Why Cursor chose xAI's compute over Anthropic and OpenAI

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:00 Jason, you are the-

Jason Calacanis 0:01 Yes, ma'am

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:01 ... unique person that is at the intersection of both the [censored] and the SPLC files.

Jason Calacanis 0:06 [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:06 Do you have a comment?

Jason Calacanis 0:08 No comment. [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:08 Do you have a comment, Jason?

Jason Calacanis 0:09 No, I'm not in the SPLC files.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:11 Yes, you are. Yes, you are. You're adjacent.

Jason Calacanis 0:13 I'm adjacent on the vice files.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:13 You're SPLC-adjacent, and you're [censored] . What does that mean? In the Venn diagram-

Jason Calacanis 0:17 I thank you, though, [laughs] for putting me in the crosshairs of all the lunatics.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:20 He's got, got a really good way to select. I mean, it's great.

Jason Calacanis 0:23 There's a reason why I'm carrying this, guys. Oh, my gosh. It's because [censored] people- What the [censored] is going on? [laughs] There's a reason why I carry a stiletto and a P-35. What the [censored] are you doing? [laughs] There's a reason. If you wanna jump the [censored] feds, feel free. [laughs] JCal is ready. [laughs]

David Sacks 0:47 What's going on?

0:47 Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 0:50 Rain Man David Sacks.

David Sacks 0:53 What's going on?

Jason Calacanis 0:54 And I said-

David Sacks 0:55 We open-sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it

Jason Calacanis 0:58 ... W. Westgate, Queen of Kinwah.

David Sacks 1:00 What's going on?

Jason Calacanis 1:02 All right, everybody. Welcome back to the greatest podcast in the universe, episode 270 of The All-In Podcast, your podcaster's favorite podcast, with me again, your sultan of science, David Friedberg, the Dick Tater, Chamath Palihapitiya.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:19 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:19 And yeah, the Rain Man is back. Yeah, it's definitely David, David Sacks. Um, he's definitely in DC with, uh, with POTUS. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:27 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:27 POTUS lets him drive in the driveway. Uh, Sacks, what's going on? You, you pushed back, you, uh, big-shotted the entire crew and pushed the show back an hour.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:36 [laughs] Simple text. He's like, "With POTUS. Start it-

Jason Calacanis 1:39 It's un- [censored] -believable

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:41 ... start later." [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:42 Okay. We'll just wait.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:43 Okay. Okay, Daddy. Look at him. All right. All right, big shot, what's going on?

David Sacks 1:47 No, look, I was in DC today-

Jason Calacanis 1:51 Mm

David Sacks 1:51 ... and I was at the White House, and I just asked if the president had time, and he made time, and we, we did have a little meeting, and so we did push back the pod for that. One thing I just wanna say is just what a pleasure he is to deal with. You know, when I read in the media, they're always describing him in a certain way that, you know, he's yelling at people, or he's moody or, or something like that, and that's never, ever been my experience with him. He's always pleasant to be with. He's always genial.

Jason Calacanis 2:19 Super charming.

David Sacks 2:19 He asks questions. He's interested in the subject matter. It's just a completely different portrayal. I don't get where the media's coming from at all on this.

Jason Calacanis 2:27 He's charming AF.

David Sacks 2:28 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 2:29 Let's just call it what it is.

David Sacks 2:30 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 2:30 He's charming.

David Sacks 2:30 I mean, maybe if you double-crossed him, maybe. I don't know. But I've just never seen any evidence of, of how they describe him at all. And I think on our issues of AI, I think we're really lucky that he's the president who's in the White House when this AI revolution is happening.

Jason Calacanis 2:45 I mean, do an alt history, Sacks. What would happen if Kamala Dingdong was in right now, and we'd have, like, no data centers?

David Sacks 2:51 We'd have no data centers, and they'd be using AI to censor us, and they'd be promoting DEI values through AI. That was in the Biden executive order. President Trump just wants the country to win and be successful, and he doesn't have these, like, doomer neuroses about it. That's not to say we don't support any regulation at all, but we should have specific solutions for specific problems as opposed to being cowering in fear over this and just trying to halt all progress. And I think a really good example of that was his idea around data centers, where he said over a year ago, before data centers even became a hot-

Jason Calacanis 3:26 Hmm

David Sacks 3:26 ... political topic, that we should let our AI companies stand up their own power generation behind the meter, and that's a much better approach than the Bernie Sanders approach of just shutting everything down. So I don't know. I think we're, like, very fortunate that he's the president during this critical time in developing this technology, and like I said, he's always been interested in it. He talks to a lot of business leaders. I'm always actually very impressed with what he already knows. He listens to, like, all the top guys in the industry, and he synthesizes what he hears. I think he's very good at that.

Jason Calacanis 3:54 He was talking about the Anthropic guys, and he was like, "These are brilliant guys," and he was, like, giving the flowers to them and how genius they were and that they were working on a deal. Any insights there about the relationship between the White House and Anthropic?

David Sacks 4:08 I thought what he said was very balanced and accurate. Like you said, he said that they were very smart guys. They do have a great product. I've certainly acknowledged that. He also said that they were very left wing, but that was something we could work through.

Jason Calacanis 4:21 Hmm.

David Sacks 4:21 Didn't have to be a deal killer.

Jason Calacanis 4:23 Yeah.

David Sacks 4:23 He said they tried to tell the Pentagon what to do, which the Pentagon didn't like. But in any event, I mean, look, he wants American companies to be successful, and he, he, I think, genuinely really does like high-IQ people. I mean, he says it all the time, and people think he's joking, but I actually think it's, like, one of his core convictions is-

Jason Calacanis 4:40 Yes

David Sacks 4:40 ... he just really likes smart people. He likes being around smart people.

Jason Calacanis 4:44 Loyal people, smart people, people who are good on camera seem to be the three circles, and hey, Sacks, you fall into two of the three.

David Sacks 4:51 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 4:51 Uh, all right. [laughs] Let the audience figure that out. Uh, topic

Jason Calacanis 4:55 one, SpaceX has signed a huge deal with Cursor. You know Cursor. That's the AI coding startup. Really, the, the... They define the category. xAI and Cursor are building and collaborating on a new AI coding model that would, quote, "be the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." Here's the deal as it's been explained. SpaceX will either buy Cursor by the end of 2026 for $60 billion. That's $10 billion more than they were rumored to be raising at. Or they will pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration together. Bloomberg says you can think of that $10 billion essentially as a breakup fee, so I think it's fait accompli that this deal is gonna get done. Cursor's run rate, two billion at the end of February. This is a money-printing machine. They expect to end 2026 with a $6 billion run rate. They're gonna triple it. SpaceX projected revenue between 22 and 24 billion in 2026, so this is quite accretive to the revenue story at SpaceX, at the IPO of SpaceX, which is now targeting a valuation of two trillion.Which would be trading at roughly eighty times top-line revenue, which is a, you know, people would say is a high valuation, but also could measure it with the opportunity. Cursor's valuation would be thirty x, so this is a good deal, I think, for everybody at the end of the day. Cursor started, I think, built off of, uh, Anthropic's LLM. You could use any LLM previously on it. But in March, Cursor released the second version of their proprietary model, Composer Two. And, uh, here it is. It's, it's ranked pretty high right now. It's between, uh, GPT-4, five point four and Opus four point six, as you can see on the screen. The key part of the story here is that Elon has five hundred fifty thousand GPUs in Colossus. He's scaling up to one million, and then of course, he's gonna bring it to space. So if you believe that infrastructure matters, and it's pretty clear it does, this is incredible for Cursor, who has been compute-constrained. So this is peanut butter and chocolate if you put these two together. I predict that this is going to move SpaceX's xAI and Cursor to the front of the coding leaderboard within twelve months. That's my prediction. Chamath, shareholder in SpaceX via the acquisition of the Starlink company that you were a backer of. What are your thoughts?

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:22 The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S-1 doesn't go stale. So I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't wanna slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S-1, have to redo the disclosures, um, have to redo the risks. And so I think what you're going to see is that this will get done. In fact, the deal is effectively done.

Jason Calacanis 7:49 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:49 But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say two trillion. So when the deal gets done on a stock-for-stock basis, it's going to be-- If, again, if it's sixty billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a fifty percent discount. And what has he bought? He can issue sixty billion dollars of stock at a two trillion dollar valuation and get a model and a service that I think is extremely compelling in coding, which is where we know all of the immediate and short-term revenue gains are. It's also patterns that are hard-fought and are really valuable in reinforcement learning. He gets all of that, and then he gets a very crack team, which, you know, we've known for a while that the Cursor team is absolutely excellent. If you look at the Grok usage, it shows why he had this excess capacity. There was a moment where Grok had a very steep and very aggressive discount on their output tokens, and in that moment, there was just a lot of experimentation and usage, and over time, that sort of went away. So there was a lot of capacity and a relatively low utilization, I think, inside of Colossus, that he was able to turn around, jujitsu move the whole thing [chuckles] , and basically acquire the most interesting and valuable third-party wrapper service in AI right now. So, uh, and the fact is that they got it effectively, I think, at this price for thirty billion. So I think it was a really good deal. Really smart deal.

Jason Calacanis 9:21 Okay. Sacks, your thoughts, if you wanna unpack it a bit. Uh, under the framing, I think it'd be interesting for you. If we were sitting here three years ago, the, uh, Biden administration didn't invite Elon to the EV summit, and the SEC and other organizations, uh, Delaware, they were explicitly involved in lawfare. They were trying to put Elon in prison, and here we are, the most important company in the history of, uh, the United States, SpaceX's xAI and Tesla now on the verge of just creating the greatest products in the history of humanity between SpaceX clusters in space and Optimus. Your thoughts.

David Sacks 10:01 Well, you're right. I do remember a press conference where Biden said, "We gotta look at the sky." And so on the heels of that, the DOJ brought a, a lawsuit attacking the company for not hiring enough-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:11 No, SpaceX

David Sacks 10:12 ... asylees. Remember that?

Jason Calacanis 10:13 Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

David Sacks 10:14 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 10:14 SpaceX, which they can't under ITAR. [laughs]

David Sacks 10:16 They couldn't, exactly, under ITAR. Anyway, that's all ancient history.

Jason Calacanis 10:20 [laughs]

David Sacks 10:21 So let's, let's put that behind us. Look, I, I agree with your guys' analysis on this. I think these two companies are, are very complementary. Cursor obviously is very strong in coding. That's what it brings to xAI. xAI brings compute, and they bring a foundation model. And the problem that Cursor had is that even though coding is kinda like the white hot area of AI right now, when it got started, it was really competing against generalists in the form of OpenAI and Anthropic, but now those generalists have decided to vertically integrate in this area of coding, right?

Jason Calacanis 10:56 Hmm.

David Sacks 10:57 And so Cursor's now competing against Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. And so they were dependent on foundation model companies that were getting in the business of competing with them, which was just not a good place to be, right? So now they have this new alliance with a different foundation model company, which also brings the compute. Just makes a lot of sense, and then they bring-- Cursor brings to xAI the training data, a lot of enterprise clients, and the experience in coding, and I think this will accelerate xAI in this area.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:27 Sacks, you think they're gonna dump Kimi K two point six? 'Cause I think Cursor Composer Two uses the Moonshot model. There's no reasonable way that Elon's gonna pay sixty billion dollars and not run on top of Grok. I gotta think.

David Sacks 11:41 It seems like it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:42 Yeah.

David Sacks 11:42 Likely, but I don't know.

David Friedberg 11:44 I think it might be tough depending on the, the users. One of the things that makes Cursor so good is they've got-

Jason Calacanis 11:48 No, wait, wait. Say, say more on that. What do you mean?

