Software Stocks Implode, Claude's Hit List, State of the Union Reactions, Trump's Tariff Pivot
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Joking intro about conspiracy corner episode covering 9/11 inside job, Flat Earth, JFK assassination, with guest Alex Jones. Previous episode got 9 views. Michael Tracy has his own YouTube channel as an escape hatch. Band members doing solo projects like Freebird, Beatles experimenting, Yoko Ono situation. Number one topic selected by All In AI bot: Dario vs. headset, Department of War vs. Anthropic. Decision on that topic end of day Friday, to be discussed next week.
Anthropic's generational run: three for three in tanking market sectors in February. February 3, Anthropic announces legal plugin for Claude: CoWork. Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, LegalZoom all down at least 10% since February 3. February 20, Claude Code Security announced in limited research preview: stocks tank again, CrowdStrike, Okta down. February 23, Anthropic announces Claude can modernize COBOL databases. COBOL is oldest coding language, used for banking, payroll, government, healthcare; runs 95% of ATMs in US, powers Social Security payments. 85% of COBOL code runs on IBM machines. IBM tanks 13% on Monday, worst day since 2023, $31 billion market cap loss.
Two explanations: tactical and strategic. Tactical: short money hedge funds degrossing, trimming positions, taking less risk, creating general downward pressure. Strategic: market shifted from 'when' debate (when cash flows impacted) to 'if' mode (if cash flows durable at all, could fall off cliff due to AI). Translates to lower P/E multiples (20x PE = 5% yield), lower revenue multiples, higher WACC (from 6% to 12-13%). Holders want massive margin of safety: PEs from 40 to 20, 20 to 10; revenue multiples from 10x to 3x. Implication: eats into cash flows tied to stock-based comp, affects tech talent recruitment/retention. Moved from 'when' to 'if'—smart question; companies may survive but duration unclear, need room to be wrong.
Substack post fanfiction set in fictional 2028 global intelligence crisis: 28 million views on X, posted Sunday night. Scenario: companies embrace AI, cut staff, margins up (like Amazon trimming white-collar staff), then lose customer base as consumers lack discretionary spending, death spiral—companies deploy more AI to cut staff, economy collapses. Dr. Doom level: unemployment 10%, S&P down from highs. Speculates AI agents eliminate 3% interchange fees, settle on stablecoins—financial stocks hit Monday: Amex -8%, Capital One -8%, Mastercard -6%, Visa -4%.
Citrini article passed around widely; authorship amended to include co-author from $262M SEC-registered hedge fund short positions in mentioned companies. Questions if truly viral or amplified by authors. Best response by Derek Thompson referencing William Goldman: no one knows AI's future in 2 years, let alone 20—science fiction masquerading as analysis. AI conversation is marketplace of competing science fiction narratives; high uncertainty, paltry real-time macro data—more literary than analytical. Prediction market: 12% believe Citrini scenario. Dueling narratives: AI abundance (Derek Thompson with Ezra Klein). Market whacked because nobody knows—if 5% on gov bonds, why excessive risk?
SaaS used to be predictable: experimentation, category leader captures share/market cap, metrics like ARR, net dollar retention (e.g., 120%—renew + upsell seats/products), RPO. Bought at 13x ARR as growth annuity. Now AI disrupts: could eat growth (not eliminate Salesforce), change pricing—unknowns create uncertainty.
AI drives productivity/leverage on human time/capital. Humans desire ~10% annual livelihood improvement (income/purchasing power) to be happy. Lower limit on consumptive capacity. New question: upper limit due to AI productivity shift? Historically, new tools lower costs, more access. Now productivity may exceed consumption capacity—breaks economic/productivity/social models. SaaS may be transitory (internet to AI era); knowledge work transitory (computing to AI). If productivity 100x, enough consumers? No limit to productivity.
