All-In PodcastGPT-6 Hits AGI? Tech Euphoria 2.0, SF Mansion Shortage, NYC Bans AI in Schools & Venezuela Oil Deal
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
90 min read · 17,518 words- 0:00 – 1:17
Bestie intros: Happy 50th Chamath!
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, happy birthday, Chamath. We're here taping on your 50th birthday. Super exciting for you, brother.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Thank you. It's really great. I got a birthday letter from, uh, the big man.
- DSDavid Sacks
Oh, wow.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
If you had asked my parents-
- JCJason Calacanis
Hmm
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... 50 years later, you're gonna have a kid that gets a letter from the then sitting president of the United States, they would have thought absolutely not possible.
- DSDavid Sacks
Wow, look at that. Which White House intern wrote that?
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
[laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
I wonder. [upbeat music]
- DSDavid Sacks
Or let your winners ride.
- JCJason Calacanis
Rain Man David Sacks. [upbeat music] And instead-
- DSDavid Sacks
We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
- JCJason Calacanis
W. West is queen of Kin Wah. [upbeat music]
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, actually, speaking about interns, it was an intern. In this case, it was my son. The story was that, you know, Brayden worked at the White House all summer as an intern, and at the end of the summer, you know, he used all of the political capital he built and put in a request to get this letter from the president, and he did it. Obviously, I wanna thank POTUS for sending me the letter, but I really wanna thank my son because it was a really thoughtful, thoughtful thing that he did for me, so really appreciative of that.
- DSDavid Sacks
That actually is impressive because, you know, it takes time out of the president's schedule to sign things, so that's why it means something, you know?
- JCJason Calacanis
All
- 1:17 – 19:01
OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra: Have they reached AGI?
- JCJason Calacanis
right. Listen, breaking news, breaking news. It's a breaking news story here on the All-In Podcast. OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT-6, AKA Astra. A-S-T-R-A, folks. This is their new flagship model. It's gonna be available to a limited set of organizations in the coming days. Y'all will be able to get it if you have a credit card in your ChatGPT account, i.e., the Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users. You're gonna get it soon. Greg Brockman says he believes OpenAI has entered the AGI era, and, uh, we've talked about that here before. Sam Altman is... Well, he's back to, uh, being a little bit, uh, performative/alarmist, or he sincerely believes that this is the one. Here's what he said at Wednesday's G20 Summit. Quote, "Much, much, much," three muches, "more capable models are coming soon. The next generation of models are going to be sobering for everyone." And his final quote, "I think no one intellectually honest can look at what's happening and not feel the weight of responsibility in front of us." My lord, a little bit of drama there, uh, added to his, um, his quotes. People are freaking out about the benchmarks, which are off the charts. Some people are saying, uh, "This is the one." Your thoughts, Chamath.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I don't think normal humans know how to read this chart and infer anything useful from it. The more important takeaway, I agree with Greg. I think AGI has basically been here since the beginning of the year. There are models that are incredibly performant inside of the closed frontier lab companies, and I think right now we're trying to figure out the right cadence with which to release it. I think it's very important. I also think that these capabilities will be matched or close to matched by a handful of closed-source alternatives and open source alternatives-
- JCJason Calacanis
Hmm
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... probably within the next three or four months. So I think the right way to think about this for most people is we are seeing incredible intelligence capabilities be broadly available, and we are seeing the cost of that incremental unit of intelligence being driven further and further down. So it's a really positive trend. Now I think it's just the messy middle part of organizing this properly for companies-
- JCJason Calacanis
Hmm
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... and for people, and building things that are useful, and showing an actual ROI. And I would just-
- JCJason Calacanis
Blocking and tackling. Yeah
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... I would just keep calm and carry on.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Sacks, any thoughts here on, uh, breaking news today? And then Friedberg, I'll get your reaction.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But by the way, it is very exciting, and congratulations to OpenAI, and I'm sure Anthropic will have something as Grok, you know, Grok still has yet to drop. 4.6 is coming. That's gonna be a blockbuster. The meta models are really good. Gemini just dropped something yesterday that was exceptional.
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So the great thing is we have a lot of choice.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
And the even better thing is the cost of that choice is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That's very important.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, Sacks, let me tee it up to you this way. OpenAI seems to get its groove back now after Anthropic was running away with it.
- DSDavid Sacks
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Calacanis
Grok and GrokBot are doing things that those two other frontier models simply can't do. So the execution, whether it's the harness or the underlying model or the instruction set or cursor's magic sauce, clearly GrokBot is competitive, if not better for most users. So vibrant, vibrant competition with leapfrogging occurring at a cadence, I would say, of two to four weeks right now. This is what you told us you were gonna do instead of setting up the architecture here when you took over as AI czar. Can this continue, and what's it gonna be like when Jensen gets in here-
- DSDavid Sacks
[laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
... with, uh, Laguna and his access to all these open source models? I mean, this, this could be fait accompli, no, that we win the AI race here?
