All-In PodcastCan the AI Industry Regulate Itself? Stripe Wants PayPal, China Catches Up, NY Bans Datacenters
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
90 min read · 17,545 words- 0:00 – 1:32
Bestie intros!
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the world's greatest podcast, the number one podcast, your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. I'm Jason Calacanis, the world's greatest moderator. With me, of course, Chamath Palihapitiya of D1.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandchild, Jason was, of a hooker and a-
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs] You saw that from France?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... a prisoner and a purse snatcher.
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- DFDavid Friedberg
[laughs] Purse snatcher.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
This, this comes from like a history of, uh, France. Some history channel-
- JCJason Calacanis
Potato thieves
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... uh, said they let you out of-
- DFDavid Friedberg
[laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
This was a, this was the deal in 1719, Sacks. If you're a prisoner in a, in Paris, you were offered your freedom on the condition that you marry a prostitute and move to the great state of Louisiana. What are you saying, Sackst, you taking the deal? It explains a, a certain of your proclivities, J Cal.
- JCJason Calacanis
I, I, I thought you were asking me-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Is all I'm gonna say
- JCJason Calacanis
... me to see if they would extend the rule for you. [laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, I'm saying that your great, great, great, great, great, great-grandmother-
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm not French
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... was a hooker.
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm Greek. [laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's what I'm saying very explicitly. She was a hooker.
- JCJason Calacanis
I never, we never spent time in a prison.
- DFDavid Friedberg
[laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
Also, of course, David Friedberg is here. How you doing, brother?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Living the dream.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah?
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's good to be back. Missed you guys last week. How was Brad? How did he fill in?
- JCJason Calacanis
Brad was great. Yeah. Yeah, he was great.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Trump account victory lap?
- JCJason Calacanis
He had a little victory lap. We played Chariots of Fire, and, uh, how was your special time at blank? And your time next week at blank? [laughs]
- DFDavid Friedberg
Thanks for ha- thanks for having me on your show, J Cal.
- 1:32 – 20:01
New AI regulatory proposal: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis proposes FINRA-type body
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, we got a full docket today. Uh, lots of stories. Let's start with, uh, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis just dropped an AI regulation proposal, and it's, um, it's pretty popular with the boys. In an X article, Demis called for a US-led international AI standards body. Proposal is modeled after FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. That's a self-regulatory body, and this would be federally overseen, but industry-funded and run by independent technological experts. Frontier Labs would submit their models 30 days before release, uh, and it would be voluntary initially, then mandatory at some point. The models would be assessed on risk to cybersecurity, national security, biological threats, and other high-risk domains. Benchmarks would be updated quarterly, and the body can coordinate a slowdown in development if the situation demands it. I guess that would be if, uh, there was a cyber risk, et cetera. Looks like, uh, on the positive side, we have Elon, who said it was thoughtful, Sam at OpenAI, Jack Clark at Anthropic, Sundar, Satya, Jack Dorsey from Block, the Collison brothers. So Friedberg, um, uh, Friedberg, your thoughts on-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh, well, way to read it, way to really, uh, put in the effort today. Go ahead, Jason. Good, good to-
- JCJason Calacanis
Just pass it to me, Cal. I'll take care of it
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... France. It's 6:00. Go ahead. Let me, let me, let me do my show reel.
- JCJason Calacanis
I mean, what, what do you want me to do? Oh my God, what an incredible topic.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Give me the mic.
- JCJason Calacanis
Sackfr- All right, here. Let me do it. I'll... You want me to do it right? Three, two-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Some of us actually care about this topic. Let's go
- JCJason Calacanis
... oh. Okay. Yeah, you care about it? Okay, here we go. Three, two. Here's a clip of me calling it on the All-In Podcast first. The whole industry is gonna need to be regulated, and I think the industry needs to regulate themselves. That's the key to this. We need to have a set of tests that Google, Microsoft, Amazon all agree to. Elon, "Hey, these are the things we should test," and they should self-certify each model before asking the government, which doesn't understand the models, to certify them. The industry should have an industry certification-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Hmm. Hmm
- JCJason Calacanis
... like they do for countless-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes
- JCJason Calacanis
... other things. I've talked about the MPAA and the video game industry. We should just self-certify. It's the simplest thing in the world to do, and then we could release the models ourselves without the government getting involved. Friedberg, would you like to congratulate me on nailing it again? [laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, first of all-
- DFDavid Friedberg
No
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... first of all, I thought that Demis' proposal was really smart and thoughtful. Now that I know that you may have shared the same thought-
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... I think we should just do something totally different.
