Inside the White House Tech Dinner, Weak Jobs Report, Tariffs Court Challenge, Google Wins Antitrust
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Bestie intros
Alright, Sachs. How you doing, brother? Wait. Wait. What's this?
Why are wearing a tie?
I'm in DC today, so it's a it's a government day.
Ah, so you suited up with the ties. You suited up with ties. Well, maybe I'll join you. Maybe I'll join you. Oh, look.
Oh, look. What is this box I just got? Oh, that's for my guy, Tom. Oh, just for JCAL? Mister Jason Kalakanis.
Let's see what's in the box here. Oh, what's on here?
Tom Ford sent you something?
Oh, Tom sent me a nice time. Maybe I'll go over one.
I heard that Moose ate your invitation to the White House.
He did. He did.
I'm sorry about that. Sorry
about that. He's horrible.
I mean, prick. Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the universe. In the universe. It's been proven time and time again.
§02Behind the scenes of the White House Tech Dinner!
Oh, this. I'm not gonna die. Okay. It's just that it's enough already. I I guess Friday we we moved the show to Friday.
Sorry you're getting this on Saturday.
Come to the White House. You can't Yeah.
I just said out
a tie.
Yeah. Well, maybe you could show me how to do this next time I'm in town. I've gotta practice with you. We'll go in the mirror. You could that'd be great.
Ben, you behind me, show me how to do a tie. We didn't have ties in Brooklyn. What do you want me to do? Alright. Well, it was an eventful week.
Some of our besties, some, not all, were invited apparently to a, a little soiree at the White House with the president, Sachs and Chamath. Here's a photo. Some pretty good seeing arrangement here. It looks like Zuckerberg got the, pole position on the right hand of the father, followed by Saxe Pooh and Chamath and Amoade sitting right across from Sam Altman and Tim Cook. What a crowd.
What a crowd. What was the was the impetus for this dinner, Saxe? Tell us.
Well, this was a tech dinner at the White House. I think it originally started with a group that Chamath organized in Silicon Valley, and they were kind of the core nucleus of this. And then more and more people just wanted to come and try to get in, and the president invited some of the top tech leaders. And pretty soon, it turned into the room that you saw there. I mean, it's really pretty amazing president Trump's ability to convene all of these people.
You normally don't get these people in a room together. Many of them are competitors, and it's remarkable. So you pretty much had, I'd say, like, maybe half the tech industry was there.
Oh, by market cap, certainly.
By market cap, for sure.
Yeah. And, Chamath, you obviously were involved here, and you got a pretty good seat. Any, great inside stories? Any inside baseball? What did they serve, by the way?
I'm curious. What gets served at a dinner like this?
That was a very elegant menu. And they they try to keep it light so that it's not overwhelming, which I think can get in the way. So So
no prime rib. Right?
There was a burrata salad, and then there was a a fillet and then a nice raspberry dessert.
Okay.
Here's what I'll tell you. Sacks said it well. What was incredible for me just to frankly be in the room felt very surreal. You're seeing the leaders of the most important companies in the world sitting together, And I just felt like there was a sense of alignment and cooperation, and that was really cool. I think none of those folks have to really show up anywhere that they don't have to.
I think they're at a place in their career and the importance of the businesses that they run. But the fact that the president can convene them, I think, says a lot about him and the agenda. And then they, to a one, were incredibly supportive of what he has done and clearing the way and allowing them to build their businesses with a lot more clarity. It was just very clear the juxtaposition of what it was like and the difficulty under Biden versus what it was now. And you saw some very truly hard cast liberals who have now completely embraced president Trump, folks like Tim Cook, folks like Bill Gates.
And I think that that's an incredible testament to him and his agenda. And then the second thing, which is more personal, is I was so proud of Sacks, every single one of these guys. And you're talking like the titans of titans. They took a moment to say that he was just doing an incredible job, and the president was really proud of it. It was like as a brother.
It's like you're seeing your brother just get completely it was was great. So that was really special.
Freeburg, any any take on this? I I noticed you didn't make it. You didn't make the cut. Mayan bite got eaten by moose offices we heard earlier. But, yeah, I thought you for sure would get a seat.
What happened? Freeburg, no seat free.
I work in agriculture, J. Cal. So we're doing the agriculture dinner next month. It's gonna be great. The president and I are arranging a roundtable.
It's gonna be fantastic. Yeah. Just kidding. Alright. No.
But I was in DC if
eat vegetables, I can come to them.
No. No. I was in DC with the guys. I actually did an interview with senator Rand Paul, which'll which I think is out on YouTube now and on our podcast channels. It was great to sit down with the senator.
What was
the highlight of the the of the Paul interview? I didn't get to watch it yet. Apologies. I was getting ready for the summit. But did you have a highlighter, Jim?
You wanna share with
you guys? He he's an interesting guy. A lot of people have challenged him because he's an independent thinker. He really is true kind of libertarian views and libertarian beliefs, and he's held firm to them despite bucking with the party, which he did recently on the big beautiful bill. You know, he was one of three Republicans to vote against it.
So he's criticized and chastised and, you know, ousted in a lot of different circles in DC because he doesn't kinda fall in line. But I do think that dissent and debate is critical and important for us to find the better path forward. And I I like the role that he plays, and I think he's very first principled. And I think his talking about his ability to get elected despite not being willing to always fall in line with the party is a really important point, and he hopes it will inspire other politicians to follow the same path and for voters to see that there is a role for independent thinkers in congress.
Yeah. I mean, that is something we need. It seems like these parties just get lock step, they're expected to vote the same, vote on party lines and Sacks that is definitely a weakness I think of the two party system. Your thoughts on Rand Paul and his you know, being a bit of an agitator, maybe like Manchin was. There's a role for this, yeah, in our, democracy.
Well, I think it's good to hear from a libertarian voice once in a while, they're gonna have a different sort of conservative
while. I cut that too, Chamath.
They're gonna have a different sort of viewpoint that could be called conservative. So I like grand Paul. But can we just go back to the the dinner? I wanna just Yeah. Build on a point that Chamath made about the level of sort of comity in in the room.
I think that the people in the room there, it was remarkable. Even though a lot of these companies are competing with each other, they were largely on the same page with respect to what was happening in the economy and the world and with the kind of support they needed for the tech industry to do well and for The US economy to do well. And I think the reason why they were largely happy with the Trump administration is because the Trump administration has been pro innovation, pro infrastructure, which includes being pro energy, pro export so these companies can sell their products internationally. And then also the thing that's been very important to the Trump administration is pro worker. And you heard the president make all of those points in his critical AI speech that he gave on July 23 at the AI summit that we co sponsored with Hill and Valley.
