Epstein Files Flop, State of the Market, Autonomous Robots, Trump's Gold Card, Friedberg on Jeopardy

Jason Calacanis 0:00 All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All-In Podcast. Our incredible comedian celebrity guest got sick at the last minute today and didn't make it. We won't say who it is, but my lord, when he comes on this show, you are gonna laugh your ass off because he's awesome.

David Sacks 0:15 I like the comedians. I think that their takes on society and culture are pretty interesting, I think.

Jason Calacanis 0:19 Do you think it will work in our format? What's your prediction here? We've never done it.

David Sacks 0:23 I think the quality of the show is best when it's less just people doing takes and it's more the back and forth banter. So, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 0:29 That's what I'm always trying to do is get the ball to go around the horn and get some real dialogue going here. But, uh, you know, sometimes people feel passionate. With me again this week on the All-In Podcast, David Friedberg and Chamath Palihapitiya. My name is Jason Calacanis. You can follow me on x.com/jason. He's at Chamath and he's at Friedberg.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:50 Why can't I- why can't I- why can't I make fun of you in the replies on Twitter anymore?

Jason Calacanis 0:54 Oh, because I- it's a very good question.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:56 You blocked my ability to reply to you?

Jason Calacanis 0:57 No, what I did was my replies were so many MAGA lunatics and crypto scams that I had no choice but to, like... I had to do something because I would have like 500 replies to every single one.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:10 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:11 And I put it on subscription and I said, "If you want to reply, it's $3 a month now." 1500 lunatics signed up, so.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18 I did, I did so I could troll him.

Jason Calacanis 1:20 Just so you could troll me. And I thank you for the $3 every month. It's all going to charity.

David Friedberg 1:26 We're going all in. Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:29 Rain Man David Sacks.

David Friedberg 1:32 I'm going all in. And I said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:37 Love you, man.

David Friedberg 1:38 Queen of quinoa. I'm going all

David Friedberg 1:41 in.

Jason Calacanis 1:41 Do you want me to intro the show or get some warm up banter about Jeopardy! Or do you want to go right into Epstein?

David Sacks 1:46 The letter from Pan to Cash is, is crazy. Dear Director Patel, before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response to this request, I received approximately 200 pages of documents. Late yesterday, I learned from a source that the FBI field office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files. When you and I spoke yesterday, you were just as surprised as I was to learn this new information. By 8:00 AM tomorrow, February 28th, the FBI will deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office, regardless of how such information was obtained. There will be no withholding or limitations to my or your access. My question to you guys is, do you think that this is much ado about nothing and that the FBI needs to have the discretion to be able to say no? Or do you think this is one of these things where you're not allowed to, uh, do what they're doing?

Jason Calacanis 3:01 I think it's above my pay grade. I don't know the law of, like, FBI investigations. And then what if they investigated a bunch of people, they were not guilty, and then they were in the files? Maybe they need to look at them before they do a document dump? Maybe there's informants in there. I'm trying to think of what happened with, like, the whistleblower papers from, um...

David Sacks 3:22 This says something different. This doesn't say-

Jason Calacanis 3:24 Snowden, yeah.

David Sacks 3:24 ..."Let's negotiate what we should release together so that we protect people." This says, "We're just gonna lie to you-"

Jason Calacanis 3:31 He didn't tell me about these things, yeah.

David Sacks 3:32 "... We're gonna lie to you and tell you that, you know, here's, here's this person."

Jason Calacanis 3:34 That's her side to the story. Maybe they have another side. Maybe the FBI has a different side. We'd have to hear from them, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:39 I- is this just, like, people are intrigued by the gossip angle of it, or is it because they want to prosecute people for hurting people? Or is it because they want to cancel people and this is a nice opportunity to cancel? Like, what's, what's, what's the, uh-

Jason Calacanis 3:52 This, I think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:53 ... the, what's happening here?

Jason Calacanis 3:53 ... this is an interesting question, because this thing's been going on for 20 years. I think this actually has more to do with conspiracy theories and now the deep state. Like, is there a deep state cover-up, is the question.

David Sacks 4:03 I think the question is, if the chain of command requests something, are you allowed to withhold it because you decide in your own judgment that the person above you doesn't deserve to know it? I think that's an important question.

Jason Calacanis 4:18 Yeah. The thing about the FBI is, the FBI can withhold information from the president, from other folks if there's an ongoing investigation, sources are, like, secret and they would be in jeopardy, and national security concerns I'm, I'm reading here, so.

David Sacks 4:34 I'm very excited to see these next two days unfold.

Jason Calacanis 4:36 Listen, it's a breaking news story that we'll have more to say about it next week when we get the facts.

Jason Calacanis 4:40 All right, it has been an amazing 24 hours for my guy, David Friedberg. I am so proud of you. If people don't know, David Friedberg was on (beep) , I'm sorry, Celebrity Jeopardy! this week, and he had-

David Sacks 4:56 (laughs) What did you call it? What did you call it?

Jason Calacanis 4:58 ... a great performance. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:59 Jeopardy!? You can't say that.

Jason Calacanis 5:01 I can't say it. You're right. Bleep it out. Bleep it out.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:03 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 5:04 So you were on Celebrity, quote unquote, Jeopardy!

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:07 Right. It shows you how much of A bar there is.

Jason Calacanis 5:09 The bar was pretty low.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:09 Pretty low.

Jason Calacanis 5:09 They're now inviting podcasters, apparently.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:12 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 5:12 But Jeopardy!'s watched by, like, 10 million people every episode, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:15 Yeah, they have, like, a huge audience on regular Jeopardy! I think it's, like, nine million a night or something.

Jason Calacanis 5:20 (gasps)

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:20 Or seven- Wow. ... seven to 9 million a night. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 5:22 Great.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:22 But I think Celebrity Jeopardy!, because it's, like, later, it's got-

Jason Calacanis 5:25 Ah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:25 ... a smaller audience. But it's still, like, a couple million people watch this thing, which is crazy.

Jason Calacanis 5:30 So you were on, and for the last four or five months, we've all had to, like, bite our tongues. And you've been in a full-scale... I don't want to say panic, but you- you've been hand-wringing about your performance. And spoiler alert, Friedberg won. Not only did he win, he (beep) crushed it. I was, like, watching this. This was, like, better than watching the World Series of Poker or a Knicks-Warriors game for me. Here is my favorite moment, the All-In Call. As a tribute, he gets the daily double, and-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:05 I'm gonna go all in, Ken.

Narrator 6:07 Oh, okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:08 Yeah. Fuck it.

David Friedberg 6:08 How dare you?

Narrator 6:09 $12,800 for Dave, but you have to be correct in African Geography. Known for its snows, this Tanzanian peak is both Africa's highest and the world's tallest freestanding mountain.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:21 What is Mount Kilimanjaro?

Narrator 6:22 That is correct. $12,800 now.

Jason Calacanis 6:24 Yeah. (laughs) What did you think of that moment, Shuman? He goes all in. And these people, they think that they're gonna get Friedberg by giving him a question about Africa, not knowing that he's African American.

David Friedberg 6:36 (laughs)

David Sacks 6:39 Honestly, like a six-year-old-

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:40 You guys want to hear something crazy? So, so that category-

David Sacks 6:42 ... a six-year-old should know that category, no? That answer?

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:44 Okay, so that category, African Geography, I was at dinner the night before with our friend Xander and his wife.

Jason Calacanis 6:49 Uh-huh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:50 And we started talking about their son was taking a quiz on African geography, and they started giving me all the questions.

Jason Calacanis 6:59 Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:59 And we were actually quizzing at dinner the night before on African geography.

Jason Calacanis 7:03 Whoa.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:03 It was like a Slumdog Millionaire moment. And I was like, in my head I'm like, "There's no way that's real, that that actually happ-" We literally were just talking about African geography at dinner the night before.

Jason Calacanis 7:12 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:12 And I'm like, "The judges had to have been listening or something," but...

Jason Calacanis 7:15 But you were nervous. You talked about being nervous and your techniques. Our friend, Jason Koon, the... We actually are lucky enough to play with one serious professional poker player in our game. Jason Koon comes to the game.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:29 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 7:30 And he coached you a bit. What did he, what did he... What was his advice to you?

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:33 Well, I was a little wound up because I watched Jeopardy-

Jason Calacanis 7:35 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:36 ... my whole li- since I was a kid, right? I mean-

Jason Calacanis 7:39 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:39 I don't watch it regularly. But like, a couple months ago I was kinda watching the show. I kinda reached out and was like, "Hey, you know, do you guys know anyone on the show?" And (laughs) that's how I got, like, hooked up. So... And I'm like, "Wait, I'm really going on?" That's awesome. Okay. And they're like, "You're going on Celebrity Jeopardy!" So I watched the Celebrity Jeopardy! episodes from last season, and I figured I could get like 60% of the answers. But you get there, and you don't realize how hard it is to buzz in in time 'cause if you buzz before the light turns on-

Jason Calacanis 8:11 I've heard this over and over.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:13 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 8:13 How does it work? Because you bought, I understand, an actual buzzer to practice with. Am I, am I correct? You did this?

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:21 Well, yeah, I bought this cheap buzzer on Amazon, the presser.

Jason Calacanis 8:23 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:23 But it didn't do anything. So I'm watching the TV at home-

Jason Calacanis 8:26 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:26 ... watching old ep- uh, Celebrity Jeopardy! episodes from last year, and I'm like, "Oh, buzz in, buzz in." But the problem is when you're there, you're not allowed to buzz till the light comes on. And if you buzz too early, you get locked out for a quarter second, and that quarter second makes a huge difference. So I was actually behind the people I was against most of the show I felt, when I was buzzing in. I'm like, "I know the answer," and I kept missing, I kept missing. So, I still did okay obviously, but...

Jason Calacanis 8:51 Wait a second, let me ask you a question about that buzzing thing. A light goes on. When does the light go on? When the question is finished or after half the question?