- JCJason Calacanis
Can't win. I can't win, Sacks. Even when I nail it, I hit a half court shot, Chamath's like, "Move the net. Move the net."
- DFDavid Friedberg
[laughs] I think it's worth putting a little definition around this proposal, which is to form an SRO, self-regulatory organization, because they're not purely independent. SROs like FINRA and the National Futures Association, they exist in the financial markets, and they were created to allow the financial institutions to set their regulatory rules, how they check each other, how they make sure that everyone is being safe, because they're obviously all trading risk with one another. So the industry doesn't wanna have exposure, and they certainly don't wanna have things get slowed down, 'cause that would make the markets inefficient. So the analogy with AI is pretty appropriate here, which is that there are many players in the industry. They are all trying to progress AI technology, and no one wants to have a single regulatory body that comes in from the government or outside that says, "Here are the tests you guys have to pass with your models in order for them to be appropriate." As we saw in California, when California tried to pass AI legislation, I think it was about a year, a year and a half ago, none of what they wrote even made sense at the time, but fast-forward a year, none of those kind of rules and requirements actually map to the technology of the day. So the purpose of an SRO like FINRA and NFA is they can adjust how tests are being run, who is actually running the test, and make sure the right experts are involved in doing this, independent experts, that is, to do the testing with federal government oversight but not control. So in the case of FINRA, NFA, they report up ultimately to Senate committee and House committee that gives those committees oversight of those governing bodies that are supposed to be doing the work to make sure that they're doing their friggin' jobs. So the SRO concept would be that experts could be brought in ... from industry that know how to assess mo- models for things like cyber risk, for things like bio risk, for things like weapons risk, social manipulation, et cetera, et cetera. That independent body can get voted on, can get changed over time, and because they actually have expertise in running software valves and running tests like this, they can operate at a faster pace than setting up a new government agency. So it's, it's kind of a very elegant solution, and I think it's why everyone, to your point, J Cal, and I, I'll say this is right, the industry recognizes that there needs to be some degree of oversight and checkpoints here, and I think that this could actually solve that problem. So that's why I think everyone's kind of climbing on board with it because it doesn't actually hand stuff over to the government. It says, "Hey, we're gonna get the right people to, to take a look at these things," and the government is gonna have oversight ultimately.
- JCJason Calacanis
Did Anthropic and OpenAI have a point of view?
- DFDavid Friedberg
They both signed up to it. I don't think Dario directly, but, uh, Dario's president gave his thumbs up, and then I think Sam gave his thumbs up.
- JCJason Calacanis
Which means they're on board. Sacks, is this the best of the, uh, possibilities in your mind? Uh, is the industry regulating itself after they have now provoked [chuckles] governments around the world-
- DSDavid Sacks
Right
- JCJason Calacanis
... to be so concerned about this issue?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, and I, you know, I talked to Demis about this, and this may surprise people, but I told him that I could potentially get on board with this, speaking just for myself, not on behalf of anyone in the government, because I thought that an SRO, again, a self-regulatory approach, would be infinitely better than creating a new government agency that I think would rapidly become a DMV for AI.
- JCJason Calacanis
If-
- DSDavid Sacks
Dario calls it an FAA for AI. The government does not have the expertise to evaluate AI models. The criteria are changing too rapidly. You're gonna very rapidly end up with a queue where all the models would be waiting to get tested, and it would start with a month-long delay, would end up being many months, and we would just lose the AI race. So I think an SRO approach would be infinitely better than that if it was done right. And I outlined for Demis five criteria or conditions that I thought were really important to, in order to make this work, and if I could, I'll just-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, walk through it
- DSDavid Sacks
... run through them.
