Aug 9, 2025 · 1h 50m · allin
OpenAI's GPT-5 Flop, AI's Unlimited Market, China's Big Advantage, Rise in Socialism, Housing Crisis
Jason Calacanis · 35m spoken Ben Shapiro · 18m spoken Gavin Baker · 16m spoken Phil Deutsch · 16m spoken David Friedberg · 12m spoken TikTok Creator · 30s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the All-In Podcast, host Jason Calacanis and guest panelists Ben Shapiro, Gavin Baker, and Phil Deutsch analyze OpenAI's GPT-5 release, the U.S.-China AI race, energy grid bottlenecks, executive governance, and the economic drivers behind the housing crisis and rising interest in socialism.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 48.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 3.5 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 2.5 The hosts pushing back 2.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 55:37 Deutsch confronts Friedberg on subsidies
Phil Deutsch aggressively rejects Friedberg's thesis, calling his stance on energy subsidies 'absolute bullshit' in a blunt exchange.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 45:50 Friedberg challenges market distortion from solar subsidiesDavid Friedberg firmly refuses the premise that clean energy subsidies were harmless, explaining how they drained R&D capital away from nuclear technology.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 19:40 Baker reframes AI CapEx vs dot-com dark fiberGavin Baker corrects simplistic dot-com crash comparisons by explaining that GPUs face immediate, heavy utilization rather than sitting unlit like dark fiber.
The host holds their own ▶ 59:10 Friedberg demonstrates deep Gen-IV nuclear domain knowledgeFriedberg showcases deep technical insight into fourth-generation nuclear deployment in China to prove the real-world impact of U.S. regulatory and capital misallocation.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| All-In Podcast Title Sequence | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Introductory banter regarding recording schedules, guest introductions, and light personal poking. | |
| Ben Shapiro Explains 'Lions and Scavengers' Thesis | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Ben Shapiro introduces his upcoming book thesis contrasting builders and critics in modern society. | |
| Panelist Phil Deutsch & All-In Summit Announcement | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | Guest intros and All-In Summit updates pivot into a humorous debate ranking Star Wars films. | |
| Comparative Benchmarking: GPT-5 vs. Grok 4 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Gavin Baker educates the panel on AI benchmark saturation and why Grok 4 currently edges out GPT-5. | |
| ChatGPT-5 Product Strategy and UX Multi-Model Router | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Friedberg offers product UX analysis regarding ChatGPT's automated multi-model routing feature. | |
| Evaluating AI ROI and Tech Industry CapEx | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | Ben Shapiro raises standard investor doubts about AI CapEx productivity timelines, answered briefly by guests. | |
| AI Infrastructure Spending vs. Dot-Com Era Dark Fiber | 3 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Gavin Baker breaks down why AI infrastructure spending is distinct from 1990s dark fiber due to immediate utilization. | |
| AI Energy Demands and Nuclear Power Renaissance | 2 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Phil Deutsch outlines hyperscaler energy demands, citing Anthropic's 50-gigawatt request. | |
| Analyzing U.S. and China Power Grid Expansion | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Deutsch and Friedberg exchange technical perspectives on China's power expansion versus U.S. additions. | |
| The Geopolitical AI Race Between U.S. and China | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Shapiro frames the US-China AI competition as an existential geopolitical race involving information warfare and military superiority. | |
| Chinese Capitalism, BYD, and Trade Tariffs | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | Shapiro details Chinese state corporatism and advocates strategic trade isolation against China. | |
| Declining Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital in China | 7 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Friedberg presents data charts demonstrating the sharp drop in Chinese startup formation following government regulatory crackdowns. | |
| Importance of Rule of Law for Sustainable Innovation | 2 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Deutsch and Baker highlight how necessary the rule of law and private property protections are for sustainable capitalism. | |
| Centralization of Power in Executive Branch and AI Laws | 3 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Shapiro outlines the historical growth of federal administrative power and preemption dynamics in AI law. | |
| Debate over Government Subsidies and Market Distortions | 2 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Deutsch and Shapiro discuss federal industrial policies and market distortions created by changing subsidies. | |
