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Trump’s First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs Down Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) The Besties welcome Box’s Aaron Levie and Flexport’s Ryan Petersen!
(4:05) Is Sacks back?
(8:19) Reflecting on Trump’s first 100 days
(28:16) Global trade disruption, how businesses are dealing with tariffs
(49:14) Amazon flip-flops on its tariff pricing feature, national security issues
(1:04:13) AI agents, 1,000,000X’ing AI, and more
Follow Aaron Levie:
https://x.com/levie
Follow Ryan Petersen:
https://x.com/typesfast
Follow the besties:
https://x.com/chamath
https://x.com/Jason
https://x.com/DavidSacks
https://x.com/friedberg
Follow on X:
https://x.com/theallinpod
Follow on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod
Follow on TikTok:
@theallinpod
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod
Intro Music Credit:
https://rb.gy/tppkzl
https://x.com/yung_spielburg
Intro Video Credit:
https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-warns-risk-nuclear-armageddon-highest-cuban-missile-crisis-rcna51146
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-takeaways.html
https://x.com/Molson_Hart/status/1915248938753392642
https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1917697018551754802
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/trump-amazon-tariffs-prices.html
https://x.com/chamath/status/1908239828283777393
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-plots-charging-20-000-a-month-for-phd-level-agents?rc=pxkrxo
https://manus.im
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/benchmark-invests-chinese-startup-behind-manus-ai-agent?rc=pxkrxo
https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-end-of-2025?tid=1746130417369
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Trump’s First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs Down Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Trump’s First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs Down Podcast Episode Summary
In this podcast episode, the panel, including notable guests like Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport, and Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, discusses the first 100 days of Trump’s second term, comparing it to previous administrations. The conversation covers a range of topics, including economic uncertainty, government downsizing, and the impact of tariffs and trade wars on businesses. The panelists express concerns about the lack of clear communication from the administration, which has led to confusion and difficulty in business planning.
A recurring theme is the need for better communication and predictability from the government to help businesses navigate economic challenges. The panelists also discuss the role of mainstream media in shaping public perception and the importance of focusing on substantive issues rather than sensationalism.
Actionable insights include the suggestion to deregulate and simplify processes to boost manufacturing in the U.S., which could lead to economic growth and reduced government spending. The panelists emphasize the importance of rule of law and express dissatisfaction with certain government actions, such as deportations without due process and controversial pardons.
The episode also touches on the potential of AI and technology to transform industries, with discussions on how companies are leveraging AI to improve efficiency and decision-making. The panelists highlight the need for continuous adaptation to technological advancements to remain competitive.
Overall, the episode underscores the complexity of the American economy and the need for strategic decision-making to address both current challenges and future opportunities.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
Trump’s First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs Down Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
Gotta wrap, guys. I gotta catch a flight to Miami. Let me do a closing here if you wanna keep going. You’re welcome. 232
Speaker: 1
00:05
the plane just waits. Just text the pilot and just tell tyler you’re
Speaker: 0
00:08
Alright. Listen. I’m not burning all the, all in Just get credits, so to speak, and all of our tokens.
Speaker: 1
00:14
I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m not like Jerry,
Speaker: 2
00:16
you’re worried about flying
Speaker: 0
00:17
a flight. It’s everything and then putting it on the all in budget and the rest of us are flying Southwest for your chairman dictator, Jamak Bayard.
Speaker: 2
00:26
You ai missed a flight? It’s a strange concept.
Speaker: 0
00:29
Yeah. David Ai, I have what does that mean? David, when’s the last time you flew commercial? Clinton.
Speaker: 2
00:33
I haven’t missed a flight in about fifteen years.
Speaker: 0
00:54
Ai, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We’re back. We’re back. And what an amazing panel we have today with us. Ryan Peterson, friend of the pod, is back on the show. He’s the CEO of Flexport. How are you doing, Ryan? Did you get any skiing in this year?
Speaker: 0
01:11
I know you like to ski in the deep powder like that.
Speaker: 3
01:13
I tried, man, but it was a busy year for work, and Ai got two little kids. I I did a few days. Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:19
So you’re oh, meh. We all forgot. You gave control of your company to somebody. It got a little, shah, got a little contentious and then you took the reins back. How has it been being back in the ai seat?
Speaker: 3
01:33
Oh, that was a year and a half ago, so it’s a distant memory for in in Flexport ai, that’s, like, a decade. We’ve, yeah, really had an amazing run, although these tariffs I mean, I guess that’s why you guys invited me on. These tariffs have kind of, made a lot of created a lot of new uncertainty in the Flexport’s world.
Speaker: 0
01:48
Okay. So we’ll definitely get into that. And, of course, fan favorite back for his fourth appearance on the pod.
Speaker: 4
01:55
I I I was so first of all, I saw the comment I I saw the comments last time I was on. I’m I’m officially not a fan favorite, but, glad to be back on. And I will be I will be representing free markets, in, in in this, in this version of what
Speaker: 2
02:08
it is. What do the comments say about you?
Speaker: 4
02:10
It is ai, you know, like, loves Ai, you know, totally beta, you know, all the, all
Speaker: 0
02:18
the Beta Biden, love. Beats it out.
Speaker: 1
02:20
Sai boy.
Speaker: 2
02:21
Was this someone you’re filling in for me, though?
Speaker: 4
02:23
I think so. Yes. I was trying to represent, I was trying to represent libertarian values at the time, but, but not the
Speaker: 3
02:30
way the leftists are, embracing Milton Friedman. I think it’s all worth it if that’s what comes out of all the narratives of different ways.
Speaker: 4
02:35
AOC is gonna be a complete free market, person soon. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
02:40
Free market months are coming soon.
Speaker: 2
02:41
Embracing free market values and the stock market. Right?
Speaker: 4
02:44
Yes. Exactly.
Speaker: 2
02:45
Because any decline in the stock market is Trump’s fault. So now they’re they’re embracing the stock market.
Speaker: 4
02:49
Well, unfortunately unfortunately, the one day that he said it’s Biden’s market, it was, it was a green day. So that, that didn’t help the case.
Speaker: 0
02:55
I meh, gosh. Well, listen. It’s certainly Ai like another massive green
Speaker: 2
02:59
day already.
Speaker: 0
03:00
Do you see this? That matters to me is that Uber is the anti tariff stock. It just does great. It’s not impacted by tariffs. So here we go. Chamath, it started already. We have TDS on both sides. We’ve got Trump derangement syndrome from Aaron.
Speaker: 4
03:14
Wait. No. No. No. No. No. I ai be oh, I don’t know. Defender syndrome from Saxon.
Speaker: 0
03:18
We’ve got both. Ai and derangement. Here we go.
Speaker: 2
03:21
TDS syndrome. TDS. Bias syndrome on your part.
Speaker: 0
03:24
Who? Me? Me? I call balls and strikes. What are
Speaker: 4
03:27
you talking
Speaker: 2
03:27
about? Okay.
Speaker: 0
03:28
Let’s get started. It’s starting already, folks. It’s gonna be a great episode. Lots of excitement with us again. Jason has the,
Speaker: 1
03:36
the sai. Self sabotage, find every way to not get rich syndrome.
Speaker: 0
03:41
I do? What are
Speaker: 4
03:42
you talking about? You guys said you’d buy me out of this thing, and I should get the hell out of here.
Speaker: 0
03:45
You know how much my shares are in all inner earth? For the love of God, write a
Speaker: 1
03:50
check to us.
Speaker: 0
03:52
Get me the hell out of here.
Speaker: 1
03:53
I just may.
Speaker: 0
03:55
Oh, God. I mean, I’m gonna be a terror. If Uber breaks 88, that’s my number. 88 is the number. You’re all fucked when that happens, and we’re getting close. Alright. Let’s get started here. We have so many topics to get through. With us again, David Sacks. Hey, David. You’re doing, more episodes now. The audience wants to know.
Speaker: 0
04:17
I don’t know if we’re allowed to make any initial announcements, but people are asking me on the streets, in the airports, in the comment threads, is Sai back?
Speaker: 2
04:26
Well, the ratings are back. Ever since
Speaker: 0
04:28
you came back to
Speaker: 2
04:29
the show, that’s for sure.
Speaker: 0
04:31
The ratings are back, Shove. But is This is measurable. Ai? Is Sachs back?
Speaker: 2
04:37
Well, I’m back as much as I can. Mhmm.
Speaker: 0
04:39
And you are a partial employee of the government. You can do a hundred thirty days a year or something. Is that still the status?
Speaker: 2
04:45
Yeah. It’s roughly half. Half workdays.
Speaker: 0
04:48
Got it. And so what do you do? You have a you have a punch clock there when you get to the White House? You punch in, you punch out, like Fred Flintstone or what? Are you keeping track of these days? How do you do it?
Speaker: 1
04:56
I know why you don’t know this because you have yet to be invited to the White House. But that’s actually
Speaker: 0
05:00
interesting. I got excited. Not how it works.
Speaker: 1
05:02
Normal, People just people just badge in and badge out like they They
Speaker: 0
05:05
badge in and badge out.
Speaker: 1
05:06
Ai your normal place, Jason.
Speaker: 0
05:08
I I mean, literally, it’s interesting. There’s a new private club.
Speaker: 1
05:11
It’s incredible that you have thoroughly prepared for this speak, just like always.
Speaker: 0
05:15
I I’m always prepared. Interestingly, I don’t know if you gentlemen know this, Ryan and Aaron. There’s a new private club in DC that Don Junior is doing and Sai is a member, Chamath’s a member. And I just checked my Gmail. I checked all three of my Gmail accounts, everything. No ai. It must have gotten lost again. Did you send a paper one?
Speaker: 0
05:35
Was it ai you sent a gold card or something, Sachs? How do I get invited to this private club? What is this private club? Everybody wants to know.
Speaker: 2
05:41
Well, we’ll be happy to have you as a guest.
Speaker: 0
05:44
Okay. Do I have to wear MAGA hats? Do I have the courtesy of MAGA hats at the door?
Speaker: 2
05:47
If you wanna be a member, obviously, there are dues and a membership fee. And k. I just didn’t wanna waste your time with an offer that I knew you wouldn’t, be willing to accept.
Speaker: 0
05:59
It’s only $500,000 is what I read. Is that true?
Speaker: 2
06:03
That’s true for for founding members who have additional benefits, but there’s also a lower level that’s the more reasonable membership level.
Speaker: 0
06:10
Got it.
Speaker: 2
06:10
So I think people are getting a little bit carried away with that number.
Speaker: 0
06:13
Got it. Okay.
Speaker: 2
06:13
That’s what I
Speaker: 0
06:14
wanted to clarify. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
06:15
Yeah. There’s, like, 10 founding members who have that level, and then there’s a lower level for Got it. More average member.
Speaker: 0
06:22
Chamath, are you one of those 10? Yes.
Speaker: 4
06:25
Do you pay more if you have TDS, or how does that work?
Speaker: 0
06:27
TDS premium? Are you
Speaker: 2
06:29
talking about JKAL specifically, or what are we talking about?
Speaker: 0
06:32
The TDS surcharge?
Speaker: 4
06:33
Asking for a friend.
Speaker: 0
06:34
It’s a TDS surcharge. You put the tariff surcharge and the TDS surcharge.
Speaker: 2
06:38
We just we want a place to hang out in DC. All of us have been to clubs like the Battery or
Speaker: 0
06:44
Mhmm. I don’t
Speaker: 2
06:45
know if you go to LA, like the Malibu
Speaker: 1
06:47
Beach House.
Speaker: 2
06:47
Places. There’s Malibu Beach House. There’s Birch Street clubs. There are places in Palm Beach that are really cool. In any event, we wanted a place to hang out, and the the clubs that exist in Washington today have been around for decades. They’re kinda old and stuffy.
Speaker: 0
07:03
To the
Speaker: 2
07:03
extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be, like, more Bush era Republicans as opposed to Trump era Republicans. So we wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump aligned. Since I’m in the government, I can’t be an owner, but I told him I’d be happy to be member number one. And so I, you know, sai, great.
Speaker: 2
07:22
Let let’s do it. And so we’re creating a place for us to hang out. That’s basically it. We want a place to go where you don’t have to worry that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist or something like that who we don’t know and we don’t trust.
Speaker: 0
07:37
Got it.
Speaker: 2
07:38
So it’s like any private club. You wanna go somewhere that’s highly curated. There’s private club, movement’s happening all over the country, not just Washington, But we’re creating something that didn’t exist before in DC, which again is younger, hip, or Trump aligned Republican.
Speaker: 4
07:56
We’re, I I actually started a Kamala Club in, in the Bay Area. So, so we’re we’re yep.
Speaker: 2
08:03
I don’t think anyone would pay to join that though is the problem. Right?
Speaker: 0
08:07
I mean, it’s an open arya. That’s for sure.
