Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?

Alright, everybody. Welcome back to your favorite podcast, the number one podcast, in fact, in the entire universe, the all in podcast with your besties. We're all here. It's the original quartet. Everybody loves when the core four are here, and we have a donkey for you today.

Guys, we gotta start out with Bernie Sanders. I know this is becoming a bit repetitive, but AI is the topic. We reached a new level of retardation this week that we cannot avoid. Bernie Sanders has a major desol pitch, a moratorium on new AI data centers. Here's his argument.

Number one, the billionaires are pushing AI because they want more money and power. Number two, there's gonna be massive unemployment, and he cites Skates, Stario, Elon saying that a AI would replace most jobs. Number three, he has an interesting point, actually. AI is harmful to kids because it decreases social interaction. Actually, we kind of agree with that one, I think, across the board.

But here's his pitch, Sax. His pitch is You want your kids using these chatbots?

No. I've I've talked to my kids about it.

Oh, okay. We'll we'll get

into it. We can get into it. But I've talked to them about it. Look. If you actually look at the data, if you look at what kids are doing, it's so much more interactive and engaging for them to talk to their friends on Snap or to watch videos on TikTok.

Those things are super engaging. Doing research on an AI chatbot is just it's way less engaging and you see this in the data. So I'm not saying there's not an issue there. You wanna pay attention to the way that these technologies are shaping the minds of young kids, but I think people get a little bit confused. What they're really talking about is social media and then they attribute all the ills of social media over to these new AI chat apps and they are a little different.

Know, when I when talk I ask my kids like how much do you use these things? Are they addictive? They said, no. They're more just really useful. It's like Google.

It's Yeah. Like I couldn't There's two

I couldn't do school without it.

Yeah. There's two pieces here. One, using AI to be smarter and to learn stuff and ask questions, absolutely fantastic, phenomenal. I think we'll all agree on that. There is and I don't know if this is actually what he was referencing, but there's character AI in a in a long tail of spicy chats where people we talked about getting one shotted and these parasocial relationships.

That's, I think, what he's referring to, but maybe I'm reading it wrong. But let's get into it here. His pitch is that we need to slow down so that, quote, democracy can catch up and that congress should put a moratorium on new data centers. That's his solution. He got roasted, obviously, on social media for this.

It's the most absurd, I think, solution to, you know, what are valid concerns. Friend of the pod, Rokana, who represents Silicon Valley, he, I guess, supported a bit, and then he replied to me and says, his concerns are not as acute and that he just wants to make sure we use renewable energy, which I guess is, you know, a fine position to have Polymarket put up a little market here. AI data center moratorium passed before 2027. Yeah. We'll see if that comes true or not.

But, hey, Sacks, you are our SGE. Sacks or SGE, this is your time to shine. You have framed the AI debate as we can't lose to China. Bernie framed it as not letting the billionaire class get more power and money by eliminating American jobs. And last week on this very program, Tucker framed it as what are Americans gonna get out of this?

Right? That that was the framing, you know, as of December 2025. So here's your chance, Sachs. Why should Americans who have some concerns about losing their jobs care about beating China? Why should they care about that, Sachs?

Why should they care about beating China? Because AI is a profound technology. It's gonna have huge economic and national security implications. And the thing that Bernie gets wrong is that he can't stop the progress. I mean, he can't stop China from making progress.

We can stop progress in The US, but it's not gonna stop China from advancing these technologies. A lot of this is just math. And just because we stopped doesn't mean China's gonna stop. So this would be the biggest own goal ever if we took our leadership in the AI race and just handed it to China. But look, I appreciate Bernie's honesty in a way because he is actually telling the truth about what he wants.

And I remember just a week ago when president Trump signed an executive order to advance a national AI framework, a lot of critics and a lot of Democrats were saying this was a violation of states' rights and we need to support the states in regulating AI. And here Bernie is acknowledging that this is not about states' rights because he's saying that there needs to be a moratorium on new data centers even if the states want them. So he doesn't support states' rights either. He just wants all the progress to stop. And I think this is really the truth of the matter is that all this talk about states' rights or affordability, it's all a red hearing.

And what's really going on is there's a large and growing contingent of people who just want all the progress to stop. But again, we can't stop China from making progress. So all they would be doing is ceding leadership at this AI race to China. What people like Bernie really want is they want The US to become like Europe. You know, Europe has half the share of global GDP that they had thirty years ago, and that's because of their hostility towards innovation and technological progress, and that's kinda where Bernie wants us to be is he wants us to go down the the path of Europe.

And the reason he says is because, god forbid, someone gets rich. Well, look, capitalism sometimes results in the unequal distribution of wealth, but socialism always results in the equal distribution of poverty and misery. And if The US stops developing AI, if we hand this leadership to other countries, it'll make The United States poorer, it'll make the American people poorer, and it will seed our leadership globally. We will not be the preeminent power in the world anymore.

Okay.

So I'll stop there.

No. No. It's great. Thank you, SGE. David Sacks of Greenberg.

There seems to be a couple of conversations. Unfortunately, we weren't here last week, but we had a really nice visit from our pal Tucker, and we talked about this. He seemed to think there was a bit of a communication problem with selling to the public the value of these technologies. Do you agree with that? And what do you think is going on here in terms of the cross conversations?

One group wants to desell, has some concerns, environmental, you know, job displacement, etcetera. And then there is there an issue where the China beating China doesn't resonate with the American populace? You've been harping on about the rise of socialism for four plus years on this very podcast. So from where you sit, what's the actual disconnect in these multiple conversations that are going on concurrently and and seemingly coming to a head here at the 2025?

Well, if you ask any of the politicians that are making these proclamations about the, quote, tech barons and try and actually talk to them about what is the AI technology delivering, what is it not delivering, you kinda typically hit a wall pretty quickly. It's very hard for folks to articulate what is actually happening. There's a tremendous amount of capital being put at risk against infrastructure to build out the capacity for many companies, the entire economy, the entire industry to deliver AI tools. There isn't an aggregation at this stage of value creation with the exception of NVIDIA, which has really got this $3,000,000,000,000 market cap creation that's happened in the last couple of years. Peter Thiel said this best.

He's like, look at all the money that's going into AI. There's really only one company that's making any money, and that's NVIDIA. Like, at this point, the jury's still out. We don't even know what AI is. It's sort of like when the Internet was happening.

You know, everyone thought these fiber optic switch companies were gonna make all the money. Turns out that was wrong. It was the end applications that made all the money, and they competed in many different markets from Google to Amazon to Uber. You can go down the list of all the beneficiaries of the core infrastructure technology of the Internet that was built out. So what is really going on?

Well, AI is the new lightning rod for fear and for divisiveness that ultimately breeds compliance and control, which is where these politicians are trying to drive the the populace and the voting conditions in The United States, and that's what's going on right now. There's a lot of fear about, oh, putting this data center in my town is gonna do x or y or z with no real conversation about the truth of that matter. There's a lot of fear about wealth creation being aggregated in the hand of a few when, as we saw with the Internet, it benefited the many. And that fear mongering is a very similar tactic that we've seen in the prior generations where policies were misstated, fear was used, and then voting control allowed folks to come to power that were looking for power. So I think it's just the lightning rod at the moment.

Okay. Shammoth, what's your take on this big picture? What's going on here?

I think it's important to understand that politicians have an incredible sense of self preservation. So the question is why would Bernie Sanders think he would not look totally foolish in putting that video out? And the reason it went viral is not because it sounded so crazy. It was that to some faction and percentage of people, it sounded rational and reasonable. And the problem that highlights is that we have a huge perception issue in AI.

We have a handful of companies. All the PR that you see from those handful of companies is a bunch of circular deal making, the bunch of capital that flows from one to the other. It causes these stocks to go up, of which a small percentage of people benefit. And at the tail end of it, it's accompanied by a completely different set of articles that everybody also reads about this sort of Damocles that's about to fall on their head, whether it's electricity prices or whether it's their jobs or whether it's the jobs of their children or the quality of their education. So we have a big perception problem.

So the question at hand is how do we fix it? How do we get back to the place where a video talking about stopping all progress would seem as laughable as it should be. And I think you can go back to the Gilded Age and you can ask the question, how did the industrialist leaders of that era respond through that 1880 to 1920 age of industrialization when you had all of this technological upheaval accompanied by a handful of people with incredible success. Right? Andrew Carnegie, John D.

Rockefeller, Henry Ford. What did they do? And I think the lesson we can borrow from them is we now need to be on the forward foot as an industry. Enough of the stupid haircuts, dumb watches, ugly clothes, ostentatious displays of wealth. We've all done it.

I've been guilty of it. It has to stop. Absolutely stop. And instead, we need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit as many Americans as possible. That is the absolute minimum.

Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. The idea was as he built the railroads, you're going to scale GDP. You're going to scale education and knowledge. Those libraries are artifacts that allowed people to feel a dividend from that industrial revolution. John D.