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:58 When the buz- So, so they show, they show the question on a huge screen. So the whole screen gives you the question right away when you buzz in.

Jason Calacanis 9:03 So you can read ahead?

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:04 So you can read ahead. Just read the whole thing. Boom.

Jason Calacanis 9:06 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:06 Then you have to wait for Ken Jennings to finish. As soon as he finishes annunciating-

Jason Calacanis 9:10 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:10 ... the last syllable of the last word, the light turns on. But here's what I found out. There is a delay of about 150 to 200 milliseconds difference-

Jason Calacanis 9:21 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:21 ... between your eyes and your ears. You actually hear stuff before you see stuff, and... Which is really interesting, like, for your brain to register it.

Jason Calacanis 9:29 Sure.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:29 And people have different, different delays. But for me, I'm like waiting for the light and then I buzz in, and it's too late because the people next to me have buzzed in.

Jason Calacanis 9:36 Got it. So speed of sound versus the speed of light? Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:38 But anyway, I was a little, I was a little wound up going into this. I called Jason Koon 'cause I realized there's no upside. By the time I show up, I'm like, "I'm gonna look-

Jason Calacanis 9:44 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:44 ... like an absolute idiot for saying some stupid stuff, getting answers wrong," which of course, everyone texts me last night being like, "How'd you miss Hoosiers? How'd you miss this? How'd you miss that?"

Jason Calacanis 9:52 All right, here we go.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:53 Here we go.

Jason Calacanis 9:53 Since you're bringing up the big miss, this is brutal.

Narrator 9:56 Answer there, Daily Double. (applause)

David Sacks 9:57 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 9:57 Oh, man. You get the Daily Double, $16,000, crushing them.

Narrator 10:01 Now, you went big last time. What do you want to do here?

David Sacks 10:02 Crushing them. Crushing, crushing their souls. Crushing-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:04 This is not my best category. I'll do $4,000.

Jason Calacanis 10:06 You look great too. Great blazer.

Narrator 10:07 Okay, you'll have an even $20,000 if you're right. Climactic moments in sports movies. Jimmy Chitwood buries a jumper from the top of the key to win the Hickory Huskers the Indiana State Championship.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:19 What is Hoops?

Narrator 10:20 I'm sorry, no.

Jason Calacanis 10:21 (clears throat)

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:21 What am I doing?

Narrator 10:23 You were right for four letters. It's called Hoosiers.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:23 I'm so embarrassed just watching it. I can't watch it.

Jason Calacanis 10:25 Who Dream? Come on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:26 Hoop... Yeah, dude, I...

Jason Calacanis 10:28 Hoosiers.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:29 I know, I know.

Jason Calacanis 10:30 Hoosiers, I know.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:31 I mean, come on, Gene Hackman-

Jason Calacanis 10:32 I know.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:32 ... he died today.

David Sacks 10:33 Oh, yeah, that's right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:33 And no one sends me a text being like, "Oh, I can't believe you got that answer. Great job." Everyone just sends the text, "How did you not get Hoosiers? How did you not get Cream?" It's always like, "Oh, I knew the answer. You need..." And, and when I realize-

Jason Calacanis 10:45 Well, we all know the answer to different ones. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:47 ... I realize as... And I realize as I'm watching the Jeopardy!, I'm like, "You know what? There's no upside." Because what'll happen is everyone will just call you an idiot for the things you missed-

Jason Calacanis 10:53 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:53 ... which is... Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 10:53 Well, I mean... And let's face it, you're the sultan of science. You went to an Ivy League school-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:59 Yeah, so there's an expectation.

Jason Calacanis 10:59 ... and you worked at Google. So there's an expectation. You should run these people over. You did run them over for a bit.

David Sacks 11:04 You know who you're facing in the semifinal?

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:07 We don't know until all the quarterfinals are over.

David Sacks 11:10 Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:10 And that'll be in the next, uh, couple weeks here.

Jason Calacanis 11:12 When you see a category come up like the Hoosiers one, right? I think that one was about sports movies, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:17 Yeah, that was, uh, sports movies, like big moment.

Jason Calacanis 11:20 So don't you, when you see sports movies, in your head catalog probable answers like Rudy and, you know, Field of Dreams and just...

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:30 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 11:30 Yeah. So you had all those ready to go? You didn't have Hoosiers there?

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:32 But dude, you don't understand, uh, like, look, I'm not a guy who gets very nervous. I don't get like stage fright or like wound up. But for Jeopardy!, it's so weird.

Jason Calacanis 11:41 Hm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:41 You're, you're up there and you can't focus or concentrate like you normally can. My brain had these like weird brain farts-

Jason Calacanis 11:48 Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:48 ... where I'm like, "I know the answer. Why isn't it coming out?" Or I'd buzz in-

Jason Calacanis 11:50 Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:50 ... and I said like Beethoven instead of Debussy. And I'm like, "Why did that come out?"

Jason Calacanis 11:54 Uh, for Clair de Lune, you don't have to...

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:56 I mean, dude, don't get me started. So there's weird-

Jason Calacanis 11:58 Clair de Lune?

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:58 There's weird stuff that happens up there that's really hard to explain.

Jason Calacanis 12:01 Gosh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:01 And then you're angry about the buzzing and you can't buzz in in time. And you're on the set of Jeopardy!

David Sacks 12:05 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:05 And it's like, "Oh my God, I'm actually on the set of Jeopardy! It's all so real." And you're like watching the scores.

David Sacks 12:10 Are there, are there people?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:10 It's very, it's, it's very overwhelming. Yeah.

David Sacks 12:12 Is there an audience?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:14 Yes.

David Sacks 12:14 There is an audience.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:16 Yeah. There's a lot of people.

David Sacks 12:16 How many people? Like, a hundred people there?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:18 About a hundred people, yeah.

David Sacks 12:19 Yeah. Wow. That's nice.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:20 Yeah. Before you go on the, the show-

David Sacks 12:23 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:23 ... they have you do a practice round in front of the audience, just so you get, everyone gets used to it.

David Sacks 12:28 Got it. Normal.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:28 And I deliberately answered wrong, and I was, like, acting like an idiot and acting like I couldn't buzz and acting like I didn't know the answer.

David Sacks 12:34 You leveled him?

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:35 I tried to be, like, a little-

David Sacks 12:36 Oh, he leveled him. Oh, that's so diabolical. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:38 I tried to be a little, like, "Yeah, I don't really know what I'm doing here."

David Sacks 12:41 (laughs) Sharp. Ooh, sharp elbows.

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:42 Yeah. And then I came out swinging, and I felt like I had to kinda get aggressive out the gate.

David Sacks 12:46 And you- you-

Jason Calacanis 12:47 Yeah, I've done that before in a bar fight once. I was like, "Guys, guys, we don't need to get in a fight." Then I, bang, I just clocked him again.

David Sacks 12:53 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 12:53 Anyway, we're so proud of you. You won. You trounced them. I have to say, the woman-

Chamath Palihapitiya 12:57 Won for the Humane Society of the United States. All the money went to charity, Humane Society of the US.

David Sacks 13:01 How much did you make for them in the end?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:03 If you win the whole tournament, it's a million dollars.

Jason Calacanis 13:05 (gasps) That's a lot of dog food.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:07 And then, I think, as the winner, your charity gets more, and the loser's, their charity gets less, but it's a fixed amount. It's like 30,000 or 50,000 or something like that.

David Sacks 13:14 Nice.

Jason Calacanis 13:14 I think they should put the three of us on together, normal episode. That would be crazy.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:20 Oh, my God. (laughs) I would wreck you.

Jason Calacanis 13:21 If the three of us were on it-

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:22 I would wreck your ass.

Jason Calacanis 13:23 No, you would not.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:24 (laughs) Come on.

Jason Calacanis 13:24 I will play you heads-up Jeopardy at any time for money.

David Sacks 13:27 Let's play poker.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:28 We could do that. Yeah. We could-

David Sacks 13:28 I say we play poker. We'll play for all of the all-end profits.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:33 (laughs)

David Sacks 13:34 I'll give you two retards, 2X the chip stack, and let's see what happens.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:38 Oh, my God. It...

Jason Calacanis 13:39 That sounds so compelling.

David Sacks 13:41 Would you do it?

Jason Calacanis 13:41 Actually-

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:41 J Cal, would you do that?

David Sacks 13:43 Would you do it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:44 All the profits?

David Sacks 13:45 All the profits.

Jason Calacanis 13:46 I might not do it for all the profits, but I would carve out 25% of the profits for a four-way tournament that was televised live. If we could get two million in sponsors, then we'd be up, no matter what.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:55 (laughs) Grift. Endless grifting.

Jason Calacanis 13:58 I'm not grifting. I'm thinking like a business.

David Sacks 13:59 The whole point is pain.

Jason Calacanis 13:59 I'm a businessman.

David Sacks 14:00 No. I want to do this so that I inflict pain on one of you, or both.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:03 What gives Chamath happiness is hurting others.

David Sacks 14:05 Yes. That's- we love that.

Jason Calacanis 14:06 Exactly. That's his love language. (laughs)

David Sacks 14:08 That's his love language.

Jason Calacanis 14:09 That's hurting the people he loves. (laughs)

David Sacks 14:11 (laughs) I like how-

Jason Calacanis 14:12 His love language is hurting the people who love him.

David Sacks 14:15 I like putting you two to the test, and I like to see you two break.

Jason Calacanis 14:18 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:19 This one makes him feel good.

David Sacks 14:20 Anyways, did you guys see Brett

David Sacks 14:22 Adcock's tweet?

Jason Calacanis 14:22 No. What did he say?

David Sacks 14:23 Friend of the pod, Brett Adcock, who's the CEO and founder of Figure, he just announced today that he's moved his timelines up by two years. He's going to be-

Jason Calacanis 14:33 Two years?

David Sacks 14:33 ... beta testing robots in the home by, by the middle to end of this year.

Jason Calacanis 14:38 That's crazy.

David Sacks 14:39 Crazy. Crazy.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:41 Are you an investor in his company?

