SpaceX IPO, Iran War Fallout, Quantum Bitcoin Hack, The Space Opportunity

David Sachs can make it this week, but we have the trio David Freeberg is here. Your Sultan of science to my point of apothea. SpaceX filed confidentially to go public on April 1st targeting a 1.75 trillion with the T valuation. When SpaceX goes public, if it's at that 1.75 trillion dollar valuation, so we're just a trillion dollar valuation for an IPO. They would be the eighth largest company in the world right behind TSMC and Saudi Iran go. They're both

worth 1.7x at the taping of this podcast. Tesla is number 10 with 1.37 trillion dollar valuation. Hey, if you were to combine those two, as many people are speculating, we'll happen at some point. And you can buy the stock tick or ELO. And that would be a three point one trillion dollar company. And that would make them the fourth largest company ahead of Microsoft. They're aiming to raise

2075 billion, which would be the by far the biggest raise ever in an IPO.

“Expect to do out in June. I think they're trying to hit the 420 date because that would have been”

even more hilarious, but they're not going to be able to do that. SpaceX recently acquired X.AI for $250 billion that includes X and Twitter and the X-A-I large language model AI company Starlink generating between 50 and 80% of SpaceX's revenue will have all those details shortly. And it'll be close to $20 billion a year according to reports. Launch of rockets is the other 40% of the business 5 billion in 2024 according to reports.

Total revenue, 2025, 15 to 16 billion with 8 billion in profit according to Reuters. So let's stop there. And we're going to talk about all the other IPOs that could be coming. I think people really want to know, and you may have mentioned this on an earlier episode, what are the chances that Tesla after if this IPO was well, that Tesla and SpaceX could wind up being the same company we saw, they're collaborating 100% on a fan. 100% is what you're

putting it on. Okay, sorry, let me, let me be clear. 99.99%. Okay. What do that mean? If those two companies or when those two companies merge one of the great things that happened in my career was there was a point where, you know, how like you grind at a level and then, you know, you just get exposed to things at a different level and then you grind for years and you get exposed to things at it yet another level. In one of those steps, I was very fortunate to be introduced

by Thomas LeFont actually to the head of Wachtell-Liptan, the law firm, law firm, and his name

“is Ed Hurley. And he said, this is the most important, well-known, well-run, powerful law firm in America.”

Then I looked at the transactions and they're just in the middle of everything. And now, you know, my lawyer, Raj Narayan, who does everything for me, one of the senior partners I walked out,

I can attest are incredible. And they said to me, in the middle of all of this stuff, when I was

doing a bunch of deals, they said, "Trump, just get ready to pay a tax." And I said, "What does that mean?" They said, "The way that the American capital markets are set up is both that you can be incredibly creative and do incredible things." But, and we talked about this a little bit last week, there's a bunch of torque that allows folks to hang around the hoop and get paid no matter what. You see this in all IPOs, shareholder lawsuits abound. And they try to create a class out of it.

And the reason they do that is that there's D&O insurance that then will pay out some number of millions of dollars. The attorneys take 40 or 50 percent and then these plaintiffs get a few bucks. You saw how egregious this torque manipulation was when this guy with 10 shares, sued Elon's compactature Tesla and one, and what was that really? That was the trial lawyers trying to get paid hundreds of millions of dollars by exploiting a scene. Why am I brilliant?

It was a shake done. Why am I bringing this up? If you take the the Rajan and example of this, this SpaceX IPO is going to set up a couple of things. The first is there's going to be the natural noise in the market and Elon will have to sort through all of the little tiki tacky things.

But the most important positive thing that will happen from the IPO is a validated external

market market valuation of SpaceX. And the market every day in real time gives you a valid market market assessment of the value of Tesla. And this allows you to put these two things together

“to minimize these losses. And I think that that's what Elon really needs. It'll make his life”

tremendously simpler from a governance perspective. It'll make the companies and this

or Jensen allocating time across various projects inside of

meta or Google or Microsoft or Nvidia nor should they really make this claim from Elon because as you're seeing, there's actually an enormous overlap and commonality to the various things that he is doing. He's building the robots, but they're used inside of SpaceX. He's building a terrifab, they're used inside of Tesla. He's building XEI. They're used across both.

“So I think we need to do this. It'll minimize the shareholder noise because it'll give less room”

to somebody that says, hey, he said evaluation out of thin air. But dollar to donuts, these things are going to merge. And it speaks to the singularity that's going on right now. You know, you had a car company, you had a space company. Okay, that was pretty, how do those two things overlap? And it's like AI, data centers in space, where do you get chips from? And then actually going to raw materials inside of one factory going out the other and having discussed it with Elon many times,

what he learned, you know, at Tesla or SpaceX about advanced materials, informed different products at the different companies. And now you just, you'll have all of that in one place. And then you think about the brain trust that he built at those two companies, plus boring company, plus neural link. If they're all in there, all this cross-disciplinary learning is going to compound and compound and compound. Elon knows more about factories than probably anybody,

anybody, like some people in China who have, you know, Foxconn knows a lot about factories. You know, there are some people who know as much or probably even a little bit more about some aspects of it. But that's a true advantage of bringing those two teams together. And you saw it. People would go from one company to the other freebird. My question for you very acutely with your NASA hat. And, you know, your background today is 20 years ago, he started trying to get to space with SpaceX.

And here we go, there's more rockets going off in a month now than there are days in the month for the entire country. And he's got rockets going up every two or three days. You can just

basically hop on a SpaceX flight and get to space. Maybe you could just use your vision there to

tell the audience, what could things look like in another 20 years if SpaceX continues at this cadence or even, you know, goes faster because of AI. This week's a pretty important milestone for that point because we just launched Artemis 2 yesterday, which is man's returning to the moon. So the United States shipped this rocket with four astronauts on board. They're going to do an orbit around the earth, head to the moon, come back around and come back to earth in anticipation

“of landing on the moon in about two years. And getting to the moon, I think, is going to be very”

important, not just because there's this important social milestone in race happening. I'm right now with China. But I think the moon could end up being kind of the next industrial frontier for humanity. And the reason is, if you can get to the moon, the moon has an extraordinary abundance

of material that we can mine process and manufacture into goods. And ultimately, the cost to ship

those goods back to the earth is zero. It will cost less to move goods, manufacture goods, processed or precious metals from the moon to a specific point on earth. It will cost the less to do that than to ship it, using any other terrestrial conventional method, whether that's a boat, an airplane, or a railroad. And the reason is that on the moon, you can take advantage of the low gravity, it's about one-sixth gravity and the complete lack of an atmosphere, meaning

that it's frictionless to move material off of the moon and very low energy to move it off of the moon. You do not need to use a rocket propellant with high energy like we have to do to move things off of the earth. In fact, the design for moving material off of the moon is to use what's called a mass driver, which is like a train track, like a rail, like an electric rail. You kind of see these and, you know, high speed trains that work on kind of magnetic levitation, and you could put a

package on that rail and use electricity to accelerate that package to 100 g-force, shoot it back to the earth or theoretically shoot it to Mars, and it will go to the exact point on the earth you wanted to go to, re-enters the atmosphere and lands with a simple parachute where you wanted to go. So we could run continuous mining, continuous manufacturing processes on the moon at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to do it here on earth. The biggest limiting factor,

getting people to the moon, and that is largely solved or will be solved in the next few

“years by robotics. So I think that there is this pretty profound intersection with what's going on”

in robotics with this moment for space industrialization and moving to the moon. So, you know,

independent company or the same company. I think we're going to look back one day and have this kind of

laughing observation that Tesla started out as an electric car company, 100 percent,

ended up becoming an autonomous car company, and the autonomous competency is what led to the robotics revolution. And the robotics revolution, even if the socialists ban robotics on earth and tell us no robots allowed they're taking over jobs, you could ship all those robots to the moon and they could get to work and create an entirely new manufacturing frontier for our civilization, for humanity. That frontier can manufacture precious metals and other goods and ship them back.