Rockefeller took all of his wealth and invested in institutions and universities. Henry Ford specifically focused on wages. We need to self organize better, and we need to be more on the forward foot. We need to start doing things that are practically measurable by tens of millions of American citizens. And it starts to beat back the perception problem that we have because Saxe pointed out last week, the data does not support the misperception.

But the problem is, and Saxe and I were talking about this last week, the misperception is gaining steam. And so I think we need to use these tools that we have to provide some more practical benefits that every man, woman, and child can feel. Otherwise, this thing is gonna build, and you'll see crazier and crazier versions of this Bernie Sanders video.

Alright. I think it's well said. And, you know, as I said last week, I think beating China does not matter to the average American. It's below their line, Shammoth, I think, in many ways. What they care about is jobs.

They care about their kids getting jobs. And, yeah, they care about costs. They care about inflation. They care about energy costs going up. Our industry has done a terrible job of explaining how this benefits the average American, and they're seeing all these headlines about, as you mentioned, all the cross deal booking and all these stocks going up.

Half the country doesn't own stocks, so they're not participating in it. And they're not blind to seeing self driving cars or seeing their kids having a hard time getting a job, and they're hearing everybody talk about job displacement, and that's a valid concern. People are scared, and our industry is scaring them, I think, by not meeting where they are. And then beating China respectfully is important. Sacks, super important.

I can intellectually agree with you on that. But if you lose

your job and kids can't get

a job, that's that's that's existential. Yes. It's not my child needs a job next year. They're graduating from school with a $100,000 in debt, and my energy bill is going up, and my grocery bills are going up, and they haven't come down. That's what Americans are experiencing.

And, yeah, maybe giving I think you also made an interesting point there too about the libraries.

The war with China is existential because if we can keep it on the battlefield of AI and intellectual and economic prowess, we have a very good chance of winning. If it devolves and all of a sudden becomes a different kind of battle, that's bad for everybody, especially our children and our children's children. So we need to win the current game on the field. But in order to do that, we need to change these misperceptions. We need to start showing tactical artifacts that show that this is a dividend that can benefit everybody, and we need to start now.

I'm just putting it out there. We have so much cash on the balance sheets of these companies. Wall Street values it at zero. If you look at the enterprise value of any of these companies and you do a sum of the parts, nobody cares about that cash. So we need to start using that cash more effectively.

What's the equivalent of the library metaphor here for you, Jamat? Do you have any ideas?

I'm not gonna front run what's being worked on except to say that the leaders of these companies have gotten the message. They are working on a whole host of solutions. And, again, we're fighting misperception, which is a complicated battle, but it's winnable, and I think you're gonna start to see stuff in the New Year.

Yeah. I would say education's at the top of that list. Sax, your thoughts here as we wrap on this first topic.

For wage growth, it's 3.8% versus 0.7% for other. So what you see here is something maybe it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me, which is as you make workers more productive, the value of their labor increases, not decreases, and they end up getting paid more and you want to hire more of them. So this is a huge narrative violation. Again, is coming from Vanguard. And it's showing that AI productivity is good for workers.

This follows on the heels of that study from Yale Budget Lab, which I talked about in a previous show, that it said there's no discernible disruption to the job market based on thirty three months of data after the launch of ChatGPT. Now I understand that you can make predictions as to the future that this state's gonna change, that there will be AI job loss, but what I'm saying is that if you look at the data so far, there is no AI job loss. Quite the opposite is job growth and job gains. By the way, we have a 2% tailwind to GDP growth right now that's coming from this AI boom, this CapEx boom that's happening. And so this is, I think, a very good thing for The US economy.

Now why do people wanna sabotage it? There's a really interesting article in semaphore recently that described how AI critics were funding journalism fellowships at major publications like NBC News, Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, LA Times, which, by the way, I mean, I track these things. They're relentlessly negative about AI. These fellowships were funded by Future of Life Institute, which is a doomer group that thinks that AI is gonna become sentient and replace humans. And they were funded by a donation by Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum.

It's an interesting story, actually. He donated his dog coins to future of life. They ended up being worth $600,000,000.

Dogecoins?

Doge. And then you remember how there was, like, those other dog coins, Shiba Inu.

Shiba Inu. Oh, Shiba Inu. Yeah. Oh, he had a collection of dog coins.

Got collection of dog coins. Apparently, people, like, airdrop them to him as, like, a promotional thing.

Got it.

I don't think he wanted them, so he's like, how do I get rid of them? So he donates them to future of life, and they end up being worth $600,000,000. So by this

Oh my god.

Almost like this accident, this Doomer think tank ends up with a $600,000,000 war chest, and they've been funding these journalism fellowships. They've been funding grants for academics to study AI. Obviously, that's gonna end up being very negative. And they are funding a lot of these NIMBY organizations that are opposing data centers because their goal

is just to get it to stop.

That's their goal. They just want the development to stop. And you can't, I don't think, underestimate how much of an impact this had on the public discourse. But if you look at their actual claims, like, for example, the water use claims, it's a total hoax. I mean, these AI dancers do not use a lot

of water. I wanted to get into because, yeah, compared to a golf course, they're not using that much or

I think

chasing walnuts and, you know, almonds in Central California. So I think it is worth maybe just unpacking.

Throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall. Look. You have to remember who was who was Ida Tarbell because it's quite interesting in the context of this. Ida Tarbell was this American writer, again, in the Gilded Age. She was part of the Muckwreckers, which was a group of journalists that were doing investigative research around the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, labor abuses and the like, and she took on Sanadol.

Exactly. If you look at that example, I'm sure that the people in this current generation who have a Tarbell fellowship, what they're living out is this desire to tell a story about exploitation and wrong and misdoing. The problem is that these things don't factually hold together, but unfortunately, it adds to the perception problem that we have, and that has been growing. As Saks said, like, so many of these things have been debunked, but it's playing whack a mole, Jason, because they'll throw the water thing out. It'll get debunked.

Next week will probably something about liquid cooling and all the PFAS and forever chemicals. We'll have to debunk that. Then we'll go to, like, air cooling and how that's a problem. Then we'll go to something else. Eventually, it'll be the upper land grouse, but they are not gonna stop.

Sachs, how do you do you have a plan to reframe this to the American public? You're explaining how these bad things are happening and all the evil forces at work behind the scene.

Well, not the evil forces, but I don't think people understand the extent to which the discourse has been impacted by a few anti AI tech billionaires. Brought it up. You brought it up every week

and on your text

on tape. Brought it up hold on. I brought it up on this show, and I tweeted about it way back in November. Yeah. And I linked to a writer named Nirat Weisplat who has analyzed this whole Doomer industrial complex.

And she has shown that there are hundreds of these front organizations, and they're all really just funded by a few big tech billionaires. It's Dustin Moskowitz, Jan Talen, and Vitalik Buterin. Well, when I first described this, people thought that this sounds kinda crazy like conspiracy theory. And then sure enough, Semaphore comes out with the article explaining that all these journalism jobs are being funded by Future of Life, which was the big donation by Vitalik Buterin. So my point is just you can't underestimate the extent to which a few billionaires who've donated over a billion dollars to this cause have distorted the public debate.

And you really see this actually in the relative popularity of AI in The United States versus China. So there's recently a poll on they call it AI optimism where they ask people, do you believe that the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms? 83% of people in China believe the benefits will outweigh the harms, they're AI optimistic. In The US, it's only 39%. So again, the discourse has really been affected by a few of these Okay.

So institutions.

Let's let's say that's all true.

Yeah.

My question to you is, what's your plan to turn this around and explain to the American people why they should be optimistic about this? What's your plan, David Saxe?

Well, look. I mean, you're right that we have to flip the narrative around, and I I do think that the tech companies have done a really bad job explaining the benefits. We talked about this with Tucker. I think he brought up some really good points. And you're right.

Like, the the AI companies lean way too much into the whole job loss narrative as as a way to explain their value prop. And I think it's just either what Jamatha said, which is this is about their next fundraising round, or it's a form of laziness because it's easier to describe job loss or job replacement than it is productivity. Right? Like multifactor productivity is a difficult concept to explain. So I do think that they've played into this narrative.

But I think that what we have to do here is just debunk these narratives. Again, no evidence of job loss yet. No evidence of the the water problems. I think the electricity issues with data centers are addressable. You have to let the AI companies build their own power.

They don't have to connect to the grid. In fact, that's what president Trump has called for for the last six months is to let the AI companies build their own power so they're not drawing on the grid. So that problem is easily addressed as well. Talking about the affordability problem. But you're right.

We have to get the message out how this technology will benefit Americans. And the bottom line is, look, I've always said I'm a techno realist, not a techno accelerationist, because at the end of the day, we don't have a choice. I mean Yeah. China's gonna develop the technology if we don't. Okay.

So we don't really have a choice.

I you know, I as I said last week, I think the three most pressing issues, education, housing, and health care. And our industry is in a unique position to use AI to impact all three of those. So why don't we, as an industry, collectively explain all the great things going on there? I gave a shout out to Daniel Ek, Pre Novo Pre Novo rather. All these great companies analyzing our blood.