So I think a lot of the compliments that we received were due to the agenda that the president articulated so well at the AI summit, and the people in that room are largely supportive of that policy. So I don't know if I would call it a love fest, but I think it was an opportunity for these tech leaders to articulate their concerns where they could use help. And I think the president, he's a great listener, and he wanted to take in their feedback and figure out how to make the economy grow even faster.
I had so many questions from my you know, behind the scenes, etcetera, like seating arrangement. How is that discussed?
The first thing I'll say is the president takes tremendous control over these details. So I've said this before about how conscientious he is, but one of the things that he noticed before was it was very difficult to host press conferences or world leaders outside in the Rose Garden. So the way that it started was around 04:00, what happened was that David and I'll tell you because there was a joke about this at dinner. David asked the president, can we do a tour of the oval for all of the fans of all in? And the president said, absolutely.
So me, Friedberg, Sachs, we went and Caroline Levitt meets us and walks us in. By the way, if you wanna see a star of stars, like, I've I've met few people like this who exudes this level of competence. I mean, I think it was the first thing that Friedberg said after maybe, like, two minutes of interacting with her. He's like, wow. This may be the most competent person I've ever spoken to.
She's outrageously good. So she gets us all. She cleans up some stuff that had to be cleaned up, walks us in, and the president gave us this tour. And the beautiful thing about the tour, if you are a student of American history, is the history is on the walls. I mean, from George Washington to Abe Lincoln to even Ben Franklin and the declaration of independence, Jason.
And so we were able to see all of that and and see all of that in detail, and he was able to talk about it. And then as it kind of always does, it veers where, you know, he does the weave, and he's like, guys, what do we wanna talk about? And Free Root was able to ask some questions, and Sachs and I, and then it just became a little bit more freewheeling. Like
Well, it turned into, a hang.
A hang. Yeah. We we hung with
the president, and then after we hung, we turned the cameras off, and then we hung, like, another half hour, forty five minutes with him. People were coming in and out of the oval and
But we'd have to pass
it's literally like an episode of West Wing meets Veep meets, like you know, it was like everyone's just chatting, going in and out. You meet all the characters.
So then that ends, and Sachs had to do some meetings in the Oval with the president. So we all leave and we're escorted into I think it's the Roosevelt Room, Sacks. Is that right? Is that something else? So when we get into the Roosevelt Room, this is where it becomes surreal.
You're seeing the most powerful people that have built these incredible businesses. I think there was 30 people, but the table can only fit, like, 15 people. And so you have, like, Tim and Sam and Satya sitting on the couch over here by these two chairs is, like, Dylan Field and Howard Zedigerwag. And it's, like, the funniest scene because everybody at that moment, all the ears are gone because they they know the context in which they're they're there.
Yeah. In their own worlds, they're like kings.
But Kings?
In the White House, you're a backbencher.
You're a guest.
You're showing the backbench.
You're an American citizen who's there to meet the president. Right? But there were some incredible people there. Some people I'd I'd not really met before, Safra Katz, lovely, and her husband. And then there were some other people that were just amazing.
Jared Eisenbein, which is wonderful to see him. There was a whole group of folks that were there. And then they say, hey, guys. Can you just get into a single file line? And so, again, it's like a it's like a surreal scene where it's like Sundar, Satya, Bill Gates, Sergei.
Suck these people in a single file line.
I mean, you guys sound like you went backstage at a Zeppelin concert. It was incredible.
No, dude. And then we're we're escorted into the oval. And this is, like, what's so kind about what he does. He sits at the at the resolute desk, and Meredith O'Rourke, who's incredible, she introduces everybody one by one so that they hear their name. I know I it may sound like a a weird thing, Jason, but, like, to hear your name called in the oval and then you stand beside the president, he's seated, and they have a photo.
They take this beautiful photo. And then the first person was Safra and her husband. And her husband says, could I take a pen? So the president says, of course. That's what they're there for.
So he gives him a challenge coin and a pen. Everybody takes one. So, again, you're seeing the leaders of these incredible businesses. One by one, they get announced. They go stand by the president.
They take a beautiful picture, and they take a coin and a pen. And then we're all just kind of milling in the oval after that's all done. And he says, well, guys, we're gonna talk at dinner, but do you wanna just start? And it was amazing because Sergei
Does he sit behind the desk then?
He's still sitting at the he's still sitting at so, anyways, Sergei asks a few questions, really starts to get the conversation going, which I which I think was really good. And then he says, okay, guys. Let's continue this conversation at dinner. And so we exit into the rose garden. And this is where our friend, Sunny Madro, says on the way like, as we're walking, sir, I hear you have a playlist.
Can we hear the music? And so he takes the iPad, turns the music on, and he apparently had been tuning it. And so now it's like it's he's got a great playlist, by the way. It's like Fleetwood Mac. I mean, like, you're hearing, like, all the classics, and it's just blasting in the rose I mean, blasting.
Lisa Su posted one of the photos. You can see them all because, like, the oval is small. Okay? So just to be clear, so
then that's dinner.
It's
Oh, wow. There you go.
Stuffed. I mean, I'm right to the left of Tim and Jamie Simonov is right at the end. And I think it's Vivek Ranadebe, who's the owner of the Kings, is right there of the Sacramento Kings, started Tipu, and then I think it's me. I think I was standing kind of more in the front there. Anyways, so we leave so so if you just pause there.
So that window, that's Sham Sankar, who's the CTO of Palantir, and behind him is Dave Wimp, and then you can see Dylan Field, the founder and CEO of Figma. That's the door you exit. You go into the rose garden, and then you walk through. And we walk down the hallway. You guys have seen that before.
And we go into the to the East Wing, and they say, we wanna introduce the first lady. So what happens is you walk into the East Wing, you walk upstairs, and there's a very elegant seating chart that they make. It's actually a really good way of doing it because normally what you would do is you would Walk around the table. No. This is a much better system.
So you actually have a small model of the table. And so what happens is you go, you you can see where everybody is sitting, and then you see where you're sitting, and then there's an escort that takes you to your seat. So it's a really it's it's done really well. I mean, for It's very thoughtful. Yeah.
It's very thoughtful.
It was in the East Room where we also did the crypto summit at the White House, and there's been other events there. But let me just give a shout out to the first lady, Melania Trump. She's very interested in this topic of AI. And in fact, earlier that day, we did an event at the White House with the AI Education Task Force, which she's chairing. And she's very passionate about making sure that every schoolchild in America has access to AI so they can get AI education.
And we had dozens of companies there at the White House making pledges of resources to make sure that teachers and students and families will be able to have everything they need for kids to learn AI so they have the skills for this critical tool. So this is a topic she's very interested in, so she wanted to be at that dinner.