Anthropic job listing: software engineer at $570K. Citadel Securities report rebuts Citrini: software engineer job postings up ~10% YoY; company formation expanding (AI eases starting businesses). Aaron Levy: Jevons' paradox—lower cost of supply-constrained thing (software engineering) increases demand. Chronic shortage even in Silicon Valley startups, worse in Fortune 500. Now 10x/100x productivity spreads 10x engineers economy-wide. Fortune 500 cost structure: 5% IT (all IT). Elon: companies as cybernetic organisms (software + human)—should be 50% software. Expect OpEx % of revenue to fall, but tech allocation within OpEx way up. Jason: Launch applicants are AI-first companies rebuilding traditional SaaS cheaply (e.g., best pilot, Waymo driver, best SDR/salesperson/exec coach).
Trained 15/20 firm people over 6-7 hours on OpenClaude agents (not developers, knowledge workers). Building software never done in 10 years, now in 30 days. Example: agent checks top 100 podcasts transcripts for advertisers, checks Pipedrive for last contact, puts into sales room—replaces SDR job/software. Redeploying human (still exists, now more consistent/accurate, runs all night). 7 such agents. Ultron root agent accesses Gmail/Calendar/Zoom/Notion/Slack: generates weekly reports for managers (emails sent, meetings, contacts, threads), helps manage people. Despite doomerism, growing productivity (10-20% more, 10% more efficient weekly via software would have paid for), not adding people.
The people we have are becoming 10% or 20% more productive. They're becoming 10% more efficient every week because the software we would have paid for or built from another vendor if we had the time or we wanted to build custom software—we had 10 engineers—it's being built by our open-claw agents. As an example, when we make clips for this podcast, other podcasts, we have it go and look at a This Week in Startups episode from 10 years, tell us the three best moments, and it makes the clip. It puts the subtitles on it, and then it puts the clip into the Slack room. That was something that was going to be a full-time job.
We're getting 10%, 20% more efficient. Then I started doing it at home, so I had our Instacart, pull out the last 10 orders we did, and then tell us what we order most of the time, and then it's going to automatically build a cart for us. Every single knowledge work job is being automated right now, and you can take it, and if you're a business process head where you know how to do a business process and you can structure it and write it with an agent, it'll just run it every day, every week.
We did another agent. How do you make better thumbnails? We said every Saturday in your skills, so when you build an open cloud, it has a sole file and it has a skills file. In the skills file, we told it, Sachs, every week, go out and look for people discussing how to make better thumbnails on YouTube, how to make better titles. It found this week, Chamath, somebody at MrBeast company talk about how they're using heatmaps. It was an article I would have never known. It added it to its skill, and now whenever we post a thumbnail, it tells us, based on its skill, that it refines every week how to make that thumbnail better, and it's starting to make the thumbnails.
This is becoming recursive, so you keep the same number of people, but they get 10% or 20% more efficient. I don't know what this means for the larger economy. All I know is it's the most exciting time I've had online since the web came out, since the internet came out. It is so much fun to automate all this stuff.
Implications for Businesses and Economy
All these businesses are going to need to batten down the hatches and give themselves room to figure this all out. If you take Sachs' point, if you take your point, J. Cal, which is the young, nimble companies like yours are going to be rapidly experimenting, the bigger, larger companies are going to slowly onboard themselves to start experimenting, all of that means we're going to get much clearer answers to all of that. What it also means is that you're going to have to have time so that you can figure this all out. If you want to buy yourself time, you're going to need a ton of cash.
If you're going to think about saving cash, the one place tech companies literally incinerate cash is how they do compensation. I kind of think at some point, the next shoe will drop, and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock-based comp. Because they literally incinerate most, if not all, of their free cash flow, fighting the dilution from stock-based compensation. If you want five or six years to just be in the arena, on the field, figuring this out, you're going to want to be very cash flow generative and really conservative in how you spend your money.