There's so much going on in health care that could massively lower the cost, make people's lives better. Obviously, in construction, you could have incredible advances and certainly in education, but we haven't explained those three things. What's your point? Is there anything you can think of to add to that list?

We have to understand. The president and Sacks, they're responsible for shepherding the GDP of America. And as Sachs said, half of American GDP over the next few years is forecasted to come from all of the capital that goes in to build out our capabilities in AI. We need this to happen. There's the existential reason why, but there's also a basic economic reason why.

So, Jason, the social license comes when off to the side, the private companies start to take this perception problem more seriously. So to your point, are there things that they can do around housing? Yes. And, again, not to front run, they're actively working on something that I think could be transformational. Separately, could they do something on health care?

TBD, but we should look at it. Can you do something in education? TBD, but we should look at it. But the point is if you can have the same companies that are on the forward foot building this revolution for us, recognize that we need to bring some more folks along, take some of their balance sheet capital, and invest it to create this social license to operate, we will flip this perception on its head.

Yeah. I think it's well said. And, you know, there was a really interesting you guys must remember this, the AT and T commercials. You will? Do you remember those?

By the way, sorry. That's another great example, Jason. AT and T, at the turn of the century, what did they do? They took their capital, and they created Bell Labs. What did Bell Labs do?

Bell Labs drove all of modern information theory. It was the precursor to the Internet. They did so much fundamental research. I wanna be clear. I don't think that this is a five alarm fire.

This is very fixable right now. And the litmus test, quite honestly, is in three, four, five, six months, Jason, when you see the trickle of progress, if we can get organized, does your perception change? And does the language that you use and the tone that you've used over these last six months Oh, I

mean me?

No. No. No. I'm actually thinking that you've actually been quite a good early warning system for what a certain percentage of Americans think. And so

in that predicted it perfectly. Yes.

Yeah. It's been extremely useful. But now we gotta act on it, and you have to change your mind.

Oh, no. No. My my mind has been very crystal clear. I won't let you, you know, tell me what I'm saying is my opinion has been job displacements coming

Jason, let me be clear.

We have

to earn you changing your mind publicly on this show. If we do that, we're back in a good place.

Yeah. No. I think that you're saying that in a very condescending way. I have brought up I have brought up okay. Unintentionally.

Here. Let me try this Sorry. Let me try this again. We have

You're saying as if I'm misguided.

No. No. No. Have a perception. Which

is what do think my perception is?

That on the balance, it's a coin flip about whether AI is going to be all good for all people or very good for a small subset of people. That's what I would roughly summarize.

I would say that's accurate. Job displacement. So let finish. About job So

So let me if we can execute this plan, again, meaning marry all the stuff we're doing on the forward foot within in investing Yeah. With some of the stuff that we also need to do to bring a broader swath of the American population along

Yeah.

You will have a different perception if we are successful. And what I'm saying is you've had this one perception, and our goal would be to shift you and people like you.

Okay. I I I Is that fair? I think it's completely fair. Yeah. I have been trying to bring up that as an industry, we have not recognized people's valid concerns about job displacement.

That's all I've brought up on this program. I'm not saying I think it's gonna be cataclysmic or we can't handle it, but I think if we constantly talk about, hey. Winning the AI race in China, that's abstract for people. And if we deny the fact that robotaxis and human robotics are coming and intelligent people like Elon or other leaders are saying, yeah. We're we're planning on replacing those jobs.

We're doing a terrible job communicating this. And I do think part of this is communication, and part of it is, hey. These are valid concerns. So I think great resolution. Yeah.

Sure. I'll be the litmus test.

Do you guys know what the Motte And Bailey fallacy is?

No. Explain it to the audience. I mean, I think I've heard of it,

but The Motte And Bailey Castle is an early medieval fortification where there's like a very protected area, the keep or the motte, and then the bailey is kind of this looser area that's hard to defend. Right? So what happens is if they need to retreat, they'll go into the motte. Okay.

Yeah. Lord of the Rings. Right.

Right. So this has become known as a debating trick or fallacy where people will make a really outrageous claim, which is they'll they'll basically run to the Bailey. And then when you prove that it's false, they'll run back into the Mott and say something very unobjectionable. So in the context of, like, the AI job loss fallacy, the Bailey is people will say, this is causing massive job loss, massive disruption. It's already here.

You can see it. And then when I point out, well, actually, if you look at the Yale Budget Lab study or you look now at the Vanguard study, there is no job loss, then they'll retreat into the mott. And they'll say, no. No. No.

No. I'm talking about what's gonna happen in the future, which is a position that's fundamentally irrefutable. And then when I point that out, well, wait. You just totally changed what you're saying. You're like, no.

No. No. I was only talking about the future. And then as soon as we sort of seem to have agreement, then the people in the Mott will race out to the Bailey and basically saying, well, look at what's happening with Uber drivers or what have you. So there is this Mot and Bailey thing happening all the time on this job loss question.

And I just want people to be straight about it or honest about it, which is, look, if your claim is that this will cause job loss in the future, it's true. I can't refute that because none of us can prove what's gonna happen in the future. But be honest about what's happening today. And in the first three years after the launch of AI chatbots, there's been no discernible disruption to the labor market, and the early studies and data are showing wage increases and actually job increases, and there's definitely job increases in blue collars because of the construction boom.

This has been our first debate club corner. Every week, we're gonna teach you how to debate better here. No. It's you know, it I I appreciate that. I I have really tried to say here, like, I'm not a doomerist at all.

You know, the statistics I look at, you know, I talk to Dhar. I have, actually, sincerely. That's why I don't use I I use displacement. You know? I I really use refined language.

I do. I do. And when I talked to Dara, he told me in areas where robo taxis like Waymo are occurring, what they did specifically to deal with this issue was they stopped trying to hire drivers in in Los Angeles and in San Francisco because there are so many Waymos. They don't want them to have a bad experience. So, you know, you wherever in the castle we're talking about this, I I don't have a a horse in this race.

I'm not part of this cabal of, you know, Dustin Moskovitz's people. I just know from talking to Uber and Waymo and these other companies and, you know, other companies that are building software where they're trying to eliminate jobs. And so I'm just bringing that up as a a really interesting example. Uber and Waymo to Elon with Tesla, they are actually making plans right now to deal with this displacement of drivers, and they're coming up with new products and services for those drivers. So one of the things they're doing is data labeling at Uber.

They they bought a data labeling company, and they're taking the drivers and saying, hey. You wanna do some data labeling over here and actually creating AI jobs for them. So this is, you know, something that the whole industry is working on.

Look. There's gonna be a spectrum. Right? Some jobs are gonna change. Some jobs will be eliminated.

The question is with respect to job eliminations, will that be more than offset by the net new job creations? If you're looking at things like Uber drivers and we go to full self driving, then obviously there's gonna be some category of job loss there. So I'm not claiming that there's not gonna be any elimination of certain types of jobs, but I believe that on the whole, what we're seeing is that when you improve the productivity of workers, their wages go up and there's more demand for their labor, not less. That's what the data is showing so far and I just don't think you get that from the media right now because they are promoting this doomer narrative and a lot of that is astroturfed by these enormously deep pocketed organizations that have been funded by a few effective altruists.

Alright. Topic number two. Economic numbers are out. It's a mixed bag. Unemployment rate is up, and government payrolls are down.

Inflation's somewhere in between. Let's get into the numbers here, fun with numbers. Unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September and 4% in January 2025 when president Trump took over. US economy added 64,000 jobs in new jobs in November. October saw about a 104,000 job losses, but a 162,000 of those job losses came from the federal government.

You remember the Doge buybacks, a friend of the pod, Elon Musk, involved in. Those all took effect at the September, so there was a little bit of a balloon payment that occurred. An analyst from Moody's says, quote, it's a frozen job market. There's not much hiring. There's not much firing happen.

That tracks with what I'm seeing on the ground. Meanwhile, inflation came in better than expected at 2.7% beating the 3.1% expectation, but still far away from the 2% target for the Fed. Trump gave an eighteen minute, very loud, emphatic address to the nation last night, and it was not that we're invading Venezuela. It was mostly him talking about his accomplishments in terms of prices and affordability and a little bit of admonishing Biden. Here's a twenty second clip.

The last administration and their allies in congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before. I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.

Sax, your thoughts on the economic data?

Well, you're you're painting it as you're painting the economic data as mix. I don't know how you have a economic report that's better than what we just had today. So first of all, we saw that CPI came in at 2.7% like you said, but the expectations were 3.1%. That's why the market is rallying today in a big way. Core inflation's down to 2.6%.

These are significant beats, and this puts core CPI inflation in The US at its lowest level since March 2021, so since the whole COVID thing. And if you listen to Kevin Hassett, he said that over the past three months, core inflation's been running at 1.6%. So the trend line is going down even further. So it looks to me like inflation's rolling over, and that's just about a solved problem, which is really good news for what it implies for interest rates because it implies that interest rates are coming down. And that's gonna bring down things like mortgage costs and the costs of financing a car payment and things like that.