So then we get seated, and people are talking a little bit, he goes, guys, if it's okay with you, we're just gonna let the press in. And I thought what that meant was a few people I mean, I've never seen anything like this before. It it's like a zoo entered the East Wing. Like, cameras, boom, microphone. That
was the gaggle.
The gaggle. And they start screaming because, like, everybody's trying to shout over each other to try to be able to ask questions. But then, you know, the president kind of imposes control and says, guys, hold on. And then he allowed the CEOs of the of the big companies to say something, and then Gates said something. And then that kinda set the tone, obviously, he said something.
And then he said, anybody have any questions? And then they just start screaming. I mean and there are people running around with mics. I don't know how you pick who gets to say something, quite honestly, because the
question procedure. It's out of control.
But you know what's crazy is the questions are so all over the place. I don't know how you can be prepared. Like, he knows what he's saying. He's very purposeful with what he's saying. I don't know how you do that because the questions are all over the place.
And you could tell, like because one of them asked Zuck questions. Zuck was like, what's
going on?
Zuck. Zuck. Zuck. What about your 12 houses in Palo Alto? Zuck.
I mean, no. It was it was a tougher
question than
it was about
What was that? I
It was about free speech in The UK, and he he did a pretty good job.
Zuck, my Instagram account's locked. Can you help me? My Instagram.
Anyway, so then so then they leave and then
Well, by the way, they have to be, like, thrown out. You know? They don't Yeah. Just leave.
They're out of control. They make
the mental packer wells. You
know? Yeah. And then we had this lovely three course dinner. And then right after the appetizer, I think, like, he starts going around and people just start talking and saying things and things that are on their mind. And I'm I'm not gonna share anything from that from that, but I thought I thought that was pretty illuminating and pretty awesome.
Let me ask you a candid question.
And then there was
a chap up on topics? Were there any I mean, we saw there's a lot of adulation. People thanking mister president. There's a lot of deference. Anybody throw him a fastball curveball?
Was there any challenging question in that format?
It's it's not about asking him questions like you're interviewing him, but there are people that brought up challenging things that they are dealing with.
Yeah. That's what I mean.
But that no. That is not what you said.
So No. No. It's something that maybe is not aligned with maybe how the administration is doing things. That's what I'm sort
of getting at. Okay. No. But that's again, you're trying to, like, the heat there nobody's there to gotcha. People are like, sir, I'm dealing with this specific issue in this specific country.
Can you help? Ah, got it. Right.
Well, I was thinking, like, immigration, high skilled immigration. That seems like a topic everybody cares about in our industry.
I'll tell you what we talked about. The issues that they had are many, and they have to deal with how American companies can build businesses in a seamless, straightforward way. And what they said is, since Biden, what Trump has done is clean the decks and allowed them. They all said that. They didn't they weren't forced to say that.
They all said it, which I thought was really cool. This is, again, why I said earlier, super proud of what David has done. Like, it was palpable, the respect that all these guys had for him, which is awesome. But then what the president says is, I could take care of this. I can do that.
That's not gonna stand. He's like, what you see is you have these American titans of industry. I've said this before, Jason. The whole premise of the American dream, I think, rests on economic and military supremacy. That is derived from technical supremacy.
That group of people are the geniuses that create the technical supremacy for the world, And he is their biggest advocate. And that's inspiring because it's like they are like, sir, here's what we need. And he's like, great. I'm gonna go to bat for you and try to get what you need. And so there was that conversation.
And then there was a joke. And he said at the end something to along the lines of, ah, you know, I had to it's a tough day or something. Like, I had to I had to film a segment for David's dumb podcast. Just said it, like, as a joke. And so everybody everybody everybody starts laughing.
And then Zuck piles on. He goes, well, the only dumb parts are Chamath's parts. Now everybody else starts laughing. But when Zuck said it, he's leaning
back, and
then he loses his balance. Sacks Sacks with the tism is just looking straight ahead at Timko. I I am like, I don't know what to do. Nat caught Zuck. Nat pulls her arm.
I don't know how she got there. It was a really sweet moment.
Then I had a favorite moment. Actually, occurred after you guys left the White House. Here it is. This is Chamat's greatest moment. There is
a
Chamat superfan. As you can see there.
Get that.
That's a Chamat superfan, and he's signing multiple pictures from all different eras. Those will be on eBay later.
So be on eBay later.
Stop. Look at this guy.
I just wanna back up and say, one of the reasons why I thought it would be cool for us to kinda do this interview in the Oval where the president kinda gave us tour of the changes he had made to the White House is I was getting a tour with my family one weekend of the White House, and the guides who do these tours were telling us about how much care the president takes in the condition of the White House and all the upgrades that he's made. And they've seen him walking around, and he'll pick out paintings and art. He'll move things around. He got a whole bunch of paintings out of storage. All the paintings that are now in the Oval Office are ones that he directly picked out.
And they also said that when he sees something wrong, like with the landscaping or, you know, he'll call a gardener over and give him notes on how to make it look better. And the president himself posted a truth a few days ago where the new pavers on the Rose Garden patio got damaged. There was, like, a big scratch and
pavers. That video. He caught them
on line. Sticky stone.
He caught the he caught
he caught the delivery guys.
Went to the tape
to figure out
who did it. Yeah.
That's a New York developer. And not only that, he fired them and he's making them pay for it and they gotta buff it or something. That's funny.
He told us a story at the dinner that the contractor who got fired was devastated, he's probably gonna have to hire them back because, you know, he's too nice.
He asked everybody. He said, Did I think I should hire him back? And we're like, Yes, hire the guy. He's like, Yeah, I'll probably hire him back.
It started as a tour. It was supposed to be a tour. We were gonna see the rose garden and other things, and then it rained. So we just stayed in the oval, and then it became, like, more of like a hanginterview.
Oh, wow. You guys are gonna make that into an episode? That's gonna be an episode? Oh, that's incredible.
Okay. So, Jason, like, look. You see the couple days before, and the president tweeted about this, Nick. I sent that to you. But you have India, Russia, and China kind of, like, fraternizing.
And then one or two days later, the president convenes this dinner of, I think, you know, some incredible entrepreneurs building a lot of the really important things that the world needs in the future. I don't know what your reaction is when you see the kind of, like, couple of places. Yeah.
There's a legion of doom there to see, Putin and, Xi and, not Modi maybe, but he he's obviously making a point. But, you know, overall, I had a lot of thoughts about it. I did a I did a press hit. Of the 20 people there or so, I'm not sure what the exact number was. I'm nine.
Here.