- 20:01 – 37:51
Stripe, Block, and Advent offer $53B to acquire PayPal
- JCJason Calacanis
here. Stripe, which is still a private company, much to the chagrin [laughs] of many of the shareholders, I think, uh, now as they go into-
- DSDavid Sacks
On this pod
- JCJason Calacanis
... their second day. [laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
[laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes. [laughs] I mean, I'm in a, I'm in a couple of funds that have large positions. Like, go public, boys. They are bidding, bidding $53B for your alma mater, David Sacks, PayPal, which is a public company. Stripe and the private equity fund Advent are jointly offering to acquire PayPal for about 60 bucks a share, which is a small premium. Most people think it'll go for more like $70 a share. PayPal stock jumped on the news, obviously, and-
- DSDavid Sacks
Were you able to get to the bottom of this, that was it just Stripe and Advent? Because then somebody else-
- JCJason Calacanis
No, no. We're about to get to it
- DSDavid Sacks
... reported that it was also Block.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes, Block is coming in as well.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's so confusing. Every other media source is like, they're all over the place on this.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, no. It's, I think it's because it was a breaking story, and maybe they were trying to keep it quiet.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's a huge deal, though, if, if Block is a part of it versus if they're not, I think.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes. And Block, formerly known as Square, is Jack Dorsey's, uh, payment company, one of the few entrepreneurs to ever create, uh, two decacorns in our industry. And, uh, they're contributing $17B in equity in the combined offer. How they, um, chop up what's inside of PayPal would be the big question. Obviously, they own, you know, a, a number of different brands, including Venmo, in addition to PayPal. That might go really well with the, I'm just taking a guess here, with the Block assets. Stripe owns Bridge. That's their stablecoin infrastructure company they acquired for a billion dollars in 2025. PayPal has PSIUSD, which is already in circulation. That's their stablecoin. So stablecoins are part of this. But the biggest thing is PayPal is still a juggernaut, Sacks. 439 million consumer accounts. You did something right there 25 years ago. [laughs] It still stood the test of time.
- DSDavid Sacks
I know. It's kind of amazing. It really is.
- JCJason Calacanis
Isn't it amazing that it's still that strong? Yeah. It's weird when brands keep going [laughs] for that long.
- DSDavid Sacks
But the problem is that the product is getting very long in the tooth. I think it's only growing 7% a year, which is a lot on the base that, you know, it's grown to.
- JCJason Calacanis
It's a big base. Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
It's a big base. But the product has become somewhat obsolete, and in a way, it's a legacy product. I'd be curious to hear from the Stripe guys how they would fix that, because I think that's a very hard problem to fix. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they would just run it more efficiently and kind of milk it for all it's worth. I think there's a different question.
- JCJason Calacanis
Kind of do a private equity play.
- DSDavid Sacks
The different question-
- JCJason Calacanis
What's the different question?
- DSDavid Sacks
I think that the interesting question to ask is what is the only kind of baby that Advent and Stripe and Block could have together? And I think there's one, which is you are creating a competitor to Visa and MasterCard.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hmm.
- DSDavid Sacks
Because you now have upwards of 600 or 700 million accounts. You have massive stablecoin infrastructure. You have all of the risk management infrastructure that Stripe has built over the last 15 or 20 years. The big critique of Stripe's business model early on was they had to build so many value-added services because everybody always thought the take that they could make as a middleman sitting on top of the traditional rails would effectually get competed away. Now, to their credit, they've done such a good job that that hasn't happened. But I think what it means now is you can vertically integrate and go soup to nuts. That is probably the most obvious thing to make out of it so that now Stripe gets access to an ultra-low-cost set of payment rails, literally, like, to zero, brings it everywhere all over the world. So does Block. Advent can pour money into it. So it's quite powerful if it comes together.