Now you talk about unemployment. I think the unemployment news is very, good. So if you look at the data from September to November, the overall employment is down 41,000. But why was that? Private employment was up a 121,000, but government employment in the last two months has declined by a 162,000.

So this is what the media was focused on is they're trying to claim unemployment was up, but actually, it's just that the government jobs decreased. Why did the government jobs decrease? Well, you remember that when Doge went in and made their cuts at the beginning of the year, they offered people a buyout as of October 1. Now some people took the buyout right away, but a lot more waited until the last possible day, which was October 1. And that's why you saw this big spike in October unemployment, but those are government jobs that are being cut.

And moreover, there are people who voluntarily wanted to take the buyout and they took that deal. So again, I think the employment picture is looking actually quite good. And if you believe what we believe, you don't want an excessive number of government jobs. And president Trump has presided over, I think, the first decrease in the federal workforce in decades. We've seen a 10.7% decrease in federal workers in 2025.

Basically, the number's gone from 2,400,000 to 2,150,000. I know that'll make Frieburg very happy. But look, what we had during the Biden years is we had 9% inflation. We had a very weak economy. We did have a recession.

It was that two quarter shallow recession, and the media even tried to start redefining what a recession was to avoid those headlines. But what the Biden administration did in response to that is they went hog wild with government hiring. And what we're seeing now is inflation is now coming back down, and we're seeing the number of government workers come down to a more reasonable level, and the private economy is making up for it. We still have a relatively historically low unemployment rate. So those numbers look good.

Then you look at the deficit. We've reduced the deficit year over year by 600,000,000,000. That will help bring interest rates down. And then on prices, you got the lowest gas prices in five years, below $3 nationally. And then finally on wages, real wages are up by over $1,000 on average, and it's $1,300 for factory workers, 1,800 for construction workers.

And again, that's a big change from the buying years where you saw that in real terms, wages went down by about $3,000 on average per worker. So look, I mean, it seems to me like we're on the cusp of a golden age here. I don't see how the numbers could really be better. Then on top of it, again, you've got this AI tailwind, which I think is a huge positive, not a negative, which is adding roughly 2% GDP growth every year because of huge CapEx investment with so far no job loss associated with that. So I would just say sit back and enjoy this.

I think we're headed for a gangbusters 2026. Rates are coming down. Inflation's coming down, and you're also getting tax cuts going into effect next year because of the big beautiful bill. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime.

No tax on Social Security, plus the standard deductions being beefed up. So people haven't even felt the benefit of those tax cuts that's coming in in April. I don't see how things could be much better.

Okay. Freiberg, any thoughts here on the data as it's come in or Chamath? I'll I'll go to either one of you.

Directionally, think it's really positive. You wanna see private sector jobs growing, And the shrinkage of government sector jobs has profound impacts, not just on the budget, but it starts to create obvious air pockets where you get a little bit more rational regulation. You can deregulate in the appropriate places. You can shift the burden and the responsibility to private industry. So it's more than just what's in the numbers that I think is positive.

I've told you this story before, Jason, to do some of the things that I've wanted to do. I'll give you an example. When we started a battery business five years ago, when we filed with the DOE, the Department of Energy, these are 700 page reports. You spend millions of dollars and you hire teams of 50 and a 100 people, and what are we trying to do? We're trying to build a battery business in The United States so that we can delever from the Chinese.

To the extent that we could do that a little bit simpler and a little bit easier because there's fewer folks, and so the burden goes to state and local regulators, which we all already have to deal with. These are just generally good things for productivity. They're generally good things for GDP. It allows us to invest more aggressively in the things that help America, it's trending in the right direction. By the way, Sachs didn't mention this explicitly, but I'll say it.

The other thing in '26 is you get a bunch of tax cuts that kick in. No tax on tips. No tax on overtime. The deductibility of the cost of interest for things like car loans. These are big stimulative action depreciation.

Accelerated depreciation. You have big stimulative actions for The United States economy.

Yeah. I think what you guys are missing, respectfully, is that, you know, Trump promised something completely different. He said, starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again to bring down the prices of all goods. And when he was running for election, he promised the Americans that he would reduce prices. Now what's happened is prices have not come down.

They've gone up 2.5 to 3.1%. But what really matters, and I think you guys are doing a great job, you know, pro administration, part of the administration, what you're missing is the American people don't believe you. And the American people are experiencing something different. And when you look at the approval rating, Trump's approval rating is at its historic lows, and specifically on inflation, pull up the silver bullet and meta analysis there. This is the disconnect, and this is why it seemed tone deaf last night when Trump was telling everybody it's great.

And when you say it's the golden age, Americans aren't experiencing that. That's just not what they experience. They are experiencing grocery prices that have continued to go up, and they are experiencing unemployment that's gone up 15%. Whether it's the federal employees, whether it's private sector and you debate the numbers or there's a golden age coming because of no tax on tips, these are all talking points. What the American people remember is the Trump administration said prices would go down.

Prices have gone up. That jobs and manufacturing, there'll be all these incredible manufacturing things. Obviously, that's gonna take years. That has not happened yet. So I hope for the best.

I hope inflation goes down to two, and I hope they turn this around. But the American people don't believe the Trump administration, and it's a big difference between promising stuff in 2024 and delivering it. And here we are in the first year, and the delivery that's come in from the Trump administration on inflation and on the economy is not good if you're in the bottom half of society that doesn't own equities, period. Full stop.

So first of all, prices have come down. You look at gas prices. They're the lowest in five years. They're below $3 nationally. Now I don't know how you want a new administration to come in and literally affect every single change on day one.

How do you do that?

Oh, no. That's just what he said.

No. What the president said is

they would start working

on possible. They would start working

on one sec. I'm not saying it's possible. That's what he said.

No. He said he'd start working on it on day one, and so he did. And look at the results. Inflation's now down to 2.7%, way below expectations. I don't know how you wanna better report than this.

Unemployment is very low. The only reason I remember

the the economic target was three three and three. 3% GDP growth, 3% deficit to GDP, and 3% inflation. They're below 3% inflation. They're above 3% GDP growth, and the deficit to GDP is not where it needs to be. So cutting is still ahead.

But I looked at the budgets for 2026 for a number of the departments in the cabinet over the last couple days, and they do have big cuts that they're trying to implement across the federal government. We're gonna be interviewing Scott Bessent tomorrow morning. That'll come out shortly after this episode airs. But this is the catch up conversation with Scott on how's the three three three plan going. But on two of the three metrics, Jay Cal, it does appear like things are good.

I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for the Trump administration, but I'd say if you look at this just from the raw economic data and the the goals of the administration, Following that, there should be a flow through in terms of job growth, the flow through in terms of affordability, in terms of wage growth, all those other sort of economic indicators that actually affect people on Main Street every day. That's also TBD in the narrative. It's still to be written, But those high level economic goals are still, you know, are starting to kinda fall within the the framework of what they set out to do, which is generally good. Right?

Yeah. I'm just pointing out the disconnect. Again, this is the disconnect of the American

people. I mean No.

No. I'm looking at year one. Just year one. We're here at end of year

one. Time to implement an agenda.

I totally agree. I'm just telling you the American people don't believe the Trump administration right now. There's more work to do. That's the disconnect.

The data that came out today is looking awesome. By the way, that Vanguard report that I mentioned that also exposes the AI job loss hoax, it also has a new economic assessment for next year. It's projecting 3% growth for next year, which I think is conservative, and an improved labor market outlook for 2026. And it says the most robust improvement will come in the second half of the year. So Vanguard is saying that 2026 is looking very good.

And by the way, that's when the fight for Congress will unfold this next year. So, you know, the thing about polls is it's obviously just a snapshot in time and it doesn't tell you what things are gonna look like six months from now or a year from now. I think they're gonna look very good.

Yeah. I mean, maybe he turns it around.

I think it's already been turned around. It just takes time to kick in.

Yeah. I mean, in the the public's perception, it hasn't turned around and inflation was supposed to go down and it stayed

It has.

No. It stayed at it's it's still way above the

two percent target. Point 6% for the last three months.

No. It has not. It just says 2.7.

No. That's the that's the that's

the year.

Problem, I think, with the administration and your part of it. Like, you guys cherry pick numbers, and it's not matching the numbers on the field. So when you cherry

pick highest number picking? This is CPI report.

The the the number

Open the cover of the Wall Street Journal. 2.7 per hold on. 2.7% CPI. 2.6% core. 1.6% for last three months.

Okay.

What is hard to understand about this? No. No. Obviously, the last three months are gonna tell you what the trajectory is.

Okay. The the fact

is You're

looking for every excuse you can to basically downplay. What is You An awesome report and just look at the stock market, which is ripping today because this way below expectations. You're the only one who's not happy about this news, Jacob.

No. The the country is not happy about it. I'm not I don't have a horse in this race. I'm doing fantastic. I own equities.

I'm doing better than I ever have in my life. I'm talking about how the bottom half of America perceives it. This is the blind spot of the Trump administration. You've proved my point by not addressing it. Let's go to the next step.

