Feb 22, 2025 · 1h 45m · allin
The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private
Patrick Collison · 25m spoken Jason Calacanis · 20m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 16m spoken David Friedberg · 15m spoken John Collison · 15m spoken Jamie Dimon · 1m spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Guest co-hosts Patrick and John Collison join the All-In Podcast to analyze Stripe's trillion-dollar payment scale, stablecoin infrastructure, tech executive leadership trends, DOGE defense budget reforms, and frontier AI developments including Grok 3 and the Arc Institute's EVO 2.
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 56.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.0 Guest teaching 4.1 Guest disagreement 1.7 The hosts pushing back 1.9
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:36:45 John Collison dismisses public market discipline
John forcefully calls the conventional venture argument that public markets enforce corporate discipline 'hogwash', explicitly dismissing the idea that 25-year-old financial analysts are necessary to run a company well.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 7:49 Chamath pushes on Visa and Mastercard duopolyChamath directly confronts the guests on when Visa and Mastercard can be disrupted, asking for the specific set of boundary conditions under which those incumbents can be dismantled.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 1:03:51 Patrick explains EVO 2 biology model capabilitiesPatrick educates the hosts on how EVO 2 learned deep biological structures across 9 trillion base pair tokens, enabling it to accurately predict human BRCA gene mutation pathogenicity despite seeing only one non-mutated human genome in training.
The host holds their own ▶ 1:15:49 Friedberg details banana clone vulnerabilities and genomic solutionsFriedberg demonstrates extensive scientific expertise by explaining how commercial bananas derive from a single clone susceptible to fungal attacks, and how Ohalo uses targeted gene silencing to introduce disease resistance.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcoming Stripe Co-Founders Patrick and John Collison | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Chamath warmly welcomes John and Patrick Collison while self-deprecatingly recalling how he missed out on investing in their first startup 18 years ago. John politely fills in details about their cramped two-bedroom San Francisco apartment workspace. | |
| The All-In Podcast Animated Intro Title Sequence | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Jason summarizes Stripe as a startup payment processor, but John gently fact-checks him by highlighting that major global enterprises like Amazon, Hertz, and Ford run on Stripe. Patrick clarifies the math around processing over $1 trillion in annual volume across global GDP. | |
| Stablecoins, Financial Infrastructure, and Anti-Fraud Reputation Networks | 5 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Chamath presses the Collisons on when stablecoins might break the Visa-Mastercard duopoly. Patrick reframes credit card interchange economics, explaining that most fees go to consumer credit and rewards, while identifying cross-border money movement and fraud reduction as stablecoins' primary value driver. | |
| Jamie Dimon on Remote Work and Silicon Valley Leadership Trends | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | After listening to Jamie Dimon's rant on remote work, the hosts and guests explore workplace trends. Patrick pushes back against rigid 'flat shoulds' regarding office mandates, citing a 20 percent US labor productivity surge and highlighting how remote work solves two-body career problems. | |
| Department of Defense DOGE Budget Cuts and Drone Technology | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 | The panel discusses proposed Department of Defense budget cuts. Chamath details how defense spending must move downstream from AI and autonomous drone technology, while Friedberg analyzes a shift toward a multipolar strategic posture. | |
| Javier Milei's Memecoin Launch and Crypto Controversy | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | The hosts and guests condemn Javier Milei's promotion of the collapsed $LIBRA memecoin. Chamath explains the mechanics of liquidity snipers while Jason delivers an impassioned speech on ethical leadership standards. | |
| Political Discourse, The West Wing, and Clinton-Era Governance | 4 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Friedberg praises 'The West Wing' as an ideal for substantive political debate, but Patrick challenges his nostalgia by noting the show's single worldview and questioning whether the 1990s Clinton era was truly a period of genuine ideological debate. | |
| ARC Institute and the EVO 2 Biology Foundation Model | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Patrick educates the hosts on the ARC Institute and their release of EVO 2, a 9-trillion token biological foundation model. He explains how the model predicts human BRCA gene mutation pathogenicity despite having seen only a single human genome in training. | |
| Agricultural Biotechnology, Tree Dieback, and Crop Innovations | 8 | 3 | 1 | 1 | John asks about widespread tree species dieback, prompting Friedberg to showcase deep domain knowledge on plant genomics, Ohalo's gene silencing techniques, and the extreme fungal vulnerability of Cavendish banana monocultures. | |
| Grok 3, xAI's Colossus Data Center, and the American Keiretsu | 8 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Chamath delivers an in-depth analysis of xAI's Colossus data center, outlining key insights on compute cluster scaling gains, time-constrained engineering, and cross-company 'American Keiretsu' collaboration. | |
| Henry Kaiser and Historical Parallels to Modern Entrepreneurship | 5 | 5 | 1 | 2 | John and Patrick draw historical parallels between Elon Musk and 20th-century industrialist Henry Kaiser. Patrick reads excerpts illustrating Kaiser's relentless drive for speed, cost discipline, and convention-defying execution. | |
| Asteroid Threat Assessment and AI in Planetary Defense | 7 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Friedberg breaks down trajectory data and yield probabilities for a approaching asteroid. John enriches the analysis by citing details from the 1908 Tunguska airburst event in Russia. | |
| Why Stripe Chooses to Remain Private Over Going Public | 5 | 6 | 4 | 3 | The hosts query Stripe's decision to stay private. John strongly rejects conventional venture wisdom that public markets are required for corporate discipline, labeling the idea 'hogwash' and noting that major financial institutions often stay private for decades. |
Statements from this episode (30)
John Collison: Stripe processes over $1 trillion in annual transaction volume
“It's more than a trillion dollars a year.”