Speaker: 2
08:09
Ai where do you where
Speaker: 1
08:11
do you guys meet up in, like, Redwood City?
Speaker: 4
08:13
We actually meet up at the, at the at the trade ports.
Speaker: 0
08:16
Alright. Listen. We’re a hundred days into Trump two point o. It’s just a random hundred day thing, but everybody’s talking about it. Everybody’s hand wringing. What has it been like for this first hundred days? How does it compare to Biden? How does it compare to Trump one point o?
Speaker: 0
08:31
43 executive orders, the most ever in the first hundred days. And they’re moving, obviously, at a at a different pace to, be generous. Major indices are down seven to 10%. Obviously, this trade war and tariffs, the yield on the the yield on the ten year, it’s down about 40 basis points.
Speaker: 0
08:51
There’s a lot going on. Let’s go around the horn. Ryan, Aaron, you’re our guest. What’s your take on the first hundred days? Is it what you speak?
Speaker: 0
08:58
Good, bad, and ai. Wins and fouls, everything.
Speaker: 3
09:03
I’ll go first. I think it’s a whirlwind. I mean, if you look at the, the John Boyd, the fighter pilot, has this concept of the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide, and act. And the concept is that if you’re in dogfighting, if you’re able to maneuver through those OODA loops at a faster pace than your than your competition, they get disoriented and don’t know what to do.
Speaker: 3
09:24
And I I think that that’s gotta be how Democrats in Washington and maybe mainstream Republicans in Washington, certainly journalists are all feeling this. Like, there’s the the Trump Trump administration takes action. And before anybody can respond to that, they have already done, like, four more things. And you’re like, wait.
Speaker: 3
09:40
I forgot to actually follow-up on the other thing that they did that I didn’t like. And so it’s, yeah, it’s pretty disorienting if you’re if you’re trying to they they can’t find a line to fall back to and go, hey. We’re gonna push back against this policy because they’re already moving on to the next one, the next one. Sai that that’s, like, my high level interpretation.
Speaker: 3
09:57
Obviously, I come at it from a trade angle. I think everybody knew that Trump was gonna be he he tyler us during the campaign that the the most beautiful word in the English language is tariff. Don’t tell them it’s an Arabic word, but, the most beautiful word in the English language. And so we knew that was coming.
Speaker: 3
10:13
I think that the the the suddenness of it all caught people by surprise. I mean, they told us April 1, April second would be Liberation Day. They didn’t tell us that it would go live the next week, you know, and and the fact shah, you’ve already ordered these goods. So that’s one aspect that people are ai disoriented about.
Speaker: 3
10:32
And then we’ll also
Speaker: 0
10:33
Yeah. We’re sana unpack that. Aaron, your thoughts on the first hundred days? Obviously, you are a Democrat, and, you were pretty vatsal, not in support of Trump. So what’s your take on the first hundred days? Any any any bright spots for you, things you, you know, support?
Speaker: 4
10:50
Actually, Sacks’ world, I’d say, has has been a bright spot. Sai, especially I mean, I think we have a very clear message on Ai. And, and that that that is that’s been, I think, a huge net positive is, you know, if you look at the the past, you know, few months, out of all the the AI push from the administration, it’s unmistakably, you know, pro open source, you know, pro, you know, bring as much AI innovation, you know, to The US.
Speaker: 4
11:15
Obviously, the the tariffs, you know, add a little bit of a headwind to that. I have some very strong asks, you know, around high school immigration because I think that, you know, AI talent is gonna be super critical to to actually win the AI war. So so I’d say that that directionally has has had some positive momentum.
Speaker: 4
11:31
You know, from my perspective, this is kind of playing out, almost exactly how I thought it would six months ago. And then three months ago, I I think there was some signs that maybe maybe, you know, it wouldn’t play out this way, just based on some of the some of the, you know, kind of early groups that were coming to the White House, the the the the the sort of deep business, you know, ai of centricity of the White Ai.
Speaker: 4
11:53
You know, I think it was day one or two that Stargate was announced, you know, at the White House. We’re gonna go build massive infrastructure. I think the case I’d like to make, you know, once we talk about tariffs is is I think there’s an alternative universe where you just lean into acceleration as opposed to adding headwinds.
Speaker: 4
12:08
But but so that would be that would be the case of what what maybe could have been, you know, very different is we just keep double down on meh doubling down on what’s working while fixing the parts that aren’t working. Ai. But, but that would be, you know, my my, my judgment so far.
Speaker: 0
12:22
Shah, I mean, you’ve been talking about it here every week. You and I have, been talking about it pretty consistently, so I don’t think there’ll be many surprises here, but take a second and maybe assess what you think if you had to pick a singular thing that’s gone really well and a singular thing you think could be improved.
Speaker: 0
12:39
What what do you got?
Speaker: 1
12:40
Let me give you my overall grade, and then I’ll tell you how I get to that. I think the first hundred days have been a b plus, and here’s how I get to that score. There have been two things where I think Trump has, frankly, hit a home run. The first is all of the direct investment and specifically the foreign direct investment into The United States.
Speaker: 1
13:12
I think it’s approaching, if not, it has already exceeded a trillion dollars from corporations and organizations and individuals from around the world who have committed to bringing money into The United States. And I think strategically, that’s a legacy that will live past him. So I think that’s been an a plus.
Speaker: 1
13:33
The second is we had a very unsafe border situation and he ran on shutting it down. I’m not talking about the execution of the deportations. I’m just saying getting the illegal crossings to zero and he’s done that. So that’s been an A plus. I think what’s going to be more controversial are these next three things though.
Speaker: 1
13:59
In my interpretation, I think the tariffs have been an a, and I think that the market reaction, the stock market is only down 4% and the interest rate markets are, you know, four and a quarter percent. I think those have been an a. Now the reason I think tariffs have been an a is because it is uncovered, in my opinion, how beholden we are to a brittle supply chain and specifically to China who is a friend but who’s also an enemy.
Speaker: 1
14:31
And I think that that’s gonna really severely complicate our flexibility and optionality in the future as they do what is in their best interests. Okay. So where have they then not done so well? I think the documents have been frankly a D. We were supposed to get the Epstein ai, we haven’t yet we were supposed to get the Martin Luther King files, we haven’t. We did get the redacted JFK files.
Speaker: 1
14:58
I don’t think that there’s been very good communication about why it’s taking so long. So I think it’s a very small, narrow thing, but I think it had a lot of attention on the way in. I think the communications of the tariffs and the back and forth had been a speak. I think the markets were not led in enough of a way where they could absorb the volatility.
Speaker: 1
15:24
But if you take it all in its totality, I would give it a B plus. I think it’s been a very productive hundred days. And when you look back, I think in, you know, three years, four years, five years.
Speaker: 0
15:37
Okay.
Speaker: 1
15:38
We’ve made some important progress.
Speaker: 0
15:40
Sachs, obviously you’re part of the administration, so I’m not sure exactly how to ask you this, but you sort of you heard some nice compliments about AI from Aaron. I happen to agree with those. I actually agree with, a good portion of the, crypto stuff ai. I think actually getting those, tightened up, which are your two zones of excellence and your area that you’re focused ai, I think you’ve done a great job there.
Speaker: 0
16:01
So just bestie to bestie. Great job there. What’s your
Speaker: 2
16:03
Thank you.
Speaker: 0
16:04
What’s your take overall? You know, it’s kinda hard, I guess, to ask somebody in the administration to criticize the administration. But hearing everybody else’s take, what’s your response maybe?
Speaker: 2
16:13
Well, I would I would highlight three main areas that I think are big accomplishments for the Trump administration in the first hundred days. So so number one has to be the border. Like Thomas said, I think you have to give the administration an a plus on this. They’ve completely stopped the border crisis.
Speaker: 2
16:27
I think we all knew that Trump would take action on this because it’s one of the main issues he campaigned on, but I think if you had asked any of us, you know, four months ago, would this problem be completely solved, meaning border apprehensions completely stopped, border completely sealed within the first hundred days, I don’t think we would have believed necessarily that it would get done so quickly, but it has.
Speaker: 2
16:48
Recall that for four years during the Biden years, we were told for the first three years that the problem didn’t even exist. Whenever the videos were published of caravans coming or throngs of people running across the border, we were told that these were cherry picked videos on Fox News.
Speaker: 2
17:06
It wasn’t real. Finally, in the last year of the Biden administration, they said, okay. We’re finally gonna do something about it. They took some limited actions, and they said that doing more than that would require new legislation. Well, all of that was just gaslighting, it turns out.
Speaker: 2
17:21
Trump came in, he restored Remain in Mexico and other policies, completely stopped it. He had this line at the State of the Union, which I think is exactly right, which is we didn’t need a new law, we just needed a new president. So I think that’s area number one. Area number two, I would say, would be the vibe shift in the culture around wokeism and DEI.
Speaker: 2
17:40
You know, how quickly we forget about this, but wokeism has completely collapsed. I don’t know that anyone is endorsing in a full throated way. Moreover, beyond just sort of the cultural aspect of it, I think we’ve had significant policy changes on DEI. Trump has basically ended DEI at the government level.
Speaker: 2
18:00
He also ai an executive order ending the use of disparate impact for affirmative action. This is the policy that said that even if you have a policy that’s applied in a completely neutral and objective way, if it results in a disparate impact where different groups are represented in a different way in the outcomes, then somehow that must be racist and that led to essentially engineering the results of various populations to basically fit quotas.
Speaker: 2
18:31
And I think all of that now has fallen by the wayside, and I think that meritocracy and colorblindness are back. The only holdout really has been these universities where Trump is now taking action against Harvard and I think that ultimately we will win that battle. You see that even in relatively liberal companies the DI departments have been canceled and they’re moving back towards more of a meritocracy.
Speaker: 2
18:55
So Ai would say that that’s like big shift number two and I think if any of us had tried to predict vatsal hundred days ago we would have thought meh Ram will do something about it but I don’t think we would have predicted the total collapse of wokeism and DEI so quickly. And then I’d say the third area, which is still in flight, is the reprivatization of the economy. That’s a term that Scott Besant used.
Speaker: 2
19:17
I think that the Trump Administration needs to reprivatize the economy and I like that framing of it. And there’s a bunch of different pieces under that. I’d say number one is Doge, again, ending this hog wild government spending. I do think that Trump has come into office inheriting a very weak Biden economy that was being propped up by massive amounts of government spending that was not only stimulating the public sector, but it was also goosing the employment numbers as well.
Speaker: 2
19:47
And we knew that that spending was unsustainable. We have to do something about it. So I think for the first time in decades, we’ve actually started to make real cuts in government, real cuts in the federal workforce, and, look, we’d like to do more, but that is a huge shift in the conversation.
Speaker: 2
20:04
There’s other pieces of it as well. I mean, president Trump has signed sai significant number of executive orders on deregulation. There’s also been unleashing energy. He ended Biden’s EV mandate and a lot of these, like, green new scam projects, offshore wind, and he’s been encouraging oil and gas exploration.
Speaker: 2
20:23
So I think there’s that, and then I appreciate what Aaron said about tech innovation. We did repeal Biden’s exec order on AI, which was, you know, a hundred pages of unnecessary regulation on AI. We’ve ended the war on crypto, and I think we’re trying to stop the regulatory capture that benefits large incumbents.
Speaker: 2
20:41
So you have all these things, and there’s been other things that that have been done on the economy as well, but I I do think that this sets us up for a Trump boom in the future. It’s just that a lot of these changes take time to to play out.
Speaker: 0
20:55
Okay. Great. Well done. And, Ai think
Speaker: 3
20:58
I think when you I think when you would actually be very pro, Chamath, Chamath seems really pro other than he wants, like, the alien conspiracy files released, which we’ll get soon. What is the what is the view ram, Jay Saloni, Wendy, where you’re the the the left leaning guy in the in the room?
Speaker: 0
21:16
I you know, I’m kind of independent, but, yeah, social liberal. You know, I I look at what all Americans believe and and try to build some consensus here. It’s one of the things I’ve been trying to do on the pod is look for where we agree. Americans universally want the border secured.
Speaker: 0
21:31
They don’t want illegal immigration, and they don’t want fentanyl. So this is the biggest win, I think, for Trump, which I think everybody on the panel pointed out. And, Sachs, you were dead right. Like, when we were seeing those videos, some of them were five years old, some of them were recent.
Speaker: 0
21:44
Biden really covered up what was going on in the border, and it took years to figure out what was exactly going on there. So that’s the biggest win possible. I I give overall, just to be brief, a b for this first hundred days, and I give, you know, Biden, like, a c minus. The second thing that everybody agrees on is they sana downsize the government. They don’t want waste and fraud. So I think DOGE is the other huge win.
