that’s being created that feels similar to
yeah. For sure, that’s true. I hope that’s true. I hope your vision of it being a productivity enhancer for humans is correct. You know, I do think, you know, people deep in AI do think there’s some probability that it goes ai. But I hope I I hope that you’re right. But coming back to to J.
Cal’s, you know, $10,000,000,000,000 prize and, you know, relative to, you know, the market caps of the companies involved, it it it needs to be at least $10,000,000,000,000. Something that I think is is interesting and and and relevant particularly to Croc four being the best product is the best product doesn’t always win in technology.
Great amount of Yeah. Yeah. In sports, you know, they say, defense wins championships. And on the Internet, distribution wins championships. And Grok four has formidable competitors with lots of distribution, and Google and Meta. Meh, if they get their app together, Microsoft.
And so from an industrial logic perspective, something that I think makes a lot of sense, particularly since OpenAI bought Jony Ives hardware startup, which will place them into a competition with Apple at some point, is XAI and Apple are natural partners. There’s been a lot of news about Apple thinking about buying perplexity or mixed draw, but that’s just a Bryden Aid.
Those companies don’t get Apple what they need, and Apple’s had an incredible partnership for many years now with Google that’s generating tens of billions of dollars for both companies. And I think there is solid industrial logic for partnership. You could have Apple Grok, Sai Grok, whatever you wanna call it, you know, so that Apple feels comfortable.
And that probably also helps Grok in the enterprise. And then it also helps both Apple and Google with this DOJ trial. And so I think in this, you know, incredibly high ELO chess match that is being played between the leading labs, like, that is that partnership makes a lot of sense for both companies.
First time I’ve heard anybody sort of make that natural connection, but you’re right. Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs at one point had this discussion, which was, hey. We’ve got search, and you’ve got a browser now because the iPhone didn’t have a browser, you know, or or, you know, they could have built their own search engine.
They could have partnered with Yahoo, but they decided to make this long term partnership with Google. And, man, that dropped, what, $2,030,000,000,000 to the bottom line at Apple and cemented Google search franchise.
Absolutely. And right now, that deal is being litigated by the DOJ, and the DOJ is considering remedies. And so if you bring on a really kind of effective, credible AI provider, I think you could help both Google and Apple with their antitrust issues. And at the end of the day, you know, Google, they have Android in their Pixel phones. OpenAI is making hardware. Anthropic is kind of a captive of Amazon.
Meta is kind of a, you know, they’re they’re in a death match with Apple. So I think there is really sound logic for that partnership. I think it’d be good for both companies. Love to see it happen.
It feels to me like the interface is gonna be the browser. I know this sounds crazy, but I’ve been playing with the Comet browser for perplexity. Did you play with it yet, Gavin, or look at some of the demos?
Yeah. And I just Shah are your
thoughts here? Because it’s really and and then ChatGPT just launched a virtual desktop that pops up to go do your, you know, little web based scrapes, agents, assignments, whatever you I’m gonna call it ai, you know, homework, chores, go do your chores. What what are your thoughts on this modality?
Yeah. The browser is part of distribution winning championships. Apple has Saloni. Google has Chrome. And if you’re not gonna strike a partnership with one of those distribution channels, you will eventually need to do your own browser, and you can extend that logic, you know, all the way.
You know, that’s why they Google, they did a browser. They did a phone. But I also do think the, you know, the companions from Grok have been interesting to play with, and they certainly make it more engaging.
That becomes the agent. It’s a kind of incredible ai blowing concept for that to be the interface. Alright. Listen. Here we go. Calling in live. Ai a breaking bestie coming on board here. David Sacks calling in live. I I see the pale yellow paint, and an ancient building. You must be in some sort of wing of the great White House. Is that correct, David?
I am. Well, I’m actually not in the White House per se. I guess I’m on the White House grounds. We’re in the, Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That’s where my ai.
Sai can tell from that work.
Yeah. No. Ai they said great things. Like and I checked my calendar here.
Tell. I’ll I’ll send you some photos. It’s great.
Well, no. But the calendar’s wide open between now and the allinsummit, allin.com/yada yada yada. So the window’s there, Sachs. The window’s wide open. And I’ll see you in the cafeteria, I guess.
Play your cards right on stage next week, JK. You might get invited after the the NBI summit we’re doing. Yes. Yeah. Absolutely. We got the
in DC next Wednesday, which has been publicly announced. So it’s sana be exciting.
David, you, you brought a friend today. Maybe introduce your friend and tell us, what you got done. What have you gotten done in the last week for the American people? They wanna know. Because you weren’t here last week doing the pod, so you must have gotten something done for the American people. Let’s hear it.
Well, first of all, this is the czar behind the czar, Ai. Okay. He’s the executive director of the president’s working group on digital assets. So that’s the working group that I chair, but he actually does all the work. He’s the executive director, and he’s here every day.
