How SaaS went from growth annuity to AI fragility story

Jason Calacanis 0:00 All right, everybody. Welcome back to your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. Today, we have a Conspiracy Corner episode for you. We're gonna go over the nine eleven inside job, we're going over flat Earth, JFK assassination.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:15 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:15 It's gonna be all conspiracy all the time after our amazing-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:19 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:20 ... blockbuster episode during ski week. We're going all conspiracy here. Our guest today, Alex Jones.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:25 How many views did it get? Nine views? [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:27 I, I mean, it's tough when you have one out of four besties. It doesn't... Michael Tracy is on standby.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:34 Not true. Not true.

Jason Calacanis 0:34 I don't... Not true.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:34 I can carry an episode for at least four hundred thousand views.

Jason Calacanis 0:37 I mean, you might.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:38 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:38 You might. I liked your... Hey, for people who don't know, Chamath has his own YouTube channel. He's got his escape hatch for when this train wreck burns to the ground. He started his own YouTube channel. He's hedging his bets. Friedberg's working on his solo project. Everybody's doing solo project. The band's got a lot of solo projects going on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:54 The Beatles are experimenting. The Beatles are experimenting.

Jason Calacanis 0:55 They're experimenting. We got a little Yoko Ono [laughs] situation-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:58 Yeah

Jason Calacanis 0:58 ... going on here. You know what the number one topic for this show was by the All-In AI bot, Sacks?

Speaker 1:04 What's that?

Jason Calacanis 1:05 The number one was Dario versus Hegseth. The, uh, Department of War versus Anthropic was the number one-

Speaker 1:11 Yeah

Jason Calacanis 1:11 ... topic selected by our AI bot. As a programming note for folks, that decision will be made end of the day Friday when this podcast comes out, so we will talk about it next week, but let's get to work. We've got a full docket. The Claude

Jason Calacanis 1:22 kill list has expanded, and an AI fan fiction Substack tanked your 401 [k] on Monday. Let's get into it. Anthropic's generational run continues. They're now three for three in tanking different market sectors, Chamath-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:37 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:37 ... in February. Congratulations. [clapping] This is like, they, they took the, the mantle from Brad Gerstner, uh, tanking the market.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:44 The Anthropic [beep] list.

Jason Calacanis 1:46 It is. February 3rd, Anthropic announces, "Hey, we got a legal plugin for Claude, Cowork." Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, LegalZoom all down at least 10% since February 3rd. Then on February 20th, Claude Code Security is announced in a limited research preview. Stocks tank again. CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Okta all down. Then February 23rd, Anthropic announces Claude can modernize COBOL databases. If you don't know COBOL, that's the, like, oldest coding language in the world. That's where Sacks learned to code when he was in college in the '70s. It's used for banking, payroll, government.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:22 Healthcare.

Jason Calacanis 2:23 Healthcare. It runs 95% of ATMs in the US, and it powers Social Security payments. 85% of all COBOL code runs on IBM machines, so IBM decided they would tank 13% on Monday, their worst day since 2000, $31 billion in market cap losses. So let's stop here before I get into the fan fiction piece. What's your take here of what's happening in the market, Chamath? Is this simply people are looking for an excuse to trim their positions 'cause things have been top ticking, all-time highs, and people are just looking for an excuse? Or is this reality? Is this the go-forward reality that AI is going to compress these kind of stocks because it solves a lot of problems?

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:08 I'm gonna give you two explanations. I don't know what percentage I would allocate across the two, but I think one is tactical and one is much more strategic, but I think both are happening. The tactical one is that we're at a moment in time where a lot of the smart money hedge funds are starting to massively degross. And what that means is they're trimming a lot of positions, and they're just taking on a lot less risk.

Jason Calacanis 3:40 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:41 Why? I don't exactly know. It could be motivated by the second thing that I'm going to talk about, but the point is, in a degrossing cycle, you tend to be trimming risk and making your position sizes much smaller. So the longs become less long, the shorts become less short, and you just shrink, and so there's just general downward pressure. That is a clear behavior right now. But I think the structural change is the more important one, and this is sort of what I talked about this morning. In a normal functioning market, what we are always debating is when a set of cash flows go from becoming highly confident to less highly confident. It's a when conversation. So when will Coca-Cola's cash flows be impacted? When will Eli Lilly's cash flows be impacted? When will Meta's cash flows be impacted? And the answer to the when gets translated by the public markets into three things. Your price-to-earnings multiple, where if you invert that number, what that is equivalent to is the yield on the money that you get, okay? So if you're at, you know, 20 times PE, that's a 5% yield. The second is a revenue multiple, and the third is what's called your weighted average cost of capital, which is to say, if you look at the next 20 to 30 years of earnings and you wanna figure out what that is worth today, you have to discount all of these back, and you have to assume a percentage of interest effectively that it takes to get there. And the basic math of this is that when you have a high WACC it's called, you're massively discounting these cash flows. When you have a low WACC, you're assuming that these things are very durable. Okay, so w-what is happening? We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode. Are these cash flows durable at all?

Jason Calacanis 5:46 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 5:47 Could they fall off a cliff in year three? Is there some AI model that's gonna come around the corner and obliterate this business without me knowing it? And because they've shifted into this if mindset, your risk becomes totally different. You have this event risk that you don't know how to price.And whenever the market shifts into that mode, what you see are that the holders of those equities want a massive margin of safety. What does that mean? They have to take P/Es way down. If you used to trade at forty, you should trade at twenty. If you used to trade at twenty, you should trade at ten. They take revenue multiples down. You used to trade at ten times revenue, now you're gonna trade at three times. You take the WACC way up. Used to be a six percent discounted weighted average cost of capital. You know what? I'm taking you to twelve or thirteen. That's the market's way of saying, "I'm now debating if these things will even exist, and so I need to give myself a huge buffer to own this stuff."

Jason Calacanis 6:50 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:50 That's what's happening right now. It has a lot of ripple effects that we can talk about. Friedberg and I have talked about this a lot. The most obvious impact is how these tech companies recruit and retain talent, because the biggest thing that it starts to eat into are the cash flows of a business, which really directly tie to stock-based comp and all this other stuff. But let me just stop there. So we are-

Jason Calacanis 7:11 Yeah

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:12 ... we have moved away from a when to now an if, and I think that that is a very smart question to be asking. The answer may be for many of these companies that they will survive, but we don't know how long, and until that becomes clearer, you have to give yourself room to be wrong.

Jason Calacanis 7:28 You said when, then if. Did you mean if-

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:30 No, no, no, no

Jason Calacanis 7:31 ... to when?

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:32 We, we've always debated when.

Jason Calacanis 7:33 Right. [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:34 When will these cash flows disappear? Now it's like, will they even exist?

Jason Calacanis 7:37 Got it, okay. So the second part of this story, Friedberg and Sacks, is that a Substack post fan fiction, uh, taking place in the fictional 2028, uh, Global Intelligence Crisis went mega viral, 28 million views on X. It was posted Sunday night. It made the market tank on Monday. In this fictional Substack post, the author said there's gonna be essentially a death spiral that happens because of AI. How does that work? Well, first, companies embrace AI. Everything goes right. They're able to cut staff, their margins go up, uh, similar to how Amazon has, you know, trimmed their white collar staff. Then they're so successful at this that they lose their customer base because consumers don't have discretionary funding to spend, then it creates a death spiral where the companies keep deploying AI to try to hit the margins, cutting staff, and the entire economy collapses, Dr. Doom level stuff. Unemployment's at 10%, S&P goes down from 38% highs. After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the 3% interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stable coins, all the financial stocks got hit on Monday. Amex down 8%, Capital One down 8%, Mastercard 6%, Visa 4%, yada, yada. Finally, this piece got a lot of pushback. There was a silly piece in it or a section in it where they said AI agents would vibe code their way to displacing DoorDash, and, uh, that's kind of silly if anybody's run a network-based business knows. Sacks, I assume you, uh, read this piece or at least saw the fallout from it. What's your take? And then we'll go to you, Friedberg.

David Sacks 9:21 Yeah. Well, I, I know that this, uh, Citrini article got passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert.

Jason Calacanis 9:28 [laughs]

David Sacks 9:28 But I'm starting to question how legitimately viral it really was. There's some information that just came out that the attribution of the article has been amended, meaning the co-authors have been amended to include a short fund that was-

Jason Calacanis 9:44 Who?

David Sacks 9:44 ... shorting some of the names mentioned in the article. This is according to another post that just came out. According to this post, the authorship attribution attributed to market moving was changed after publication, and the co-author is a managing partner of a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund-

Jason Calacanis 10:03 Bum, bum, bum

David Sacks 10:03 ... who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named. So I think that's point number one is I just wonder, did this article truly go viral or did the authors do anything to kind of amplify it? And we just don't know the answer to that question. But regardless of that, let's just take the arguments on their face. I think one of the best responses to it was by another writer named Derek Thompson who wrote a article called Nobody Knows Anything, which I think is a reference to a famous take by legendary Hollywood writer William Goldman.

Jason Calacanis 10:36 Yeah.

