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All In Podcast Episode 238 Recap and Notes August 9 2025

August 9 2025

  • Jason shilling stuff again
  • No Chamath and Sacks
  • Gavin Baker joins the show
  • Ben Shapiro joins the show - has new book coming out
  • Phil Deutch
    • NGP energy partners - debut on the show
  • All in Summit 2025 line up is all star!!!
  • GPT-5 release
    • Underwhelms

    • 2 open weight models also

    • (Friedberg thinks Star Wars is anti tech and anti progress)

    • First time that a new OpenAI model that is not clearly the best

    • The model is able to figure out what kind of task is being asked for

      • The focus was more on the user experience therefore and less on model performance
    • Excellent product company

  • AI total addressable market
    • Questions about ROIC (return on invested capital)
    • We might not be ahead of demand - if anything we’re still behind demand
    • Dotcom era was a telecom bubble
    • The huge focus on energy is because of AI - its giving legs to the push for energy
    • Anthropic said we need 50GW of power for AI by 2028
      • That’s 5% of total US energy production
      • This is how much US adds per year
  • China has advantages
    • China was adding power - but they are adding most in solar, hydro and nuclear

      • They are relying on others for natural gas and coal
    • If US cares about this slide - they would do things differently in the 1BBB

    • Luckin coffee NYC socialists tiktok, etc is backwards

    • BYD, Luckin, TikTok, etc is a strategy by the Chinese to overtake American capitalists

    • China tweaks up and down its private market investment etc

    • China needs to release entrepreneurship again - their climb out of poverty was built on the backs of Chinese people

    • Apparently Deepseek has CCP minders in every meeting, etc

    • Capitalism is the rule of law with economies

  • Political windvanes
    • Hard to be an investor in the US with both administrations picking winners (renewables, rare earths, etc)
    • Is the imperial president trend happening because congress is not doing its job?
    • This goes back to early 20th century where Federal government grew so much and had so much cash that congressmen decided to pass giant omnibus bills and pass their responsibilities to the bureaucrats who can take the heat and they can go back to their constituents and boast about how much money they raised - so this is an abdication of responsibility by our elected constituents
    • So this might lead to state governments to become more powerful because the Federal government is useless
  • Socialism will sweep over the nation
    • Need to invest in clean energy

    • If market crashes then folks will want socialism even more - Zohran might help that trend

    • The solution is never to reduce the government’s role - the solution is always to increase the government’s role - its uni-directional - this isn’t a binary switch flip - it happens over time

    • People are not moving now - this is sad

      • So where is the entrepreneurial spirit? American dream was to move and start from scratch
    • New generation needs help with housing

  • Tariffs
    • $30B revenue in July
    • $125B in 2025 so far
    • US trade deficit lowest since June 2023 (now $60B recently)
    • Too early to be triumphant about the policy
    • Not sure how pulling back from globalization helps the US
    • Trump seems to have a zero sum mindset instead of a grow the pie mindset about economic policy and tariffs, etc
    • Might be better to not do tariffs - lower taxes and deregulation itself would have been enough
    • (Phil is admitted die hard democrat)
    • Business, capitalism, economic growth enjoys stability - Trump dominating headlines is not good for that
    • If things don’t work out - Vance, Rubio won’t win - we might get socialism
    • Tariffs were a traditionally democratic policy - Clinton and Obama ran on them but didn’t do it
    • Reciprocity or abusing comparative advantage?
  • Nvidia chip smuggling case
    • 2 folks charged recently in a new case
    • Overall seems like $1BN in nvidia hardware has been smuggled to China
    • You can’t stop this - its too valuable
  • Apple
    • Insane share buy back over the last decade

    • Insane strategy - could they have invested in R&D instead?

    • They are very comfortable being late to markets

    • Their AI products are terrible

    • Incompetence is indistinguishable from malice at the limit

    • Meta’s rayban glasses are cool - can Apple do better?

    • Maybe Apple Home?

    • Fleet of electric vehicles are a great mobile power source

  • Summer reading recommendations
    • TV shows
      • Department Q, Netflix (Ben)
      • The Penguin (Phil)
      • 1923 second season (Gavin)
      • Dope Thief (Phil)
    • Movies
      • Superman (Phil)
      • F1 (Phil)
    • Books
      • Moonfall series (Gavin)
      • Project Hail Mary Andy Weir (Friedberg)
      • Elon Musk bio by Isaacson (Phil)
      • Making of King James Bible (Phil)
      • Monocle.com magazine (Jason)
      • All about me by Mel Brooks (Jason)
      • Who knew by Barry Diller (Jason)
      • Comedy Samurai by Larry Charles (Jason)
      • I regret almost everything by Keith McNally (Jason)

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