And, he’s been working on crypto pretty much nonstop since we started the administration. And he’s kind of the unsung hero within our operation here on these two bills that just passed the House, which are historic and quite momentous.
So, Beau, welcome to the ram. And, maybe you could tell us a little bit about these bills and what they do for the American people.
Yeah. Well, first of all, David, you’re you’re too kind. We’ve had a blast working together. I mean, we connected, back in transition, I think, in late November, and we started mapping out a plan for this. And to see it come to fruition this week is is really, ai, it’s unbelievable.
The fact that we had the bipartisan votes we did today in the House, is remarkable. It’s unprecedented. And it shows you that, you know, leaders on both sides of the aisle understand that our country has to be at the forefront of this technological development. But let’s start with genius because I think genius is really the foundation for everything else we can build upon in this space.
A lot of industry cares about market structure as do we, and we wanna see it done on the president’s desk as well. But Genius is unique because it really updates the payment rails inside of our current financial system. I mean, the payment rails have been archaic, and I’ve likened it to the fact that the ways in which we’ve communicated have changed quite dramatically over the course of the last several decades.
The ways in which we move money really haven’t, and we have the technology there and blockchain technology. So what we’re doing here is we’re fixing the plumbing of our financial system. We’re securing US dollar dominance for decades to come. If you wanna access our markets, you’re gonna have to use a dollar backed stable.
You’re also providing a pathway for, you know, tokenization of public securities in twenty four seven markets and the things that people have dreamed about for for quite some time. This is a revolutionary piece of legislation, and the fact that it had this much bipartisan support is incredible. It’s a testament to president Trump’s leadership.
It’s a testament to our fantastic AI and crypto czar, David’s leadership. I mean, he’s truly been the guiding star behind the ideology and what we’re pushing here. And, you know, he has a phenomenal team as well. I mean, I’d be I’d be remiss not to thank Tracy, who’s David’s chief of staff.
I mean, in the midst of all of the chaos to get this done, and, like, there were so many steps to this, we had to beat the banking lobby to get it past the senate. Then it moved over to the house in which we had to to to basically fight some members that that really misinterpreted or misunderstood what this bill actually did.
And the president stepped up. David stepped up in an enormous way. It wouldn’t have happened without either of them. And so now we have this bill heading to his desk tomorrow. And to pivot the market structure really briefly, this provides, like, the rules of the road for the exchanges, the brokers that run-in this speak. They desperately need it.
So that we can break down the wall between traditional financial institutions and these digital asset players. I think that’s that’s well underway. Obviously, you know, getting a vote as strong as they did in the House is indicative of what can happen in the Senate. If we deliver on these two pieces of legislation, I mean, that’s about 90% of what needs to be done for crypto to make The US crypto a capital of the world.
And, you know, it’s it’s just remarkable. I mean, we’re we’re over the moon.
Okay. Sachs, you got these two things over the finish line. Congratulations on that. Lots of compromises you had to make, so I wanna get into what were the compromises to get this done.
Just to clarify one thing when you say finish line. So like Bo was saying, there’s two bills. There’s the Genius Act, which is the stablecoin legislation, And then there’s the Clarity Act, which is market structures. Basically, all the other tokens besides stablecoins. Where we are is that both passed the House today, but Genius has already passed the Sana.
So it is going to the president’s desk tomorrow, and it will become law. We’re doing a bill signing with the president. By the time this pot is released, it will probably be law. I think we will have the the signing. Clarity started in the House, and so it has passed the House, and now it’s going to the Senate.
And they still have to do their hearings and markup on it. And we expect that’ll happen over the next couple of months. In fact, the chairman of the Senate Bank Committee, Tim Scott, has said that he wants to finish with the market structure legislation by the September. So if all goes well, then we could be looking at a second bill signing in, say, October.
And like Beau said, that would be pretty much the crypto industry’s wish list for having a clear legal framework in The United States for both stablecoins and other crypto tokens. So it’s really pretty amazing. I mean, when I started this job, I’ll just tell you, one one of my friends in Silicon Valley said that, you know, you may be able to get some AI things done, but you’ll never get anything done on crypto.
And and the reason is because the entrenched interests are too powerful, and they’ll stop it. The banking lobby will stop it, or Elizabeth Warren will stop it, or just all the status quo players who could get disrupted by blockchain based technology will somehow find a way to stop it.
And that didn’t happen. Like, we’ve actually now moved forward. Genius is about to become law. And I think Clarity is looking like it’s gonna have the votes in the Senate as well become law. So it’s really pretty amazing how much progress we’ve made in just six months. And like Beau said, this really comes down to President Trump’s leadership.
He made the promises during the campaign to prioritize crypto, to make The United States the crypto capital of the planet. And it was his negotiating skills and deal making that made this all happen. I mean, this past week has
a roller coaster. There were reports over the last couple of days that the whole thing was falling apart and wouldn’t happen. There was a moment, I think this has been publicly reported, but to give you some color on it, is there were 12 members of the House whose votes were necessary to advance the bill to this vote today.