David Friedberg 11:50 So I think that the d-different developers wanna have choice in that sense. There's a toggle. So one of the things that's really good about Cursor is they've got this very well built out IDE, this application layer that puts them probably from a UX perspective, meaning developers are using the toolAbove Codex, above Claude, above anything else. You can use a third-party IDE and integrate the models or integrate whatever other third-party service you're using. But I would imagine that the developers are gonna wanna continue to have at least some choice on what's actually writing the code for them. The thing that people are waking up to in the last 120 days is just how much of the value of AI is being realized by writing software, and we've kind of got this wrapper term, we call it agents, but agents are fundamentally just quickly spun up applications. But for all of them, as we're realizing very quickly, you end up making too many agents, they end up being super inefficient, they need to be engineered, and you still need to have a strong software engineering capability and competency to fix all the agents, to build all the harnesses, to make everything work well together, and that's why having a strong developer environment, a strong IDE, actually solves that biggest problem. So eventually all the enterprises that are getting hot and heavy on agents are gonna be like, "Whoa. Wait a second. We've actually gotta fix how this is all being done," as we saw this week in that story with Amazon, where there's like a million agents being spun up inside and everything's wasting resources, redundant data creation, redundant data stores, redundant API calls, et cetera, tons of money being wasted. So you have to centralize still, you have to have good software engineering talent that's making good infrastructure and good use of these agents, and that ultimately will require an integration of the AI tooling with a standard software engineering front end, which is the IDE that Cursor has. So I think that- that's probably w- where everyone's waking up to the fact that having the, uh, the software engineers may end up winning you the arms race here and seems pretty smart for Elon to buy Cursor.

David Sacks 13:53 Well, another piece of it, you mentioned Kimi, uh, K 2.6.

David Friedberg 13:56 2.6, yeah.

David Sacks 13:56 Yeah. I mean, so I think that one of the things that's gonna become a priority over the next several months is this idea of optimizing because enterprises' token bills are going through the roof right now. I mean, just month over month they're spending increasingly large amounts because their employees are just building more and more software, but I'm not sure that anyone's been incentivized yet to be efficient about it. And it really only makes sense to go to a frontier model for a frontier task, but more mundane things could be done using an open source model or a less-

David Friedberg 14:27 Totally

David Sacks 14:27 ... expensive model. And I think, like you're saying, whether it's the IDE or something else, there needs to be some sort of middleware that determines which model you go to and how much you're willing to spend and what the most efficient way of getting the tokens is gonna be.

Jason Calacanis 14:41 I am deep in playing with, uh, xAI's suite of products, and I would predict we're gonna be sitting here in six to 12 months and they are gonna be dramatically, dramatically improved.

David Sacks 14:53 Let me just flag one other area that I think is maybe the white hot center within this red hot area of coding, which is cyber. And I think Mythos has kind of woken everybody up to the potential of frontier models to be a weapon that can be used by either cyber offense or cyber defense. Now, the issue with Mythos is that it's very large and expensive. It's something like a 10 trillion parameter model, and there's a lot of reports that Anthropic just doesn't have enough compute to be able to serve it. I'm not sure it was ever built to be a commercial model, to be honest, because I just think it's so big and expensive. But I think what'll happen is these companies will start training dedicated cyber models.

David Friedberg 15:36 Mm.

David Sacks 15:36 Let's say Mythos comparable models, but with a lower token cost, and I think there's a real race on right now to get those products to market because I think IT departments and CISOs are very worried about the risk of hacks right now, AI-powered hackers. So this is something I think over the next three to six months will be, again, this may be the hottest part of the market.

Jason Calacanis 16:00 Polymarket says all this is fait accompli. SpaceX acquiring Cursor, 74% chance. SpaceX IPO by the end of August, 80% chance. So this is happening, folks. All right. Let's keep moving.

David Sacks 16:14 By the way, I think that deal structure is smart because, I mean, to Chamath's point, yeah, it prevents the IPO process from being disrupted. Also, it kind of gives a huge motivation to these Cursor guys to bust their ass and make it work over the next, I don't know, six months. Yeah, they have a $10 billion breakup fee, but I'm sure they want the deal to be successful.

David Friedberg 16:31 Well, the $10 billion breakup fee will go back to SpaceX anyways, because if they actually run the compute and they're not owned by SpaceX, they're gonna have to pay for it. That is not cheap.

David Sacks 16:40 I mean, we saw a bunch of these xAI co-founders leave after the acquisition by SpaceX. I don't know if that was the reason why, but, you know, all of a sudden they're sitting on SpaceX stock and they may have felt like they had it made, you know?

David Friedberg 16:53 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 16:53 Well, it's actually-

David Sacks 16:54 Which is always a problem. It's always a problem with, with M&A.

David Friedberg 16:57 This Cursor thing came about pretty quickly because-

Jason Calacanis 17:01 Okay.

David Friedberg 17:01 Let's just say friends of ours who were supposed to wire into that round [laughs] were like, "Where's the wiring instructions?" It all just evaporated.

Jason Calacanis 17:09 Here's a tweet from Elon. We don't have to, um, speculate too much here. sacks, he was very clear that s- uh, xAI wasn't, uh, built right the first time around. The quote, "xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla." And, uh, that tweet is from about five weeks ago.

David Friedberg 17:31 How crazy is it that when he tweets, he gets 50.8 million views? It takes the four of us [laughs] seven months to get 50.8 million. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 17:39 I mean, that's probably our collective, uh-

David Friedberg 17:41 [laughs] It's unbelievable the distribution he has

David Sacks 17:44 Well, also how many CEOs-

David Friedberg 17:45 Oh, my God

David Sacks 17:46 ... would just fess up like that and say, "Yeah, that... We didn't do it right the first time. Now we're rebuilding it."

David Friedberg 17:49 It's, it's really incredible.

David Sacks 17:49 I mean, most people are not willing to say that.

Jason Calacanis 17:52 He's a magnet for talent. He's a magnet for the right kind of talent, and the SpaceX talent has his philosophy. He inherited, I think, uh, a lot of, you know, maybe, uh, people for xAI or for Twitter that were not in his mold, and they're clearly getting aligned, and it's also gonna make his day-to-day life much easier when all of these things are occurring in the same building with the same team. The continuity of not having to task switch between companies is gonna be great. We talked a little bit about the possibility of Tesla and SpaceX merging.

David Friedberg 18:23 Even Walter Isaacson now is on the Tesla-SpaceX merger train.

Chamath Palihapitiya 18:27 Hmm. There you go.

Jason Calacanis 18:28 He just did a pod. Everybody's confirmed it. It's gonna happen. We called it here first. Okay, topic

Jason Calacanis 18:33 two, is there a SaaS debt bomb in private equity? Thoma Bravo, we had Orlando Bravo at the fourth All-In Summit, uh, last year, is nearing a deal to hand its portfolio company, Medallia, over to its creditors. This is a SaaS for customer experience company. TB acquired them in twenty twenty-one for six point four billion, all cash, at the top of the market. As part of the deal, they incurred three billion in debt. And for background, in twenty twenty-one, this company had four hundred and seventy million in revenue, growing twenty percent a year. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that TB's debt servicing costs for Medallia were about to triple from a hundred million a year to three hundred million a year. Blackstone and other firms refused to extend, uh, a lifeline to the company, to the SaaS company. So it looks like Thoma Bravo just handed the keys back and wiped out five point one billion in equity. Chamath, your thoughts? We've been talking about the SaaS headwinds for a bit. You've been quite vocal about it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 19:38 Well, first of all, I think Thoma Bravo is an unbelievably well-run organization. Their returns are bonkers, and Orlando's a really, really, really good investor. So what do I think happened? I suspect that they probably got enough of their equity, if not all of their equity. There's probably a decent chance that they did at least one or two dividend recaps in the last five years. And if I had to guess, I suspect that they are positive return. It may not be the return that they would want, and so turning the keys over becomes easier. 'Cause you have to remember, in private equity, the entire playbook is for transformations of assets that are at some point not working. Right? It's very rarely that they're buying the same kinds of businesses that the four of us would buy, which is just sort of this, you know, clean white sheet, de novo, grow at all costs kind of business. So they have operating partners and all of these other people waiting in the wings to un- [censored] situations. That's the whole playbook.

Jason Calacanis 20:43 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 20:44 So to turn it over, I suspect means that there is a core rot that people couldn't fix, combined with the fact that they have probably gotten enough downside protection that it's not a huge thing for them. Now, this is an issue for the bond holders, and then that'll maybe flow through to the borrowing costs that Thoma Bravo has to pay maybe for a subsequent deal. I don't know, but I doubt that they would just walk away from a business. So I suspect they probably got most of their money out.

David Friedberg 21:12 I don't know if that's true. There was someone that published some internal data showing that the sales team was, like, eighteen percent of target at Medallia. Do you guys know what this company does, Medallia?

Jason Calacanis 21:24 Customer support, uh, is the general arena and customer experience.

Chamath Palihapitiya 21:28 No, customer, customer experience management.

David Friedberg 21:29 Yeah, it's like surveys.

Chamath Palihapitiya 21:30 I don't know what, I, I don't know what that means.

David Friedberg 21:32 Yeah, they'll basically send... Like, you go on Caribbean cruise ships, and you get a survey afterwards, and then they use that survey data to provide management insights and operational insights to the leadership team and the operating team on how to improve the quality of their product or their service. So it's sort of like this feedback surveying loop. So if I were to tell you guys, "Hey, you wanna build a feedback surveying loop to run your business better," are you gonna buy SaaS today, or are you gonna ask your AI to spin up an agent for you to do that? And I think that's a big part of what's happened, is all these sorts of companies where the alternative to buying a SaaS product is to spin something up internally, and it's much cheaper and easier to spin it up internally. You get a custom workflow.

Jason Calacanis 22:10 No, no, I agree with that.

David Friedberg 22:11 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 22:11 I'm just saying-

David Friedberg 22:12 And so I think-

Jason Calacanis 22:12 ... in the last five years, you think they sat on their hands and didn't take a dollar out? They're not that dumb.

David Friedberg 22:17 Maybe they took cash out, maybe they didn't, but there was still a big debt overhang, and the debt's clearly, um, gotten impaired, which means that the equity-

Jason Calacanis 22:24 No, the, yeah, the, the debt holders-

David Friedberg 22:25 Yeah, the equity-

Jason Calacanis 22:25 The debt holders, the debt holders are clearly screwed here. [laughs]

David Friedberg 22:27 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 22:27 The question is, is Thoma Bravo screwed? And I would say if you sat around for five years, they're, that's not their style. They generate too much money.

Chamath Palihapitiya 22:34 Hmm.

Jason Calacanis 22:34 They're too good.

David Friedberg 22:35 So they may have taken cash out and covered some of their, their costs, but the equity got fully impaired, and then the debt is clearly impaired 'cause you can see how the debt and the, uh, CLOs are trading, which indicates that this business is just not doing well. And then someone else on Twitter posted some internal information from Medallia saying the sales team is just not hitting their targets. They're, like, way, way off their sales targets, which I think speaks to the underlying problem here.

Jason Calacanis 22:59 Yes.

David Friedberg 23:00 Which is that all of these-

Jason Calacanis 23:01 No, unpack that. Yeah, please.

David Friedberg 23:02 Yeah, so the underlying problem is that these businesses in the SaaS space, where you're driven by net new sales every year, how many new customers are you signing up, and then you're trying to manage retention, and you're trying to increase sell-through and retain customers, they're just having a really hard time sourcing new customers, and there's probably higher than modeled attrition.

Jason Calacanis 23:19 That's right.