Patrick Collison: Credit card programs are not major bank profit pools
“Card programs are not actually big profit pools for most of the major banks.”
Patrick Collison says companies lose 1% to 3% revenue to AP/AR
“If you look at most companies, they're losing one, two, three percent of revenue to AP and AR.”
Patrick Collison says Stripe Billing reached $500 million ARR
“Stripe Billing, which we actually just announced last week has passed, you know, half a billion in, in ARR.”
John Collison: Stripe has previously seen 93% of processed credit cards
“When someone comes and buys something from a Stripe user, 93% of the time, we have seen that card before.”
Patrick Collison: Stablecoins will probably become the common payment rail
“I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's going to supplant all the consumer-facing networks. I think we're going to see consumer-facing networks It's built upon and that, you know, substantiall…”
Patrick Collison: Stripe fraud metrics dropped 80% over past two years
“Various fraud metrics across the industry and the ecosystem are way up over the last couple of years. And Stripe's actually down by 80%”
Chamath: Off-the-shelf software promotes corporate bureaucracy and bloat
“And so I think that the reason why things have become so bureaucratic and bloated is that there is just this propensity to run towards software because you think it's a solution. At best, it's a symptomatic aid. It doesn't address the root cause, and in fact, …”
John Collison: Remote work hurts early-career productivity, according to Stripe data
“The thing that we have seen, and interestingly, we measured this before COVID, because we were doing a lot of remote hiring, and we wanted to see how much we should lean into it, is that it is not good for early career people. We can actually measure it in our…”
Patrick Collison: US labor productivity has risen 20% in 10 years
“Libra productivity in the US is up, like, 20% in the last 10 years, and so just like, again, you just look at the data, just the median person in the economy, or the average person, is is producing 20% on an inflation-adjusted basis, more than they were 10 yea…”
Friedberg: China's factories can output millions of drones monthly
“China now has drone factories that can output millions of drones each month.”
Patrick Collison: Proposed DoD cuts match magnitude of 2010–2025 spending changes
“As far as I can tell, the cuts proposed Over the next couple of years for the Defense Department are of approximately the same magnitude as the reduction in the defense budget that occurred between 2010 and today”
Calacanis: Javier Milei is an absolute failure and his leadership is abhorrent
“And the way you should judge people, I think, is what they do when they're given a lot of power and what they do when they make mistakes. Millet is a failure on all of those fronts. It's absolutely abhorrent.”
Patrick Collison: US federal spending dropped five percentage points of GDP under Clinton
“I think federal spending fell by five points of GDP over the course of the Clinton presidency, which is really not a small amount, you know?”
Calacanis: US wasted surplus years by adding $16 trillion in debt
“And the last two administrations and you look at California, there were massive windows of surplus and there were massive windows of a surging stock market over the last eight years. And we plundered and we wasted them by adding 16 trillion to the debt during …”
Patrick Collison: 79% of surveyed top scientists would alter research without NIH grants
“We ran a survey of scientists back a couple of years ago of top scientists, and four out of five, like, 79% of them told us That if they could just spend money however they wanted, if they weren't kind of limited by, you know, what they're prescribed by these …”
Patrick Collison: Arc Institute's Evo 2 is the largest biology ML model ever
“Yesterday, AHRQ released this new foundation model for biology. It's the largest biology ML model ever. It's actually, I think the largest open source AI model ever.”
Patrick Collison: Evo 2 achieves state-of-the-art human mutation prediction from one human genome
“It's trained on nine trillion base pair gene tokens. So, you know ChatGBT, LLMs are normally trained on, on, you know, the, on, on human language. This is a language model, but it's trained on, on DNA, the language of life. And there's only one human genome in…”
Patrick Collison: Arc Institute spends around $100 million annually
“So ARK spends around, ah, a hundred million a year. And it started about, ah, three years ago.”
Patrick Collison: Powerful biological AI models will require phenotypic data
“There's a certain amount you can probably derive sort of, you know, from first principles just by looking at genomes, but I think the really powerful models are going to need to do exactly what you say, and to feed in a lot of ancillary, phenotypic, and just k…”
Friedberg: All commercial bananas stem from one clone, Dwarf Cavendish
“All the world's banana that we grow commercially comes from one original banana clone called dwarf Cavendish.”
Friedberg: 60 cents of every dollar spent producing bananas goes to fungicide
“And so, 60 cents of every dollar we spend on bananas today goes towards fungicide.”
Chamath: xAI bought one-third of US portable liquid cooling capacity
“They bought one third of all the portable liquid cooling capacity in America. And located it on-prem.”
Patrick Collison: Henry Kaiser expanded Richmond shipyards from zero to 100,000 workers in one year
“When he had the ship, the shipbuilding yards here, he went from zero to a 100,000 people in Richmond in one year.”
Calacanis: Grok 3 has eclipsed Gemini, DeepSeek, Claude, and ChatGPT-4o
“Grok III has now eclipsed Gemini, which is Google's LLM, and DeepSeq from China, Quad, and ChatGPT-IVO.”
Chamath: Grok 3 proves cluster scaling in pre-training still yields superior outcomes
“He basically proved that there was still value in pre-training where size actually led to better outcomes.”
Friedberg: NASA lowers Asteroid 2024 YR4 Earth impact probability to 0.33%
“NASA just dropped the probability of an impact event to about a one-third of one percent.”
John Collison calls the public market corporate discipline argument 'hogwash'
“People generally make the argument that it is critical for discipline to be public and public companies run in a more disciplined fashion. And I think that's hogwash. Like if you need a 25 year old fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your capex, bla…”