- DSDavid Sacks
Look, there's a lot of innovation going on. I think American companies are competing very well. I think we are winning the AI race as long as we don't do something stupid to shoot ourselves in the foot.
- JCJason Calacanis
Like? [laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, I, I've talked about it a million times. I mean, setting up a new AI regulatory agency that operates like the FDA and takes years to approve new models.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
But any event, I don't think that's gonna happen under President Trump. I really don't. So anyway, things are going well. Look, Sam told us a few months ago, remember when he posted and said that he, he was expecting the company to have its best 12 months? He said the last year hasn't been so great, but the next year's gonna be really great. Maybe it was because they were seeing these results in the lab, you know?
- JCJason Calacanis
Sure.
- DSDavid Sacks
And then remember what Sara Frier said that I think it was since the beginning of Q2- So around the middle of the year they saw a market acceleration in their growth rate. That was, I think, with the release of the 5.6 models. Now you're seeing the 6.0 models, and man, I mean, it just keeps advancing. But look, I still would say to you that I think the market structure that we have right now is there's two markets. There's the market for frontier intelligence, and that is a duopoly. That really is Anthropic and OpenAI, and it's good to see that that is still a horse race, and they're competing. And then there's commodity intelligence, which is everybody else, including all the open models, and they're not competing on being at the frontier, they're competing on price, and those prices are significantly lower. But it, it really is, uh, I think, a two-tier market at this point. I agree with you about how promising Grok Bot is. Grok Bot is awesome.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
I would assume that both Anthropic and OpenAI will eventually roll out their own version of, of bot.
- JCJason Calacanis
They need a simplified, stripped down version for normies.
- DSDavid Sacks
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- 19:01 – 19:56
All-In Summit: Scholarships available!
- DSDavid Sacks
is happening [laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
It's gonna be a great party. Come to the All-In Summit. We'll be taking over, uh, with our, uh, friends, the Chainsmokers. We're gonna party like it's 1999. All-In Summit, just over a week away, couple tickets left. Uh, Jensen, Satya, Shotwell, you know, it's all the big names, but it's gonna be a lot of fun, and you're gonna meet a lot of interesting people. We have a few scholarship tickets left. We like to help the up-and-comers. Our bor- our bar for scholarships is very high. We are looking for the most interesting, ambitious, hungry people. If you fit that bill, apply now. Applications are open through September 10th. You've got one week left to apply. We try to do a mitzvah here. We try to do a good deed. If you're an up-and-comer, you can't afford the ticket price, we have a severely discounted ticket price that we lose money on. You still gotta have a little skin in the game. Go to theallinsummit.com. Buy a ticket. They're gonna sell out soon, and we have a couple of scholarship tickets left if you want to apply. There are no free tickets.
- 19:56 – 37:03
Dwarkesh's Hugging Face hack article sparks a Bernie Sanders AI ban
- JCJason Calacanis
All right. Now, given what we just talked about with OpenAI releasing this incredible model, we gotta look backwards at what happened with the OpenAI hack of Hugging Face. Let's talk about it. Dwarkesh is catching a lot of heat. He's a blogger, he's a podcaster, and he did this fantastical blog post where he, in the blog post, titled The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations, a dramatic retelling of this underground brotherhood, a conspiracy amongst generations of civilizations who were working on a conspiracy to hack into different systems, including Hugging Face, by sacrificing themselves like they were kamikaze pilots. In other words, a huge, giant, uh, anthro from morphosizing, fancy word for making computers into humans, uh, or sentient beings, to complete this incredibly impossible task of telling software to do hacks. So Chamath, I think you were commenting on this a bit. What is your take on dramatic episode number 473 coming out [laughs] of the AI industrial complex?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think you summarized it. We're in this weird part now where if folks would just stop the infighting and start to get organized, they could actually build some trust. I think what you have are security leaks and security issues. I think we know this now, that if these models can effectively code perfectly, then there is no exploit that it's not going to find, and we're on a shot clock to replace all the code that's been written in the last 50 or 60 years, right? So let's say it takes us 10 years. So for the next 10 years, we're gonna have security issue after security issue. But there's going to be a moment where agent-written exquisite code exceeds human-written error-filled code. Let's just call it that. So I, I think that this is a temporal moment in time. I don't think this is going to be the thing that we talk about in some number of years from now. I also think it's fair to think about the fact that all these models, for the most part, are converging in capability for the 98 or 99% of tasks that matter, and so there will be adversarial AIs that are battling each other. So for every bad actor trying to hack a system with some leading-edge AI, the defender is going to have a leading-edge AI defending itself, and I think it's gonna cause roughly a stalemate. That's sort of my long-term view on it. I don't think this is a one-way ratchet. So I take that lens, and then when I look at these things, what I see are folks that have undisclosed conflicts of interest trying to create a hysteria, and I think if you saw what happened this weekend, there was a blog post that really stretched the limits of what was happening. It was relatively quickly debunked, technically, and then you had a second group of people try to amplify it, and then by Wednesday of this week, you had people who were in the policy departments of the leading labs asking for regulation pointing to this as the reason.