And at a certain point, President Trump brought him into his office, the Oval Office, and worked out all the differences personally. And that’s what put this bill over the top. If it wasn’t for the president’s direct involvement and action and understanding of the issues, he listened to all the concerns, and he paid attention to the ones that were real and then rebutted the ones that weren’t.
If it wasn’t for his direct involvement, we would not be here today.
And he understands crypto. He’s involved in it. He’s, seems to have an understanding of the value of stablecoins for the US dollar. That seems to be a key motivator for this being bipartisan. You got ai as many Democrats as you thought you would get. Is that because people wanna make sure that dollar supremacy gets locked in in stablecoins as a way to do that?
Because you can’t have a stablecoin unless it’s backed by a dollar.
Yeah. I mean, like I’ve talked about on on the show before, it shouldn’t be that hard to sell regulation to Democrats. I mean, what we’re doing here is providing a regulatory framework for the industry. They didn’t have one before, and that’s why the number one stablecoin player in the world right now is an offshore entity.
They will have to come onshore as part of this bill in the next three years. So what we’re doing here is creating a regulatory framework. But the reason why it’s substantially bipartisan is because the industry wants this regulation because they want the stability it gives them in terms of having that legal authorization.
They wanna make sure that if, you know, four years, eight years from now, twelve years from now, whatever, there’s not some new Gary Gensler who comes in and turns the whole industry upside down because he doesn’t like some aspect of what they’re doing and he just starts prosecuting them, which is what the industry experienced over the past four years with Biden’s war on crypto.
So we, meaning that the Trump administration could fix the the Gensler issues just with agency rulemaking, and we’re certainly on that path to do that. But if you want long term stability that goes beyond just this administration, you have to get legislation. You have to canonize it into law.
And that’s why the industry was so interested in getting these bills passed. So I think that’s why you’re seeing some bipartisanship here. Like Beau said, I do think that there’s a substantial number of Democrats who understand that this technology is the future, and it’s a positive thing for The US.
What could be bad about allowing digital dollars, which extends the dollar’s dominance online sai that it basically bolsters the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency? Over time as we get challengers from bricks, for example, this is gonna make the US dollar stronger.
And every time a dollar token trades somewhere in the world on a crypto wallet, there has to be a physical dollar in a US bank account invested in a US Treasury. And that creates demand for our debt, which is another positive thing. And there have been studies done that show that the results of this bill could be trillions of dollars of new demand for our debt, which is only a positive thing.
And if you don’t allow a legal way to do this and you don’t have a proper framework,
have you’ve been dancing around, this person who has three years to get their act together. That’s Tyler. I’ll say it. You can type you can do a search for Tether controversies or, shenanigans, and you’ll find plenty
Well, I don’t think it’s fair to say they don’t have their act together. I think they have their act together. It’s just that they did not know how they’d be treated operating onshore in The US under Gary Gensler and the Biden administration. And so they operated offshore. And what was happening under the last administration is that the last administration, by creating all this uncertainty and doubt, was driving all the innovation offshore.
Okay. Fine. They have a sordid past. That’s my statement, not yours. But now they have to clean up whatever messy stuff they have in their past. That’s me saying it, not you. You can have your opinion. I’ll take mine. But Sai we’re we’re in agreement that if you don’t have a framework, they would be doing even more things that were maybe off the reservation in my mind.
Gavin, any thoughts here on crypto? I’m not sure you’ve participated in it particularly because it didn’t have a framework. Yes?
I would just say, one, David, congratulations. Seems like an incredible achievement. Two, I try to invest in areas where I feel like I I at least believe I have some sort of, competitive advantage, and it’s not clear to me that I have any sort of competitive advantage in crypto.
But three, David, I am curious for the stablecoins. Is it does the Genius Act limit them to dollar backed stablecoins? So it’s not like you can create the stablecoin and then swap in something other than a dollar. Is that is that true?
Well, I mean, anybody can create a stablecoin that’s backed by anything. And in fact, I think there are, like, Euro backed stablecoins out there, for example, but nobody uses them. I think if you look at the stablecoin market share, it’s ai 98% US dollars, 2% euros because there’s a flight to quality.
I mean, everyone wants to use the best one, right? And this is why it’s in the interest of The United States to basically enable this technology to continue flourishing is because as the best fiat currency, we’re the one that’s gonna get used the most. There’s no reason to have multiple fiat stable points, not really. So that this is gonna accrue to the benefit of The United States.
Jacob, let me go back to something you said. So I don’t necessarily agree with your criticisms of of that particular company, but where I I will agree is that this bill will provide additional comfort for consumers and additional protection for consumers because now all the Stablecoin companies will have to operate in The United States.