The people who embrace this, I think, become five or 10 times more valuable than the people who are not. That's where I think the opportunity in the economy is. Unless you think humanity is going to run out of problems to solve, I think it's going to be boom. It's going to be boomtown. And I think people are going to start more companies, because the barrier to start a company is no longer $3 or 4 million. You can just have two or three people, and you start setting up these agents, and man, you can make software, you can do sales, you can do PR. Everything is getting faster and faster and faster.
The time between conceiving of a product and publishing it and finding a developer, you don't even need a developer. You can just publish software. The wake-up moment for me was... We were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack. And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered Matterpost? I'm like, what's Matterpost? It's like, oh, it's an open-source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance, and put it there. And I was like, oh, don't do that. We're only spending $6K a year on Slack or $10K a year.
The software is building CRM systems for us, it's building agents for us, and it wants to just build all the software stack. So you could... When you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you are working with, you're going to be able to say to them, hey, we could roll our own. And when you want to upsell us on this latest thing, like you talked about, Zach, upselling is such a big part of SaaS, you're like, I can actually build that software myself internally. I don't need you to do it.
Ryan Peterson just posts on X, Claude for legal seems to work just as well as Harvey, by the way. Now it's... The SaaS...
For a while now, there has been a question of which layer of the stack is going to capture all the value. So is it going to be the model companies? Or could it be the applications that are built on top of the models? Or if there's a lot of competition at both those layers of the stack, do the chip companies get it all? I think it's an unclear question. But yeah, I think for any given vertical application, you do have to defend why you think your value prop will be sustainable, as the underlying foundation models just get better themselves. And it's open source, like this week, we put up Kimmy 2.5 can do about 80-85% of the jobs. So we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up.
A lot of these debates about AI are dueling science fiction narratives, I just think that the Doomer narratives are inherently more appealing to people. Most sci-fi movies are dystopian, not utopian. We have a bunch of heuristic biases in favor of the Doomer narrative.
- Seen vs. unseen: It's a lot easier to see the jobs that already exist that could be obsoleted than it is to imagine the new jobs and the new business models that haven't been created yet. That will likely take some great innovator or a genius to think of in order to create. It takes way less creativity to think about the destruction.
- Fixed pie fallacy: Most people do tend to think of the economy as a fixed pie. This is why you see so much anger against millionaires and billionaires is because of this idea that if someone's getting rich, it must be at the expense of someone else. That's not actually the case, the economy itself could be growing larger, as a result of someone inventing something new, that increases production.
The economy is not a pie, it's a garden, and technology is rain.
All of this technological innovation is going to increase the growth rate of the garden, it's not a fixed pie. And just because you see an expansion in productivity of the economy does not mean that you're going to see job loss in another part of the economy.
The job people are not seeing, but I'm seeing right now is the person who creates agents manages them, and is the maestro of the agents, the person who can take the business process, explain it, and train the agent to do it. And there are certain people in business who are just really good at operations, you were one of them sacks running companies. And like that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent, and figure out how to manage them. And figure out how to increase your look with any new technology job.
It's not a developer. With any new technology, there's always a huge change management aspect with enterprises, because it's hard for them to adapt and change. And the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones who are going to create an amazing career opportunity for themselves. But it's hard to do. And that's going to slow down the rate of change, just the amount of inertia in the economy.
Infrastructure Constraints
One other constraint is going to be that at some point here, we may be token constrained, right? We may not have enough energy, like we've talked about, even though the chips are getting so much better that tokens per second, tokens per watt, and tokens per dollar are all increasing very fast, but we're still going to probably be constrained in the next couple of years, on some dimension, whether it's land power shell, or just energy production, or maybe chip production, there are real world constraints on just how fast we can scale the infrastructure. And that will mean that these like, hyper utopian or hyper dystopian narratives will be wrong. I don't think there's time in the next few years for the whole economy to change in the way that the extremes would present.