No. You I haven't what? What? No. No.

It's I guess your point

is you guys your point is that the American people expected that inflation would go down and prices would go down. Prices have continued to go up. The Fed has a

2% target. It's a little bit unrealistic to say that what you wanna you wanna wait. You wanna have you wanna have a negative inflation rate?

Trump said prices will go down. They have not.

That's your argument.

The American people feel. Unemployment has gone up. They expect it to go down. So the this idea that we're in the golden age is not tracking with the bottom half of Americans. That's just facts, David.

It's just facts. You have work to do. Trump has work to do.

You're you're saying that anything less than deflation anything less than deflation in your view

is tough. Not say that. You keep telling I keep telling you what I'm reporting in terms of facts, then you tell me I said something different. I didn't say that. The American people are very disappointed in the Trump administration's first year when it comes to inflation and the economy.

Don't understand how the numbers could be any better. We just blew past expectations here. 2.7%. The American people percent. Yeah.

I don't know whose expectations I don't know whose pulse you think you have the finger of, but the the economists who put together these expectations were expecting 3%.

I'm just

pull I'm up the chart

one more time for me. Just pull up the chart for me so I can just explain that this isn't bias on my part. Just putting the fact on the field. No. It is not.

This is these are numbers that you can look at and see that Trump's two worst categories right now are the economy and inflation. The American people thought he

was better. Snapshots in time, and they're gonna be completely

different next year. Time from February goes down. That's the snapshot time. Every month, you have twelve months there to look at this.

Let me explain. I don't know what's so hard about this is a really partisan point that you're making. You're basically

saying I'm not partisan. The US economy

is like a giant supertanker. I'm here

to take I'm not partisan.

Can I finish my point?

Sure you can.

I mean, you must know this, and I think you're pretending not to. The US economy is like a giant supertanker. It takes time to turn around. It takes time to implement your economic agenda. It took the president the first six months of the administration to implement the big beautiful bill, is his economic program, but it doesn't even go into effect until January 1.

So the tax cuts have not gone into effect. The inflation reductions have happened. We've gone from 9% under Biden to now 2.6 core, 1.6% in the last three months. I don't know what more you could want. Interest rates have come down.

They're projected to come down even more because inflation's coming down. This is again a huge shift that's in the process of turning around, and I predict that by next year, the numbers are gonna be even better. Let me remind you of what happened in the early nineteen eighties on Ronald Reagan. When Reagan took over, okay, the misery index was at like 20%. Reagan implemented his economic agenda, but it took a couple of years to actually implement it.

By 1983, we actually had a very severe recession because Volcker had raised interest rates so much to tame inflation. We're lucky we don't have that issue today. In any event, it took like three years for Reagan to implement his economic agenda and his popularity was very low by 1983. But by 1984, the program had worked and it was mourning in America again and he won the biggest landslide election, I think, in American history. So you gotta give it time for the president's agenda to play out and work, and it certainly looks like after ten months that it's performing extremely well, and we are just beginning to see the impact of it.

I think the core issue is Trump overpromised and underdelivering year one, and it's not the golden age for the bottom half of Americans, and they don't feel it's the golden age. And I think just tackling that head on and saying, yeah. We have more work to do. And I actually think that's what the address last night was about. I suspect somebody, maybe Susie or the chief of staff or somebody said, hey.

We gotta start communicating better about the cost of living and our promises during the election so that we turn this around. That's actually what I think is happening, but I I don't have a horse in this race. I'm doing fabulous because I own equities. I'm happy. I'm concerned, sure, that the bottom half of society needs to do a little bit better.

That's all. Alright. But, you you know, listen. I I'm I'm never gonna win with you, Sax, because you're the captain of the debate club. You'll win every debate.

You're you're incredible.

Well, look. I mean, like the president the president made the right point last night, which is he inherited a giant mess. Again, under the Biden years, we had a $3,000 reduction in in real wages by American workers. That's already gone up by a thousand dollars under president Trump in the first year. But, yeah, if you're a worker and you're just looking at your situation, you're underwater 2,000 relative to where you were five years ago.

So obviously, you're gonna be salty about that. But that's the situation that that president Trump inherited. I don't know how much more progress you could make in ten months, but give it another year and then we'll really see.

Alright. I am rooting for you guys. I hope you turn it around in year two. Okay. Freiberg, we got an important story here we have to get to.

Do you guys wanna hear a crazy personal story for two minutes as a palate cleanser?

Oh, three two.

Oh, yes. As a palate amused bourge.

Okay. This is an amused bourge. Little

pample a mousse sorbet. This is the craziest

story fruit.

In my life right now. Okay. Pull up the photo, Nick. The first photo. You guys remember my dog, Monty?

Yeah. This is the virtue signal dog.

No. This is best dog.

This is the

photo one. Oh, Monty

Monty Monty was my dog for ten years. I got him ten years ago in January, and he died suddenly in May. He turns out he had a tumor on his heart, and his heart burst open in front of me and he died. It was the worst thing. He was with me every second of every day that I wasn't at work.

He slept on my bed. He was in my office all day. You guys have seen him a million times in the background during the all in pod. My best friend in the world, the greatest thing I've ever come across in my life. So he died suddenly.

It was very brutal, very hard. So I'm at my house the other day. My next door neighbor walks in, and he's got this dog on his leash. Pull up this photo. This is this dog.

So my next door neighbor finds this dog at Rocket Dog Rescue. It was pulled out of a kill shelter. The vet estimates this dog is like a decade old. Today, I live probably 40 miles away from where we got Monty. He was found wandering the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco.

This random dog here was found at some random kill shelter somewhere in California, pulled out of the kill shelter a few days ago, put into Rocket Dog, and rescued by my next door neighbor, brings him over. He's walking him in the street. I'm like, oh my god. That dog looks just like my old dog Monty. We ran a DNA test.

This dog is Monty's What? This dog is Monty's brother. It is the craziest There's like a billion dogs on planet Earth. And of the billion dogs, some random dog from some random litter from some street pup in the Mission District from a decade ago found its way into a shelter, into another rescue center, into my next door neighbor's arms, and brought back to my house months after Monty died. How crazy is that?

What is his personality like?

I'm gonna hang out with him this afternoon. I gotta go see. But how crazy is this? Just it's Monty's actual brother from

the same litter. Monty in fairness.

Yes. Like Monty.

No. The angles are off.

Step brother?

Yeah. Monty's more robust. Yeah. Well, Monty

was well fed. This dog lived in a freaking kill shelter. So

Monty was a cackle.

I mean

take take 12 pounds off Monty.

But Wait. Where's the other Where's the

tests don't lie.

Where's the dog that was being tortured by Revlon?

That dog's gotten still there. That dog's gotten robust too. Yeah.

Was it Revlon who was torturing your She

she she, Daisy, has a thousand siblings, not just one. And they're

Daisy Daisy, I'm fine with. It's Mitchell it's Mitchell Friedberg,

I hate.

Marshall Marshall. Marshall. I

hate Marshall Friedberg.

I got to hang

out with the pistachios last Christmas.

He doing a little dinner. Ate out.

Monte's father must have really gotten around San Francisco.

That's why he's

saying he had a great ride

on church. Of this.

Same mother, same father. It's not a half brother. This is the

same father. Monte's dad

was a family. Same litter, same dog. Wow. Same same mother, same father, same litter on the streets of San Francisco a decade ago, and they all find their way in different parts of California and come to and Monty's buried in my backyard, and this dog had brother.

Samples. What

is it the of love? Was it the summer of You

would say no way, but you gotta see better shots of it. I'll put more

Yeah. Photos on This doesn't make sense.

I know. It's the craziest ever. And by the way, like Yeah.

It doesn't look like they're related, I'll be honest with you.

Gotta find you a proper photo

of What's going on, Chamathu, Oki and Joker? How old are these dogs now?

Oh my god. From your lips to God's ears, bro. Aki is 14. She turns 15 in July. She's so precious.

Joker's eight or nine, so touch wood. They're

Yeah.

Golden retrievers don't really live to 15, but my god.

She's doing You got a lot of good years. I was just on the I was on the floor last Thursday snuggling with her, and it was so precious.

Well, you know what we did? The I think the best thing that we did was we got much more disciplined about diet for Aukey when she turned about 13. Little bit calorie restricted. It's not nearly as much. She lost a few kilos.

It just helped her a lot walking. She's a little deaf, unfortunately, but she can see. Dogs are the best.

Dogs are

the best.

Here's here's here's my other photo of the dog that Chamath hates. Pull it up just so you can see what

you're Listen. Mark, last last Christmas at Nat's birthday dinner on the twenty sixth, which is her birthday, Marshall Freeburg jumped on the table, started eating all of the pistachios and the nuts. Ruined them. Ruined all of them. Slobbered everywhere.

All Horrible dog. David Friedberg was like, oh, look at that. Allison Friedberg was

like, Marshall Friedberg?

They they have no control over what's going on

in this.

Here, pull this photo up, Nick. This is a medical issue Marshall Friedberg's been dealing with. He wakes up with irrecoverable erections,

so he can't walk. What?