David Friedberg 23:20 And when you have a very kind of typically historically predictable business where you can say, "Hey, I've got a net revenue retention of a hundred and eighteen percent," or what have you, meaning I'm, I'm selling into my install base by eighteen percent over what I'm making last year, and then I'm signing up new customers, you can lever that business, right? You can borrow money against those cash flows because it becomes predictable. And what's happened in the last year in particular is agents have become so good and so fast and so cheap that many enterprises can simply spin up an alternative to a vertical SaaS solution, and that's crushing the sales team's ability to sell in. That's who you're competing against. Now, I wanna make one point and just link this with something else that happened this week, and that's Kevin Warsh's hearing for Fed Reserve chair. Kevin Warsh went and talked a lot about the deflationary effect of AI. And I actually think we all talk about the SaaSpocalypse as if it's this sort of, like, isolated business phenomenon where these SaaS companies are getting blown up. I think another lens to look at what's going on is the incredible deflation of how much it costs to successfully run a business, and you don't have to pay a premium price for SaaS products anymore.Meaning that that piece of the business-

Jason Calacanis 24:30 That's right

David Friedberg 24:31 ... can suddenly get much cheaper.

Jason Calacanis 24:32 That's right.

David Friedberg 24:32 That AI is delivering on its deflationary promise. I'll just say one thing about what Warch said. Warch spoke a lot about the deflationary evolution promised by AI, and that he expects that it will drive productivity growth like we've never seen before. But he said, "I don't know what that's gonna do to the job market," that there may be a dislocation between that productivity growth being realized and how the labor markets are gonna be able to respond to those things. But fundamentally, he's saying that we're going to see economic deflation. The problem with economic deflation is that when it occurs, it means some business is seeing their revenue go down. And if that segment of the economy is levered, if they have debt sitting on top of that piece of the economy where it's supposed to always, always, always grow, like a SaaS company's top line is always supposed to grow, suddenly that debt gets impaired, and that can have an economic ripple effect that is adverse. But what he's pointing out is that as a result of deflation, because it's not coming from some cost cutting or economic contraction. What he's saying is that the deflationary forces ultimately lead to economic expansion because other parts of the economy will now grow. So if I can suddenly cut, you know, call it 50% of my SaaS budget, and I can reinvest that capital in other ways of growing my business instead of managing my expenses, all of a sudden my enterprise will grow and the economy will grow. He also said, just as an aside, and I wanna make sure I cover this so, so that we're really clear, he said, "The way that we've been measuring inflation is wrong," and that he doesn't agree with the way the Fed has been measuring inflation. Because you can do a survey of any household, and they'll tell you, "My God, everything's so expensive." So all of the indices and bullshit that are being used to calculate an inflation index is completely misrepresenting what the average American is actually feeling. And so he wants to rethink how the Fed is addressing inflation from an interest rate perspective, but he does think that the overall kind of economic picture is one of deflationary pressure and productivity gains coming out of AI.

Jason Calacanis 26:28 Sacks, I'll, I'll drop this off to you. I think it's pretty clear what's happening here, is that the loss, SaaS's loss is the token dealer's gain, right? And startups are now, you know, and we always see the, the, they're the tip of the spear. They're writing their own tools. They're making their own dashboards. I see that every day. And if you look at the SaaS Product Index, here it is. Salesforce down 32%, uh, in the past six m- months. Shout out to bestie Benioff, best guest we've had, huh, Sacks, uh, at the summit. ServiceNow down 54%, Snowflake down 43%, Adobe down 33%, Figma, which had a huge IPO pop, and is now down 67%. So what is the role of venture capital and then private equity in addressing the software market? Software was eating the world. Now tokens are eating s- uh, the SaaS business and the software business, yeah?

David Sacks 27:21 Well, I'm of two minds about this. I'm gonna talk about the opportunity for private equity. Let me just say backing up, that historically we only had two good exits for software businesses. One was IPO, the other was M&A. And then these big private equity shops came along and gave us a third potential exit, which is you would sell to them, and then they would raise the capital based on, I don't know, one-third equity and two-thirds debt. So it was debt finance buyouts, which is something that's been around in let's call it the non-tech part of the economy for a long time, but was a relatively new entrant into the world of technology. And the reason for that is that if you're gonna debt finance a purchase, you need to have very stable cash flows, because if you miss, if your cash flows miss and you can't pay your interest on the debt, then you're gonna lose all your equity because the debt holders will foreclose. So in order to do a debt financing of any kind, you have to have very predictable cash flows. And it was believed for a long time that software did have those predictable cash flows, at least for the mature businesses, the ones that were at the stage where they could IPO as a potential alternative. So it was a very attractive thing. I, like I said, I think it was great to have that third option. I, I'm of two minds about where the private equity business is today. On the one hand, the pricing now has gotta be super attractive for them. I mean, we're seeing public SaaS companies that-

Jason Calacanis 28:43 They're free

David Sacks 28:44 ... are doing a billion-

Jason Calacanis 28:45 They're free

David Sacks 28:45 ... of ARR-

Jason Calacanis 28:46 They're free

David Sacks 28:46 ... with 20% growth rates-

Jason Calacanis 28:48 [laughs]

David Sacks 28:48 ... 80% gross margins, and they're trading at three times ARR.

Jason Calacanis 28:52 Yeah.

David Sacks 28:53 You know? And so-

Jason Calacanis 28:53 You can buy a dollar for 50 cents.

David Sacks 28:55 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 28:56 So is, is that an opportunity, Sacks, you think? Uh-

David Sacks 28:58 Well, that's what I'm thinking, is-

Jason Calacanis 28:59 Do you think we're hit rock bottom, we should do a roll-up?

David Sacks 29:02 Well, on the one hand, I do think that the pricing has never been more attractive if you're a private equity shop looking at a business like that. I mean, those companies used to be valued at 13 times ARR. Now it's three. Uh, I'm talking about, like, a category leader. Now, the downside of that, like just-

David Friedberg 29:16 By the way, Salesforce is off 9% today. I don't know if you guys saw this, but the market's absolutely tanking today after the, uh, Medallia, uh, announcement came out.

David Sacks 29:25 Right. Okay. So, so that would be like... You know, I said I'm of two minds about it. So I would be bullish for private equity just based on pricing, but the bearish part is that in order for their business model to work, you have to have predictable cash flows. You can't have a SaaS company go from, I don't know, 120% net dollar retention one quarter to 80% net dollar retention six months or a year later because a big part of their customer base has attrited to using tokens, right, or to basically creating some bespoke software.

Jason Calacanis 29:54 You just said the absolute critical thing in all of this, which is you have to have predictable cash flows. I think what happens is when you're a startup, you typically have to figure out how to disruptively price to enter the market. So you're like, "Okay, if I deliver $10 of value, I'm gonna charge a dollar." And that's, that's the normal playbook, like a 10% ratio, right, of price to value. The problem is when you start to stack venture capital into it, and you, then you stack growth equity into it, what you're effectively creating in, in the preference stack of your company is that you are creating a higher return hurdle

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:31 Right? You've got to clear 300 million, 500 million, a billion of pref, and then you have to return 15 or 20% on top of that. So what do people do as they raise more money? They increase price. But the problem is, at some point when you increase price, you engender a ton of competition, and you put a huge target on your back. Private equity is the last stop because when y- they come in and they layer in billions and billions of dollars of not just equity, but also debt, and that has to then be completely predictable and paid back, their only lever is to raise price. They can never cut price to take share. They don't... They can't underwrite that to pay back their debt holders. And so, Sacks, part of the big problem here and why nobody wants to touch these companies is that they are overpriced. Yes, they're making a billion dollars of ARR, but the unit cost has gotten out of control. It used to be 10% of value. It's probably now 30% of value, and everybody's looking at their contracts thinking, "Well, when it comes time to a renewal, I'm gonna just cut this in half, or I'm gonna cut this by two-thirds, or I'm gonna cut this by 75%" because the value isn't there anymore.

David Sacks 31:42 Or they can threaten to and negotiate a better deal.

Chamath Palihapitiya 31:45 And it becomes even worse because the minute you make these products headless, right, and you say, "I'm just gonna communicate with these products via MCP and with agents," you can't charge on a per seat basis. What do you do then? Friedberg doesn't need 50 seats of, you know, Workday. He needs two seats because the agents act as the way to write in and out of Workday. So he wants to pay for two seats, not 50. And then if you multiply that by a million companies, that's what gets us to this place where it just feels like a falling knife, and I think it comes down to these unit costs. The unit costs and the price to value of these products are out of whack with what the market needs and wants. And until they reset that or you find new products that can do it cheaper, we're not gonna get a cleansing and a clearing here.

David Sacks 32:31 Yeah, I think it's-

David Friedberg 32:31 By the way, Sa- Salesforce today is down 9%, 140 billion enterprise value on 15 billion of free cash flow. This thing is trading at less than 10 times free cash flow. It's unbelievable.

David Sacks 32:44 I think it might be a bargain, to be honest.

Chamath Palihapitiya 32:46 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 32:46 It sounds like bargain hunting, and what if Benioff, who's the king of acquisitions, what if he just starts cleaning up-

David Friedberg 32:53 Well, we didn't, we didn't put-

Jason Calacanis 32:53 ... and buying some things?

David Sacks 32:53 Well, he's been buying his own stock.

David Friedberg 32:55 Yeah, and we, we... Yeah, and we didn't put this on the docket, but did you guys see his kind of headless product announcement?

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:00 Yeah.

David Friedberg 33:00 Did you see this? It's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:01 Yeah

David Friedberg 33:01 ... it's actually very decent.

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:02 It's very smart.

David Friedberg 33:03 Yeah. I mean, there's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:04 I think it's very smart

David Friedberg 33:05 ... there's ways that that business can maneuver, right? And I think they're pretty unique. It may be that of all the businesses in the scape, like that... You know, the ones that have that scale, that have that multi-product platform, that have a lot of your data, there's a lot of opportunity for them to, you know, maneuver their way into an evolution of the business.

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:24 Benioff's the first one and... 'cause, like, if you look at it and you compare it, for example, to other companies, I think the Workday response was to say, "You can't have an AI interact with us without paying some kind of, like, toll."

David Friedberg 33:34 You're exactly right. That's the... You're exactly right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:35 Whereas Benioff is the exact opposite, which is he's like-

David Friedberg 33:37 Totally

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:37 ... "Okay, we're gonna go headless for the whole thing," which is brilliant.

David Friedberg 33:40 You're exactly right. You're exactly right. I think that's, that's gonna be the distinction of the winners here and the losers, and are you on the wrong side of this?

Chamath Palihapitiya 33:46 The problem is that we have to figure out what is the bottom clearing price, and that has nothing to do with business quality. And so is Salesforce a good buy at 10 times free cash flow? Historical artifacts would tell us a screaming yes. The problem is that if you cut everybody's cash flows off at year five or six or seven, then all of a sudden I think you see the natural compression to between three and five times free cash flow. And that has nothing to-

David Friedberg 34:15 [laughs] Dude, that's, that's crazy

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:16 ... that has nothing to do with business quality. That just says you, you literally mathematically take year seven through N of the future, and you discount it to zero.

Jason Calacanis 34:25 And having free cash flow in a war chest gives massive optionality. We've seen this with Salesforce. We've seen it with Apple. We've seen it with Meta, with Google, with Uber. Just having massive free cash flow. When you've got tens of billions of dollars, you can put it to work, and you can weather these storms.

David Friedberg 34:42 By the way, JCal, I think another-

David Sacks 34:42 Well, assuming you're not in debt

David Friedberg 34:43 ... another, another way to think about this is-

Jason Calacanis 34:45 Yeah

David Friedberg 34:45 ... you know, to the question about maneuverability and who has the gumption to make the hard choices right now-

Jason Calacanis 34:51 Yeah

David Friedberg 34:52 ... look at Benioff. He's the founder of the company. He's run this thing since its-

Jason Calacanis 34:56 Yes

David Friedberg 34:56 ... founding decades ago. He is willing to bet it all. He's willing to make the change, and it may be that the index you buy in this era of AI transformation is the index of founders, that the founders who are still running their businesses are gonna be the ones who are most likely to see the future.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:11 They can burn the boats.