- JCJason Calacanis
Friedberg, what does this say about private market companies at scale, and Stripe potentially never going public? I mean, how does a private equity firm get their return on this investment in two, three, four years? Do they wind up selling more of it to Stripe? Uh, what, what are your thoughts here on the structure and capital market implications here?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I think there's gonna be more of these kinds of deals. If you look at Ryan Cohen's bid for eBay, I think it's probably a second dot on a line that I think is emerging, which is folks that are, call it AI native, are looking at, call it first generation digital native businesses that have become mature and old and stale and aren't run by the founders anymore, and have not yet realized the opportunities with AI, have not yet realized their potential, are overspending in a lot of ways. And when you take a look at those businesses as a modern day AI operator, you're like, "What the hell? This thing is so under, uh, utilized." They're not using their network well, they're not operating well, they're overspending, they're not using AI well, and there's a set of opportunities that become quite obvious. And I think the capital markets, as we've seen with, like, Josh Kushner's roll-up of accounting firms, and General Catalyst has a project like this, where you can kind of use capital to go buy, you know, in those cases, traditional services businesses and AI-ify them. I think this is part of a line of maybe looking at traditional digital businesses and AI-ifying them, and there's a long list of these. There's a couple dozen of them. So I think if you looked at the public markets and you said, "Hey, where are all these kind of software companies, network businesses that emerged in the early part of the internet, or even in the more recent part of the internet, aren't run by their founders anymore, have stalled out?" There's a massive opportunity. Now, the question as a capital provider is who do you partner with to go and execute that operational revival of that business? You're not gonna go hire some McKinsey consultant to do that work for you. It's gotta be the best of the best. It's gotta be the right players in the business. So I think Ryan Cohen has proved his mettle, obviously, with some of the things that he's done with Chewy and GameStop, and that's obviously debatable. I spent some time interviewing him to understand his, his processes.
- JCJason Calacanis
This was on the All-In interview program. You can go to our channel and find it there. It's last month.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Thanks for the plug.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And obviously when it comes to payments, who better than Stripe?
- 37:51 – 42:49
Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
won't [beep] this one up.
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, let's get to the next topic. Somebody else is suing OpenAI. This time, it's Apple. On July 10th, Apple filed a 41-page lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged, alleged stolen trade secrets. Apple says OpenAI stole their IP to develop their consumer hardware device. Remember, we had, um, Sarah Friar at Liquidity, and I, uh, probed her on this new device, and she said it was very human and lovable. She gave us a little bit of the goods. Well, it turns out Apple is alleging that maybe this is partially their IP. Tang Tan, Apple's former VP of iPhone design, is OpenAI's chief hardware officer. He allegedly [laughs] directed Apple job candidates interviewing at OpenAI to bring, quote, "actual parts to interviews" to, quote, "show and tell" [laughs] in the interviews. Chang Liu, former, uh, Apple senior technical engineer, sent this text message to a still employed Apple colleague, quote, "LOL. I found out I can access the network storage. So funny." During all of this, OpenAI has poached over 400 Apple employees over the last-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Wow
- JCJason Calacanis
... year or two. Big numbers of poaching. Apple and Tim Cook have seen enough, Chamath. Tim Cook green-lit this. As insane as this is, Sam Altman has found a way, found a way to screw yet another party. Screwed Elon, his first benefactor. Chamath, if you remember correctly, the default for iPhone AI was supposed to be ChatGPT. So they took this relationship, Sam took this relationship where he got to be the default on the most important platform for AI, the iPhone, and now it's wound up in a massive lawsuit. What are your thoughts on this?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I haven't really seen Apple act very litigiously in 25 years in Silicon Valley. So that's obviously a concerning data point for OpenAI. They're very reactive more than they are proactive on these things. So there must have been something that really, really upset them.
- JCJason Calacanis
Egregious, yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So I don't know. It's gonna take a court to sort this out. I don't really wanna gossip because, like, who knows what's actually going on and who said what and blah, blah, blah. But nobody should be stealing things from their former employer. Nobody.
- JCJason Calacanis
Obvious.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You're just not allowed. It's just obvious. These people are very, very smart, and they're very successful, and, you know, that's why OpenAI probably wanted them, and that's why they wanted them. You know? And you come to them with the collective wisdom of what you've accumulated, and I think that's sufficient. You don't need to, especially as a senior person, do this. So I just hope that this stuff isn't true. Because I think, I don't think that Sam or Sarah or anybody else there are trying to induce this to happen. They're, I don't think so.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, I doubt they induced it, but I do believe that it's true, or Apple wouldn't have brought it. Sacks, when we look at this, maybe you could open the, um, aperture here if you want, or you can just go very detailed, but the nature of we have a free market, we don't have non-competes in California, generally speaking. You can just employment at will, go where you want. But we have had instances, you know, Waymo famously, uh, you know, brought some IP to Uber. When they did, Travis and the team said, "Leave the building. Your job is rescinded. You don't get to bring that information here." In this case, it seems maybe they didn't induce it, but it occurred for some period of time. So take us through big picture what you think is going on here and what it means for the industry.