Pull this up.

Pull this Irrecoverable.

Oh my So, Nick, you gotta blur this out while

you Woah.

Woah. Dude's packing.

This little guy, he waits and he tells

that erections.

He has these erections. And, well, the doctors say, like, you just gotta wait till if it ends up staying for too long, there's gonna be a surgery. But, like, right now, he's okay. But he can't move when he gets them, and he's stuck. And he'll Disaster what?

Unable to move for, like, twenty minutes. Like, when there's

a Same thing happened. I gave Yeah. Chamot some of my rose sparks, and he had a similar thing happen. He was frozen.

That is a There's a Brian Johnson joke in

here, but That is a problem. Yeah.

How's Moose doing, JKL?

Oh, he's my

special guy.

Oh, here he is, Zach.

Special guy.

Oh. Is that your dog, Zach?

This is the Moose. That Moose is your He's trying

to keep oh, buddy.

Oh, buddy. This is my buddy. He is such a little love buddy. Shy tight little love bug. It's

like a gremlin.

He loves it.

It's your

it's great it's great to see you so in control. Come on, Jason. You're such a natural dog, guys.

Styrofoam, buddy?

A disciplinarian.

This dog loves food.

You're really

And he loves

to wrestle. You're like a modern unbelievable.

You're like a

modern Caesar Marlon.

He headbutt you?

The dog whisper.

Moose, take it easy, buddy. I know. He loves to wrestle this dog.

He's heavy. Right?

He's Well, we he added about four or five pounds because he wasn't eating all that much when we got him, and then we realized he needs a little bit of extra food. So we gave him a little more food, he became a little less grumpy. And then he just we take him for, like, maybe three, one mile walks a day on the ranch. Totally fine. If he misses a walk, dog's got way too much energy.

So he's not. He's a ranch dog, not a city dog. This dog needs to

I know. I told you.

Yeah. He needs to run. When he doesn't run, you got a problem. Alright. Let's keep going through the docket here.

That's dog corner. That's canine corner.

What do you guys think? That's a good corner. It's a good

catch corner is the best corner.

But how crazy is that? One like, one in a billion's gotta be that this dog lands up next to me. It's just the craziest thing. Anyway Yeah.

And, yeah, there's no cat corner here. Cats are horrible. No. Shout out to our friends at Waymo for eliminating the cat problem in San Francisco. I mean, that's just that was the greatest update to their software ever.

If they can eliminate more cats

What's that So what's

that paradox that the AI has? Where it's like, do I hit the trolley car? Trolley car. It's like the cat problem. Just trolley car problem.

Go for the cat. It's just go for the cat.

Absolutely. You could get somebody there on time, or you could get them there thirty seconds late and take out a cat. Take out the cat. Less stray cats. That's horrible.

A shout out to our cat ladies listening to the pod. There's I wonder how many cat ladies listen to this pod. Think they're all.

Oh, there are a few.

Are there a few? Yeah. They we hear from them on they're on blue sky talking about oh god. I had a joke. I'm not gonna do it.

Alright. According to a Reuters report, Freeburg, China has built a prototype of ASML's EUV machine. Hey. If this is true, this report, it's it could have a profound impact on the AI race that we talked about. For those of you who don't know, ASML is the Dutch company worth $400,000,000,000, twenty second largest market cap in the world, and they are the only company that makes EUV machines, also called lithography.

That stands for extreme ultraviolet. That's how you make h one hundreds. Here's a photo of one of these giant machines. They cost $250,000,000 to make, and they take six months to make filled with all kinds of important parts, Carl Zeiss lenses, etcetera. Since 2018, these machines have been limited for sale by the Dutch.

Why? Why can't China buy these machines? Well, in 2018, Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, put pressure on the Dutch to impose export controls on China, and later that same year, they did. So according to Reuters in this news story, Freiberg, China used former ASML engineers allegedly to reverse engineer the machines. Reuters has pointed out that the machine in China has not yet produced any working chips.

It's a prototype. The CCP is targeting 2028 for working chips. Some sources say maybe twenty thirty is more likely. You've been talking about China lithography on the show. We can play the chariots of fire music that Freiberg insists we play when he does his victory lap, Chamath.

Here's his victory lap, episode two two four.

Last year, China announced and began a $37,000,000,000 investment in developing their own three nanometer Chimp technology. China made a claim that this investment they had made was starting to pay off, and they had developed their own EUV system. And their big semiconductor company is called the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation or SMIC in China. They launched a seven nanometer chip with Huawei in their Mate 60 Pro, which is sort of like their iPhone competitor in China. And so they're proclaiming that they've already got this EUV technology.

From what I understand, and Sax would know better than I, it sounds like there was a lot of reverse engineering and workaround of existing technology in order to deliver that system. Who

do you think has the best chance of challenging NVIDIA?

My early prediction for 2026 is Huawei, where I think that there's lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is gonna be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in Mainland China.

So announcements 2026, impact '27? Probably fair. Do you have a first? First on all in, Freiberg, congratulations on your weekly 50 lap here on

the show. I honestly don't think that the Reuters story is necessarily news because I think it's a little bit of a narrow scope in trying to describe what happened, which is that they, quote, stole ASML technology because scientists are working on it. That's not really the full scope of what's been going on in China for a number of years, and it really understates the technological progress that China's independently made in using other systems to try and achieve lithography parity. So if you go back a number of years, the current kind of investment vehicle is actually Chinese banks put capital into a a fund that's roughly $48,000,000,000 US dollars, which is actually what's called the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund phase three. So there was phase one, which started in 2014, which focused on manufacturing, so developing fabs with groups like SMIC.

Phase two was stood up in 2019, which focused primarily on design and materials. And then this phase three fund was established in 2024 explicitly to pivot to what they call choke points or bottlenecks in the manufacturing process. And state media has confirmed the existence of this phase three fund and the intentionality of the phase three fund to try and replicate lithography technology. Couple of months ago, if you pull up the link, Nick, here's a publication on this paper. So this is the leading research group out of China that's been backing into lithography technology using AI driven systems.

They published this paper, which was a very good summary of where they are in July. Was this in nature? No. It was in light science and applications. And this paper is called advancements and challenges in inverse lithography technology, a review of artificial intelligence based approaches.

If you read into the paper and then you read the other publications from this particular research team at Tsinghua University, they have made a number of breakthroughs in using AI to try and reestablish alternative systems in the traditional Zeiss optics and other control systems that are used in the ASML platform. And the way that they've done it, I I won't spend too much time on it, but there's a bunch of neural networks that they've used, trained, and have made discoveries from, including doing things like working with suboptimal optics, meaning you can have optics that have a degree of diffusion. And then how do you actually recreate three nanometer printing techniques or three nanometer masks by having shadowy effects accounted for in the AI? So you almost, like, assume that the shadowy effects are gonna come out and you print differently than you otherwise would. You don't need the degree of precision that you need, and you don't necessarily need to go get the Zeiss optics.

There was another paper that was published early this year by another Chinese research team that actually demonstrated how they did use AI to discover a novel method for doing optics. So there is a very broad and well funded effort that's been underway for over a decade. But just in the last couple of years with artificial intelligence based approaches, they've made a series of breakthroughs. It is very likely the case that Huawei already has a lithography system that they'll be putting into production, and this is why I kind of talked about it when we were in Vegas and pointed it out earlier this year. But I again, I think Reuters just sort of maybe caught on to some narrow segment, but this is a bigger story and a bigger set of progress that's been made over quite some time.

Ramification, Saxe, Here and and what you're thinking, obviously, you've talked a bunch about, hey. Let's sell our stack in there, and they're clearly working on their own stack. What what's the what's the ramification of this if it's true?

Well, I've never supported selling EUV lithography to China. It is probably No.

Selling the stack of h one whatever the previous NVIDIA stack was. Yeah.

EUV lithography, these machines that are made by ASML is probably our single biggest advantage in the AI race because they're the only machines that are capable of creating, say, two to three nanometer chips, semiconductors. And it's sort of the perfect export control because there's only one company that makes these machines. Like you showed, they're gigantic. They're expensive. So if you think about, like, trying to put an export control on a commodity, there'd be a lot of ways to circumvent it because there's a lot of sources for a commodity.

But in this case, there's literally only one company that makes these machines. So it's been a tremendous advantage, I'd say, for the West that we have EUV lithography. I'm not surprised that China is trying to reverse engineer it. It's kind of the obvious thing to do. No advantages forever.

It does seem likely that at some point, they'd be able to figure out how to do it. So I think that this article is not altogether a surprise in that sense. I mean, I'm sure that China is trying really really hard to reverse engineer this. In the meantime, however, they've also made substantial progress with DUV lithography. So the previous generation of lithography before EUV was DUV.

E is extreme, d is deep. In any event, DUV was supposed to sort of top out at, say, 14 nanometer chips. And China was able to push the technology to get to seven nanometer and now to five. So they were able to get a lot further using DUV lithography than anyone thought possible. And that is why the Huawei chips, the Ascend chips are they're not as good as our chips, but they're serviceable and they've been able to use their prowess in networking to string more of them together.

