Mar 8, 2025 · 2h 6m · allin
Tariffs, Trump's Economic Endgame, Market Chaos, Bitcoin Reserve, CoreWeave IPO
Jason Calacanis · 42m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 27m spoken Joe Lonsdale · 14m spoken David Friedberg · 14m spoken David Sacks · 13m spoken Scott Bessent · 19s spoken
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In this episode of the All-In Podcast, host Jason Calacanis, co-hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, and guest host Joe Lonsdale analyze major Trump administration economic policies, government efficiency, and AI developments, followed by an interview with White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
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 87.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.3 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 2.8 The hosts pushing back 3.4
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:49:30 David Sacks pushes back hard against media corruption charges
David Sacks forcefully defends his integrity against allegations of self-dealing, labeling media claims of conflict of interest as unevidenced slander.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 34:07 Friedberg presses the panel on Silicon Valley kleptocracyDavid Friedberg directly challenges Joe Lonsdale and the panel to address claims that tech leaders are replacing old corrupt networks with a new Silicon Valley kleptocracy.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 34:47 Joe Lonsdale details corrupt defense procurement practicesJoe Lonsdale educates the hosts on how legacy defense primes rig technical specifications to exclude far cheaper and superior startup technology.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:06:00 Chamath breaks down macro bond market dynamicsChamath Palihapitiya demonstrates deep macroeconomic command by mapping how deflating equity markets depresses inflation and reduces the 10-year yield for national debt refinancing.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title Sequence and Show Welcome | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Introductory banter and casual show check-ins between hosts and guest Joe Lonsdale. The tone is relaxed and welcoming with minimal debate. | |
| AI Model Releases and Trump's Hamas Warning | 4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Chamath highlights AI releases and market compression while Joe brings up geopolitical tweets. Jason lays out the chaotic news timeline for the week. | |
| Macroeconomic Theories: Tariffs, Taxes, and Reshoring | 8 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Friedberg elaborates a detailed three-legged stool macroeconomic theory combining tariffs, income tax cuts, and spending reductions to re-shore industry. | |
| Government Workforce Cuts and Spending Waste | 7 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Joe and Friedberg explain the indirect employment bloat caused by federal contractors and NGOs, while Jason brings up specific software waste data. | |
| AI Energy Needs, Inflation Reduction Act, and Grant Controversies | 8 | 4 | 4 | 3 | Chamath delivers an expert breakdown of energy bottlenecks facing AI expansion and contrasts rigorous grant applications with rapid shell NGO funding. | |
| Government Defense Procurement and Startup Competition | 6 | 7 | 5 | 6 | Friedberg directly challenges the panel on kleptocracy concerns. Joe schools the hosts on defense procurement biases favoring legacy prime contractors over superior startup technology. | |
| Government Service Incentives and Open-Source Policy | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Chamath proposes mandatory open standards and published RFPs to eliminate cronyism, while debating Joe on motivations for entering public service. | |
| Citizens United and Big Money in State and Local Elections | 7 | 5 | 5 | 6 | The panel vigorously debates Citizens United and free speech. Friedberg passionately defends the right of individuals to spend capital promoting advocacy causes like animal welfare. | |
| Proposal for Hard Caps on Direct Campaign Spending | 5 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Jason proposes explicit spending limits on campaign canvassing and ads, but Joe points out edge cases and censorship risks associated with defining political activity. | |
| CoreWeave IPO: GPU Infrastructure, Hypervisors, and Business Viability | 8 | 6 | 2 | 4 | Chamath explains CoreWeave's core technical advantage of bare-metal GPU access without hypervisors, while Friedberg compares the business model risk to 2003 dial-up speed doublers. | |
| CoreWeave Secondary Sales and Host Fashion Banter | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Lighthearted segment touching on CoreWeave insider secondary sales before devolving into host fashion banter and luxury watch humor. | |
| Trump's Main Street Strategy and Global Bond Market Rebalancing | 9 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Chamath provides a deep macroeconomic analysis connecting Main Street policy, equity price compression, disinflation, and European bond market pressure. | |
| Debt Refinancing versus AI Productivity for Economic Disinflation | 6 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Joe agrees with disinflation targets but highlights AI-driven productivity gains and government spending cuts as superior pathways compared to asset deflation. | |