Speaker: 0
22:06
The things I think that could be improved, really just three simple things. The economic uncertainty is really terrible for running a business. I’m seeing a lot of folks in my circle, on my podcast, This Week in Startups and here, telling me, oh, I don’t know how to plan for the future, and we’re gonna get into that with this tariff stuff and the trade war.
Speaker: 0
22:25
And so I think economic uncertainty, we have to sort of slow down and maybe make it easier for people to understand what the administration is trying to do. I think rule of law really matters to people. People didn’t like Biden’s pardons. They didn’t like covering up his mental acuity.
Speaker: 0
22:42
And I don’t think people like the deportations without due process. We talked about that on a previous episode. Overwhelmingly, people want Trump and the administration to obey what the Supreme Court says. They really want rule of law. The third term talk, like eight out of 10 Americans don’t like that kind of talk. And then conflicts of interest. Obviously, people hated the Hunter Biden stuff.
Speaker: 0
23:04
They hate the meme coin stuff. And so that’s where it could improve CRISPR communications, more thoughtful execution, maybe less trolling. I don’t like the White House Twitter account trolling. And then focus on what got Trump here. You know, you all said the same thing. What got Trump in here was the economy.
Speaker: 0
23:20
And one thing that wasn’t mentioned by everybody is the peace dividend. And Trump is making massive progress in Ukraine, apparently. I don’t know if it’s on the docket today or not, but stopping the wars and making the economy move, those are the two most important things that he could do.
Speaker: 1
23:35
Can I help on that? Ai I totally missed that. You’re absolutely right. That’s another one where I would give Trump an a plus. Matt and I had dinner with POTUS two weeks ago.
Speaker: 0
23:45
And Wait a minute. You had dinner with Trump. This is breaking news.
Speaker: 1
23:48
Well, okay. Whatever. Yes.
Speaker: 2
23:49
Well, Sai think it’s I think it’s remarkable how much of a Putin apologist Jake House ai. I mean, you wanna end the war in Ukraine now? Or you’re gonna you’re gonna just give it you’re just gonna give it to Putin?
Speaker: 0
23:59
No. No. No.
Speaker: 2
23:59
I’m not gonna stop Putin?
Speaker: 0
24:01
I’m totally in favor of what Trump’s doing in in negotiating a deal together.
Speaker: 2
24:05
Oh, no. You wanna talk to Putin?
Speaker: 0
24:06
No. I’ve always wanted to talk to Putin. I just don’t trust him, but you you can trust him.
Speaker: 1
24:10
Let me tell you what Trump said. So There we go. There was a handful of us at dinner and then he got up to say a few words at the end. And he reminded me why I was so inclined to vote for him, which is he talked about his uncle and he talked about how his uncle taught him about the severity of nuclear war and how people don’t understand how intense and how destructive it is and the power of these weapons.
Speaker: 1
24:43
And he left that speech at the end saying, and this is why I’m so fundamentally against this thing. And it reminded me to your point, Jason. It is so easy to forget that there’s only one existential risk sai, like, aliens coming from the heavens. Right? There’s only one existential risk where all these issues become fringe issues. You know, you mentioned rule of law, border security, foreign direct investment, tariffs.
Speaker: 1
25:12
It all goes out the window in a nuclear war. And I was like, I am so glad this guy’s in charge because this one issue, he never waivers.
Speaker: 2
25:23
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
25:23
And I think there’s all kinds of complicated moments that could make this an issue. And this was where my biggest issue with Biden was, was I did not know who was in control. And I think that Trump in the first hundred days to your point, I think has completely reinforced that there are no conditions under which he’ll go to war.
Speaker: 1
25:42
He has time and time again showed ai the off ramp, and I think that that’s really healthy for Americans to see.
Speaker: 2
25:48
Yeah. And Let me build on that point with respect to to Ukraine is we were on a glide path before the Trump presidency that Biden had put us on a certain path. Kamala Harris gave every indication she would have continued it. What was that path? It was a path of continued escalation and doubling down in Ukraine.
Speaker: 2
26:07
Recall that it was Biden himself at the beginning of the war who said that if we give Ukraine Abrams tanks and F-16s or ATACMS or HIMARS or if we allow them to hit targets inside of Russia, it would lead to World War three. He actually used the word ‘Armageddon.’ So at the beginning of that administration, they were very concerned about how an escalatory path could lead us into direct conflict with Russia and World War three.
Speaker: 2
26:36
And meh, despite that, at every fork in the road where they had a choice, they ended up doubling down. They gave the Abrams tanks. They gave the f sixteenths. They gave the HIMARS. They gave the ATACMS.
Speaker: 2
26:45
And finally, when Biden was a lame duck in his last couple months in office, they did the most reckless and irresponsible thing, which is allow American weapons to be used to strike targets on Russian soil, not just fighting in Ukraine, but on Russian soil. Moreover, we now know from a New York Times article that just came out in the last few weeks that it was American generals and American intelligence who arya planning this war.
Speaker: 2
27:08
So when you’re talking about striking Russian targets on Russian soil, it’s not just the Ukrainians using our weapons. They’re using our targeting. They’re using our guidance. They’re using our satellites. I mean, we are deeply integrated in the kill chain. This is The United States being a co belligerent in the war, hitting Russian sai.
Speaker: 2
27:24
That is incredibly reckless and dangerous. I have no doubt that if the Democrats were still in office, we would be in an escalatory spiral right now with the destination being World War three, and I do think that Trump has pulled us back from the brink there. There’s obviously still more work to do, but I really appreciate the efforts that Steve Witkoff has undertaken where for the first time in three years, we’ve at least had direct diplomacy with the Russians.
Speaker: 2
27:49
We weren’t even talking before. We weren’t even talking before.
Speaker: 0
27:52
I mean, talking is a great thing, and and and, apparently, we’re gonna keep supplying with them with weapons as long as they pay for them. So it’s gonna be very interesting to see how this all hashes out over the next hundred days or so. Let’s keep moving. We’re ai.
Speaker: 2
28:05
I don’t think we know that yet. Let’s let’s wait and see on that.
Speaker: 0
28:08
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s, yeah, what was reported, but you’re right. We should wait and see. Okay. Downstream tariff impacts. We gotta talk about this, and this is why we have you here. Ryan, since you’re in the thick of it, you tweeted a thread last week about the lag time, of shipments from China.
Speaker: 0
28:26
And when you were on, I guess, during COVID, you really educated us to how the supply chain, how the supply chain works. And according to the thread that you shared, somewhere around early June, we’re gonna expect warehouses, trucking, the entire supply chain, maybe to start to seize up or layoffs.
Speaker: 0
28:46
I don’t know how you would frame it, Ryan, but are we past the point of no return with regard to the supply chain? Is there an off ramp for this tariff conflict war negotiation with China in your mind? What are you seeing on the streets and in the purchase orders and the invoices at Flexport?
Speaker: 3
29:07
Definitely not past the point of no return. I think we’re still right in the middle of the don’t judge the cook while he’s cooking is one of you know, like, let’s see what the let’s see what it tastes like at the end is Sai think a starting point here, and we’re still they’re still in active negotiations.
Speaker: 3
29:19
So I don’t think today’s it’s not static. Now the world does want a lot more certainty, and that’s a big cause of what’s happened here. And what has happened is a 60% decline in bookings of ocean freight from China to The US. I mean, so that’s really, really pretty dramatic, like, probably exceeding what was expected.
Speaker: 3
29:37
I don’t think you know, when they issued when they rolled out the initial reciprocal tariff plans on on April 2, there was meant to be a 54% tariff on Ai. Then, you know, there’s multiple cycles of escalation. We ended up at what’s now a 54% tariff. So this is this is a lot higher than anybody planned for, and so, therefore, I don’t think anyone’s planning for a 60% decline in ocean freight.
Speaker: 0
30:03
Ryan, let me ask you a question about that. Yeah. Are people actually paying that 54%? There’s been this discussion online, and it’s it’s sort of unclear from the administration and from tyler. Stuff that’s landing that people ordered before April 2, are they actually paying the 154% on top of what’s landing?
Speaker: 3
30:23
It’s ai now. It is it was based on departure date. So goods that departed China after midnight eastern time on April 9 are subject to the tariffs upon arrival. And so now enough time has passed that pretty much all the ships that are arriving now left China after April 9 when that started. So yes.
Speaker: 0
30:40
So what happens? People are paying it, or are people saying, I won’t take delivery because
Speaker: 1
30:44
it’s Jason, you have you have to pay it. Ryan, correct me if I’m wrong, but you have to pay it at the dock in order to get the goods released. More or less.
Speaker: 3
30:51
Right? More or less, that’s true. You you they they allow you to you have a bond in place sai you can pull the goods out before you pay, but it the money’s owed at that time and then you get you get, like, a two week time frame to actually make the payment. But, there are strategies here a lot of people are doing that you can use what’s called a bonded warehouse and move cargo into this warehouse, and then you only owe the duties when the cargo leaves.
Speaker: 0
31:12
That’s what I was asking. Like, is there a hack here to
Speaker: 3
31:14
It’s not that vatsal let you defer things and it’s very, very common right now. People are searching everywhere for bonded warehouse capacity because in a bonded warehouse, not only you defer payment to when the cargo leaves the warehouse, but you only owe the duty amount based on at that date.
Speaker: 3
31:29
So if the duties come back down, which a lot of people are betting they will on the China specific duties, you’ll actually lower your tariff burden. And then there’s another hack for this, which is effective use a Mexican or Canadian bonded warehouse. So you move the goods into Mexico, and then you actually only technically import them into The US at a future date when tariffs are lower.
Speaker: 3
31:48
So I understand a lot of a lot of companies are doing that right now too. We’re helping some people with that type of strategy.
Speaker: 1
31:55
But yeah. Is that sorry, Ryan. Do you think that the government will they view that okay, that kind of hack? And
Speaker: 0
32:02
Yeah.
Speaker: 1
32:02
Or, like, you know, like, if you look at the GDP numbers, one of the craziest things was the inventory pull forward that people did to your point, like, trying to get as much stuff into The United States before April 9 as an example.
Speaker: 3
32:15
Yeah. I mean, it’s not a hack. It’s a bonded warehouses have been around for decades, and they’re they’re very commonly used. I don’t know that it’ll be that material in the scheme of things that it would, you know, cause a change in the law around bonded warehouse.
Speaker: 1
32:28
So you don’t think, for example, the department of commerce will have an issue with the strategy of sending inventory into Mexico? That essentially you’re essentially like, isn’t it an It’s a workaround. Ai around. Yeah. Like, instead of paying the China tariff, now you pay a Mexico tariff, which should be less. Is that the idea?
Speaker: 3
32:46
Well, you can move it into a bonded warehouse in Mexico even and not pay Mexican tariffs either, and you just wait until it imports. But, I mean, what’s the Department of Commerce or the customs to do? It’s sort of you just delayed importing the goods. You imported them in the future and, you know, it doesn’t I I wouldn’t even call it a hack.
Speaker: 3
33:02
It’s just sort of ai people people are gonna get creative here. You know what I mean? Like, that’s the job, actually. The government should set the rules and the rest of us gotta figure out, ai, how are we gonna compete and make money in this environment that they’ve created?
Speaker: 0
33:14
Ryan, in that tweet you redid, which was a pretty dramatic tweet painting a very, like, I don’t know, like, a pretty dire situation. Where are we at in terms of how dire this will get or resolvable? Paint us the best case scenario and what you expect could happen in that case or if this gets extended arya we going to see as, you know, people are hand wringing empty store shelves, Christmas gets ruined, and all these layoffs start happening in the supply chain?
Speaker: 0
33:45
Take us through the two scenarios that people are debating.
Speaker: 3
33:48
Yeah. I mean, the the the bleak scenario, which is I don’t really think it’s gonna happen. I think that the administration doesn’t want this to be their legacy that they, like, created a policy that just, like, kind of tank small business and supply chain. So I don’t I don’t actually think this is gonna happen. But the bleak scenario is tariffs stay at this level for 145% on China.
Speaker: 3
34:05
The 10% goes way back up to what it was originally announced in reciprocal tariffs. So there’s no, like, safe haven for tariffs. And trade just falls off a cliff, and a lot of companies go bankrupt. In our in our especially small companies are the ones that are importing from China.
Speaker: 3
34:18
Reality is, like, tariffs have been high on China for a long time. Labor costs in China are not are not there for cheap labor. You’re there for quality manufacturing at this point. Like, there’s much cheaper labor in Southeast Asia, other parts of the world than there is in China.
Speaker: 3
34:31
So you’re in China because of the capabilities, the ecosystem, not just for cheap labor. And if you could have moved, you would have already with the 25% tariffs from the Trump’s first terms were pretty were high enough incentive. And so that’s the bleak scenario is that small business starts getting wiped out, the ones that are buying from China. And it’s a lot of brands.