You could manufacture semiconductors on the moon. All that's missing is the robots. So, moving the robots to the moon or setting up the materials for robots to build themselves on the moon is kind of the first phase of this transition, you know, asking about 20 years from now,

“and the next phase is building us all out. So, look, I mean, I think that this may not be”

that it certainly won't be limited to just space X, but space X is demonstrating its capacity at being effectively the railroads. You know, what the railroads were to the west and to the front here and the west, you know, in the last generation, space X will be to the moon and ultimately to Mars and there's going to be an extraordinary abundance of production that's going to come out of the moon. The moon has everything, by the way, and I'll say one more thing about space X.

Space X has also created and this is going to be a big part of the valuation analysis that many are doing. They've created a backup to the internet. You know, the internet is fundamentally limited by all of the nodes on the network and the connectivity amongst all those nodes. And that connectivity is largely driven by copper and fiber optic cable. So, in space with the number of satellites going up with starlink and to actually deploy data centers that can output data on those nodes on that

network, space X has largely built a backup internet. And that backup internet can coincide with the Earth's internet, but it creates this extraterrestrial communication network that gives us the oretically, the ability to think about, hey, government's collapse, if there's civilizational upheaval,

“et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This becomes, I think, a fundamentally kind of important”

technology infrastructure that's going to exist in parallel. So, I'm pretty excited about like these two separate paths for space X and where they intersect with Tesla. I think it's pretty profound at the moment. Yeah, it can't be understated what lowering the cost per kilogram to get to space has done to entrepreneurs around the company. There's multiple entrepreneurs who are now doing asteroid mining or varda doing experimentation in space. And I have been doing some late-stage stuff

to mop with my syndicate. And one of the interesting companies we syndicated, we did zipline, which is a great company. But we also did this company called vast, vast space. Jet is the founder. He created a ripple and some other crypto projects. And he put a lot of his money, hundreds of millions of dollars into this company, vast space. And they're designing a space station. How did they do it? Well, they just bought carriage on SpaceX rockets. And they paid in advance.

They have their slot. And now they're doing this massive innovation to make modular space station

components. Here's what I'll, and there's this is, hey, what if Google or Amazon want to have a

space station in space? You know, it's completely possible they might want that. Here's what I'll say.

“I think sometimes it's better to be lucky than good. There are all of these ways that”

so many people will end up with participation into SpaceX. I think we all will elon in an enormous thanks. I think that this is going to unleash just an unbelievably large economy of things that we have no idea about. And when I see this thing that video that you just showed, what it reminds me is that we have a very rudimentary capability in space. What does that mean? If you take, if you catch a ride on Falcon 9, or Falcon Heavy, basically it's dropping you off

at 550 kilometers, I think. You have a difference problem if you're trying to get to Gio. But even if you get dropped off at 550, how do you get to your actual orbital plane? Right? So, meaning if you think of Elon as like the big container ships that go from China to America, once it gets along beach, you need FedEx. There's an entire infrastructure there. That's going to get all of this logistics built last mile. There's a huge garbage collection

problem that's getting built up. We still haven't technically solved how to do garbage collection in space. There's nets, there's magnetic plates. All of that is getting fixed. Then there's going to be an explosion in actual power generation. The cell composition of solar

cells up in space are materially different. It's a really incredible thing. You look at these

thin sheets. They are like one millimeter thick. If you carry it on your hand, the glass breaks, yet you can smash a meteor into it when it's laid and laminated and nothing happens. So, my point is, in every single dimension of what the earthly economy looks like,

There'll be a burst of space. There'll be a, I don't know what the garbage collection

companies are, allied waste of space. There's going to be everything of space that exists in the United States. Freebird just talked about the freeport macro end of space. Like everything. And that we owe to him. Yeah. And I hope he gets that credit because the amount of

“businesses, I think that can get created and the amount of value that will be created on top of”

space exit shoulders is vast. It's the beginning of the beginning of the beginning. And it's going to create enormous opportunities for people who are smart and resourceful. And freebird, maybe you could comment on the PGMs, the palladium that's on asteroids and just their rare here on Earth. If we had an unlimited supply or a continuous supply of those minerals, what could the downstream affect of that be? And then what if we find things in space that we are unaware of?

There are unknown unknowns, correct? Freebird, when you start to conceptualize this, I do think like the asteroid mining is an interesting concept, but I do think it's going to be more likely that we'll have the need for infrastructure so we can produce wars and refine and so on versus, you know, bringing chunky rock back. I think that you could do this very effectively on the moon. The primary elements that are missing from the moon that we have on the Earth

are, you know, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen, basically these things that make life

on Earth. But that's because they primarily exist in a gaseous form and the Earth has enough gravity to retain those gases and have an atmosphere. The moon is too small to maintain an atmosphere. The gravity's too little so those gases all kind of went away. They evaporated away in the early formation of the Earth and the moon. But on the moon, there's everything else. There's aluminum. There's silicon. There's palladium. There's platinum. There's gold.

“There's everything you possibly need. So I think as we do the calculus on all of this,”

we'll end up realizing that the moon is probably the best frontier. One of the biggest issues is dissipating heat because you don't have an atmosphere, but theoretically you could recapture that heat and use like helium gas or something to turn a turbine and actually run production of even more electricity. You just put a couple solar panels out. I did the math on this. It's like 500 square meters of solar panels will let you run a four kilometer mass driver to ship material

back to the Earth every 10 to 15 minutes, one ton of material every 10 to 15 minutes. On the slide, you described earlier that Elon's been talking about his failure. So you could think about having autonomous mining vehicles deployed on the moon, processing the ore, and then sending completely processed material back. And then for a heat shield for re-entry to the Earth, you just use moonrock. You only need about 15 centimeters of moonrock at the front of the package.

And then that'll burn up when it re-enters the atmosphere and the package, you know, kind of parachutes down and lands where you want it to land in your industrial shipyard or whatever. So there's just like, you know, I think we'll continue to kind of iterate on this. I'm speculating about how different we're getting. The beginning of the beginning. Gosh, I mean, can you imagine having a moonbody in America? Yeah, imagine Jake has like permanently present on the moon. It's just

and factory's on the moon. It's just wow. Can you guys just imagine like the middle or the early 19th century, like the late 1700s, early 1800s in America? And there's like all this land out on the west. And like whatever people were contemplating in that moment about what they were going to go do with that land on the west. And they started to travel west. Their minds would have been blown to see what happened 100 years later. We're now 150 years later. You know, like it's just

that's the moment that we're at right now. And the railroads are being built to get us to this next great frontier. They're being laid out before us. And the opportunity is really limited only by our

imagination. And before we would have never been able to tackle these great frontiers. But this magical

new technology came about called robots. And these robots are going to allow us to actually make

“use of these frontiers and explore them and develop them. And that's why this is such an incredible”

moment where this intersection of autonomy and robotics and space traversal kind of drive forward humanity into this new era. And it's again, this is not a zero-sum game. This is expanding humanity's potential expanding production, which is so different than the way the socialist on Earth are talking about it where everyone's fighting against progress, zero-sum game. They think that progress is some people taking things from other people. And the truth is, it's about everyone building stuff

that's new and everyone benefiting from this. How many open a hotel casino in this space? - I mean, go that would be so funny. - Really, seriously. - Absolutely. - You think it's funny, but I am. - I would love that.