| Trump's Willingness to Suffer Equity Losses for Rate Relief | 6 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Friedberg evaluates Trump's willingness to sustain market turbulence, while Joe outlines a diplomatic peace-through-strength framework regarding Russia and Ukraine. | |
| The Future of NATO and Transnational Organizations | 7 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Chamath examines how transnational legacy institutions lose relevance when new geopolitical alternatives like BRICS or OPEC+ emerge. | |
| Techno-Optimism, Resource Abundance, and Global Geopolitics | 8 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Friedberg presents a compelling techno-optimist vision where energy and resource abundance render territorial and resource conflicts obsolete. | |
| Evaluating ChatGPT 4.5, Grok 3, and X's Verification Tools | 6 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Chamath and Jason review frontend LLM choices, highlighting Anthropic Claude 3.7 for coding and Grok 3's real-time integration inside X. | |
| AI Model Benchmarks, Evals, and Drowning in Abundance | 8 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Chamath criticizes AI benchmark overfitting by labs and insists the industry requires independent, constantly shifting evaluation standards. | |
| The Emerging AI Labor Class and Ohalo's GCP Workflows | 5 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Jason describes the emerging human workforce dedicated to fine-tuning AIs, followed by lighthearted nostalgia around Casio calculator watches. | |
| David Sacks on Trump's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Executive Order | 7 | 7 | 3 | 4 | David Sacks joins to clarify the White House Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Executive Order, detailing Bitcoin's unique decentralized status. | |
| Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Structure vs. Digital Asset Stockpile Management | 6 | 7 | 3 | 5 | Sacks educates Jason on the regulatory distinction between the immutable Bitcoin Reserve and the broader managed Digital Asset Stockpile. | |
| Refuting Conflict-of-Interest Claims and Detailing Complete Divestment | 7 | 8 | 8 | 6 | When pressed on conflicts of interest, Sacks strongly refutes media allegations, presenting evidence of his total asset and fund divestment prior to taking office. | |
| Crypto Policy, Market Structure, and Disclosure Frameworks | 7 | 7 | 4 | 5 | Sacks outlines market structure legislation and mandatory disclosure requirements, emphasizing that fraud will be punished while lawful innovation is permitted. | |
| SEC Leadership and Regulatory Agency Coordination | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Sacks commends incoming SEC leadership nominees and Jason closes the show with summary thoughts on holding officials accountable. |
Statements from this episode (61)
Friedberg: Calling a business complex is usually a bad sign
“As one of my management team members told me today, it's a very complex business. That's usually not a good sign when the conversation starts with that.”
Calacanis: Cardano, XRP, and Solana surged following Trump crypto reserve post
“Cardona ripped 70%. XRP 32%. Solana 25%.”
Calacanis: Crypto trader opened $200M 50x leveraged long on BTC and ETH
“One whale went 50 times long on BTC and ETH. Two hundred million dollar position on just a four million dollar investment.”
Calacanis: Trump announced $100B TSMC investment in American fabs
“Then at 2:38 PM, Trump announces a hundred billion dollar investment from TSMC in American fabs.”
Chamath: OpenAI's GPT-4.5 release was not well received
“OpenAI dropped. GPT four, five, and I think it was not really that well received.”
Chamath: Magnificent Seven stock valuations are compressing relative to S&P 500
“Specifically you're seeing the Mag seven compressed towards the rest of the S and P 500.”
Lonsdale: Trump is using tariffs as a negotiation tactic over fentanyl
“He's using this to negotiate. So I talked to the senators and I asked him what's going on. Cause obviously I import things all over the place. I'd like to know what the hell the rules are. But he wants people to actually crack down on this stuff and save Ameri…”
Chamath: Trump and Elon's political honeymoon period ended this week
“I think that Trump and Elon were very much in a honeymoon period until this week. And I think there was the benefit of the doubt.”
Chamath: Tariffs enable US to rebase dollar reliance and deficit funding
“I think what tariffs allow us to do is rebase the long-term reliance on the US dollar. It allows us to rebase our ability to fund our own deficits. And it allows us to rebase the long-term ability for American companies to be economically vibrant.”
Friedberg: Greenhouse LED light prices jumped 25% following tariffs
“For example, I buy LED lights in my greenhouse. And the price of the LED lights just went up by 25%.”
Lonsdale: Tariffs are pushing his portfolio companies to build in US
“A lot of my companies, thanks to the tariff stuff are looking to build stuff here. So I'm not a huge fan of tariffs personally, but they definitely make sense for things in defense. They definitely make sense for negotiating with countries, and it is true. It …”
Calacanis: EU imposes 10% tariff on US cars versus 2.5% US tariff
“When we send cars to the EU, they get a 10% tariff, but when we get their cars, it's a two and a half percent tariff.”
