Nvidia's Historic Quarter, SaaS Comeback, Bessent vs Druck, America's Debt Crisis, Cancer Vaccine
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
This episode of All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg explores a range of topics including Nvidia's record-breaking earnings, the resurg
Key takeaways
- China's overwhelming public enthusiasm for AI and robotics highlights a strategic advantage in cultural perception over the U.S., where pessimism about AI may hinder progress.
- Nvidia's earnings reversal has debunked the 'AI Capex Bubble' narrative, signaling sustained investment momentum in AI infrastructure.
Main topics
- Nvidia's historic earnings quarter
- SaaS industry recovery
- Bessent vs Druckenmiller debate on bond markets
Notable quotes
"China is much more optimistic about AI than we are. In the US, that number is in like 30%."
"The Chinese have a billion people and they couldn't find 4,000 to show up? No, Dave, this is the perfect psyops."
Conclusion
The episode concludes with an optimistic outlook on scientific innovation, particularly in AI and cancer
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, your podcaster's favorite podcast. Yes, it's the all-in podcast. The core four, the fantastic four, the original quartet is here. David Freberg, hot off of his deep state conspiracy interview with Eric Weinstein. Amazing. He did a little run to DC. Great episode, Freberg. Speaker 2 (0:22) It was fun. Eric is one of a kind. I saw Kratios too, kind of two sides of the coin of science in America was the basis of those two interviews. They were fun. Who Speaker 4 (0:33) is Speaker 2 (0:33) Eric Weinstein? He's a scientist who works with Peter Thiel Speaker 3 (0:37) from Harvard, has done some really... Speaker 2 (0:40) Used to be Thiel Capital. Speaker 3 (0:41) Yeah. And he had a podcast for a hot minute. He is a heterodox thinker in science. What Speaker 4 (0:48) is his heterodoxical thought about science? Speaker 2 (0:50) There's all these... things that everyone takes as fundamental premises in modern physics, like the string theory as an example, and he thought it was bullshit and called it out as bullshit. So he's been kind of outcast in the scientific community. It is bullshit. Right. And so he's made this case and he's proposed alternative theories that kind of create a grand unification theory of physics. And then he's been outcast by the scientific community and people say that he's a quack and he's moron. And he's talked about UFOs, and he's talked about Jeffrey Epstein, and people kind of say, well, this guy's fringe, or they use these different terms to chastise him. And over time, you know, the point is, similar to what Kratios has said, like so much of science has kind of followed this sheep-like mentality where everyone has to line up, agree to the same general theory, or you get outcasts, you don't get grant funding, you don't get tenure, you don't get jobs, you don't get invited to do lectures. You have to follow the mainstream in science. or your outcasts. And it used to be that science was all about heterodoxy. Yeah, Speaker 4 (1:50) I know. But it's very rational to say, until string theory is proved, it's unproved. And so if you want to use the adjective bullshit, that's fine. It'll probably offend some people. But he's more right on the substance of what he's saying than he is wrong. It's Speaker 2 (2:04) unproved. Right? It's like Jay Bhattacharya being like, hey, you know, COVID may have come from a lab leak. And when people were saying this, they were they were told. you were creating conspiracy theories, you were pushing misinformation. When there is no misinformation, if there's no absolute truth that you're talking about, it's theory. Everyone was starting with theory on where the COVID came from. You're Speaker 4 (2:23) talking about a level of corruption in a very narrow, specific realm of science, which is the funding and grant approval apparatus. And getting tenure Speaker 2 (2:32) and getting professorships. And so if you don't follow the voting... the methods, the theory. If you don't follow the mainstream, you're outcast. By Speaker 4 (2:39) the way, I buy that. I don't Speaker 2 (2:41) know Eric Weinstein, but Speaker 4 (2:42) I buy it. The argument is Speaker 2 (2:42) that this is what has led to stagnation in science in America. Because if you're not part of the mainstream, you get excluded. And because everyone has to now think in the same way, you don't have heterodox thinking. You don't have outside of the scope thinking, which means we're not pushing the envelope and discovering new things anymore. And that's a very kind of pointed issue right now. That's why I went and talked to... Grazie, auf Wiedersehen. Speaker 4 (3:02) Said differently, there's probably a lot of incrementalism in 2026 that didn't exist in 1926. Speaker 2 (3:08) Totally. Exactly right. When you think about the general theory of relativity being published, it was completely outlandish, but people still studied it, assessed it. They didn't discredit it and say, oh, you're an idiot. And if you're thinking about this general theory of relativity as being real, you're a moron. That's what goes on today in science, where if you say stuff that's too far outside of the realm of the standard approach to things. You're chastised. You're outcast. You're excluded. Do you guys see the Olympics? Speaker 3 (3:33) You see the robot