- Yeah. - And then, no rate, no rate, no gravity. No rate, no gravity. - No gravity. - No max, no max. - No max. - No, no max. - No max, no max. - No max, no max. - No max, no max.

- No max, no max. - No max, no max. - I love it. - Whoever implements the red light district

- Oh, wow. - That's, yeah, with the robotics

and the pleasure droids, replicants, oh man, it could get crazy. - All right. - Well, let's just hope you're, we're not the dawn or party on the way there. - 2026, don't worry, you'll be safely on the ground.

- I love being syndicates. - You'll be fine. - I'll tell you something. - Thank you, shoutout to syndicates.com and blow it to you and join me.

- And Greg, no, he's... - Do you all listen? - I'm still in contact with you guys. - You might be retired, but I'm in the game. - I'm in the arena and trying the extra modeling.

- I'm selling enterprise software every day. - That's what I did. - Literally,

“Tramot said, "Hey, Jacob, can we get wrapped this up real quick?”

"Cause I gotta get on a sales call, I got a discovery call." Listen, I like the fact that we're all working. We're working into our 50s. I love it. Hey, 2026 could be an all-time record for IPOs.

Looks like it will be anthropic, opening eye, data bricks. I mean, these are all nine and possibly 10 figure IPOs in terms of the valuations. The long-tail of other companies, stripe, cerebrus, canvah, discord, lots of people waiting.

Here's your polymarket, SpaceX 94% obviously. That looks like it's, we just talked about pack for 20 minutes. Andthropic, 41% in people who are saying 70% in February, opening eye, 38% data bricks, 32%. People are wondering, what could, do we all this?

Obviously, we have a very pro-business group of people in Washington, D.C., but you have potentially this Iran war. We'll talk about that later in the program. Could potentially push the SPAC if God forbid it was the spiral, or there was a recession, maybe the Democrats,

you know, taking control of Congress, Senate, et cetera.

“What are your thoughts here on the flurry of potential IPOs?”

We're talking about trillions of dollars of companies. Chumap, and if that does happen,

let's start talking second and third order impact

of that kind of distribution chain that could happen for LPs. And then just also all these employees, you know, and then a currency for these companies, we'll go from a mag 7 to a mag 17, it looks like. I think that we have a bit of a risk problem.

And I think this is why it makes so much sense for Iran to get out first. If you think about appetite as equivalent to like a person at a Thanksgiving dinner, when you first come in and you see all of this stuff, it's so plentiful, your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

And I think in a moment like that, you want to be the one that is consumed first. And I think the risk increases when you are at the tail end, because the risk is that the diners will run out of space. And if you place that up, and if you use that analogy,

I think the reason why people's plates will get full are probably too full than maybe three full.

The first and most important thing is

there's enough tactical event risk that people generally want to be risk off and have more margin of safety.

“I think the Iran thing is kind of in there.”

But I think the big tactical event risk is that we have a lot of these really important financial moments high to this concept of AGI ASI. I don't know if you saw the OpenAI announcement on their final terms, but a huge slug of Amazon's capital

is tied to a 2028 IPO or a moment that calls for this. Then there was a bunch of leaked text messages or whatever that said that there's a version of some AGI running inside of Anthropic. Then there was the fact that the leak of Claude code basically demonstrated that they had feature flagged away

a bunch of improvements. So if you stack up all these improvements, they're actually much further ahead than the models realized. If you take all of that as a basket, it goes back to what I said last week, which is we have a real pricing problem.

If AGI is real, the durability of most companies is slim to none. If AGI is not real, then the fundraising capacity of these companies that are now raising hundreds of billions of dollars needs to get questioned and inspected thoroughly. History will sort out which one is right, but both cannot be right.

So in that vein, I actually think J. Cal, I don't think we're going to have like these quote unquote blockbuster stream of IPOs. I think what happens is SpaceX is going to get out. They're going to do great.

And then maybe the next one does good to great. Then the next one will do good. And then the appetite runs out because you just can't absorb incrementally trillions of dollars of new demand.

And if you think about it, where is it going to come from? Is it going to come from the sidelines? I don't know. I think it's more of a reallocation exercise. But if you look at the S&P, well, most people are now defensively moving away from these kinds of things

What the industry calls Halo, right? High asset, low ops, a lesson's kind of businesses. Those things trade for zero today, Jason. You can buy hundreds of millions of dollars of year of cash flow for two to five times right now in the stock market.

And so why are you going to go way out on the risk curve? And buy something at 200 times Revs, let alone earnings. Yeah, the, the, so I don't know.

I'm more in the camp of, I think it's good to be first.

It's pretty decent to be second. But if I were you, I would get the heck out and get public and get your money and fortify your balance sheet, ASAP because I think the risk builds the further down the IPO chain you're in. Yeah, there's going to be a competition for investor dollars,

whether it's retail or it's institutional or sovereign well funds. They're going to have a lot of choices here. Do you want to be an Nvidia? Do you want to be in SpaceX?

“Maybe you have to rotate out of Amazon or Google or Disney”

in order to take on those opportunities. And that's going to be a great competition probably. We could see a lot of these IPOs, Friedberg trade below their IPO price in the year or two after they come out and get reprised.

Yeah, like we've seen before. I think the market's going to need to find a price. Remember, the shareholders in a lot of these companies have held on to these shares for long period of time and the valuations are extraordinary. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars in market value coming to market

liquid for the first time. Some of these investors, regardless of whatever their entry price was, are going to be looking for liquidity. So there's only so much capital to absorb those shares on the buy side, meaning if the buyers and the bid is not there to fulfill all of the selling,

then you're going to see the share price decline. And the market's going to find a price.

“And so I think this idea that an IPO is just a step in driving the price or a value of a company”

up is a pretty false sense. And I think we'll realize it's pretty false as some of these IPOs take place because there is so much pent-up selling demand. There is so much value that's been created. There is going to be so much selling pressure.

And then there's going to be very little buying activity on some of these, because anyone that could have bought at scale on the buy side post public, we're already in a lot of these companies pre-public as private companies. And so I don't know who the big buyers are that everyone's expecting or to show up. They're probably thinking, "Hey, it's going to be retail retail," yeah.

But how much money does retail have left? I mean, if you look at retail investors, they have a certain amount of powder. And it's probably deployed. It's not like they have unlimited places to look for that. And there's some evidence of this blooper Bloomberg ran an article on Wednesday.

We tape on Thursday folks, and you get to listen to the bottom Fridays. Open AI is falling out of favor with secondary buyers.

According to a report, opening AI investors can't find buyers at the new $850 billion valuation

that Shemoth referenced earlier. Investors Bloomberg spoke to are looking to sell $600 million worth of shares. People are looking for liquidity and said they were institutional investors. Anthropic currently valued at $300 billion is seeing major secondary bids. That is $600 billion valuation. So I think Shemoth, what this shows us is you're correct. They're, you know, open AI and Anthropic are the two next cards.

That's your turn in river folks of SpaceX as the flop. And maybe they're massively overvaluing right now. Maybe they're 3, 4, 500 million billion dollar companies, not trillion dollar companies. And if you look at the amount of revenue, 24 billion for open AI at $852 billion. That's 35 times price to sales ratio.

And that is a absurd price to sales ratio, depending on if the growth keeps happening. And as you reference, Shemoth, what if we are at artificial general intelligence, AGI? And the votes on these things is diminimus or there is no vote. Anthropic just got hacked. All their secrets are out.

Somebody transmuted the code into another language, posted it on GitHub. Can't be stopped. I don't know if you saw that story freeberg, but this was kind of mind blowing. Somebody took the Anthropic code. I don't know what it was written in. And then basically just put it into another language, repost it it. If Anthropic comes and says, hey, you can't do that.