David Sacks 14:43 I don't talk about my investments, but in this case, no.

Jason Calacanis 14:46 No disclosures here.

David Sacks 14:47 But in this case, no, I'm not an investor.

Jason Calacanis 14:51 So we're not talking a book here. I do think Optimus and this Figure and the other, there's about a dozen of these doing it credibly. If they can make these for, what, Chamath, 20 grand, when do you think it becomes something a middle class household, you know, dual income household would buy one of these? Five years from now?

David Sacks 15:09 So-

Jason Calacanis 15:09 Ten years from now? Like, how, how probable could they be?

David Sacks 15:12 Last week... Well, I think the issue is bounded by two things. One is that I'm not sure that the generalized AI is good enough yet. And what he did was he had a deal with OpenAI, which he pretty publicly canceled a few weeks ago.

Jason Calacanis 15:28 Hmm.

David Sacks 15:29 And he announced his own model. And I don't know the details of it to know whether he rolled it himself or this is just, like, taking some open source-based model and iterating from it. But I think the model is not perfect yet to be general purpose. That's one. And then the second is a practical issue with the robots, which is that the actuators themselves are good, but they're not great. And you can see it in h- in the demo, where it's an incredible demo because it shows the value and the power of the model, where there's sort of this master-slave orientation that has to happen, where one model is actually doing most of the computation, and the second model and the second robot is then feeding off of it. And the demo that they do, Nick, you can probably find the video, is of them sorting a bag of groceries for the first time, totally unsupervised, which, and it's, it's an incredibly cool demo.

Jason Calacanis 16:24 It's a cool demo.

David Sacks 16:25 The thing that, that you notice, though, is that the actuators are good, they're not great. And so the physical dexterity is still relatively limited. And I think that that doesn't allow these robots to be super functional in the next couple of years. But when they get that figured out, then I think it could be really useful, because if you have a robot like this that could sort the groceries, make food, do the laundry, mow the lawn, so to speak, it just requires a level of dexterity that's not yet totally possible. But see, in this example, what you're seeing are the two robots basically figuring out how to communicate semantically between the robots. And that's incredibly powerful, and it's yet another sort of breakthrough that we need. So I don't know, we're probably, like, a couple years away. But see, look at the dexterity there. He's taking the Pepperidge Farms and feels like he's crushing the Pepperidge Farms, or she, or whatever you call this robot.

Jason Calacanis 17:13 They, them.

David Sacks 17:14 They.

Jason Calacanis 17:14 Please don't misgender the robot.

David Sacks 17:16 But it's, it's really incredible. They're figuring... The, the coolest part of this demo, by the way, which I loved, was they take an apple, and then the second robot figures out that it should go in the fruit bowl.

Jason Calacanis 17:28 Hmm.

David Sacks 17:28 Pushes the fruit bowl to the first robot, and then the first robot-

Jason Calacanis 17:30 (laughs) Oh, that's cool. There it is.

David Sacks 17:33 But that level of semantic awareness and understanding between two models working dependently is very cool. Look at that. That's very cool.

Jason Calacanis 17:43 They're collaborating with each other. It makes total sense. I can tell you, here on the ranch, I would love to have an all-purpose robot going out there and using the weed whacker and, and trimming the, the, the bushes and the hedges and getting me wood and collecting chicken eggs. Like, there's a million things they could do on a ranch, it'd be immediately applicable for ranch work. And if they are 24 hours a day, it doesn't matter if they go slow. But I, I think this is the category people are sleeping on. And I, I don't know who on the, on our prediction show said this will be the year of robots, but it's been, this is the year of robots for 30 years (laughs) in the industry. And it does feel like this is it. Freeberg, uh, you sticking with your prediction, I assume? Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:21 I am, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 18:23 I think it's also, it's not just this kind of dexterous automation, but I do think drones, autonomous vehicles, uh, I'd put them all in the same category where they're-

David Sacks 18:36 Hm.

Jason Calacanis 18:36 ... they're some- it- it's some combination of mechanical response to a machine vision system that, uh, I think is become, like, accelerated this year.

David Sacks 18:48 You need a lot of rare earths to make robots.

Jason Calacanis 18:51 Yeah, where could we ever get those from? Hm. Does anybody owe us a little money? Is anybody behind on their payments? Maybe the Vig could be a little, you know, taste. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but there was a company in the '90s that was all the rage called Segway, they were gonna absolutely change cities and everything and they never did, but it was basically like a scooter you could walk on and had a- a- a balancing, uh, kinda system to it. But they made robots, and here, they're making these lawn mowers now, and these lawn mowers are really, like, cheap, they're a thousand bucks, and they work. Here in Austin, I have seen two or three of these on people's lawns. This could be, like, you know ... What was the one that you did in your house? Roomba. To your point, Freeburg, there will be purpose-driven ones to deliver you a burrito, do your lawn, et cetera, and a Roomba's, like, three or four hundred bucks I think, and this thing's a thousand bucks. Man-

David Sacks 19:42 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 19:42 ... this is gonna get crazy.

David Sacks 19:42 I do- I do think it's a- it's a lot harder to create one of these general purpose systems and automation than create, like, vertically or kind of utility-specific automation systems, so a device that just does one thing; delivers something to you in the air, or drives your food to you, or loads and unloads your dishes. I- I, you know, I'm not sure if that's... The whole, the whole idea of the humanoid is-

Jason Calacanis 20:06 Hm.

David Sacks 20:06 ... it's ambitious.

Jason Calacanis 20:08 Yeah.

David Sacks 20:09 It is a general purpose device, and it makes a- a technically very hard roadmap, I gotta imagine.

Jason Calacanis 20:15 Some of the bulldozers out there are also now becoming remote-controlled, so you can get, like, a- a bulldozer that you have to put in a dangerous situation, and they're remote control and they're gonna have AI, so ... I got pitched on a startup one time that was gonna go up into Tahoe Hills and allow humans with remote controls to drive, Chamath, little bulldozers and make fire paths. So, imagine some fire breaks out. You send in, or helicopter in, the bulldozer, no human in it, just got a 5G connection or a Starling connection, and zip, zip, zip, you're doing fire roads in the middle of this smoke-dense area. It's gonna be really interesting when these things, uh, get dialed in, and they're getting-

David Sacks 20:53 I'm gonna-

Jason Calacanis 20:53 ... dialed in every day.

David Sacks 20:54 I'm gonna ask Brett to be a beta, alpha tester of one of these robots in my house and then we'll go and do it, we'll do a segment.

Jason Calacanis 21:00 That would be great. Excuse me, robot? Can I get some more morels? Too sweet,

Jason Calacanis 21:06 morels.

David Sacks 21:06 Let's talk about Stripe. I thought the- the report was really good.

Jason Calacanis 21:10 We had the Collison brothers on last week, they crushed it. Great job to them. And then, um, here is a quick summary. So, uh, in terms of processing, volume, Adyen, 1.34 trillion; Stripe at 1.4 trillion. I mean, that's incredible that they're both in the-

David Sacks 21:25 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 21:25 ... almost the same exact space. One's growing 33%, Stripe's growing 38%. Valuation, Adyen, 56, they're public; Stripe, private, 91.5 billion, I guess that's the private market premium. Employee count, very interesting here 'cause since we've been talking about, uh, Jamie Dimon's, uh, rant last week, Adyen, 4.300, Stripe, over 8,000. And, uh, both are profitable. Adyen's got a billy in EBITDA, which is extraordinary, but Stripe has a higher margin. What's your take on a tale of two cities here?

David Sacks 21:55 I thought there was three takeaways. The first takeaway for me was, the value of Stripe's ecosystem is- is probably underappreciated. I think Patrick mentioned it, but he just kind of said it as a passing fact and none of us picked up on it, but in the report, they talk about all the additional products that they're able to build around core payments, and one of them was the billing product. It's half a billion dollars a year of ARR.

Jason Calacanis 22:19 Hm.

David Sacks 22:19 That's just incredible. And I think if they figure out network effects inside of the Stripe ecosystem, that's i- interesting. So, that's first, which is the hub and spoke of payments being at the center of it and all of these other incremental services. I think that that's really interesting and underappreciated for Stripe. That probably speaks to why there's such a difference in valuation, because Adyen has less of that ecosystem, or at least it's not nearly as well described maybe as Stripe's is. That's number one. Second is, I go back to what I've been saying for a while now, but the- the rise of these stable coins is really interesting.

Jason Calacanis 22:51 Hm.

David Sacks 22:53 The stable coin infrastructure globally, the push for a bunch of these national governments to embrace them inside of India, inside of Brazil. Slowly it's happening inside of the United States. So I think that that was really interesting. And then the third takeaway, Nick, I sent you this tweet, was just the- the nature of the AI ecosystem relative to the rest of SaaS. And what this is, was from Stripe's report, which showed the time to get to five million of annualized revenue, and the average SaaS company took 37 months. And by 2024, the top 100 AI companies got there in 24 months.

Jason Calacanis 23:40 I mean, that's efficiency in the market, right? I mean, that's why we're all looking at AI saying, "We could see a lot of our economic issues come from growth, and the growth is very clear." You can do more with less, and you can generate more revenue with AI. So it's- it's pretty clear, the trend. Yeah, Chamath?

David Sacks 23:57 I think it's really clear. I mean, I can give you a little factoid from AD90, you know, we got to five million of revenue in three months.

Jason Calacanis 24:06 Hm.

David Sacks 24:07 Really crazy.

Jason Calacanis 24:08 Couple of wows in there, yeah. Couple of big ones.

David Sacks 24:10 Yeah. And so, it's just a very different selling motion than- than I've historically seen, where the ROI is just so obvious in terms of the efficiency that it creates and the cost savings you can generate relative to traditional enterprise software. It's a more straightforward sale.... the ROI is clearer, the revenue is bigger-

Jason Calacanis 24:34 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 24:34 ... it happens faster.

Jason Calacanis 24:36 Yeah.

