The All-In Podcast

Freedom vs. Safety and the Future of Policing: Axon CEO Rick Smith joins Friedberg Thanks to our partners: @AppLovin (0:00) $AXON CEO @AxonRick joins @friedberg (2:39) History of TASER/Axon: brink of bankruptcy to IPO (9:05) Going public during the dot-com crash, selling to police, battling shorts and an SEC investigation, pivoting to software (20:47) Creating the police body cam, surveillance state concerns around Flock (35:25) Freedom vs safety, Skydio deal, Taser drone project controversy (45:24) Future of robotic systems and drones in policing Thanks to our partner for making this possible: Most advertisers have never heard of the platform with an $11B annual run rate in ad spend. AppLovin Ads. 1B+ daily active users, full-screen video ads watched for a median of 35 seconds, and businesses are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on it. Now open to everyone. Sign up at applovin.com/ALLIN

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Chamath: “I got it totally wrong. This election was a complete and total repudiation about the state of the economy. The economy is broken.” “What I don't think I understood clearly enough, and I think that this election has made it extremely clear, is that since COVID, we have moved past political ideology. And I want to say this again, I do not think Democrats or Republicans matter. That is my real takeaway after this election. There is a central bloc of people that vote on the prescient issues of our time. What are these people voting for? I think what they are shouting now, they were trying to signal, and now they are shouting, is a broad-based belief that the economy has completely decoupled from reality and is broken. The economic reality in America is broken. There is a small percentage of people, the four of us on this pod and all of our friends, who are the asset owners of America, and we have benefited in every weather condition. When rates were zero, we benefited because we were able to build our businesses with very cheap capital. When rates were high, we benefited because we had pricing power. And in every condition in between, we've all managed to continue to accumulate and grow assets, but we are few and far between. And then there's everybody else who are wage earners, and the structural capacity of the American economy to support and grow wage earners is broken. I don't think this has anything to do with socialism. I don't think the far left won particularly more than they were expected to. I don't think the far right won particularly more than was expected. This was a complete and total repudiation about the state of the economy. The economy is broken.”

David Sacks: Trump Can Save His Second Term by Ending the Iran War Sacks: “Your question was, ‘Can Trump fix this?’ I think absolutely.” Jason: “What's your top three things he can do to fix it?” Sacks: “Just get out of the war. That's my number one, my number two, and my number three. Because what will happen, the price of Brent crude will drop precipitously. On the day of the election, the price of Brent crude dropped 10%. Is that because something changed in the Strait of Hormuz? No. It's because the market started to price in the mere possibility that the war would end sooner, and we got a 10% cut in the price of Brent crude. It will go from $110 to $70 (per barrel) if this war ends. Gas prices will drop. Diesel will drop. The price of food will drop. And then the underlying strong economic growth, the GDP growth, and the employment picture, which are still robust, will come into focus. And I think that Trump's popularity will rebound and be back in the 40s. That's the thing we need to do. And if we don't do that, if the war continues, the Republicans will continue to bleed popularity.”

Episode is dropping Saturday, we recorded late this week!

Tim Dillon: “Jon Ossoff will be the next president.” “I don't think Americans are ideologues. A lot of Americans are pragmatic. What's selling to me is sort of an economically populist, culturally moderate Democrat. Somebody who's not annoyingly woke, somebody who's economically populist, socially moderate, which by the way, was Donald Trump. So that seems to be where a lot of the country is. I think Talarico's probably going to have a good night in Texas. Jon Ossoff will be the next president. I'm putting my money on it right here, Polymarket or whatever. He's the guy.”

Jason Calacanis Was Warning Trump About the Midterms: The Signs Were There January 2025, post-Inauguration “I was a ‘Never Trumper,’ and now I am rooting for him wholeheartedly to do great work.” “He has to stay with the 2.0 agenda, as hard as it is, and stay away from the Steve Bannon agenda and the grifting. Those are the things that will take this all apart. So that's my appeal to them.” March 2025, after Kristi Noem’s visit to a prison in El Salvador “I believe that there is a sadistic nature to this administration. It is an Achilles' heel for them. And when you see them doing videos from these prisons and saying, ‘This is going to happen to you,’ this is why they will lose the midterms if they continue to do this type of stuff.” October 2025, after Trump’s net approval hit a new low “It's not pretty for Trump right now. Liberation Day when he did the tariffs, then the LA protests, remember the violent protests, and the ICE agents chasing people down in fields, not releasing the Epstein files in July. They don't like the chaos. The Democrats are going to shellack the Republicans in the midterms if this continues.” November 2025, after inflation hit 3% in the September ‘25 print “Trump sold people that prices would go down. We're back up to 3% inflation, folks. Not only is it not going down, it's going up. Trump has failed the middle class. That's the bottom line here.” March 2026, after the US and Israel strike Iran, kicking off the war “This is kind of the end of Trump's second term, and if you were to put together the series of mistakes that he's made, they're really at the heart of why people voted for him. You take starting a war like this, specifically with Iran, that's what we were told was the reason to vote for President Trump. He was not going to take us down this path. If this continues for another six months, it's basically going to result in the Democrats doing a clean sweep in the midterms.” June 2026, after the Iran War exceeded initial timelines “It’s just a huge, colossal error starting this Iran War, and hopefully we can get out of it. We can't be in a forever war, obviously.” October 2026, on Midterm predictions “All I have to say is, Trump promised not to start a war, he did. He promised to solve inflation, he didn't. The end. And I think the Democrats sweep.”

