Trump Takes On the Fed, US-Intel Deal, Why Bankruptcies Are Up, OpenAI's Longevity Breakthrough

The episode opens with a dog named Moose wandering onto a desk, along with the show's usual intro lines, before the hosts welcome listeners back to what they call "the number one podcast in the world." They note the original crew is back together.

The first business item promotes the fourth annual All In Summit, set for September in Los Angeles. The sponsor read turns into a joke about one host's awkward delivery, then lists partner activations. Oracle is building a bar in the Expo Hall and sponsoring the PE and VC dinner and the AI infrastructure dinner. Circle is building a networking lounge and, with BVNK, sponsoring a stablecoin dinner. iRen, described as operating data centers powered by renewable energy, is also involved. BVNK is putting an arcade in the Expo Hall, which sets up a proposed Street Fighter II showdown.

The arcade leads to stories about childhood celebrations: a backyard bar mitzvah with a rented Street Fighter II machine, Brooklyn birthday parties with a choice of "Pizza, bowling, or both," and a joke about whether one host's bar mitzvah had a Reagan theme. That host says it was around 1985 and they were not yet involved in politics. They trace their political turn to Stanford, where in their account a push for political correctness produced a reaction. They compare this to Gen Z, saying polling shows today's young people are "super conservative" as a reaction to wokeness.

Another host tells a story about tipping a maître d' $50 to skip a line. Their daughters objected that it was unfair to people who could not afford to do the same. The host's reply, "That's their problem. Work harder," is delivered half in jest. Other small talk covers a trip to Pantelleria and Milan that was cut short by illness, praise for On running shoes along with a mention of Roger Federer's equity deal with On, and Ben Stiller's soda brand, which another participant mocks.

A host announces that Founder University, a course on building companies that they run as part of their startup-investing work in the United States, is going international. The first city will be Riyadh in November, in partnership with a regional venture firm. Applications are open through MENA.launch.co, and Asia comes next, for three cities starting next year.

Asked whether this works like Y Combinator, the host calls it "kind of a pre accelerator." Many teams are not yet incorporated, and participants have no obligation to take investment. After watching teams for twelve weeks, the program invests in roughly 10% of them. The host describes the funnel as about 5,000 applicants, then 50 participants, then about 10 investments, and accepts the description of it as a filtering mechanism and a source of deal flow.

The main story is President Trump's fight with the Federal Reserve. The host recaps that Trump had threatened to replace Jay Powell and had insulted him. He then fired Fed governor Lisa Cook, one of seven governors, whom Joe Biden nominated in 2022. As of the Thursday taping, Cook had sued, arguing the White House has no authority to remove her.

The stated basis is an accusation from the Federal Housing Finance Agency director: Cook allegedly listed two homes as her primary residence, before she became a Fed governor. A criminal referral went to the DOJ. The host stresses that Cook "has not been charged in any crime yet." Because governors can only be removed for cause, Trump first asked her to resign. When she declined, he said he was firing her "for cause for deceitful and potentially criminal conduct." The host calls this the first time a president has fired a Fed governor.

The situation was still unresolved at taping. An emergency hearing was scheduled for 10AM Friday in DC, ABC News reported the case would likely reach the Supreme Court, and Polymarket put the odds of Cook being out by year's end at 25%. The host called that "not huge, but it's not a long shot." The host then frames two questions: whether Fed independence is at risk, and whether this is lawfare, meaning the justice system being used to force faster and larger rate cuts.

The first panelist says the Fed is like any other government appointee: partisan. They compare it to the Supreme Court and to political appointees across federal departments, saying presidents pick people who share their ideology. Their view is that refusing to admit this is part of the problem.

And so we should stop pretending that they're independent because they're not.

From that premise, the panelist argues that Fed governors, who do not hold lifetime appointments, are closer to ordinary civil servants. A sitting president should therefore be able to remove one who is out of step with the electorate's wishes. Pressed on whether this is weaponization, they push back on the word and compare it to appointing people to Commerce or Treasury.

The bigger point, in this panelist's view, is a first-principles look at what the Fed does in 2025. They describe a "$130,000,000,000,000 global economy" moving "at the speed of light," with a handful of people meeting periodically to set monetary policy from data that is often wrong. They cite BLS data and GDP prints as examples. Later they add that private industry operates "at nanosecond scale," which makes it hard to see how a few people looking at month-old data can judge what is happening.

The panelist sorts the Fed's functions as follows. Lender of last resort: Treasury does it better, as shown during the GFC. Monetary policy and price stability: capital and free markets do it better, and SOFR is a better rate mechanism than the Fed funds rate. Banking supervision and regulation: the Fed probably does this reasonably well and could keep it. Payments and clearinghouse: also uncontroversial for the Fed to keep. Their conclusion is that the Fed is worst at the two most dynamic functions.

As a sign of where this could go, the panelist points to the Commerce Department starting to publish GDP data to a blockchain. They propose that employment, payroll and other economic data, scrubbed for anonymity, be published the same way. Pricing oracles could then show conditions in real time, and markets could set rates in real time.

On the lawfare charge, a participant notes that some people see the FHFA head's investigation of Cook's mortgages as lawfare, and compares it to accusations made about the case against Trump. The panelist defends Bill Pulte as "an exceptional American" with a lifetime in the rate and mortgage markets. They say that if the information was obtained fairly and transparently, "the data is what the data is," and that others can argue over whether it matters.

A second panelist notes that Fed governors serve fourteen-year terms precisely to shield them from election cycles. They warn about the push to cut short-term rates. Flooding the market with cheap capital would spur borrowing and growth, but also inflation and government spending, and that could push up the long end of the curve. The result could be a spike in thirty-year rates and higher costs for the US to service its debt. The panelist says economists have raised this concern and that it has shown up in the bond market.