You're going to see a 10x in the demand for tokens. But I also think you're going to see a 90% price reduction in the cost of an output token probably by the end of this year. So it's going to just create an enormous upswing. It's going to create an enormous upswing in the cost of the future of all of demand, because we're going to be able to cut the prices of an output token so dramatically.
That discussion we had some off last week, when we talked about cup, the tokens outpacing the employees salary, and just where these tokens are going to come from, that was our most viewed clip or one of the most viewed clips in the history of this podcast. People are really focused on this. I had my team at 89, we did our cost model. And now we have that as a line item, when we think about fully burdened cost of employees, we now factor that in, because we're at a place where some of our engineers are just racking up ginormous bills. And then separately, just general runs that we do, for general purpose stuff that we need to just run our product is it's so expensive.
I am waiting with bated breath for what Zach said, which is like, we need an explosion in the capacity that's available, because I do think that the facility is going to be a lot more expensive than the actual cost. Rumors the new Mac Studio is coming we'll have an M5 chip in it and we'll be language model ready so that's the rumors that they're building it for models so that could be an incredible turn of events everybody's desktop running the local model.
Political forces want to stop the construction of all data centers in the United States so it's crazy if that gains steam then that's going to be a huge constraint on any change whatsoever.
I went back this weekend and I looked at the number of data centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns and I posted it on X. It was really a very small behavior which was pushing back on data centers and getting them canceled we had a 25 projects total of which 20 were just in Q2 alone there are a hundred data center projects right now that are facing some form of local opposition.
If you take that 40 number and you multiply it by the number of megawatts that they have announced last year we lost almost five gigawatts in terms of cancel projects this year coming in 2026 we have about seven that could be canceled if you use this map if then you flow that through OpenAI Sarah Fryer said this that every gigawatt for her for OpenAI is about $10 billion of revenue so if you assume that that's roughly accurate plus or minus a billion here or there what that means is that 2025 the industry as a whole lost $50 billion of revenue and this year if seven gigawatts gets canceled it's about $70 billion now you're talking about $130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that'll go forward in time that we miss out on.
We need to figure out a way to nip this in the bud. Confounding because we were sitting here five years ago 10 years ago local municipalities were fighting and giving discounts to try to get these data centers open to get the jobs and get the revenue and now we've got people trying to stop them.
All In is going to host two events in 2026. One of them Liquidity May 31st to June 3, in Yonville, up in wine country, Chamath has taken control of the event. And he has set a standard for who gets on stage, none of you mids can control the programming.
Who do you got so far? Dan Loeb, who founded Third Point, who is an unbelievable investor in literally every domain, private credit, public equities, private tech. He's just a beast. So he'll be doing a really important keynote. He has not done one of these public speaking slots in a very long time. And then the second is the CFO of OpenAI Sarah Fryer. Unbelievable star. And we're gonna double click into the entire business model of OpenAI on stage in front of everybody. Go to allin.com.
For those of you who plan ahead for travel, more coming more coming every week. If you are an All In Summit fan, we're going to be in our fifth year, September 13 to 15.
Bill Gurley Book Plug
Plug to friend of the pod Bill Gurley? He's got an amazing new book Running Down a Dream. Buy three copies. Give it to two young people and a parent. This book is incredible. It's inspiring for kids. And Bill Gurley, friend of the pod. He always shows up for us.
One of the big topics, and I think something you're working on with President Trump's acts is this energy pledge. Explain what's going on in terms of getting the country in sync around these data centers and energy.
The president announced in the State of the Union last night that he supports a ratepayer protection pledge. Which requires the major tech companies to provide for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not see their rates going up. This makes total sense. To your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices are going to go up and that shouldn't be the case.
The president said that he's committed to not allowing residential rates to go up as a result of data centers. Get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers to pay for the increase in the electricity costs, or you let them set up their own power behind the meter. The president's been talking about this for over a year, that our biggest AI companies would also become big power companies because we had let them stand up their own power generation behind the meter. So these data centers don't even have to connect to the grid. They could just do co-location themselves.