David Sacks 10:36 In any event, what the article says is no one really knows what's gonna happen with AI in two years, never mind 20 years, and so they resort to science fiction writing masquerading as analysis. And the author here, Derek Thompson, says that the conversation about AI is really just a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. And he says, "That's not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick, but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply of real world, real time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical." So in other words, what he's saying is, look, this guy's writing very compelling science fiction, but there's no real analytics behind it to defend it, and yes, this could happen. Here's a prediction market on whether people believe the Citrini report's gonna come true. Something like 12% believe the Citrini scenario's gonna happen. But the truth is no one really knows. I mean, there's other dueling science fiction narratives where AI's gonna create such a world of abundance that we're not gonna need for anything. And just by the way, uh, Derek Thompson is one of the abundance guys with Ezra Klein.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:51 This is why the market's getting whacked. I think that-

David Sacks 11:53 Right

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:53 ... you're right, Sacks. Nobody knows. So if you can get 5% for owning government bonds, why are we taking excessive risk here?

David Sacks 12:00 Yeah, let me just build on your point about SaaS. So the reason why there's so much uncertainty around SaaS is that SaaS used to be such a easily modeled and predictable category.And you know, I saw as a VC, we saw the same story play out across many, many different categories of software. You'd have this initial period where there'd be this experimentation phase. You have a bunch of different products that come to market. There'd be a battle, and then the market would eventually settle, and there'd be a category leader, and they would capture most of the market share and the vast majority of the market capitalization, and they would have very, very predictable metrics. It was very easy to grade a SaaS business. You look at ARR, you say annually recurring revenue. You look at the net dollar retention. You wanna see, depending on the phase-

David Friedberg 12:45 RPO, RPO, revenue under performance obligation.

David Sacks 12:48 Right. And so, you know, these things began to be seen as like a annuity with growth, right? Because-

David Friedberg 12:53 They were rock solid, yeah.

David Sacks 12:54 Yeah, because a good net dollar retention would be something like a hundred and twenty percent, which means that your sort of cohort of existing customers on balance would all renew the next year, and actually they would renew at a hundred and twenty percent of their previous year's contract values. And the reason you got that extra twenty percent is they would buy more seats or there'd be additional products or features they would upsell. It got to be very, very predictable. And so when people were buying software companies at, I don't know, thirteen times ARR, they thought they were buying a growth annuity. And now all of a sudden you gotta factor into that, well, wait a second, what if AI disrupts the whole market? What if it doesn't eliminate... I don't think AI is gonna get rid of Salesforce, but it could eat into their growth opportunity. We just don't know. What if it changes the pricing model? I mean, it just creates a whole lot of unknowns, and I, I actually don't believe in the Citrini or, or the doomer take on this, but I can see why the market would feel this level of uncertainty-

David Friedberg 13:54 Hundred percent

David Sacks 13:55 ... given how predictable a category SaaS used to be, just, say, a year ago.

David Friedberg 14:02 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 14:02 Well, chaos-

David Friedberg 14:03 Hundred percent

Jason Calacanis 14:03 ... is a ladder, Friedberg, and this means opportunity. So if we look at this and SaaS has headwinds, then is there a winner? Is open source the winner, or is this all deflationary in your mind, Friedberg, and we just make less money and the earnings of these companies get compressed, the size of them gets compressed? How do you think about it?

David Friedberg 14:24 I think fundamentally, if you're driving productivity with AI, you're driving leverage on human time and leverage on capital. The question is, how quickly can you drive that up? And that's a function of how much consumption there is, how much capacity there is for consumption. So on the one hand, I'll just speak broadly. I think, like, humans have this desire to improve their livelihoods by roughly ten percent every year. Meaning, like, your income and your ability to purchase stuff that's new relative to where you were last year has to go up by ten percent for you to be happy. If it's less than ten percent, you're probably unhappy.

Jason Calacanis 15:00 Is that, that's your anecdote or that's like-

David Friedberg 15:02 That's just like an anecdote. Like, I think, I think that's sort of like my rubric for thinking about, like, why are people unhappy or happy? So if your earnings are the same but things are getting more expensive, you're not happy. If your earnings go up by ten percent and things stay the same price, you got ten percent more than you had last year, you're, you're gonna be happy. I just think, like, all humans are driven by this need to consume more each year than they did last year. So I think for me that's like the lower limit on consumptive capacity in the world. The question that we're now facing, which we've never faced in human history before, is there a upper limit-

Jason Calacanis 15:38 Hmm

David Friedberg 15:38 ... on consumptive capacity? Because AI creates such a profound shift in productivity and in leverage that normally you would say, "Hey, when we get a new tool or we get new leverage in a system, we build a new technology, we can make more with less. Therefore, everyone gets access to more things for the same price or the cost of things that they consume come down by a certain price." But there may be a situation now where the ability to make stuff exceeds the capacity to consume stuff, and that is something that I don't think we've faced before. And I think that's sort of where a lot of the models start to break, just general economic models, just general productivity models, and general social models. And this goes to the point about, like, what is everyone gonna do? In the same way that I think we've argued that maybe SaaS was a transitory business phenomenon that existed between the foundation of the internet and the era of AI, it may be the case that knowledge work in general is also a transitory phenomenon that only existed between the foundation of the computer or computing tools and the existence of AI, generally speaking. And if all of that goes away very quickly, and all of those people can be redistributed and recast into doing other higher level, more creative things, their productivity goes up by a hundred x, is there really a consumer on the other end of all of that productivity? Is there really enough consumptive capacity? And I think that's the profound question that we all face. I don't think that there's any limit to productivity.

Jason Calacanis 17:10 Sorry, is that, is that your way of saying that SaaS goes to zero, or that's your way of saying s- these companies go to zero?

David Friedberg 17:18 I'm just saying knowledge work in general, like the, the-

Jason Calacanis 17:21 No, I under-

David Friedberg 17:21 Like, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 17:21 But what is the implication to these businesses?

David Sacks 17:22 But is this just another dueling science fiction take? I mean, or what's your evidence for this? I think it's fine to have a sci-fi take about the future.

Jason Calacanis 17:30 It's intuit- I think it's intuition, I think, is what I'm getting from Friedberg.

David Friedberg 17:32 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:32 Yeah, but is there data? 'Cause I can show you some data that I think contradicts what you're saying.

Jason Calacanis 17:36 And I have some firsthand sort of-

David Friedberg 17:38 In the sense that there's more leverage, Sacks, that people are able to actually deliver?

David Sacks 17:42 No, I mean, let me... Well, Jake, I wanna hear what you have to say 'cause I know you're experimenting with this, but let me just show you a few data points real quick, um, 'cause I think this is relevant. So we're really talking about the disruption caused by coding assistants, right? This is, like, the first big killer app of AI. I mean, I guess after writing and research for chatbots, and we'll have agents later, but really it's all about coding assistance, right? And the ability to more easily create code. That's what's creating the disruption to the SaaS category. Well, so this is focused on the data we see right now around that, and there are a lot of peopleWho are pointing this out, that Anthropic right now has a job listing for a software engineer on their website right now for five hundred and seventy thousand dollars. And a lot of people are kind of pointing out, "Okay, so wait, so what Anthropic is saying is they're still trying to hire software engineers at a very high wage, but somehow they think these jobs are gonna be eliminated?"

Jason Calacanis 18:38 Chamath might apply for that job. He's-

David Sacks 18:39 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 18:40 Yeah, austerity measures. Sounds pretty good to me.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:43 That's a lot of money.

Jason Calacanis 18:44 Chamath might take that job and then just have AI do it for him.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:47 No, I'm, I'm, I'm worried, like, I hope my eighty/ninety team doesn't see that offer. That's a- [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 18:51 [laughs] It's a big number.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:53 Our, our equity is way higher, but our salaries are not that high. I mean, y- you look, you put these things together, it's like that equity is money, good. The reality is, like, those guys are doing five to six billion dollar structured secondaries every year now, or they're, they're starting, which means that they will. That's like cash compensation.

David Sacks 19:09 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:09 So for, for me to match that, I need to be three X higher than them.

David Sacks 19:13 Right. And I, I think a lot of people are kind of pointing out, well, this is a contradiction. Anthropic doesn't really seem to be practicing what they're preaching if they're paying enormous amounts still for software engineers, even as they claim they're obs leading the entire category. Something doesn't quite add up. Citadel Securities did a new report that rebuts that Citrini report, and they show a couple of stats here which I think are really interesting. So job postings for software engineers are rapidly rising. They're showing, I think it was roughly a ten percent year-over-year increase in the demand for software engineers. On a related note, they also show that company formation is also rapidly expanding, and that may have something to do with AI making it easier to start a business or to get leverage, to your point, Friedberg. So look, there's a couple of competing effects going on here, and I think Aaron Levie had a really good explanation of why you might see something very counterintuitive happening. And again, it all goes back to Jevons paradox. But what Aaron says is that when you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate, but there are gonna be many other jobs like that. But think about software engineering, even among startups in Silicon Valley, which I think are probably some of the most attractive places for software engineers to work. There's always been a chronic shortage of them. Then you've got the Fortune five hundred companies, non-tech companies, which have always had an even harder time hiring technical talent. So you have this massive unfilled need-

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:50 Mm-hmm

David Sacks 20:50 ... for software engineers across the entire economy. Now you're gonna be able to get a lot more leverage out of software engineers. It doesn't mean they're gonna get fired. It just means that now maybe you can have a lot more ten X software engineers, and they're getting, those jobs are now being spread throughout the whole economy. You know, I also think, just to put some numbers on this, I think the cost structure of the average Fortune five hundred business is something like five percent IT, and that includes all of their IT, not just their software. You know, what should it be? What should the percentage of software be in an enterprise cost structure? Elon describes companies as cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human.