David Sacks 24:36 So-

Jason Calacanis 24:37 There's also a s- I don't know if you're seeing it, but there's a sense of urgency in the market right now. People feel like they have to adopt this new technology fast because there's competition, because the gains are so clear, because in a slowing economy, this is maybe a way to accelerate revenue.

David Sacks 24:53 I'll be honest with you, at least with the, our 80, 90 customers, I haven't seen that yet. You know, we're in, I don't know, eight or nine segments of the economy, big segments of the economy. It's more still about the frustration that they have with what I would call the software industrial complex.

Jason Calacanis 25:10 Ah.

David Sacks 25:10 There's a big... And you, you can see it with what's happening to Salesforce and other big companies, is that these renewal cycles are getting harder and harder to justify, and so people are willing to take some bets and see if there are different ways in dealing with this problem. And I think that's the real opportunity, is if you can find a repeatable pattern to help these companies replace that big software spend that they have-

Jason Calacanis 25:40 Yeah.

David Sacks 25:41 ... that scales really quickly. And the only way to do that, really, is using AI in two ways, AI inside the machinery of what you're using yourself to make the things, right? So, those are things like Cursor and whatnot to just fully accelerate, and then AI within some s- very specific products that the customers actually need that also create efficiency. So, there's two different places, but th- the problem with using it in both of these two different places is in the first one, you can manage the errors.

Jason Calacanis 26:09 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 26:09 It's ver- it's very straightforward. At the end of the day, code either compiles or it doesn't. So, even if you're using something like Cursor, which is an incredible product, there are no errors at the end of it because the thing actually works or it doesn't.

Jason Calacanis 26:20 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 26:20 The problem is actually when you use these models in actual work. And if you're in a regulated environment particularly, it gets very complicated because if you generate a hallucination in a healthcare business and it causes a, you know, patient record to be incorrect, there are huge consequences there.

Jason Calacanis 26:38 Hmm.

David Sacks 26:39 And that, we haven't solved yet. That exists in regulated finance, it exists when you're dealing with real estate and construction, it exists when you're dealing with power, it exists in aerospace, right? Imagine if an LLM helps you design an, a plane better. But if there's a tolerance error and that's not well understood, that could have, you know, horrific consequences downstream. So, we b- we're, we're working with all these people to try to figure it out. It's a very difficult technical challenge, but I just thought the Stripe data was really interesting because it validates what we're seeing, which is the, um, the growth in this industry is, it's not like anything I've ever seen before.

Jason Calacanis 27:15 Back to the stable coins, here's a look at Tether. They're at $143 billion in Tethers out there. Who knows what's reality there? They've had a little bit of a shaky history. And then USDC, Jeremy Allaire's is at 56 billion already, and, and that's only been in existence since like, uh, really in earnest, like 2021. I do think Stripe's main business could be, if we're sitting here in five years, Chamath, could be sitting on $300 billion and getting whatever it is, 3, 4, 5% on some coupon, right?They could be making 10, $20 billion in pure profit if they, uh, have a stable coin out there that gets widely adopted.

David Sacks 27:57 Yeah, and, and I, and I think the best way for Stripe to actually do this is just to, to build it and to actually facilitate payments between existing Stripe customers because-

Jason Calacanis 28:06 Hmm.

David Sacks 28:07 ... again, it's sort of what I said last week. These are all ultimately ledger entries, and I think that the more that you can commoditize these things to be a simple ledger entry inside of two systems of record at two companies, that's a much better product feature. I think Stripe has the scale to do that now. And to your point, they could have a, an enormous stable coin business. At the same time, they're probably better off just embracing what's already been built. I- i- it may be disruptive to try to launch yet another one. I don't know.

Jason Calacanis 28:36 They bought that other company, so I gotta think they'll launch their own.

David Sacks 28:39 But Bridge is the facilitation layer, so.

Jason Calacanis 28:41 It's the rails, yeah, but I mean... I think, you know, this is where brand comes in. If you have a trusted brand amongst developers and, uh, there's three choices, are they gonna take Tether, which people go, "Eh, uh, maybe it's a little sorted, it's offshore, eh, got some challenges there." Am I gonna use USDC? Okay, I'm- haven't heard of it, but okay, yeah, they sound interesting. Oh, I'm gonna use Stripe. I'm gonna go right to Stripe. It's kind of like the IBM, you know, or Microsoft of payments. Right, nobody gets fired for picking Stripe, I would say, so.

David Sacks 29:10 Not anymore.

Jason Calacanis 29:11 Not anymore.

Jason Calacanis 29:12 All right, let's go through the market update here. A lot of people are trying to figure out, are we going to have a market collapse, a boom? Let's just look at some of the numbers and have a, uh, a first principle discussion here. S&P up almost 2%, uh, so far this year, NASDAQ 100 flat, DOW up 3%, so pretty good start to the year in those index numbers. But if you look at the Mag 7, some of them have s- had some serious compression. Tesla down 27%, I do think that they had a big Trump/Elon spike. Google down 10%, Amazon nine, Microsoft about 8%, Meta, Apple, NVIDIA were up to varying degrees. And then coming into our taping this week, Bitcoin down 15% over the last month. That, too, got the Trump bump. And then adding to all this confusion, unemployment is still at historic lows. We're, we're at close to 4%, and if you look at the deportations that were promised, they've been modest to start. Obviously, they're just getting started, they need some money to deport folks, but they've only been deporting 500 people to 1,000 a day, and we haven't heard many numbers about the last couple of weeks as Doge has been sort of the center of attention. So, you know, they'd have to get to two or 3,000 people a day to have low millions, let's say, Chamath, two or three million people deported for it to have any impact on unemployment.Finally, act three, and then we'll, we'll get everybody's feedback on this. CPI up 3% year over year. We had hi- dipped down to that nice 2% handle and, uh, now it's back a little bit. If you remember in September, it bottomed out around 2.4% just in time for the election. Interesting how that happened. That same month, the Fed cut 50 bps, then it cut another 25 in December and since inflation's been growing modestly but steadily, not insignificantly. So put it all together, Chamath, and what do you think? And then Friedberg, we'll go to you.

David Sacks 31:06 I tend to be sort of in the Stevie Cohen camp. It's not like the bottom is gonna fall out, but there's, like, a lot of room for concern, I guess is the best way to put it. Um, Nick, I don't know if you can find that clip, that, at FII, but he had a very precise summary of how he saw the world. And I, I, I frankly just agreed with everything that he was saying. So he, he probably can say it better than I.

Guest commentator 31:29 When you take a brew of tariffs, on top of that, we have slowing immigration. And in addition now, you have DOGE. I mean, that's austerity. We think growth is gonna slow to 1.5% from 2.5% in the second half. And so I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while. And it may only last a year or so, but it's definitely, I think the best gains have been had and, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction.

David Sacks 31:56 I think a couple of very specific thoughts. The first is that you're starting to see this compression of the Mag 7 towards everybody else. So this is the forward PE of these guys. And so what you're starting to see is everybody else starting to capture back some of the ground. People are processing what the real upside of, of the Mag 7 is. Now, if you go to the other chart, what this starts to show you though is that Mag 7 is really priced to perfection.

Jason Calacanis 32:25 Hmm.

David Sacks 32:26 And so you have to believe that the world kind of stays the way that it is. Otherwise, you're gonna have some amount of, of mean reversion. So I think the stock market on the margin is a little expensive and not particularly that attractive. Second, the bond market has basically said, "Okay, we are going to give you credit that DOGE is going to work and that tariffs are going to work." So we've had some pretty meaningful compression in the tenure, which I think is really interesting. I think it's very good for Besant and for Trump. And, and I think I've mentioned this before, but we gotta go in and, you know, refinance $10 trillion in the next six months. So you could see this thing maybe even get under 4% if we get s- a good string of data. The real problem, I think, though, is that if you look back and say, "What does this look like?" The example that I would give you guys is in 2010 in the United Kingdom, the deficit as a percentage of GDP was 10%. And the UK government embarked on a multi-year austerity plan. And they said, "We're gonna get the deficit as a percentage of GDP back in line."

Jason Calacanis 33:43 Mm.

David Sacks 33:43 And ultimately, by 2016, it got to 3%, which is where we are trying to get to. And right now, we're a little bit under 7%. We're trying to get it to 3%. So it's interesting to ask, what happened? And there, the bond market gave the UK government a ton of credit so they kept rates relatively low and they brought them back from where they were. That seems like what's happening here.

Jason Calacanis 34:10 Yeah, I mean-

David Sacks 34:10 The stock market, the stock market kind of went sideways to a little bit down. Let's see what happens here. But the real big thing is in the UK, all of this created tremendous dissatisfaction, and you had Brexit. So I think the question that I have is, if we go through a prolonged austerity program and the frustration amongst the American populous builds, what's the release valve? There, the release valve was voting to leave the EU. Here, it's not quite, it's not obvious to me what our release valve is.

Jason Calacanis 34:45 Well, electing Trump was step one, and I don't know if there's something even more populist than Trump, other than...

David Sacks 34:50 No, I think, I, I think he is the mechanism of implementing the austerity. I think people want this austerity. Just the question is, what happens when the actual byproducts of that austerity are felt by people for six or seven years? I don't know what the answer is.

Jason Calacanis 35:04 Certainly, people are in favor of DOGE and downsizing the government more than I think anybody anticipated. People are, the statistics are showing and the polls are showing, Friedberg, that it's incredibly popular. When you look at this, I don't wanna say conflicting, but it's a lot of different conflicting data here as to what's going on. What do you, what do you see in the numbers here? And, and what does your instinct tell you? Because s- part of this, I think, is getting used to Trump again, right? Like, he says a lot of stuff. Some of them are scary, some of them are just trolling, and everything in between. So w- what are your thoughts here? Are markets just adjusting to the, the new, uh, the new team back in town?