David Friedberg 35:12 They'll burn the boats.

David Sacks 35:12 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:12 They'll burn the boats.

David Friedberg 35:13 They'll maneuver. They'll make the changes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:14 They'll call code red. They can call code red.

David Friedberg 35:15 And all of the, all of the guys who have hired managers to run the business are gonna do the things that Chamath's talking about, which is try and charge fees and try and maintain the old way of doing things as opposed to reinvent for the new future.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:25 If you look at the 10-Ks, if we could figure out what the unit price cost and the trend and the inflation is of a s- per seat license for these products, I will point to the ones that are gonna die first.

David Sacks 35:37 Can I make two quick points? So-

David Friedberg 35:38 Yeah, wrap us up.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:39 Yeah.

David Sacks 35:39 One is, yes, I would, like, fully endorse what, what you said about Benioff. He's made every previous wave work to his benefit, whether it was social, whether it was mobile, whether it was big data, all that kind of stuff. What are the odds he's gonna make AI work to his benefit? I'd say pretty good. So his stock might be a bargain right now. So that'd just be point number one. Just on... I wanna say just a quick thing about venture debt, which is I, I... Look, I think it's fine when private equity guys use it 'cause they know what they're doing. But I've always hated when founders take on-

Chamath Palihapitiya 36:09 Ugh, the worst

David Sacks 36:09 ... venture debt, and I know, JCal, you agree with me. Part of it is that founders forget that they have to pay it back. They treat it like venture capital, and they forget about that, and then they get surprised. But the other thing I've never liked about it is it makes you more fragile. It basically subjects you to a bunch of business covenants, and it makes it harder for you to do an abrupt shift in your business because now you've got a bank looking over your shoulder, and they wanna make sure they get paid, and they have to review your financials and all the rest of it. And to your point, JCal, the companies that have free cash flow right nowAre the ones that have the most maneuverability. I hate taking away maneuverability from founders, and that is what debt does because it subjects you to a fixed schedule of payments. And so this is always the thing to remember, whether you're a business or you're an individual, you know, when you put on that debt, it makes you more vulnerable to big disruptions in the market.

Jason Calacanis 37:03 Yeah, it just... Y- you become incredibly brittle, and founders who are listening, when you get that... In, in peak markets, peak zero, you're gonna have venture debt people offer you tons of cash, and then the problem Dave and I saw up close and personal in many different companies, where the founders would look at it as like, "Well, I'm extending my runway." Well, if you're a hot startup, there's always more venture capital, there's always more people who wanna own equity. The equity sale gives you optionality, and you have more people on your team, more people rooting for you, and aligned with equity interest, as opposed to now you have a debt instrument. They have a different goal. They have different downside they're trying... Yeah.

David Sacks 37:40 No bank wants to be your last three to six months of runway.

Jason Calacanis 37:43 [laughs]

David Sacks 37:44 Because th- that means that in a high percentage of cases they're gonna lose their money.

Jason Calacanis 37:48 Yeah.

David Sacks 37:48 So they're-

David Friedberg 37:49 I, I've never seen-

David Sacks 37:49 ... they're built to try to avoid that

David Friedberg 37:51 ... I've never seen venture debt work well to improve the quality of a business.

Jason Calacanis 37:55 No one's.

David Sacks 37:56 Never. Never. It doesn't work.

David Friedberg 37:57 I have only, only, only ever seen venture debt lead to craps-

Jason Calacanis 38:00 100%

David Friedberg 38:00 ... that damage companies, and if you get the venture debt, you can never actually use it.

Jason Calacanis 38:05 100%.

David Friedberg 38:05 So the venture debt investors that ultimately make money, it's because they put money in a company and the company never actually used the money they gave them. I hate this business. I think venture debt's, like, the worst vulture-like business in Silicon Valley.

David Sacks 38:17 Right.

David Friedberg 38:17 It's terrible.

David Sacks 38:18 And if, if you get down, if, if the last money in the bank is the debt you owe to the bank, they're gonna rug you. That's when you get rugged.

David Friedberg 38:25 100%.

David Sacks 38:26 You think they can afford to lose 100% of their money when they're getting an 8% return or something like that?

David Friedberg 38:33 That's right. That's right.

David Sacks 38:33 No way. That's not how it works. VCs can afford that because we have the opportunity for a 10X or 100X or 1000X for that moonshot, so we can accept a bunch of zeros. The bank can't accept a bunch of zeros.

Jason Calacanis 38:45 Well, and then when they, when they do get scared, and when they do think they're gonna lose their money, wait 'til you see what they extract in terms of value.

David Sacks 38:53 Ugh.

Jason Calacanis 38:53 What they ask for. They will ask... They'll double the interest rate. They'll ask for warrants. It's b- basically like being in debt in prison. Chamath, you can talk a little bit about your experience when you were, uh-

David Friedberg 39:04 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 39:05 ... in debt in prison.

David Friedberg 39:06 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 39:06 It's not gonna be pleasant.

David Friedberg 39:08 [laughs]

David Sacks 39:08 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 39:08 And I had a moment where it was reflexively kind of collapsing inward because the assets that I was using to secure it shrank in value in a moment of market disruption. I was scrambling, and then at the same time there was a risk. It was the worst moment of my professional working life. I had, like, a couple hundred million dollars sitting at Credit Suisse, and they were about to implode. And so on a weekend I was trying to figure out whether my money was still there.

David Sacks 39:39 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 39:40 I had always had this rule, don't have debt, and then I violated it to try to run the number up. I almost got run over. I almost lost everything. I will never do it again, and if I ever do it again, if you guys ever th- hear me do it again, please just come and punch me in the face. Uh, we will. We've been waiting for an excuse.

David Friedberg 39:58 Can we-

Jason Calacanis 39:58 Yeah

David Friedberg 39:58 ... punch you in the face for other things too?

Jason Calacanis 40:00 Yeah, please.

David Sacks 40:00 Buffett has this line about-

Jason Calacanis 40:01 Yeah

David Sacks 40:02 ... how-

Jason Calacanis 40:02 Absolutely

David Sacks 40:02 ... this is how smart guys go bankrupt, is they take on debt.

Jason Calacanis 40:06 Debt equals prison, bitch. Keep it in your mind, guys. You will be a bitch.

David Friedberg 40:10 Unl- unless you socialize the debt, and then everyone thinks it's okay, which is what we do with governments, and that's-

Jason Calacanis 40:14 [laughs] Okay. Take it easy

David Friedberg 40:14 ... the problem with governments. Don't get us started.

Jason Calacanis 40:16 He's gonna start going off.

David Friedberg 40:17 Yeah. Yeah.

David Sacks 40:18 Ooh.

Jason Calacanis 40:18 Don't push the button.

David Friedberg 40:19 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 40:19 All right. Listen, we gotta talk about Tim C-

David Friedberg 40:21 By the way, another... Just, just, uh, just a quick aside on that. In the 1950s, all the corporations in America had pension plans where you would get some guaranteed payout at the end when you retire, and they were all like, "We're all gonna go bankrupt," because a pension plan is either significantly overfunded or underfunded. If it's underfunded, you're bankrupt. If it's overfunded, you've wasted all this money, you can't do anything with it. So they all moved to 401Ks and everything got moved to defined contribution plans, except, except governments.

Jason Calacanis 40:46 Yes.

David Friedberg 40:46 And that's because the government employees formed-

Jason Calacanis 40:48 Bum, bum, bum

David Friedberg 40:48 ... government public employee unions, and they're like, "We wanna keep the pension plans." And now the pension plans, it turns out 70 years later, are gonna bankrupt all the governments in the United States. That story about, uh-

Jason Calacanis 40:58 That guy Spencer, by the way, that guy Spencer Pratt, who's running for mayor, he started uncovering all of the salaries of the union folks and their pensions in Southern California. It's bonkers. They're making $400,000 $500,000 a year right before they go on pension, then they double their overtime and they get two thirds or half. The pension doesn't work. You gotta go superannuation fund. I don't know how many times we've talked about it here, but-

David Sacks 41:22 Well, speaking of-

David Friedberg 41:22 You don't, you don't need a superannuation fund, you just need a 401K.

Jason Calacanis 41:25 Sure.

David Friedberg 41:25 Let people have a, have an account, and they got their money in their account.

Jason Calacanis 41:27 Yeah, but it's just a way to force people to contribute to it, so a forced 401K is different than a 401K. You gotta force people, and it's, you're not allowed-

David Sacks 41:35 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it

Jason Calacanis 41:35 ... to force people into the 401K-

David Sacks 41:36 Listen

Jason Calacanis 41:37 ... as you know. Yeah.

David Sacks 41:37 A- as we've seen in California, everything related to the government is a giant grift, it's a giant scam. There's tons of fraud going on. Uh, we've talked about the homeless industrial complex, 12 billion a year to homelessness, but the number of homeless keeps going up. There's a million examples like that.

David Friedberg 41:52 The racism industrial complex.

David Sacks 41:54 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 41:55 We'll get, we'll get to that in a second.

David Sacks 41:55 Maybe it's a good time to... Let's shift to SPLC, 'cause I think that's a good example.

Jason Calacanis 41:58 We'll, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. Um, yeah, but you know what's even better is you can just pass a law like the Nick Shirley Act, and you can put your fingers in your ear, cover your eyes, and say, "La, la, la, la, la," and just pretend the fraud's not happening, which is their reaction in California. Uh, hey-

David Sacks 42:10 How much fraud has Nick Shirley uncovered so far in California?

David Friedberg 42:13 Billions. Billions.

Jason Calacanis 42:14 I mean-

David Friedberg 42:14 He should be a billionaire

Jason Calacanis 42:15 ... it's gotta be billions. Where's his-

David Friedberg 42:17 Yeah, he should be a billionaire

Jason Calacanis 42:18 ... you know, he should be doing it privately and then getting the whistleblower awards. I think that actually would be a better strategy for him. Do it privately.

David Sacks 42:25 We told him that was the, we told him that business model, remember?

Jason Calacanis 42:28 Yeah. No, he t-

David Friedberg 42:28 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 42:28 ... I think he's addicted to the views.

David Sacks 42:30 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 42:30 But, I mean, he could literally raise money on-

David Friedberg 42:32 Well, he's making-

Jason Calacanis 42:33 ... that concept

David Friedberg 42:34 ... he's making thousands when he could be making billions, to Greenberg's point.

Jason Calacanis 42:37 No, whatever. This guy-

David Sacks 42:38 Well, but it's better, it's better for the public that he's-

Jason Calacanis 42:41 Thank God

David Sacks 42:41 ... doing what he's doing.

Jason Calacanis 42:41 Thank God for Nick Shirley.

David Sacks 42:43 So thank you, Nick Shirley.

Jason Calacanis 42:44 Let's just leave it at that.

David Friedberg 42:44 Yeah, true.

David Sacks 42:44 Whether you could be making more money or not, what you're doing is-

Jason Calacanis 42:46 Well-

David Sacks 42:46 ... God's work

Jason Calacanis 42:46 ... and you know what he also did? He shamed the mainstream media, who's forgotten about investigative journalism, who f- forgot the ability to knock on a door and just ask a basic questionAnd now Bari Weiss with CBS has deputized one of her reporters, and she's doing the exact same playbook and meeting him punch for punch. Where's CNN? Anderson Cooper should have a Nick Shirley on his team. The New York Times should have a Nick Shirley. The LA Times should have a Nick Shirley. Why don't they? That should be a number one hire.