They’ll be subjected to quarterly audits, and we will know that every Stablecoin that’s been issued is fully reserved or backed up by a dollar in a US bank account. And so, therefore, when a stablecoin holder eventually wants to cash out and they go to basically an off ramp, the money will actually be there.
Now I’m I’m not saying that the money isn’t there with any of the current providers. In fact, I think it is, but now consumers will have the additional protection and confidence to know that all these entities have been audited, they’ve passed these audits, and they’re regulated entities under US law.
And that creates confidence for the arya, and it’s good for everybody, and it will spread the adoption of the stablecoin product.
And if they don’t, they can’t participate in our market. Right? So that’s the the good news here is, you know, if you choose to not go through those audits and you do attestations or other fugazi, fugazi stuff off offshore, you know, not saying anybody’s doing that, but people have, you know, then you just don’t get to participate.
And and this is the great thing about having some basic rules of the road. We should talk a little bit here about infrastructure sacks. You were in Pittsburgh this week. There were some announcements. This was another bipartisan win. I think Shapiro was there. A bunch of investment going on there.
Maybe tell us a little bit about the progress made in Pittsburgh with regards to AI and infrastructure.
This was a energy and innovation summit that was organized by the Pennsylvania senator Dave McCormick and his wife, Adina Powell McCormick, and they did an amazing job bringing together all of these different companies and interests that have a stake in energy in Pennsylvania and and the development of AI. And Pennsylvania is, I think, it’s the number two energy producing state in The US. It has tremendous amounts of natural gas. They feel like they can expand that.
I think there’s been a lot of fracking in the past there. For example, they even have nuclear Westinghouse’s there. And it makes sense to have the data centers near the power source. Right? And so we know that these big AI data centers sai be powered by either natural gas or nuclear.
And so Pennsylvania just makes a lot of sense as a place to build this AI infrastructure. So this was a summit to announce new investment in Pennsylvania, something like $90,000,000,000 President Trump was there to keynote the summit and talk about these investments. It’s his policies towards energy that he started describing long ago. I mean, remember, he made the campaign promise of drill, baby, drill.
He’s been talking about the need for energy expansion in America for many years, and I think he was very farsighted in seeing that energy is the basis for everything. It’s the basis for AI. It’s the basis for all other kinds of growth. So by promoting energy dominance, we also get AI dominance.
So we’ve talked on this show before about how we’re sana need that energy to power the electricity of all these new AI data centers. So this summit brought together all these different groups. And the thing I thought was really interesting, the thing I learned from it was just how diverse the business interests are that are gonna participate in this whole AI boom.
It wasn’t just big tech. Yes. Ruth Porat from Google was there. It’s also small tech. There was hardware companies. There were robotics companies.
But there were also these energy companies. There was nuclear. There was gas. The trade associations were there. It’s construction. It’s electricians. It’s carpenters.
And so there’s a huge ai array of different parts of the economy that are gonna experience growth from this AI boom that’s taking place. It’s not just a Silicon Valley thing. So that was what I took away from Pittsburgh, and it was a really cool experience being there.
there were two interesting notes as well. Ai, I saw Google was investing in ai and upgrading some dams there. This is, I think Gavin, one of the great upshots of the AI boom is that the AI companies, whether it’s Meta or Google, they’re so motivated that they’ll actually go and upgrade the infrastructure.
They’ll invest in the, you know, small modular nuclear reactors that are coming. And, even gas ai, obviously vatsal gas as as a major part of this as well. And and you saw that up close and personal with the build out of Colossus. Yeah, Gavin?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, electrical production is fundamental to AI. If we do not significantly increase kind of domestic energy production and electricity generation, you know, we are already at a disadvantage to Ai, and I do think we want to close that kind of electrical generation gap as quickly as we can.
You know? And natural gas is great. Nuclear is great. Solar is great. Batteries are great. We need it all. Yeah. All of it.
And Vatsal, I saw your favorite governor, Josh Shapiro, was there, and, he was being very positive about finding common ground on energy, economic development, and, saying, hey. This is, like, a great example of ai bipartisan efforts to collaborate. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that because you had two great moments of collaboration between the Trump administration and the Democrats.
This is, this is good for the American people. Yeah? Both on the crypto project and on AI in Pennsylvania.
I have never met Shapiro. I did see him there at the event, but I didn’t see him on the stage. I don’t know if he was part of the round table, so I don’t know exactly what his status was. But what’s interesting about Pennsylvania right now is that it’s a state that’s turning red.
And so you see that Fetterman, who’s probably the most right wing member of the Democrat party in the Senate, and Josh Shapiro obviously is tacking towards the center because they see the direction of travel in Pennsylvania. So yeah, I think you’ve got some centrist Democrats in that state.
Yeah. Working out pretty well.
Josh Shapiro, every two days, tweets something about how he’s deregulated something. He’s made it easier to do business. Like, he is he’s on the program. He seems like a sensible man.
I’ll just give a final shout out to Beau here for all the work that he did on genius. I mean, he’s kind of the unsung hero.