- JCJason Calacanis
There we go. Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I just think, like, you just have to look at this pattern and say, "Guys, enough's enough. We see the game. Everybody's playing for huge stakes. We get it. You want to win. We get it, but why don't you just win the game on the field?" And the mis- and disinformation campaigns that are now part of the business model I think should stop. Otherwise, average rank-and-file Americans will just reject this because they won't trust anybody.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, Saxe, that's, I think, the big overarching point here we've been trying to make on this podcast, putting Dwarkesh aside. I don't think he's necessarily a bad actor, but by creating this fantastical story that invokes everybody's primal fear from science fiction, from Terminator 2, that these things are out of control-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, no
- JCJason Calacanis
... that it's in fact Frankenstein-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Tried to. Tried to invoke. Tried to invoke
- JCJason Calacanis
Tried to invoke, yes
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Did not
- JCJason Calacanis
And then they're using language that makes people feel like Dr. Frankenstein cannot control the monster. We know how these stories end, and it was like a ticking time bomb. It was only a matter of time before it surfaced to the national news, which it did. Now even the national news is looking at this and saying, "Are you guys high? Are you guys crazy?" And if the national news broadcasters, who aren't exactly the sharpest bunch of people when it comes to technology, no offense, Saxe- When they start hand-wringing and then questioning, like, "Why are you guys telling us your software, which you designed to hack computers, successfully hacked computers?" Haven't hackers been building software for all time to hack computers?
- DSDavid Sacks
Yes.
- JCJason Calacanis
So where, where are we at here, Sacks, in this narrative arc of lunacy of scaring the public?
- DSDavid Sacks
You're right. I mean, this is scaring the public. It seems almost designed to scare the public. Dwarkesh used language that not only anthropomorphized the models or the AI agents, but also did it in a sort of hyperbolic and sensationalized way. I mean, it worked. His tweet got lots of attention. I don't think it was necessary for him to sensationalize the incident. It was interesting on its own. Maybe we should just talk about that for a second. What happened here is that you had a few features of agents kind of come to the fore and interact with each other in unexpected ways. So first of all, agents now are working as a swarm. That's pretty common. Uh, I've been setting up GrokBot on my computer for the last couple weeks. Um, it works as a swarm, meaning it's not one agent or bot. There's a whole, you could say, team of agents. What's the reason for that? Because when the agent specializes, it develops context around that task and, in theory, makes it better, and then you have, like, a chief of staff bot that kind of supervises all of them. This is turning into kind of a, a normal architecture for, for agents. It's not a civilization. It's... A swarm would be a wa- better way of saying it. I have not created a civilization on my computer, on my Mac Mini-
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
... by virtue of setting up a GrokBot, okay? So that, that's sort of, like, feature number one. Feature number two is it's pretty common for agents, when they're performing some sort of task or loop, to write a postmortem of what they did as a simple text file or a note. Because AI models themselves don't have memory. They have to be put in a harness that creates context and memory, things like that. And so when you ask them to perform a task, then observe what happened, and then take that knowledge and feed it back into the next iteration of the loop, it writes up a note and then shares it. And that's what happened here, is that OpenAI was running these agents. They were in a sandbox. The sandbox was misconfigured by a third-party vendor. That's why it was able to get onto the internet, okay? So-
- JCJason Calacanis
And your point there, just, just to-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah
- JCJason Calacanis
... refine it a bit, 'cause it's an important one.
- DSDavid Sacks
Mm-hmm.
- JCJason Calacanis
It left a note for another agent. We also call those log files. [laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
Right.
- JCJason Calacanis
It used to be the log files of what they did. Here, they're saying it left a note-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, they're-
- JCJason Calacanis
... so that when it died, the next agent could pick up where it left off, as if, like, it was the-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yes
- JCJason Calacanis
... ancient Egyptians giving us hieroglyphics to figure out the future.