Olympics sacks? Check this out. I did see Speaker 1 (3:36) it, yeah. Speaker 3 (3:37) This is pretty crazy. They had these Olympics in China. Oh my God. Speaker 4 (3:44) They copied how Freiburg actually runs there. Look at this. Speaker 3 (3:47) Look at that. Yes. That is definitely a Freiburg sprint. The Freiburg sprint. I like Speaker 2 (3:52) it. Speaker 3 (3:52) They're doing the Freiburg sprint. Look at this one. He backs up and then boom. Speaker 2 (3:57) That's more my sprint. That's like me skiing right there. Yeah. Look, and there's Jason Kuhn setting records at 42 years old. Speaker 3 (4:03) Yeah, this is Speaker 2 (4:03) Jason Kuhn right here. Here's Speaker 3 (4:04) Jason Kuhn. Yeah. With his shirt off at the poker game. Really, Greg? Put your shirt back on, Coon. You know, I was thinking about this, Sax. You know what I realized? I think you're 100 % right about the PR. And I realized that the Chinese, the CCP, is f***ing brilliant at PR. Look what they did. They got a bunch of Chinese people to fill a stadium and cheer for AI and robotics. They're cheering for it. They're rooting for it. And then we got Dario saying, all jobs are over. We're going to be the last company in the world. And it's the end of days. I give the Chinese a lot of Speaker 2 (4:40) credit. Speaker 3 (4:40) We're not Speaker 2 (4:40) talking about Dario this week. We're not talking about Dario this week. Your Speaker 4 (4:43) grand unifying theory is that in a country of a billion people, they couldn't find 4,000 to show up to watch a bunch of robots run around a track. Are you really? No, Dave, this is the perfect Speaker 1 (4:52) - Speaker 4 (4:52) That's Speaker 1 (4:53) your Speaker 4 (4:53) grand Speaker 1 (4:53) unifying theory? It is true that China is much more optimistic about AI than we are. AI optimism in China is over 80%, meaning they pull on the question, do you think AI will be more beneficial and harmful? Over 80 % of Chinese people say yes. In the US, that number is in like 30%. Speaker 3 (5:10) So Speaker 1 (5:11) I've been saying for a while that the US is ahead of China in every category except one, which is optimism. And that is the biggest risk to us winning this AI race against China is doing something that will shoot ourselves in the foot because we're so pessimistic about what AI might do. I Speaker 3 (5:28) think it's all psyops. They're making you feel, you see that, show this, the robot blowing up at 16 seconds, Nick. This is all stage. It's a psyops. This is a psyops. They make you feel bad for the robots. They make you cheer for them. Speaker 4 (5:42) This is going to be like a major thing. No, it's the red robot. The funniest thing was when the red robot lost his legs. There was like a couple of tweets that I thought were hilarious. Like one guy was like, oh my God, he tore his HDMI, his CPU. And then the second one, which is not funny because I know Christian McCaffrey and he's a great guy. He's like Christian McCaffrey in week three. And you just see the entire leg just snap off. Very, very mean. Speaker 3 (6:07) Congratulations to the CCP. Speaker 4 (6:09) By the way, Speaker 3 (6:10) Optimus, have you guys seen the latest Optimus videos from Elon by chance? Is he showing any of you guys? I haven't seen it. He's Speaker 2 (6:18) not Speaker 3 (6:18) publishing publicly. I saw the latest Optimus. It would win half of these things already. When you guys see it, he's making sick progress. He's not showing it publicly. Without Speaker 1 (6:30) the sparks coming out of its midsection? No sparks, Speaker 3 (6:32) but I saw a video that I said to him, I said, is this CGI or is this real? And he said, no, this is real. They just sent it to me this morning. And it's like, whoa, Optimus will be the best selling. I think product. Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:46) And Speaker 3 (6:46) you Speaker 1 (6:46) know, the hard part, as I understand it with these robots is you can train them to do a specific action, like running that race or jump or whatever. But the hard part is when they encounter a condition that they weren't programmed to expect. And specifically when they have to interact with something in the physical world, that's when it gets tricky, right? Can they do the whole folding laundry or pick something up without breaking it or dropping it or whatever? And specifically something that they weren't taught to do, you know? That's where it gets tricky. Speaker 3 (7:14) Yeah, the fidelity of the Optimus and its ability to do novel things, you kind of nailed it. I don't want to say any more. You've been playing with Grokbot though, right, Sax? Speaker 1 (7:23) Yeah. You Speaker 3 (7:24) got Grokbot shotted? You've been Grokbot maxing? Speaker 1 (7:27) I just reached my Grokbot usage limit and have to upgrade. 200 bucks a month? Yeah. It's been really interesting, actually. Speaker 3 (7:37) It just does what you tell it to do, right? It just gets it done. Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:40) What's great about Grokbot is that it's always on. It's in the cloud. You set up your agents, and then they can keep working even when your computer is off or it goes to sleep. The other agent harnesses that were kind of doing this were like OpenClaw or Hermes. They were just on your desktop. So if your computer went to sleep, they would stop. You have to do all these Mac minis. And also they were like very hard to use, very power user-y. Speaker 3 (8:04) Super Speaker 1 (8:04) complicated. This is like by far the easiest. It's still a lot of work to get it set up, working right, perfectly, whatever, but it's fun. And it's the easiest it's ever been. And you can really see where it's all going. Speaker 3 (8:15) Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I told him he should make it multiplayer mode. So like you can put two agents in the same room, but then being able to put two people from your team in the same room and then, you know, having humans in the loop. it's going to go super. That's such a good idea. Speaker 1 (8:29) That will make this thing go so fricking viral. Yes. If you can just add, because then, you know, what's, what's cool about the agents is you actually have an agent swarm. You actually have lots of different agents performing different tasks and they get good at different things. You know, some people ask why don't you just have one agent? It turns out that if you have multiple agents, then the agents develop more context and expertise. So they get more specific, but yeah, you could then use each of those agents as a channel. and invite people to it, and then they participate in that. And Speaker 3 (8:59) then they add another person. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:01) Yeah, then it could get very, very viral. Speaker 3 (9:03) Yeah, it's a great product. All right, let's get to work. We got a lot going on. NVIDIA just had a record-setting earnings report. I mean, they blew the doors off this. And also, we'll talk a little bit about Salesforce also coming back and the SaaSpocalypse ending. Stock was up, NVIDIA's that is, 9%. on huge numbers and even huger guidance. 96.2 billion in revenue in the quarter, Chamath, up 106 % year over year, more than double. Wall Street's expectation was 92 billion. They guided for 70 % growth next year. That is well above what Wall Street was expecting at 45%. So let that sink in. The number people are going crazy over, 60 billion in net profit. That is the most profitable core business quarter of any public company ever. Google and Amazon, they've had higher one-off quarters, obviously. Here's your chart. NVIDIA net income and revenue quarterly. Just blowing the doors off of it. Stock is up. It's reaching its all-time high again, getting close. Heading into earnings, NVIDIA was only up 12 % year to date on par with the S &P 500, but they were lagging the broader chip index. I guess the headwind, Shamath, is that people believe there's competition coming. We'll talk about that. NVIDIA is the world's most valuable company. 5.5 trillion. PolyMarket says 79 % chance. Here's your PolyMarket, our great partner, PolyMarket. 79 % chance NVIDIA ends the year as number one. 6.3 million in volume. In other news, Salesforce up over 20 % on Thursday after they also reported a big quarter revenue up 11.3 billion, 11 % year over year. That was in line with expectations, but they beat their adjusted EPS by 80%, 590 versus $3.27. They got a big jump because they are major investors in Anthropic. They raised their full year guidance to 46 billion. You called it, let's give Chamath his victory fap. Here he goes, the victory fap, the lap. Chamath on May 15th. What's your take on this? You've been pretty critical of the Speaker 4 (11:22) SaaS space in previous episodes. I think the high end of the market where Mark operates, where the large monoliths operate is quite safe. What people are finding is, hey, hold on a second. This is a lot harder than we thought. It's not like boop, boop, boop, put in a prompt and beep, bap, boop, it all works. It's not how it works. I think we're a little oversold. Now I think this consolidation and the re-rating can happen in the opposite direction. So what is the opposite trade? The opposite trade is who has constructive net dollar retention, who has negative churn that's been really predictable, which is a way of saying who has the best relationships. Those guys, I think, are positioned to crush. All right, Speaker 3 (12:00) there you have it, Shamath. Your thoughts on NVIDIA? And Salesforce blowing the doors off of their quarterly Speaker 4 (12:08) earnings reports. There's a lot there. So maybe we'll start with Salesforce first, and then I'll go to NVIDIA. Because I think the NVIDIA one is actually a good segue into talking about the national state of finance. Speaker 2 (12:21) I don't know, it was pretty obvious to me in May that Speaker 4 (12:24) Salesforce specifically was meaningfully oversold. I think what I was trying to say there, and maybe I can say more precisely now, is we're getting to the end of this second phase of AI. So if the first phase of AI were models, and think of like a model as a brain, the second phase of AI is harnesses, right, and agents, which is the analogous equivalent of giving a brain a pair of eyes and hands and a notebook for memory and a keyboard to type things on. So you're sort of taking this primordial object that was really good at Q &A and you're making it more useful, almost like an autonomous being. But we're starting this next phase soon. At least I see it in the enterprises that I work with, which is that that's still insufficient. And what you now need to do is make that autonomous agent much more informed and give it context and allow it to do a job much more intelligently. So meaning you take a brain, you give it arms and legs