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, like Chamath said, I have no idea what's going on here. I mean, these, this is a lawsuit. The facts are all alleged. We don't know. It's gonna be adjudicated, so I really don't wanna opine on what happened here. But if people wanna know, a very simple rule of thumb for how to avoid these types of disputes is just when an employee leaves their previous company and joins the new company, just don't take anything with you. The only thing you can bring to your new job is what's in your head. That's it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Your memories. [laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
Your memories. That's fine.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
Whatever's in your head, you're allowed to take, but never leave with-
- JCJason Calacanis
Never
- DSDavid Sacks
... anything else.
- JCJason Calacanis
No thumb drives.
- DSDavid Sacks
Never.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Ever.
- JCJason Calacanis
No CD-ROMs.
- DSDavid Sacks
No thumb drives, no documents, no nothing. Just-
- JCJason Calacanis
Zip
- DSDavid Sacks
... what's in your head-
- JCJason Calacanis
zilch
- DSDavid Sacks
... is okay.
- JCJason Calacanis
nada.
- DSDavid Sacks
But that's it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Friedberg, any thoughts here on just the Number of lawsuits that seem to be piling up over at OpenAI. Bad luck?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Couple dots make a line, I guess.
- 42:49 – 59:53
Grok Build data leak, AI data privacy, Tokenmaxxing update, Mira Murati's new model
- JCJason Calacanis
SpaceX had a data leak this week. They launched Grok Build in public beta at the end of May. The newest coding model, Grok 4.5, powers Grok Build. I've been playing with it. It's extraordinary. It's a coding tool that works inside of Cursor. Uh, SpaceX previously told users, Chamath, "Nothing from your code base is transmitted to XAI servers during a session." But what actually was happening is every time a developer, or according to reports, used Grok Build, the tool was sending their entire code base to SpaceX cloud servers withou- without alerting the users. Not just the files that were needed to do that specific coding task, just everything. Passwords, API keys could've got pulled up there, all the, uh, change logs, et cetera. Uh, the privacy setting was supposed to stop this, but it didn't work. SpaceX quietly disabled the upload on July 13th by flipping a switch on their servers. Elon Musk, friend of the pod, promised on X that all previously uploaded data has been deleted, I guess. Uh, and in, in response, SpaceX open-sourced Grok Build. That's their harness, so that's another open source win or win for the open source community and AI sovereignty. You got any kind of thoughts on this? Obviously, this was not intentional, but trust is important, uh, with these models, as we've been talking about for the last couple of months here on the All-In Podcast.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I would actually connect this to my comments on CNBC earlier this week, which built on top of Alex Karp's comments the week before. Privacy in AI is very fragile, and it's very brittle, and this is despite the best efforts of great businesses like, you know, you may not like Elon for personality quirks, but he is incredibly trustworthy. He's overly transparent, and so to their credit, they shut it off immediately. But my takeaway is that there are all kinds of non-obvious data leak vectors lurking in AI. And so if you think that you're going to flip a ZDR switch, zero data retention, which is the magic term that the industry uses to tell you that everything's gonna be okay, I think the answer and the message should be, "It's not gonna be okay," because you can't guarantee any of it. So the model companies, when they give you these zero data retention policies, are probably trying their best, but I think the reality is you are leaking information where you don't know it, and they, despite their best efforts, may still have trapdoors that they don't even know about until it's figured out by somebody else, like in this example. So all of this speaks to you have to have a stratified ecosystem. You have to have third parties. Now, look, that's very biased for me because it's in part what we do for large enterprises at 8090 when we implement our software factory. But the reason why it's working so well is this exact reason. You need an independent third-party layer to interface to these models to manage this exposure because there are trapdoors everywhere.
- DSDavid Sacks
And that's what Sacha just said in a really interesting blog post. Did you guys see that?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, I thought that was excellent.