Chamath Palihapitiya 21:34 I think-

David Sacks 21:34 If you think about the current Fortune five hundred company being one or two percent software, maybe they should be fifty percent software. I think what Aaron is saying here is the market for software and software engineers was so constrained by the lack of availability that even if we ten X or a hundred X the productivity of software engineers, the demand will be there to absorb this new supply, and so it could lead to this explosion in productivity without the massive job loss.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:00 I think you're right. I think the, the thing that I would look at is I would expect OPEX as a percentage of revenue to fall off of a cliff, but within that OPEX, the percentage of it that you allocate to technology and technology-related things probably goes way, way up than what it is today. Okay, Jason, the batch of people that are applying for Launch, has SaaS stopped? Has software stopped?

Jason Calacanis 22:25 No. It's AI first companies, obviously, and people are-

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:29 Are they rebuilding traditional SaaS tools, just cheaper?

Jason Calacanis 22:32 Basically, everybody's building the great... You know, a- as we talked about at the All-In Summit, like, some of these companies are trying to build the best pilot in the world, or Waymo's trying to build the best driver in the world. People are now trying to build the best SDR in the world, the best salesperson, the best executive coach, and so we have been, like, obsessed with Claude Cowork, but mainly OpenClaw. And so what we did was... And, and I think it's not developers that are gonna do all this work, it's knowledge workers. So we had, we have twenty people in our firm. We had fifteen of them come in this weekend, and they all got trained over, like, six or seven hours how to have their own OpenClaw agent, and we started building it. Every piece of software that we wanted to buy or build over the last ten years that we never got to, my people are building in the last thirty days. As an example, you know, when you're selling ads for a podcast, you wanna check all the other podcasts and what advertisers they have. We trained an agent to go take the top one hundred podcasts, look through the transcripts, figure out who the advertisers are, check those advertisers in Pipedrive, tell us when the last time we contacted them, and put it into the sales room. That was an SDR job that we wanted to fill and software we wanted to build. Then we wanted people to have like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 23:47 Sorry, hold on. That was a, that was a human that you were paying money and now you've replaced with software? Or that human still exists but now they just do it in a better way?

Jason Calacanis 23:54 Redeploying that human. We had a human doing it. We're gonna re-redeploy them to do other things. And the consistency of this, Chamath, and the accuracy, and then it's doing it all night long. So we have like seven of these agents in these kind of roles. The next piece we did was we gave my agent, which is like the Ultron, acc- root access to Gmail, Calendar, Zoom, Notion, SlackAnd what it's doing is it's giving each person, "Here's what you got done this week," with their manager. "Here's the emails you sent, here's the meetings you took, here's the contacts, here are the threads you were involved in." And then it's helping manage those people. And so we are getting-

Chamath Palihapitiya 24:30 Okay, but all, all that, all that to me says you, Jason, despite all your doomerism, seems like you're growing, and you're gonna be hiring [laughs] more people, and you're more productive. Am I getting this wrong or-

Jason Calacanis 24:41 No, no, no, I'm not doomerist. What I think's gonna happen in this position is-

Chamath Palihapitiya 24:44 But are you... But you're growing, and you're gonna be hiring more people.

Jason Calacanis 24:46 We're not-- No, no, we're not gonna add more people. Definitely not adding people. The people we have are becoming 10 or 20% more efficient every week because the software we would've paid for or built from another vendor if we had the time, or we wanted to build custom software, we had 10 engineers, it's being built by our OpenClaw agents. As an example, when we make clips for this podcast, other podcasts, we have it go and look at, like, uh, a This Week in Startups episode from 10 years, tell us the three best moments, and it makes the clip, it puts the subtitles on it, and then it puts the clip into the Slack room. That was something that was gonna be a full-time job. So we're getting 10, 20% more efficient. Then I started doing it at home. So I had it take our Instacart, pull out the last 10 orders we did, and then tell us what we order most of the time, and then it's going to automatically build a cart for us. Every single knowledge work job is being automated right now, and you can take it, and if you're a business process head, well, you know how to, like, do a business process, and you can structure it and write it with an agent. It'll just run it every day, every week. We did another agent, how do you make better thumbnails? And we said, "Every Saturday in your skills..." So when you build an OpenClaw, it has, like, a soul file, and it has a skills file. In the skills file, we told it, "Sacks, every week, go out and look for people discussing how to make better thumbnails on YouTube, how to make better titles." It found this week, Chamath, somebody at MrBeast company talk about how they're using heat maps. It was an article I would've never known. It added it to its skill, and now whenever we post a thumbnail, it tell, tells us based on its skill that it refines every week how to make that thumbnail better. And it's starting to make the thumbnails. This is becoming recursive. So you keep the same number of people, but they get 10 or 20% more efficient. I don't know what this means for the larger economy. All I know is it's the most exciting time I've had online since the web came out, since the internet came out. It is so much fun to automate all this stuff.

Chamath Palihapitiya 26:48 The big question that I am thinking about that I haven't gotten a good answer about, so I don't, I don't know what you guys think is all these businesses are going to need to batten down the hatches and give themselves room to figure this all out, right?

Jason Calacanis 27:02 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:02 Like, if you take Sacks' point, like, y-if you take your point, JCal, which is the young, nimble companies like yours are going to be rapidly experimenting. The bigger, larger companies are gonna slowly onboard themselves to start experimenting. All of that means we're gonna get much clearer answers to all of this, but what it also means is that you're gonna have to have time so that you can figure this all out.

Jason Calacanis 27:27 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 27:27 And if you wanna buy yourself time, you're gonna need a ton of cash. And if you're gonna think about saving cash, the one place tech companies literally incinerate cash is how they do compensation. And so I kinda think, like, at some point, the next shoe will drop, and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock-based comp because they literally incinerate most, if not all of their free cash flow fighting the dilution from stock-based compensation. So if you want five or six years to just be in the arena on the field figuring this out, you're gonna wanna kinda be very cash flow generative and really conservative in how you spend your money.

Jason Calacanis 28:08 Yeah. Sacks, the people who embrace this, I think, become five or 10 times more valuable than the people who are not. That's where I think the opportunity in the economy is. So unless you think humanity's gonna run out of problems to solve, uh, I think it's gonna be boom. It's gonna be boom town, and I think people are gonna start more companies 'cause the b- the barrier to start a company is no longer three or four million dollars. You can just have two or three people, and you start setting up these agents-

Chamath Palihapitiya 28:32 Mm-hmm

Jason Calacanis 28:32 ... and man, you can-

Chamath Palihapitiya 28:34 You can cook

Jason Calacanis 28:34 ... make software-

Chamath Palihapitiya 28:35 You can cook

Jason Calacanis 28:35 ... you can do sales, you can do PR. Everything is getting faster and faster and faster. So the time between, like, conceiving of a product and publishing it and finding a developer, you don't even need a developer. You can just publish software. The, the wake-up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, "Hey, we wanna get this functionality out of Slack," and it's like, "Yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered Matterpost?" I'm like, "What's Matterpost?" Like, "Oh, it's an open source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance, and put it there." And I was like, "Well, don't do that. [chuckles] We're only spending 6K a m- a year on Slack, or 10K a year." But the software is building CRM systems for us, it's building agents for us, and it wants to just build all the software stack. So you could, when you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you're working with, you're gonna be able to say to them, "Hey, we could roll our own, and, uh, when you wanna upsell us on this latest thing," like you talked about, Sacks, upselling is such a big part of SaaS. You're like, "I can actually build that software myself internally. I don't need you to do it."

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:39 Ryan Peterson just posts on X, "Claude for legal seems to work just as well as Harvey, by the way." [laughs] Now the, the SaaS apocalypse-

Jason Calacanis 29:49 It's dunking on-

Chamath Palihapitiya 29:49 ... is going after private companies now too.

David Sacks 29:51 Well, I think for a, a while now, there has been a question of which layer of the stack is gonna capture all the value. So is it gonna be the model companies, or could it be the applications that are built on top of the models? Or, you know, if there's a lot of competition at both those layers of the stack, do the chip companies get it all? I think it's a unclear question, but-

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:10 Totally unclear

David Sacks 30:11 ... yeah, I think, you know, for any given vertical application, you do have to defend why you think your value prop will be sustainable as the underlying foundation models just get better themselves.

Jason Calacanis 30:25 And it's open source. Like this week we put up Kimi two point five. It can do about eighty, eighty-five percent of the jobs, so we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up. All right, listen, this is TBD. We got a lot more to think about

Jason Calacanis 30:39 on this topic

David Sacks 30:40 Just on this point of a lot of these debates about AI are dueling science fiction narratives. I just think that the doomer narratives are inherently more appealing to people. I mean, I think it's partly just you look at most sci-fi movies are dystopian, not utopian. In addition to that, I think we have a bunch of heuristic biases in favor of the doomer narrative. So one of them is the seen versus the unseen. It's a lot easier to see the jobs are, that already exist that could be obsoleted than it is to imagine the new jobs and the new business models that haven't been created yet, and that will likely take some great innovator or a genius to think of in order to create. So we have that huge heuristic bias of not being able to see the creation that's coming. It takes way less creativity to think about the potential destruction.