Tim Dillon Explains the Democrat Sweep: “We have an economic war that's disguised as a culture war… Nobody wanted to go war with Iran... If people can't own a house, get married, have children, live, they're going to become radicalized in some way to some end of the political spectrum. That's obvious.” Chamath: “What is this? Is this a vote for Democrats? Is this a vote against Trump? Is it a vote against the cost of living? How do you interpret it?” Tim Dillon: “It's been said before, we have an economic war that's disguised as a culture war. I think people that don't have the confidence in their economic standing are attaching meaning to a lot of things culturally, where there is none. And I think it's a vote against the cost of living. I think it's a vote against, in some ways, the corruption that people see is inherent in the system right now, that Donald Trump won claiming that he was going to correct. I think it's a vote against what Donald Trump unfortunately has become, which is the system. The same people that elected Trump because they wanted cheaper gas, cheaper groceries, they didn't want to go to war with Iran. Nobody wanted that. 10 people wanted it, and they gave Trump a lot of money. I think it's a vote, a little bit, against people's circumstances, their economic circumstances. And that's why people vote, and that's why I think you're going to have a massive shift to the Democrats. If people can't own a house, get married, have children, live, they're going to become radicalized in some way to some end of the political spectrum. That's obvious. You're not talking only about the poor people, or the working poor, or even the working class. There's a lot of white collar college graduates that are voting for the DSA candidates because they're mired in debt, they don't own anything, and they don't feel like they ever will. And Trump was supposed to address those concerns, and if he doesn't, somebody else will.”

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Friedberg’s Bull Case: Everyone is Making Money in AI “I took a look at the AI value stack to try and identify who's making money where, and it turns out everyone's making money. So for every dollar of COGS, every dollar that Nvidia spends, that turns into $4 of revenue for Nvidia, 75% margin. And then that gets sold to SpaceX, and then SpaceX turns around and they're making an 83% margin on that chip spend because they're looking at a five-year depreciation, but then they're making $1.25B a month on Colossus. And then Anthropic is showing in this S1 that they're making about 85% incremental gross margin on every incremental dollar coming in. So at the end of the day, $1 that Nvidia spends turns into $18 that Anthropic is making selling to customers. And the question is, are customers making money? So if the customers are making, call it on the order of 2-10x the money they're spending, because otherwise there would probably be a retention issue and a decline in spend. Generally speaking, if AI is delivering value to the customers, I think this shows that there really is true productivity arising from AI. That across the whole value chain there is such margin to be had, there's so much value being created, that this really is what I think Eric Schmidt a long time ago in the early days of Google used to say, ‘Google's total addressable market is global commerce.’ And I think for the first time ever, we're seeing a business actually potentially starting to realize that theory that if you can create enough productivity gain for your customers, that your TAM is commerce. We're almost growing the equivalent of the human working population by 100x or 1000x or 1,000,000x with this technology stack.”

Jason Calacanis Identifies AI’s Biggest Opportunity: Adoption Is Still Nascent At Work “Gallup's been keeping a survey of who's using AI at work. The people using it frequently versus daily, we're still talking about 10 and 20% here. It's nascent. A lot of the top enterprises are not letting their employees use this in an unconstrained fashion, and they're certainly not letting them connect their email, their knowledge bases, their Notions, their Slacks. Big corporations are not letting people actually use the power of AI because they're scared about cyber. So once the cyber threat gets mitigated, this is gonna go from 10% of people being daily users to 60, 70, 80%. There's so much growth left here when every single employee has an agent. I saw just last week Uber bought ChatGPT for every employee. That's going to be the next shoe to drop, do you buy these things for every single employee?”

Chamath: The AI Boom Has a Borrowing Problem “The entire United States economy is levered to the AI complex. So very narrowly, we're talking about seven or eight companies that set the tone for the entire country. And whether we like it or not, that is where we are. Why do I say that? The most important companies in the world are in a massive spending binge, right? These were highly profitable, highly cash accretive, highly cash flow generative businesses that have said, ‘We're going to put the foot down on spending because we believe in what's coming into the future.’ That's what drives GDP and it's what drives growth. Now, as they do that though, they deplete their cash and they have to raise debt. The AI complex now owes $340-400 billion to the market. And you'd say, ‘Okay, why is that important?’ The problem is this: These companies are raising so much money it starts to crowd out the capital markets. And the most important part of the capital market that it starts to crowd out, is the appetite for government treasuries. And what you can see here is that when you look at these AI firms, the amount of money that they need to raise through the end of '27, it's 30% of all of what the Treasury's about to issue in that same period. So, whether we like it or not, they are going to start competing for demand.”