and limbs and eyes, etc. But then you have to train it to be a lawyer or be a customer service rep or be a sales agent or what have you. And to do that next step, you need a ton of contextual information. And so the people that control that today, the large systems of record. What I said before and what I'll double down on now is that those guys hold an incredibly special place in the ecosystem if they do it right. And I think what you're seeing is Mark is finding a way to play well with the models, support harnesses, but also build his own and now start to push into this next phase. And I think that's why his net dollar retention is strong. That's why his revenue is strong. That's why he's guiding up. And that's why the stock's ripped. I think it was like a 43 % since I said it had bottomed. I mean, it took a few weeks. Yeah, Speaker 2 (14:32) it Speaker 4 (14:32) was Speaker 2 (14:32) up Speaker 4 (14:32) 20 % Speaker 3 (14:33) today just on that. And Freeberg, I think you were in, were you on CNBC or are you just on the quarterly call? Speaker 2 (14:38) I went to Benioff's office for the earnings setup yesterday. So Dario was there. Dario and Mark did their CNBC bit. They set up a studio for the earnings call on the 60th floor, you know, where we've all had dinner up there. And then I did the earnings call with Mark because, you know, about a year ago, I think I mentioned this to you, Chamath, like we kind of over a weekend built a CRM tool internally using cloud code and cursor and stuff and kind of spun it together and stood it up. And we were using it and then it's like, well, you got to add this feature and you got to change this and then account and security and access and... Where's the data repository that makes it protected? And there was a lot of kind of back and forth on all the features we ultimately needed to build to make it truly useful and scalable. Meanwhile, we've got competing interests in our company on where we can build software that's unique to our company, like plant breeding software, which is what we do as kind of our unique advantage as a company is plant breeding. So how do we build a better breeding technology platform? How do we build software that gives the... people in the lab and in the greenhouse and the breeders tools. And so we started building all these internal tools and eventually realize our time, our efforts, our energy is better spent building the workflows that are unique and create value for our organization uniquely versus recreating a bunch of software that other people have already made. Where's your best ROI, your best return on time spent and your best return on dollars spent. And it's not on rebuilding a communications tool like Slack. or a messaging tool like Gmail or a CRM tool like Salesforce. And at the time, Mark and I were talking on the phone. He's like, you know, hey, try Salesforce. I'll set you up. Come on, do it. And I was like, no, no, no. And then he's like, yes, yes, yes. And he's so persistent. You guys know Mark. He's like so persistent. He put his like best sales guy on a text with me and kept texting every day. Are we up yet? Are we up yet? Are we up yet? Until the sales guy, I said, okay, go to my office. He goes to my office, he gets set up and then we're done. And then we realized, oh my God, this is actually a much better way for us to do this. So Mark asked me to come and recount that story at the earnings call and talk a little bit about the view on this change. So I do think, and I've shared this in the past, I think the horizontal platform companies, these tools that are horizontal, CRM works across many different verticals, industry verticals, and Gmail works across many industry verticals and Slack and so on. Excel, no one's going to go rebuild Excel. The real values in the software that's unique for your vertical, that's where AI plays a role in building custom workflows and custom software. And so I think that's kind of how I view this, the real SaaSpocalypse. It's more of a vertical SaaSpocalypse, which is software that's designed for just one vertical. 100%. And that's where I think things get blown up. I totally agree Speaker 4 (17:22) with you. Versus Speaker 3 (17:22) a Speaker 4 (17:22) platform like Salesforce. I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. Speaker 3 (17:26) Sax, let's talk about Mark Benioff. He is just an incredible salesperson who just fought through the SaaSpocalypse and then figured out a way out of... being put in the bucket of SaaS roadkill, and then just massively integrating AI into the platform. You've known him for a long time. Maybe you could talk about him as an executive and what we can learn from what he just did in terms of going from, in the market's mind, roadkill to leading the pack, let's say, in SaaS again. Speaker 1 (18:00) Well, this narrative of the SaaSpocalypse was totally overdone. I mean, this whole SaaS is dead. narrative is just getting shredded today with Salesforce being up over 20%. You could go back and look at some of the clips I've been saying now for months. I do not believe that core systems of record like CRM are going to get ripped and replaced with something vibe-coded. I've been saying that for a long time. Enterprises want certainty. They have compliance. They want professionally managed software that's been running and debugged for years. I mean, just think about all the bug reports that have been... filed