Chamath Palihapitiya 31:30 I think it's a, it's a big-

David Sacks 31:30 And then finally, I think, you know, the other heuristic is just the whole fixed pie fallacy. Most people do tend to think of the economy as a fixed pie. This is why you see so much anger against, you know, millionaires and billionaires, is because of this idea that if someone's getting rich, it must be at the expense of someone else. That's not actually the case. The economy itself could be growing larger as a result of someone inventing something new that increases production. A really good line from a- another article that was written just a couple of weeks ago was, "The economy is not a, a pie, it's a garden, and technology is rain." So again, you know, all of this technological innovation is going to increase the growth rate of the garden. It's not a fixed pie. And just because you see an expansion in productivity in one part of the economy does not mean that you're gonna see job loss in another part of the economy.

Jason Calacanis 32:21 Yeah. I think the job people are not seeing, but I'm seeing right now, is the person who creates agents, manages them, and is the maestro of the agents, the person who can take the business process, explain it, and train the agent to do it. And there are certain people in business who are just really good at operations, you were one of them, Sacks, running companies, and, like, that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent, and figure out how to manage them, and figure out how to increase their sales-

David Sacks 32:49 Sure. Look, w- with any new technology-

Jason Calacanis 32:49 It's like a great job

David Sacks 32:51 So-

Jason Calacanis 32:51 And it's not a developer

David Sacks 32:52 Look, with any new technology, there's always a huge change management aspect with enterprises because it's hard for them to adapt and change, and the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones who are gonna create an amazing career opportunity for themselves. But it's hard to do, and that's gonna slow down the rate of change, just the amount of inertia in the economy. And also, one other constraint is gonna be that at some point here, we may be token constrained, right? I mean, we may not have enough energy, like we've talked about, even though the chips are getting so much better that tokens per second, tokens per watt, and tokens per dollar are all increasing very fast, but we're still gonna probably be constrained in the next couple of years on some dimension, whether it's land, power, shell, or just energy production, or maybe chip production. There are real world constraints on just how fast we can scale the infrastructure, and that will-

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:46 Hmm

David Sacks 33:46 ... mean that these, like, hyper utopian or hyper dystopian narratives will be wrong. I don't think there's time in the next few years for the whole economy to change in the way that the extremes would present.

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:57 I think you're right. I think you're gonna see a ten X-ing in the demand for tokens, but I also think you're going to see a ninety percent price reduction in the cost pr- of an output token, probably by the end of this year. So I think that, to your point, like, it's, it's gonna just create an enormous upswell of demand because we're gonna be able to cut the prices of an output token so dramatically. And I think that's gonna-

Jason Calacanis 34:22 And by the way, that discussion we had, Chamath, last week when we talked about c- the tokens outpacing [chuckles] the employee salary and just where are these tokens all gonna come from, that was our most viewed clip or one of the most viewed clips in the history of this podcast. So people are-

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:36 I had, I had my-

Jason Calacanis 34:36 ... actually really focused on this. Yeah

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:38 ... I had my team at eighty nine, we, we, we did our cost model, and now we have that as a line item. When we think about fully burdened cost of employees, we now factor that in because we're, we're at a place where some of our engineers are just racking up ginormous bills. And then separately, just general runs that we do for general purpose stuff that we need to just run our product is ex- it's so expensive. So I am waiting with bated breath for what Sacks said, which is like we need an explosion in the capacity that's available because I do think that the, the Silicon solutions are coming that will cut the cost, but we need a large block of land, power, shell ready to then turn all of this stuff on, so that we can actually take advantage of it.

Jason Calacanis 35:23 Rumor is the new Mac Studio is coming. We'll have an M5 chip in it and we'll be language model ready. So that's the rumor, is that they're building it for models, so that could be an incredible turn of events, everybody's desktop running the local model. Sacks, you wanna have the final word here? Uh, Friedberg or Friedberg, before we-

David Sacks 35:40 Just to go back to what Chamath was saying there, I mean, you've got political forces that wanna stop the construction of all data centers in the United States, so-

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:48 Which is crazy. Yeah

David Sacks 35:49 ... if that gains steam, then that's gonna be a huge constraint on any change whatsoever.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:53 Can I tee this up for you, J. Cal? So I, I went back this weekend, and I looked at the number of data centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns, and I, I posted it on X, so Nick, maybe you can put this up. But it was really a, a very small behavior which was pushing back on data centers and getting them canceled. We had about twenty five projects total, of which twenty were just in Q2 alone. There are 100 data center projects right now that are facing some form of local oppositionSo interesting because these-

Jason Calacanis 36:30 Where if you take that 40% number and you apply this, and then you multiply it by the number of megawatts that they have announced, last year we lost almost five gigawatts in terms of canceled projects. This year coming in '26, we have about seven that could be canceled if you use this math. If then you flow that through, OpenAI, Sarah Friar said this, that every gigawatt for her, for OpenAI, is about 10 billion of revenue. So if you, if you assume that that's roughly accurate, plus or minus a billion here or there, what that means is that 2025, the industry as a whole lost 50 billion of revenue. And this year, if seven gigawatts gets canceled, it's about 70 billion. Now you're talking about 130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that'll go forward in time that we miss out on. I think that that's really bad. We need to figure out a way to nip this in the bud. So confounding because we were sitting here five years ago, 10 years ago, local municipalities were fighting and giving discounts to try to get these data [laughs] centers open to get the jobs and get the revenue, and now we've got people trying to stop them. This is a perfect transition for the State of the Union. Before we get there, two important programming notes. All-In is gonna host two events in 2026, one of them Liquidity, May 31st to June 3rd, uh, in Yountville, uh, up in wine country. Chamath has taken control of the event, and he has set a standard for who gets on stage.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:04 None of you mids can control the programming. I decide.

Jason Calacanis 38:06 That's it. Chamath came in, and he dropped the hammer. Who do you got so far? You wanna, uh, tease a couple of, uh, people who you invited to come speak?

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:14 I'll tease two.

Jason Calacanis 38:15 Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:16 The first is an incredibly dear friend of mine.

Jason Calacanis 38:18 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:19 The Axe of Axes, Dan Loeb, who founded Third Point.

Jason Calacanis 38:26 Good get.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:26 Who is an unbelievable investor in literally every domain. Private credit, public equities, private tech. He's, he's just a, he's just a beast.

Jason Calacanis 38:38 It's a good get.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:39 He's a beast.

Jason Calacanis 38:40 Good get. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:40 So he'll be doing a really important keynote. He has not done one of these public speaking slots in a very long time. And then the second is the CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Friar.

Jason Calacanis 38:50 Oh, wow.

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:51 Unbelievable star, and we're gonna double-click into the entire business model of OpenAI on stage-

Jason Calacanis 38:57 Amazing

Chamath Palihapitiya 38:57 ... in front of everybody.

Jason Calacanis 38:57 So, uh, go to allin.com, and then for those of you who plan ahead for travel-

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:01 More coming. More great names coming

Jason Calacanis 39:03 ... more coming every week. If you are, uh, an All-In Summit fan, I can't believe it, Friedberg, we're gonna be in our fifth year, September 13th to 15th. So if you wanna-

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:11 Only gets better. Gets better every year

Jason Calacanis 39:12 ... gets better every year. We're gonna have some good parties too. I mean, that Back to the Future and the Blade Runner parties, those were epic. Allin.com/events. Hey, can I give a plug to friend of the pod, Bill Gurley?

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:23 Do it.

Jason Calacanis 39:23 He's got an amazing new book.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:25 Phenomenal book.

Jason Calacanis 39:25 Running Down a Dream. Please.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:26 Wait, wait, wait, wait, before you start.

Jason Calacanis 39:28 Go buy-

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:28 Before you start. Go ahead.

Jason Calacanis 39:29 There it is. Running Down a Dream. I just want everybody to stop the po- pause the podcast. I want you to buy three copies, give it to two young people and a parent you know.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:36 This book is incredible.

Jason Calacanis 39:37 It's a great book. It's a great book. It, it really is inspiring for kids, and, uh, Bill Gurley, friend of the pod, he always shows up for us.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:44 JK, I'll do an impression for us of what it would be like if you and Bill Gurley started a podcast together.

Jason Calacanis 39:49 All right, everybody, welcome to the JCBG Podcast.

Chamath Palihapitiya 39:52 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 39:52 I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. "And I'm Bill Gurley, and we're here in Texas at Terry Black's where we're getting some beef ribs, and we're gonna discuss-

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:02 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 40:02 ... investing in marketplaces, as well as my new book, Running Down a Dream-

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:09 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 40:09 ... which will teach your kids how to not be [beep] ups. And if your kids are [beep] ups, you can hit them in the back of the head with the book. Texas style."

Chamath Palihapitiya 40:18 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 40:20 One of the big topics, uh, and I think something you're working on with President Trump, Sacks, is, uh, this energy pledge. I've been seeing, uh, rumblings about this. Explain what's going on in terms of getting the country in sync around these data centers and energy.

David Sacks 40:37 Well, the President announced in the State of the Union last night that he supports a Ratepayer Protection Pledge, which requires, uh, the major tech companies to provide for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not see their rates going up. I think this makes total sense. I think, Chamath, to your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices are gonna go up, and that shouldn't be the case. And so the President said that he's committed to not allowing residential rates to go up as a result of data centers. It's pretty straightforward. You get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers, to pay for the increase in the electricity cost, or you let them set up their own power behind the meter. The President's been talking about this for over a year, that our biggest AI companies would also become big power companies because we had let them, uh, stand up their own power generation behind the meter. So these data centers don't even have to connect to the grid. They could just do co-location themselves. But also, I think that with this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, what you're gonna see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices, because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid. Also, they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure. So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the cost to generate it are not all variable. There's a lot of huge fixed costs in there. So when you increase scale, then you can actually reduce the, the metered rate. So again, you know, this is really, I think, the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders, who just wants to stop all progress whatsoever. I saw a, a funny post calling it BANAS, which is Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Jason Calacanis 42:28 [laughs]

David Sacks 42:28 So this is the-

Jason Calacanis 42:30 That's not sustainable

David Sacks 42:30 ... BA- BANAS is replacing the new NIMBY, so you just can build absolutely nothing.