David Friedberg 43:17 Because you're talking about, you're talking, you're talking about old media that does things one way, and the point about Nick Shirley is it's new media. It's citizen journalism. It's people on the street distributing fact-finding, distributing information gathering, and old media, in order to survive, became an opinion organization.

David Sacks 43:30 But didn't, didn't the media-

David Friedberg 43:31 Yeah

David Sacks 43:31 ... used to care that the Pentagon was paying $900 for a hammer or what have you?

Jason Calacanis 43:35 Yes.

David Sacks 43:36 I mean, like 60 Minutes used to do things. Now it's like the media just wants to protect the waste, fraud, and abuse no matter how egregious it is. Remember, I mean-

David Friedberg 43:46 Do you remember that guy Dennis Kozlowski, the CEO of Tyco who went to jail, and they, like, had a, just a field day because-

Jason Calacanis 43:53 His umbrella stand?

David Friedberg 43:53 He... Umbrella stand, the, the-

Jason Calacanis 43:54 Yes, the umbrella stand

David Friedberg 43:54 ... like the $6,000 umbrella stand [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 43:57 Made out of, like, ivory from, like-

David Friedberg 43:59 Yeah

Jason Calacanis 43:59 ... a bison

David Friedberg 44:00 I buy no elephants.

Jason Calacanis 44:01 Sacks, you're so-

David Friedberg 44:01 I know you bought that at auction-

Jason Calacanis 44:02 You're so right

David Friedberg 44:02 ... didn't you, Chamath? [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 44:03 No, Sacks, you're so right. People really used to care except when it was their team, and then the minute that it was their team, they're like, "Oh, no, no, let's just look the other way."

David Friedberg 44:11 It, it was a standard-

David Sacks 44:11 No, you're right. If it's a CEO, if a CEO basically engages in some misbehavior, and I'm not defending it, the press will be all over that.

David Friedberg 44:18 All over it.

David Sacks 44:18 But when the government does it, they don't do anything.

Jason Calacanis 44:20 Free pass. Free pass.

David Sacks 44:21 And in fact, we had one of the most successful, probably the most successful entrepreneur of our generation donating his time to the government to find waste-

Jason Calacanis 44:31 Yeah

David Sacks 44:31 ... and the media basically drove him out of that.

Jason Calacanis 44:34 Drove him out. They vilified him and drove him out. Yeah, they made it untenable. Well, this is w- whoever comes up with a way to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse like DOGE did, and they productize that and make them, make that their platform, that's the way to win in 2028 and going forward is to convince the public that they don't need to have their taxes raised. They could have their taxes reduced just by eliminating the minimum of 20 or 30% of waste, fraud, and abuse there is in the system. Uh, we'll get to Tim Cook stepping down in just a moment, but I wanna remind everybody, Liquidity sold out. I'm sorry. We added a couple of tickets. We, we, we burned through them immediately, but you can still get into the All-In Summit. This is our fifth edition-

David Friedberg 45:14 Ooh

Jason Calacanis 45:15 ... in Los Angeles, September 13, 14-

David Friedberg 45:16 I have a Liquidity announcement

Jason Calacanis 45:18 ... and 15. allin.com/events to apply. Please apply and then don't come to us 60 days out and say, "I didn't get a ticket. I'm a bestie. Get me in." Just buy your damn ticket and don't get left out. Oh?

David Friedberg 45:29 I have a Liquidity announcement.

Jason Calacanis 45:31 Oh, yum, yum.

David Friedberg 45:32 We are going to do one political panel.

Jason Calacanis 45:35 Okay.

David Friedberg 45:36 And it's going to be Dave McCormick and John Fetterman, the two sitting senators from Pennsylvania-

Jason Calacanis 45:44 Oof

David Friedberg 45:44 ... on stage with us talking about all topics from a left and right perspective.

Jason Calacanis 45:50 Amazing. So Fetterman's coming, which means the dress code is now sandals, uh, shorts, and a T-shirt.

David Friedberg 45:56 Con- construction sheet.

Jason Calacanis 45:57 That's great. Yeah.

David Friedberg 45:57 Construction sheet.

Jason Calacanis 45:58 Construction sheet. Get your Timberlands out.

David Friedberg 46:00 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 46:00 Get your, get your Timberlands out, boys. I mean, is he really gonna show up looking like a hobo?

David Friedberg 46:05 Um-

Jason Calacanis 46:05 I love his hobo style. It's great

David Friedberg 46:06 ... McCormick's very fit and handsome, so, like he, he'll, he'll balance him out, so it'll be good.

Jason Calacanis 46:10 We should, that's what we should program it as, like he should wear his best Brioni suit versus-

David Friedberg 46:16 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 46:16 ... the Old Navy for Fetterman. [laughs]

David Friedberg 46:18 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 46:18 Who wore it better? All right,

Jason Calacanis 46:20 listen, just rapid-fire here on the Tim Cook, uh, resignation and moving on. This guy, John Ternus, is a 25-year vet. He did lots of hardware, worked on iPad, AirPods, and he was the favorite on Polymarket since day one. He's a bold decision-maker according to reports, and unlike Tim Cook, Cook, Tim Cook did a great job of squeezing every last nickel out of Steve Jobs' product line, which lasted for a decade, iPhone, Apple TV, Watch. I don't need to repeat them. But here we are. We got a product person in the seat, which is what we all know they needed because hey, these tools are getting a little bit stale. Siri, disgraziad. AirPods, disgraziad. The whole, uh, system is not built on innovation anymore. It's built, Friedberg, I think you would agree, on just wringing more profits, more profits. W- what's your hope here? Because man, they missed so many great swings at bat. They didn't get the Oculus, you know, Ray-Bans that Meta did. They canceled their self-driving car. What would you hope that this new CEO of Apple focuses on, Friedberg, in terms of innovation? They don't have a problem selling phones still. They don't have a problem selling laptops and making a ton of money, but if you were in the seat, if you were on the board of Apple, which wouldn't be a bad idea for them if I'm being honest, what would you tell the new CEO to focus on, David Friedberg?

David Friedberg 47:44 I mean, I don't know. The software layer of the future is not the software layer of the past, so.

Jason Calacanis 47:49 Okay.

David Friedberg 47:50 It, it's pretty obvious. I don't know how much there is to talk about, but you just need the Siri equivalent that's ubiquitous in all of your devices, knows who you are, personalized to you, sees your email, sees your calendar entries, knows what kind of music you like, has connection to your home. Basically build that AI layer for your life and make it ubiquitous in all of your Apple devices that no matter what device you're using, it knows who you are. You can engage with it using kind of a natural language method, and it's, you know, it's, it's pretty obvious.

Jason Calacanis 48:19 Yeah. They should buy Whisperflow. Yeah, I mean, that would be-

David Friedberg 48:22 I, I don't know how they're, I don't know how they're running the business, but...

Jason Calacanis 48:24 Well, they're running it for profits, obviously, Sacks. Uh, I would say buy Whisperflow and just replace the Siri team with that because Siri's been just... The fact that Siri can't spell Polihapitiya or Calacanis after 20 years of us giving them $20,000 for iPhones is just disgraceful. Sacks, if you were on the board of Apple, again, not a bad idea, what would be your hope for the company? What would be your sage advice for the new CEO?

David Sacks 48:50 Well, I mean, everybody is gonna be asking the same question, which is what are you gonna do about AI? I don't know that they needed to be on the bleeding edge of it, but they are gonna need an answer at some point, and Siri's gonna need to be AI-empowered.Probably the way it should work is that you get to choose your model. I mean, I don't know that they need to pick just one model provider. It could be a setting where you go in and you set up your account with whatever, ChatGPT or Grok or Claude or what have you, and you can choose your own model provider, and then you'll have more customization and more ability to control your, your storage. Let me just say, just on Tim Cook's retirement, he had an incredible run as CEO of, of Apple. I mean, he ran it very effectively for 15 years. The market cap of the company went up by over 10X. The revenue grew from roughly 100 billion a year to over 400 billion a year. He also improved the quality of revenue by moving the mix into services-

Jason Calacanis 49:47 Yeah, that's been a big win, yeah

David Sacks 49:47 ... which is partly why it got, why it got a higher valuation. And, you know, people say that, "Well, they never did any innovation under Tim Cook," but, you know, I've seen people tweet lists of products that were released under him, and there were a lot of them. Now, it's true, nothing as big as the iPhone, but they did release a lot of products under Tim Cook. And then just finally, I mean, you, you look back over the last 15 years and there really weren't any public snafus or scandals or imbroglios with, with Apple. It's one of the few tech brands that is still, I think, beloved by the population. I think a, a major part of that was Tim Cook's dedication to privacy and keeping the company on the right side of that, which I think users do appreciate. And, you know, he even, Tim Cook even got praise from the president. I think it was just unsolicited, where the president talked about how Tim Cook didn't call him up that often, but when he did, it was something important, and therefore, the president tried to help them out. Seems like he nurtured a good relationship with the president over, over the last decade or so. So you just have to say that he navigated what could've been a turbulent period with a great deal of grace and aplomb.

Jason Calacanis 50:58 Clearly, uh, Chamath, he was a great steward of the brand, even though that list of products were all developed under Steve Jobs and they were just executed well, but he didn't bring in a lot of new products or services. Any final take there, Chamath?

David Sacks 51:15 But actually, Jake, uh, can, let me ask you a question.

Jason Calacanis 51:16 Yeah, please.

David Sacks 51:17 What do you think, other than AI, you know, AI-powered Siri, let's say, what do you think he missed?

Jason Calacanis 51:24 Yeah, clearly he-

David Sacks 51:24 I mean, like, what should Apple have done that they didn't do?

Jason Calacanis 51:28 They would have out by now, uh, a pair of glasses that weren't 17 pounds like the Apple Vision Pro. They would have gotten glasses that pair perfectly with your phone, take videos for kids, and they're coming out with it. It's just on a really broken timeline. They would've had a killer Siri. They would've had a search engine-ish Perplexity-like product. They would've had a self-driving car. When you went to the Apple Store, you would've been buying two or three very important products. Glasses, a car, and probably a television set. If you look at actually what they did innovative under Tim Cook, I think they've, they have great taste and Apple TV produced a lot of great programming. I-- He was working on a television set, not Apple TV clunked onto the back. I think those three products would have been... Four products. Siri, glasses, car, television set. Those would've been extraordinary, and who knows what he would've come up with. When they lost Jony Ive, uh, and obviously Steve Jobs passed away, they lost the soul of the company. They lost the innovative, groundbreaking soul of the company, and they just went into profit and iteration mode. But no acquisitions of note. Nothing important was acquired, and nothing important was released. Vision Pro, you can give them, like, maybe that's, like, the sixth best product or something, but it obviously hasn't hit the mainstream. Chamath, any final thoughts from you?

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:50 Yeah, I have, um, three specific things to say. The first is that he had honestly, like, an impossible job. It's sort of like you play basketball with Michael Jordan, and then you're asked to be Michael Jordan, and I think that that's an impossible task. And on that dimension, I think he has done just an incredible job. He has been an incredible steward of the business. Sax is right. No major snafus. I think he did a really smart thing around doubling down on privacy, and just as a practical matter of being a great CEO. Like, if you... I think you can categorize CEOs in two buckets. One is the innovator, the person that's pushing the envelope, and then the second is just a great steward. He's at the top of the top of that second category. Um, I sent you a couple of charts to, to show this, and he found a lane that allowed him to separate himself from Steve Jobs. So, you know, as an example, like, what does it mean to be a steward? Well, when you're a steward, you're allocating resources, and the two most important resources you control is capital and people. And I think on that dimension, what Tim did, if you just look at this, is he was able to invest appropriately in R&D. They completely divested their need of Intel. They spun their entire new line of silicon. That silicon, it turns out, and this will be important in the future, is very useful in AI with all of this open claw stuff, and, you know, some of you guys are completely addicted to it. And they've kept the acquisitions light, so he was very capital efficient. If you look at the, the next chart, what's so interesting is, like, it is the exact opposite of what Steve Jobs did. Look at the amount of money that Steve Jobs returned to shareholders [laughs] in his tenure at Apple.