Well, that negates their argument, Shemoth, that they're allowed to train on other people's data and then spit out a different output. So this is a very weird moment in time, right? It is. I think you're you're bringing up a bunch of different points.

“So let me just sort them out in the order that I think is important.”

Is there a market for open AI at $800 billion? Yes, and there should be.

When I read that press release, my mind was blown. This is a, I've never seen a business like this.

And I'd say the same thing of Anthropic, what an incredible thing that both of these two companies

at this scale. Okay. It's unbelievable. These are trillion dollar companies.

They both are. And they both deserve to be. How profitable they are? I don't know.

“What their terminal valuation is. I don't know. What will people pay for it IPO?”

I don't know. But Nick, I just shared something with you. These two companies need to get out as quickly as possible. And the reason is every single company that comes after it, all those companies that you just name Jason are not nearly as important and do not need the money nearly as badly as these guys do. And where will it come from? The specific answer to your question when you look at this chart is the tech sector PE is going to shrink faster in my opinion than the non-tech PE.

And the reason is because as these companies come out, the combination of SpaceX,

OpenAI and Anthropic, all three are baking an AI technology that first and foremost will go

after the tech sector. It will eliminate and it will cannibalize and it will erode most of the modes that support this differential trading. So if I were a betting man, my first bet is as those three companies come out, these software businesses are going to approach the rest of the non-tech PE. Okay, that's the first step that has to happen. So the rate of change of the multiple erosion will basically say to the world, hey, these tech companies are, I don't know, I'll buy the first

five or six years of this story, but I'm not buying year 15 of this anymore because these three

“guys are going to build something. So that's where the money comes from. That's why I think”

after SpaceX, these two guys need to get their act together, file quickly, get out and just get the money, fortify their balance sheets and be in a position. Everything that happens after that is a total coin toss because once these three companies are public, I think the blue line will converge to the orange line and it's going to be nasty. Freebird, just looking at this, do you believe that secondary market is a canary in the coal mine

here with OpenAI because if we've gone through this year after year here, these are exceptional

businesses, they've grown incredible. Customers love their products, but the burn is brutal,

to circle a financing problem is still out there. Like what's reality here? And that's going to all come out when these S1s get filed and they're probably traded companies and have quarterly earnings reports market share for these could be flipping and profit and and Gemini, other players coming into the market. What are your thoughts here on in profit and opening I post the SpaceX IPO? Like I said, there's only so much capital in the world.

So I do think one of the things that's probably being underestimated at the moment is the liquidity crunch that's ahead for capital intensive technology businesses given the conflict in the middle least. I don't think that Qatar and certain Saudi offices and certain offices in UAE and Oman are as eager as they were or have been to provide large slugs of capital to support these initiatives.

“And remember that capital moves its way through the market, whether it's through JP Morgan”

and a loan to soft bank, which then gets paid to open AI at the end of the day, there has to be unencumbered debt-free capital that's being provided to these systems from somewhere in the world. And if you trace all of it back, like the large chunk of it has historically in the last couple of years come from Middle East sovereigns and family offices. And I think that those are likely going to tighten up in the near term. That being the case is probably less demand. I do think that there's

a lot of secondary demand coming from family offices in Europe and Singapore places like that. That generally have not had great access or early-stage access to private companies, but at some point, there's only so much demand there. So I don't know how far this is going to go or when this capital crunch that's going to emerge. I think from the Middle East. I don't think we've really felt this shockwave yet on what's happening because remember, a lot of these Middle East

capital commitments were made in the last cycle as LP commitments or whatever. And if they stopped, if they downscale LP commitments or they stopped doing primary and secondary transactions, it takes a little bit of time before the market feels that and then it's like, "Oh, the reliable go-to or gone." And a lot of the big funds, the mega funds that are there, totally. That have Middle East LPs or gone. And suddenly everyone's going to be like, "Whoa,

and the shockwave will hit." So let's see. It is a risk for the United States because China, I don't think, is going to be as challenged. We're so dependent on Middle East capital, but maybe that China has a capital advantage actually. Maybe going into this experience. We talked about force, maybe you're coming to play here

"You know what, we're going to downscale our commitments and hey, there's a war." So we don't have

“to fund the markets. I think the markets have shaped that off, Jason. I don't think that they”

do this around thing as a big thing. I think the big event risk in the market is, is AI real or not real? And if it's real, what are all of these companies worth? That is the big sort of damages over the stock market. Yeah. All right. Well, that's a good segue. I think into talking a bit about Iran. We took the week off from it last week, and we're going to catch up by the way, not because we just to be clear, not because we intended to, which all the comments

railed us on, but we literally Jason did a terrible job moderating. It was on the friggin' docket. We were supposed to talk about it. We didn't get to it. He does it. He does it. So it's clearly my fault. He DMVed it. He, you know, it's like, "Come on, I'm just protecting Trump. I'm out here. I'm getting the cover of Trump's mistakes." Everybody knows I'm in the pocket of President Mike. Like, take a ticket. Take a ticket. Oh, you have an issue. Okay. Well, you're issue number 17.

Trump DM to me and said, "Can you please take this off the docket?" I was like, "You got a bus?" And then you're like, "Oh, sorry. Office is closed. Come back tomorrow." Today is day 34 of the Iran War/military operation. Trump addressed the nation Wednesday night for a breast 18 minutes here's a 42nd clip. We're now totally independent of the Middle East, and yet we are there to help. We don't have to be there. We don't need their oil. We don't need anything they

have, but we're there to help our allies. For years, everyone has said that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons, but in the end, those are just words if you're not willing to take action when the time comes. Our objectives are very simple and clear. We are systematically dismantling the regime's ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders. And tonight, I'm pleased to say that these core strategic objectives are nearing completion.

All right. The costs here are mounting. War is a very serious business. 13 American service members have tragically died. Over 200 have been injured. On the other side of the ledger at 3,500 Iranians have died, including 1,600 civilians and over 200 children, 1,200 people in Lebanon have died from Israeli strikes. And we now have 50,000 troops deployed to the Middle East. Chances of a ground invasion are increasing. War has cost $70 billion so far.

That's assuming $2 billion a day, which there seems to be consensus on via the Department of War. Pentagon has asked Congress for another $200 billion. To put that in context, the war in Ukraine

was $113 billion in the first year. This could quickly exceed it when we hit 50 days. This isn't

cheap. There are lots of costs. Here's your polymarket on a ceasefire, 25% chance of a ceasefire, by the end of April 47 chance, by the end of May. The shirts are thinking this could wrap up, but ground invasion, which would be just really impactful, I think, 63% chance by the end of April 71 chance by the end of December. We're going to get into the second order of facts, but what do you think, Chema? This obviously is super unpopular. I think two things, and the president

“kind of alluded to one that I think is very important, which is if you are not energy-independent,”

you are at risk, and I don't know how many more examples now that world leaders need to be shown to get their acts together. So if the Ukraine Russian conflict didn't show Europe, then this should show not just Europe, but the rest of the world. You need to be in control of your own energy

infrastructure and energy independence, because stuff happens in the world, and you're not always in

control or can shape how that stuff can indirectly or directly affect you. The United States has energy independence. It's an incredible situation. What was interesting to me is if you look at Europe, they gutted a couple of their energy markets, and they essentially seeded control to a combination of very expensive imports and China. They did that in markets like nuclear, where they just went out of it. They did that in things like knack ass, where, again, we can

debate, but where we're at North Stream 2 Go, we don't know, and they did that in things like solar, where they just gutted all of the credits. But what's interesting is they're starting to turn that around.

“I think Italy just reintroduced effectively what's called investment tax credits. Spain just”

did as well. Germany is restarting nuclear. So if you just look at the the last few months,

energy independent so that they preserve complete and total optionality like we do in how we respond

to these situations. That I think is a critical thing that is a positive outcome of what's happening.