Beau, how are you, how are you doing all this while finishing up your degree? When do you when do you graduate from college? The kid looks like he’s 20 years old. How old are you, Beau?
I have the baby face. I’m 29, turning 30 next month.
Look at you. 29 in the White House, lead and working with David Sacks. This is a dream come true for you,
It is. I mean, David’s been incredible. I’ve learned so much from him. Just the way that he negotiates and the way that his his brain works has been it’s it’s been a blast just to be a part of it. But I have a 10 old now, so I should have bags under my eyes, from lack of sleep.
But, Jason, I’ll make one more point before I jump off on on the tyler topic. Like, the one thing that I think your viewers should know is this year, they’ll be the fourth largest purchaser of US treasuries. And I think that’s something that, you know, we should really contemplate. You know, I I agree with David Cinnamon on this.
I’m excited to see what they do here in The US. I’m glad they’re gonna be a part of our system under the regulatory regime, but so will everyone else. And I think that’s a great thing for our country. It allows us to have control.
That’s great that you guys are backing them up because they’ve been banned so many times by other governments. I’m glad you got their act together. I’m gonna I’m gonna keep on those Tyler guys until they get their act together. So
Keep qualifying that you speak only for yourself.
I only speak for myself. I’ve been following that Tether story for a long time, and I think it’s great.
I wanna make this point. I always know that our critics have never actually watched the pod when they start talking about the all in point of view on something. Right? As if there’s a singular point of view, from the all in pod. Like, you know, it’s like the all in
Think something. When anyone who’s watched the show knows that we’ve been ai, like cats and dogs for years, and there’s four distinct points of view. And sometimes we agree, but there’s almost always some disagreement. So
We we’ve disagreed about this issue. We also, Trump and I, as you know, are relentless supporters of Ukraine. We believe we should be giving them weapons and support. And, David, you happen to disagree with me and our president on that. You’ve had a different position historically. So here we are.
I’m gonna stay in my lane on that one.
David, can we talk about the h twenties, or would you rather not? Because I feel like you have been, like Let’s go. So dead right about this. And I am you know, I it seems like the export, they’re gonna get the ai, and that is 100% the right decision for America. And I do give you credit for championing that.
I’m happy to talk about why I think it’s great, but would just, you know, if you
Can you frame it for a second for the audience, Gavin? What we’re talking about here, NVIDIA obviously was banned from selling their latest and greatest to China and even the last generation, the h twenties. And, obviously, that creates, an opening for Huawei and and other players Yeah. To create competitor products as opposed to using the standards built here in America.
Yeah? Well, I think I mean, I think you said it well. But first of all, it’s not the latest and greatest. The h 80 is not the latest and greatest. We’re not gonna I don’t think we’re gonna let the latest
It’s not even the last gen. It’s a deprecated version of the last generation.
Right. Yeah. Sai remnants.
It’s a less powerful version of the hopper chip, and now they’re on to Blackwell. So it’s anyway, Gavin can explain.
Yeah. It is. It’s many, many years behind. But while it’s many years behind the kind of state of the art here in America, it is, I think, kind of devilishly clever because it’s, call it, two years ahead of kind of the chips from Huawei. And so it kind of gives America an advantage while preventing China from developing kind of a domestic Nvidia alternative.
And the real threat is because China, they do have more electricity. They can do things that we cannot do here in America. You know, the Blackwell racks are exquisitely designed to be as power efficient as possible. If you don’t care about power, you can make very different kind of design decisions.
Huawei has something called the Cloud Matrix three eighty four, which uses fiber optics instead of copper to link the chips together. And while it’s not nearly as power efficient as the Blackwell NVL 72, They have all the power they need. And so I think it’s very it’s it’s it’s a smart decision for America to sell this chip that gives Meh an advantage in AI and keeps China from developing ai of their own domestic alternatives, which could eventually kind of challenge, you know, NVIDIA, AMD, you know, other kind of American AI accelerator champions globally.
We don’t want that that to happen. So I thought it was a mistake when they banned the chips, and I’m really happy and thinks it’s really good for America if that is being reversed. And kudos to you, David.
Well, Gowney sai it so well. I don’t think I have anything to add.
Can I just say one thing or crypto? You guys could put it in
or not, but it I thought it was interesting, David. I was always worried about stablecoins as a risk to the dollar, but I think you make a very good point that when you arya the dominant currency, they entrench the dominance. And I just should not thought of them that way.
Well, I think what’s gonna happen with these dollar based stablecoins is they’ll start being used all over the world. Let’s say that you’re in a country, maybe it’s a developing world country, where the fiat currency is not trusted. And now all of a sudden you can transact in dollars using a wallet on a phone, you know, and the merchant also has a wallet on a phone, and now you can just transact in dollars, you could see a large portion of these economies dollarizing from the bottom up.