Speaker: 3
34:51
Like, it’s not just Amazon sellers selling stuff that you don’t need. It’s ai all the brands that you know are, like, you know, fashion brands, apparel brands.
Speaker: 0
35:01
I had Cuts clothing on this week in startups last speak. And he said there’s gonna be ai, if this doesn’t get resolved in ai, let’s say two to four weeks in his group chats, people are gonna start layoffs and they they can’t physically restart the supply chain in Vietnam or wherever to make t shirts.
Speaker: 0
35:19
So, Aaron, what’s your thought on this as well? Just bringing you in. Sure. Well well, first
Speaker: 4
35:24
of all, I mean, Ryan has supplied me with a high degree of doomscrolling, And, Ai it’s just like a horror show reading his tweets. First of all, I I, like, I would feel better if the messages out of the administration were either more kind of consistent or that there was a logical connection between do we either want to raise the ai of, you know, tariff revenue ram, or do we want free trade?
Speaker: 4
35:49
Like like, those things are are working against each other because, like, depending on who you talk to, they they say this is a a mechanism to bring down income tax, which obviously then ai definition means that they expect the tariffs to sort of persist, which is totally different from let’s go negotiate deals that just allow for the, you know, free trade to actually increase.
Speaker: 4
36:07
And so are we worried about the reciprocity, or are we worried about kind of revenue streams? So that’s a whole whole issue. You also have this issue, which is the messaging from the government. And this is the the meta point I’ll make in a second is about is about how we could have actually accelerated into the transformation of the economy.
Speaker: 4
36:22
But, you know, you have folks like Lutnick, etcetera, you know, going on on TV, talking about the the end state of our economy, which are are actually probably, you know, fine messages, but but we haven’t seen what that vision looks ai. You know? So everybody is kinda confused. Like, does this mean that we literally go into manufacturing plants and we’re ai the ones literally doing the screws on an ai?
Speaker: 4
36:41
Or is it a bunch of jobs which are next generation, you know, jobs, which is ai we’re managing robots and and, like, shipping and logistics grows as a result of this and all of the surrounding kind of supply chains, you know, start to grow. Sai, ai, like, you know, ai, there’s a there’s an underlying I mean, you know, most people on this call have managed teams. Like, you do change management.
Speaker: 4
37:01
You lead people to the end state that that you want them to sort of see the potential in. And and I think some something that kinda gets missed is and the the part that kinda confused me is, like, I don’t know if if to, you know, exactly to Ryan’s point, like people are in China because of the ecosystem of manufacturing, yet the messages you get out of the administration are like, oh, you know, we’re gonna have fewer toys in at Christmas time.
Speaker: 4
37:22
It’s like, no, that’s not the big picture. Like the big picture is, is like like, you know, this is supplying the parts that go into a building, a manufacturing plant and building a car that that allows us to actually, you know, be even remotely competitive in car manufacturing.
Speaker: 0
37:36
So where should in your mind this all lead? Because you have some thoughts on Yeah. American exceptionalism and maybe skating to where the puck is going. So for if you were to become an ai Yeah. On this as a technology expert and and somebody who spent their whole career in it, what would you advise them to do?
Speaker: 4
37:53
I’d get rid of Navarro immediately. And and you would basically say, you know, meh culpa, like, oops. And, like, obviously, you need to, like, land that with some really cool trade deals that make everybody kinda feel happy. And you basically say, you know what? Like, let’s go back to the first two days of Trump, which is let’s announce massive deals. We’re bringing manufacturing here with Stargate. We’re doing TSMC. We’re building NVIDIA chips.
Speaker: 4
38:17
We’re gonna do a deal, which is you get, like, 5% tax, rate if you build in America. And so you just stimulate a manufacturing boom in in the country. You know, we incentivize, you know, automation across the manufacturing. We use that as a competitive weapon to go and compete with with the the sort of lower cost labor that that that happens internationally.
Speaker: 4
38:38
You know, we we find every incentive and tool we can. We deregulate. You allow people to build these plants. And so you don’t have to go through the, you know, three year EPA process. Like like, you you just accelerate from from this position and you see you see it all as upside.
Speaker: 4
38:53
And so then business leaders, you know, if you go talk to the Fortune 500 company that actually has to build, you know, anything right now, you give them a path to say, listen. We’re gonna help you transition away from your current supply chain, and we’re gonna make it even more competitive and more compelling in America to do that.
Speaker: 4
39:09
You know, there’s a reason that Elon builds in America. Like like, he is he’s actually made it be more effective to to be able to to, you know, bring automation to manufacturing, to be able to to build locally, but he wasn’t forced to do that. And so so I would just I would argue, like, you you use as many carrots as possible in some surgical areas.
Speaker: 4
39:27
And, Chamath, I’ve I’ve heard your points about the like, you know, chips, pharma, you know, AI. Like, in those surgical areas, we get tough where where necessary. And and if we have to do, you know, a couple sort of very surgical tariffs, yeah, you know, to ai make make people move the the direction that we want, that’s totally fine.
Speaker: 4
39:44
But but, I I mean, I I it’s like the the even arguing the premise is hard because because we act like we’re like, it’s like countries that are screwing us. But, actually, businesses are are independently making decisions about where they want their supply chain to exist.
Speaker: 1
39:57
They they
Speaker: 4
39:58
have a free market, they’ve made that decision. They don’t need the government to tell them where’s where are they supposed to or where are they allowed to to have their supply chain operate. That that ends up with just lots of economic distortions that everybody on the the right would have called, you know, the left socialists for trying to kinda implement central planning around supply chains.
Speaker: 4
40:17
So that’s my piece.
Speaker: 0
40:18
Well, no. What do you think, Chamath, here of this sort of reframing slash off ramp and and sort of maybe the positive spin on it? Hey. If you wanna make t shirts, you know, you wanna make commodity items, have at it. Free trade, you know, reciprocal tariffs, great, checkbox there, but here is a series of incentives and a path forward to do the advanced stuff, to do robotics, etcetera.
Speaker: 1
40:40
Let me answer this in a different way. Okay. A lot of those things he’s actually doing. I think this is where we are is we’re beyond TDS. There’s something that comes after it, and I think that the mainstream media has just lost their mind to a degree that they hadn’t even lost their mind in Trump one.
Speaker: 1
41:04
I’ll give you a couple of examples. Well, one example, by the way, just a shout out to our friend, completely brazen, ridiculous reporting by the Wall Street Journal last night when they were told that this, you know, this whole Tesla thing was a total farce, they continued to publish it.
Speaker: 1
41:22
Okay. Fine. They’re they have a You’re referring
Speaker: 0
41:24
to Elon, the board Yeah. Starting a search to replace Elon. And then the board said, well, wait, we told you we weren’t doing that. And they didn’t even mention
Speaker: 1
41:32
They communicated that directly to the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal said, I don’t care. I have an ax to grind. Correct. Yeah. I think that Trump has a strength, which is he shapes these potholes for the mainstream media to fall into. The downside of that though is that the the mainstream media then doesn’t do the other part of the job, which is to tell the things that are important.
Speaker: 1
41:54
So for example, we spent a lot of time breathlessly talking about the MS thirteen knuckles of the guy. Right? Or then we spent a bunch of time talking about how MSNBC blurred out the names of the placards on the lawn. Okay. But here’s the other part where then they get so tyler, here’s what they don’t report.
Speaker: 1
42:16
They didn’t report that for example, when Trump took a shot at Harvard, he also reinforced and strengthened historically black colleges and universities. Totally did not get written. I’ll give you another example. This past week, Besson said that the tax bill will allow you to fully deduct all the PPE and all of the incidental costs of building a factory.
Speaker: 1
42:46
I heard that. I immediately went to my wife. She runs a pharma business. This is exactly what she’s trying to figure out. And we now are ai, how do you build a business case if this actually gets effectuated?
Speaker: 1
42:59
The point is that thing would create an absolute economic bonanza if it were to get passed. Other than people hearing it on this pod or randomly maybe finding it on a direct clip that Besson puts out on x, there has been zero coverage by the mainstream media.
Speaker: 4
43:20
Yeah. But but, Shimonth, the like like, the the, first of all, that yeah. Okay. MSM and whatever we wanna call it aside, like the that is that is still on the administration for driving a, a change management process that that causes people to build on momentum and not causes boards to basically say, oh, are we gonna pivot our entire supply chain this week?
Speaker: 4
43:42
Because because Trump, you know, didn’t get a callback from from Xi. Like like that, that is ai it’s this is really not a a a TDS Meh issue. This if you talk to Fortune 500 CEOs
Speaker: 3
43:53
Did you
Speaker: 1
43:54
know about the PPE thing? No.
Speaker: 4
43:55
But that’s not but, like, I’m I don’t need to. Like, the thing that
Speaker: 1
43:58
I know. But there are many other CEOs that do. They’ve they’re controlling trillions of dollars of capital allocation. It’s an important thing.
Speaker: 4
44:04
If we had if we had Mary Barra on this call and and we said, Mary, has has, you know, Trump increased your ability to execute and operate and accelerate the the transition to The US, or has he had headwinds that make it tougher to navigate right now? Which which way do you think she’d go?
Speaker: 1
44:22
I think that she would give you a calculated answer that neither is pro or con.
Speaker: 3
44:26
I think I think that answer changes by the day. I think that if you talked to her last week, she would say this has been a major headwinds, and then yesterday, to to Chamath’s point, they did this thing with you can depreciate or fully expense in year one capital improvements or building out factories.
Speaker: 3
44:39
But also earlier this week, they made it so that auto auto parts are not subject to the tariffs. They created a huge exemption Yeah. That we’ve sent out everything. Like, it’s great. It should’ve by the way, that should’ve speaks to If this was a bit of communication, it should’ve been there in the beginning because these auto auto companies were saying, hey.
Speaker: 3
44:56
This is gonna bankrupt ai.
Speaker: 0
44:57
We have
Speaker: 3
44:57
to pay taxes on demand.
Speaker: 1
44:58
Where I where I would take your side.
Speaker: 0
45:00
Circling back to communication and making a crisper and Yeah.
Speaker: 1
45:04
You’re right. Aaron, where you are right is, my expectation is it’s my job to stay informed. Okay? As a CEO of my company, I try to stay informed and you’re right. It is hard because sometimes I find myself hunting and pecking to find the things that matter. But I do put a bunch of that responsibility into the lap of the people that are supposed to actually report the facts. They can choose.
Speaker: 1
45:26
They didn’t have to run that article about Elon, which turned out to be total bull and horse on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. They could have talked about what Ryan just mentioned as the first article and said, here completely changes your ROIC and ROE calculations for 90% of the S and P 500.
Speaker: 1
45:45
That was not the article they chose to write and to publish.
Speaker: 3
45:48
But I also think it comes back to my original point around the OODOT loops that there that Trump is the administration is running these very tight, hey. Let’s take an action. Let’s see what happens. Let’s see the reaction and then take another action. And Washington’s used to doing all these committees that plan everything for five years or something or whatever, eighteen months, and then roll it out slowly. And they’re going, hey.
Speaker: 3
46:07
Let’s roll it out. Oh, crap. We’re about to cause this huge problem in the auto manufacturers, and they’re all telling us they’re gonna go bankrupt. Okay. Three days later, they push an update to that. And it’s Ai and Aaron.
Speaker: 3
46:17
Deal’s chaotic, but it’s Just,
Speaker: 0
46:18
yeah, to summarize Ryan and Aaron, your position so we can keep going through the docket. Hey. A little less shock and awe, maybe a little more predictability, a little crisper communication. And, Chamath, I think your position is, hey. Hey. Maybe the mainstream media can play a better role here in focusing us on what matters.
Speaker: 0
46:34
That
Speaker: 4
46:34
that wouldn’t be my takeaway. So yep. Okay. My my What’s your takeaway? Ai mean, like like, zero shock and awe. Like Okay. Like, not a little less. Like like, I like, my strategy would be a % different. Actually, Scott Bryden has an incredible podcast from, like, September of last year.
Speaker: 4
46:50
And he basically said, you know, Biden Bidenomics got it all wrong. And I was, like, listening to it. Ai was like, oh, okay. Actually, this is kinda cool. Like, he basically says, deregulate The US.
Speaker: 4
46:59
Make it easier to build manufacturing in The US, increase the GDP, and then you’ll be able to take in less tax revenue, spend less in the government. And it was like, oh, this is actually ai a glide path. We could take we could take the fact that we did a soft landing relative to the rest of the globe. We’re winning in AI.
Speaker: 4
47:16
We’re winning in it in in, you know, a a a, you know, number of categories. We obviously need more energy. We need we need to bring in manufacturing into The US. And sai you you have this great momentum, which is where we are the tech leader, you know, in the world. Let’s, like, just pour fuel on that.
