March 13 2026
- Brad Gerstner in for Friedberg
- Brad got a shout out at the State of the Union
- Trump Accounts
- 100K accounts claimed per day so far
- Millions of kids got their accounts already
- More amazing announcements upcoming
- Iran War and fallout
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Oil prices are up
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New Ayatollah claims Strait of Hormuz will stay closed
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BG expects shorter duration of the impacts because Trump doesn’t care about democracy so much (Cheney like) as achieving the goals
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Chamath thinks this shouldn’t get worse
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Sacks also thinks war should end soon but more right leaning folks want the war to go much longer
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Iran could then escalate to hurting oil and gas infra of the rest of the middle east countries
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So open the strait but can’t refine oil?
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Also Desalination plants in the region are soft targets
- This would be catastrophic - would destroy the gulf states from a humanitarian perspective
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Israel is also getting hit badly - so it doesn’t help to prolong the war
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Escalation could lead to really frightening scenarios
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Important to seek an off ramp
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Polymarket is predicting US boots on the ground
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Jason thinks starting this war will sweep the Democrats into the midterms
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Chamath thinks this is being done to get a grand bargain done between Trump and Xi at the meeting coming up
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This is a massive problem for China, Asia and Gulf states if oil prices go up because America produces enough oil to take care of its needs
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The Chinese haven’t canceled the summit with the President and are not defending Iran
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20% of their oil consumption comes from Iran and Venezuela
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China can’t afford to get the 25% of youth male unemployment out of control - with oil prices rising
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- Anthropic and OpenAI are scaling revenue and costs faster than ever
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Anthropic $14B run rate ($1B → $14B in 14 months)
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OpenAI $2B → $20B in 24 months
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Anthropic had a $6B month - this is a split the atom moment
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Brad claims we have crossed a threshold with Opus 4.6 (and now GPT 5.4) - they are now augmenting labor - you don’t do this hitting just IT budgets
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These companies should go public because otherwise it would be destabilizing to normal people
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Chamath thinks we are overselling this
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Coding assistants is the number one use case - and software engineering is very scalable use case
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Not clear what the limit on this is
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So its not clear beyond coding what is really working here
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Maybe agents - that is also like code
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So the ability to buy code on metered basis (tokens vs people) is cool
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AI is very disruptive
- Will change society - disrupt demographics - certain people will be disadvantaged (who were advantaged) and vice versa
- If its not good to help the military build it - then what about other countries who will use it? You will lose both sides
- Just tokens as a service
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AI has very negative perception in the US - we need to fix this
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NY is going to outlaw medical advice from AI chatbots - this just hurts poor people the most
- Classic protectionism by medical industry
- Could be rational response if you see - the AI industry leaders are also scare mongering
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A lot of this anti AI sentiment could be fomented by EA plants in journalism outlets
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See how many data centers have been canceled
- This hurts revenue and tax collections
- These cancellations seems to be happening in Virginia, Indiana, etc - not in Texas
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Open source
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- Washington state millionaire tax
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Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz moved to Florida
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People making > $1M a year will pay an extra 9.9% tax
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Bezos already left in November 2023
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Schultz had virtue signaled in the past saying he should pay more taxes
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This is the result
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Hoover Institution study shows CA has already suffered
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Until you eliminate fraud you can’t raise taxes
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Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna proposed a national bill for 5% tax on billionaires - annually - so in 20 years they take all your money
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The Dems will definitely do this by 2028
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Newsom is also giving himself wiggle room to embrace this policy
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