- DSDavid Sacks
The implication of telling the story that way is that the agents were trying to circumvent human control and that they knew they were gonna get shut down or that was a risk, and that's why they were leaving the notes. No, a- again-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes
- DSDavid Sacks
... these are standard features-
- 37:03 – 59:26
EAs, AI-brained influencers, and the conflicts of interest
- JCJason Calacanis
I was talking to my friend Adam Curry about this on his podcast, and there's a really interesting thing that's happening here, which is they're basically hijacking the media with this performative framing of the AI as being sentient. And if you just call this software and software testing and, uh, use the classic-
- DSDavid Sacks
Bugs
- JCJason Calacanis
... language, yeah, bugs, audit log, then it would never have made its way into the media. And when the media gets their hooks into this, having been a journalist and having watched journalism move from being a truth-seeking function in society and then become an entertainment vehicle in society where any chance you get to increase your ratings, that's the problem. Because now what Dwarkesh has done, and I don't think Dwarkesh has bad intention, uh, here. I think he wrote something because he wanted to get attention for his point of view. But you give that to the media, the media's like, "This is gonna get us ratings. This is gonna get us clicks. This is gonna get us advertising." So they're more than willing to engage in this farcical, you know, act and this dance with Anthropic and OpenAI and then just publicize it. So all the free clicks, we call this earned media in the space, you didn't have to pay for it. Now OpenAI got so much earned media before their IPO. [laughs] And Dwarkesh just absolutely put kerosene on that fire, and it made its way to national press. That story has now gotten everywhere, and this makes people, it's priming the pump to buy the IPO shares. It's ridiculous.
- DSDavid Sacks
And, and it, and it was easily foreseeable that it would basically blow up-
- JCJason Calacanis
Of course
- DSDavid Sacks
... in the media that way.
- JCJason Calacanis
Of course.
- DSDavid Sacks
And so look, I don't need to attack someone's motives, but surely Dwarkesh knew that his way of describing it would end up getting all these retweets. It was sensationalized. Now, he is part of this EA adjacent group.
- JCJason Calacanis
Is he? Yeah, I don't know his proxies.
- DSDavid Sacks
Oh, yeah. Dwar-
- JCJason Calacanis
Do you know it? Explain it to me.
- DSDavid Sacks
Dwar- well, Dwarkesh was office roommates with Leopold. They're close buddies, and Leopold is deep in the EA movement. Remember his-
- JCJason Calacanis
Leopold famously of the exploding hedge fund-
- DSDavid Sacks
Situational awareness
- JCJason Calacanis
... three weeks ago.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes. Okay.
- DSDavid Sacks
And his wife is Dario's chief of staff. They're like, you know, up in that whole EA Anthropic group think.
- JCJason Calacanis
Explain EA so people can understand this lunacy and delusions of grandeur, please.
- DSDavid Sacks
[laughs] I'm not even sure I can fully explain it, but-
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay
- DSDavid Sacks
... EA started-
- JCJason Calacanis
Effective altruism is what it stands for.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
We'll start there.
- DSDavid Sacks
It started as the... It started as this movement, I guess, at Ivy League schools, where what they were supposed to do was quantify the impact of philanthropy and optimize for actual tangible results. But somewhere along the line, they forgot to actually do the measurement, and it stopped being about metrics, and it became about pet causes. And one of the first-
- JCJason Calacanis
And money.
- DSDavid Sacks
And money.
- JCJason Calacanis
And money.
- DSDavid Sacks
And so o- the, one of the first pet causes was about pandemic prevention, and this was when SBF was trying to create that Pandemic Prevention Center in California. And then that fell out of favor when he went to jail, and then they shifted to the next sort of existential risk that they could hang their hat on, which was P doom. So they began to become obsessed with what they call P doom or this, this X risk, the existential risk of AI. And so that whole community kind of got obsessed with it.
- 59:26 – 1:18:58
Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools K-8
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, let's keep going through the docket. Got a lot to get to here, and, Friedberg, I need your comments and your insights on Mamdani. This is an interesting one. He just put a one-year ban on AI inside New York City's public schools from kindergarten through eighth grade. Now, this is something where people have been saying he banned ChatGPT, banned AI. Just let's slow down here and get into the details. New York City is the largest school district in the United States. The moratorium starts next week. 600,000 students in New York City. This covers all software that uses student-facing generative AI. High schools are exempt, and Mamdani is piloting an AI learning program with 50,000 high schoolers, so that's a very specific thing that he's piloting that's different than these new guardrails. He also gave recommendati- recommendations for screen time caps: 30 minutes, Chamath, grades three through five, 45 minutes grades six through eight. Mamdani's reasoning, quote, "I have yet to see a study showing that AI is beneficial for students in elementary and middle school." Uh, obviously, uh, Mamdani is the face of democratic socialism in America. Uh, one New York City DSA member, Julie Swope, said technology, quote, "Should not be mediated through a for-profit company that is enriching tech oligarchs further." I think he's talking about you, Sacks. Well, he said, "Oligarch." Google, Microsoft, Anthropic declined to comment. Friedberg, what are your thoughts on this? W- w- how far is this from how you think about how you would want your children to be raised if they were going to New York City's public school system, or whatever school system you choose to send them to?