I think we're 29, 30.
I think about 19 of them are lifelong Democrats who have switched to this party. And and I think the Democrats need to look at this. This opportunity was always there for the Democrats. But what did they choose? They chose to take the position of ban the billionaires in an agenda that makes no sense.
And if you had invited this group of people, if you were Biden, Kamala, and you invited this group of people to come to the White House, they would have come as well. And you could have a really thoughtful conversation about them, the democrat's positions might be, you know, wages, health care, and and this same group of people would have engaged. But they were not allowed to access the White House. They were not allowed to have a dialogue. And I think they pursued, you know, very weird agenda.
And they got Nancy Pelosi out there day trading at AOC and the socialists, you know, pursuing some crazy agenda. What do you expect people to do if you tell them, we don't want to hear your concerns. We don't want to engage with you in debate. You can have all kinds of differences with Trump on style. I do.
You could have policy issues. I do. But as a moderate, when I see something like this, I just gotta give, you know, you a lot of credit, Sacks, for being able to give access to the president and give the president access to these individuals and let all these important discussions happen. And then the group can act as one in the American people's interest. And I think it's very important for the democrats to learn something here, which is 90% of Americans aspire to be billionaires.
And 10%, maybe they're, you know, socialists, communists, whatever they are, it's fine. They can pick and choose what they believe is important in the world. But Americans love these individuals. They love these products and services. And 70% of the top 50 companies in the world by market cap are American companies.
This is the best of America. This is the best of the American dream. And it's great that they can go and have debates with the president. That was, you know, to my earlier question, like, I know a lot of these guys have some issues with the president or certain issues, tariffs, etcetera. This is an important, I think, moment in time to just say Trump two point o is engaging the business community and meeting them where they are and saying, how can I help you grow faster?
How can we compete? America is not the only game in town now. As you saw with Modi, you know, creating this alliance with Xi and Putin. It's imperative for the American companies to excel and create jobs, and we have the lowest unemployment. We'll talk about employment today.
There's there's some new statistics. We have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes. It's for a reason. It's not because of any presidents, because of these great companies. We should be celebrating them.
And the president's done an exceptional job of doing what all Americans do. We celebrate this company. We love the iPhone. We love Teslas. We we love these products and services people are building.
People love Google. They love ChatGPT. It's fantastic. And so it's easy to be cynical, you know, about business or business leaders. But this was really, I think, a great show of force.
And it shows the country's getting in sync on what matters. And that has it should be independent of political parties. So I was very proud of you, David, that you built this bridge, and you built it brick by brick. And I think
to know, great stuff to come.
Well, I mean, just just to be clear, I mean, obviously, the president already had access to all these people. And in fact, many of them were already on speed dial, and he already knew them. And he he's the one who convened them at the White House. I've just been helping with policy, so I don't wanna just let's just be clear about that.
Well, I'm not overstating it, but I'm I'm I'm even going back six months when you guys held the fundraiser and then just you know, you see, like, a very close friend of mine, Mark Pincus, lifelong democrat has donated, you know, probably 8 figures to the Dems in total over the years. And he got frustrated at a certain point that he couldn't get his calls returned or he couldn't have important discussions. Well, here we are.
He was
at that dinner. I think that's a very important lesson. The Democrats need to field moderates, business leaders. They got their Bob Igers. They got Jamie Dimon.
They got a bunch of people who could help, you know, build an agenda that's not lunacy.
Yeah. And what I would say is is, look, maybe half the people at the dinner have actually moved to the center or to the right relative to where they were. And I think Mark Pincus has basically put himself in that category. There's people who have, like, been red pilling and moving over to our side. And then I'd say the other half of the people in the room haven't necessarily changed their politics, and they're just there to do business.
They wanna have a good relationship with the government. But the same is true on the part of the president. You know, I saw some conservative influencers saying, how can the president meet with this person or that person? He's been such an opponent in the past. I mean, look, the president is doing business as well.
He asked all the attendees of the dinner, how much are you investing in America? You know, what do you need to invest more? He wants to see the infrastructure investment. Why? Because it benefits all Americans, not just software companies.
It benefits the construction industry, the trades, the electricians, the carpenters, the energy companies, fracking, and so on. So he's there representing the interests of the country, and then many of those CEOs are representing the interests of their companies, and there's a dialogue going on. And it doesn't mean that everyone has to, like, suddenly become a Republican or change their politics, but it's constructive. And this is all in furtherance of having The US economy grow better.
§03Tariff showdown headed to the Supreme Court
Alright. Perfect segue. We got lots to talk about in terms of the economy. And first story here, Trump's tariffs got overturned in court. Federal appeals court ruled seven four that Trump exceeded his authority when it comes to the Emergency Economic Powers Act.
Okay? We'll get into the details here. Historically, congress was in charge of tariffs. But under an emergency, a national emergency, the president can get involved with tariffs, and they cited the forty seventh administration fentanyl crisis at the borders, Mexico, Canada, China, etcetera, and the trade deficits. Well, the White House got sued by a group representing small businesses.
In May, two federal courts ruled that he wrongfully invoked the IEEPA, and, the White House appealed that. They've now lost, and Trump's tariffs will remain in effect until October 14 allowing the supreme court to appeal this. These tariffs have been tremendously unpopular in the business sector. I think maybe 80% of business leaders in a recent survey, SAC said that they don't they're not crazy about them. But they have on the other side generated over a $150,000,000,000 in revenue in a couple of short months so they could generate trillions of dollars in the next decade according to estimates.
I guess the question I have for you, Saxe, is you guys are moving at the White House there in this administration, the executive branch at startup speed. Moving fast and break things is something we talk about doing in our industry. And, is this just the natural extension of that? The president is doing a lot of aggressive things, and sometimes they're gonna be allowed, sometimes they're not. What's your take?
Well, I'm not concerned about the fate of tariffs at the Supreme Court, even though it's probably a coin flip whether the Supreme Court's gonna allow the tariffs under IEPA. But there are five different laws under which the president has the authority to impose these tariffs. So there's a chart here that we can throw up on the screen. There's section two thirty two, there's section two zero one, section three zero one, section 122, section three thirty eight. There are at least five different bases for the president's authority to impose tariffs.
So at the end of the day, I think it's actually quite unlikely that the Supreme Court's gonna force a change in tariff policy, and I don't think the Supreme Court sees it as this urgent matter that requires a quick resolution. So I'm not particularly worried about it. In terms of the popularity of the tariffs, my guess is that they're not gonna be reversed in the future by a future president because I think they actually are quite popular with the country, with workers. Among the business elite, it's more mixed, I'll grant you that. But if you change the way you ask the question from are you in favor of these tariffs to are you in favor of raising $4,000,000,000,000 in revenue over the next decade through tariffs to fund a tax cut like we had in the Big Beautiful Bill, then that might change people's perception of it.