| How Solar Subsidies Disincentivized U.S. Nuclear R&D | 8 | 5 | 5 | 7 | Friedberg hits back forcefully, arguing solar subsidies suppressed private investment needed for fourth-generation nuclear power. | |
| Civil Service Defense and the Case for State-Level Governance | 2 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Baker and Shapiro explore the shift of legislative responsibility from Congress to the executive branch and state governors. | |
| Economic Anxiety, Inflation, and the Potential Rise of Socialism | 7 | 6 | 8 | 6 | Friedberg warns of rising public support for socialist policies due to inflation, provoking a sharp pushback from Deutsch. | |
| The Housing Affordability Crisis and Declining U.S. Mobility | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Calacanis and Shapiro discuss declining geographic mobility in America and its connection to housing costs. | |
| Evaluating U.S. Tariff Policies, Revenue Trends, and Trade Strategy | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Panel debates the economic efficacy and unpredictability of Trump's trade tariffs and revenue claims. | |
| DOJ Crackdown on Illicit Nvidia AI Chip Smuggling to China | 2 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Baker contextualizes DOJ arrests over illegal GPU exports, noting black market scales remain small relative to US clusters. | |
| Apple's $700B Capital Allocation, AI Lag, and Hardware Future | 6 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Gavin Baker criticizes Apple's lack of AI progress, while Friedberg cautions against predicting Apple's downfall. | |
| Summer Reading and Media Recommendations | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Panelists share summer media, book, and television recommendations to conclude the episode. |
Statements from this episode (59)
Shapiro: Civilization is dividing between builders and those who tear down
“We're watching civilization break down between people who want to build and people who want to tear down.”
Calacanis: Writing a book is a net loss for successful podcasters
“Writing a book is a net loser in terms of your productivity and time when compared to doing your daily show and all the other things that daily wire does.”
Calacanis: GPT-5's launch featured flat charts, miscalculations, and typos
“A little bit of a messy presentation for GPT-Five yesterday. This wasn't like your classic Steve Jobs keynote. The charts were flat and wrong, miscalculations, typos, all kinds of stuff, but the model did top some leaderboards in fairness in the chat bot arena…”
Shapiro: Rogue One is the last good Star Wars movie
“Rogue One is like the last good Star Wars movie that's been made.”
Friedberg: Star Wars is built on an anti-technology, anti-progress worldview
“I remain adamant in my point of view that the entire Star Wars Franchise is built around an anti-technology anti-utopian view of the world, anti-progress, and the Death Star is the ultimate manifestation of technology, and of course, it's used for evil. That's…”
Baker: GPT-5 is OpenAI's first frontier model that isn't decisively best
“This is the first time that, you know, open AI has released a new model that was not decisively the best.”
Baker: Grok 4 scored 44.4% on Humanity's Last Exam versus GPT-5's 42%
“GroK IV when it came out and it is improved. Since, since its release roughly a month ago, was at 44.4%, and GPT five was at 42.”
Gavin Baker: xAI has the largest Nvidia Blackwell cluster
“They have the largest Blackwell cluster.”
Gavin Baker expects Google to release an impressive new Gemini model
“I would expect there to be a very, you know, an impressive new Gemini model, and we'll see how that lands relative to both Grok and GPT five.”
Friedberg: Effective AI UX requires automated routing over manual model selection
“I think this is really important from a user experience perspective for AI to work. You don't want users going in and technically choosing which model. No one understands what those letters and numbers mean. You want to have a very simple, clean, basic interfa…”
Friedberg: ChatGPT-5's UX upgrade will give OpenAI a real advantage
“So I think from a product experience point of view, this was actually a pretty big upgrade for chat GPT. And it'll give them a real advantage as people start to access it.”
Baker: OpenAI's ChatGPT-5 router was broken for its first 16 hours
“I mean, in all fairness to OpenAI, the router that kind of auto selects the right model was apparently broken for the first kind of. 12 or 16 hours of the model's release. It wasn't working.”
Shapiro: Daily Wire produced an AI commercial far cheaper than video shoots
“We put out Jeremy's Razor commercial two months ago that was entirely AI, and it still had the kind of AI slop feel to it a little bit, but it was doing a thing, and it was obviously a lot cheaper than having to shoot something”
Shapiro: Magnificent Seven drive 60-70% of S&P 500 gains
“60, 70% of all S&P 500 gains are happening in the Magnificent Seven.”