With this ratepayer protection pledge, what you're going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices because when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid. Also, they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure. So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the cost to generate it are not all variable. There's a lot of huge fixed costs in there. So when you increase scale, then you can actually increase the cost of the grid. And that's how you reduce the metered rate.
This is really the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders, who just wants to stop all progress whatsoever. BANANAs is replacing the new NIMBY, build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. The president's approach finds a very good balance here, which is, look, we can have progress. Just don't make residential consumers pay for it. Let the big tech companies pay for it. You'll see more coming out about this from the White House next week.
Data Center Buildout and Global Competition
How should America be thinking about this great data center build out energy usage if you expand it out over the coming decade? And how do you sell that to the backdrop that you talk about, the socialist movement?
The data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of light, so you could put them anywhere. Our policymakers need to be very cognizant of that fact. We do connect the internet using high-speed cable, high-speed fiber optic throughout the world. And so theoretically, if we don't embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry, and it will fundamentally be an industry because it is almost like the new sort of oil, where are the oil rigs going to go? Where are the railroads going to go? Where are the telegraph lines going to go? Where are the factories going to go?
If we don't put them here, someone else will put them on their shores, someone else will put them in their country, someone else will put them in their jurisdiction. A lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of the second and third order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere.
Data centers do not take up a lot of space. They're very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the data centers in the world fit under the tip of a pin. And so this is a very small footprint. If we're going to give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value creation, we're being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the world.
I would just encourage the system that provided data centers are producing their own electricity, that means that you're taking electricity consumption off the grid, because they otherwise are not being used on the grid. And that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. It's silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on data centers. As soon as you do that, the companies are going to have to pay for it. Data centers are not going to slow down. They're going to go put them somewhere else, and we're going to miss out.
Chamath, you were recently in the Middle East, and I've been there a bunch in Saudi, UAE. These are the folks who built a large portion of those oil refineries, and they are savvy to this. And what are they doing in Saudi, UAE, Qatar, all of these regions? They're doubling down, they're 10xing their data center bills. Either we build them, or they're going to go somewhere else, and there are people who are willing to underwrite these, and they're willing to take out the red tape from the process here and move quicker than us.
This is a pretty deft move by President Trump to say, hey, you guys should all just guarantee that consumers don't get impacted. The water thing is a total hoax. The water is recirculated. That's a hoax.
Utility Business Model Risks
What the president is doing and what Sachs is doing is really smart. The thing to keep in mind is that there's still a risk that prices go up, and it has nothing to do with these data centers, and it has everything to do with the business model of being a utility. Because what happens is in order to get a license, a monopoly license in an area to provide energy, to generate energy for a community, the exchange works in the following way. You go and you present a capex plan to the Public Utilities Commission. That's effectively your budget. That says, here are the lines I'm going to upgrade. Here are the generators I'm going to upgrade.
Independent of data centers, the reality is the draw, the electricity consumption of individual Americans is going up because we have more devices, we have cars, we have all of these other things. What we also have to do is we have to look at how utilities' business model actually incentivizes them to increase prices by making all kinds of investments. We have to do a good job of making sure we hold everybody accountable because otherwise what you could see is that the data centers taking on the burden for themselves, but prices still continuing to escalate because a utility says, I need to spend a billion dollars this year to upgrade my infrastructure, and what that allows them to do is take that billion dollars and essentially invest it for a return. That's the business model of utility. This is really happening in blue states.
Micron has a $100 billion mega fab in New York, and there's a lawsuit by six concerned citizens. That's shameful. The project has taken 1,200 days between their announcement and the groundbreaking, and they spent 612 days on the environmental impact study. People, wake up, just go to Texas. Elon built his factory here, the Gigafactory, in under 18 months. This is the great state of Texas. Come here. We'll build it for you, and you'll be done. I don't know why anyone bothers with the blue states anymore. They may not even care about the blue states anymore. It's too hard to build.