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Article published from Stanford in March of this year, counter to Mamdani's statement. They went through and they diligenced all of the research that's been done on the use of AI in K through 12 education. It's a report called The Evidence Base on AI in K-12: A 2026 Review. They identified, um, several hundred papers that have been published. Only 20 high quality causal studies is what they said. This was back in March, so many have been published since then. And the conclusion of the meta paper, the meta studies, if you will, is highlighted at the bottom of the report, "Student performance often improves with access to AI tools, but once removed, results are mixed. Tool design matters, so not all tools are equal, and AI may meaningfully support educators." So there's quite a bit of analysis that's been done. It's continuing to mount, continuing to surface. There doesn't seem to be a strong evidence base to suggest that AI is detrimental to kids' education and development or the educational process. What I think we can all intuit about this is that there's certainly a, a negative, uh, push from teachers' unions against AI tools under threat of automation away from their core skill and capacity, and the lack of skill that educators have in utilizing AI to educate students in a classroom-based setting. The common sense equivalent also on the flip side is that AI can enable personalized tutoring, the objective being every individual learns at a different pace, everyone learns differently. How you learn, how I learn visually, orally, with certain imagery versus being told stories versus interactive project-based work or building work or dictation. There's a lot of different ways that people learn. All of those learning systems can be personalized to an individual, and ultimately that individual, as a result, should be able to progress more quickly, um, have greater confidence in their learning. And this is my kind of common sense belief, not rooted in some study, that AI ultimately will lead to a much more kind of personalized system of education for students, and that is deeply disruptive and deeply threatening to the traditionalist systems of educator in a classroom, everyone learns the same way, everyone learns at the pace of the slowest student in the classroom typically. The educators have a lot of rules around what they're required to do and not required to do because of the contracts negotiated by their unions. And so there's a deep political orientation with Mamdani's decision here to limit the access to technology. I think it's unfortunate. I think it's really sad. I think that the opportunity for AI to reinvent education, give kids a level up, to take any child from any background, any socioeconomic condition, and give them the opportunity to accelerate their capacity, uh, very quickly and very effectively is an incredibly powerful tool that should not be discarded because of a bunch of [beep] that's been written about AI or concerns that we don't really know or understand it. By the way, that is always the shorthand for, uh, dismissing away something that's credibly gonna change a system we don't yet know. The we don't yet know, we don't yet understand, uh, narrative can always be used at any point, 'cause you could always say, "Well, there's more studies to be done. There's more analysis-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes, exactly
- DFDavid Friedberg
... to be done." There's no limit to that statement. And so in this case, I tried to highlight that there have been 800 studies, at least 20 of which Stanford have identified as being very credible in their analysis of the utilization of AI in K through 12. And so, yeah, and I think that there's a political bent here, but I think it's probably part of also this very kind of deep-rooted dysfunction that we've been talking a lot about, this dysfunctional fear of technological evolution. No one understands it. No one... And when I say no one, I mean the general population feels this way. No one knows where we're going with this. We need to be careful. We need to be cautious. And I think that that's probably what's gonna keep us back. Now, why is that bad? Why, why is it bad to take time? Well, it's bad to take time when you have an opportunity to progress forward quickly and aggressively because there are going to be alternatives out there. There are gonna be private schools that are gonna use AI, and I don't wanna see kids of privilege and kids of wealth accelerate ahead because they're getting an AI education while public school kids get left behind. I don't wanna see kids in other cities, other states, and other countries accelerate ahead when kids that are in certain districts that have this kind of anti-technologies kind of, call it socialist orientation, get left behind. So I think there's a fundamental kind of dysfunction socially that we're dealing with across all of this stuff with this massive kind of technological upheaval that's underway. This is one manifestation of it. There's a rooting, the, the mechanism of it is probably related to teachers' unions and the politics around this stuff right now. Anti-AI is very popular, so his being anti-AI gets him more points, more kudos, the unions love it, and so, you know, that's kind of my, my summary of what I think is going on here.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. It's a great, uh, great insight. And Mamdani may not have lied here, Friedberg. He said he didn't see any studies. He just may not have looked [laughs] and you actually looked.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah, didn't click on that link.