- DSDavid Sacks
The reverse information paradox.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
That's exactly the, the takeaway that he left with. He was building on Alex Karp's supposed crash out, you know, the point that Karp made about how enterprises who have technical ability want control over their compute, models, weights, data, and alpha. But he, he went further with that idea. I mean, he started with Karp's idea, but then he kind of provided a recipe, a roadmap for how enterprises should operationalize that. And what he says is that enterprises, they have to establish a real trust boundary with private evals, proprietary learning loops inside the tenant, decoupled orchestration, and the explicit right to fine-tune their own output. So he kinda goes through a litany of fairly technical things that enterprises should do in order to achieve the operational control that Karp was saying that enterprises really want over their AI compute models and data, their alpha. So it's really interesting. I think now there's, you know, a, a, a virtual, almost like college dorm session going on between the leaders of these companies who are brainstorming some of these concepts and now extending them, right?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
- DSDavid Sacks
And what's happening is you're starting to see the formation of not really an alliance, but like an ecosystem that is trying to create alternatives to, you know, a monolithic closed model stack, which is where Anthropic and to some extent OpenAI w- wanna go, is they want you to be locked in to their, to their stack, right? Their models, their harness. They control the data, all, you know, all of that, and now you're starting to see all these different companies.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And you pay a huge premium for the privilege for them to do it, which is even more insane. So I, I saw this data, and Nick, maybe you can find this companion clip. The companion clip I'd like you to find is Eric Gleiman, who's the CEO of Ramp, was on Squawk Box, I think today, talking about a new feature where you can manage the token maxing of your employees through your Ramp card. But the data that I saw was that a million tokens on Fable is about, Sacks, 56 bucks. A million from Sol is about 26 bucks, which is the same as Claude 4.8. A million input tokens from, on Grok is about [laughs] $1.50.
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Zucks is about $1.50. Elon's about a dollar, and the Chinese models are 50 cents.
- DSDavid Sacks
Wow.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So on top of the whole data sovereignty Bleeding your alpha away. Can you imagine that you're paying 56 bucks as well per million input tokens-
- JCJason Calacanis
Bro, you-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
For that risk? That is insanity
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm using Perplexity Computer, and they started supporting Groq, and they already support GLM 5.2. So when you're like using Claude or OpenAI, you can only use their models. So I started effing with the different models, and I gave it all the same basically PRD, and I said, "I want to make a podcast player that deep links," so like if we were talking about, I don't know, Mythos, it would play me all the Miso- Mythos clips across all the different tech and business podcasts-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Sure
- JCJason Calacanis
... but make it into one stream. And I was like, "This would be like really helpful for me for prepping for the show and just be interesting." I did it. It took couple of hours. It cost $11 on [laughs] the new Groq. It was hilarious how cheap it was. And then adding to this, I don't know if you saw-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So sorry, did you try to do it on Fable to see how much more expensive it would've been?
- JCJason Calacanis
I didn't. I didn't, 'cause I was out of [laughs] Fable credits on my $200 account. So you know, like-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, look at this clip here. Nick, play the clip from, uh, Eric Gleeman. That's k- kind of interesting
- SPSpeaker
We're thrilled to be launching Token Spend Management today. It's available to Ramp and non-Ramp customers.
- JCJason Calacanis
Smart.
- SPSpeaker
And, and he's e- exactly right. Over the last year, I looked at the stats this morning, token spend among Ramp customers has grown by 21 times.
- JCJason Calacanis
21 times.
- SPSpeaker
21 times.
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
Not 21%, we're talking about 21 times.
- 59:53 – 1:22:57
NY bans datacenters, becoming first state to enact a moratorium
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
worse.
- JCJason Calacanis
Speaking of, um, data centers, Sax, everybody's favorite socialist governor, Kathy Hochul, in, uh, m- the great state of New York, my hometown.
- SPSpeaker
Powered by fossil fuels, they drive up our carbon footprint. They occupy massive amounts of land, potentially displacing agricultural space and open spaces. The bottom line is progress shouldn't arrive-
- JCJason Calacanis
So dumb
- SPSpeaker
... with a higher utility bill, deleted water supply, or noise pollution. So we have no choice but to address these challenges created by these massive facilities. That is why-
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- SPSpeaker
... today I'll be signing the nation's first ever statewide moratorium on hyperscale data centers.