Jason Calacanis 42:34 Yeah. It's BANAS.

David Sacks 42:34 I think the president's approach finds a very good balance here, which is, look-

Chamath Palihapitiya 42:38 We can have progress, just don't make residential consumers pay for it. Let the big tech companies pay for it themselves, and I think you'll see more coming out about this from the White House next week.

Jason Calacanis 42:47 Quite a deft move. Friedberg, h-how should America be thinking about this great data center build-out, energy usage, you know, if you expand it out over the coming decade, a-and how do you sell that to the backdrop that you talk about, the socialist movement? You got a great interview coming out with Ray Dalio on the All-In Interview program next week. How do you think about those competing forces? You've got the socialists saying, "Bananas, NIMBY, slow down, uh, de-sell," and then you've got this incredible race we're in for efficiency and this opportunity and abundance. How would you sell it to kind of bring these two sides together, or is it just impossible?

David Friedberg 43:31 The data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of light, so you could put them anywhere, and I think that our policymakers need to be very cognizant of that fact. You have, and we do, connect the internet using high-speed cable, high-speed fiber optic throughout the world. And so theoretically, if we don't embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry, and it will fundamentally be an industry because it is almost like the new sort of oil. Where are the oil rigs gonna go? Where are the railroads gonna go? Where are the telegraph lines gonna go? Where are the factories gonna go? If we don't put them here, someone else will put them on their shores. Someone else will put them in their country. Someone else will put them in their jurisdiction. And a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of the second and third-order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere.

Jason Calacanis 44:40 Such a good point.

David Friedberg 44:40 So-

Jason Calacanis 44:41 Yeah

David Friedberg 44:42 ... it's not gonna, like, just go away. The, the demand is there. The economy's moving forward. AI's moving forward. We live in a world with a hundred and ninety-six countries, and data centers do not take up a lot of space. They're very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the data centers in the world fit under the tip of a pin. And so this is a very small footprint, and if we're gonna give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of, of economic value creation, we're being pretty silly and, and pretty obtuse in our view of the world. I would just, like, encourage the system that I think is the right system, and we talked about this last time, where provided data centers are producing their own electricity. That means that you're taking electricity consumption off the grid because they otherwise are not being used on the grid, and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. So it's silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on data centers. As soon as you do that, the companies that use data centers are not gonna slow down. They're gonna go put them somewhere else, and we're gonna miss out.

Jason Calacanis 45:47 And it's such a good point, Chamath, because you were recently in the Middle East, and I've been there a bunch in Saudi, UAE. These are the folks who built a, a large portion of those oil refineries, and they are savvy to this. And what are they doing in Saudi, UAE, Qatar, all of these regions? They're doubling down. They're ten-X'ing their data center builds. So to your point, Friedberg, either we build them or they're gonna go somewhere else, and there are people who are willing to underwrite these, and they're willing to take out the red tape from the process here and move quicker than us. So we... I think this is a pretty deft move by President Trump to say, "Hey, you guys should all just guarantee that consumers don't get impacted." The water thing is a total hoax. Like, the water is recirculated. That's a hoax.

Chamath Palihapitiya 46:35 I think this is really smart. I think that what the president's doing and what Sacks is doing is really smart. The thing to keep in mind is that there's still a risk that prices go up, and it has nothing to do with these data centers, and it has everything to do with the business model of being a utility. Because what happens is in order to get a license, a monopoly license in an area to provide energy, to generate energy for a community, the exchange works in the following way. You go, and you present a CapEx plan to the Public Utilities Commission. That's effectively your budget. That says, "Here are the lines I'm going to upgrade. Here are the generators I'm going to upgrade." Independent of data centers, the reality is the draw, the electricity consumption of individual Americans is going up because we have more devices, we have cars, we have all of these other things. So what we also have to do is we have to look at how utilities' business model actually incentivizes them to increase prices by making all kinds of investments. So we have to do a good job of making sure we hold everybody accountable because otherwise what you could see is that the data centers taking on the burden for themselves, but prices still continuing to escalate because a utility says, "I need to spend a billion dollars this year to upgrade my infrastructure." And what that allows them to do is take that billion dollars and essentially invest it for a return. That's the business model of utility.

Jason Calacanis 48:00 And this is really happening in blue states. Micron has a hundred billion dollar mega fab in New York, and there's a lawsuit by six, one, two, three, four, five-

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:11 This is, this is shameful

Jason Calacanis 48:12 ... six concerned citizens.

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:12 That's shameful.

Jason Calacanis 48:13 And the project-

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:15 That's shameful

Jason Calacanis 48:15 ... has taken twelve-

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:17 Shameful

Jason Calacanis 48:17 ... twelve hundred days. Twelve hundred days between their announcement and the groundbreaking, and they spent six hundred twelve days on the environmental impact study. People, wake up. Just go to Texas. Elon built his factory here, the Gigafactory, in under, like, eighteen months. This is-

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:36 Yeah, I don't-

Jason Calacanis 48:36 ... the great state of Texas. Come here. We'll build it for you, and you'll be done.

Chamath Palihapitiya 48:40 Yeah, I don't know why anyone bothers with the blue states anymore. They make it too hard to build

Jason Calacanis 48:44 It's retarded. It's so dumb, and such a self-own too. Like, what-- Don't you wanna be part of the future? You're literally ankling the entire country. Disgraziade.

David Sacks 48:54 By the way, there are a lot of people in New York who wanna work. This is not a case actually of this new fab being unpopular. The majority of people in the area actually want this plant being built. They want the jobs that are gonna come there. A lot of people say data centers don't create a lot of jobs. This is actually a chip fab, so it will create a lot of jobs, a lot of good high-paying jobs. People want it.

Jason Calacanis 49:15 Totally.

David Sacks 49:15 But six people can stop it with a lawsuit-

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:18 It's not-

David Sacks 49:18 ... after it's already been through a two-year environmental review.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:21 It's not blue and red states. These are nonprofits that get organized to create this kind of chaos. I remember looking at a massive lithium investment in Nevada, and the whole point was to domesticate lithium production. And what was interesting is this enormous deposit that's just sitting there ripe for development, right before they were about to get environmental approvals or right after, there was a lawsuit by people who wanted to protect the upper land grouse. It's seared in my mind-

Jason Calacanis 49:51 Hmm

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:51 ... that the upper land grouse of Nevada is the reason why we do not have domestic national security around lithium. And you have to ask yourself, "Why is this possible?" And it's possible because you have these environmental nonprofits that can go and create this chaos with absolutely no risk to them. Zero. They can fundraise around it, and they can create this chaos. I mean, Nick, to this point, this is an example of Greenpeace, and specifically here they were pushing back on an oil pipeline to such a degree, and they created so much chaos that they were sued. And a North Dakota judge just said that he's gonna order Greenpeace to pay damages that should total almost three hundred and fifty million dollars in connection to those protests.

Jason Calacanis 50:34 Nice.

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:34 And it should not be the case that six people can slow down a hundred billion dollar investment package. That's not right.

David Friedberg 50:40 Well, I think there's... And, and I just wanna highlight this important point. There's not a lot of logic and reason. You guys are right, but I do think there's a lot of emotion, and there's a huge aversion to big tech, a huge aversion to wealth creation by select individuals, select companies, a huge aversion to economic growth that doesn't benefit everyone. There's a fundamental kind of underlying left behind emotion that drives a lot of this, and I've said it before, but I think unless there's systems or mechanisms that get folks to come along with the value creation ahead and, and help them connect their own lives to the value creation that's being realized, they're not gonna be supportive because there is this kind of diametric opposition towards big tech, towards the wealth gap, towards value accrual to a select few companies or select few individuals, and this fuels and feeds that. So I think fundamentally, w- maybe it's not just about giving the data centers their own power capacity, but there's gotta be mechanisms and tools that helps the broader population understand or recognize or get some benefit from it as well, where they're an owner in it or participant in it because they have the power. As we're seeing, they have the power to stop it, therefore they wanna have some benefit for providing authority to do it.

Jason Calacanis 51:56 And these six people are concerned about housing costs, worker exposure to toxic chemicals, pollution, air and water, greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, flooding of the wetlands, all these things that obviously could be mitigated. All right, let's keep moving here. We got a lot more docket

Jason Calacanis 52:13 to get through. State of the Union came in at one hundred eight minutes, and, uh, it's the longest in sixty years. Actually the longest since they started tracking this. The theme of President Trump's State of the Union this year, America at two fifty, strong, prosperous, and respected. Trump took a bunch of victory laps, inflation, jobs, closing the border. All those have gone really well, but this comes to the backdrop of Trump's approval rating being super challenged. He started his first year at plus eleven point seven percent, now he's negative fourt- fourteen point three percent, twenty-six point swing. Economy started plus three point four, down to eighteen point two, and trade started at five point nine percent, and we'll talk about the tariff stuff later, and went down to twenty-two point seven. So let's call balls and strikes here, gentlemen. Favorite moments. What were your favorite moments from the State of the Union and just general impressions of one hour [chuckles] and forty-five minutes of Trump going to town?