So that's really the question is, how do you wanna raise revenue for the government? And between Big Beautiful Bill and the tariffs, what you see is a substitution from taxing Americans to taxing foreign companies, unless those foreign companies then make a big investment in America. So look, there's no great way to extract revenue from the private sector. All taxation is is unfortunate and undesirable, and it'd be better if we didn't have to tax so much. But the reality is I think that if you have a choice between taxing American people or imposing tariffs, I think tariffs may be the better way to do it.
And I just wanna note that the CBO has now increased their projection of what tariffs will raise to 4,000,000,000,000 over the next decade.
Billion a year. It's pretty significant.
Right. And initially, it started as a lower number, and it completely pays for the one big beautiful bill.
Shamath, here's the chart. Trump's tariffs were meant to help manufacturers. Do manufacturing firms think they're helping? Has your business been impacted by higher tariffs this year? And here negative impact 72% of manufacturers, 3.7% think it helped and 17% said no impact, 7% don't know yet.
Your thoughts on tariffs are obviously unpopular with people in retail manufacturing in those businesses. But as Axe points out, hey, maybe the American people like them and they like the idea of a new revenue stream. What are your thoughts, Shama?
I think that the tariffs on balance are a pretty smart masterstroke of strategy. I think that we did not understand what the impact of tariffs would be except for hypothetical econ wonk talk. And so that hypothetical econ wonk talk basically said that tariffs were always going to be a disaster. And if you ask them, well, what is the actual practical data that you would point to? They didn't have any.
It was just more hypotheses. But what is the practical data now? I think that The United States is going to book probably close to half a trillion of of incremental revenue. It's actually forced a stabilization in the dollar, which I think that people were always very concerned with. What's gonna happen to the dollar complex?
Everybody always screams, like, with a like, their hair is on fire, but the dollar complex has stabilized, I think, because of tariffs. So there's been some real positives. And what Sacks says is right, which is whoever is president over the next, you know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years, there'll be some Democrats, there'll be some Republicans, it's gonna be very hard to justify why you would undo this now because this source of revenue is going to be an incredibly important one.
Well and, also, it's not just the fact that the revenue is very important. You raise a great point, which is the US government's gonna become dependent on that revenue, but also just workers. I think the tariffs are very popular with blue collar workers. Certainly, the auto workers really like it.
Well, here's what I was going to this the the pie chart that you showed is not accurate. And the reason it's not accurate is that the investment cases that you would underwrite because of tariffs and the big beautiful bill haven't happened. So I'll give you an example. I am a person that started a business that is building a factory to make batteries, in my specific example, in Michigan. So to delever away from China for the battery supply chain.
And what I will tell you, Jason, is after the big beautiful bill and because of tariffs, it is much easier now for me to underwrite. Why? Because I have a 100% depreciation across all my CapEx. It's a complete changer on the IRR of these projects. So before, where I would have to raise billions of dollars from outsiders, I can subsidize a lot more of it internally because I can actually underwrite to a better gain because the the tax savings are so meaningful.
Same thing for this data center that I'm building in Arizona. So in all of these cases, I think that, a, you have this uptick in revenue because of tariffs on the short term, and, b, the important thing is to redo this pie chart in probably a year. Like, for example, our groundbreaking in Michigan will be in July for that factory. It'll be online two years after that. The real story, Jason, of all of this will be really known in that period.
But right now, what I have to tell you is the underwriting case for putting a ton of money into The United States has changed to the positive because of these
Because that 100% depreciation.
That's huge. Huge deal.
Yeah. Whether you're buying a plane, yum yum, all in aviation. FreeBerry, here's your poly market. Will tariffs generate greater than 250,000,000,000? It's peaked at, like, 30%.
It's come back down to five. Most people are betting, so this could be a case of free money if people wanna go get it on Polymarket because it has a pretty good chance of hitting that.
But the number the number I said, Jason, is like a yearly run rate. So, technically, if you if you just look at the calendar '25, you you only get a stub of eight months because it started
April 1. Eight months, 50 a month 50,000,000,000 a month, it's 400,000,000,000. So they should be able actually, think they're gonna hit that bogey, but Freeburg, the reports from people who have been impacted by tariffs, Obviously, these could become inflationary, but the people who are being impacted said they've been eating them to date, but they're not gonna be able to eat them forever so it could become inflationary. What are your thoughts on the tariff kerfuffle here in the in the legal battle over them as well as the impact it might have on inflation, which is something we do not wanna see come back and we have been teetering just under that 3% number, which then puts the fed obviously in difficult position with their mandate to get to two, Freeburg.
I'll address the legal kerfuffle point, which I think is a good one because I do think that the great debate that's gonna happen from this presidency and will likely shape the next set of presidencies will be the right for presidents to declare emergencies to move forward their legislative agenda. And, arguably, the tariff institution by many members of congress should have gone through a congressional process. In the meeting I did with Rand Paul this week, which has now been posted, he talked about the challenge that they have had with democratic presidents, Biden, and prior to that, using emergency authorization vested to them under the National Emergencies Act, which is a 1976 statutory authority to take action. And then in order for the emergency powers to be turned off, congress actually has to vote, and they can only do so after thirty days. And when congress makes that vote, the president can veto their vote.
So the president can then say, send it back. So then they have to get a two third supermajority to get it to pass. So it creates a system whereby the president can have this emergency authorization to progress much of their legislative agenda under the guise of emergency powers, which, you know, for many people, they would say is not the right way to do it. So senator Paul and others have proposed bills, for example, that the president has to get any emergency power reauthorized after thirty days, And then it can only be a maximum of ninety days without congress enacting a renewal. And so it requires actual congressional action to continue the authority of that emergency power.
Depending on what the supreme court does or doesn't do, I think it is gonna catalyze a legislative push, and the Republicans are likely not gonna embrace it this presidency or this term because president Trump is in office. But I think the conversation that some, you know, out of the box Republicans like senator Paul and others are saying is, well, what's gonna happen next time? What's gonna happen when there's a democrat president? And we don't
President AOC is gonna take emergency powers to do something you might not like. Right? Is this your point?
Yeah. And so as it relates to both the IEPA of 1977, which is the act that this case is about, but also the National Emergencies Act of 1976, should they go back and pass a new law that basically forces the president to have to get congressional approval for any emergency to last longer than thirty days? So I do think that's gonna be the big debate that's gonna come out of this. As it relates to the tariff revenue, I am most worried about the fact that we use the tariff revenue, as I said before, to offset spending and basically keep a baseline of spending without actually getting ourselves to that deficit target. Right now, we are going to vaporize and create debt of $2,000,000,000,000 this fiscal year.