You have the CloudMatrix three eighty four technology where Huawei will string together 384 of their Huawei Ascent chips into a rack and that will perform comparable to an NVIDIA rack, but using a lot more power. So the bottom line is China's been able to create a lot of these workarounds to our restrictions. But if they figured out how to reverse EUV, that would be, I'd say, a blow because it is a real advantage for us. But I'm not convinced that this Reuters story is the the full picture. I think it's just a data point.

Tramont, any thoughts here? If you

want a very short summary of how the last generation of chips work, the best way to think about this is that the most profitable and valuable chips to date have taken a very compute centric approach. That's why we've needed these ultra advanced process nodes. But the reality is that in a world of infinite inference, let's say, the next generation of silicon will not take the same compute heavy approach and will probably rely on a much more memory centric architecture that uses a lot of SRAM. The value of that is that you can produce these things, as Sax said, at 14 nanometer, at seven five, all of these process nodes that are much less advanced. That, I actually think, is the future.

So in a weird way, if they steal this, which I think we should assume they've already stolen, quite honestly, and they figured it out, The question is how bad is it? That's the really important question. And the thing about a more memory centric approach for AI inference or these next generation forms of silicon, it demands a lot more of compilers. It demands a lot more of the software. I still think that's where we are light years ahead.

So I don't think it's the end of the world, and we're still in a very good place. But it is bad.

Friedberg, weren't we supposed to start onshoring with the Chips Act and maybe get trending towards having this production ability in America? And, obviously, that's been really hard to do. And China and the relationship with Taiwan seems to be, and and the possibility that they actually take over Taiwan in a military fashion has been this existential concern or even short term concern. Maybe it's a better way to

say it. I think the biggest security implication to consider at this moment is that both The US and Mainland China are onshoring manufacturing, and that makes Taiwan less of a strategic point of interest for The United States and for United States industry. Maybe one of the ways to think about the positive aspects of what is going on, which is maybe call it the balkanization of generally manufacturing, but specifically semiconductor manufacturing in this case, is reduced security concerns. So there's no longer this flash point perhaps in Taiwan. If China did invade Taiwan and The US had fab manufacturing, we're less likely to wanna defend Taiwan.

And, frankly, if China has fabs on mainland, do they really need to invade Taiwan? What's the economic interest in doing so?

Yeah. That's So where he's going with it. But if they also wanted to jump start Friedberg, they could just go to Taiwan and take the machines. Like, is that actually the plan?

Like I I don't know what the CCP's plan is. I think that's a Yeah. Pretty simple statement to make. I think just going to Taiwan is probably a lot more complicated than

Of course it is. My point is if this if this was super existential to get those chips for China and they go to Taiwan and they I get it. Then they've reverse engineered the machines by default.

We we need to recognize we keep using the term reverse engineering as if ASML is the only way to do this, and it is not. If you read their papers and you read what's coming out, there are alternative production manufacturing methods and systems that are being developed in China that not only maybe provide parity to ASML but get ahead of ASML. And I think this is really important to understand. China is not just in a catch up race. They're in a primacy race, and they are trying to develop primacy in lithography technology, which will give them primacy in manufacturing, which will give them primacy in AI, which will give them economic leverage over the planet.

And that is very critical for us to understand. This is not about stealing data from ASML. Like, no one gives a shit if you're sitting in China. You're thinking about, I've got the world's best scientists or some of the world's best scientists, and I'm giving them the resources, and I'm giving them the mandate to go solve this problem. The government, as I mentioned last year, put $40,000,000,000 against this problem and said, go figure it out.

And these guys at Tsinghua are publishing some groundbreaking research on how to do it.

But it's easier to catch up or to copy than to innovate. Right? So if you're China, the first thing you'd wanna do is just copy EUV and get that technology for yourself.

Well, let me ask you this. What would you do? So you're the AI czar. You're sitting in The United States and China's got this lithography technology. Is your goal to steal their technology or is your goal to get your best scientists and say, let's get ahead of their technology?

If I'm China?

Neither. I think it would be the it's to solve the problem. What is the actual economic commercial problem we're seeing?

And so if you can figure out a way to do manufacturing better, cheaper, faster than the way the that China does it, you would obviously take that path. You're not trying to get the parity with China if you view yourself to be supreme to China.

But you have to understand, even with these EUV machines

And the same is true on the other side.

At two or even sub two nanometer scale, you have these incredible laws of physics that you are pushing to the boundaries of, which cause these chips to have pretty low yield. You have a lot of systems that actually aren't that efficient and highly utilized as a result. So these systems are brittle. The second thing is that when you have these compute centric architectures, you end up making design decisions like HBM. They'll have to go and steal all the HBM, which is the high bandwidth memory business that SK Hynix and Samsung have.

But, again, that's where NVIDIA and then Google have an effective monopoly.

Let me ask you a question, Sax. I mean, what's your strategic response if China next year goes into manufacturing with a sub two nanometer system that's got higher yields, is faster, is cheaper than anything that we're seeing anywhere else in the world?

Well, I don't think that's gonna happen. Let's talk about that if it actually happens. I don't think it's going to. But what would I be focused on right now? I would say we wanna get more of the leading edge manufacturing in The United States.

TSMC has already opened a big fab in Arizona and they're planning on increasing the size of that and that's really important. And we should get all these restrictions out of the way. They're facing all sorts of permitting restrictions. I mean, all the stuff that Bernie's talking about where he wants to slow down I mean, he's talking about data centers, but not

So you've you've heard Bernie Sanders

are the same.

Ro Khanna, Elizabeth Warren, you've

got wrong. I mean

And side tech progress people saying, let's stop all this stuff. Meanwhile, China is not just racing to catch up, but they're likely gonna get ahead of The United States. And if we're caught flat footed because we've got a moratorium on development, a moratorium on production, it's gonna be extraordinarily damaging.

Right. Well, look, this is where I agree with you is that if this Reuters report is accurate, it does speed up the timeline on China closing the chip gap from

It's not just decades or

a few years.

You can go read the Tsinghua papers. You'll see that these guys are so advanced.

If they care about being ahead, why are they publishing that paper?

So by the way, this is a really important point, and I picked up on this from a number of different disciplines in scientific research. So what's been going on is scientists in China, they're very smart people. There's very great scientists there. And like all scientists, they don't think necessarily in terms of nationalism first. They think in terms of science.

They want to publish their research. They want to be known. They want to be the discoverers of these new frontiers, and so they publish. And what we've seen in several instances is that the scientific research groups will publish and they'll publish slightly ahead. And once they get ahead of the market or they get ahead of the world, suddenly they stop publishing.

And it's almost like the CCP comes in and it's like, okay. You guys are now, you know, going too far. We don't wanna tip our hat too far and the stuff starts to recede. And I think there was this one paper on optics that is designed to replace the Zeiss monopoly in optics that suddenly disappeared, that research team stopped publishing. I gotta find this paper.

This came out last year. There are number of these disciplines where there's publications that go to a certain extent and then they stop publishing. So I think that there's a little bit of

a mechanism. Funding cycle in China. You have every single local government that's given capital to invest in businesses, and so they compete and compete until it gets to the state level and you have one or two national champions.

But if this was so important, Friberg, would there also be an argument to publish things that would send, that would be misinformation or send people down a wrong direction?

No. Because you have to again, the funding cycle is you get as a policy person in Shanghai, you get promoted because you make a good bet. Yeah. No. You're not.

So by the time it becomes one national to Friedberg's point, when's the last time you saw BYD or CATL publish anything meaningful? But when they were not the national champion, they were probably publishing very aggressively. But at that time, there was 50 different companies competing to be the national champion. So I suspect what's happening here is there's 50 different semi startups all over China. Everybody's trying to support their own local version, and eventually when there's one, they disappear.

Okay. Interesting.

I mean, one of the things we see is China does give money to these research institutions on frontier science, and then there's an industrialization. It's something The US isn't quite as good at. And I think it's again, we've talked about the co opting of our universities as research institutions over the last couple of decades. They've become these sort of employment centers, if you will, and they've become these sort of weird social engineering systems. They've kind of gotten away from some of the core research or that that's been kind of co opted.

In China, there are these sort of dedicated research centers, and then there are universities where there's very clear independent research that goes on on university campuses. They typically get quite a bit of funding. And the way this worked, if you look into the details of this China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, there were three funds, one, two, and three, The funds get bigger and bigger as the research teams make progress. It's a very smart way of doing things from a central planning perspective. And then in in phase three, they're now targeting the specific unlocks that then will enable industrialization.

So they're funding some of this core research. The core research has these breakthroughs, and then it gets industrialized. It's during that research phase where we see a lot of publications happening, and this is happening in life sciences as well, and in physics and in material science. And as soon as they start to get a little bit ahead of the curve, then it gets industrialized and the and the publications kind of stop. So I don't know if it's necessarily the CCP stepping in and saying, hey.