Calacanis: $1T-$2T will be deployed into data centers in 5 years
“We are now seeing hundreds of billions, low hundreds of billions per year being deployed, and we'll see a trillion or two deployed, I think, in the next five years on data centers and this”
Gavin Baker: ROIC for tech companies has risen alongside AI investments
“You can calculate some, you know, something called return on invested capital, and it's actually gone up. Since they started making these AI investments.”
Baker: AI infrastructure is not overbuilt and is trailing market demand
“All of the dollars that are going into the ground are being used. We're not building ahead of demand. In fact, we're clearly still behind demand”
Phil Deutsch: Anthropic requested 50 gigawatts for US AI over three years
“Anthropic just released a paper this month saying we want 50 gigawatts of power for the AI in America and over the next three years.”
Phil Deutsch: US electricity demand growth has risen to two to three percent
“In the United States, now it's two to three percent, and a data center needs continuous power in specific locations, and it's relatively price insensitive.”
Friedberg: China adds 1 terawatt of power capacity every 18 months
“Meanwhile, China's adding one terawatt, a thousand gigawatts every 18 months.”
Deutsch: Solar and wind account for around 80% of new U.S. energy additions
“So the US, our additions are like 80% solar and wind, but the installed base, it's, you know, under 20.”
Calacanis: China has over 150 nuclear reactors in deployment
“They have a 150 plus nuclear reactors in some state of deployment.”
Shapiro: The US-China AI race is existential for America
“Well, as you might imagine, I'm definitely in the existential race category.”
Shapiro: China uses TikTok as a psychological operations weapon
“I just look at how China has utilized TikTok as a PSYOP weapon in a myriad of ways, gathering data, putting out its own propaganda.”
Calacanis: China will try to beat the US using commercial capitalism
“They're going to try to beat us on capitalism and then use brands like we've used brands like Apple and Google to defeat us.”
Calacanis: BYD produces electric cars for half the price of US cars
“BYD producing cars now for half the price of American cars.”
Shapiro: China operates on state-sponsored corporatism, not communism
“And the truth is that what you're talking about in China, obviously, is in communism. It's state sponsored corporatism.”
Friedberg: Remote Autonomous Devices Will Be Front Lines of Future Battles
“Remote autonomous devices are going to be the kind of front lines in battles going forward.”
Friedberg: China Holds Drone Manufacturing and Materials Advantage Over US
“China has both manufacturing productivity materials advantage over the United States on that front.”
Friedberg: China startup creation and VC investment peaked in 2018
“It peaked in 2018, which by the way, aligns pretty well with the peaking of venture capital investment in China from the United States and from VCs. Around the world. And then it began its rapid decline because there was a set of policy changes.”
Friedberg: China's economic boom was driven by citizen entrepreneurship, not central planning
“It wasn't the government central planning. It was the entrepreneurship of the peasants and their ability to kind of self-organize and self-mobilize and build, build business and create better productivity from the ground up. And it was the individual Chinese c…”
Baker: DeepSeek employees have CCP minders and cannot be near Americans
“If you work for deep sea, you are not allowed to be in the same room as an American while you're in China. And you have kind of a CCP minder with you most of the time.”
Baker: 2% privatized Soviet farmland produced majority of nation's food
“Towards the end of the Soviet Union, they could not produce enough food using kind of socialist systems. So they let two percent of the acreage in the Soviet Union kind of like be, you know, more entrepreneurial and self-organized. And that two percent of the …”
Deutsch: Firm operated wind blade factory in China with unstable terms
“We've had factories in China, one making wind blades, and basically every day was a renegotiation on terms, no matter what you want to do.”
Gavin Baker: Chinese firms were the only global rivals to US internet giants
“These kind of internet entrepreneurs, they did create kind of the only kind of internet companies that were capable of challenging American internet companies, not just in China, but globally.”
Shapiro: If China reaches AI superintelligence first, state corporatism wins
“If they get there first, then corporatism wins.”
Shapiro: Decades of federal market intervention have denigrated private industry
“The centralization of power in the federal government and the choosing of the winners and the losers over the course of the last several decades, actually, has been really denigrating for private industry.”