Speaker: 4
47:31
And so to pour fuel on that, you you do you just do a series of carrots and and the and the winds that build a flywheel of positive energy. Like, the the reason why I take I take a little bit of exception to to Chamath’s Meh point is that I think to some extent, Fortune 500 CEOs are not the ones like, oh meh gosh.
Speaker: 4
47:48
Like like Rachel Maddow said this. Like, I’m gonna go and and, you know, worry about this topic now. Ai, they’re like like, the information coming at them is is I’m
Speaker: 1
47:55
not talking about the information that’s presented. I’m talking about the information that’s excluded. How do you get the information that’s not published and shared broadly?
Speaker: 0
48:03
No. No.
Speaker: 4
48:04
But but come on. Like like, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are not writing reports on the fact that we might enter a recession because of of MSNBC’s re MSNBC’s reporting on this topic. Like like
Speaker: 1
48:14
Again, but ai, that that’s not what I’m talking about. Ai saying like glad handing some high level prognostication, which nobody ever gets right, is in my opinion, worthless. What I’m talking about is the details. So when you talk about something as narrow and specific as excluding PPE or allowing you to double or triple depreciate something in a given calendar
Speaker: 0
48:35
year That’s fantastic.
Speaker: 1
48:36
That is narrow, it’s precise, it’s specific, it’s actionable. And what I’m saying is if I surveyed the 500 CEO of the S and P five hundred dollars to donuts, the overwhelming majority would not have known. And had they brushed up against that somehow in their normal media consumption to then ask their teams, the odds of that would have been zero as well.
Speaker: 1
48:57
And also Ai guess then
Speaker: 0
48:58
who do we blame for this, Shamoff? Is it the administration’s job or ram mainstream media job?
Speaker: 1
49:03
But I bet you everybody knows about the blurring out of the stupid you know, pictures on the lawn and the MS thirteen knuckle tattoos.
Speaker: 4
49:09
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
49:10
Okay. So let’s wrap up on this just really lightning round here. Amazon flip flopped on a new tariff notification on their websites. Trump said he had a great discussion with Bezos. He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing. Good ai, etcetera. If you haven’t seen this, it’s something that Timu is doing. Here’s what Timu does, currently today.
Speaker: 0
49:33
Nick, you have that image if you could pull it up of just when there is a tariff, they explain the tariff coming into the country. They put it as like a line item. I thought this was actually kinda cool. I don’t know why people take offense with it. Ryan, this is pretty standard stuff.
Speaker: 0
49:47
So Amazon’s competitor, Timoo, is putting in the import charges. They don’t say tariffs. They don’t say taxes. Import charges. This is like a standard thing.
Speaker: 0
49:54
This happens in other countries too. Right?
Speaker: 1
49:56
What is this? What is Timoo? Is this like a dollar store?
Speaker: 0
49:59
It’s basically like a ai is it this the last place you would ever buy?
Speaker: 3
50:01
Ai, you can buy ai jeans.
Speaker: 0
50:04
Yeah. You can buy $12 jeans. Basically your left sock from Norapiana costs less than Timu’s entire inventory of jeans. The point being, I thought this was actually a plus for
Speaker: 3
50:19
I think they and was I totally misplayed this. They they they did it. They rolled it out, then they got criticized. I think they were called a treasonous company from the White House press, you know, by the press secretary. They totally misplayed this because they should have gone and leaned into it and said, yeah. We’re showing you all these tariffs when you buy from China.
Speaker: 3
50:35
If you buy from America, you don’t have to pay
Speaker: 0
50:37
any tariff.
Speaker: 3
50:37
And look at all these other products.
Speaker: 4
50:39
Come on. Come on. That would’ve lasted three and a half seconds. This is consistent with the other issue, which is they’re playing whack a mole. Okay. We’re gonna do something with the automakers. We’re gonna we’re gonna try and solve some problem with Amazon. Like like, this is a sign that that it’s, like, it’s not a good strategy if you have to do this much whack a mole.
Speaker: 4
50:57
Like like, they’re they’re not like, they can’t cover up what Amazon is gonna end up dealing with because there’s gonna be 500 other retailers that that don’t get the call with Trump. So so this is ai that that like, to me, that’s evidence of of clearly this. They didn’t think through the entire downstream set of of of conditions that are gonna change as a result of this.
Speaker: 0
51:16
Sure. Yeah. I I thought this was a big win, Chamath, because they could then have Amazon. Here’s, a mock up somebody made. I’ll pull it up here. It was interesting. They could, to Aaron’s point, just show, hey. Here’s a bunch of American companies. Buy Meh. When you do a search
Speaker: 2
51:33
Well, that’s
Speaker: 0
51:34
Ryan’s point. I’m sorry. Ryan’s point. Hey. Here’s what it might look like. Pull pull out, the Oral B toothbrush one up, Nick, if you got it right there. So somebody mocked this up. I think this could be the hugest win. You could have the retailers do buy American, buy it once, buy a high quality product from America.
Speaker: 0
51:51
If you look here
Speaker: 4
51:52
We don’t have the products. We would it it wouldn’t work. We don’t have the products.
Speaker: 0
51:57
Well, I mean, we do have for some products, you know, American made products. You know, I buy my boots from Danner, and those are all American made.
Speaker: 4
52:05
Sai Yeah. So we should just go back to communism, and we’re all gonna make our our shoes. Like, it’s like that’s like we’re we’re in a global market. Like, we buy ram everywhere.
Speaker: 0
52:14
Chamath, any thoughts on this? I mean, obviously, there’s the whack a mole angle. There’s buy American and be proud of it. There’s communication.
Speaker: 1
52:23
Here’s a narrow question. I I got a bunch of emails from people, and a bunch of them were Amazon sellers. And I don’t know, Nick, if you can find it, but I posted their comments and I reshared them just to kind of highlight the issues that they were going through. And at the core of it was a feeling by them that Amazon had abandoned them as American purveyors and sellers of goods.
Speaker: 1
52:49
And that Amazon, on the margins had a tendency to help competitors from abroad come stand themselves up and compete and essentially cannibalize on price and margin.
Speaker: 3
53:05
This is my view completely. And that this is the biggest opportunity that I think the Trump administration is flying at 40,000 feet doing macro level negotiations and look and failing to see some of these micro optimizations that are really, really real. So you in The United States, you can import goods as a foreign company.
Speaker: 3
53:20
You don’t not you do not have to create an LLC or any sort of registered entity in The United States to import goods. Sometimes they say, oh, Americans pay the tariff. Like that is not true. In many, many cases, the foreign company just imports this stuff and they sell on Amazon.
Speaker: 3
53:35
And when they get caught cheating, they can they can lie about the valuation and pay a lower tariff. They can change their classification and pay a lower tariff. They can import stuff that, you know, is harmful to children, has lead paint, whatever else. There’s no enforcement at all.
Speaker: 3
53:48
You can’t So
Speaker: 0
53:49
you’re saying Amazon third party is ai a bit of a backdoor to abuse the system. Right?
Speaker: 3
53:53
I mean, Amazon is sort of just playing the game that’s on the field, but they’re, this is legal in The United States sai these companies import stuff. And I think it’s 60% of all the sellers on Amazon are these Chinese registered. They’re not registered in The United States at all, just Chinese companies selling.
Speaker: 0
54:05
Okay, look, which sounds profoundly unfair in terms of this level playing field. For sure.
Speaker: 1
54:09
Could we just take a step back and also acknowledge that we are talking about a level of detailed issues that we would never have talked about six months ago? That there was no interest in even bringing this up? Like if if Ryan wanted to bring up the sort of hollowing out of American salesmanship, let’s sai, if you will, because of, like, this arbitrage that Amazon does for GMV, that would have been a snooze fest.
Speaker: 1
54:37
Except today, it can actually get a lot of awareness. And Aaron mentioned this and I’ve mentioned this before, but, like, I think that there are four things that really matter, batteries, AI, pharma APIs, and rare earths. That now is on the agenda. I think the the positive way to look at this is the American economy is too complicated.
Speaker: 1
54:55
If you had waited, Aaron, for a study for all of the implications, we would have been waiting forever and nothing would have happened. And I think that we’ve made macro level moves, you’re right, and now we are finding what the implications are in course correcting in real time.
Speaker: 1
55:11
And I hope what happens though is when we find these big thorny issues, I think the Amazon thing is a is a pretty interesting issue actually about ai American competitiveness. Now the question is, do we follow through and get to the root cause of it and and fix it?
Speaker: 3
55:26
And those feedback loops are there. I mean, the Trump administration’s gonna act on this, and if and there’s an act that’s coming out of congress as well to shut down the foreign importer records. So those feedback loops are there in ways that I don’t I don’t know if they were there in the past. Go ahead, Aaron.
Speaker: 4
55:37
We can totally chaos monkey the the economy and just see what breaks. I think that the you know, you you you sort of phrase the we could, you know, do the research paper and we could do, you know, Aspen Institute, as a bad thing, but also it can be a bad thing if you’re the small business owner right now who has 30 employees, and you just literally don’t know what you’re gonna do next month.
Speaker: 4
55:58
And so so that that’s that’s sort of then the argument to not That’s it’s a good counterbalance. That’s that’s, like, why you
Speaker: 1
56:03
For sure.
Speaker: 0
56:03
You
Speaker: 4
56:03
do have some bureaucracy sana and you don’t chaos monkey the economy sana why Rand Paul is literally saying, maybe we shouldn’t actually let, you know, have unilateral, you know, control over tariffs. So, you know, in interesting that that, like, dynamic there.
Speaker: 0
56:17
Alright. Saks, you sana to, wrap us up here or you wanna pass?
Speaker: 2
56:21
Oh, am I still on the pod?
Speaker: 0
56:23
Yeah. Well, you’ve turned your camera off, so
Speaker: 2
56:26
Look. I spent eighty minutes debating this topic with Larry Summers three weeks ago. The point I made then is that we had in this city at for twenty five years, a globalist consensus on trade that distorted a lot of outcomes. I don’t need to rehash that debate, but I’ll just recall that Larry Summers’ main argument for why this would not work out is that the market was down.
Speaker: 2
56:53
Do you remember that? That was his evidence
Speaker: 0
56:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
56:55
That this wasn’t gonna work. Okay. And it was all about the market not pricing in lower expectations. Well, guess what? The market is actually up since Liberation Day on April 2. So what happened three weeks ago was basically a panic in the market over this policy, and the media has been trying to fuel that panic.
Speaker: 2
57:15
Now what I said as well is we do have to stick the landing on this. I mean, president Trump shifted the conversation away from this globalist consensus, and he’s now redefined the debate, but is now up to Scott Bessen, the treasury secretary, Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, Jamieson Greer, the US trade rep, and so on, the Trump trade team, to now negotiate these deals, stick the landing.
Speaker: 2
57:39
And I agree with you to the extent that the sooner that is done, the better because it is good to provide business certainty. But the idea that sai far this hasn’t worked, I think, again, the main argument against that was the market reaction that now the market’s now positive.
Speaker: 2
57:55
So I think my point is just we need to give this time to work. I think it’s too soon to be judging this policy as if it hasn’t worked yet. It needs to be executed properly. And quite frankly, Ryan, I mean, I remember the last time you were on this pod. You were coming on about wasn’t there, like, some union deal that was supposed to shut down all the ports and all the shelves be empty? That never happened either.
Speaker: 3
58:17
It did happen. It did. They shut down for three days. I don’t
Speaker: 2
58:20
okay. I don’t remember the the shelves being empty, which is now the new panic the media is trying to create. Sai, look, there’s a lot of pants sweating that’s occurring here that’s being filled by the media.
Speaker: 4
58:29
Well well well, I I do want I want I I do sana, I just wanna bookmark one one thing. The only thing I ai, I was more frustrated listening to the Larry Summers and and you have conversation. Cause I was like, why Larry make this point? Like, come on. Like, well, don’t go down the WTO vatsal. Like that’s, that’s not relevant. So here here’s the only thing.
Speaker: 2
58:44
The Of course it’s relevant. It’s how we got here.
Speaker: 4
58:46
No. No. No. It’s ai like sai in, like, that’s 25 ago. Like, let’s worry about literally today ai, like, what what do we do going forward?
Speaker: 1
58:53
Today
Speaker: 4
58:54
is Ai and the only thing I just wanna sai, because I because I I do think that that, you know, I appreciate your point about, hey. There’s, like, you know, everybody’s freaking out, whatever. But to be totally fair, that some of that freak out, whether we can decide how emotional it needs to be, is the reason that then Trump walks back the things that then caused the market to correct.
Speaker: 4
59:12
So so we can’t just say the market’s back and and, like, see, we didn’t need to freak out because it was literally
Speaker: 2
59:18
Ai sai we have to make the deals. We have to stick the landing. But, look, China over the last twenty five years has been able to strategically annihilate our rare earth processing Yeah. Capability and our ability to cast rare earth magnets. We just sat back and watched as the market basically went to the lowest bidder which was being subsidized by the Chinese government which the WTO allowed them to do.