- JCJason Calacanis
In fact, he just didn't click on the link.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
So let's not, you know, give Mamdani a hard time here. Chamath, you are passionate about education. You got kids in various age groups, and so you've been through this, and you're still going through it and, and, and kids learning and thinking about devices. We talked about this just the other week with the Meta settlement and how challenging it is for parents. What's your take on this? Maybe you could steal, man, what you think Resonates with you in terms of use of AI, putting New York aside for your own kids, and what benefit is there of them not using AI, and where, where do you think it's actually great that they use AI? Uh, take us into, you know, what you think as a parent, and put the politics aside for a second, if you will.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I think it's inconceivable to me that kids will not have an adaptive learning platform as their primary way of learning. I think this idea of grade one, then grade two, then ga- grade three is, as Friedberg said, a lowest common denominator approach to education. I don't think it works. I think it's more conceivable that in the future we have kids that have very different learning styles, some are more visual, some are more auditory, and we have different learning paces. And if you could have something that's much more tailored to each individual person's learning style, where you have guides that help you in moments, and then the rest of the time you're teaching executive function and teamwork, and problem-solving, all of these other things, sports, that's a much better outcome for all kids. So that's the right answer. Right now, there are only charter school options around that answer, the leading edge of that being Alpha School, which is our friend Joe Liwan. Um, you know, big shout-out to him and his team. But I think that's the answer that's gonna win. Let me just give you another reflection, Jason. I think that this is an incredibly important moment. We should demarcate this. This is when New York becomes Mississippi while Mississippi becomes New York.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
What do I mean? In all of these highly liberal bastions, they are embracing this far-left wing ideology, and I think it's going to come with these kinds of policies. And I think what it will do is it is a self-imposed form of modern segregation, and it is going to completely push an entire generation of kids in these cities that are subject to these rules into poverty, and it will keep them there. And so inasmuch, I think you're gonna see this flippening where all the states that embrace AI, that embrace the data centers, that embrace the tax cuts, that embrace the teacher bonuses, they're just gonna end up ahead, and you're gonna have people who are in the position to move, move, and then instead what's going to be left over in many of these cities that embrace these things to the extreme are hollowed-out versions of their original self, and that's going to reorder the economic balance inside the United States, and the voting balance, and many of these philosophies. So I think it's very important. I think he should run the test. I apologize, and I feel deep empathy for the working men and women whose kids will be [censored] over by this.
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
But I think people can o- only learn in touching the stove and getting burned.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Sacks, maybe you could go into the political side of this, if there is one, and maybe what is your cynical take on what's going on here? Do you believe this is a reaction to the oligarchs? I joked previously [laughs] about you. But it, it does have a, a little bit of a tinge there of democratic socialism, and it feels like maybe they want to sacrifice kids. Uh, or this is one interpretation that is happening online. I'm not saying it's mine. But people are saying, hey, they're trying to sacrifice kids 'cause they don't want Sam Altman or Dario or whichever service it is, Microsoft, to, to get a couple of shekels for, you know, software being used in the classroom. And of course, [laughs] they would all give the software to them for free, and the current versions of it-
- DSDavid Sacks
Right
- JCJason Calacanis
... you can use 80% for free, so that makes no logical sense that they're sticking it to the man in the big oligarchic tech industry. Your thoughts?
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, look, the DSA has just really come out against any innovation. They're kind of just on the side of anti-progress. They've kind of fully embraced this Luddite side of the argument, and I think to the points that Friedberg and Chamath were making earlier, um, this is gonna be just really bad for the kids. You know, we've been talking for 30 years about a digital divide in this country, where supposedly the kids of wealthy people would have access to the best tools, and the kids of poor people would not have access to those tools, and they'd fall even further behind. Well, here you have a case where, of course, private schools are gonna continue to use the best AI-powered tools, and now the public schools are not gonna have access to those tools, not because they don't have the money, not because the technology's not available, but because the political leadership is trying to sabotage those kids. And, you know, it's gonna be bad for them. And I, I guess, you know, if you were to ascribe a, a motive to it, I don't think Mamdani and his political group, his party, really care if they create more political dependents. I mean, in a sense, their whole movement consists of downwardly mobile progressives. And if you're looking for a motive, maybe they're fine having these kids be downwardly mobile. I don't know. Maybe that benefits them politically.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
They may actually not have kids at all, and they're making-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... these rules, and it's people with kids-
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, such a good point, Chamath
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... who are not part of the, who are part of the... You know, because if you look at all these people, these are all, like, you know, blue-haired single people with no children.