And then the second Jason, which I think is a huge question mark, and it builds on what Freebrook said before, the Middle Eastern states specifically the UAE and Saudi, Qatar, Kuwait, they are our most important financing and banking partner in the future. And I think we need to see a conclusive end to this war, because they need to be in a position to monetize these critical assets, because at the same time, if you see these big pools of demand

start to become energy independent by either accelerating nuclear, but again, that's just problematic

“and slow. But frankly, they're just going to ramp up solar, that's the only way that you can”

dispatch energy quickly. I think what that does is it decreases hydrocarbon demand over the Longland, that then decreases the monetization capacity for these countries. So if you put these two things together, all of these folks in the region want safety security and they need a quick end to this thing now. And I think that they're more incentivized to put boots on the ground Jason in America. That's the point I was trying to make. Freebrook, let's talk a little bit about fertilizer.

You had brought up when we had the start of the Ukraine war. Hey, this is the bread basket. We could have a massive fan. And thankfully, that was avoided. There were carve outs for getting wheat and other crops out of Ukraine. But here we are again, with a significant amount of fertilizer, comes out of that region. And it's not flowing right now. Do you have concerns this time around that we could see something similar? Fertilizer is made up of three elements.

There's different fertilizers. The one element is N for nitrogen, P for phosphorus and K for potassium. Ukraine is the largest producer of the K, the potassium, the potash.

But the N in fertilizer is nitrogen. And that is about 60 percent of what goes into the ground.

“That's 60 to 65 percent of global fertilizer is the nitrogen. That's what really drives”

agricultural productivity. And we need nitrogen fertilizer to grow crops everywhere on earth that we're growing crops to feed people at scale. That nitrogen is primarily made where natural gas is produced and processed. And the reason is that they use the natural gas as an input to the production process. They get the carbon, the hydrogen, the oxygen. And then they compress. Remember, 70 percent of our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen gas. So they compress the nitrogen

in the air to 200 times atmospheric pressure. Run it over a electrical current with a metal catalyst and you break apart the N2s. You have just single nitrogen atoms. And then you combine it back and you end up getting ammonia out of the other end. That's why nitrogen fertilizers are produced where natural gas is processed. So the Middle East obviously is a massive producer,

“particularly in Qatar of natural gas. And that's why so much of the world's”

nitrogen fertilizer is made in the Middle East. In fact, about 35 percent of the world's

nitrogen fertilizer goes through the straight of hormones. And it is then shipped to countries around the world that farm and that need it to grow their crops. The swing producer in the world is China. China historically makes about 15 percent of the world's nitrogen fertilizer. And when the war started a few days after it began, China shut down exports of their nitrogen fertilizer. And so they basically choked out the rest of the world. And so in a straight of hormones shut, the nitrogen stops flowing.

Here you can see the price spike that happened. So as the war began, this is Eurea. Eurea is the solid form of nitrogen fertilizer. So Eurea was creating at about 350 bucks a ton before the the conflict kind of took off. And it continues to spike up. It reached over $700 a ton in the last two days. And this is really, really, really impactful. It's not just like, oh, the price is double. Number one, there's a supply deficiency. So farmers in places like Africa and South Asia are not

getting the Eurea that they need to farm. That is going to have a massive follow-on problem. And in markets where they have access because the price is spiked, like in the United States, our biggest crop is corn. You need about 200 pounds of that Eurea per acre for corn. And that cost basically makes you unprofitable. There is no way you can make a profitable crop of corn. The other thing that China did at the same time is they stopped buying corn. So corn prices

would normally spike up. And corn prices have remained low while the input prices have spiked

planting, which is happening right now, about two thirds of American farmers, had already secured their fertilizer before this began. But a third did not. And they're switching crops typically to soybeans. But we have a fall planting coming up in a couple of months here. And the choke points on production is going to keep prices very high. In the United States, we make a lot of our own ammonia at our natural gas facilities in places like Oklahoma and Texas and Wyoming and other

places. And then it shifts directly to the farms. But the cost is so high because of the global market that it's going to become very hard for farmers to make a profit. And around the world, there are many farmers, millions, and millions of farmers that can't access this fertilizer now.

So the choke point in the straight-of-form moves is turning out to be a real critical global food

“supply crisis. Yet again, similar to Ukraine. And I remember there was about 400 million people”

following the Ukraine war globally that we saw enter into a state of malnourishment. This means more than one year of 1,200 calories or less per day for a year, 400 million people after Ukraine. So coming out of this crisis, it could be even more severe given the criticality of nitrogen based fertilizers and the shutdown of the straight. Let me make two more points on this. You would think, okay, we'll make more nitrogen fertilizer. The facilities take at least three to

five years to fix when they break, which is what just happened in Qatar. That facility got damaged the main facility that's being used to make fertilizer. So that is the largest producer of Ukraine in the world that's now going to be incapacitated for three to five years. And if you want to build a new facility, it takes about seven years. All the facilities around the world that make Ukraine an ammonia. These nitrogen fertilizers typically run 24/7, 365 at full capacity.

There is no downtime when you can just turn on excess production in the world. So, you know, the world is very delicate in its balance of inputs and food production outputs. The whole world has less than 30 days of food of calorie stored up. So as these kind of supply chain problems start to percolate, there's shock waves that start to get felt around the world. So it's a pretty serious crisis ahead. And it'll take a few months before it'll be fully realized. In the meantime,

U.S. farmers are getting their asses handed to them. They can't make money. And China is using this as a moment for extraordinary leverage over America and taking advantage of the situation by shutting down exports and their fertilizer. And at the same time, not by American production, of corn. We probably need Friedberg to have some sort of resiliency here and address this like we did with pharmaceuticals, PPE, all these other things. Yeah, we should have some sort of stock

pile of fertilizer. To most point, it's absolutely correct. Natural gas reservoirs exist around the world. And we've been low to exploit them or develop them because of the climate change

“carbon risks and issues. But I think what we're realizing is that those are luxury beliefs to an”

extent. You can only say, let's not exploit carbon resources until you hit a shock wave like this. And then people are like, wait a second, we really do need to have these systems up and running. And we need to have excess capacity and local capacity in the system because single points of failure for the whole world's food supply is not going to cut it anymore. Particularly as the world is becoming more fragmented and multi-polar and there's less U.S. policing of the world. It's going

to happen. And so on, it's going to be very critical that everyone starts to think about doubling

down, not just an energy production, but some of these other critical inputs like fertilizer. And another output just as a quick side story on that gas production is when you pull that gas out of the ground, that's the primary place we find helium. And helium, we're all waking up to the fact. You know, we never really think about helium. We think about kids balloons at birthday parties. But helium goes into MRI machines. Helium goes into semiconductor manufacturing. Helium goes into

mass spec machines that are used in chemical analysis with a lot of applications around the world. Helium is a critical input to medical equipment to manufacturing equipment. And all of a sudden, a third of the world's helium coming out of Qatar is not making it out. And so we're going to have a helium supply shock that's going to affect the world. So we're starting to wake up to the fact that perhaps these nat gas fields that we've allowed to kind of turn a blind eye and say,

let one country exploit them and let them make all the nat gas. The U.S. is actively developing, you know, I went down and visited that Chenier facility in Louisiana with Doug Burgham, a couple

months ago, which was an amazing site to see where we do all the LNG exporting. But the U.S. has

extraordinary nat gas reserves. So do many other places in the world that have failed to take advantage

“of developing them. And I think we're realizing the criticality of doing so at this moment.”