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:16 I thought it was great. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 53:18 Favorite moment? Favorite moment or two?

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:21 Well, I had a couple. One was the Ilhan Omar, R- R- Rashida Tlaib death stare [laughs] and them just, like, losing their minds and, and screaming. I just thought it was so un-American. The second was when he was calling for law and order where... And focusing and prioritizing on American citizens, and none of the Dem-

Jason Calacanis 53:47 Over illegal, uh, aliens

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:49 ... yeah, and none, and none of the Democrats stood up. I thought that was kind of foolish. It was, like, obvious things, and the Democrats wouldn't applaud, but this time they did, like they did for the hockey team, which I thought was, like, the right thing to do. And then the fourth thing is just a, a shout-out to our friend Brad Gerstner, who got a big shout-out from the president. I don't know, Sacks, if you engineered that or not, but that was-

David Sacks 54:06 No, I-

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:07 That was fantastic and it's like-

David Sacks 54:08 That was incredible.

Jason Calacanis 54:09 Yeah.

David Sacks 54:09 He got, like, a double shout-out. It was like a double tap. [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:12 Yeah. That was really cool.

Jason Calacanis 54:13 That was surreal on group chat.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:15 Our group chat, our group chat went crazy.

David Sacks 54:16 It lit up, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:16 It was really, it was really cool. Those are my four highlights.

Jason Calacanis 54:20 Great. Here's your, uh, here's your clip of, uh, yeah, Democrats not standing for Americans, uh, over illegal aliens. Twenty seconds.

Speaker 54:31 If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. [audience applauding]

Jason Calacanis 54:52 Why wouldn't you stand for that? That's an easy one to stand for. Doesn't make any sense.

David Sacks 54:57 Would you stand for it, Chago?

Jason Calacanis 55:00 Yeah, I mean, I, I'm, I'm pro- I'm, I can be anti-ICE, but I'm pro-American and I'm pro reasonable immigration, like 90% of the country is, so it just doesn't make any sense. Uh, if you have any highlights-

David Sacks 55:12 But do you think, but do you think American citizens should be prioritized over illegals?

Jason Calacanis 55:15 Well, of course. Of course, yes. Of course, yes. And then I, I, I also think there should be a path to citizenship for people who've been here for a while, and I think that's what the majority of the country thinks as well.

David Sacks 55:25 Well, but your, your point is, y- I can hold two thoughts in my head, so I would have stood if he asked me.

Jason Calacanis 55:30 Yes. Obviously, we should take care of American citizens first, yes, and we should deport violent criminals. We've been over this, like, a million times here. This is, like, consensus in the country.

David Sacks 55:39 Yeah, but what do you, but what do you, what do you think is going on in everybody else's head when they're like, "We gotta s- we cannot stand for this. This is out there"?

Jason Calacanis 55:44 These two sides... I mean, I think it's like the tariff thing, it's like the ICE thing. These two sides cannot work together. It's just the most polarized it's ever been. Trump is not, like, the kinda guy to reach across the aisle. The Democrats are now digging in. So we just have a dysfunctional government where, you know, in a more functional time period, like under Clinton, let's say, or Bush, people would've gotten together, and I'm, I'm jumping ahead to the tariff discussion, and they would've said, "Yeah, of course. Tariffs are done in Congress. That's the law, whatever. What are your thoughts, Mr. President? How can we support your tariff program?" But now it's like, oh, well, we don't work together. We don't actually have discussions anymore. There's no bipartisan, you know, collaboration. Uh, all these politicians are disgraceful, disgraziati across the board. They should be working together for the American people. If the president wants to do tariffs-

David Sacks 56:33 Well, how do you, how do you-

Jason Calacanis 56:33 ... they should be reasonable about it and give him the power to do reasonable tariffs, and he should be reasonable and say, "Hey, I understand that's your power. Let's get together and we'll, we'll chop it up and let's have dinner together." But they're just too polarized. It's just disgraceful where this country has gotten to. I blame both parties.

David Sacks 56:47 [laughs] Whenever the Democrats get smoked out as being radicals and extremists, you always wanna basically say a pox on both your houses and blame the Republicans and Democrats equally. The fact of the matter is the president said to the audience, to the members of Congress, "Hey, if you agree with this statement, stand up." And of course, every single Democrat sat there stone-faced and refused to applaud or acknowledge what he was saying. This was a very easy test for the Democrats to pass.

Jason Calacanis 57:20 Which is what I just said.

David Sacks 57:21 In fact, in fact, it was a-

Jason Calacanis 57:22 Literally what I said. [laughs]

David Sacks 57:22 In fact, it was a political risk for the president because it was so easy for the Democrats to demonstrate-

Jason Calacanis 57:28 They're dumb. Yeah

David Sacks 57:28 ... that they're operating in good faith and that they're willing to be bipartisan and they're not extremists and they're actually commonsensical and logical, and they completely failed the test.

Jason Calacanis 57:38 Yeah.

David Sacks 57:38 And by the way, it wasn't just on that one. I mean, let me just tell you some of the other ones-

Jason Calacanis 57:42 [laughs]

David Sacks 57:42 ... where they refused to applaud. So they refused to applaud the grieving families of innocent American women and children murdered by criminal illegal aliens, including the mother of Irina Zhuravskaya.

Jason Calacanis 57:56 That was very sad. That was sad.

David Sacks 57:58 That was unbelievable. They refused to applaud for securing our homeland and, uh, ending the invasion of criminal illegal aliens, killers, rapists, gang members, and traffickers. They refused to applaud for unifying against political violence. So the president mentioned the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They would not even do a polite clap-

Jason Calacanis 58:18 Hmm

David Sacks 58:18 ... for Erika Kirk in unifying against political violence. They refused to applaud for keeping violent criminals locked up. They even refused to applaud for lower prescription drug prices for millions of Americans because it was President Trump who orchestrated that policy, and there were so many other examples like that. And, you know, I think the reason why this speech was so effective, and by the way, it's not just me saying it, something like 2/3 of the people that CNN polled. So 2/3-

Jason Calacanis 58:46 Yeah

David Sacks 58:46 ... of CNN watchers said it was highly effective, and something like 3/4 of CBS News viewers said it was highly effective, is because the president laid out 80/20 issue one after another, right? Or even 90/10 issues or 95/5 issues. I mean, these were all issues where the overwhelming number of Americans, I think, agree with the policy the president laid out. And in every single case, the Democrats opposed it, wouldn't even give it a polite applause. And that is different than, than in the past. And you can say that's because of hyper-partisanship and polarization, but it's also because of another thing. It's because the Democrats have become a party of radicalism and extremism, and the viewpoints that they expressed through their aesthetics the other night, they do express those things in policy and in speeches all the time. So it's not just, like, a one-off or, you know, somehow, like, we have a misconception-

Jason Calacanis 59:43 It's pretty crazy

David Sacks 59:43 ... of who these guys are. I think, you know, the big line of the night was when Trump just sort of said, "These people are crazy." I mean, he said it in, like, almost mournful and regretful way. He doesn't want them to be crazy. He wants them to be rational so he can work with them.

Jason Calacanis 59:55 I mean, just a-

David Sacks 59:56 But I think that point resonates

Jason Calacanis 59:57 ... I'll, I'll, I'll still point the other side, which is th- this has been going on for a couple of, you know, State of the Unions here across this. The, the Republicans didn't stand for the Democrats often, and, uh, it's a bit of showmanship, but the truth is Trump is the divider in chief. He, chief, he always is attacking people. He's always mocking people, so they don't wanna play ball with him. So I, I do think you can both sides it.

David Sacks 1:00:17 He's counter-punching. You have no choice in politics. You gotta counter-punch.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:20 You know, you can, you can... Uh, no, I, I don't think so. That, that's actually the, that's actually the problem with the, the, that philosophy, Trump's philosophy of we have to counter-punch, we have to attack, we never have to apologize, we never have to be reasonable. That's part of what's broken down in our politics, and these two sides should work together. We should go back to a bipartisan-

David Sacks 1:00:37 Really? How are you gonna work with Ilhan Omar-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:39 Yes

David Sacks 1:00:39 ... when he has talked, when the president talks about-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:41 I, listen, I'm not saying it's gonna be easy, but she is the mirror-

David Sacks 1:00:42 Hold on. What, what-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:42 Hold on. I'll finish my statement. You asked a question. I think Trump is the mirror of that. He has been hostile towards these Democrat... He doesn't give them an inch. They should be more collaborative. Th- that's what-The balance of power between the executive branch, you know, a- and these, uh, you know, congressmen and, and, and the Congress and the, and the Senate, like, this is how it's supposed to work. And these two sides need to learn how to get back to listening to each other, understanding each other's positions, and then finding a middle ground. And that's why the Democrats lost last time, because they didn't have the common sense to say, "Hey, everybody wants the border closed." To your point, it's a 90% issue, and Kamala Harris was too dumb to just say, "Yeah, we should've closed the border. It's closed now, and, uh, we've got it." Anyway, the whole thing is a mess. Uh, y- I, I understand you gotta fight for your team-

David Sacks 1:01:28 Well, you just-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:29 ... but I don't like the counterpunching

David Sacks 1:01:29 No, you just-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:30 I like collaboration

David Sacks 1:01:30 ... you just actually made the key point. You made the key point, which is underlying the optics and the polarization, you have issues. And on those issues, President Trump is on the side of the American people, the issues where 80% of the American people agree. Some huge percentage, I don't know exactly what it is, thinks that the Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota was an outrage, and the president is right to point that out. And what's the Democrats' reaction? You've got Ilhan Omar screaming from the audience at him.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:59 Yeah, she's a loon. I mean, uh, at the end of the day-

David Sacks 1:02:02 But the Dem- the rest of the Democrats are not that different

Jason Calacanis 1:02:03 ... he did stand, he did have, he did have Elizabeth Warren stand for, uh, stopping Nancy Pelosi from trading stocks, and that gave Trump his best one-liner of the night. That was his best one-liner, clearly.