So we're using the the tariff revenue under the CDO scoring to basically say, hey. We can do these tax cuts because it's offset. But the goal shouldn't be to offset. The goal should be to get cuts to actually reduce the deficit. And so that's the biggest concern I have with respect to the tariffs long term is it's now a new revenue source that we don't actually treat as incremental to reduce deficit.
We just use it as a way to introduce new spending or continue spending.
Sachs, just to, you know, talk about three branches of government, wouldn't it also be an option for the president just to go to congress with some of these tariffs and say, hey. Can I get these approved? Would that be the worst thing in the world? Wouldn't you
vote in favor?
I mean but, yeah, things take time. Or do you have concerns that president AOC might do some things with executive powers that the Republican Party might be opposed to if she, winds up winning in 2028?
That's an important question, Sachs, is if AOC's president and then she uses her emergency authorization to do things that you disagree with, wouldn't the Republicans then feel regret that they didn't pass one of these acts that limits emergency authorization and power?
Well, look, I I think that in general, when you have a policy that you want to last for a long time, the best thing to do is to codify it into law because executive orders obviously only last until the next president decides they don't want them anymore. So, yeah, it may make sense after the administration hopefully wins its case to seek to codify these things into law. We have a few years to do that. But I don't think it makes sense to wait for Congress to act because they may never act. And in fact, it was president Trump who shifted the whole debate on this topic.
I mean, the whole establishment of both the Republican and Democrat parties were very against tariffs, and it's pretty obvious that nothing would have happened on this issue. And he's completely moved the debate. So this is just one where I think he's acted unilaterally because he had to. But I think that once these tariffs are in place for a few years, I don't think they're gonna get pulled back by a future president because I think they're gonna-
It's too much money.
Become quite popular.
§04Other Trump Administration legal battles
It's too much money.
Okay. In the other cases, two more lower courts have ruled against Trump. One said the deployment of marines in the National Guard were illegal. One said he can't freeze research funds for Harvard. So again, back to moving fast and breaking things.
These cases are making their way through the courts, and there has been some resistance to sending in the National Guard, which is something there's been a bit of saber rattling about maybe going into Chicago next. What are your thoughts on the national priority issue?
They should. Look. Here's the thing. Who is against safety and security? Who?
And why? I don't understand. So if you can't do your job look. You have to remember, Jason. Let's take where we live in California or you used to live.
Yeah. Not anymore.
13% of our income goes towards state coffers. And then we pay real estate taxes and all of this stuff that goes to local municipalities. What are you doing with that money if you're not making the places we live safe? And then the second thing would be making the schools good. And so if you if you can't do it if you can't do it, of course, somebody else should step in.
And frankly, what I have heard consistently is even though the talking point has to be, oh my god. Woe is me. We can do the job. Everybody behind the scenes is like, oh, thank god they're here.
Anybody who is being impacted by crime would like to see a show card come in and remove encampments or drug dealers or get drugs off the streets. Sachs, you know, you're a my perception would be that you think that there should be separations between the executive branch and maybe the states and that this rule breaking of sending in the National Guard that would go against the rules of the sovereignty of the states. So putting aside Chamac's point, which is completely valid that they haven't done a good job here, and it it is illegal as the judges are pointing out. Do you have concerns about that?
Okay. Well, first of I reject this characterization that is the Trump administration that's move fast and breaking things. If you recall Well, you're moving fast.
Let's just say moving fast.
Well, I think the president is taking swift executive actions that are popular. You see this actually in his poll ratings. He got the highest approval rating he's ever had just in the last week. And a big part of it is because of the reduction in crime in DC. I think he got to 55% approval on poll rating.
And even in DC, by the way, the mayor and her staff have said all sorts of positive things about the help they've received now from the National Guard and from the federal government. And the citizens are extremely happy. Crime is down. I think we had the first two weeks where there was no murders in the Capitol in a long time. The residents are very happy.
So this is definitely working. Now with respect to California, let me just point out that the National Guard wasn't called in specifically to enforce laws on the street. What happened was that you had ICE and Homeland Security agents and workers were doing their job and they were conducting some deportations, and then you had protests turn into riots, and those protesters were threatening to burn down their headquarters. And that's why the National Guard had to be sent in. So it wasn't the Trump administration breaking things.
It was rioters who are breaking things. I can't understand for the life of me why the administration wouldn't be able to send to the National Guard to protect federal workers against rioters, but apparently that's the case. So look, I think the court reached a very specific decision about what happened in California. We still haven't had a case adjudicating the question of whether the proposed interventions in in these blue states to clean up crime will be allowed over the objections of Democratic governors. We don't know.
I think it's pretty clear that the DC intervention will be allowed, and it's extremely popular. And look
The DC one, he's legally allowed to do. So, yeah, he's got he's got his what what is it? A thirty day mandate? He can take it over. And so here's your popularity from the economist.
It is ticking up, but, Trump, and the country still seems pretty divided. 41 approved, 55% disapproved, 3% unsure, but he has moved up significantly in the last week. Today, some big news came out Friday with the, soft jobs report. Pretty much bad across the board. Jobs came in super light, 22,000 added versus 75,000 expected.
§05Weak jobs report: what is the state of the economy?
Most of the gains came from part time jobs. US lost 357 full time jobs while gaining 597,000 part time jobs last month. And, this is after a bunch of revisions. You guys remember we talked about here a couple of times with these revisions, and we'll show up some, charts with long term revisions. July revised up slightly by six k 73,000 to 79, and June was revised down significantly.
Remember that impacted the market by 27,000. This makes June the first month with a net loss of jobs since July 2021. So there's an account on xCovici letter, and they did this, revisions chart. It's pretty crazy as you can see. May and June revisions were in the 6 figures, and they're constantly revising these down, it seems.
Alright. Friedberg had some Internet connectivity issues apparently, but Shammaf, let's talk about the revisions here and the softness in the job market concerning. Did maybe the Fed take too long to, get towards cuts in September? What what is what's your read on this and the endless revisions?
Look. I think that I've said this, yes, last week, I think. Right? So I'll just say it again this week. You can't run the most sophisticated economy in the world if you have data that is completely unreliable in either direction.
And so the problem with this jobs report is there are already two competing versions of the truth. One group of people are trying to paint the jobs report as everything is working. There's nothing to see here. Another group of people are saying, oh, well, hold on. There's a births deaths number where if you extract that out, the jobs number is is actually negative.