Because again, once you have your choice of fiat currencies through stablecoin, why ai you just use the best one? And that that’s what I think is really interesting. So I do think it extends the the dollar’s dominance internationally into the online realm.
Yeah. And previously, people were basing their stablecoins on a basket of assets. Some treasuries, some real estate investments because they were seeking yield, Gavin. So they would buy real estate or, you know, short term, long term treasuries. They might put equities into it. They might keep some in cash.
And none of that was known. And so that’s where this big fear came. Hey. These things are getting pretty big. There’s obviously a demand to use this concept of a stablecoin. But what if there’s a run on the stablecoins?
And that was always the big fear with various players, was what if everybody wants to withdraw their stablecoins? Are there enough dollars or liquid assets in there? And that’s where Ai think certain players have maybe, you know, moved the asset allocation. And in order to be in The US market, Tether’s gonna have to be a 100% in treasuries. Right? They’re not gonna be allowed to be, say, in real estate.
There was a, you know, concept that maybe they were buying Chinese paper for real estate back in the day and people were concerned about that. So this cleans all that up and they have an easy path. But you can’t make interest on it. That’s actually a very interesting portion of this.
So that will have to come at a later time sai the banks don’t lose anything here. Right?
Well, just to just to clarify one point on that, one of the concessions that was made to community banks is not to have an interest feature because the community banks were worried that this new stablecoin industry would put them out of business. I think that that fear was wildly overblown on their part. I don’t think that’s what’s gonna happen remotely.
But when you have a new technology like this in a very established industry, you can see why maybe they’d be afraid. But the bill allows for all sorts of marketing, promotions, rebates, that kind of stuff. So maybe it’s not called interest, but there there are mechanisms to create, let’s say, rewards for Stablecoin holders.
So it’s not as ai black and white as just, oh, there’s ai nothing a Stablecoin issuer can do to attract or incentivize or reward one of their holders. It is a dimension they could compete on.
So maybe if I were to buy $10,000 worth of a stablecoin, I could get mileage like points ram maybe a load in gift card arya
little bit of a matter. Yeah. We have to interpret the language, but the mechanism is there.
Okay. Well, there you have it, folks. Alright. Reporting from our capital, David Sacks, our czar of AI and cryptocurrency. I’ll see you next Wednesday in DC for a very important summit.
Ai. Besties, I’m here at the White House with senator Bill Hagerty from Tennessee, the principal author of the Genius Act. He, I would say, along with the leadership of president Trump, are the reason why this bill happened. And then we have stablecoin legislation just signed into law by president Trump. Bill, you did a phenomenal job.
I got to observe this whole process, and you really played the critical role. You’re a very skillful legislator crafting delicate compromises. You were kind of the glue that held the whole thing together. Congratulations on getting this done. Is this your first bill that you’ve gotten done as a senator?
It is. I’ve I’ve served in the senate for over four years, but we were in the minority for the past four years. So this is the first opportunity since the senate, was taken by the Republicans to actually drive legislation through. And And the fact that we had the house representatives in the senate and the Ai House made this possible, it was just a threshold concern.
We worked so hard, as you know, to retake the senate in 2024, to retake the White House in 2024, and hold on to the house representatives. It worked. And that’s the only thing that’s enabled us to deliver this type of meaningful legislation. And I say this too. It’s been a great team that has done this.
I may be the author of the legislation, but the leadership that you’ve brought to bear from the White House coming in and donating your time from the private sector, working as a volunteer here, but making certain that the leadership and the vision is present here at the executive branch, you’ve been absolutely great.
And that vision, I think, is carried forward into the senate, the house. More and more people are understanding this and catching on. And I think what we’ve done today is launch the catalyst for what’s going to make America the crypto capital of the world.
Yeah. It’s been it’s been really amazing and interesting for me to watch this whole process. They say that you shouldn’t watch legislation or sausages being made. But, you know, earlier in the week, the media was reporting that this bill was dead because there were a dozen holdouts, and President Trump made calls late into the night.
He gathered people in the Oval Office. He cajoled. He twisted arya, and, and he also persuaded, and he he got us over the finish line. It was pretty incredible.
Well, I think the founding fathers made it actually quite difficult to legislate for a reason, but it is difficult. It’s taken months upon months to get to this point. And legislation, the the the genius act has been killed a couple of times in the media. Elizabeth Warren declared victory, early on that she killed the bill.
That didn’t happen. She didn’t have the juice to do it. But there have been many, many tests.
That’s a big deal because until now, the crypto community’s been living under Elizabeth Warren’s reign of terror. I mean, she basically was calling the shots during the Biden administration on crypto. And I was there when the Genius Act passed the Sana. I was up in the bleachers or whatever, and she was not happy. I mean, you there were photos of her, and she she she did not like losing.
There’s there’s a fundamental reason for this, David, because Elizabeth Warren and her crowd want to see a central bank digital currency. Mhmm. What they want is control of our transactions. They want the ability they’re the ones that wanted to go to a $600 threshold for your Venmo transactions reporting everything.
