ICE Chaos in Minneapolis, Clawdbot Takeover, Why the Dollar is Dropping

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All-In Podcast, your favorite podcast, podcasters favorite podcast. With me again, the original quartet is here, Chamath Palihapitiya in just an absolutely fabulous winter sweater, January. Looking great. Look at the size of those buttons.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:20)
Huge buttons.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:21)
How many rhinos died to provide those buttons? Zero. Zero rhinos.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:26)
I'm a simple man that lives by simple means.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:28)
Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. And your Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, what's the background here? Is that a Melancholy and Infinite Sadness background? I'm trying to figure it out.

**David Friedberg** (0:40)
Jay Cal, we don't talk about my background.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:41)
Thank you. It looks like Melancholy and Infinite Sadness by the double album, by the amazing band Smashing Pumpkins. Am I close? Or is it the original artwork of that?

**David Friedberg** (0:53)
Don't talk about my background.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:54)
You don't talk about your background.

**David Friedberg** (0:55)
Don't talk about your background.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:58)
Giving me so much to work with here. Luckily, I have my straight man, my brother in arms, my Davos party crashing partner, David Sacks.

**David Sacks** (1:09)
I got you your first invite to something elite and exclusive.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:15)
I mean, I got invited to go 25 years ago. They just wanted 50 dimes.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:21)
But we had a fun time.

**David Sacks** (1:22)
Yeah, we had a good time.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:23)
We had a good time. Any post Davos, WEF impressions? We had a lot of interesting meetings, most of which I don't think we can talk about on air. But yeah, it was it was an interesting, interesting event.

**David Sacks** (1:38)
We were staying in a log cabin that was like 300 years old. The ceilings were like six feet high and the door frames were like five feet high. So bumped our heads a couple of times. Yeah, it was pretty crazy.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:49)
It was brutal. I mean, it looked good on the web.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:53)
The photos of the place looked amazing.

**David Sacks** (1:55)
The Airbnb photos look great.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:57)
Yeah, but I think you need to be inside the circle. You need to be inside the thick of it, not driving in every day. But it was a distinctly different Davos. We've mocked Davos here for many years.
But this one was a business takeover and a Trump takeover. Correct. Chamath, you would have loved it. It was 1.5 days of everybody hand wringing of what Donald Trump would say when daddy got there. Then for the 75 minutes daddy gave his talk, the entire city shut down. Everybody ran to a television set. Then for the next 1.5 days, everybody talked about what Trump said.

**David Sacks** (2:36)
Basically, I think there are two really big differences with this Davos based on what I heard, because this is the first time I've attended. One is, it was much more business centric. Then second, there were a lot more Americans there, a much bigger American presidents. I think that owes to the fact that President Trump gave a major speech there. I think it was Larry Fink, who's chairman of the whole thing now, who orchestrated that. He wanted to get President Trump there, and I think he's pushed for them to be a little bit more business centric. And it feels like they're catering a little bit less to kind of boutique European political issues, although that's clearly a big part of it. I would say in terms of memorable moments, a big one was, I'm only going to talk about this because I think it was publicly reported, otherwise I wouldn't bring it up, but there was this opening night dinner. And so Larry Fink calls on like five people to give little speeches. And the last one he called on was Howard Ludnick, our Secretary of Commerce. And Howard just goes up there and he just starts dropping truth bombs on them.
And again, he said all of this on the record in his remarks at Davos, I think either that day or the next day. So again, I'm not talking out of school. It was all stuff that he said. But basically he said to like all the Europeans, he said, look, I've been coming here for 30 years and you guys have completely failed. You've wrecked your economies with all this net zero stuff and climate change and energy. And he just started blasting on that. And then all the open border stuff, he really let them have it. I mean, he was really the truth. And then there was this uncomfortable like rustling in the audience, you know, as he was like gathering steam. And then it's been reported Al Gore started booing at the end.