David Sacks 54:44 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:44 It's easy to count. It was zero. He loved to, to keep that money on the balance sheet, and he probably or maybe, I'm guessing, would've directed that at some huge shot on goal. In the Tim Cook era, it was very different. He shrank the share count by almost 50%. I think it's, like, 44%. So he-

Jason Calacanis 55:01 That's insane. Is there any-

Chamath Palihapitiya 55:02 He was, he was-

Jason Calacanis 55:03 ... corollary to that, Chamath?

Chamath Palihapitiya 55:04 No. He's, he's been a prolificShareholder-friendly CEO, finding ways to give us money back, which I think everyone who's owned the stock has very deeply appreciated. The last thing I'll say, though, is what is the future for John Ternus, and I think it's in this final chart. We talked about the problematic nature of increasing per-unit pricing in SaaS. And what I would say is if you look at the iPhone, the unit price has gone up, and people would say yes, but the capabilities have gone up in turn, and I acknowledge that. But the problem with the per-unit pricing being as high as it is, is what Friedberg says is going to happen. AI rips open the canvas of the devices that we will use to interact with information and knowledge. We are going to live in a much more heterogeneous world in the future. It's not going to be two devices and two different operating systems that get you to knowledge. There's gonna be all kinds of stuff, pens, orbs, who knows, Jason, your glasses, whatever. And so the problem is if you get too addicted to a single thing that has an incredibly juicy profit margin and great stickiness and the ability to raise price, it's a hard drug to get off of. So I think really what John Ternus has to do is figure out how to move to this world where everybody will be launching umpteen devices via MCP or otherwise. All of these services will be open. It'll be agentically talking to everything. I think the moats decay, and I think if that happens, that's problematic if you're too reliant on a single thing to kinda keep it going.

Jason Calacanis 56:51 Yeah, and just expanding on what you said, like wearables is where they really, uh, made some good inroads in terms of getting people to use them, whether it's AirPods or the watch, and the next wearable, like this is a Plog pen that I use to record. You can put it here, put it on your wrist. That AI synchronicity of having your eyes, having your ears, having your watch, having your phone, your desktop all sync together with AI could be a huge product line. I'll also add a fifth, robotics. You know, the-- I think T- I, I think Steve Jobs, if he were alive today, would've been looking at Roomba, he would've been looking at Optimus, and he would've said, "Hmm, consumer robotics in addition to a consumer car?" Those are two things I think he would've absolutely, uh, executed on at a high level. Okay, let's keep moving here. Uh-

David Sacks 57:40 Just can I make one last point on-

Jason Calacanis 57:41 And we'd love to have you on the pod, John, so just come on the pod when you're ready. Uh, we'll have you come sit in. Go ahead, Sacks. You get the final word.

David Sacks 57:47 Just one last point on this is that I think the succession at Apple is reminiscent a little bit of the succession at Disney, and apparently Steve Jobs and Tim Cook had this conversation back when Steve was alive and, and Steve told Tim, "Don't do what Disney did," where basically after Walt Disney died, the company kinda languished because it felt so beholden to Walt's vision that they never really iterated. Now, when Walt died, his brother Roy took over, and Roy was already in the business. He was sorta like the business co-founder. He was a COO type, little bit like Tim Cook, and he kept the magic going for about five years, and then he himself died. I think it was around 1971, and then you had this string of CEOs who took over, kind of uninspired, and it wasn't until Eisner came in in 1984 that he sort of revitalized the business. And so as I understand it, Steve and Tim had this conversation, and Steve told him, "Don't be too beholden to my vision. You need to figure out your own and extend it." I think that, you know, you could argue that Tim, in a way, was like the Roy figure here, very effective business partner of Steve. He got a 15-year run. Roy only got five, and I think, again, he added a zero to the value of the company.

Jason Calacanis 59:06 Crazy.

David Sacks 59:06 The market cap went up-

Jason Calacanis 59:08 It's crazy

David Sacks 59:08 ... over 10X. So you'd have to say fantastically successful run as CEO. I think the question now for John Ternus is, okay, you're now past, let's say, the, the Walt Disney and Roy Disney part of the business. Is it gonna be like the 1970s Disney, or is it gonna be more like the 1980s? Do you figure out a way to revitalize it, or do you have to go through y- kind of a funk first?

Jason Calacanis 59:31 Hmm. Yeah, and if-- I, I think it's, like, really illustrative of this discussion, Eisner and Iger 'cause Eisner's innovation was he realized that Disney was, uh, I think he called it the vault strategy. He would, and we probably remember this from our childhoods, he would re-release all-- into theaters all of their IP every seven years. You couldn't get some of those Bambis, whatever, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You couldn't get those products except in theaters, and he figured out a cadence to keep publishing. But then Iger came in and said, "Hey, what if we use this balance sheet, and we use this distribution at the parks," uh, a- and, you know, with their brand to buy Pixar, Marvel, uh, and Star Wars. And so there's multiple ways to do it. There might be something there in terms of acquisitions. Bold acquisitions with the Apple balance sheet could be super accretive to shareholders as opposed to lowering the share count and just distributing a ton of cash. All right, listen.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:32 We're gonna talk about the Southern Poverty Law Center-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:36 Racism Corner. Let's go to race-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:37 [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:37 Fake, Fake Racism Corner. I wanna know how the SPLC managed to accumulate eight hundred and twenty-two million dollars in offshore bank accounts.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:46 Yeah. This is incredible. These are big numbers. Okay, SPLC-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:50 How is that possible? What is going on?

Jason Calacanis 1:00:52 All right, let me tee it up here for the team.

David Sacks 1:00:54 This is like one of the biggest grifts of all time. Anyway, Jake, I'll let you-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:56 I mean, this is a big one. SPLC has been indicted, indicted, not found guilty yet, on 11 counts of wire fraud and money laundering. Keep that in the back of your head, wire fraud and money laundering. Here's the core allegation. Between 2014 and 2023, the Southern Poverty Law CenterUse hidden bank accounts to funnel 3 million in donor money to paid informants. Like, these are confidential informants, like the police or FBI might use. They use these as a non-profit NGO to infiltrate hate groups. And so the official mission of the SPLC is, quote, "To be a catalyst for racial justice in the South and beyond, working in partnership with communities to dismantle white supremacy, strengthen intersectional movements, and advance the human rights of all people." Okay, sounds great on paper. Examples of organizations they were trying to infiltrate: KKK, Aryan Nation, neo-Nazi groups, and the Unite the Right organizers. Proud Boys, labeled as a hate group by the SPLC. Oath Keepers, not listed as a hate group, but part of the militia movement. My friend Sam Harris, he [laughs] was not listed as a hate group, but he was also pinned by the SPLC as, like, uh, hate adjacent in their Hatewatch headlines. And this is something that I had a major problem with this organization on, which is they would just very loosely label people as hate speech and try to get them canceled. All of this kind of, uh, came to a head. The revenue before Charlottesville, you remember the incorrectly clipped, uh, Charlottesville hoax where they said Trump said both... good people on both sides, but they didn't give his full quote. Very unfair to President Trump, uh, we found out later, and that was the reason Biden of course ran. He said the Charlottesville both sides thing was his inspiration. 58 million in 2026, to your point, Chamath. Doubled and spiked to 136 million, more than double, and it's remained elevated ever since. Here are some s- you know, uh, images. For the indictment, and I'll wrap on this and then get everybody's, uh, feedback, they had F37 as one of their confidential informants. He was a member, and this is according to the indictment, quote, "Member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F37 more than $270,000." That's the legal case here. Let me pause there.

David Sacks 1:03:36 Can I add one thing?

Jason Calacanis 1:03:37 Sure, keep adding.

David Sacks 1:03:38 So-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:38 There's a lot of detail to this case, yeah.

David Sacks 1:03:39 Yeah. So you're right that the SPLC allegedly did fund $270,000 to help plan Charlottesville. In addition to that, they secretly funneled more than $3 million to a bunch of violent racist extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, Aryan Nation, United Klans of America, and it goes on from there. So I think d- don't forget about the 3 million bucks. So this group that was supposed to be fighting racism in fact was fomenting racism by paying these groups to basically organize protests that SPLC could then point to and say that America has a huge racism problem, donate to us. And that's basically what happened after Charlottesville. They increased the amount of money that they were able to fundraise by $81 million. So that $270,000 investment led to an $81 million return. Pretty good. But this is kind of the whole point of the story, is that these guys are basically running a grift. And one of the ways that you know this is a, a grift is because, according to the indictment, that they opened bank accounts under fictitious entities to conceal the payments that they were making from their own donors. Because if their donors knew that they were funding the KKK, [laughs] they wouldn't be getting all these contributions from Hollywood celebrities and all the rest of it. So it's really just this unbelievable story.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:08 Unbelievable.

David Sacks 1:05:09 Uh, it really boggles the mind.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:10 And just to clean up a little bit there, these are allegations. They haven't made the jump from planning these events, and the SPLC claims they were not planning these things, they were monitoring, so that's gonna be their argument on the other side. I'm not saying I agree with that.

David Sacks 1:05:26 I know, I know.

Jason Calacanis 1:05:26 I'm not taking that side.

David Sacks 1:05:27 You're, you're, you're right that the-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:28 Yeah

David Sacks 1:05:28 ... SPLC's cover story is that they were simply paying informants. That's what they've claimed, but there's two problems with that story. Number one is they were paying the actual leaders of these groups, not just sort of moles who were infiltrating the groups. And second, these leaders, they weren't paid to inform, they were paid to foment the activities. So I'm just saying that's the, the flaw. I understand they have this cover story that they were just paying informants. I'm just saying, in my view, that does not hold up. And again, if they were just paying informants, why the extraordinary efforts to conceal the payments from their own donors? If they were proud of these efforts to infiltrate these groups, they should have basically informed their donors what they were doing.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:10 Well-

David Sacks 1:06:11 In fact, they hid it.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:12 And he... Well, here's the reason, uh, that it was hidden according to them. Again, I'm not taking the side. SPLC is not an organization I'm endorsing in any way. Their version of this is, "We didn't plan any of this. If we put SPLC bank accounts together for informants, that would be like the FBI sending a check to an informant from an FBI account." That's their explanation of it.

David Sacks 1:06:34 They're not a law enforcement agency.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:36 Well, that's actually the question I had about all this, is like, what is a nonprofit doing hiring confidential informants, Chamath, to infiltrate these organizations? To what end? And then if you show me an incentive, you're gonna sh- you're gonna see an outcome, and the outcome here is, hey, we'll get more donations if there's more racism. Uh, your thoughts just generally speaking here, Chamath. Again, all of this is alleged.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:58 These NGOs have completely run amok. They're cosplaying as these overlords and power brokers in our lives, and it needs to get stopped. They should all be dismantled. The people that donated to the SPLC should sue them, rip open all of the documentation, get their money backBecause just so you guys know, if you are listening or watching and you have donated, there's $822 million of your money [laughs] sitting in an offshore bank account waiting for you to get it back. Okay? And then separately, if you are thinking of donating to any of these organizations in the future, unless there is a full transparent auditing of it, you actually may be doing the opposite of what you thought. If you are against racism, you may be supporting racism. If you are against discrimination for gays, th- this could be actually promoting discrimination for gays. If you are supportive of trans rights, this may be pushing back against trans rights, 'cause the playbook seems to be do the opposite to create the narrative, give it to your friends in the media who will look the other way and just amplify it, tell the lie, create the craziness, and then raise a bunch of money, make a bunch of stink, and try to curate power.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:10 Friedberg, do you think this is, uh, in your estimation or your gut tell you this is arsonist firefighters, they're lighting things on fire so that they can go put it out? Or do you think this is like, um, a lawfare as some people are claiming because there hasn't been, to Chamath's point, it's... They don't have donors taking this action. They're being accused of wire fraud on behalf of donors who haven't shown up yet to do, you know, a legal action. What's your take on all of this, Friedberg?