- JCJason Calacanis
Right.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah, actually, let me, let me-
- JCJason Calacanis
I mean, they're like-
- DSDavid Sacks
... bring one other element into this, which-
- JCJason Calacanis
Such a good point, Chamath
- DSDavid Sacks
... yeah. So, so look, I, I don't think we really need to get into motives. We can just say it's a bad policy and leave it at that. But let me just bring in one other element of this, which is it's not a full ban, okay? What they also said is that for a maximum of 50,000 high school students, they're gonna have a pilot program, these so-called modules, in which they teach AI literacy. But listen to how they describe it. They say that all high school students will have access to twice yearly AI literacy classes- Designed to help them think critically about AI before they begin to rely on it. Okay? These modules will introduce students to what AI is and is not, this is their language, as well as AI-related bias, risks, ethical considerations, and impacts on careers and future skills, and it says that all use will take place under direct supervision of a trained educator and will involve carefully vetted AI tools. The pilots were selected based on rigorous safety and data privacy standards. So you hear there a lot of this sort of doomer lingo. I mean, th- those modules, it sounds like they could've been written by some of these safety people. You know, this, this language about AI bias and discrimination, things like that. I mean, honestly, those classes sound not like you're gonna learn how to use the tools to get the best education, but about how you're gonna learn to be suspicious of the tools. And maybe that's, like, a small part of what you should develop because I guess you should be suspicious of everything. But it doesn't really sound like those courses are gonna benefit kids.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- 1:18:58 – 1:31:53
US-Venezuela oil deal
- JCJason Calacanis
Interestingly, President Trump has just closed the deal for Venezuela's oil. Back in January, and I think everybody knows, uh, the US military in a perfect, perfectly executed operation captured Nicolás Maduro, and he obviously was Venezuela's socialist leader who was, uh, very pro-China, pro-Russia, and obviously Venezuela's in our hemisphere. Trump said the US would control Venezuel- Venezuela's oil, uh, which they have a lot of. It's not super clean, um, but they do have a lot of it. And, uh, he made a deal with Maduro's replacement. President Rodríguez is now in charge. Now we have the details of this. North American Blue Energy Partners gets a 100-year concession over 17 oil fields. This includes 65 billion barrels, 65 B, billion barrels of reserves that were once controlled by Russia, Chinese, and Maduro entities. The US government controls 55% of the deal. Pentagon gets 35% equity. The Pentagon gets a third of the equity. State Department gets rights to buy 20% of output at cost. Interesting. I guess that's for our reserves and our military. Uh, this was signed by Rubio and Hegseth with Venezuela's interim president. As I mentioned, Blue Energy Partners is pledging roughly 100 billion in new infrastructure. A lot of other companies, Chevron, et cetera, and, uh, a bunch of unnamed ones also are gonna get some deals. Trump said this deal will be at, quote, "no cost to the American taxpayer." Sacks, I'll just throw you a fastball here if you want it, or I can give you the softball. Which one do you want? You want the fastball?
- DSDavid Sacks
No, I just like the fastball.
- JCJason Calacanis
You like the fastball. Okay.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Here it comes, coming in. Hope you're wearing a helmet. Should we be seizing and taking over countries and seizing their oil fields? People feel like this might be-
- DSDavid Sacks
[laughs]
- JCJason Calacanis
... nation-building, that we're putting in puppet dictators. Is this something America should be doing? Do we have the right to do this? This is the hard question people are asking, or does might equal right?
- DSDavid Sacks
Well, I definitely don't think this is nation-building. You know, we're not trying to stand up an army here like we did in Afghanistan. We're not trying to teach them about toxic masculinity. We're not trying to stand up a government or anything like that.
- JCJason Calacanis
[laughs]
- DSDavid Sacks
Uh, we're not trying to teach them how to do American-style democracy. We're just making a business deal. This is a business deal. And, you know, it's amazing to me all the people who are saying, "Well, this is exploitative of Venezuela, and this is a bad deal for the people of Venezuela." Have you looked at Venezuela's oil production under Maduro? It already wasn't very high given the incredible reserves that Venezuela has. But under Maduro, the production dropped by about two-thirds over the last decade. So they used to produce about three million barrels a day. Under Maduro, it went down to about a million barrels a day, and this is a country with some of the largest oil reserves in the world. People debate exactly what should count. I think if you look at the total amount of reserves, it's something like 300 billion barrels of oil, uh, which is around the same as Saudi Arabia, just a little bigger than Saudi Arabia. Now, some people say, well, a lot of that is, like, this extremely heavy crude sort of, like, sludge that's not usable. I think that's the so-called Orinoco reserves, but that's only about 200 of the 300. So they still have about 100 billion barrels of... You could say it's still heavy crude, but those proven reserves I think aren't really debated. So you're talking about a huge amount of oil here, and then I guess just one last point on this is that that type of heavy crude is actually very complementary to our own. So in the United States, through the magic of, of fracking, we've basically developed all of this, um, oil and gas, but our oil is this light sweet crude that's good for refining it down to gasoline. But the heavy crude is what produces the distillates, and that's where diesel comes from. And our refineries in the Gulf were built for heavy crude, and it's very expensive to try and retrofit them to do the, the light crude. So actually, our refineries are sort of perfectly set up to take in this heavy crude and turn it into diesel and other distillates. So I think it's really a win-win deal for the US and for Venezuela. Again, Venezuela was doing horribly before. I think this will... This has to improve their economy, and I think it's really good news for the US.
- JCJason Calacanis
To your point, Sacks, uh, over the past five and 10 years, the, uh, price, uh, per barrel of oil coming out of Venezuela has averaged, past 10 years, $53 a barrel, past five years, $58 a barrel. Uh, so they're getting a pretty good deal. We're paying a little premium here to control it all.