- DSDavid Sacks
Everything she's saying there is a false accusation, uh, on the data center, so let's just go one by one.
- JCJason Calacanis
Please.
- DSDavid Sacks
So she's saying-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah
- DSDavid Sacks
... that they eat up all of the power. Well, yeah, I mean, look, if you connect to the grid without producing more power and you force data centers to compete with- You know, residential rate payers, then yeah, you could drive up utility prices. However, if you do what Chamath said and let them build behind the meter, then they bring their own power, and that's what the president has advocated for since the beginning of his administration, is let the AI companies become power companies. So that is the way to solve the energy problem or the utility problem. Then she's talking about, you know, eating up land. The reality is these data centers are a model of land use efficiency. We have a ton of land in this country, obviously. You can find places where there is enough open land to build a data center. The economic impact and value of a data center relative to the land use, again, is one of the best ROIs there is. The supposed noise pollution, that's largely made up. That can be dealt with. You obviously don't want to put these things right next to a residential area, but create a little bit of distance and it's fine. The whole water consumption thing is-
- JCJason Calacanis
Hoax
- DSDavid Sacks
... largely a hoax.
- JCJason Calacanis
Totally hoax.
- DSDavid Sacks
Uh, the, the mo- modern data centers, uh, recirculate the water.
- JCJason Calacanis
Closed loop systems.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, and I think there, there was a study that showed that a typical data center uses the same amount of water as two and a half In-N-Out Burgers. So In-N-Out-
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
... uh, Burger chains.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I mean, just go after the almonds if you're concerned about water pollution.
- DSDavid Sacks
There's... There... Yeah, or golf courses. I mean, there's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah
- DSDavid Sacks
... many, you know, there's many uses of water that are way more wasteful. So when you compare economic impact to all these different things, data centers are w- like, honestly, one of the best things we could be building as a nation, but-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And tax. There's all these taxes and incremental revenues. Did you see the article where, I think it was in, uh, North Dakota or something, where, like, teachers were getting, like, 30 and $40,000 bonuses from all the tax revenue that was coming in? There's all these upsides.
- DSDavid Sacks
That's right. They generate, um, a lot of tax revenue. They've created a blue collar construction boom. It's not true that there's no jobs once they're built, that you do have ongoing jobs there. And then, oh, one final thing just on the, the point that Hochul is making. She said it created a lot of pollution. In natural gas, which is how most of these data centers are, are powered, is one of the most clean-burning sources of power that we have.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
100%.
- DSDavid Sacks
These data centers become the scapegoat for all the angst that people have about AI, and it's kind of become this very clumsy way of trying to throw a wrench in the gears of innovation and just kind of slow the whole thing down.
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, all, all I have to say is welcome to Texas. We got plenty of land here. And-
- DSDavid Sacks
For now
- 1:22:57 – 1:29:51
Science Corner: New data on reversing aging!
- DFDavid Friedberg
I'll cover Science Corner solo. So in the past we've talked about Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins that can go into cells and reverse the aging of the cell, and the cell starts to act young again. Pretty amazing. And, uh, there's a lot of advancement happening on that front. But this paper that came out just this week that everyone's kind of going crazy about was put out, uh, jointly by Calico, which is Google's kind of, you know, age reversal startup that's super secretive that they're not allowed to talk about, in partnership with a group called Revales Pharma. And what they focused on was what's called the extracellular matrix, the parts outside of the cell that age. And, and what does aging actually look like outside of the cell? Well, over time, sugars and fats bind to proteins in the area between our cells, and they accumulate, and they don't get cleaned off. And as they accumulate and they don't get cleaned off, they make it harder for your body to clean out that area, to maintain that area. It causes stickiness. It causes binding, and that reduces mobility and ultimately leads to things like wrinkles in our skin, makes it harder for our joints to move.
- JCJason Calacanis
Is that visceral fat? Is that what visceral fat is?