against Salesforce for over 20 years, right? And that's the hard part to get right. I mean, when I play with all these agents and AI, you're dealing with something that's probabilistic and there's so many edge cases. When you're dealing with a core system of record, you just want to know that it works. And the expense of it is low enough that you just don't want to basically jeopardize one of your core systems by ripping it out and replacing it with something built in-house in a kind of DIY way. So I just think this whole SaaSpocalypse narrative was overplayed. Now, At the same time, to your point, Jason, I think Benioff is doing all the right things here. You could say it's a if-you-can't-beat-them-join-them type approach, which is he made this deal with Anthropic. What is that deal? First of all, he's going to be offering Anthropic's models inside of Salesforce. More importantly, I think, this is really the critical thing, he is integrating Salesforce into Claude. He's willing to allow Claude to be the front end. to have the sort of the primary user relationship. And Claude is now going to be able to access all of the data in Salesforce and all of the workflows, all the actions that a user could take. So in other words, Benioff here is willing to risk disintermediation in order to ride this AI wave because he knows it's what the customer ultimately wants. You know, you don't want to go into Salesforce or any SaaS application. to write your agents. You want to create agents in the AI program that you're using. And you want those agents to be able to run across all of your SaaS platforms. So he's willing to, again, to give up a big piece of the user relationship in order to make himself more relevant. Now, why is this ultimately good for his business and not bad is because, like I said, I still think that you need systems of record. You need the AI agents to basically go to those systems, get the data from a canonical source of truth. You just don't want there to be any probabilistic variability around that. And you want AI agents to be able to write back to those systems. And you want to be able to write back to those workflows. So what's happening here is that it's not a rip and replace. Their layers are getting built, right? You've got the database layer. Then you've got applications and workflows. And then you've got agents. And then you've kind of got the AI. user interface. And Benioff is saying that the AI is now the user interface. He's basically acknowledging that he's leaning into it. Now, here's the thing. I talked to him this morning, actually, and a point he brought up with me that I think is underestimated is that he says there's a lot of trap value in Salesforce, meaning we know it's got this incredibly broad, rich platform with tons of functionality. The average user is never going to find all those things, but the agent will. So think about all the cases where now the agent is going to go to the user and say, hey, I just saw that there are these actions you could take in Salesforce that seem to line up with what you're telling me to do. Do you want me to do this? And the user is going to say, yes. Which then Speaker 3 (21:36) codifies Speaker 1 (21:37) Salesforce as the Speaker 3 (21:38) system of record. Speaker 1 (21:39) Yes, Zach? Yes, exactly. Because now think about the agent as a power user of Salesforce that knows how to use Salesforce perfectly. You don't necessarily need to hire this like... team of highly priced consultants to figure out Salesforce. The agent knows how to do it. So it can unlock the full value of Salesforce and all these actions. And then after you develop trust in your agent, you, the user, are just going to click the always allow button. And now the agent can basically tap the full capabilities of Salesforce. So, I mean, that's where this is headed, but now it raises the question, okay, so how do SaaS applications play into this AI and agent wave? You have to have great APIs and you have to have a great CLI, the command line interface, which is how the agents are going to relate to the SaaS tools. I think in the past, the way that most SaaS products thought, they spent a lot of time on their user interface. And now they really got to think about the agent interface, not just user interface. You have to build the best agent interface. And you've got to, I think, relax the idea that you're going to fully control the customer relationship. You have to think of agents. created by the AI companies as being an extension of your platform and not feel threatened that you're losing the customer relationship. If you can do all those things and become a source of truth and a system of record, then you've got a big opportunity. I Speaker 3 (23:00) got to say, he's one of the most underestimated and underappreciated. Speaker 3 (23:05) product and sales executives in our industry, because I was talking to him when we were at Davos Saks about Slack. And he was like, tell me about what you're doing. And I was like, listen, you have all my data. I can't get my data. My team wants to move off Slack. They want to use this open source product specifically so I can get all this information. He, again, to your point, Freeberg, put me on with the sales team. And now I have complete God access to our Slack. And they built a product called Slack Today, which they've been slowly rolling out. And it does the promise of open clock. And