Looking at this, I think, we'll have Trump pivot extremely soon. I've brought this chart up now. It's going to be the first time we're going to put it in J. Kelly. You think he's going to wrap this up? I mean, he's 100% going to wrap this up. And I can show why. I mean, is just basically look at the history of this. You guys remember, I brought up this chart with Trump's a net approval rating. And you look at how this has changed over the three times

up here. The stuff with ICE, then, you know, the Epstein files and just going right down the line of unpopular decisions. Trump's their approval rating now has just plummeted to negative 17. This is the least popular he's ever been. And he's had to pivot here. Pam Bondi at the time, we are recording this as I predicted on a previous episode that Christy Nome and Pam Bondi would be fired or in my guess, Trump's terms. He likes to get them a new job and give them a window seat.

This is absolutely going to result in a quick pivot. Who knows what the downstream effects are, but the inflation free handle is coming back, according to Pauli market, gas is over $4 a gallon. And then, you know, it's easy to mock like we did earlier, these like no Kings protests,

but 8 million people came out for that. That's a large number. And if you look at the

Pauli market for what's going to happen in the midterms, 51% chance now that the Dems take the Senate 86% that they take the house. And you know, what you're going to take from that is, wait, sorry, Pauli market is now showing the Democrats winning both houses. Yeah, pull it up

“and it significant chance of that. And you know, when this happens, how much money is being bent on that?”

Let's just see. 51% they take the Senate 86% they take the house and 4.5 million dollars for it. 4.5 million dollars in this. Oh gosh. Yeah, I tend to filter how seriously I take Pauli market just based on the total quantum, but this is a big number. Yeah, and you know, listen, this is not me trying to dunk on Trump and my personal beliefs. I think when you lose

Tucker, when you lose Meghan Callie, when you lose Joe Rogan, you know, and people are looking

at who Trump's surrounded him with. There's really just two groups. You have these super highly qualified people. Bessant, mutnic, obviously David Sachs. You got, you got really highly qualified people, JD, you know, who I think the world of, I think these people are great. But then he puts in people in positions that I think weren't up to the task, Pam Bondi, Christie, I'll put Stephen Miller and Cash in that as well. It's my personal belief. In that case,

and those people have not served him well, and they need to get this presidency back on track, because what's going to happen is we're going to have two more years of impeachments and investigations, and the whole thing's going to be derided. And we really need to start thinking about who's making these decisions, who made this decision to go into Iran and why, who made these decisions

“to have ice go into Minnesota and why. And I think a lot of it goes back to Stephen Miller,”

I got mocked a bit here on the pod for like blaming him. But you can correlate Stephen Miller, Christie, know, Cash, Patel, and Pam Bondi with all of the downside of this presidency and the plummeting ratings. Trump's going to need to clear House. He's cleared Act 204. I predict to clear off the other two and get great leadership in there and turn this presidency around, because listen, this is going to be socialism now. And AOC is going to win. This is going to cause massive chaos.

If he doesn't get out of Iran and do it soon, just my handicapped of the situation. Hexat, I'm not so sure. I'm not sure if I, you know, what I think of him yet, but you know, we don't have information on why Trump did this. That's going to be the next

shooter drop. Why, why he did it? Freeberg. I think, you know, this is the point I made the second

this war happened or military operation. Let's, let's call it. This is a war. When you kill the top hundred people, it's a war. I said, I don't have the information of why he did this. Like, he might have information freeberg that we don't have that made this an absolute must for us to do. But we haven't revealed that information. It has, let's land it well to the American

“people. I think that's why the ratings are, you know, and I don't want to make the ratings like”

a TV ratings. He got his popularity is getting crushed here. The way this was explained to Americans. And again, I'm not inserting my position here. I'm just talking about the disconnect right now. Is that Operation Midnight Hammer was supposed to have just decimated this? So why did we do this? Again, and we don't have the information. This is why I try to stay humble in this and say, like, what information does Trump have of that we don't have? Some people seem to think,

Trump, this was overconfidence. There's obviously this debate. Did we get baited into this by Israel and get pushed into it? And is he a mentoring candidate, et cetera? That's about my pay grade too. I don't have any information on that. I'm not in the CIA. It's hard to be an armchair critic on this stuff in both sensors. Like, I think it's hard to say, hey, this guy got talked into doing this. Israel manipulated him into it. You know, it's sorry. It's easy to say that. It's also

easy to say, hey, we should go get rid of the country that's made all the nuclear weapons. Both of those are easy to say without all of the texture of the relationships and the details and what really

areas like, yeah, how do you say me with Venezuela? Like, how do we know we don't have any intelligence to map? We're not in the CIA. We don't have any of these insights that we saw or there's really intelligence services. How do we know how this was going to go down? And, you know, that's all going to come out. I think when this all gets investigated, yeah, I think Trump is and has been the most consistent anti-war president of modern history. Yes. And I think that it's fair to say

that he has and has had and has demonstrated enormous restraint and has the highest bar thus far of folks for actually getting into conflict. So I do think that what Friedrich says is very important, there's just so much we don't know. And I think that he doesn't want to stain his legacy with a typical American, you know, conflict. He doesn't want that. I don't think he doesn't need to be anywhere near that. So there is obviously stuff that we don't know. I still think that there's

a short-term problem, which is not just the threat that Iran poses to Israel, but there's a threat that Iran poses to the rest of the Middle Eastern community. That neighborhood is a complicated place. There was an interview that MBS did on Saudi television. Nick, maybe, maybe you can find it. It's an Arabic, but there's a good version of it that I saw with subtitles. And if you hear the MBS is telling of what the Iranian threat is, it's not dissimilar to how the Israelis

“would characterize the threat. And so I think it's important to understand that unpredictable actors”

should not be given an opportunity to have a cataclysmic weapon that can just completely destroy the Earth as we know it. That just doesn't make sense. And I think if you can intervene to prevent that, we're now aware of the damages of what this can do to enough of a degree where there should be enough of nuclear disarmament from here on out to six, seven, eight, nine countries that have it. Okay, there's all kinds of reasons why maybe we could have remade those decisions

over the intervening 70 years. Maybe there's some that we never should have let have it.

The Pakistan India thing is a good example of one. But we are where we are. And I think we can all agree no more country should incrementally get access to this thing. Absolutely not. And this regime specifically believes that anybody who is not part of this specific religion needs to die and the whole, well, that there is law needs to be reunited in order to take on anybody who's not part of an version of radical Islam. Like it's a,

it's this is a religious lunacy in that country. I think everybody else should be murdered

“if they don't convert. I think it's important to say that the overwhelming majority of”

Sudanese and the overwhelming majority of she has are peaceful observed in peace. There are

fringes in every religion. And in specifically this, I think the most important thing is

to not take your word or anybody else's word. I do think it's important to listen to somebody like MBS because I think it's the lived experience of, you know, having to run a country in that neighborhood and what it means. And I think what you see is as you are articulating many layers of complexity. That again, I think that most of us in the West have zero appreciation for. All of this goes to in the short term. I think that they forced themselves into

a corner. I think we can go back and re-litigate why did Obama let him out? That was a really, really stupid idea. We probably should have kept our thumb on the scale and had them close to

“teetering on economic insolvency. That's the only thing that has kept them in check. They veered”

wildly away the minute we left them out of the disarmament agreements that we had. But we are where we are. We got to put the genie back in the bottle. And we cannot look to other countries and tolerate this idea that they also want to build the kinds of weapons that can do

literally destroy the face of the planet as we know. It's a non-starter. And then the second

order effect is how do we make sure that folks that are participating in all of this broader seeds of so-and-k-aus? How do we hem them in? And how do we create a more reasonable world order? And I think that the second order effects and I've said this before, kind of bring this back to China. And I think a world where it's bipolar, where it's the United States in China, roughly as the two leading statesmen of the world is probably the Nash equilibrium here. And so I think getting

could happen for China was the president delaying the summit. And here we are. We're now it's delayed for six weeks. It's going to go into midbay. If you think the straight or four news numbers as it relates to energy prices in Europe or anywhere else or crazy, look at what's happening inside of China right now. It is a no-boy-no situation. And so in May, if we can re-establish a set of operating criteria that keeps normalcy in check, no more of this rapid random expansion everywhere,

where the Chinese are trying to build bases near us. And now we have to have a point of view near