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's... No, it's called glycation, and so it's the binding of sugar and fat to the proteins that sit in that extracellular, which means out-
- JCJason Calacanis
In between the cells.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
In between the cells, exactly. And so it's that whole gunky area in between the cells that when you're young, works well, everything's smooth, the proteins get replaced if they break down. And as you get older, sugars and fats kind of stick to these proteins, block 'em up, and as they get blocked up, your body can't repair 'em, it can't clean 'em. And more importantly, it changes the structure and the shape of those proteins, so things like collagen that are far apart stick together, and that causes things like wrinkles, and that causes immobility. And it also causes inflammation, 'cause then those proteins kind of look different than they're supposed to, and your body starts to attack 'em, and that activates inflammation, and that's why we get... one of the reasons why we get more and more inflammation as we get older. And so one of the key, what are called advanced glycation end products, that's the term for these things, is called CML. CML is kind of the predominant molecule that, that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and nothing breaks it down. So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme. An enzyme is a protein that breaks something down, um, that can break down CML. And remember, a protein is just a series of amino acids, and those amino acids are programmed by DNA. So you can put three letters of DNA to make an amino acid. So you can literally just print DNA and then put it in a bacteria to print proteins and then test those proteins to see what they do. That's the, the modern kind of era of kind of protein synthesis and protein testing. And so these guys kind of went out and they took the target, which is CML, and tried to figure out, okay, how do we actually degrade CML, clear that extracellular matrix, and reverse aging? And they started with AlphaFold, and they used AlphaFold to find a protein that could bind to CML and activate an enzymatic or process that would break it down. And then they took that protein from AlphaFold that comes out of a bacteria, they produced it, they started to test it, and then they started to find some of the binders or the parts of that protein that they could make better, and they used, you know, DNA programming to change it, and they made hundreds and then thousands of variants of it to measure activity, which is how good is it at breaking down the CML. And they did this recursively five different cycles, and then eventually they tested it once they'd kind of gotten it breaking down the CML really well in a test tube. They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, casein, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin, and they were able to get rid of fifty-two to ninety-seven-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
[laughs]
- DFDavid Friedberg
... percent of the CML, just degrade it away.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And then they, um, they found several sites where they were able to degrade over ninety percent, and then they took actual human skin from elderly patients that had donated their skin, and they put this enzyme onto that skin, and they were able to eliminate fifty-five percent of the CML on the skin, which basically reversed the skin's age down to the age of a thirty-one-year-old. This is from greater than seventy-year-old patients, just by putting this enzyme on the skin. And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of AlphaFold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high-throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today that can do something pretty profound for human health. And now the next set of questions is, "Okay, well, great, this enzyme is awesome. How are we gonna get it into our bodies? How are we gonna get it into that extracellular matrix? Is it gonna be a cream? Is it gonna be a shot, a supplement? Could we eventually take an RNA shot that makes the protein inside of our body and starts to do the degradation from within?" Uh, a lot of questions kind of still to be answered, but it really, I think, lights a great path forward-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Amazing
- DFDavid Friedberg
... for these novel therapies that we're developing, and it's fucking awesome. I mean, dude, like-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Amazing
- DFDavid Friedberg
... you know, all my-- I got all these joint pains in my hip and my shoulder [laughs] now. Like, everything, you can feel yourself getting older.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, that's-- I'll, I will tell you this right now. That will not be the first market. The first market will be cosmetic, and, um-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Cosmetic skin, yeah
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... it will be a trillion-dollar market [laughs] if-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... if you can create a cream.
- DFDavid Friedberg
I mean, dude, if you could put this enzyme literally on your skin and have it absorb in and be-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
On your face as a cream.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Game over.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Unbelievable.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's a, it's a, it's a-- That, that alone is two trillion dollars.
- DFDavid Friedberg
But I mean, dude, AI, let's just talk about applications of AI, why it's actually awesome, that everyone should be able to agree on, and you can't be convinced by some foreign psyop. This is fucking awesome. I mean, this was AlphaFold-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's amazing
- DFDavid Friedberg
... used to discover this thing and evolve it and drive this outcome. Everyone can benefit from it.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Thank you.
- DFDavid Friedberg
It's just so profound that we have this tool at our disposal in this day and age. I think it's pretty awesome. Anyway, thanks for sticking around for Science Corner.
Episode duration: 1:29:54
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Transcript of episode 9IMwRIei-Xc