David Friedberg 1:08:39 The IRS definition of what a 501 [c] [3] nonprofit organization is meant to be doing is to engage in exempt activities. The definition of exempt activities is charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literacy, public safety, or fostering amateur sports competition, or preventing cruelty to children or animals. You tell me how the [beep] 90% of what we call nonprofits today fall under that definition. We have completely [beep] closed our eyes to the fact that organizations, regardless of political affiliation, social interest, have fundamental commercial and probably not aligned interests with the definition of a 501 [c] [3] , and we've allowed them all to get away with it for far too long. I don't think that this is a blue or red thing. I think that this is a thing where we let these organizations make it easy to get money, to hide the money, and to do whatever the hell they want with the money, and we need to stop it. And I think that it's an amazing opportunity right now for everyone to kind of reset the decks by cleaning all this [beep] up and getting all of these organizations flushed, and make sure that any organization that wants to do whatever [beep] nefarious things they wanna do, by all means, do it, but it's not a nonprofit, and you shouldn't get a charitable donation deduction, and the government should not be putting money into these sorts of things. This is an entirely different sort of activity in the social order. And as a libertarian, I'm all for it, but I don't think that they should be tax-exempt, and I don't think they should be getting government money, and I don't think that individuals should be benefiting from giving them money. And if we could fix all that shit up, I think a lot of these problems are gonna go away, and I think this is a major problem.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:25 I think the theme of this episode is audit everything, whether it's government waste and abuse, or it's these NGOs, or it's people like Dow making these chemicals that 30 years later, you know, perhaps are correlated with cancer. We need to audit everything. We need to take a fresh look at this, 'cause it's not red versus green. Uh, red... This is not red versus blue. It's green. This is clearly a monetary incentive, and it is incredibly disruptive for society to not know the truth about what's going on with race in this country. I got absolutely... You guys might not know this, but in, uh, this is part of the cancel culture moment in time where they tried to take people having reasonable discussions about race in this country and tried to cancel them. They tried to do this to me in 2014. Very famously, you guys may not know this, but I have won a couple of awards in my career. Most Offensive Tweet ever by Vice in 2014 was my alleged racist tweet where I said, "Hey, if you wanna get into, uh, blogging and journalism, there's no racism in Czech journalism. All you have to do is publish for a couple of years a blog post. Nobody can stop you, and there'll be a ton of jobs available to you." And then what they did was they tried to cancel me and tried to cancel all my media properties and my investing. And this stuff had, like, a modest impact on me maybe for a year, and then now it's obviously all being-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:11:45 Wait, wait, wait

Jason Calacanis 1:11:46 ... undone.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:11:47 I, I'm not sure I understand. JCal, you're saying the SPLC put you on a cancellation list?

Jason Calacanis 1:11:50 No, they put Sam Harris on it. Vice put me on a cancellation list. I... It didn't get picked up by the SPLC, but I experienced the same thing, which was they said because I said, you know, race does... race doesn't play a role in hiring.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:12:04 You're so careful about your virtue signaling. I'm just shocked that anyone would try to cancel you. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:12:08 Well, that's what's shocking about it, is, like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:12:09 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:12:10 I know. I was very clear. I said, "In journalism," like a very vertical thing that I have a lot of experience.

David Friedberg 1:12:16 You're a very skilled, you're a very skilled virtue signaler, so-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:12:18 [laughs]

David Friedberg 1:12:18 ... it's, uh-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:18 I mean, they tried to cancel me, guys. I don't... You know. It's... They tried to cancel you too, Chamath.

David Friedberg 1:12:23 Jason.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:23 Go ahead. You have a question for me. Go ahead.

David Friedberg 1:12:25 I'm uncancelable.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:26 Yes.

David Friedberg 1:12:26 'Cause I don't give a f-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:27 We all are. That's what we found out through all this-

David Friedberg 1:12:29 No

Jason Calacanis 1:12:29 ... mishugana.

David Friedberg 1:12:30 You care about what all these idiots think, but-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:32 No, I don't

David Friedberg 1:12:32 ... [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:12:32 I never have.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:12:33 [laughs]

David Friedberg 1:12:34 Jason, I have a question for you.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:35 Go ahead.

David Friedberg 1:12:35 What percentage odds now do you keep in the back of your mind that your petite, little, illustrious human rights watch-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:42 [laughs]

David Friedberg 1:12:43 ... is actually creating human rights abuses to try to-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:46 This is actually-

David Friedberg 1:12:47 ... whip up-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:47 ... a very good point. You know, a lot of the human rights organizations from back in the day that had a-

David Friedberg 1:12:50 What is the organization that you were... What is it called?

Jason Calacanis 1:12:52 Amnesty International.

David Friedberg 1:12:53 Oh, yeah. Okay.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:54 When I worked at Amnesty International, a very fine mandate. The mandate was human rights abuses as described in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights created by Eleanor Roosevelt and the, uh, UN-

David Friedberg 1:13:05 This is like Science Corner. Wait until Mrs. Dunst says

Jason Calacanis 1:13:08 ... 1950. No, but they... It was torture.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:09 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:13:09 It was people being put in jail b- and being tortured.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:12 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:13:12 It was people being censored because of freedom of speech. And, and that's what I worked on when I was at Amnesty International. These groups-Went adrift in order to get money, Human Rights Watch included, and then they started taking on things like, you know, uh, transgender rights, this rights, that rights, and censoring people. Th- th- they went after Sam Harris because he had Charles Murray-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:36 You haven't answered my question

Jason Calacanis 1:13:36 ... from The Bell Curve.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:37 Stop with all this [beep] . I'm asking you a very specific question.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:38 No, I think it's a 50/50 chance that all these organizations are involved in shenanigans.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:41 Okay. So you think 50 fi- 50/50 chance that-

Jason Calacanis 1:13:43 Depending on the organization

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:44 ... that Amnesty-

Jason Calacanis 1:13:45 SPLC, I'm gonna guess 95%. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13:47 Amnesty International you think is 50/50 that they're engaging in nefarious [beep] to try to whip up people's belief that there are human rights abuses happening that are not happening. You're saying it's a coin flip.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:58 I've... I think it's probably a coin flip, yeah. That's what I would say today, because these organizations all got co-opted. SPLC might have had a great origin story, but now it is corrupted.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:07 I admire your intellectual honesty, and I appreciate you saying that.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:10 Of course. Well, I mean, just based on fact. So let's see what this legal case brings about.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:15 Well, let's be clear.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:16 I am all for-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:16 This is not... Let's be clear

Jason Calacanis 1:14:17 ... them investigating SPLC, 100%.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:19 When you bring a grand jury indictment, you've already previewed the evidence. This is not like some guy who's trying to whip up law here, okay?

Jason Calacanis 1:14:27 Um, actually, you, you don't have to bring all the evidence, but that's a side thing. And, and they're very frisky about allowing you to indict somebody, as we experienced with Trump.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14:37 Grand juries are a whole different animal.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:39 Yeah. They, they will indict a ham sandwich is the line. Um, so we'll see. Let's give them their day in court is always my position.

David Sacks 1:14:44 Well, I mean, regardless of what happens in court, if it's true that the SPLC is funding the Ku Klux Klan [laughs] and the American Nazi Party-

Jason Calacanis 1:14:52 They stopped, by the way. Just so we're clear.

David Sacks 1:14:53 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:14:53 They stopped using confidential informants.

David Sacks 1:14:55 Uh, that's good enough for me.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:56 But when you say it out loud, it's insane.

David Sacks 1:14:58 That's good enough for me. Listen, here's-

Jason Calacanis 1:15:00 Oh, my God.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:15:00 It's insane

David Sacks 1:15:01 ... here, here's a systemic problem with nonprofits and NGOs is... And let me just contrast it with business. In business, you set up a company. The company has to make revenue, it has to make profits, and if it doesn't, it's gonna go out of business, right? Because it'll lose money. So there's a feedback mechanism from the market. The company has to create products that people are willing to buy, and those products have to make money. With an NGO, a nonprofit, what have you, they raise money. They don't sell things. They fundraise from donors in order to engage in an activity. But what happens over time is the actual activities may stop mattering, and all that really matters is that they're able to keep fundraising, right? 'Cause they're just trying to figure out a justification to keep going back to donors to get more and more money out of them. That's what perpetuates the organization. And then if it's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:15:46 And they're trying to keep their job. And they're trying to keep their job.

David Sacks 1:15:47 That's right. Exactly. And then if it's an NGO that gets money from the government, then it's even worse because all they do from that point forward is try to lobby the government to get more money, and it doesn't really matter whether the program is working or not. All that matters is whether they can spin it as working.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:16:05 Why wouldn't the Southern Poverty Law Center focus on Southern poverty, which is an issue that actually still exists [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:16:12 Shouldn't it be a federal thing? I mean, it... A- and-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:16:15 Why do you call it one thing, focus on racism, and then all of a sudden whip up fake racism?

David Sacks 1:16:20 I'll tell you why. Here's my theory. Here's my theory on it, is I do think that at one time in this country, civil rights was a noble cause, a very legitimate cause.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:16:28 Of course it was. Of course.

Jason Calacanis 1:16:29 Yes. Of course it is.

David Sacks 1:16:29 We had the, the legacy of segregation and Jim Crow, and there were groups that were set up to basically change that, and they succeeded. But again, no one in an NGO or a nonprofit-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:16:42 Wants to admit it [laughs]

David Sacks 1:16:42 ... ever declares victory.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:16:43 Exactly.

David Sacks 1:16:44 They're never gonna say, "You know what? Like, we, we addressed this problem. We solved it." You know, I always thought that in 2008 when, when our-

Jason Calacanis 1:16:51 Yeah, fire, fire me. Fire me. My job's done.

David Sacks 1:16:52 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:16:52 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:16:52 When, when O- Obama got elected in 2008, I thought that regardless of whether you liked Obama or not or agree with his politics, I thought that at that point most people could see that this was not a racist country.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:03 100%.

David Sacks 1:17:04 Whatever else you could say, the fact that the highest office in the land was not denied to anybody showed that this country was not holding people back based on their skin color. And instead of just basically packing up shop and saying, "Okay, we've achieved our goal"-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:19 [laughs]

David Sacks 1:17:19 ... the goalposts all got moved. Remember, that's when the whole anti-racism thing started was-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:24 Right

David Sacks 1:17:24 ... was around Obama's second term. And what anti-racism was, it said that it's not good enough not to be, just not to be racist. You actually had to be anti-racist. But what anti-racism meant was, was basically that all the distributions had to match the population. Basically, it meant equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity. So effectively, this, uh, whole goalpost was moved from equality of opportunity to equality-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:49 You're right

David Sacks 1:17:49 ... of results.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:50 Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's like they sat around and they said, "Now what?"

David Sacks 1:17:54 Right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:17:54 And one person was like, "I got an idea."

David Sacks 1:17:56 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:17:57 [laughs] Well, and make racism again. Like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:00 Exactly.

David Sacks 1:18:01 Right.

Jason Calacanis 1:18:01 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:18:01 But if they just said, if they just said at that time, "You know what? We're gonna move the goalpost from equality of opportunity to equality of results. We're gonna basically make everyone equal at the finish line," which is to say, I guess communism or, or some sort of identity socialism, people would've said, "Eh, no, we're not on board for that." So instead, they created this whole new terminology to justify it, and it's taken us years to unpack that and realize what's really going on.