A lot of people in New York want to work. The new fab is popular; majority in the area want the plant built for the jobs. Chip fabs create many high-paying jobs, unlike data centers. Six people can stop it with a lawsuit after a two-year environmental review. Not blue vs. red states; nonprofits create chaos. Example: massive lithium investment in Nevada to domesticate production halted by lawsuit to protect greater sage-grouse. Environmental nonprofits create chaos with no risk, fundraising around it. Greenpeace sued for $350 million damages by North Dakota judge for oil pipeline protests. Six people should not slow $100 billion investment.
There's emotion driving aversion to big tech, wealth creation by select individuals/companies, economic growth not benefiting everyone. Left-behind emotion fuels opposition. Need mechanisms to connect people to value creation, make them owners/participants. Locals concerned about housing costs, worker exposure to toxic chemicals, pollution, air/water quality, greenhouse gases, energy use, wetland flooding—all mitigable.
State of the Union 108 minutes, longest in 60 years since tracking began. Theme: America at 250, strong, prosperous, respected. Trump took victory laps on inflation, jobs, border closure. Backdrop: approval rating from +11.7% first year to -14.3% (26-point swing); economy from +3.4 to -18.2; trade from +5.9% to -22.7%.
Favorite moments: Ilhan Omar/Rashida Tlaib death stare and screaming (un-American); call for law/order prioritizing American citizens (Democrats didn't stand); standing O for hockey team; shout-out to Brad Gerstner (double mention).
If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.
Pro-American, pro-reasonable immigration (90% of country agrees). Prioritize citizens, deport violent criminals, path to citizenship for long-term residents—consensus. Polarization prevents collaboration; dysfunctional government, no bipartisan work like under Clinton/Bush.
Democrats failed easy bipartisan tests: refused to applaud protecting Americans over illegals; grieving families of Americans murdered by criminal illegals (e.g., mother of Irena Zuritskaya); securing homeland/ending invasion of killers/rapists/gang members/traffickers; unifying against political violence (Charlie Kirk assassination mention); keeping violent criminals locked up; lower prescription drug prices. Speech effective: 2/3 CNN poll, 3/4 CBS viewers said highly effective. Trump laid out 80/20 or 90/10 issues where Americans agree, Democrats refused polite applause. Democrats now party of radicalism/extremism.
These people are crazy.
Trump said mournfully, wanting rationality to work together. Republicans didn't stand for Democrats in past SOTUs too—showmanship. Trump divider-in-chief, attacks/mocks, breaking politics. Need collaboration, listening, middle ground. Democrats lost by lacking common sense on border (90% issue). Elizabeth Warren stood for stopping Nancy Pelosi stock trading:
Insider trading act without delay.
Trump's best one-liner. Also stood for stopping Iran nuclear. Bipartisan moments possible, disproves pure polarization—Democrats agree on some issues.
On collaboration hope (e.g., ballooning deficit to $2.5T under Trump): both parties agree to keep money flowing, burn capital, add debt.
Yamanaka factors: four proteins discovered by Shinya Yamanaka (Nobel Prize) reverse cell age, reset epigenetic clock/markers on DNA (turn genes on/off) to youthful state. Led to companies.
Harvard's David Sinclair (controversial: overhyped, sold resveratrol company to GSK for $720M—didn't work; promotes supplements) co-founder of Life Biosciences. FDA agreement: first to treat humans with Yamanaka factors. Inject into eye vitreous fluid to affect retina, treat blindness from glaucoma/stroke-like diseases. Expect rejuvenation, vision restoration (works in animal models).
Delivery: DNA packaged in AAV virus into retinal cells; switchable via doxycycline antibiotic (turns production on/off). Phase 1 trials underway—first in human history. Over a dozen startups developing Yamanaka factors or alternatives to reverse aging via epigenome reset.