David Friedberg 1:02:15 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:02:15 And they stood for Iran too-

David Friedberg 1:02:17 That was good

Jason Calacanis 1:02:17 ... and, and stopping Iran from being a nuclear.

David Sacks 1:02:19 I give Elizabeth Warren credit for that.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:20 There you go. You don't have to punch her back.

David Friedberg 1:02:22 There, there it is.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:22 You don't have to punch her back.

Speaker 1:02:23 We gotta stop Insider Trading Act without delay. [clapping]

Jason Calacanis 1:02:27 Yeah. See? That's something bipartisan. Look at that, Sac. That's what you need to get the country back to.

David Sacks 1:02:32 Okay, but that-

David Friedberg 1:02:33 [laughs]

David Sacks 1:02:33 Hold on, but this, this disproves the point you were making before. You said that it was polarization-

Speaker 1:02:38 They stood up for that? I can't believe. [laughing]

Jason Calacanis 1:02:41 Can't believe it. [laughs]

Speaker 1:02:42 Did Nancy Pelosi stand up if she was here?

Jason Calacanis 1:02:44 Yeah. [laughs]

David Friedberg 1:02:45 Zing, zing pow. Good job.

Speaker 1:02:46 Nailed it.

David Sacks 1:02:47 That's why he's so good, is he's in the moment and he's reacting to what's happening in the chamber. He's not just-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:51 He's got good timing

David Sacks 1:02:52 ... he's not just reading from a teleprompter-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:53 Nailed it

David Sacks 1:02:53 ... and he nailed it. But look-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:55 Good timing

David Sacks 1:02:55 ... that moment disproves what you were saying, J Cal, because this is not just about polarization. On that issue, Elizabeth Warren was willing to stand because she actually, to her credit, wants to ban insider trading by members of Congress.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:07 Yes.

David Sacks 1:03:07 But on the rest of those issues, like securing the border, she did not stand. Why? Because she does not agree with the president on that issue.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:14 [sighs] We just have to get back to these sides working together. That's my personal feeling. Uh, Friedberg, any thoughts on the, uh, theatrics a- and, uh, Trump's first year writ large and, you know, the sort of back and forth? And is there any hope that these two teams could collaborate at some point on something like, say, the ballooning deficit, which Trump has not gotten under control in his first year, and it's gonna be $2.5 trillion added? What, what are your thoughts here on them collaborating on anything important, Friedberg?

David Friedberg 1:03:45 That's probably one thing they can agree on, is just keep the money flowing.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:48 Got it. They'll both give a, they'll both give a [laughs] a standing ovation for burn more capital and put us more in debt. Well said, my guy, David Friedberg.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:58 Sultan of science, it is your time to shine. The world's greatest moderator has decided we're going directly to Science Corner.

David Friedberg 1:04:06 [laughs] Sac, Sac's waiting.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:07 This is your time to shine-

David Friedberg 1:04:08 Sac's wa-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:08 ... and it's Sac's time to drop a deuce.

David Friedberg 1:04:10 Sac's waiting immediately [laughs] off camera.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:12 Yeah, he has to drop a deuce.

David Friedberg 1:04:13 He's still-

David Sacks 1:04:13 I'm here. What's up?

David Friedberg 1:04:14 He's still here. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:04:16 [laughs]

David Sacks 1:04:16 But what do you need me for?

Jason Calacanis 1:04:17 This is very important for you.

David Friedberg 1:04:19 Friedberg's gonna talk.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:20 Lightning round for Science Corner. Go, Friedberg.

David Sacks 1:04:22 Wait, wait, wait. Are we doing any more topics after this, or can I just leave?

David Friedberg 1:04:24 Yes, tariffs.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:25 Yes, we're doing tariffs.

David Sacks 1:04:26 Wait, why would we do that?

Jason Calacanis 1:04:27 Three-

David Friedberg 1:04:27 Because to keep you-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:27 Because I want to get paid for Science Corner

David Sacks 1:04:29 ... you're gonna put the audience to sleep.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:30 Two-

David Sacks 1:04:30 I'm not saying-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:31 One

David Sacks 1:04:31 ... Science Corner doesn't have its audience-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:33 Listen, you can go take-

David Sacks 1:04:34 ... but why wouldn't we do... Yeah, exactly.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:36 Go take a deuce-

David Friedberg 1:04:36 Look at you. You're, like, screaming, you're screaming-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:37 Let him do his work. Three, two-

David Friedberg 1:04:39 Let him, let him cook. Let him cook.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:40 Friedberg, tell us about this Harvard study.

David Friedberg 1:04:41 Speaking of science, I think that there's a very important moment happening right now. We've talked a number of times on this show about Yamanaka factors. These are these four proteins that were discovered by Shinya Yamanaka that we found later that when applied to cells, mammalian cells, can actually reverse the age of those cells, reset the epigenetic clock, reset the epigenome, which is the little markers on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off, back to a youthful state. Extraordinary, groundbreaking work that was done that won the Nobel Prize, led to the foundation of several companies. There's a Harvard, uh, scientist named David Sinclair. He's a bit of a controversial character. Do you guys know him? I think you guys, one of, one or two of you may have met him. Sa- Chamath, you ever met him?

Jason Calacanis 1:05:25 I, I, I-

David Friedberg 1:05:26 Yeah

Jason Calacanis 1:05:26 ... I've followed him. I've seen his stuff.

David Friedberg 1:05:28 So Sinclair is kind of bemoaned a little bit by the scientific and academic community for being a little too over-hikey, snake oil salesman, as some of folks have claimed, because years ago he sold a company to GSK saying resveratrol would reverse aging and, you know, he made $720 million on that. It didn't end up working, and he's promoted certain supplement companies and so on. So I wanna preface with that before I kind of underwrite what he's saying with this next thing. But he's a co-founder of a company called Life Biosciences, and they've reached a major agreement with the FDA to be the first company to treat humans with Yamanaka factors. Specifically what they're doing is they're going to be d- delivering these Yamanaka factors, these are these proteins that rejuvenate cells and make them youthful again, into the eye. And so their, their first indication is to actually inject them into the vitreal fluid in the eyeball, and they'll affect the retina in the eye to address people that have gotten blind from glaucoma or one of these kind of stroke-like diseases that happen in the eye. And the expectation with this phase one clinical trial is that the delivery of these Yamanaka factors into the eye will rejuvenate the retina, make it youthful again, and restore vision. If it works, which it's expected to, because we see this result happen in animal models, it could be an extraordinary breakthrough, not just in terms of blindness, but in terms of the first human application of Yamanaka factors to reverse aging.The way they're doing it is they're actually packaging up DNA that will make these proteins into viruses, a AAV virus that is delivered into the eye. The virus will then go into the retinal cells, and then will deliver this payload for this DNA to make these proteins in the eye, uh, cells. And it can be turned on and off. Amazingly, they've created a switch mechanism in it where the protein production, the production of these Yamanaka factors can be turned on and off by taking an antibiotic called doxycycline. So the person that gets the delivery of this drug takes the antibiotic, turns on the production of these Yamanaka factors, and then theoretically their eye cells will de-age, will get youthful, and their vision will be restored. So Phase One clinical trial's underway. First time in human history we're seeing Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans. Literally the tip of the iceberg. There are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by restoring the epigenome in cells and make them young again. So this is the beginning of a wave of what I think will be the most extraordinary revolution in human therapeutics and ultimately could lead to, you know, some people would argue the fountain of youth.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:21 Is this just a talk study? So is it mechanism-

David Friedberg 1:08:24 Phase One. They're not-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:25 One A?

David Friedberg 1:08:25 Yeah, they're, they're... Well, they'll see results. They'll see results, but they're gonna, they're gonna keep dosing low, but you will see results.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:31 God, that's gonna be incredible.

David Friedberg 1:08:33 It's gonna be incredible. By the way, the number of other folks that are gearing up for Phase One using, if not the Yamanaka factors, other factors that they've identified or designed as an alternative to Yamanaka factors, again, to rejuvenate the cells. And just to remind folks, the way this works is it was discovered that these proteins, when they go into a cell, they take all of those little markers that sit on top of your DNA that turn genes on and off, and they create a system that ca- causes them all to move to the right place. So it resets the markers so that those cells-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:04 Incredible

David Friedberg 1:09:04 ... will start to operate like they're supposed to when they were young again.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:07 That's gonna be wild.

David Friedberg 1:09:08 It's gonna be incredible. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:09 Fucking wild.

David Friedberg 1:09:09 Do you think, like, pe- you know, in all seriousness, people's knees or joints or... W- where do you think it could flow to next in terms of-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:16 Arthritis.