Stop publishing. You're gonna let the world know too much of what we're having versus, okay. The handoff is now happening and industrialization begins.

Yeah. Look, I would just say that to me the takeaway here is that the timeline on China closing the gap with us is being sped up. Whether it's the fact that they're copying what we're doing, whether EUV is being reverse engineered or maybe their scientists are figuring out a way to leapfrog, we are in a pretty close race with China and that's why I think it's really important that we don't listen to Bernie and others who just wanna stop the progress because the progress is not gonna stop. It's just gonna happen in China. And that will be a big problem for The United States.

Alright. Speaking of socialism slash communism, you guys thinking about coming to Austin, my neck of the woods?

I've been pulling up these photos in Austin of these homes.

You know I'm doing it. Right?

Welcome to Texas, boss.

Like, on the lake.

Saks already bought a house. Saks already bought a house.

He hooked me up with the agent.

What has she got you looking at?

I'm not sure yet. We're just gonna go You guys

are bidding against each other, assholes.

You can have my sloppy seconds.

You have the high ground, so you can negotiate hard. There is so much inventory. But only, like, 20% of the inventory is on the MLS. 80% here, because it's a no reporting state, is off market. So it's completely different than any other market, certainly California.

I wanna be on the lake. Like, I'm gonna do this, I don't wanna be on the

Oh, really? I don't want the lake?

I mean, if you're the here here's the challenge with the lake. People are gonna come up to your house and take pictures and hang out, like, two feet off your house and starting at 7AM

sex's house in

San Francisco. Everybody's zipping around the lake in motorboats starting at 7AM. It's beautiful. I love the motorboats. It's great, but just understand it's gonna get loud at

seven There's

nothing a good good motorboating doesn't

Who doesn't love a good motorboat?

Jake, I've heard you're, like, an hour away. You're not even in Austin.

I I am in the hill country on my ranch, but we're getting a place closer to the city, actually. So we're thirty minutes outside the city.

First thirty minutes? My god.

I heard you're the

house.

I heard you're in the sticks.

No. Not that far. Not that far.

No. He's in the suburbs of the suburbs.

If you wanna have, like, you know, dozens of acres, you can't do that in the city.

When I was growing up in Memphis, they called that Bumble Egypt.

BFE. Bumble?

I mean, if you want a ranch and you want, like, dozens of acres, you can't do that. You can get an acre to three acres inside of the city.

I found an acre in Tarrytown. No problem.

An acre is doable. Two acres is possible.

You know what's so sad? Even if this bill doesn't get on the books, which I

think Everyone's leaving.

There's a decent chance. It ripped the Band Aid off. The revenues of California are going to plummet. Plummet.

Man. It is yeah. I mean, we saw the writing on the wall. Socialism is coming, and, you know, this is one of the great things about having a United States Of America. The different states can optimize for different things.

That one bill the thing here.

That one bill, this proposed billionaire tax, has single handedly changed the trajectory of the California economy by a 100 to $200,000,000,000 over the next five to ten years. It's an enormous cell phone. People were here willing to pay the money, and now

Yeah. People were willing to put up with a lot in this state.

People were pulling And up now soon

as you tell people, hey. We're we're doing property seizures, property seizures or their threat of property seizures or the fact that people didn't come out against property seizures is enough for everyone to be like, see you.

See you later.

The fact that all the politicians didn't, in uniform, stand up and say, this is ridiculous. We're never gonna let this happen. They let this happen. By not defending the property rights that are endowed in this country, they lost everything. They had to defend it.

What do you think happens to the state budget over the next four or five years as a result of this?

You're right. It's trash. And by the way and that's what drives the socialist spiral because then they try and do more property seizures and they try and get the money back.

Who are they gonna tax? Everybody's gonna be gone, though.

And here's the other crazy statistic that we never talk about. I was gonna try and put some data together and get it as a topic, but we should save it for the New Year. But the California pension fund system is underfunded by roughly a trillion dollars. So these folks in the California pension fund system are sitting around waiting for money to come to them every year for the next thirty, forty, fifty years, and the money isn't there. They're guaranteed that money from this pension fund system, and it's not there.

What are they gonna do? It's a trillion dollars short. That's a state obligation.

Why would anybody hear something like that and think giving politicians more money is a good idea? These people are so fiscally irresponsible. They're fiscally illiterate.

There is that. It's pretty clear to me that in New York and California, it'll be 60 plus percent taxes. And, you know, if you were living in a perfect society that appreciated it and you had this incredible safety, you had extraordinary schools, and the roads and the public transit Everything works? Yeah. Like Japan

You'd be 60% be ecstatic.

Yeah. You'd be like, okay. Mean Whatever. A lot, but, hey. This is a pretty great place to live.

If you're paying that and people are breaking into your home and there's nine overdoses a day, you're like, wait a second. And then on top of that, by the way, they just

And they're seizing your private property now.

Seizing your property.

They're seizing your property. And by the way, they don't care about you. When it when you look at the laws was just talking to some law enforcement people.

Cities using your money to give homeless people vodka. It's just hard.

Well, I mean, if it was tequila, I mean, I have a

good tequila brand we could give to the homeless. Maybe we make a deal. Yeah.

Shout out to all of tequila coming to you. Delivery is happening right now. In all seriousness, I was talking to some security folks and was talking to my security guy in who's up in California. And in California, not only did they not have the castle doctrine, they've replaced the castle doctrine where you can, like, defend your home if somebody comes into it with your gun and protect your family and your property. Now you have to have this duty to flee.

So you have to be able to run out of your home with your family as opposed to defend your family. So they literally are telling the criminals, hey. Listen. If you break into somebody's home in California, don't worry about getting shot. You they're gonna have to run out or else they're in the wrong.

Like, this is deranged. The the inmates have literally taken over the asylum. They they have taken over the asylum. I I realized this two years ago, and I pulled the ripcord. Some Elon realized it six years ago when he tried to build a factory.

He pulled the ripcord. You guys are realizing it now. Everybody's realizing this. New York, the hedge fund guys in New York and in Jersey and Connecticut, they realized it went

through the NFL. Hollywood guys. I know a bunch of Hollywood guys leaving.

Yeah. I literally this producer one of the major producers who has produced billions of dollars worth of films came here last year. I met him at a football game. He said, tell me everything. I told him everything.

He moved here. He moved here. He's gonna start making movies here, and he is one of the top top. I won't say who he is, but you know his films because his partner who is an incredibly high profile comedian, like, amongst the highest profile in history, where they make films together, he moved here. Why?

He he doesn't want to live in LA and risk his family's life to a home invasion and and the house burning down because they don't fill water in the reservoir. I mean, guys.

Hopefully, not everyone realizes it because I need to sell my house to someone.

Good luck.

You'll be okay. You'll be okay. There's a Chinese billionaire

looking to Actually, you know you

know who you'll be able to sell your house

to? Billionaires left in California.

It's whoever the politicians are that are able to aggregate power and money in the socialist

Gavin will buy your house and turn

it into a home. Oh, shove him, sir. You guys are gonna look you guys are gonna look back on Gavin and realize he was the most Moderate. Upstanding moderate governor that California had in modern era, and suddenly we're gonna be like, what the fuck?

And I think that's a great place to stop it, boys. We will be doing a couple of episodes between now and the end of the year. And, yeah, no weeks off. Hopefully, we get to see each other over the holidays. I'll see you, Sax, and you as well, Chamath and Friedberg, shortly.

Oh, by the way, the president just signed an executive order reclassifying marijuana from schedule one to schedule three.

Schedule one to schedule three. Okay. That's something Obama wanted to do in the second term and never did.

I mean, it's a good thing. I mean, schedule one is like heroin. You know? It's never made sense to treat it the same as heroin. You know?

I know a lot people aren't thrilled about marijuana. It's not great when people are smoking

in the don't like marijuana, but I I agree with the But it's not heroin.

It's not heroin.

It's yeah. I mean, it would be on I think most people intellectually would put it on the same level as alcohol.

Right? I just want it studied so that we can have toxicity labels. That's the big thing that I want. Because, like, if these

kids Yeah.

That's the most important thing. You just put a tox label on these things so you know what you're taking.

It's the the strength of these things over the last fifty years has changed dramatically, and yeah. There are There there there are these shards they create of this, like, incredibly intense THC that will make you, like, go psychotic. Like, it's really dangerous. So the smoking a joint from our youth is very different than smoking these, like, resins and stuff that they've created, apparently, that are, like, a 100 times the potency, 200 times the potency. They can put you in a psychotic state.

Really dangerous, folks.

Oh, that's that's where, like, the FDA should regulate it. More like or something.

100%. 100%. Better process, especially since kids are getting 100%. Stuff. Yeah.

Alright, everybody. Another amazing episode of your favorite podcast in the world, the all in pockets.

Let me Happy holidays, everybody. Merry Christmas.

Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas,

Paul. Hanukkah.

Merry Christmas. Whatever you're into. We'll let your winners ride. Rain man Davidsack. I'm going home.

And it said We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

We

should all just get a room and just have one big huge Dorothy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.