Speaker: 2
59:39
Which is totally happening. Critical dependency
Speaker: 3
59:42
Yep. In
Speaker: 2
59:42
our supply chain on China for basically every electric motor in every product including cars. That was crazy. We should not have allowed that to happen. Yeah. How can sana change that?
Speaker: 0
59:52
We can
Speaker: 2
59:53
So we needed to shift the political conversation to recognize the ways in which It’s so
Speaker: 1
59:59
fluid and not.
Speaker: 2
59:59
Meh to unfair trade and created unacceptable dependencies on the for the American economy.
Speaker: 1
01:00:05
Wait. Wait. Just I I just wanna make one one point. It’s more than that.
Speaker: 0
01:00:08
Point and then Ai finish
Speaker: 1
01:00:10
But this is the national security of The United States that that’s at stake. Let’s go take your favorite pet issue. China invades Taiwan. Okay. And we have to take a ai, Jason.
Speaker: 0
01:00:22
My pleasure?
Speaker: 1
01:00:23
Hold on. Let me just finish. And Who’s going to And the and the and the Chinese say, here are the implications of supporting Taiwan on this. A, b, c, and d. You don’t get any pharma APIs. You don’t get any rare earths. You don’t get any batteries. Okay. It’ll it’ll send life back fifty years.
Speaker: 1
01:00:42
Or let’s say China and India get into a fight and were forced to pick a ai. Same situation. The point is there’s all these scenarios that we never even considered us being able to have strategic optionality to make the decision that’s morally and ethically right for The United States.
Speaker: 1
01:00:59
And I think that we have learned through this lens that these are huge issues. The thing that the Chinese did that was so brilliant, which we still don’t have an answer for, is they have these national champions. And being a national champion allows you and we’ll talk about this in AI. It allows you to blur the lines between the public and private partnership.
Speaker: 1
01:01:18
It allows you to blur the law. It allows you to blur capital. And I’m not saying we have to do that, but what I am saying is we need to have our own answer to it. And that was never on the table until April 9.
Speaker: 0
01:01:33
Ai? Sai
Speaker: 4
01:01:34
Yeah. But but, like, a %. Like, do that strategy. And then and then and then don’t have a mad rush.
Speaker: 1
01:01:39
Is the strategy.
Speaker: 4
01:01:40
No. No. No. Because because that’s sai you if you have a, you know Ryan, what what is the number? I don’t know. Trillion of imports or whatever. Like, you don’t need everybody then then jamming the system to build their supply chain, you know, in The US to solve that
Speaker: 1
01:01:52
problem immediately. If we’re sitting here in nine months and you’re saying this and there are no deals, I would say that you’re right. What Howard Lutnick said last speak, and again, we may have all gotten caught up in the knuckle tattoos and we missed this, but he was very clear.
Speaker: 1
01:02:06
We have a country, a deal is already done. Yep. We’re convening parliament. It’s gonna be the first of many. So for all we know, there’s, like, 30 deals that are waiting in the wings, and the first one will set the tone.
Speaker: 1
01:02:19
And and I think that Sachs is right here, which is it’s way too early to declare defeat and that it was quote, unquote chaos. I think if we’re sitting here in nine months and foreign direct investment has shriveled up and domestic investment has shriveled up because there is just no continuity, you have a claim.
Speaker: 1
01:02:36
But that’s
Speaker: 0
01:02:37
probably what
Speaker: 4
01:02:37
we are now. Ai don’t think that’ll happen. I don’t think that’ll happen. I think we will end up in like, I’m with Bryden. Like we will end up in a good spot because we’ll iterate through this. My only point is there’s an alternative path that that could have occurred. It
Speaker: 0
01:02:48
could have been done
Speaker: 2
01:02:49
That’s all.
Speaker: 0
01:02:49
In a more thoughtful, well communicated pattern instead of, hey. Let’s do barrel rolls with the airplane. I don’t disagree with you, Aaron. And I can tell you, we’ve already started to see layoffs. Nobody
Speaker: 1
01:02:59
wanted to even initiate the barrel rolling. Wait, guys. Yeah. Listen.
Speaker: 4
01:03:03
We get it.
Speaker: 1
01:03:04
It’s like, hey. I don’t want anything to change. I don’t agree
Speaker: 0
01:03:06
to disagree on this, sai.
Speaker: 2
01:03:08
Where are you with this? Hold on. Hold on. Just one last point. Yes.
Speaker: 0
01:03:11
We’re gonna move
Speaker: 2
01:03:11
on to next time. Excuse me. You didn’t call me for forty minutes. I just wanna make one final point.
Speaker: 0
01:03:16
Ai. Here he goes.
Speaker: 2
01:03:17
Aaron, where were you with this perfect plan? Yeah. Where were you with this perfect plan before Liberation Day?
Speaker: 4
01:03:23
I was telling Kamala about it.
Speaker: 2
01:03:25
You were telling Kamala. Okay. Great.
Speaker: 0
01:03:26
He was. But no They were having,
Speaker: 2
01:03:28
Nobody nobody all the people.
Speaker: 0
01:03:30
Ai they were talking about this specific issue.
Speaker: 2
01:03:33
All the people who suddenly know what the perfect plan is and how to perfectly execute it, no barrel rolls, had nothing to say about this topic for twenty five years. Now all of a sudden, they’ve come forward with their perfect plans.
Speaker: 0
01:03:45
Yeah. I would say that’s victory for Trump.
Speaker: 3
01:03:47
Finish. It’s like, look at this. Wait. The best thing of all of this is you’ve got the Liberals embracing Milton Friedman and their backgrounds on their I love it. Yes.
Speaker: 1
01:03:54
Alright. Listen. We agree
Speaker: 0
01:03:55
to disagree. We’re gonna agree to disagree on this one.
Speaker: 2
01:03:57
Now the Liberals love the stock market.
Speaker: 0
01:03:59
Listen, Sachs, Kamala’s coming on next week. We’re gonna make some cocktails. It’s gonna be wonderful. You know, we’ll we’ll we’ll ask her some direct questions about it, but I wanna talk about AI agents. Twenty twenty five shaping up to be the year of AI agents. Tons to talk about here.
Speaker: 0
01:04:15
OpenAI is planning to charge between 2 and 20 k a month for different levels of AI agencies would be basically cron jobs. They would run-in the background and do things for your company that, humans are doing right now. You may have heard of this, agentic tool. Again, agentic is just a fancy word for agent, which is a fancy role foot word for, like, a cron job that just runs No. Professionally. Ai.
Speaker: 0
01:04:36
And, Manus is, the company in China that started this. Weirdly, benchmark invested in it. That’s created a whole kerfuffle on the side. And Manus’ website has a really good visualization of what these agents would look like.
Speaker: 3
01:04:49
So
Speaker: 2
01:04:49
first of all, I think you’re giving a little too much credit to Manas. They didn’t come up with the agents, but I do think that they have a very good demo. And it’s hard to know exactly how real it is because not everyone’s used it.
Speaker: 0
01:05:00
Ai from China?
Speaker: 2
01:05:01
It’s from China. I’ll get to that in a second. Yeah. If you go to their website, you can see a bunch of their their demos. And I do think that what they deserve credit for is advancing the ball on the UI ai. And it’s not that other people weren’t doing this. I mean, I think notably, Anthropic was doing this with its operator product, but the basic idea is that you’ve got this two pane view and in one window you’ve got the standard chatbot interface and then in the other view you can see what the agent is doing and that agent has the ability to toggle between currently four apps: their search, browser, co terminal, and document editor.
Speaker: 2
01:05:39
And so when you give Manas a task, the first thing it does is create a to do list in the meh or you can kind of see it there and then it works sequentially to achieve each of those tasks and then puts an x on them there and you can kinda see it working. And I think what’s cool about the demo is just the way that it seamlessly toggles between those four apps, and you can see what the AI agent is doing, you know, and it’s browsing the Internet.
Speaker: 2
01:06:02
It’s searching for things. It’s writing documents. It’s crossing things off its to do list. Now Ai think it’s pretty easy to imagine where this goes, which is you’ll be able to connect an agent to all of your SaaS apps. So it won’t just be four applications, it’ll now be connected to dozens of applications, including ones that already have your vatsal, and it’s sana to know what actions it’s possible to take in those apps sai when it creates its to do list there’s a much wider range of things that it can accomplish and in fact there’s a new standard called MCP which is taking off like wildfire which is built specifically to enable agents to connect with applications and understand the data and understand the actions that are possible in those SaaS applications.
Speaker: 2
01:06:42
So look, Manus is just the tip of the iceberg here. I think this will become a very standard UI paradigm. That’s the reason why I meh it. Not because I am pre declaring them to be the winner in the space, but just because I think there’s a lot of talk about agents and I think it’s hard to conceptualize what that means without just seeing it visually.
Speaker: 0
01:07:01
Great great summary there, Sachs. And, Aaron, I wanna get your thoughts on it because, obviously, you’re running Box and and you have your your finger on the pulse of this. We actually started building one of these in our venture firm. We have 20,000 applications a year and we have updates coming in from investments.
Speaker: 0
01:07:17
We are now taking those sacks, Aaron, and we are having an agent sort them and then look for competitors and compare them to the last update. And we’re looking into our Notion, our Coda, and saying, what else have what other communications have we had? What questions should we ask about the arya and about their strategy? And then we’re presenting that in Slack to our team. So this is coming fast and furious.
Speaker: 0
01:07:40
And we spend, I don’t know, probably fifteen minutes on each of those incoming applications. Just start doing the math on that. Ai about five thousand hours of work. Aaron, what are you seeing on the street? What are you doing at Box in terms of agents landing right now in q two of twenty twenty five?
Speaker: 4
01:07:57
Ai. I mean, I think I think Saks represented it, well, which is which is, you know, you have to now think about AI as as effectively being able to do anything on a on a computer or another piece of software as, as a human can do. And the little distraction that, that I think happened two years ago after the Chat to BT moment was we sort of thought about that as, oh, we’re just gonna now, you know, do like typing information retrieval.
Speaker: 4
01:08:19
And that’s a new paradigm for user interfaces, let’s say. So you just, like, talk to your software and you, like, search Zillow via chat. That was sort of a little bit of a distraction shah that’s super helpful, like, when you want basic information lookup or or whatnot. The big breakthrough is starting to think through these things as as full, you know, effectively, you know, agentic systems that that operate on any amount of data, any amount of tools for as long as you want to complete any task that you want.
Speaker: 4
01:08:45
And this is sort of a big year where agents are starting to, you know, enter the vocabulary of enterprises, of IT people, of, you know, larger and and certainly small organizations. And and it kind of requires you to have a little bit of a of a reset moment on how you think about AI, which is which is it’s not just now a a kind of a copilot that you talk back and forth with.
Speaker: 4
01:09:07
It’s actually something running behind the scenes that’s now actually starting to deliver, you know, real automated, you know, kind of work for you. And so lots lots of implications, like, you know, massive implications to what the software business model is in the future. You know, I I I would argue, you know, strongly that it’s a massive TAM increase, because now software starts to go after labor spend.
Speaker: 4
01:09:27
It completely changes the dynamics of then, you know, how do you build a moat in a world of AI agents? But but I think I’ll talk
Speaker: 0
01:09:34
about that piece
Speaker: 4
01:09:34
there, Aaron.
Speaker: 0
01:09:35
You said something very interesting. How software then is going to go over human spend. Yes. Explain that concept.
Speaker: 4
01:09:42
I’ll pack
Speaker: 0
01:09:43
it for a second.
Speaker: 4
01:09:44
David and Ai, you know, we we we go back way back in SaaS land, but, like, you used to basically just, you know, you built you built a piece of of software and you sell it for the number of of people in the organization. And so, you know, company has 500 employees and, and you sell that thing for, let’s say, $10, you know, a user a month, you know, a hundred $20 a year and you make $60,000.
Speaker: 4
01:10:06
And so so that and that’s kind of the business model. Now when your software actually brings the underlying workflow to the customer or the underlying outcome to the customer, so, you know, that that company might have 10 lawyers. And so previously, if you were selling software for lawyers, you had a maximum amount of 10 seats that you could sell.
Speaker: 4
01:10:25
Now, all of a sudden, if your AI agents are doing the equivalent of, let’s say, paralegal work or some form of professional services, all of a sudden you might be able to sell a a multiple of the initial kind of 10 seats that you would have sold previously.
Speaker: 0
01:10:36
So you say that’s a huge opportunity because you’re now you’re not enabling a human to be 5% more productive. You’re replacing a human or you’re replacing one out of 10.
Speaker: 4
01:10:44
Yeah. And and actually, I’m gonna take a massive I’m gonna do an underscore on this point, though. I I don’t I don’t like the word replace because I I think actually most of the upside is actually gonna be for companies that now deploy labor at things that they wouldn’t have deployed labor at before.