David Friedberg 1:09:17 Yep. Um, and, and by the way, when applied, and if it's distributed in the skin, they've seen some results in monkeys where, like, wrinkles go away. It, like, literally makes-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:25 Hmm

David Friedberg 1:09:25 ... these cells all work youthful again. And so a lot of the damage that happens over time is not damage to DNA. It's damage to the epigenome. It's the parts that sit on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off, and they get moved to the wrong place as you get older. And by resetting them and getting them back to the right place, boom, the cell is young again, the organ is young again, and suddenly you look and act and feel young again. It's an incredible technology. We're just at the early stages, the early innings of turning it into therapeutics. Again, the discovery goes back to 2006, and now we're starting to see it get into clinic. So-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:59 All right. Let's rejuvenate, let's rejuvenate some hairlines on this podcast. Uh, that would be next up.

David Friedberg 1:10:04 Speak for yourself.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:05 I don't know. You got, you got a little, uh, you got little peaks going there, my, my brother. Little peaks here and there.

David Friedberg 1:10:09 What are you talking about, bro? My hairline's incredible. I'm 50.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:12 I mean, it's not bad for 50. I give you credit. You're, you're holding your own. All right, let's talk about our final topic.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:17 SCOTUS struck down Trump's emergency powers tariffs last Friday. SCOTUS voted 6-3 against President Trump's EEPA tariffs. Six judges voted against, three conservatives, Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, uh, and three liberals. Via Bloomberg, this is the biggest rebuke of existing executive policy in 91 years, since SCOTUS struck down FDR's first New Deal in 1935. UPenn Wharton Analysis says the tariffs collected about $175 billion to date, 50% of all tariff duties, um, might wind up being refunded. This is gonna take some time to sort out in the courts. 2,000 importers have already filed for refunds. We, we talked about it here. I think the majority of people felt like this is the way the decision would go, and we talked about here that there were other options for President Trump to pursue. He immediately, uh, said he was not deterred and invoked a 15% global tariff across the board via Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. Here's your Polymarket. Will the court force Trump to refund tariffs? 18% chance, but spiked to 40% after the SCOTUS decision. How will Congress react? Polymarket says 3% chance Congress passes any tariffs by March 31st. So again, as I referenced earlier, these two sides just can't seem to work together, and that would've resolved the whole thing. Sacks, you want to, um, give us your take here?

David Sacks 1:11:52 First of all, I don't think that the tariffs are going away. What the court basically indicated, especially the 70-page Kavanaugh dissent, is that there's multiple alternative bases in law for the tariffs in existing law. So for example, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 enables temporary 150-day tariffs of up to 15% to, uh, address balance of payments issues, and the president has already invoked this. So we are now operating under that. What the 150 days is gonna do is buy the administration time to substantiate via studies and agency reviews what it needs to prove in order to invoke more sweeping tariff authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act and under Section 338 of the Tariff Act. Section 301 authorizes tariffs responding to unfair foreign trade practices. Section 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs against countries discriminating against US commerce. The Kavanaugh dissent actually provided a roadmap for the administration to put in placeTariffs using one of these alternate, uh, bases. So I think that one way or another, the tariff policies of this administration and the favorable trade deals that they allow us to strike with many nations, they will continue. And I think the court seems to know that because the majority's opinion as concurrence has collectively said nothing about how the administration should go about refunding the tariff revenue already collected. I think that if they expected this decision to end the tariff policies altogether, they probably would have said something about that. And I think that brings up a really important point just on the merits here, which is why would we want to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to a bunch of importers when we're trillions of dollars in debt? And I'll just say that the people who originally predicted that somehow these tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy, those predictions all proved not to be true. So I think that this is ultimately, I think, gonna be a popular policy. The administration will figure out a different way to do it, and I predict that future administrations, whether they're Republican or Democrat, will keep some version of the tariffs in place because I think that they will be ultimately popular on a long-standing basis.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:14 Chamath, your thoughts?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:15 I think we've proven the experiment has been successful. What was the experiment? We needed to smoke out what the right balance of trade should be between the United States and all of its partner countries. I think that what we uncovered is that for the most part, there were structural imbalances that were made not because they made economic sense for America, but it was just part of a hodgepodge of globalist drivel that people just bought into. And if you strip all that stuff away, we had a hollowed-out manufacturing class, and we have a hollowed-out middle class, and the tariffs will create more equality for the American worker in the end. So now I think the debate should be about how to implement these in a structural and permanent way. I think we talked about this before, Jason, that-

Jason Calacanis 1:15:05 Yeah

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:15:05 ... this was sort of expected, and there are many other mechanisms. I think the president activated one of them immediately. I don't think this is going away, and I don't think it should go away. So I think now the point is Congress really should ratify these things because it is clear that it was the right thing to do. And if they don't, then, you know, the president still has a lot of room to get these done. But these make smart economic sense in my opinion.

Jason Calacanis 1:15:32 Friedberg, any thoughts on the ruling? Does it give you some, I don't know, um, respect for the courts that they made a, a judgment not along party lines for once? Uh-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:15:45 Yes.

Jason Calacanis 1:15:45 Does it-- Yeah. Okay. Ex-expand on that. [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:15:46 Yeah, and I think, I think that all, I think all Americans should feel assured and comforted in the fact that I think a lot of people view the Supreme Court as having a high degree of partisanship. The fact that the president, despite having a majority of what others would think were kind of politically aligned appointees on the Court, had a ruling that he did not want, I think should give everyone good faith that the system that the founders set up is working, that there is a judicial branch that adjudicates the law against the executive branch when they think that, um, it doesn't map, and I think that that was very important to see. So, you know, I clearly-- You-- The, the debate about tariffs, the economic effect of tariffs, the security structural trade relationship effect of tariffs, and the importance of that is a separate conversation, but I do think that the read of the law being what I would say is non-partisan with respect to the court's action is important and probably very valuable.

Jason Calacanis 1:16:43 I'll reiterate that. This is a great moment, I think, for, uh, the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful decision, and I think we need to think about executive power a whole bunch, whether it's Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs. We have this beautiful system set up by the Founding Fathers. I know it's frustrating. Gridlock's frustrating. Having to work together is frustrating. Trust me, we, we all come to this podcast every [laughs] Thursday, and we have to work together. It's hard to work together. But you gotta learn to work together, and we don't want an executive branch that can unilaterally just roll over the other branches. And, uh, that's gonna end. I think Trump's gonna lose the midterms, and we're gonna get to more chaos again. And it-- we might as well start this reconciliation process of these two sides stopping their lawfare against each other and working together for the American people on the important issues. The tariffs, there are some fundamentally important things that Trump was doing there, and they were working. They could have been chaotic. Uh, that's a reasonable, um, you know, criticism of them because business owners didn't know what to do. So Trump did it in a chaotic way. That's just a fact. He should have done it in a more thoughtful way, and the Congress should have been alongside him saying, "Hey, what tools do you need? How can we help support this? We know that there's trade imbalances. We know that people are being unfair. Let's work together as one America to negotiate these things." So both sides start having dinner together, start playing cards together, and do what we do here on this podcast, which is you fight it out, you argue, but then you come together and try to find some resolutions for this stuff. So they should go and tell Trump, "Hey, we'll approve all the tariffs you did. We will not force you to get refunds." The Congress should come out and just say that. And then they should say, "Hey, and when you want to do them in twenty twenty-six, just run them by us or ask us for some parameters that you want, and let's just be thoughtful about it. These are our concerns." That's it. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

David Sacks 1:18:38 Can I just do one response on that?

Jason Calacanis 1:18:39 Absolutely. I'm sure you have some debate club points that you wanna point out. Go ahead.

David Sacks 1:18:42 Well, I just wanna make one. I mean, do you think Susan Rice is gonna respect your call for comity and basically working together, kumbaya? She just-

Jason Calacanis 1:18:53 I want the esprit de corps. No, I don't. I think both sides-

David Sacks 1:18:55 She just, she just-

Jason Calacanis 1:18:56 And this is what we need

David Sacks 1:18:57 ... had a diatribe where she basically said that Republicans, and actually not just, like, partisan Republicans, but even tech companies that merely were working with the administration should expect to get prosecutedI mean, she was basically outright saying she's she and the Democrats are going to pursue lawfare as soon as they get back in charge.

Jason Calacanis 1:19:16 They're absolutely going to do that. Just like when Trump got in, he went after Comey, he went after Jerome Powell. The lawfare is happening on both sides. Both sides need to drop the lawfare. We need to get rid of these pardons. They're ridiculous. And we have to be a team. So let's just get some esprit de corps and teamwork going in Washington, D.C. And that's what we should vote for in the midterms. We should vote for moderates who want to work together. And in 2028, we should have some kind of moderates and tickets that want to work together. That would be better for all Americans. This kind of chaos is not good, folks. All right. Listen, this has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast, your favorite podcast. Like, subscribe, whatever the hell you want to do on your own time. For David Sacks, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya. Love you, boys. I am the world's greatest moderator, JCal. See you next time. Bye-bye.

David Sacks 1:20:07 Bye-bye. Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:12 Rain Man David Sacks.

David Sacks 1:20:17 And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:21 Love you, besties. Ice Queen of Kin Wong.

David Sacks 1:20:24 Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:29 Besties are back.

David Sacks 1:20:31 Gold 13.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:32 That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway, Sacks. Wait, no, no, it's good. Oh, man. I came to my haberdashery weekly. I put We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. We need to get merch. Besties are back. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.