Shapiro: Trump administration picks market winners better than Biden administration
“You know, if you basically are now relegated to a choice between the winners that are picked by the Trump administration and the winners picked by the Biden administration, you know, from a political point of view, I'm going to pick the winners picked by the T…”
Phil Deutsch: Policy flips between administrations inhibit U.S. tech innovation
“But if we keep flipping back and forth, we inhibit one of our greatest strengths, which is our technology and innovation.”
Friedberg: Solar subsidies starved U.S. investment in Gen-IV nuclear systems
“And therefore, the R&D investment dollars that were supposed to go into nuclear that would have allowed us to accelerate to Gen-IV systems, which, by the way, China has now done, went away.”
Friedberg: US Is Decades Behind China in Nuclear Energy Development
“And so now we are several decades behind where China is with respect to nuclear, which is ultimately the most scalable energy production system we have.”
Baker: Imperial presidency is preferable to an imperial judiciary
“And the executive branch, which is at least elected and accountable, I would rather have an imperial president who we can judge and vote out of office than an imperial judiciary.”
Shapiro: U.S. Founders failed to foresee branches abdicating responsibility
“The founders gamed for ambition, checking ambition. They never really gamed for people trying to kick responsibility from one branch to the other.”
Shapiro: Congress created the administrative state to escape political accountability
“I'm blaming Congress for having kicked them the authority in the first place. If you're going to place, you know, blame with somebody, you have to give it to the branch that actually abdicated its duty and decided to construct an entirely different branch and …”
Shapiro: Federal gridlock will permanently shift political power to state governments
“I think that actually this is not going to get solved at the federal level. I think what's actually going to happen is that the federal government is going to lock up and it's going to be essentially rotating elected quasi-dictators until, until the end of tim…”
Friedberg predicts that socialism will eventually sweep over the United States
“Socialism will sweep over this nation, I fear, and I think it's a cancer.”
Friedberg: Nearly half of Americans work directly or indirectly for government
“By my calculation from last year, I think nearly half of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by the government at this point”
Baker: Zohran Mamdani will almost certainly win NYC mayoral election
“Unless Adams or Cuomo pulls out, he's almost certainly going to win.”
Ben Shapiro: U.S. geographic mobility has wildly decreased over time
“One of my favorite charts with regard to the American populace is geographic mobility over time. How much people move. Because what you actually see is that that has wildly decreased in the United States.”
Shapiro: Unwillingness to relocate leads to higher real estate prices
“If the American people don't keep up with that, and if they're unwilling to move to places where the real estate is cheaper, then you are going to get more expensive real estate.”
Baker: Raising over $250B in U.S. tariffs in 2026 seems reasonable
“But for 2026, that does seem reasonable.”
Shapiro: Raising tariff revenues and reshoring manufacturing are mutually exclusive goals
“You can champion The amount of revenue that we're raising off of tariffs, but you can't do that at the same time that you're championing reshoring, because if you reshore, then that revenue is going to go away, presumably, right? You're not going to be buying …”
Shapiro: Trump's tariff war is dampening U.S. economic growth
“The third is the tariff war, which I think is actually creating a pretty significant dampening effect on economic growth right now.”
Baker: Tariffs are traditionally a Democratic position that Clinton and Obama ran on
“Tariffs are traditionally a democratic policy position. You know, Clinton ran on them. Obama ran on them to be a slightly lesser degree.”
Baker: Expected foreign retaliation against U.S. tariffs has not occurred
“We have not seen retaliation, which I think in some ways, you know, validates some of their points of views, just that we do have a lot of leverage and we are using it and other countries are charging America much higher tariffs than we're charging them.”
Friedberg: Tariff revenue will give the U.S. government a crutch to keep spending
“The thing I most worry about with respect to tariffs is if it does create a new revenue source for the federal government, it gives the federal government another crutch to keep spending.”
Baker: $1B in smuggled Nvidia chips won't alter US-China AI race
“A billion dollars worth of GPUs. It's not enough to really move the needle, you know, even if they are Blackwell's the latest and greatest, you know, it's better than having none if you're China. But I mean, it's just, you know, it's not like a 10, twenty bill…”