Friedberg: Total government spending accounts for 30% of US GDP
“The government accounts for 30% of GDP in the United States.”
Calacanis: Government paid for 35,855 ServiceNow licenses used by 84 people
“35,855, according to Doge, breaking news, ServiceNow licenses on three products only being used by 84 people in our government. 11,000 Acrobat licenses with zero point zero users.”
Chamath: FERC report shows renewables were 91% of December power additions
“FERC published a report just this past week. And what do you think it said was the percentage of incremental electricity that was generated from renewables versus non-renewables? I'll tell you the answer. It was almost 91% in December.”
Chamath: U.S. gas turbine lead times prevent new power before 2030
“There is a five-year delay to get a gas turbine into America and online. Ok, if you ordered one today, the fastest that you can get it turned on is 2030.”
Chamath: New U.S. nuclear power capacity cannot launch before 2035
“The fastest that you can get nuclear turned on is 2035.”
Chamath's battery materials startup secured a $100M DOE grant
“I started a company with these guys from Tesla to make battery materials in the United States in 2019. We grind, we put in tens, I put in tens of millions of dollars... And then we applied again on some success and we got a hundred million dollar grant.”
Lonsdale: Epirus shot down drones 9.5 times farther than legacy contractors
“When we went head to head with them, we didn't just like beat them by a little bit. We shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away. Same size, same power, nine and a half times, completely wiped the floor.”
Chamath Palihapitiya worked with Trump transition team on government spending proposals
“When the administration was getting formed, one of the things that happened, I had an opportunity to work with some of the folks. To write some proposals for what theoretically could happen in some of these bigger government organizations where there's just hu…”
Palihapitiya: Goldman Sachs CEOs historically had direct pipeline to Treasury Secretary
“Goldman Sachs had a direct line to become treasury secretary. If you were the CEO of Goldman, you were the treasury secretary.”
Lonsdale: Trump's crypto promotions are silly schemes that damage moral authority
“I was very frustrated With posts of Trump mentioning specific coins. I don't know who was trading them before. It just looks bad. Like we're fighting all this grift, reading all these things where we have the moral high ground. I agree. I don't want to give up…”
Palihapitiya: Mark Zuckerberg spent $350 million on 2020 election efforts
“Lest we forget, I think Zuck spent three hundred and fifty million in 2020.”
Palihapitiya: Overturning Citizens United would revitalize local elections
“And so the reason to get rid of Citizens United from my perspective is that you'd have much more vibrant local state mayoral elections.”
Chamath: Only 10% to 20% of political spending goes to ads
“10, 10, 10 to 20 cents goes to ads, 80% goes to all kinds of shady stuff.”
Chamath: Paying people to vote is legal under current election rules
“Using dollar incentives to incentivize people, that's allowed today. You can pay people to vote today.”
Joe Lonsdale: Capping political speech requires an effective censorship board
“The problem at the end of the day with defining what's political or not is the boundary cases are really tough and you do end up needing effectively effectively a censorship board.”
Calacanis: CoreWeave operates 32 data centers with 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs
“They've got 32 data centers with 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs.”
Palihapitiya: CoreWeave's early success stemmed from foregoing hypervisors
“And as it turns out, they had one very specific technical decision that I think was extremely valuable, which is that these guys did not use hypervisors.”
Calacanis: CoreWeave relies on Microsoft for 60% of its revenue
“They had massive revenue growth, but They have a dependency, 60% of the revenue now from Microsoft”
Friedberg worries massive cloud capex will diminish specialized GPU service providers
“I worry a little bit about a business like this where there's four or five companies that are each doing eighty billion dollars of capex this year to create infrastructure that effectively starts to replace what these guys are effectively offering out as a ser…”
Calacanis: CoreWeave founders still hold majority ownership of company
“They still own the majority.”
Chamath: MAGA policy will prioritize Main Street over stock market levels
“When The core strategists inside of MAGA figure this out. One of the big takeaways is that they're not going to care about the stock market in Wall Street. And a lot of the policies will be viewed through the lens of Main Street.”
Chamath: Deflating asset prices reduces consumer spending and depresses inflation
“If you deflate asset prices, you also deflate inflation.”
Chamath: US government must borrow $10T in the next nine months
“We have 10 trillion dollars we need to go out and borrow in the next nine months.”
Joe Lonsdale: Bond markets hate war because it is inflationary
“Bond markets hate war. War is expensive or is inflationary.”