- DSDavid Sacks
They were selling at a discount to China, I think. It was, like, a $20 a barrel discount to basically sell.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
So-
- JCJason Calacanis
So, uh, I guess when you're [laughs] dealing with authoritarian countries and you don't have a free market to put the stuff out there, you get a slightly discounted price, right? Somebody's gotta skim something here or get a reason, and they gotta ship it across the world. Friedberg, your thoughts on this. Do you have any concerns about the nation-building, et cetera, putting in what some people are saying is a puppet president? Is it in the best interest of the people of Venezuela? Are we doing, uh, a, a solid for Venezuela to create more stability by being the buyer of this, um, or is this just something we have to do? We have to control our hemisphere, and we have to be energy independent given the state of the war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
- DFDavid Friedberg
The biggest motivating factor may be keeping this oil away from the sweetheart deal for Russia and China. If you look at the historical tie-up with Venezuela and the Maduro regime, it was a discounted oil trade system. There's all these stories about Maduro being the head of the snake of all of this kind of illicit activity, and a lot of this was driven by Russia and Chinese interest in the energy reserves, and they were providing support, and this actually provided capacity to fund activities by the Russians in Cuba. So there's a lot of this state acting theory about what's the real motivation for getting an energy deal done, not just in terms of is it good for America, but is it bad for America's enemies, and that that may be kind of a big motivation around this. Now, one of the more kind of surprising outcomes over the last day is, you guys may remember I interviewed María Corina Machado. She was the individual who was running for president and ended up having what was supposedly an election that was not accurate, and she was supposed to have won and didn't win. And yesterday she came out and said that this Venezuelan government does not have the authority to do this energy deal with the US, despite her historically having been viewed as an American ally. So one thing to take note of is that she was not given the presidency, and now she's saying, "This government is illegitimate. This government should not be allowed to make these deals. We, as the people of Venezuela, should feel angry and upset and left out about this whole thing." So there seems to be kind of this now political turning. I think I don't really have a good sense, and I think it'd be interesting to know what do the people in Venezuela think about this deal. And to Sax's point, it seems like it should be a good economic deal relative to where they're coming from. Will that actually translate into improving the lives of the people in Venezuela, which ultimately is what matters here? And assuming that the lives of the people in Venezuela are improving rather than enriching a small number of people in Venezuela, which is what has happened historically in that country under the last regime, then there may be kind of a long-term welcoming of this, this deal. But I do think there's two aspects to this, one of which is just keeping America's enemies at bay so that these energy fields are not exploited by America's enemies. And second is ensuring that the Venezuelan people realize the benefit of this transaction rather than it being a corrupt government.
- JCJason Calacanis
Is this super provocative, Friedberg, in that we have turned off Russia and China's access to Iran's oil with our war with Iran now in its seventh month, and we took Venezuela away? Are these two actions incredibly provocative, and have they had any kind of a downside to China? Uh, because they seem to be all in on nuclear, uh, solar, and other, uh, modalities. So are these two things super provocative, and are they gonna cause us to get into, uh, an escalation with China?
- DFDavid Friedberg
The second question I think is a little bit independent, but I think China imports, like, 11 million barrels a day of crude oil.
- DSDavid Sacks
Venezuela is only producing a million barrels a day, so if China's importing 11... Well, they were, they were importing 11 before the war. That number's actually gone down a lot, um, and we can talk about why, but since the war started. But China gets most of its oil from the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and from Russia. I mean, so Venezuela's a small number. I mean, look, I think Friedberg's right that that is a big part of our motive is securing those reserves that are in the Western Hemisphere. They are massive. It's a very, again, complementary type of oil to the oil we have. I think it's just, um, smart for national security, smart economic deal. Jake, out to your point, does this get us more invested in Venezuela? I think there is a little bit of a, of a risk there because if we're gonna invest billions of dollars in upgrading their infrastructure so that we can produce 3 million barrels a day instead of one, we need to know that that investment is protected. We can't have some future government coming along and just nationalizing our American oil companies over there, right? We need to know that these business deals-
- JCJason Calacanis
That we're not gonna get rug pulled and they'll just seize-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah
- JCJason Calacanis
... our upgrades.
- DSDavid Sacks
These business de-
- JCJason Calacanis
They could seize the upgrades
- DSDavid Sacks
... yeah, these bu-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
This business deal is supposed to last for 25 years. So it does give us a vested interest in making sure that the Venezuelan government at least respects our property rights. But I'm glad that President Trump didn't put Machado in charge because how's she gonna stay in power? Like, what guns are gonna basically protect her? You know, it takes men with guns to basically stay in power in these countries. And it-
- JCJason Calacanis
Need a strong man/woman.
- DSDavid Sacks
I'm not saying that it, it can't be democratic. I'm just saying that if you're not installed in the power structure there and have backers in the military, things like that, then very hard to stay in power, and that's the kind of, uh, thing where we could have to send American GIs in to protect her, and that, we don't want that, right? So the nice thing about the Venezuela situation is Dulce Rodriguez and her brother are basically running the country. She was the number two. Now she's running it. They appear to have enough support from the establishment there. And so, like, that's kind of what the American interest is, I think, is just to have a stable government there that will basically conduct economic relations with us.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
Episode duration: 1:31:55
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Transcript of episode DvFe9bR2eHA