I don't know which one is actually better in terms of where we wanna be right now going into a rate cut cycle. So my general commentary is the following. The BLS and their approach is incredibly brittle. It doesn't work. I think commerce has taken the first right step, which is to start publishing useful economic data into the blockchain.
I think we need to figure out a way, and this is where congress should get their act together, and pass an incentive or a requirement for certain parts of the critical economic infrastructure of America to report their data in an anonymized way into a broad set of blockchains. And the reason is that you will have very astute and precise pricing oracles help distill that information. So if you're ADP, if you're American Express, if you're Stripe, there's an imperative now for you to contribute the information you have into a broad collection of information so that we have an accurate sense of what the hell is actually going on. Because I can't react to this number because I don't know how it's gonna change. It could literally swing by 200,000 in either direction, Jason.
This is a, I think, a really good point. Here's some research. I had my, put one of my researchers at launch on this. Here's 2021 and the initial reading first revision, and we did this for the year, SAC. So as you can see in 2021, they missed it by 1,900,000, which was about fifteen percent.
2022, they miraculously nailed it. 2023, they were off by 10%. 2024, it looks like they were off again by 10%. All this is revising down, by the way.
No. Jason,
of this year let me just finish the chart. First half of this year, initial reading September, first revision July, second revision four ninety seven. So they were off by 50% so far this year alone.
This chart is itself inaccurate.
The table is?
And and it's because it's coming from the same people that measured. So you're asking the people that measured to grade themselves. And I suspect that the answer is actually much worse than all of this. Now what is the implication of it? The implication of it is if you take the most positive view possible, it's that the people that then control the levers of the economy don't actually have accurate data, so they'll be hesitant to act until the data is overwhelming.
The most important lens of that will be the Fed and what they do with rates. And so everybody's like, oh, wow. There's a 99% chance of a 25 basis point cut. That may be wildly, wildly, wildly conservative in terms of the the total amount that they need to be thinking about and how they should phase that in. But how would I actually prove that to you?
I can point to a whole litany of private data, but the problem is the federal actors use public data, and this data is not useful. And I think that when you get private data into your hands, which I know that other folks have hedge funds, banks, the White House, what they see is different than what the Fed sees. So what I would tell you from this jobs report is it's gonna start again this clamor of what is your plan. Clapping is not a strategy. So a 25 basis point cut to a $32,000,000,000,000 economy is not a strategy.
And I think that the reason they don't know what to do exactly is because they have extremely faulty data.
Again, this is not I'm I'm not taking a position on this. You're framing it as if I'm taking a position. I'm just reporting the data here as they've reported it. So I'm just I'm just doing that here just to be clear here that I'm not endorsing any side of this. I'm an independent.
I'm moderate. I'm just giving you the data as it stands. Here's the Fred chart just so we can zoom out and see unemployment. Since the fifties, we're still at historic lows, and there's a slight uptick, 4.3%, which is the highest unemployment since 2021, but it's absurdly low historically. So even we're looking historically, SACS, we're still at very low.
But do you have concerns that the economy could be slowing and that we could have a jobs issue? That, I guess, is the question that is filling the airwaves on CNBC and that everybody's talking about in group chats. Are we, maybe didn't make the Fed cuts in time for what clearly is some amount of slowing? Now we could argue over if they're getting the data right or not. The Fed says they look at all data, not just this data.
They say they look at the private data as well. But what are your thoughts here, Sacks?
Well, we had 22,000 jobs added in August. And yet, while the number of jobs went up, unemployment rose, like you said, from 4.2 to 4.3%, which is a little bit of a contradiction, but that happened because more people started looking for jobs.
Yeah.
But there are huge error bars around this data, like Jahma said. I mean, like you should, there's roughly 50% revisions to all of this data over time, over the course of a year. So we don't really have great visibility in what's going on. And that's why you see such huge disparities in how people are interpreting this data. So if you wanna look at some of the people who are pessimistic, you've got Kobe EC Letter, but they're pessimistic about everything.
You've got Moody's economist Mark Zandi. He says we're on the precipice of recession, and he has a bunch of reasons why. But then if you look at polymarket, people on polymarket are strongly betting against a recession this year. I think the number's at about 8%. So it appears that most people still feel like the economy is doing well.
And remember, we just had a 3.3% GDP growth rate for q two. So I'd be surprised if there's a recession. I think there's a lot of factors against it. I guess I would also note that if there's any weakness in the job numbers, it's coming from foreign born workers more than native born workers. Around 2,000,000 more American born workers have jobs in 2025 so far.
And I think, meanwhile, about a million foreign born workers roughly have lost jobs. So the net increase is about a million. But what you're seeing is a repatriation, in a way, of jobs within the economy. The other thing that's happening is a reprivatization of the economy. So in August, the federal government shedded about 15,000 jobs, and there's been 100,000 federal jobs lost over the course of the whole year.
So that makes the overall numbers look worse than they are, but a lot of us would argue that having fewer federal workers is a good thing for the economy. So you've got those factors. Then you've got blue collar real wages are rising, the second fastest in history. You had 3.7% wage growth this year versus 2.7% average inflation. So you have a net 1% wage growth.
During most of the Biden presidency, it was negative. And then I would also point to, I think, several factors which would make me optimistic about the economy moving ahead. You've had massive investment in The US by both private companies and foreign governments, you know, according to these new trade deals. I think roughly $8,000,000,000,000 of new investment. You've got this AI boom.
You're seeing And
that's gonna land over the next year. Right? That hasn't actually been dumped in. So we should see that in 2027, maybe late twenty twenty six. Yeah.
Yeah. This is the outlook for 2026 and beyond. I mean, this would be the bull case is number one, dollars 8,000,000,000,000 of of new investment in The US economy by private companies and by foreign governments. Number two, the AI boom. You've got this massive build out of data centers and AI infrastructure underway, and that includes energy and the manufacturing sectors are gonna boom alongside tech.
Number three, this has been the most affordable summer at the pump since 2021, and low gas prices don't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. So lowest gas prices since 2021. Number four, you have these huge new tax incentives for business expansion. You've got the accelerated depreciation on equipment purchases, on R and D. I think those are gonna kick in once the big beautiful bill goes into effect.
And then the last thing I would say is that interest rate cuts are coming. I would say that now and well out of the latest jobs report, Powell should really cut 50 basis points. I doubt September. Yeah. In September.
Probably do 25. Yeah. Yeah. I doubt he will. It's probably gonna be 25 and then hopefully another 25.
But I think you could make the case that they should do 50 now and then 25 after that. But regardless of what it is, I think that most people think interest rates are coming, and that's gonna juice the economy and further improve our fiscal position. So look, for '26, I think there's a lot of bullish factors here.