Mechanism: proteins reposition epigenetic markers to youthful configuration; cells/organs function young again. Damage often to epigenome, not DNA. Early stages (discovery 2006, now clinic). Potential: knees/joints (arthritis), skin (wrinkles gone in monkeys), hairlines.
SCOTUS 6-3 against Trump's IEEPA tariffs (Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch + 3 liberals)—biggest rebuke of executive policy in 91 years (since FDR's New Deal 1935). U Penn Wharton: $175B collected (50% of duties) might be refunded; 2,000 importers filed. Trump invoked 15% global tariff via Section 122, 1974 Trade Act (temporary 150-day for balance of payments).
Polymarket: 18% chance court forces refunds (spiked to 40% post-decision); 3% chance Congress passes tariffs by March 31.
Tariffs not going away. SCOTUS/Kavanaugh 70-page dissent: multiple legal bases remain. Section 122 buys 150 days for studies/agency reviews to invoke Section 301 (unfair foreign practices) or Section 338 (discrimination vs. U.S. commerce). Kavanaugh dissent roadmap for administration. Tariffs/favorable trade deals continue.
The court majority's opinion and concurrence said nothing about how the administration should refund tariff revenue already collected. If they expected the decision to end tariff policies altogether, they would have addressed that. Why refund hundreds of billions of dollars to importers when the US is trillions in debt? Predictions that tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy proved false. This will be a popular policy. The administration will figure out a different way to implement it. Future administrations, Republican or Democrat, will keep some version of the tariffs because they will be popular long-term.
Matthew Feeney: The experiment proved successful. It smoked out the right balance of trade between the US and partner countries. Most imbalances were not economically sensible for America but part of globalist drivel. This hollowed out manufacturing and the middle class. Tariffs will create more equality for the American worker. The debate now is how to implement them structurally and permanently.
Matthew Feeney: This ruling was expected, with many other mechanisms available. The president activated one immediately. Tariffs are not going away and should not. Congress should ratify them because it was the right thing to do. If not, the president has room to proceed. They make smart economic sense.
Jason Kuznicki: Freiburg, thoughts on the ruling? Does it give respect for the courts making a judgment not along party lines?
Matthew Feeney: Yes.
Jason Kuznicki: All Americans should feel assured that the Supreme Court is not highly partisan. Despite the president having politically aligned appointees, the court ruled against him. This shows the founders' system is working: the judicial branch adjudicates law against the executive. The debate on tariffs' economic effects, security, structural trade relationships is separate, but the court's nonpartisan read of the law is important and valuable.
Matthew Feeney: Great moment for the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful decision. Need to think about executive power, whether Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs. The founding fathers set up a beautiful system. Gridlock and working together is frustrating, but we don't want an executive that unilaterally rolls over other branches. Trump's going to lose the midterms, leading to more chaos. Start reconciliation: stop lawfare against each other and work together for Americans.
Tariffs were fundamentally important and working, though chaotic because business owners didn't know what to do. Trump implemented chaotically; Congress should have supported with tools, acknowledging trade imbalances and unfairness. Both sides should work together as one America to negotiate. Fight it out but find resolutions. Congress should approve all tariffs Trump did, not force refunds, set parameters for future ones like 2026, and be thoughtful.
Do you think Susan Rice will respect calls for comity and working together? No. She said Republicans and even tech companies working with the administration should expect prosecution. Democrats will pursue lawfare when back in charge, just as Trump went after Comey and Jerome Powell. Both sides do lawfare. Drop it, get rid of pardons, be a team. Vote for moderates who work together in midterms and moderate tickets in 2028. Chaos is not good.
Amazing episode of the All In Podcast. For David Sacks, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya. World's greatest moderator. See you next time. Let your winners ride. Rain man, David Sacks. Open source it to the fans and they've gone crazy with it. Love you. I'm the queen of Kinwa. We should all get a room and have one big huge. Sexual tension, need to release it. Need merch. I'm going all in.
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