They want the ability to do choke point three point o.
you think about it, they had visibility in our transactions, the ability to centralize and control them. They could control our lives. It may be okay for the Chinese Communist Party, but that’s not gonna work here in Meh, and this legislation put the final nail in the coffin to that.
It’s really amazing that you got it through. And to get this passed, the sana, you had to have 60 votes. Right? Because reconciliation, you only need 50 plus one, but for a regular order, I guess, to get past the the potential for a filibuster, you need 60.
That’s exactly right. What demands did that put on you in terms of getting Democrat votes? Because the Republicans have what, 53?
we didn’t have all the Republicans.
We didn’t have all the Republicans, but but what enabled me to get the other nine Democrats to come on board was really an education process. Because at at its core, this shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Mhmm. This is about taking America’s payment system into the twenty first century.
This is about making our nation more competitive. This is about great, you know, expanding demand for the US treasury securities that we issue. This is about the dominance of the US dollar. It’s hard not to like it, but I I think there’s a partisan bent here in Washington that’s so strong that their objective is just to keep Republicans or Donald Trump or David Sachs from from getting a win here.
And and through education and through listening, and frankly, I don’t think it’s my legislative skills. I think it’s the business skills that I brought to the legislative branch. I think it’s through the business skills and the ability to negotiate that we’ve actually gotten to this point today.
And so tell us about that. So before this, you were a businessman, then you became ambassador of Japan.
You met president Trump. You told me you sana to run for senator he told the story up at the in his speech. He said that, you had learned Japanese in, like, six months as ambassador to Japan.
It it was a little longer than that. Okay.
There’s a there’s a piece of the story missing because I I started my career at a place called the Boston Consulting Group, and they sent me to Tokyo for three years back in the late eighties, early nineties. Mhmm. That’s when I learned the language. And to go back as US ambassador to Japan under President Trump in 2017, the honor of a lifetime.
I can tell you representing the greatest nation in the world, any place in the world is an honor. But particularly in a region like that, that has so much strategic, you know, so many strategic initiatives that are underway right now. You think about this, Japan has more US military stationed there than any place else in the world. Japan is one of the toughest environments in the world.
If you think about the neighborhood that they’re in, North Korea, Russia, China right at your doorstep. The time that I spent in a as ambassador really helped me dig in deeply in terms of the national security issues that our nation confronts and those that our allies confront.
same time, we did two trade deals with Japan. Nobody thought it could be done, and we were able to navigate that, with Jamieson Greer working right beside Bob Blytheizer. I loved working with those guys, and we got two great trade deals done. Jamieson is back now as The US trade representative, and I’m very optimistic that we’re gonna see more trade flourish. President Trump knows how to do this.
I’ve been with him in the trade negotiations. He knows exactly how to navigate this, and I’m looking forward to great results from our trade negotiations as well.
Excellent. And so we’re only six months since this administration. It feels like so much has happened. So much has been done. I mean, we just had the one big beautiful bill. Now we have this legislation. What’s next in in your view? What do you think is is gonna happen next?
What what’s happening right now in the United States sana, we just put through a rescissions package for a little bit over $9,000,000,000. That’s a that’s a small amount. It’s a large amount of money, of course, but it’s a small amount relative to the entire budget. And the Democrats have had, they they they just, gone apoplectic over this. Any any effort to cut back on spending, somehow, they’ve got to be against that.
They’re only for spending, and we’re trying to bring physical sanity back to America. So the focus is gonna be to continue to find opportunities to basically legislate what has been found at Doge. The other activities well beyond Doge, every department head, every agency is looking for ways to streamline regulations and to cut cost and to operate more efficiently.
And I’ve got to believe there are tremendous opportunities there and many billions more dollars that’ll come out of the budget as a result. But we’ve we’ve gone into a fairly partisan mode right now, and I think it’s gonna be tough for the next little while. While we’re in this sort of partisan, gap, I think what we should be doing is focusing on market structure for digital assets, and and we’re working on that.
I just talked to some of my colleagues in the house today about how we’re gonna marshal that forward. I’m gonna look forward to your leadership there as well and many people in the industry. But just
sai everyone knows what that is. So market structure is the legal framework. It’s the rules for all the crypto tokens that are not stable coins. So the Genius Act just passed. I gave legal framework for stable coins. Now we got market structure for all the other tokens. And it deals with questions like what’s a crypto security, what’s a currency, what’s a commodity, who regulates those things. Yeah. Just providing clarity. That’s the name of the bill.
That’s exactly right. Arya participants know what the rules arya. Because the last four years under Genzer, they’re basically prosecuted
Without knowing, you know, how to how to, abide.
Yeah. They called it regulation by enforcement. You don’t know what the rules are, but they just launched an enforcement proceeding against you. And president Trump was funny today because he looked the audience. He said, I guess half of you were being prosecuted here about a year ago by the previous administration.