Jason Calacanis 1:18:26 Gosh, I don't want to put myself in a position of defending the SPLC. [laughs] They were partners with the FBI for a long time. To your point, Chamath, or, or, or Sacks's point, rather, there was probably a time when it was important to infiltrate the KKK and the Nazi groups. Um-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:40 It's not 2025. Yes

Jason Calacanis 1:18:42 ... but it's not in 2026, like, I think, necessary to be doing this work.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:46 Sorry. It's not in 2026.

Jason Calacanis 1:18:46 I think law enforcement can handle it, uh, in 2026.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:49 Okay, I'm gonna give you guys a newsflash. I just got... This just hit the wire. Um-

Jason Calacanis 1:18:54 Oh. Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:54 This is really important.

Jason Calacanis 1:18:54 Breaking news here. Breaking news.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:18:56 America is profoundly less racist than you think, okay?

Jason Calacanis 1:19:00 There we go. Okay, breaking news.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:19:02 Wake up.

Jason Calacanis 1:19:03 Friedberg wanted to do a surprise Science Corner. This is a first. We don't know what he's about to talk about, but David looks like he's been working really hard and he needs a nap, so Friedberg, you have the microphone. Let's go.

David Sacks 1:19:15 This was not-

Jason Calacanis 1:19:16 Surprise Science Corner.

David Sacks 1:19:17 Yeah. This is not necessarily a big surprise, but, uh, there was a really interesting paper published this week

David Friedberg 1:19:24 On trying to elucidate the underlying cause or predictor of colorectal cancer. So I don't know if you guys know any young friends, but colorectal cancer, Nick, if you could just pull up this first image, or colon cancer has become now the third leading cancer. Over the last twenty years or so, there's been a scary rise in the number of young people, people generally under fifty years old that are getting colon cancer. That number has climbed by over eighty percent in just the last two decades. Historically, it's been an age-related disease, so as you get older, over seventy years old, your probability of getting colon cancer shoots through the roof. But this rise in young people getting colon cancer has been pretty alarming, and there's been a real question mark on what is causing it, what's the underlying trigger? So this research team out of Barcelona in Spain did an amazing study where they looked at the difference in the epigenome or the gene expression in tumor cells of patients that are under fifty years old and those that are over seventy years old. This sort of data will show you what different environmental triggers are associated with those changes in gene expression. So whenever we're exposed to something in the environment, whether it's some food or some drink or whatever else it is, some chemical in the environment, the cells in our body that are exposed to that chemistry or exposed to that environmental trigger have genes that get switched on and off. And you can see which genes are on and off by looking at the RNA of those genes, which tells you that those genes are expressing RNA to make protein or not make protein. And you can look at that gene expression to determine what is changing when a cell is exposed to a particular environmental trigger. And so they were able to get these samples of colon adenocarcinomas from The Cancer Genome Atlas, which is funded by the federal government. And they were then able to take a look at these cancer cells from colon cancer in patients that are under fifty and patients that are over seventy, and look at the difference in the gene expression profile and what, um, environmental triggers are associated with that gene expression profile. So that will tell you, hey, these environmental triggers are more likely the cause or an underlying driver of the risk of getting this colon cancer. And one thing rose to the top. So they looked at a whole bunch of things. They look at lifestyle factors. They look at eating index, how much you ate, how overweight you were, alcohol, birth weight. They adjusted for gender. They adjusted for all these different things. And as you look down this list, you'll see this is the difference between people that got colon cancer that were over seventy, when you typically have a very high chance of getting it, and people that are under fifty when you don't, and what is going on with people under fifty. And you can see there's this one row here that's all orange. That row is a pesticide called picloram. Picloram is a pesticide that was developed by the Dow Chemical Company in nineteen sixty-three. This is the chemical formula for that pesticide. It's related to auxin, which are these hormones that plants make. And in the nineteen sixties, there was this big rush to try and make synthetic plant hormones that you would then apply to a plant. It would cause the plant to overgrow, and the plant would quickly die. And picloram became a very widely used herbicide in our environment. It's used to manage weeds in rangeland and pastureland where cattle graze. It's used to control weeds near roads and near railroads, on industrial sites to clear weeds away from highways and utility corridors. And the problem with picloram, one of the, the things that's been known about it, is it's very persistent. It doesn't biodegrade very well. Picloram sticks around for well over a year. It stays in the water, it moves into groundwater, and it's persistently in the environment after it's been used for some period of time. I went back and looked at the EPA data on this chemical. The last time there was an EPA safety study done was in nineteen ninety-five. And so this was before we had this capacity to do epigenomic studies like what was just done to elucidate that even though a chemical might not be causing cancer immediately, and you can't apply it to a cell and see it trigger a cancer, the long-term use or exposure to certain chemicals in our environment causes a change in the epigenome, which means that these genes are being turned on and off. And when certain genes are turned on or off in the wrong way, it can trigger cells in the tissue to start to g- malfunction and go haywire and ultimately lead to cancer. And I think that this paper shows a pretty strong effect of picloram in driving colon cancer in young people. It will very likely lead, and it should lead to an EPA review on whether this should be legally allowed, but it should also lead to a new mechanism by which we assess chemistry that we're using in our food supply, in our environment, in our industrial applications, because we can now look at all of this at sort of epigenomic data to try and figure out what are these chemicals doing to us before we see them cause the problem. So I thought this was, like, an amazing paper done by this team. They did a lot of work to try and make sure that the statistics were sound in the studies that they did. It really, uh, I think elucidated something pretty scary.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:24:51 Is this like a Monsanto thing where, like, one company makes it, or picloram is broadly available?

David Friedberg 1:24:57 It's off patent now, and so I'm pretty sure, m- my guess, I haven't looked into this, but my guess is most of this is made generically in China, and then it's probably packaged up with lots of different brands in the U.S. and all over the world. So it's one of these chemicals that's just become ubiquitous in our use that just shows up everywhere. But I think it really speaks to the fact that historically, think about nineteen ninety-five, you can look at what the immediate chemical application of something does to a, a rat or a, or a human cell, and you can say, like, "Oh, it didn't cause cancer. It's good to go. Let's go." You know, didn't, didn't cause, quote, "toxicity". But there's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:25:31 Can I ask a question?

David Friedberg 1:25:32 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:25:32 In that study

1:25:33 Are you exposed to picloram based on where you live? Because like if you're-

David Friedberg 1:25:36 Oh, yeah, sorry. That's a, that's a great question, Chamath. So, uh, I was gonna talk about this. Thank you for asking that. They then took that, uh, picloram exposure, and then they looked at all the counties across the United States. They were able to gather data where there's enough data in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and they were able to look at picloram use estimates from the Pesticide National Synthesis Project and try and deduce in places where picloram was highly used and not highly used. And once again, it elucidated signal, which is that when picloram was used in the environment in the counties more frequently, there was a much higher frequency of colon cancer in those counties.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:26:11 And that R squared is weak or it's strong?

David Friedberg 1:26:13 Reasonably strong. The odds ratio is like three X. It's very strong.

Jason Calacanis 1:26:16 This is accomplished, Friedberg, from a combination of big data and this, uh, science to study these-

David Friedberg 1:26:25 You know, I think it's important... Yeah, I think it's important. Yeah

Jason Calacanis 1:26:25 ... and then increased testing as well, right? So you have this confluence of increased testing, increased data, you know, knowing where these instances are occurring, and if you add a layer of AI onto this, Friedberg, this is like a really positive use going back and looking at all these compounds and figuring out which ones we need to eliminate. Yeah?

David Friedberg 1:26:45 Yeah, so I'll, I'll put my PCAST hat on. Thank you, David Sacks, for the role. And I think this speaks to one of the important roles that government has in doing fundamental science and fundamental research. So the, the National Cancer Institute and the federal government stood up this genome atlas with $100 million a couple years ago. They spend a f- only a few million dollars a year now to maintain it, to get cancer tissue samples, and then create the availability to scientists to use those cancer tissue samples to do this sort of epigenomic analysis and study supported by, you know, government grants, or in this case, supported by a foreign university getting funding to do it. And so there's, there's an important role that fundamental science still has in elucidating this that we would've otherwise not been able to see if we didn't have this resource available to us from the federal government and federal funding of scientific programs like this. And that leads to this discovery. You don't need fancy AI for this, to be frank, JCal. There's an incredible amount of da- data that's available or, or resources that are available. What's happened in the last couple years is what's called RNA sequencing, where you can actually look at which genes are on or off, not just what's the DNA, but in the DNA, remember we've talked a lot about the epigenome, what genes are on or off, and how that changes when you have different cancers or when you have different chemicals. And when you have a certain chemical like picloram, your colorectal cancer goes through the roof, and you can see that relationship in those tissues, and then you can put all the data together and say, "Oh my gosh, there's a lot of evidence here that points to this connection." Very powerful. I think it's important that it opens up the window that this shouldn't just be a one-off research project conducted by a team in Spain, but maybe should be a fundamental role that some of the government agencies play, which is to stop Americans and the world from getting frigging cancer. Let's figure out the things that we got wrong in industry and go back and delete them out of our food supply and out of our industrial supply, um, and I think this is a really good example of that.

Jason Calacanis 1:28:38 So, Sacks, uh, how does Friedberg's focus on Uranus, uh, im- you know, inform your co-leading of PCAST here? Are you gonna go deep into this colon research? How deep do you plan on going, and how will you get through eight of these presentations a day at PCAST? [laughs]

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:28:54 [laughs]

David Sacks 1:28:55 I... It's all good. This is why we hired Friedberg.

Jason Calacanis 1:28:57 Yes.

David Friedberg 1:28:58 By the way, did you guys-

David Sacks 1:28:58 He's, he's gonna handle, uh, Mars, Neptune, and Uranus. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:29:02 Absolutely. He's gonna go deep into Uranus and clean it up.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:29:06 That was good, actually.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:06 We need to clean up Uranus. Uh, great work, Friedberg.

David Friedberg 1:29:10 Anyway.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:10 Great, great work.

David Friedberg 1:29:10 Anyway, I think, I think this is important.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:12 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:29:12 And I don't think there's any news attention on this since it came out a couple days ago, so I thought it would be worth bringing up on the show-

Jason Calacanis 1:29:17 Absolutely

David Friedberg 1:29:18 ... and making people aware.

David Sacks 1:29:19 All right.

David Friedberg 1:29:19 But thank you guys for sitting through it.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:20 Well, no.

David Friedberg 1:29:21 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:21 I think it's, it's great work you're doing there.

David Friedberg 1:29:23 I just read the paper. [laughs] But yeah.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:25 All right, everybody. That's it for episode 270 of the world's greatest podcast. I am your world's greatest moderator. Thank you Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg for the episode. To your friends, your neighbors, and we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:29:40 Love you boys. Bye bye.

David Sacks 1:29:43 Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:46 Rain man David Sacks.

David Sacks 1:29:50 And instead, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:29:54 Love you guys.

Jason Calacanis 1:29:54 Ice queen of Kim Law.

David Sacks 1:29:57 Let your winners ride. Let, let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:30:03 Besties are back.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30:04 Oh. [laughs] That is my, uh, dog taking a piss in your driveway, Sacks. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:30:08 Wait, no, no, it's-

David Sacks 1:30:10 Oh, man. Oh, man.

1:30:11 My haberdasher will meet me at Linda's.

Jason Calacanis 1:30:13 They should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy 'cause they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30:21 Wet your feet.

Jason Calacanis 1:30:22 The feet. Wet your feet.

David Sacks 1:30:24 Wet your feet.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30:24 Wet your feet.

Jason Calacanis 1:30:26 [laughs] We need to get merch.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30:28 Besties are back.

David Sacks 1:30:28 I'm going all in. I'm going all in.