“them. We don't need any of that. So I think if we can use this as an opportunity to de-escalate”

I think we should. Yeah. We seem to have moved from, I mean, I think this is the question. There's a doctrine, if you guys heard this one before, of mowing the lawn, which is the Israeli's view of Hezbollah, Hamas, and even Iran, which is just, hey, we have to take away their progress,

the last 30 or 40 percent of their progress towards nuclear bombs. And we just do that consistently

and we contain them. This has tipped over into regime change. And so I think that's the wild card that none of us can predict what happens from this point forward. And I don't know how you leave Iran in this state, if they're going to take over the straight and charge everybody at dollar a barrel, is that going to be tanable? Are they going to keep blowing stuff up? This is uncharted territory, and yeah, and very high stakes. President Trump also reiterated the U.S. doesn't need Middle East

oil. And that European should go straight to the straight and just take it. He said that the straight will open naturally because, quote, why do you think I'm supposed to be able? Why are you

always focusing on the streets of Hormuz, Jason? Why am I? I mean, you're always on the straight.

You're always overlooking the gaze of Hormuz as an example. That's true. And the non-binary is of Hormuz. They all count. Well, why is it all about the streets of Hormuz? Well, the time is in, I don't want to get canceled here because I'm talking of, I don't know the pronouns to use for these streets of Hormuz, but yes, the streets in Hormuz. I don't think you're allowed to be

“gay in Hormuz. I think you have to keep that pretty quiet there, don't you? That was the greatest”

clip ever. If you don't know what we're referring to, it's a very close incredible of purple-haired people. No, not purple-haired. This is a young Indian lady. And we all thought the same thing. Indians are so smart. How what happened to her? Oh, one. She's the, they found an Indian who didn't understand the question. They found the one dumb in, yeah, exactly. Oh, god, it's a big founder. They found her. This is, she's been absolutely, I mean, isn't it a little bit comfortable with it? We're so focused

on the straights of Hormuz and not the gays of Hormuz. Yes, I agree. Yes, for sure. I don't really have anything to leave the gays of Hormuz behind. I think it's just history. Which I believe you think she went there? Brow. Yeah, 100% browner color. Okay. Oh, yeah, that's, that's a good call. I would say Columbia. She, yeah, she might have gone to

“Vassar, actually. I think that would make it in her safety school. It that's the best”

not for not for at Brunal in personation. I've heard it a long time. Saw a free bug. Why are you so gay? You think they're friends of Hormuz? Are you, are you, are you making your potatoes non-binary? It's like literally, is it Brunal? You, you got 10 minutes from after you want to do your Bitcoin thing. We want to just break the Bitcoin thing. Oh, it's interesting because I think in the last couple of months what we've started to see is an increasing amount of research that says that

the scheduled eventuality of a quantum chip, a functional chip, is probably not 25 or 30 years away. It's probably now in the next five to seven years if I had to guess. And I think that because that event horizon has moved in in these next five to seven years for those that follow Bitcoin and care about it, my only advice on this topic is that the leaders of the Bitcoin ecosystem need to organize themselves and need to make sure that they have an answer to the question

of, is this stuff quantum resistant? Because if the answer is no, they are a very visible and

obvious honeypot. Now, there is the answer that then a lot of the Bitcoin community gives, which is, well, everything is screwed. And my only advice is possibly, but if a non-state actor gets a hold of a quantum technology that can defeat crypto as we know it today.

A non-state actor's incentive will first be to drain the obvious honeypots and then tell everybody that it's broken so that then everything goes to sh*t all the prices go to zero and then they have all the money and then they can buy some. That would be the sequence of events if you were a non-state actor. So yes, you're right, the banks get hacked, yes, you're right, all this other stuff.

“Goes to put, but I think you first go and you exploit the obvious places and I think crypto is the”

most obvious honeypot in a world where you can defeat encryption. Now, in fairness, the crypto community, this was much, much earlier, had to deal with this. They had to migrate from different encryption schemes in the early parts of Bitcoin and they were able to self-organize. The difficulty here is you're talking about a big technological lift, you're talking about all the wallets being re-architected. You're talking about all the transactional flows, all the

processing notes. These are complicated things that need to happen and I would just tell the crypto community you have five to seven years to get your sh*t in order. That's it. Freebreak, quantum computing, just generally speaking, you feel it's going to have a major impact in the short term. Do you think it's actually going to become viable in the midterm? Where do you think about it? Because it's

always been 10 years out, but it feels like we're making some progress? Yeah, there's a lot that's

changed. I mean, so the primary mechanism of modern encryption standards relates to factoring primes of an integer, discovering the prime factors of an integer would give you the ability to theoretically crack encryption. There was an algorithm that was theorized by a guy named Peter

“Schore. I think I talked about this on a priori episode back in 1994 called Schore's algorithm”

today. It's kind of the commonly well-known model for how you could do this. And it's a, you can watch a YouTube video on it. There's some YouTube videos that explain it pretty clearly. Takes a bit of time to understand it. And then a couple of years ago, I think in 2023, there was another computer scientist named Oded Regive from NYU, who published another paper that showed a faster, different approach to Schore's algorithm. It was an improvement on Schore's algorithm

that basically reduced the number of quantum operations required to factor a large integer

significantly. So there's kind of, sorry, we went from 28 million of those operations down to 500,000.

Yeah, and so there's this a lot of work going on right now. Even before we have industrial scale quantum computers, a lot of work going on in quantum computing theory and building models in algorithms. A lot of this is rooted in in pure mathematics and statistics and whatnot. That work is making progress in building better algorithms even before the compute comes online. And then

“there's the separate set of things that you can track. But, you know, the market if you want to”

trust the market is betting that we are within spitting distance of quantum computers, reaching an industrial scale at this moment. So those two things intersect at some moment in the near term where you have algorithms that are low demand, low latency, that can crack modern encryption standards and then the computing comes online and someone is going to execute. The real thing is what do you do about it? There's a whole bunch of research that's been

going on for 20 plus years on quantum algorithms, quantum encryption standards. And so the to Jamoth's point, these things exist. It's just a heavy lift. And so there's going to be this heavy lift. Probably, you know, pretty good business to be made in the next couple of years and all of the changes are going to need to happen across all encryption standards across the whole internet, across how we do communications and so on. In a crazy way, free book cryptos in the same

place is all these software sox, meaning if AGI and ASI are real, these software companies are not what we thought they were. If quantum is real about you, these projects are not what we thought they were. And so you can't have both guys. You got to choose pick one. All right, everybody. This is Ben.