Lonsdale: AI is already lowering construction costs for our projects
“We're doing construction for much cheaper right now.”
Friedberg: 60% chance Trump 2.0 is less influenced by market drops
“I'd say 60%, he's probably different than Trump one point oh, and he's probably less Influenced by the short-term rumblings about the market. And he's probably listening to Besant on this one”
Lonsdale: Putin would not have invaded Ukraine with Trump in office
“I don't think he would have invaded with Trump as president.”
Lonsdale: European civilization will decline over the next 20 to 30 years
“I did not see European civilization going the right way the next 20 or 30 years.”
Chamath: EU regulatory overreach harms European companies and citizens
“The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth, and so what happened is the folks there started to pass inordinate numbers of laws. And that has made it really complicated to be a European company, a European citizen”
Friedberg: Inner Mongolia thorium reserve could provide 60,000 years of energy
“There is this discovery, which I think we put on the docket for the Science Corner today, of a giant thorium reserve in Inner Mongolia, which can be used to make a thorium molten salt reactor, and there's enough thorium in this reserve in China to produce enou…”
Friedberg: NATO is no longer as necessary in a world of abundance
“So I would argue maybe NATO in a multipolar world of abundance isn't as necessary as it has been in the past century, which was a world that was limited in resources, Fighting for access and a growing global population, particularly in the developed world in t…”
Palihapitiya: Anthropic's Claude 3.7 is best in market for code generation
“Its models on code generation, I think, are just exceptional. They're, they are the best in market.”
Palihapitiya shifted his personal consumer AI usage to Grok 3
“Then what I would say is, as a consumer, I've mostly flipped my usage to Grok three.”
Chamath: AI labs are overfitting models on benchmarks, making scores unreliable
“And the problem, the dirty little secret of these model makers is that these guys are so trained on the evals that they're overfitting. And all this overfitting basically makes it pretty unreliable.”
Chamath: Meta is about to launch a standalone app competing with ChatGPT
“And Facebook is about to launch a competitor to ChatGPT and Grok, yeah. A standalone app.”
Lonsdale: I am invested in xAI's Grok 3 and Cognition AI
“I'm invested in Grok three and I'm biased towards Elon, but you know, a lot of our companies will build on top of multiple of them as well. And yeah, I think you're talking about Cogen. I'm, you know, in cognition, I think a lot of my companies using Devon is …”
Calacanis predicts AI training and fact-checking will become a $50k-$150k job class
“We're gonna have a new job class, which is people who train AIs, And people who fact check AIs and refine AIs, and this could be a 50 to 150,000 dollar a year job, because every time you make the AI a little better, everybody on the planet gets to benefit from…”
Lonsdale: Patek Philippe watch prices have fallen to around $100,000
“You can get a decent Patek for a hundred now. It's like they've gone down.”
Sacks claims Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency without an issuer
“It's the only one that doesn't have an issuer, right?”
Sacks first bought Bitcoin in 2011 at around $120
“Back in 2011, I think it's the first time I bought a Bitcoin. I think it was at 120 dollars.”
Sacks: Retained US-sold Bitcoin would be worth over $17 billion
“If we had held all of that, it would be worth just that the portion we sold would be worth over seventeen billion.”
Sacks: Executive order prohibits Treasury from selling Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
“The executive order actually provides that the secretary of the treasury will not sell the Bitcoin. Okay. We're prohibited from selling the Bitcoin.”
Sacks: EO allows Treasury and Commerce to acquire Bitcoin budget-neutrally
“With respect to reserve, the EO provides that the secretaries that I'm talking about treasury and commerce, they're allowed to figure out strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin for the reserve. If those strategies are budget neutral and don't cost the taxpayer …”
Sacks: Craft Ventures sold $200M in crypto, including $85M personal stake
“So we basically sold, I think it was around two hundred million dollars of crypto, of which around eighty-five million dollars was personally attributable to myself. And we cleared that before day one, paid taxes on it, and basically so there wouldn't be a con…”
David Sacks says he serves as an unpaid government consultant
“I'm an unpaid consultant to the government.”
David Sacks divested from Jason Calacanis's fund over crypto holdings
“You were one of the funds I divested from, not because you're a crypto fund, but because you might have a crypto position.”
Sacks: FIT21 passed House last Congress but was blocked by Senate Democrats
“There is a bill that passed the last Congress in the house, but Biden basically, he didn't veto it, but he basically he and the Democrats, he stopped it in the Senate. The Democrats did. It was called fit. 21.”