Speaker: 0
01:10:56
Got it.
Speaker: 4
01:10:56
And and, you know, maybe I’m biased from the view we have, but most of our conversations with customers are when they have AI agents, it they can actually now go and actually deliver work in areas that would have been unaffordable previously. So they actually they weren’t doing the work.
Speaker: 3
01:11:11
Is that true in logistics? So, like, we we’re making thousands of phone calls a day using AI calling truck drivers. And we if we have a load we’ve got 400,000 truck drivers using the mobile app, the Flexport mobile app. I don’t have enough loads to keep them all checking it every day to see if there’s a load that matches them.
Speaker: 3
01:11:28
And if they don’t check it, Ai they’re they’re useless to me. Now and it was too expensive to call the truck driver and have a human call and talk to them even if it’s a human in a call center in The Philippines. Whereas with AI, it’s almost free. I’m calling thousands of them a day going, hey. This load looks like it’s a good match for you. Are you interested?
Speaker: 3
01:11:45
And and then we activate them on the platform. That’s new work that wasn’t gonna happen before not just a replacement.
Speaker: 4
01:11:51
Yeah. Ai I think that I think probable I think, like, we we have but, you know, in in the valley, unfortunately, we’ve been co opted a little bit somewhat with with a little bit of a doomer, you know, mindset in some arya. And and we think of then AI as, okay, like like, it’s all fixed pie. It’s gonna replace things.
Speaker: 4
01:12:06
And on the ground with large enterprises, the vast majority of the use cases are are it’s it’s the, you know, it’s the ability to finally review the contracts that we never got around to reviewing. It’s the ability to finally automate an invoice process that we never did. It’s the ability to go in and just create marketing campaigns in every language that we never got around to.
Speaker: 4
01:12:25
And so so I think that’ll probably be actually, like, 90% of the usage of AI in the future will be things that if we look back and we snap the line right now, we sai, this is what knowledge work is today. 90% of AI usage will be things that we don’t do today. 10% will will replace, you know, what we’re what we’re doing in some areas.
Speaker: 0
01:12:41
That’s the right take because, Chamath, I can tell you in our firm, we would never have associates or researchers or analysts, Sachs, you also were in this line of work as well, venture capital, you would never have them review legal documents. That’s something lawyers would do in legal department.
Speaker: 0
01:12:56
But now because of AI, we have them say, here’s the sai, here’s the term sheet, here’s the edited version, dump it all in, Find out what the changes are. What are the deltas here? And then let’s have a discussion about what the founder changed in a Sander document. And we don’t have to bother with an attorney.
Speaker: 0
01:13:13
And maybe you wouldn’t have even checked those documents if you were, you know, a seed fund or an angel fund. You would just go along for the ride because you’re the tenth person signing the documents. So what do you what do you think, Chamath, here in terms of the premise that maybe it’s 10% replacing work that’s happening, but this is Blue ocean and we’re sana do 90% of, like, new stuff that we just never got to.
Speaker: 1
01:13:32
Yeah. I tend to I tend to believe that’s true. I think the customers that we sell into at eighty ninety are largely large enterprises as well, so not dissimilar to Aaron’s customer base. What I would say is that what they are encountering is the trough of disillusionment.
Speaker: 0
01:13:52
And
Speaker: 1
01:13:52
I don’t know if, Aaron, you’re seeing this as well, but every single, you know, CIO ran around signing up some sort of AI product in large part because their CEO would say to them, hey. What’s your AI strategy? And the reason the CEO asked them that is that at some point, somebody on the board said, what are we doing about AI?
Speaker: 1
01:14:13
So that’s the the bull cascade that that that we went through in the last two years. And I think what has happened now is people have spent billions and billions of dollars. I think you can see it in the revenue traction of the AI companies. But I think where we are today is that there are some real technical complexities that have not been solved. I’ll give you an example.
Speaker: 1
01:14:37
We have a lot of customers in regulated industries, which is to say that if you make a mistake, you will get fined or you will get shut down. Life sciences, healthcare, financial services are three examples. People still don’t seem to appreciate that when you replace software that is deterministic with software that is probabilistic, meaning software that somebody wrote for you, do a, then do b, then do c with an LLM that can hallucinate, you’ll have errors.
Speaker: 1
01:15:13
So what used to be a throwaway thing, which is quality assurance and QA, ai, unit testing, integration testing, is now the only thing that matters. Why? Because if you’re a financial services institution and you’re supposed to do KYC and it borks and now all of a sudden you send a wire somewhere in Syria, guess what?
Speaker: 1
01:15:31
You’re in trouble. Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:15:33
You’re a bueno. Yeah.
Speaker: 1
01:15:34
If you’re a healthcare company and you’re supposed to do some clinical diagnosis to send out a drug on time and you don’t do that because the the model hallucinates, that’s a real problem. And I ram guaranteeing you, we have not seen the class action lawsuits that will come when those errors will eventually be made. They’re guaranteed to be made.
Speaker: 1
01:15:57
We just don’t know the scope and the scale of them. So that’s why I ram sort of of this posture where I think we’ve sold in a ton of promise. I think the reality is much more tactical. It’s a little bit more banal.
Speaker: 0
01:16:11
Mhmm.
Speaker: 1
01:16:12
I think we’re sorting through the exact use cases where you can put guardrails around these error rates where it’s okay and tolerable. Ai, Brian will probably tell you there’s some number of phone calls that just sound totally f cocked, but he’s okay with that because the broader thing is okay.
Speaker: 1
01:16:29
And error will prob sai Ai don’t know. So I wanna
Speaker: 3
01:16:32
talk to my customers though. I have it calling truck drivers to offer them, you know, offer them loads, but I’m not having to talk to my customer.
Speaker: 1
01:16:39
Sorry. I I meant your truck ai, but my my my point just is that Ai think agents are real, but I think that we are far away from that because we’re still at the phase of how do you build reliable software in production for an enterprise versus the toy apps that you see on the internet, which is like, let me vibe code something.
Speaker: 1
01:17:00
I think these things are worlds apart still.
Speaker: 0
01:17:03
Okay. So let me get Saloni on here. And just to inform the audience, you heard ai of disillusionment. This comes from the ai cycle. This is something Gartner has been talked about for a long time. So in case you’re taking it for granted, if you’re watching, you have some sort of technology trigger ai agents, you have this like peak of inflated expectations.
Speaker: 0
01:17:19
Now we’re in the trial of disillusionment. Meh, this stuff doesn’t work. It’s hallucinating, but we’re kinda going up that way.
Speaker: 1
01:17:23
It works. It just doesn’t ai me. It does say we’re
Speaker: 0
01:17:26
on the slope of the mountain, I think.
Speaker: 2
01:17:27
I don’t see this disillusionment. I I don’t know where this is coming from. I don’t even think we’re at the peak yet.
Speaker: 0
01:17:32
Oh, okay. So you think we’re still going up? Because I I a lot of people, to Shamat’s point, were buying stuff and saying, hey. It doesn’t work, you know, and now we’re in the meh.
Speaker: 1
01:17:41
Let me sai let me say it differently, Sana. I think we have not yet figured out how to move the budgets from experimentation to mainline production, meaning where large chunks of The US economy are comfortable enough with the ways in which hallucinations are managed, such that they will replace legacy deterministic code with this new probabilistic model generated code, meaning model enabled code.
Speaker: 1
01:18:08
Let’s just put it that way.
Speaker: 0
01:18:10
And I ai We’re on the slope here. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:18:12
Look, I would I would separate change management issues, which are always gonna be important and there’s always gonna be big ones whenever there’s a big disruption, especially in enterprise and especially around compliance and legal, all that kind of stuff. I would separate that from the impact of the underlying technology trend And I don’t think the impact has come anywhere close to peaking it.
Speaker: 2
01:18:32
And, in fact, I would say the rate of progress is exponential right now on at least three key dimensions. So number one is the algorithms themselves. The models are improving at a rate of, I don’t know, three to four times a year. They’re not just getting faster and and better, but qualitatively, they’re different.
Speaker: 2
01:18:50
Remember, we started with pure LLM chatbots, then we went to reasoning models. And the difference there is with a chatbot, it just it’s like kind of a smart PhD or college student giving you an answer off the top of their heads. The reasoning models, it’s more like the PhD saying, okay, let me go off and think about that. Let me do a project on that.
Speaker: 2
01:19:07
And it could work for thirty seconds or a couple of minutes. I mean, as much compute as you sana throw at it and it will break down your complicated question into a bunch of sub questions and then it’ll try different approaches and it can validate some of those approaches and come back to you with a much more impressive answer.
Speaker: 2
01:19:22
And if you’ve been using ai the GROC3 Deep Research or the new ChattGPT-three to do these types of new reasoning models, it’s pretty mind blowing what they’re capable of. Have we even come close to figuring out how to tap the potential there, especially in an enterprise context? No.
Speaker: 2
01:19:40
But my point is that the rate of progress on the algorithms is again, three to four times in your own. Let me just go through the whole
Speaker: 0
01:19:48
live here. Okay. Yeah. Go. Okay. Go finish with that sai and then I’ll I’ll take it and pass it.
Speaker: 4
01:19:53
Go ahead. Well, I
Speaker: 2
01:19:53
was trying to lay out the dimensions of which progress is proceeding exponentially. Okay. So one is the algorithms. Okay. Which is not just quantitative, but it’s also qualitative. We didn’t even get to the agents part of it yet, but that’s the next big leap after reasoning models. We’re just starting to scratch the surface there.
Speaker: 2
01:20:09
Then you’ve got the chips. I mean, the chips are getting better at, I don’t know, three to four x a year. We’ve gone from, you know, the h 100 to the h 200. Now we’re on the GB 200. We’ll be at GB 300 soon.
Speaker: 2
01:20:20
We’ll be on to
Speaker: 3
01:20:23
ai, meh. Times better per year or they get better three times per year?
Speaker: 2
01:20:26
No. No. No. No. They’re getting the chips themselves, depending on how you measure it, each generation of chips is probably three or four times better than the last. Okay? And NVIDIA is back to rolling out new chip, new generation of products roughly annually, and I’m just using them as one example. Obviously, there are other companies as well.
Speaker: 2
01:20:43
So basically, the leap from Hopper to Blackwell to
Speaker: 0
01:20:47
Got it.
Speaker: 2
01:20:47
Bryden, I guess, will be in next year and and then I think ai minutes coming after that. I meh, really an astounding rate of progress. It’s not just the individual chips arya getting better, they’re figuring out how to network them together like with the NVL 72, it’s like a rack system, to create much better performance at the data center level and that would be ai the the third area where you’re seeing basically exponential progress.
Speaker: 2
01:21:07
Just look at the number of GPUs shah are being deployed in data centers. So when Elon first started training GROC, I think they had maybe 100,000 GPUs.
Speaker: 0
01:21:16
Colossus was 100,000, correct. Ai.
Speaker: 2
01:21:17
Now they’re up to 300,000, they’re on their way to a million. Same thing with OpenAI’s data center, Stargate, and within a couple years they’ll be at, I don’t know, 5,000,000 GPUs, 10,000,000 GPUs. Saloni meh,
Speaker: 0
01:21:29
I’m live.
Speaker: 2
01:21:29
And you see that
Speaker: 0
01:21:30
on the
Speaker: 2
01:21:30
power side, right? You’re going from hundred megawatt data centers to 300 megawatts to we’re just starting to now see the first gigawatt tyler data centers. I don’t even think they’re live yet, but this is where they’re trying to get to. And I don’t think it’s beyond the real possibility that we could be at five or 10 gigawatt data centers in the next, I don’t know, several years.
Speaker: 2
01:21:48
Sai so my point is just, look, the algorithms, the chips, and the data centers are all improving or scaling at a rate of, I don’t know, three to four x a year. That’s 10 x every two years. Okay? Where people don’t understand exponential progress is that if you’re getting better at 10 x every two years, that doesn’t mean you’ll be at 20 x in four years.
Speaker: 2
01:22:08
It means you’ll be at a hundred x, a hundred x. So the models, the chips, and the data centers will all be a hundred times more powerful in four years, let’s say at the end of this presidential term. So you multiply those things together, the algorithms, the chips, and then the raw compute that’s available, you’re talking about a million x increase, some of which will be captured in price reductions, some of it will be in the performance ceiling, and then some of it will just be in the overall amount of of AI compute that’s available to the economy.
Speaker: 2
01:22:39
But the impact of this thing is gonna be absolutely massive ai I think people still don’t even appreciate that fact because they don’t understand exponential progress.