Oh, hey, we listen. You know, I have an incredible EA executive assistant. It's a really

been like, you know, everybody talks about like agents, agents, agents and this was the pre-agent agent. You know, my, my EA's averaged around 188 to 28k a year. And then we're right now, their heads are exploding, middle America. Let's tell the truth, I was paying $180 to $200,000 a year. They were wonderful, okay? Right. And then I Jason was like, try this, try this thing called Athena. Athena, Athena, I'm like, what is it? So I call the guys and they're like,

yeah, we have these really well trained folks. They're like geniuses that work in the Philippines. It's 3,000 a month. And we're building all this tooling. And so as all these agents

it a try. This is the first time I've had a mail assistant, his name is Lay. Lay's fabulous. He's a math grad. Math, it could be your science in the Philippines. Okay. And he's excellent. I love Lay too. Somebody just put it in the chat. I love Lay from Nick. Nick, you love Lay. Come into NBC this

fall. These guys are incredible. They do everything for me. It's like the most incredible hack and

arbitrage I've ever seen. Then now then I can direct a bonus to Lay at the end of the year, which is great because then it allows me to feel like I'm giving him a really, you know, good support. He works my hours from the Philippines. Have not looked back. Go Athena. Yeah, that's all right. I use it as

“well. I was the first investment. You were the first, you were the, how many Athena's you have one or two?”

I have one, two. I think I take it a second one. And then that person moved on. You split it between like work and personal or no. Yeah, it's work and personal. As an example, like there's an incredible bakery where I live, like out in dripping springs called Abbie Jane Bakery. They don't take orders. But every Thursday, my Athena assistant calls at 8 a.m. Ask them what's on the menu because they change the menu every week. I order the bakeries.

And then he calls in Uber a courier to pick it up and drop them off because they're not on

door to Azure Uber. It's just a stupid example of something that made our lives incredible to have

the best bakery in all of Austin in the house every weekend for the girls and everything and every day problems. Yeah, well, every day problem. Anyway, it's a silly example. But I was having to go make that run and I did it every like fourth or fifth week as a treat. Now it's every week. So you just look at what you're doing. The other thing we're doing is they've been able to we had Americans who are research or sorting through the inbound applications from founders.

We were able to put an Athena assistant on that and then define it and then we, they're learning how to use open class. So the Athena open claw merger is kind of happening in real time. Yeah, I have I have lay doing a bunch of advanced tasks that I typically wouldn't give to my EA and then he also deals with sort of this the more practical data to tasks scheduling all this of. Anyways, it's been, it's been an incredible eye-opening thing because it sets a very good

example where you know, you can be cost effective and still get your work done. And it was really bothering me actually because like the amount of cost inflation for that role because I don't think I've

“ever needed an EA. I'll just be honest. I'm going to put it out there. I think I've always needed an”

EA and I would title them differently and sometimes I would call, you know, I mean, I said this before, but like, you know, even like rules like chief of staff, they just don't make sense. Like the chief of

staff should be the second most powerful person in the world because they work for the president of the

United States. Yeah. Everybody else should not have a chief of staff in my opinion. Okay. It's a major unlock and the problem is we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes and it just people don't want to take the EA or the administrative assistant position in America. They just don't. There's, they want to do something higher up the stack but the people in the Philippines, you know, they do that job. Lays crushing. I love lay. RJ is my guy. And yeah, for some of you got a guy too.

I got a guy too. And he is also very technical. So anyway, shout out to Athena. Shout out to Athena. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Awesome. Yeah. Free bird. I know you're making

“great progress. You showed me some pictures of potatoes from a hollow. Yeah. How's that going?”

Ship and see this week. The farmer is all over North America. So we're getting going. Are you sending sea to our friend Roger the dirt farmer? He is his son. Yeah. Oh, that's so great. That's Roger. Yeah. I love it. Roger the dirt farmer is a phenomenal poker player. He and Keating off and played the game together. How they do a couple of weeks ago. They came up. Crushed me. That's not me the next day. Both of those two goof balls ran over the game. It's so frustrating.

It's frustrating playing with Keating. Roger is much more of a tag, you know, a tight aggressive player. So it's no picnic. There's no free lunch when both of those two guys are in the game. And then on top of that, you know, Helm youth, Cune, Robo. It's like it's not a murder game. It's murder game. It's murder. It's murder. I got, I made a late trip to the valley. I'm like, H. Ma, G. I mean, I get to play. I'm not like, uh, I got some bad news. Yeah. You're no longer on the list. And I filled the game up

plus two. So I squeak into the game. I've run up a quick 20, 25 dime skis. And then Helm youth, passive aggressive Helm youth, Cune who cannot handle the fact that I'm more famous than him now. It's just totally tweak him that trim off. And I, and you pre-break are so much more famous than him. Broken his brain. He's like, uh, okay, a card dealer, card dealer, you're supposed to have a seat and Jake out doesn't. And I literally just doubled up at that point. She must like,

okay, I guess you could book the win, Jake out because, you know, it's like poor taste and double

my way. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Chemoth, I wear here at the end of the show. I just wanted to make sure people know that the liquidity event that we're hosting, uh, you can go to all end.com/events has sold out and we've started a weight list. So this is the quickest we've ever sold out.

“I asked Kimber and Lisa to try to find another 100 seats. I think there's like 7.7 trillion”

dollars of money that want to attend. Oh, can't get everybody in. So we're trying to get everybody together.

We announced Bellacman and Andre Carpathy last week. Incredible. We're going to do an irisome

like pitch competition. There's like four, whiz bang, hot, funny manager. What that is for folks who don't know. Yeah. I know a bunch of these guys, but four of them in particular are running super hot right now. Like taking 50 million, running up to a billion to 3 billion. They're just ripping. And they're going to go on stage and they're going to give us their best ideas pitch and the three of us plus, I think, as many of the guests that can do it will vote. And then maybe we can

“even publish these ideas so that folks can can try to follow them. They can vet them, right?”

It's like a really brave thing to do to get on stage and say, hey, I'm making this bat. Like that's

great. I did it four times. I mean, I just spanked it. But hopefully these guys can do the same thing. But listen, we have a natural resource as pitch. We have something in health care. We have something in tech. We have something in genius. It's great. It's like all the big category. We write something in crypto. So it's, you're going to get every shade of every wippy, big alpha market. By the way, you created a bit of a storm on the interwebs with your towel mentioned in the

Jensen interview. I just asked Jensen a question. I'm not long towel. He'd redirected it to

“something which is folding at home, which is, I think if you don't know it, you should look it up.”

But it's how you can allocate compute to helping solve health problems. The point is these open source projects or these distributed compute projects are the future. The real question is what is the architecture and the incentives? None of us knows that. Yeah. But man, I think it's so important. And then all these goons, one crazy, went crazy. Well, I mean, the reason is because I did like submit on towel. Like a couple of weeks ago, I went public with, hey, yeah, I've got a small

bat here because I think these sub nets are fascinating. Your job, you're telling me. I mean, it's like, I might be five or six hundred dollars a tiny bat. Your syndicate maxing. No, I did it myself. I did it myself. I made a small bat on towel because I watched exactly this retarded syndicate maxing. I'm not, it's not. I'm not retarded maxing here. But I am certainly not doing any introspection. I am just doing deals on great founders and companies. And Dreson has been rage

tweeting about this guy that he watches a genius who posts these videos about retarded maxing.

Yes, I watched the videos. It's incredible. This guy is, what is the guy's name? I don't know,

but he goes on his back deck. He's got a webbroker. I'm hoping to stick out. I'm sorry, cigar. And he says, listen, it doesn't matter. That just needs a more credible and joint life. That's the most incredible contribution. And Dreson may be making to culture and society in America, not the browser. He found this guy. I encourage you, Nick, find the video. Post the links. This guy is incredible. Because you're overthinking, it folks. Just oh my god, he's so good. And we're card and don't think

it through. Because look what happened to Freeberg. He started celebrating. Lovey boys. Don't ruin it. Just go sell software and go make better potatoes free. No more dominating and therapy for you Freeberg. Come on the program anytime. I'm more interested. He'll recharge max with us. You're on the all in five. Lovey boys. Lovey boys. Lovey boys. We should all just get a room and just want to thank you, George, because they're all

his muscles. It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release out.