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:48 The big question in the Trump actions is around tariffs versus the tax cuts that are being proposed versus the, the spending cuts. Those are kind of the three levers. And there's a very serious sensitivity to the economic outlook for growth and inflation as a function of how far each of those three levers are pulled and how they relate to each other. Is Trump actually going to pull forward the cuts that he has talked about or that Elon's talked about? How real is that? There's a whole spectrum of opinions on that right now. On one end, you're looking at the House and the Senate reconciliation process for the budget proposals that they've put forth, and you're gonna scratch your head and be like, "Are we really cutting enough relative to what the economists and others are telling us we need to do?"Meanwhile, you've got Elon and Trump saying, "Hey, we're cutting, we're cutting, we're saving. We're going to get up to a trillion dollars a year." But that's not showing up necessarily in the budget. Is it showing up in the actions out of Doge, TBD? So there's a whole spectrum of opinions on the cuts. On the tariff side, there's a spectrum of, like, how far are these tariffs gonna go? You know, the United States, up until 18 something, was entirely tariff-driven in our federal government's revenue, and it was a way of being kind of protectionary to the industry here. And then over time, the tariffs rates came down and down and down as we introduced an income tax, which started, I think, at 3% right after the Civil War and went to 5% for high income earners. And then, obviously, in the 20th century, that's totally flipped. Now we have, like, no tariffs and a 50% income tax for the highest bracket. So can we actually revert back to a tariff-driven income model for the federal government? And what is the economic effect on growth for corporate America in that world where taxes get cut for the companies and for individuals, but we make all of our money from global trade? Does the s- the, the increased cost of global trade hurt companies more than the benefit of paying fewer taxes, lower taxes? That's the big economic argument that's underway right now. And it's funny, it kind of seems to fall along political lines, believe it or not. Much (laughs) like everything else, you know?

Jason Calacanis 37:56 (laughs) Shocked.

Chamath Palihapitiya 37:57 Like e- economists that, uh, that are Democratic-aligned are- Democratic-aligned-

Jason Calacanis 38:01 What's my party doing? Uh, I agree with that, yeah. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:04 Yeah, exactly. And so the Democrat-aligned economists will say, "The tariffs don't make sense. They reduce, uh, economic growth. They have a negative effect. We shouldn't be doing that." And then the Republican-aligned economists are saying, "The tax cuts will more than make up for the reduce, uh, the reduction from the tariffs." And that's the big unknown right now. Um, so I would say that the spending cuts, wide spectrum, the income tax cuts, big spectrum on what's actually gonna get done here, and then the tariffs, big spectrum on how far this is gonna go.

Jason Calacanis 38:37 Wild card, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:38 And so those three things, you've got like three very wide ranges of things that all interplay, that ultimately determine inflation, economic growth, government deficits over the next decade, and we don't really have a clear picture yet of how those three things interplay. And they're all being hotly debated, and by the way, there's high variability. They're changing day to day. Every day, Trump's like, "This tariff, that tariff." Yesterday, there was a whole bunch of confusion on tariffs. Today, there's a whole bunch of, like, discussion on how far the tax cut extension's gonna go in the reconciliation process and on and on and on, so TBD.

Jason Calacanis 39:10 I encourage people to use my 72-hour rule (laughs) and look at what happens 72 hours after Trump says something spicy because, a lot of times, he's just, he says a lot of things and you, you gotta wait for it to land.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:20 Well, it's not just Trump. I'll, I'll say, like, yeah, but the House and the Senate, they both put forward their, their budgets, right? And now they go through this reconciliation process, and there's a lot in there that leaves a lot to be desired. (laughs) If you're, if you're, uh, an absolute, like, you know, fiscal conservative and you're trying to get us to 3% deficit as a percent of GDP, you're like, "Wait a second, does this do enough?"

Jason Calacanis 39:47 And the tax cuts are 4.5 trillion over 10 years so, you know, that's approximately 450 billion a year. If you're trying to catch up, (laughs) how are we doing tax cuts, you know?

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:55 But, J Cal, remember, you can't make those statements as fact because a lot of those over-10-year projections are projections based on someone's estimate of the economic effect of the tax cuts. So there's also-

Jason Calacanis 40:06 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:06 ... a lot of debate on that, which is, hey, some people are saying, "If we make these tax cuts, the economy will grow faster than this particular-"

Jason Calacanis 40:14 Much faster, yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:15 "... th- the CBO economist will estimate," and the CBO economists are trying to be conservative. So there's a whole lot of debate going on right now on, like, how much is this really gonna cost? And people are like, "Oh my God, Trump is talking about raising our deficits so much over the next decade." But then there's a different point of view, which is, wait a second, if you assume that the economy will grow because of these cuts, then that's actually not true. And then there's all these wild cards around the golden visa card.

Jason Calacanis 40:38 Yeah, we're about to get to that, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:40 Are the tariffs gonna be a trillion a year? Are they gonna be $2 trillion of revenue? No one really knows.

Jason Calacanis 40:44 Or none, and it's just a negotiating position, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:45 Or just a negotiation, so no one knows, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 40:47 No one knows. So tha- that's my, I think, main point is this, uh, this administration is all over the place, you know, and the cuts are great-

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:56 But Chamath's right, the bond market tells you a lot. The fact that the tenure has-

Jason Calacanis 40:59 The bond market does tell you if people's bet, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:00 The, the tenure was at, was, it peaked at 5% two, two weeks before the election, and then it peaked again the second week of January at 4.78%. Now it's down to 4.26% today. So it's come down by a full half a point in the last month, which tells you a lot about the expectations on inflation and growth over the next decade. And it's actually a reasonable, like, sign that we don't think there's gonna be rampant inflation over the next decade based on some of the policy decisions and actions that are being taken by this administration. So I would say there's some indication that if, if you were to kinda try and decode the enigma of the three things that we talked about are going on, you know, it's generally kind of deflationary to some extent, or it's not inflationary.

Jason Calacanis 41:43 Are you optimistic? Just net-net, Dave, you're optimistic about this next four-year period or not?

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:47 I'm honestly pretty uncertain, and I'm pretty unhappy with both, um, the Senate and the House budgets, personally. I don't think that there's a-

Jason Calacanis 41:53 They're too fat, too many cuts, not hard enough?

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:54 Yeah, I don't think there's enough action in there. I don't think that... And, and it's weird because you hear Elon talking to all the members of the, uh, the cabinet, and he's pretty clear-cut. "Hey, we've gotta save... This government is in a debt spiral. We have to fix this problem," yada yada, and then it's sort of like business as usual. Which, like I said-

Jason Calacanis 42:10 Yolo (laughs) in DC.

Chamath Palihapitiya 42:10 ... when we were in DC, that was exactly my observation for every senator, representative, member of Congress that we met with or that I talked to at a cocktail party, it was the same bullshit. It was like, "I gotta get this for my people." That's the goal. And we've turned this federated republic into a whole bunch of elected representatives showing up in DC, scrambling and grabbing money for their constituents. That's what they were hired and elected to do, and it's a really unfortunate circumstance that no one looks out for the better interest of the US dollar over time and says, "You know what? We've actually got a limitation on us, and that limitation should be less than 3% deficit, uh, to GDP. That's our budget. That's our max budget," and start from there-

Jason Calacanis 42:47 All right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 42:47 ... and then do a build-up, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 42:49 Yeah, I mean, Chamath, I think, collective action aside-You've been talking a little bit about this. I don't know if it was a couple of weeks ago, you, you were tweeting about the Great Reset Theory, and there's, you know, whatever that is, the third or fourth turning people have been talking about. You want to, uh, maybe encapsulate your thoughts?

David Sacks 43:09 I think you have to figure out what the goal is. So one goal is, you could say that the Republicans want to have consistent political power, right? That's a reasonable goal. The Democrats want that too, right? A different goal would be to do what Friedberg said, "We're going to go and take the lumps because we are going to defend th- the dollar and the credibility of the United States. We're just going to make sure that structurally it's sound and take the pain that's necessary to reset." That could be a goal. I think the reality is something in the middle-

Jason Calacanis 43:47 Hmm.

David Sacks 43:47 ... where you can't be in one camp and you can't be in the other, 'cause I don't think you can get anything done. And somewhere in the middle, I think the thing that I have been thinking a lot about is when will somebody sniff out what the great coalition is that preserves political power? Whether that's the Democrats or the Republicans, the reality is that you will have a consistent majority if you get three cohorts of people together. Cohort number one are the people that, frankly, don't have many assets and are the working and middle class. Meaning they don't necessarily own homes, they don't necessarily have investments in the stock market, so they don't particularly care about what's happening there. Okay? That cohort dominates. There was a clip of a discussion at Harvard just this past week about the different political coalitions that voted for Trump versus Kamala Harris. The most important takeaway that I took from it is that if you make $100,000 or more a year, you're a reliable Democratic voter. If you went to college, you're a reliable Democratic voter. Everything else is a reliable Republican voter. But the thing to remember is that bucket of everything else is growing faster than that first bucket. So you have this coalition of the asset-light, working and middle class, and then you have other people, patriotic business people and patriotic business owners and technology people that care about innovation, that MAGA has been able to corral into a coalition. My point is, if that is the consistent, reliable thing that cements political power multiple elections from now, and we've seen this before in the past where Republicans can go on a three-term run or, you know, a four-term run, Democrats have as well in the past, it is bad news for the stock market and it is bad news for asset owners, because it doesn't reward the constituents. Back to Friedberg's point, so if you are going to feed your constituents and your constituents don't own stocks and your constituents don't own homes, or they are so wealthy that they can be inoculated from a massive drawdown in those asset categories, what do you think the winning strategy is? That is my rough working version of what our version of Brexit is, right? So if you have many, many years of austerity, what does it really result in? I think if you want to cement political power, I think it requires a walking down of these asset markets in a meaningful way. That's stocks and that's real estate, and I just don't see any other way around it.

Jason Calacanis 46:37 Fascinating. The good news is, I think, from my perspective is-

David Sacks 46:41 Well, by the way, sorry, last thing I would say. That's a total theory, and I could change my mind-

Jason Calacanis 46:45 Yeah.