Things started to change.
He was, he was on fire today. He was. Sai mean, people should go back and watch. I mean, he he speak, off the cuff, basically, like he normally does for twenty minutes and was very funny. But part the reason why he said that is when we did the crypto summit at the White House back in March, the, you know, the Winklevoss brothers, Tyler and Cameron, were there, and they told the story about how a year before, they thought it would be more likely that they’d be at in the Big House in the White House.
That that it was ai the fact that they were at the White House was Rather than in the Big House. Yeah. Because that’s the way it was looking. I mean, they were dealing with so much unfair lawfare. But ai any event, we’ve we’ve moved past that. So thank you for your leadership on this.
And by the way, on the rescissions, I know that this is the one issue that I think all of the hosts the four hosts of the all Meh Pod Mhmm. All agree on is that deficit spending is out of control. Anything we can do to try and rein it in and have more fiscal sanity is appreciated.
Even Calcanas sai, can agree with that one. He’s sort of ai the the token ai on the podcast.
we’re gonna continue to work along those lanes that the the big beautiful bill is doing it’s oriented toward growth stimulation. Right? Everything that that we can do to stimulate more capital investment in The United States is embodied in that in the tax laws part of that bill.
So with the growth coming out of the big beautiful bill, and if we continue to go through the cuts with decisions, I’m very optimistic that we’re gonna get back on the right path. That’s the objective. That’s the goal. Meanwhile, taking us into the twenty first century with our payments, with digital assets, We’re gonna continue to work along those lanes as well, and I appreciate your leadership in that regard.
Well, and we appreciate you. I think the state of Tennessee where, by the way, I grew up. I grew up in Memphis. It’s very lucky to have you as our senator. The Republican party is really lucky to have you. The sana is very lucky to have you to have someone with your business background, to have your
who has now gotten through this first piece of legislation through again, this wasn’t a a budget bill. It took 60 votes in the senate. I mean, when’s the last time that even happened? I mean, it’s been years.
Sai Ai heard it’s been a rearing.
Committee. I mean, I heard they hadn’t passed a bill in, like, ten years, basically, because it takes sixty.
out of the Senate Banking Committee. One of my friends wrote me yesterday, and he said, I I didn’t think you could get the 10 commandments passed out
United States Senate. So congratulations. And I I I don’t wanna take the the credit for it because it’s been a wonderful team. As I said, your leadership in the White House and the executive branch, our friends in the house, representatives, my great staff led by Luke Pettit Yep.
Done just a terrific job.
Luke Pettit was amazing. We worked closely with him. Beau had a great job. Yeah. He was the director of the crypto council who was on the show earlier today.
Tyler was wonderful at Treasury.
Yep. Tyler Williams at at Treasury who was secretary Besson’s, staff person. The staff people never meh the credit they deserve for all the work they do. Right? But but Tyler, Luke, and, and Beau were were amazing through this process.
And in the senate too, we we’ve had great leadership. Our chairman for the senate banking committee is Tim Scott. He’s been a true proponent of this. Cynthia Lummis is is, very focused on on on digital assets, was very supportive of me as she chairs the digital asset subcommittee of our banking committee.
So we’ve had great support in the senate, and I think it’s gonna continue to grow, both sides of the aisle.
Cynthia Lummis, she’s been great. I’ve met with her many times. Tim Scott’s been great. I understand that Kirsten Gillibrand, the democrat senator of New York was great to
She brought in a lot of democrat votes. I think you got 18. And the
great thing about Kristen too, she was a Wall Street lawyer at Davis Polk. She understands the the the arya, and to have her level of technical expertise was a huge asset. And she was able to to really convey to the Ai side, that we were here trying to get the right thing done for the country.
This was not a partisan effort. This was something that really is aimed at growth, leadership, technology leadership, and, frankly, dollar dominance that we all should be for.
Amazing. And so I think it’s really amazing that we got this done. When you compare this to where we were a year ago, I mean, it was nonstop, ai regulation by enforcement. It’s basically regulation through prosecution, lawfare, and the crypto community was being driven offshore. There there there wouldn’t have been a crypto community in The United States.
And then president Trump won the election, and now thanks to the efforts of of Bill and and others, it’s law. The the Genius Act is now law. We have a legal framework for stable points. And market structure’s next. The Clarity bill is next. We’re gonna try and do that by October.
So it’s really amazing that this is a you know, I thought that working for president Trump would be a once in a lifetime opportunity because he’s a president who really wants to get things done, and that’s what’s happening. It’s really been amazing. So thank you both for being here.
You, Dave. Appreciate it. Thanks.
We’ll let your winners ride.
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with it.
Love you, sis queen of quinoa. Besties are gone.
Oh, no. That is my dog taking a
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension and we just need to release them out.
Let your feet. Wet your feet.
feet. Wet. Where did you get mercy? I’m going all in.