Alright. Just before we wrap here, Google, as we know, was found liable in this antitrust case, but the sanctions seem to not be as harsh as people thought they would be. Judge Mehta rejected the request that Google have to spin off Chrome, Android, and pointed out that Google is having massive competition. So we had four years of Lena Khan, you know, in these aggressive cases. There were there were tactical things we talked about here, like dark patterns, etcetera, that we all agreed with.
§06Google avoids worst-case scenario in antitrust case
I think there was consensus there. But this one we found a little confusing because, gosh, Google's under so much pressure. What are your thoughts on
I thought this ruling was excellent.
Unpack it all.
Essentially, the crux of the ruling was, look, there are some restrictions that Google has to live by. Don't get me wrong. But the most punitive remedies that were suggested were thrown out. And the reason they were thrown out was because the judge very eloquently cited competition in a fair and free and open market. And that is incredibly refreshing because the real question is, would this judge have had the wherewithal and the courage to actually be able to rule this way a few years ago when there would have been an enormous amount of political pressure.
They probably would have found a way to to run this case in a in a different place, etcetera, etcetera. But now what you saw was just very simple logic intervene. And at the core of it was, you know, when we started this lawsuit, things like OpenAI and ChatGPT didn't exist. And when you fast forward, it's incredibly fast moving. We are reallocating hundreds of millions or billions of users' intentions.
As a byproduct, we're reallocating tens of maybe hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And so the judge said the most severe remedies aren't necessary because the free market is doing this job. Yes. And they I just think that's incredibly refreshing because we forget that if the market is left to deal with these issues on its own, they do a very good job of cleaning things up. And it's because, as you said earlier, Jason, consumers want creative destruction.
They want the next best thing.
They want to be in the prices, better services. It happens by the free market.
And they're willing they're willing to reward better companies and better products. So I think the the great news for Google is that this takes an enormous risk off the table. And now I think that they probably have even more ambition and energy to just go for it and try to compete because they're not gonna be worried about everybody on the outside and probably some percentage of employees on the inside who are always trying to slow things down. Yeah. And so that's exciting.
Out correctly, and I'll just comment on this, Saxe, is that they did get some tactical, you know, penalties here, and they make sense doing deals that are exclusive when you are a monopoly player like getting Firefox and Apple to only do an exclusive deal with you. They're not gonna be allowed to do that. And, man, that would change the game on the field if somebody like DuckDuckGo or Bing or a new entrant, Perplexity, whoever who's doing search would be able to say to Apple, we will outbid Google for 10% of the searches. We'd like to buy 5% of the searches from the Safari browser going to Firefox and saying, hey, we'd like to one up and we'd like some percentage of that. So that seemed like a good part of the ruling, your thoughts overall about this.
So on this podcast, I think it was two or three years ago when this case first came up, I think I took the position that Google Street broken up into two or three companies because I thought it was this invulnerable monopoly. And I don't think monopolies are great for the SARB ecosystem. And what I mean by that is they had the Google search monopoly and the YouTube business, which was basically a monopoly and so forth and so on. So I was in favor of breaking this up, but I've got to admit I was wrong about that for the reasons that the judge said, which is Google, for the first time in a long while, is existentially threatened by what's happened with AI. I mean, they're cash cow.
The core of their business is search. And people are starting to substitute in droves from traditional Google search, which they own, or keyword search, where they have this monopoly or dominant share, to AI. And if you look at AI revenue, I think something like 90% of it is going to OpenAI. I mean, they have the dominant position among consumers.
For now.
For now. And there's, let's say, five major AI companies that are hot on their heels and very competitive and performing equally, if not better, on performance benchmarks. So the point is just I think everyone can now see that the search business is either going away or transforming into something else, which is it's basically merging with, it's called AI chatbot business.
It's an answers business now. It's not a like, give me links. It's just give me the damn answer.
Right. And we've been talking about this for a while where it's so obvious that having AI just give you the answer is better than 20 blue links, especially as the quality improves and it gets better at synthesizing those 20 blue links into the exact right answer and the speed improves. One of the things that Google is really good at is just fast responses. They've always shown you in milliseconds how long it takes to give you the search result. And obviously, if you're looking for something quick and an AI chatbot's gonna take thirty seconds, you're gonna go with Google, but that's gonna get better too.
So I think Google is kind of in the fight of its life right now. And I think this is why Sergei's come back. You know, we saw him at the dinner at the White House yesterday, and he said he's very involved in Google DeepMind. He's
going to the office all the time. Yeah.
Right. And so you're seeing that founder involvement again because they know that they've got a real existential threat to their business. And this is the argument that opponents of strong antitrust enforcement have always made, which is that the free market will eventually break up even the strongest monopolies if you just give it the chance to do it. And that's what appears to be in motion right now. By the way, I'm not saying that Google is gonna get destroyed.
I'm not saying it's going away. I'm just saying that they have to pivot here in a big way. Their business is being disrupted, and they suddenly have competition, I think, in their core business like they've never had before. So I do think that we don't need to bring the hammer down on them in the same way that maybe we did a few years ago. I still would not let them pursue anticompetitive tactics against, say, applications in the Android store where they basically have a duopoly.
So I'm not saying I would let them do anything, but I certainly agree with this judge that we don't need to break up that company right now.
Yeah. And there's there's rules in the field that need to be adjudicated. So having a a very simple approach with the FTC of saying, hey. These exclusive deals when you have 90% market share, that's not allowable, But you can compete and you can fight versus the five new entrants and, have at it and and give consumers a better product at a cheaper price. That's really the goal of the FTC is to to have some basic rules of the field.
We saw it in the media business as well. We spend a decade or two trying to fight the consolidation of media companies, and then Netflix has trounced them all. And YouTube as well in terms of viewership, Netflix and YouTube are crushing the cable monopolies that we spend all this time trying to regulate. Alright, everybody. There's your episode.
We have to get back to work and get to Los Angeles for the amazing fourth edition of the All In Summit. It's gonna be amazing and all the great content, including some surprise speakers that'll be released over the next week or two after the event. So you're gonna get massive amounts of content. Make sure you go to the YouTube channel, subscribe, and click that bell so you get alerts. Go to allin.com, put your email in.
We'll invite you to more events. Shomop and I might be doing something in the poker space. That could be a lot of fun. My guy, TK, and I, we might be doing a little backgammon tournament. Alright, everybody.
Thanks for tuning into the All In podcast. We're finished. Bye bye, besties.
Love you. Love you, guys.
We'll let
your winners ride.
Rain man David Sack. I'm going home.
And it said we open sourced
We
should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.