David Sacks 46:45 ... as I get more data, but I'm just saying, like, I'm just trying to work through the possibilities and in the distribution of outcomes, that's sort of where my head's at right now.

Jason Calacanis 46:52 I think it's, like, a good mental model because politicians want to stay in power. How do they stay in power? The populous has to want to continue to back, and they have to understand what-

David Sacks 47:02 Backing strategies that, that reward-

Jason Calacanis 47:04 Yeah.

David Sacks 47:04 ... asset owners when asset owners are a shrinking minority is not a good idea.

Jason Calacanis 47:09 Well, there's 60% of the country own assets, but 80% of those assets are in the top, like, 10%, so it is definitely weighted heavily. People do have some, I guess, through their 401 (k) s in some cases, and yeah, 60% of people own a home, 61%. But yeah, I think it's a, it's a good framework. The good news is, if you look at every time we have a great technological revolution, whether it was the iPhone or the internet, now AI, that tends to make, uh, um, the most impact on the economy. And so based on what I'm seeing-

David Sacks 47:40 No.

Jason Calacanis 47:41 ... on the streets, entrepreneurship is on fire right now.

David Sacks 47:44 No, but that's not true. I think you're confusing that with how certain people, like, everybody has an iPhone, that's true, but you're the one that's talked a lot about this a lot. It hasn't lifted average hourly earnings that much. In fact, we've had massive wage suppression. It has rewarded the employees and the stockholders of Apple or Google or Meta, but that's not everybody.

Jason Calacanis 48:10 Well, I'm talking more about, yes, you're correct, it does polarize the win in Apple shareholders, right, in the case of the iPhone, or Google in the case of the internet, but it does make the entire populous more efficient, and the United States more efficient since we led both of those revolutions.

David Sacks 48:26 I, um, I don't think it does. I think it, it benefits supremely a small cohort of people, that's why the, the denominator goes up. But does it affect individual people in measurable ways on a broad-based basis? I think that's been statistically proven as not to be true. That's why we have the populism we have today.

Jason Calacanis 48:43 It's disproportionately rewarded equity holders, that's obvious, and wage earners it ha- you know, have not had the same escalation. But I'm talking about the United States.... and our place in the world and our e- economy when compared to other countries. So I still think if we lead AI-

David Sacks 49:02 Well, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 49:02 ... we will still have the best standard of living, the best overall economy in the world, but-

David Sacks 49:06 I

David Sacks 49:07 love his... What do you guys think about the golden visa? I love that, the golden visa.

Jason Calacanis 49:09 Well, this is incredible because (laughs) I literally tweeted, like, six months ago, you know, "We should just sell citizenship for $500,000 a pop," and he added a zero.

David Sacks 49:20 I'll give you a prediction.

Jason Calacanis 49:21 I love it.

David Sacks 49:21 I'll give you a prediction. I will predict that within the next few months after this gets announced, you are going to hear about founders taking $5 million of secondary in a round-

Jason Calacanis 49:34 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 49:34 ... to make sure that if they are non-Americans, to get their visas.

Jason Calacanis 49:38 100%.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:39 Hey, uh, check out this prediction. Nick, we now have a poly market to trade. How many gold cards-

Jason Calacanis 49:44 Oh.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:44 ... will Trump sell in 2025?

Jason Calacanis 49:46 Ooh, in poly market? Oh, that's a free-

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:48 In poly market.

Jason Calacanis 49:48 Well done. I- I think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:50 So-

Jason Calacanis 49:50 What is the- what is the bet?

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:52 Well, so you either can have zero.

Jason Calacanis 49:54 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:55 You can have one to 100, 100 to 1,000. Here's the, the different levels, 1,000-

Jason Calacanis 50:01 Oh, okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:01 ... to 2,500, 2,500 to 5,000. So you can basically buy the level that you think. There's an 8% probability right now in poly market that by the end of 2025, there will be zero of these golden visas sold.

Jason Calacanis 50:11 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:12 25% chance of one to 100.

Jason Calacanis 50:15 Mm-hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:15 17% chance of 100 to 1,000 and so on. The most probable level is actually 2,500 to 5,000, which is sitting at 29% probability right now.

Jason Calacanis 50:25 I'm taking the over.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:25 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 50:25 I'm taking the o- I'm taking the way over.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:27 So what do you think then? But this is by the end of '25, J-Cal. So you gotta get... They basically have to get the program-

Jason Calacanis 50:31 Oh, okay, so they still have to get this done.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:32 They gotta have the program up and running-

Jason Calacanis 50:33 Okay, I understand, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:34 ... and then people by the... So it's by the end of '25 is the-

Jason Calacanis 50:37 Hmm. Okay-

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:37 ... the way it goes.

Jason Calacanis 50:38 So people are really just betting when can he get the first one done? And then, yeah, how- how many does he get done? Yeah. I know.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:46 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 50:46 I'm gonna take the top two. I think I might take 5,000 and above here.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:49 Will you put real money on that? You should do that. Oh, you can't trade poly market.

Jason Calacanis 50:51 I mean, it's not available to Americans.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:53 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 50:53 But if there was a way to do it, I might do it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:55 Well, here's what I-

Jason Calacanis 50:55 This is not unprecedented, by the way. There is something called the EB-5, which I talked about before on this-

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:01 That's right.

Jason Calacanis 51:01 ... show where non-citizens can invest a bunch of money, but it's a bit of a scam. I got pitched on it. People said, "Oh, we can get you LPs for your fund. Here's how it works." They invest in some, you know-

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:12 That's right.

Jason Calacanis 51:12 ... fugazi Fugazi real estate thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:14 You have to- you have to create 10 full-time jobs is the-

Jason Calacanis 51:17 Yeah, so there's a bunch of scams going on about this EB-

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:19 ... requirement.

Jason Calacanis 51:19 ... 5.

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:20 Right.

Jason Calacanis 51:20 But I said, "As your president, I'm going to sell these citizenships and get 100,000 people to do 500K each," right? And I said they would sell like Taylor Swift tickets. I, I gotta tell you, I think out of the gate, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, buy, you know, one to 10,000 of these. So let's say you were able to buy these and you could swap them out, like if somebody left and went back to their country, you could still use it, you still have the visa. These would become incredible for recruiting talent. If you got to get the CEO of a company over here and you can offer them that, you could buy their company.

David Sacks 51:52 Is that how it's gonna work or is that... is it gonna be tied to a person, do you think?

Jason Calacanis 51:55 We have two different issues here. One is, could you swap these between another person?

David Sacks 51:59 We don't know.

Jason Calacanis 51:59 He could... The president could make it like that if they wanted to for corporations to give them essentially what is a, a season pass that you could swap between users. Those things exist in the world as a concept. So he could decide to do that. The second piece is how valuable they are. Are they worth five million or are they- are they worth a million? Which- which would sell the most?

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:20 The way this is proposed by Trump and Luttnik is it's $5 million for basically a green card. You get permanent residence in the United States. You get to live here permanently.

Jason Calacanis 52:30 Yeah, I think-

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:30 They're getting rid of the EB-5 program after this. That's their proposal.

Jason Calacanis 52:34 Exactly.

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:34 And so here's, here's the math. Let me ask you guys a question. Jamal, J-Cal.

Jason Calacanis 52:38 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:38 How many people in the world have a net worth above 100 million?

Jason Calacanis 52:45 Oh. Above 100? Uh, well, we know that there are like 5,000... 4,000 or 5,000 billionaires is the estimate, I think globally. So a centimillionaire-

David Sacks 52:57 Well, I think that there's a lot of-

Jason Calacanis 52:58 ... got to be 50,000?

David Sacks 53:00 There's a lot of hidden billionaires. So I would take in-

Jason Calacanis 53:02 That's where they are, Russia and China, yeah.

David Sacks 53:03 Even in America. I would guess that there's at least 10 or 15,000 billionaires in the world.

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:08 100 millionaire.

David Sacks 53:10 And so then as a centimillionaire-

Jason Calacanis 53:11 We're working backwards.

David Sacks 53:12 ... probably 50,000.

Jason Calacanis 53:14 That's what I said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:15 28,000. 40% of whom are in the US, which means there's 17,000-

Jason Calacanis 53:20 Okay, so... But who knows that number's real?

David Sacks 53:22 These num-

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:22 Come on.

David Sacks 53:22 Yeah, these- these numbers are all made up. So I- I think the-

Jason Calacanis 53:24 You know how many Russian oligarchs have $100 million? A lot.

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:27 I'm just... Okay, so whatever fudge factor you want, 17,000 is the reported number of-

Jason Calacanis 53:33 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:34 ... 100 millionaires outside the US. Do you think that that's the cutoff for people that would spend five million? And then what percent of them would buy a US green card for $5 million?

Jason Calacanis 53:42 Oh, I think people with 20 million who are overseas in Venezuela or the Middle East would spend five million on it if it was a path to them becoming a US citizen. You amortize that over a lifetime, you could make twice as much money living here. So I think the numbers, like if you had $20 million, you would give 25% of your current net worth to get into the US, of course. You're gonna buy a house here worth 10 million.

David Sacks 54:02 And Donald Trump said that you would not have to pay any tax on foreign assets.

Jason Calacanis 54:08 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:08 Right.

Jason Calacanis 54:09 Easy peasy.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:10 It's a true green card.

David Sacks 54:12 That is a-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:12 That's a real green card.

David Sacks 54:13 No, no, no, a real green card is what I had, (laughs) which is your global income is taxed.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:17 That's true.

David Sacks 54:18 So it's worse. Meaning the green card is worse than this. This is way better. So if, if I had to do it again and this was available to me-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:26 I'm just, I'm just pointing out, I'm not sure there's a million-

David Sacks 54:27 ... I would have spent five million bucks.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:28 I'm not sure there's a million buyers.

David Sacks 54:30 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:30 I think there's probably 10,000 max buyers of this thing is my estimate.