Speaker: 4
01:22:46
Yeah. And I I think maybe just to square the circle the the because because ai everything is that that you just said, Zach, is what what I think is propelling the industry. And then the reality on Chamath’s side, like like, just just to connect the dots. So, we have an eval test that we do, where we run enterprise data through every model to to ai figure out its accuracy rate and and, you know, how much it’s not even hallucination, but just literally how much data does it miss when we ask for facts.
Speaker: 4
01:23:12
The best model in the world, actually, interestingly, we was Grok three on on this particular test. We send it 500 documents, and we ask for 40 data fields back from the documents. And so it has to get every single data field correct, and we only do a single pass. So we send the document to to the to the model.
Speaker: 4
01:23:29
We get a single pass back. Right now, the the best score is not about 90%. And so you can imagine a number of industries where you can’t have 90% accuracy, you know, if you give something, you know, a a question on 40 data fields. Now there’s ways to solve it is you rerun it multiple times or you chunk up the document into smaller parts, and so it doesn’t get confused by the large context window.
Speaker: 4
01:23:50
But a lot of the people that were deploying AI a year ago or a year and a half ago weren’t doing that. And so they they, you know, they did have a a kind of a a pilot run of something, and it it kinda worked okay. And what they have to realize back to your point, Saks, is, like, this space is literally exponentially, you know, changing.
Speaker: 4
01:24:07
And so if you don’t use the the latest methods of okay. You have to actually, like, run the data through the model multiple times, and you have to chunk up the data into smaller parts, and you have to use a reasoning model, and you have to make sure that your your prompt is, like, hypertuned for the particular use case.
Speaker: 4
01:24:21
If you haven’t done those four things, then you probably will actually end up with a project that fails. And and even so, even when you do all those things for even, you know, harder problems, you know, you’re still gonna run into issues. So I think I think the challenge is that everybody’s running a million miles an hour right now, and they’re trying a lot of things.
Speaker: 4
01:24:36
Some work, some don’t work at the same time that the space is actually, you know, you know, changing at a at a pretty, you know, kinda crazy rate.
Speaker: 0
01:24:42
Rate. And let’s take a look at our partner Polymarket and, which company they think will have the best AI model by the end of twenty twenty five and get feedback from our panel on, if you think this is accurate and who you would pick here, looks like Google is in the lead here.
Speaker: 0
01:25:00
41% of people believe that they will have the best AI model by the
Speaker: 1
01:25:06
end of the question. Ai is what is the dimension? Like, you know, we use Gemini. So for many tasks at eighty ai, we use Gemini. It’s incredible. But for most of our cogent, we use Anthropic and Cloud kicks ass. It’s it’s exceptional.
Speaker: 0
01:25:19
This is, based on the best scores in the chatbot arena, which just became a Forbes profit company. So that is slightly different because people have gained those tests. So that is a rub there. People are now building their a model for the eval unit. Right?
Speaker: 1
01:25:34
All the models are way overfitted for these eval.
Speaker: 0
01:25:36
So But if you had to pick, who’s your I mean, so I guess, Chamath, you’re saying
Speaker: 1
01:25:39
You have to pick task by task. It’s what Depends on task. I agree with that. What Zach said is right. So it’s kind of like what what problem are you trying to solve? And then you have to ride this technology wave that is compounding very quickly. All I was just trying to get across is that the error rates have been diminishing but not nearly as fast as you need for some sectors of the economy.
Speaker: 1
01:25:56
Right. So you can use a model to generate deterministic code. That’s great. And as long as you unit test it and integration test it, it’ll be fine. But I’m saying if you’re gonna use a model in production, in an environment where if stuff goes wrong, there are consequences, we’re not there meh.
Speaker: 0
01:26:13
Ai. Right. And you don’t wanna use this for healthcare meh, but you could use it for writing or writing jokes or maybe 10 or five. No. No. No. No.
Speaker: 4
01:26:20
No. No. No. No. That’s that’s too that’s too binary. Like, it’s already used right now in health care, but it’s just the doctor’s meeting notes that that would normally take thirty minutes to go and transcribe. Yeah. Yeah. So so it’s we you can’t be too too black and white on that one. Yep.
Speaker: 2
01:26:33
What’s happening right now, the reason why the the progress is so rapid in coding assistance, and I I think, you know, you’re right that Anthropic with was it Claude three point seven?
Speaker: 1
01:26:43
Yeah. Sana three seven. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:26:44
Yeah. I think they’re the leader. And in fact, I think the Manus demo that we showed, it’s not entirely a wrapper on Claude because they actually they do a number of different things, but I think they are significantly using Anthropic for the code assistant part of it. In any event, the reason why the progress is so rapid with coding is because code compiles and you can determine objectively whether it works or not.
Speaker: 2
01:27:06
You can validate it. And so that makes it a perfect area for AI to get better at through reinforcement learning and test time compute is Ai tries a bunch of things. It sees what works. It sees what compiles, sees what the user then accepts, and then to be able to learn and iterate based on that.
Speaker: 2
01:27:23
That’s why coding right now is really the big breakthrough application and use case, but it’s not gonna be the only one. I mean, math is another good area where I think AI is improving rapidly again because math you have proofs and you can look at the results and see if it validates.
Speaker: 2
01:27:39
Now, I think one of the big questions in terms of AI progress is how extensible is the progress to other areas that don’t easily validate that way. So for example, legal work is I think a really good area for AI, but how do you validate that as correct?
Speaker: 3
01:27:56
You would have to go to the court.
Speaker: 0
01:27:57
Right? The court is the ai. Like, a lawsuit is the compiler ram maybe the laws
Speaker: 2
01:28:01
Or you could hire, like, a thousand lawyers or experts in the area to basically do, you know, reinforcement Which people
Speaker: 0
01:28:08
are doing.
Speaker: 2
01:28:08
Human. People arya doing. Human. But it’s
Speaker: 0
01:28:10
not like a compiler to your point. It’s not like a manual.
Speaker: 2
01:28:13
The progress isn’t gonna be as rapid because it’s harder to validate. But Absolutely. But my guess is that once they figure out how to nail coding, math, and the things that are easily validated, they can move to the things that are harder to validate. And but I think this is one of the big questions is whether I think people just kind of assume that AI progress will be, you know, equally fast in all arya, and I think it’s possible that AI gets really good in some areas, better than human, but it’s sort of childlike in other areas.
Speaker: 2
01:28:40
And, that’s impossible to ask.
Speaker: 0
01:28:42
Is, like, make your point. Right? Like, with a finite answer or an answer we know is the definitive
Speaker: 4
01:28:48
answer. But but but this is the the important thing about the agent kind of, you know, let’s just say, framework or architecture, you know, momentum was, was instead of just saying, okay, we’re sana do a single pass through the model and then whatever it comes back with is, is we’re gonna be satisfied.
Speaker: 4
01:29:04
Like, you know, the legal work might be might be reviewed by another agent whose job is to review legal work. And so we we can just throw more and more compute at the problem, and we’re just early in figuring out how to architect those
Speaker: 0
01:29:17
Ram multiple models. Right? You could have log
Speaker: 4
01:29:19
check You would have anthropics. Exactly.
Speaker: 0
01:29:21
You would have anthropic check, LGBT check, Gemini. Yeah. When you have
Speaker: 4
01:29:24
some anomaly, it spits back out to the user. So human in the loop still matters in this in type of process.
Speaker: 0
01:29:29
In the early days of OCR, you would have a computer say, here’s the characters in this legal meh. Then you’d have two humans type it in, and then you would get a certain level of certainty.
Speaker: 1
01:29:38
Yeah. You’ll quickly find that when you layer these models on top of each other, the test time compute costs are astronomical.
Speaker: 0
01:29:44
Yep.
Speaker: 1
01:29:44
And Aaron’s probably dealt with this. Like, it’s like Sai get a bill from AWS, and it’s like, oh, wait. Hold on a second. I just you know, per hundred thousand this month. What’s going on? So you have to get to the point.
Speaker: 2
01:29:57
That that that, by the way, is another major trend line, which is that the new applications that we talked about are all much more token intensive. So we went from basic LLMs
Speaker: 1
01:30:06
Totally.
Speaker: 2
01:30:06
You you know, which don’t require that many tokens to give you an answer, to the reasoning model where you can spend a thousand times more tokens just getting one answer to a question. And now the agents are gonna be even more token intensive than that. So the amount of compute required to serve all these new applications is gonna be massive, which is why I think the capex build out actually makes sense.
Speaker: 0
01:30:26
When you do a deep research to your point, David, you’re firing off maybe 200 queries and it’s asking them the AI is saying, hey, what query should I ask on behalf of the user? And then you go down that rabbit hole. You it’s basically ai doing 200 of them at once. Ryan, your thoughts here on AI first companies and agentic computing.
Speaker: 3
01:30:43
Well, the one that I really wanted to tie back to is actually our earlier conversation on tariffs. And there’s a real use case of of LLMs is how do you classify a product? And you’d like to get to what we see today, when we did our first machine learning based natural language classification of a product, you take a product URL listing page, a Shopify page, or Amazon page and say, hey.
Speaker: 3
01:31:03
What shah classification code is this? What duty is owed? Six years ago in a hackathon, we got to, like, 70% accuracy. We’re now in high nineties accuracy versus what a human trained expert will get to. But you actually get to it, which is not good enough. You know?
Speaker: 3
01:31:19
You’re wronged 3% of the time. You you ai have committed a a violation of the law for sure. But, actually, what is truth in that regard? It’s there’s a lot of gray area in this. And truth ultimately is what does customs say? What does the CBP determine is correct?
Speaker: 3
01:31:33
And those guys are using software
Speaker: 0
01:31:36
Right.
Speaker: 3
01:31:37
That’s pretty that’s a very simple algorithm, and it’s a decision tree that’s going, okay. Is it a shoe? Yes. Is the top made of leather? Yes. You know, is the bottom made of rubber? And they just go through a very simple and that outputs it. So on some level, if you convince the government to use your LLM, it becomes true whether it’s true or not.
Speaker: 3
01:31:55
I think there’s sana be some interesting cases like that that we haven’t really thought through of, like, when does the government adopt these to be the source of truth?
Speaker: 1
01:32:02
Okay. All of this speaks to this thing that’s gonna sound totally esoteric, but, like, we all used to shah on QA. Right? Like, the least talented engineers were allocated to QA. I think in the world of AI, it’s it’ll end up being the most talented. You know, we internally at eighty ninety, we call it improvement engineering and it’s a total specialty. It’s similar to when I kind of coined the growth team at Facebook.
Speaker: 1
01:32:27
I feel it’s the same kind of moment.
Speaker: 4
01:32:29
That’s
Speaker: 1
01:32:29
cool. Improvement engineering is really the skill that translates toy apps and vibe coding into something that’s very practical and real. And we, like and my team and the leader of this team, he’s, like, steeped in things like Japanese kata management from ai Toyota and quality systems.
Speaker: 1
01:32:48
And these are all the things that matter when you’re trying to just shrink the error rate down to zero so that you can use it in a reliable way. And also to document it sai that if people sana questions what happened or have, you know, recompense or some some way to come back and sai, hey, that that really harmed me.
Speaker: 1
01:33:07
How do you even do that? Ai, these are all very complicated issues that that will get sorted up. Super, I think interesting.
Speaker: 0
01:33:14
Okay. Four. I gotta wrap guys. I gotta catch a flight to Miami. Let me do a closing here if you wanna keep going. You’re welcome. Two, three, two Well,
Speaker: 1
01:33:21
the plane just waits. Just text the pilot and just tell tyler you’re
Speaker: 0
01:33:24
All right. Ai, I’m not burning all the, all in Just get the credits. So to speak and all of our tokens.
Speaker: 1
01:33:30
I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m like, wait, wait.
Speaker: 2
01:33:33
You’re worried about them seeing flight?
Speaker: 0
01:33:34
It’s everything and then putting it on the all in budget and the rest of us are flying Sai
Speaker: 2
01:33:39
for
Speaker: 0
01:33:39
your chairman dictator, Chamath Ai.
Speaker: 2
01:33:43
Sai flight? It’s a strange concept.
Speaker: 0
01:33:45
Yeah. David Ai, I had what does that mean? David, when’s the last time you flew commercial? Clinton.
Speaker: 2
01:33:49
I haven’t missed a flight in about fifteen years.
Speaker: 0
01:33:53
Before Ryan Peterson from Flex Port, Aaron Liebu from the Amazing Box, David Sachs, your chairman, dictator czar. I am the world’s greatest moderator.
Speaker: 1
01:34:04
Love you, boys.
Speaker: 0
01:34:07
Your winners ride. Rain man David Sacks. And it said We open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. Nice queen of quinoa. Winters fly. Besties are gone. That is
Speaker: 3
01:34:29
my dog taking it. I wish your driveway syntax.
Speaker: 2
01:34:35
Oh, man. Ai
Speaker: 0
01:34:37
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 that they just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. Wet your feet.