David Sacks 54:34 I'll take the over of 10. I wouldn't take the over of a million. I think you're right on the million number.

Jason Calacanis 54:39 Is that... What did Trump say? He said there's a million people who would buy it?

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:41 Pull up the poly market, Nick. The most probable is one to 2,500. I think that's probably right.

David Sacks 54:46 But you didn't ask the total-

Jason Calacanis 54:47 That's in year one.

David Sacks 54:47 You ask in year one and, I mean-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:50 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 54:50 So it takes six months to get anything done in Washington.

David Sacks 54:51 This poll, this poll is, this poll is dumb. The real question is, how hard will they be vetted? Because I think the point is there's a lot of gray money around the world.

Jason Calacanis 55:00 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 55:01 So the question is, can you bring it into the light?Right? So-

Jason Calacanis 55:04 Yeah.

David Sacks 55:05 ... how many, like, look, I know of, m- many people in India, many, who are extremely wealthy in ways that we don't understand, and their wealth is literally, like, in cash, it's in gold. How are they supposed to kind of, like, if they wanted to, like, raise their family in America, because now it's possible, how do they do that? How do they... How do they take their assets? Do you go to JPMorgan and all of a sudden, like, you show them this golden visa and they say, "Great. We're gonna..." If there's a workaround to, like, the KYC AML laws, honestly, Freeburg, you could sell two million of these things.

Jason Calacanis 55:42 (laughs) Don't think so.

David Sacks 55:44 If you literally have to go through the existing set of frameworks on, like, OFAC, AML, KYC, all that stuff, it's probably in the tens of thousands.

Jason Calacanis 55:56 All I have to say is, this is one of the greatest proposals ever, and-

David Sacks 56:01 Oh, it's great.

Jason Calacanis 56:02 It's fan-freaking-tastic, combined with Doge. Okay? Uh, if he gets this done, if he gets Doge done-

David Sacks 56:10 Jason, but I agree with you, by the way-

Jason Calacanis 56:12 ... and he gets accredited investing done, if he gets those three things done, I'm voting for his third term. We're gonna redo the, uh, constitution.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:17 Jason, just explain to us

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:19 your, your personal interest in accredited investing. What's the grift connection? I'm not sure I'm fully tracking the idea.

Jason Calacanis 56:23 It's not a grift connection. I feel like there's a bunch of people stealing money doing crypto scams.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:29 Uh-huh.

Jason Calacanis 56:29 And that all of that would be solved if people could just take a test to become an accredited investor, which is, like, currently 6 or 7% of the country, and then they would understand diversification and, you know, how different devices work, convertible debt, whatever. And if they did understand that, you could take people who are gambling in the stock market and allow them to invest in po- private market companies, and I believe that would create more... Th- this issue we brought up in the last segment, about poor people not being able to become rich people, and upward mobility. Upward mobility could be very easily-

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:07 I, I-

Jason Calacanis 57:07 Hold on, let me finish my thought.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:08 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 57:08 Upward mobility could be so much better if a person who's an Uber driver or an HR person working, you know, at a company, could put $500, $1,000, instead of betting on the Knicks or the Jets, God forbid, they could put that $500 into this new product or service they're using, LinkedIn, or this new product or service they're using. And then that would allow more startups to get created. There are so many people who contact me after reading my book and say, "I want to invest in startups." They can't. And I-

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:35 I will tell you-

Jason Calacanis 57:36 ... think they would be so much better off putting $100 or $500 into a startup than just wasting it at roulette tables.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:42 Great. I'll take the opposite.

Jason Calacanis 57:44 Okay, go ahead.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:44 And, and I'll tell you why. I think you're right, it would be great, but they should buy the S&P. They should buy the S&P index. Proven, scaled, audited, profitable-

Jason Calacanis 57:55 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:55 ... well-vetted, solid fiduciary responsibility with public board companies.

Jason Calacanis 57:59 Yep. And what will they learn from that?

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:02 If you do what you're tell- The problem is, most of these people, most people, even smart VCs, even intelligent people, make extraordinary mistakes in the startups that they back.

Jason Calacanis 58:11 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:11 I don't think that we have a shortage of startups. I think we have a shortage of good startups. And I think that if you-

Jason Calacanis 58:16 Let me address this.

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:17 But if you, if you flood the market with capital, you're gonna see the same problem we've had with every venture capital cycle, or every private cycle, which is you get a whole bunch of bullshit that gets funded, that shouldn't get funded, that ends up eating a lot of peoples' money. And unfortunately, when people are less sophisticated and they enter the private investment markets, they're not gonna necessarily be left well off. They're gonna end up getting scammed in a different way. Someone's gonna show some-

Jason Calacanis 58:41 Let me give you the, um...

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:42 ... crazy fancy PowerPoint to them-

Jason Calacanis 58:44 Yeah, yeah. I-

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:44 ... take their money, and they're gonna get eaten up, which won't happen if they buy the S&P. Go ahead.

Jason Calacanis 58:48 Okay. Yeah. So, let me counter all that. They should buy the S&P, sure, and they can do that today, right? They can get a Robinhood account. They can buy-

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:56 Make 11% a year.

Jason Calacanis 58:57 Perfect. And that's the protectionist, paternalistic approach that we've had. What that doesn't do is, it makes them nice and safe, and then their thousand dollars becomes 1,070 next year and 1,150 the next year. Great, they learned one lesson, the rule of 72 and compounding interest. That's the only lesson they learn. But when you start betting on startups, you learn how entrepreneurship works, how product market fit works. And so, sure, put 80%-

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:24 Depends on the startups you get into.

Jason Calacanis 59:24 ... into an index fund and put 20% into investing in private companies. They would learn more. And when Uber wanted to give Uber drivers access to buying shares, they're not allowed to. And so the rich can buy whatever they want. They can make whatever bets they want. They can be in private equity, they can be in all these things that have the chance to 100x to 10x, but poor people can't. All I'm saying is, if they're educated and they take a course, let them do... Take a little bit of risk in an intelligent fashion and let them learn about entrepreneurship. I grew up blue-collar, and I didn't have exposure to how private for- company formation worked. I didn't understand any of this. I had to battle my way to learn all of it. If you had a course and people could go just as easily as they go to PrizePix, which I bet on every Knicks game, and they could go just as easily to PrizePix as they could go to Coinbase, as they could go to a private market company and invest, that would be better for upward mobility. So, you're right. People are gonna lose money, but they're gonna learn.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:27 What do you think, Chamath? Settle the difference between the two of us.

David Sacks 1:00:29 I think that both are true. I think that we're all much better off just owning indices, or at least that was true. I think the, the problem with these indices right now is those are not really well-balanced indices, because the rules have changed.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:44 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 1:00:44 And the rules have changed because these companies have been smart enough to lobby folks like S&P, and S&P has allowed these thresholds to creep up. And so now when you're buying the S&P 500, you're not doing that anymore. You're buying the S&P 7 and then the rest in the 493 is, you know, 60%. So, if that's what you want, that's fine. So, we'd have to fix the ETF market to make sure that there was a little bit more transparency and there was more balance.But these weighted indices are basically just the Mag 7. That, that's neither good nor bad, I'm just saying that's what it is. And so...

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:20 Yeah, and I'm just saying...

David Sacks 1:01:21 It just creates the same problem. People think they're buying diversification because you're like, "Hey, go here, and it's diversified," and it turns out it's not.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:26 That's an interesting point, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:27 Not even, not even diversification, just, like, vetted, like, mature real companies versus what I think will happen, which we've seen time and again with people that are not sophisticated or experienced when they first enter a new, a new market, any market, is this process of adverse selection, which is you have predatory practices, predatory pitchers that show up and say, "Invest in this. It's a great deal. This is the new thing." Most people aren't able to vet that thing, and they end up getting-

David Sacks 1:01:52 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:52 ... taken advantage of, and that's the problem.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:54 They're getting taken advantage of in every crypto thing right now, so-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:57 I agree. I do agree.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:58 ... all I'm arguing for is more education and a path for those people who want to do it, to show five hours of education, 50 questions, that they have an above average, you know, knowledge of how private companies work, just so they have the choice to do that.

David Sacks 1:02:12 I think the balance that pe- we will have to strike is there are a lot of people that are on the outside looking in with no assets, and then second, there are a lot of young people who want the high alpha opportunities-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:24 Yes.

David Sacks 1:02:24 ... like crypto represents, and so Freebrick, it's easy for you to pull the ladder up from under you because you're already rich, but for people that are not rich, and if you went back to when you were poor, the question is, how would you have reacted if somebody above you basically said, "I'm going to tell you what you can invest in"? And would you have said, "Okay, that seems reasonable. I know you're looking out for me"?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:48 No, I don't, I don't-

David Sacks 1:02:48 And I think that's the question.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:49 I don't disagree with that. I think there's a reason we have securities regulations and securities laws that public companies have to follow but private companies are more lax on. That's, that's where there's this distinction. So I don't disagree. Yeah.

David Sacks 1:03:00 No, that's, that's not, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying when... Now that you're rich, you want rules for everybody else. What I'm saying is...

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:06 That's not true. Don't, don't, don't mischaracterize me, Chamath. That's not true at all. I'm obviously a free market guy. I don't give a (beep) . I'm pointing out what-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:12 So why can't poor people invest in Uber?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:13 I'm not. I'm pointing out the consequence of what would happen. I'm not saying I disagree with the notion of letting anyone invest in anything they want.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:18 Because some of them will lose. What happened to you with your portfolio of private companies?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:20 I'm just telling you what I think is gonna happen.

David Sacks 1:03:22 Okay, what I'm asking you is, go back to when you were poor. How would you react?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:27 I, I would want to invest in everything. I'm not disagreeing-

David Sacks 1:03:30 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:30 ... with the notion. I'm pointing out what will happen, which is predatory ass (beep) will show up, and they'll rip people off. That's what happens in every one of these (beep) markets.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:36 And if you're educated, that's why the education component hits here, you'll learn something, just like people are learning right now to not bet on the Jets ever.

David Sacks 1:03:44 What do you think the solution is?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:46 People can lose their ass. They just need to know they're going to lose their ass. I'm just telling you, that's what's gonna happen. And then you know what's gonna happen next? Elizabeth Warren is going to get on TV and be like, "Hey, we got to fix this. Put a bunch of (beep) regulations in place." Nobody cares what Pocahontas has to say, to be honest. See, that's how this goes. I'm pointing out, this is what happens- She's irrelevant. ... in all these (beep) markets.

David Sacks 1:04:01 Yeah, I agree with you. That is the cycle, but what I'm saying is, how do we fix it then? How do you allow people that don't have assets to have assets that work for them? How do we-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:10 Look-

David Sacks 1:04:10 How do we do that?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:10 Even the... As, as you guys know, we looked at the data. Even the best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley with the smartest, most sophisticated people investing in private assets were not able to beat the NASDAQ over the last 10 years.

David Sacks 1:04:21 I get it. That's true. What I'm saying is... What you were saying before, this is... I'm confused. What you were saying before is people should only be allowed to invest in the S&P 500.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:28 I didn't say that.

David Sacks 1:04:29 That is what you said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:30 I... That's not what I said.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:31 That's exactly what you said.

David Sacks 1:04:31 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:31 That is what you said.

David Sacks 1:04:32 Okay, clarify.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:32 That is exactly what you said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:33 I said, "Here's what's gonna happen." I said, "Here's the consequence of this."

Jason Calacanis 1:04:35 Okay, you're projecting doom. Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:04:37 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:38 Here's the other possibility of what happens. eBay, Etsy, Airbnb, DoorDash, say to the people who are part of their networks, "For every 100 rides you do, we're going to give you $100 in shares. For every 100 nights you book, we're going to give you $1,000 in shares of Airbnb. And by the way, you can buy extra shares if you want to, and the government says you can spend up to 20% of your yearly income, averaged for the past two years, on investing in startups." And then some number of people who built those networks, whether it was Google's network or eBay's network or Uber's or DoorDash's or were part of Tesla, some number of those people are going to hit massive home runs, and they're going to move from the bottom third to the middle third. And then some number of those people are going to say, "You know what? I got really educated. I looked, and I understood Tesla, and I understood Uber, so now I'm going to bet on this AI self-driving company, and I'm going to bet on this other company that makes robots and delivers, you know, VTOLs." And the entire group of people in our United States is going to get more savvy about entrepreneurship and capital allocation. That's a good thing.

David Sacks 1:05:45 I think what's going to happen is not much of anything. I think the rules are going to stay exactly where they are.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:50 In favor of the top 10%.

David Sacks 1:05:51 Because I think this argument between the two of you is exactly the reason why it can never change. And I think that, that... Now, again, so then what is the alternative? Maybe it comes back to what I said before, which is then the only alternative left is just to debase assets. And then if you debase assets and make them much cheaper, then there's less money, theoretically, to lose per quantum of investment. So maybe that's, that's the right way to think about it.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:14 We've got to get more people owning equities in this country. That's just high order bit because if you feel like you have more agency in your life, and you're just smarter and savvier, that's the American dream, and we've lost the American dream, to your point, in the early segments, Chamath. Half the country doesn't feel like they can ever get into the top half. They don't feel like they'll ever be able to buy a second home or even a first. So you have this helplessness of one group of people who are like, "I need a handout," and the other group of people are like, "Got any stock tips? Where are you making money? What can I place a bet on?" We're sitting here at a rigged game. We all get to play in one casino, and then everybody else gets to work in the casino. I just want the people who work in the casino to be able to place some bets and maybe become owners in businesses.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:58 Hey, you know, I, I think talking about the US Postal Service is interesting. It turns out Trump is going to issue an executive order to dissolve the leadership of USPS, and the Postal Service is going postal about this in some ways, uh, not literally, but they're angry about it.And they wanna observe the, absorb the agency into the executive branch. Uh, just so you know, post office has been operating for 250 years. Trump plans to fire the governing board and place the agency under the control of ...

David Sacks 1:07:28 Commerce.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:29 Lipnic. Commerce. And for context, (laughs) US Postal Service has lost $10 billion last year on 80 billion in revenue. They can't figure out how to just make a simple profit margin or even break even. And it employs 635,000 workers. Think about that.

David Sacks 1:07:46 By the way, Howard did an interview with Fox News yesterday-

Jason Calacanis 1:07:49 Oh, yeah.

David Sacks 1:07:49 ... where he said one of the ideas that he went back to the President with was for the Postal Service to do the census, which would save four billion a year.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:59 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 1:07:59 Give him another idea, which is I think that non-farm payrolls and GDP, that data should be collected-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:06 Hm.

David Sacks 1:08:06 ... by USPS as well.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:07 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 1:08:07 Because they touch every business, you can actually get ... Instead of sampling, with all this error and all of this craziness that we have, there has to be a way for then all of these feet on the street-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:19 Hm.

David Sacks 1:08:19 ... to get us much more accurate information so that the markets can actually function properly. I am surprised that we don't see even more dramatic revisions, and that probably, again, is, like, errors on top of errors. I really don't trust-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:35 It's g-

David Sacks 1:08:35 Like, you know, you showed the GDP data or you showed the unemployment rate, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:38 No, we all know this stuff is crazy.

David Sacks 1:08:40 It's wrong. I just don't know how wrong it is.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:42 Yeah, and this is where Stripe's data might come in handy. Uh, I, I did a tweet about this, and it's one of the most (laughs) popular tweets for controversy. I got three and a half million views here without an Elon retweet or anything. I had a very simple concept here. Postal Service goes down to one time a week. Easy peasy. Once a week, there's nothing coming in the Po- US Postal Service that's that important. Two, all citizens starting next year have to opt in to getting postal mail by paying $1 a year, so you gotta sign up for it, you gotta give them a credit card or something. I'm thinking 80% of people don't even bother because it's all flyers and garbage anyway. And what people don't know, 'cause I was in the magazine business and I knew all about this, we had a magazine rate, a media rate, and all these marketers have ... They're subsidized. So, this is the ultimate marketing and publishing grift. Magazines, newspapers, anybody, uh, publications, advertisers, catalogs, they pay nothing and I think they should just double or triple the rate or remove any discounts, uh, and then take all those buildings, Chamath, put them into the, uh, new sovereign wealth fund, redeploy the buildings, get some money out of that, give every postal worker two-year severance or, you know, whatever, graduate it down full, full-year severance, half-year severance, quarter-year severance, while you retrain them, and, uh, just let the private markets handle this. What do you think, Chamath, of my suggestions?

David Sacks 1:10:00 There was a tweet from this woman who got leaked some data-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:02 Uh-huh.

David Sacks 1:10:03 ... from one of her friends or colleagues in the government where they broke down I think seven or eight leases and real estate things that were happening inside of, I think it was Veterans Affairs maybe. The numbers are just astounding.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:17 Yeah. Half the office space is not being used.

David Sacks 1:10:20 It's stunning.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:20 The other half is being under-utilized. It's bonkers.

David Sacks 1:10:22 Bonkers.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:23 They're gonna be able to sell 75% of this stuff. So anyway, you know, don't blame me here, but I think it's, like, a really good opportunity. Our guy Jeff Bezos, come on the pod. Jeff, sit in the, uh, Sachs chair one time. That'd be fun to have him on. He's making some big changes at the Washington Post. He's lost a fortune running this thing, and, um, it seems like he's getting engaged and in founder mode, dare I say. He, uh, posted to his X account and he emailed everybody that the editorial page is gonna be run differently. He said, uh, that while newspapers once had a mandate to publish opinions from the broadest possible spectrum, the internet now mostly covers that. He said, "I'm confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion." So, he's gonna focus on those two pillars, personal liberties and free markets. This seems awesome, and I, I could get into why it's brilliant on a publication basis, but I'm just wondering what your thoughts are with him getting more engaged with the publication that he was incredibly hands-off with.

David Sacks 1:11:28 I was a little surprised that he wrote this. I, I, I think that if you wanna write about personal liberty, one of the tenets of personal liberty is free speech, but he's effectively said that certain opinions aren't allowed anymore. I don't think that that's the solution to the Washington Post. So, I, all I think it does is it polarizes the readership even more. I looked-

Jason Calacanis 1:11:50 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:11:51 ... inside of Google Trends. The overwhelming majority of WaPo readers are in, obviously Washington DC and then Maryland and Virginia, which are the two surrounding states. So, I think it's very much a beltway paper. I think he's trying to have a direct influence on the ideas that folks inside the beltway read. And so inasmuch as he's the owner, he's allowed to do it. But I wasn't a fan of that idea because I think, I think the Elon plan is much better. Here's a fire hose. Go at it. You have to find the people. Despite all the conspiracy theories, I don't think he suppresses free speech in the least. In fact, I think it's a literal free-for-all inside of X.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:27 It is a (laughs) free-for-all. I mean, we got Nazi diamond pendants coming from Kanye.

David Sacks 1:12:31 The difficulty in X, which I think will be the next set of features that he'll have to figure out, is how the curation happens.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:38 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:12:39 Where you're curating, I'm curating, other people are curating. How can then ... For example, like, when I go to an account that I like, there's no easy way where I can mass follow a bunch of their f- the people that they follow as an example, right? I can't just copy it. I can't sort of start with a profile. Those are all these things that allow you to just take on all kinds of opinions right away-

Jason Calacanis 1:13:01 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 1:13:01 ... and filter from there. I think that that is a really useful feature, so I don't know. I, I didn't think that if I was the owner of Washington Post, I would've been even more extreme on the free speech part. I would not have sanctioned speech.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:16 So, it's interesting going, you know, newspapers historically always had a point of view. They picked a side. Fox, obviously MSNBC now and cable news picked a side. This will make the publication, I think, by picking a side