The Stablecoin Future, Milei's Memecoin, DOGE for the DoD, Grok 3, Why Stripe Stays Private

1. 0:00 – 4:28

   The Besties welcome John and Patrick Collison!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. I am your host, Jason Calacanis, and with me again, a couple of my besties. David Friedberg, you know him as our sultan of science. Lots to get into today, sultan. Hi, how you doing?

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:18

      I'm keeping busy. Thank you.

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:19

      Keeping busy. Chamath and I on Valentine's Day, we had a little trio. We were on MKUltra's podcast and it hit number four, All-In Podcast, of course, number one. Uh, Chamath, uh, uh, reflections on our Megyn Kelly, our triumphant Megyn Kelly Valentine's spectacular?

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:38

      Uh, it was fine. It was good.

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:40

      Okay. Wow, thanks. You're such a great performer, giving me so much to work with, Chamath, as always. But it was a great, great pod. Shout out to our friend and friend of the pod, Megyn Kelly, and also we've got an incredible duo. For the first time, we've invited a duo to join us in the red throne. David Sacks is sick. He's busy saving the country, but we're really excited.

   6. JCJohn Collison1:04

      (laughs)

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:04

      The Coulson brothers are with us.

   8. JCJohn Collison1:06

      Thank you for having us.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07

      You guys wanna hear a great lost porn story? John has one for you.

   10. JCJohn Collison1:10

       The last time we met Chamath was 18 years ago when-

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:15

       Oh.

   12. JCJohn Collison1:16

       ... we were working on our prior startup, Automatic, with Harj and, and Kul Tiger.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:21

       You were how old?

   14. JCJohn Collison1:22

       They were 17, 18, 19.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:23

       It was one of these San Francisco setups where it was, like, a two-bedroom apartment. There was a few of us living there, I think maybe six people working out of there. And-

   16. JCJohn Collison1:32

       A normal number.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:32

       Exactly. Normal numbers to load up a, a two-bedroom apartment with. And then Chamath, you came and, and visited. This is what's so brutal about this, okay? I could have invested a dollar.

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:42

       (laughs) One single dollar.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:45

       And I would have made a billion dollars. I remember meeting these guys.

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:48

       Huh.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:49

       And I was with Alan Morgan, who was my boss at the time. I was a junior principal at Mayfield.

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:55

       Shout out, Alan.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:55

       And I think we tried to... Guys, I don't know if you remember, Patrick and John, I think we tried to invest in, in the business or it didn't happen or then you ended up shutting it down, but right away, you spun back up and started Stripe.

   24. JCJason Calacanis2:07

       Hmm.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:07

       And I just watched from the sidelines the whole way. It is such a... First of all-

   26. JCJason Calacanis2:12

       It still is.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:13

       ... it's an amazing... Well, no, it's an amazing place for Silicon Valley where you can, like, see these people just keep pushing the boundaries up and up and up, number one. Number two-

   28. JCJason Calacanis2:21

       Yeah.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya2:22

       ... the thing that is such a learning for me is, like, why didn't I just pick up the phone and call them at any point in the last (laughs) 17 years? Like, what am I thinking?

   30. JCJohn Collison2:29

       (laughs)
2. 4:28 – 20:31

   Stripe's business evolution: $1T in volume/year, stablecoins, challenging the Visa/Mastercard duopoly, publishing economic indicators

   1. JCJohn Collison4:28

      exactly.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya4:28

      Jason, do you want to tell everyone in the audience what Stripe is and-

   3. JCJason Calacanis4:32

      I mean, do we have to? Okay, Stripe processes payments. This is a ten-plus-year-old startup that... Basically, if you're a startup company and you want to do transactions, you use Stripe. For example, the All-In startup uses Stripe to pay for the tickets, and then we give these guys, for some reason, a half million dollars every year. No discount, they don't sponsor the event, and, uh, they're making a fortune. They got 10,000 employees and, uh, the company changed the world.

   4. JCJohn Collison4:59

      Well, we've never been, uh, we've never been offered to, to sponsor the event. I didn't know this was, uh, this was an option, but-

   5. JCJason Calacanis5:04

      Well, you hit us up for a half milly last year. I mean, maybe this year we, we can hit you up and negotiate it live.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:10

      (laughs)

   7. JCJohn Collison5:10

      That's broadly accurate. I would just fact check that it's nowadays not just startups, even though they run on Stripe-

   8. JCJason Calacanis5:15

      That's true.

   9. JCJohn Collison5:15

      ... but also the world's largest enterprises, Hertz, Amazon, Ford, all these kind of companies.

   10. JCJason Calacanis5:20

       Oh.

   11. JCJohn Collison5:20

       And so-

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:20

       There we go, Tim.

   13. JCJohn Collison5:21

       ... when we started out with Stripe, we thought it would only be for startups. Like, we thought those were the people who needed a problem solved and we thought payments was broken for them. And as time went on, we just found out it was kind of broken for everyone. And so-

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:32

       And sorry, is it public how much volume you guys do a year? Do you guys talk about that?

   15. JCJohn Collison5:36

       It's more than a trillion dollars a year.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:37

       A trillion, uh, dollars a year is processed through your network? Yeah.

   17. JCJohn Collison5:40

       Yeah, which, which works out to, you know, global GDP is around 100 trillion a year, so it works out to around 1% of global GDP.

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya5:45

       Incredible.

   19. JCJohn Collison5:46

       And you could say, well, you know, GDP is, is final goods and, and, you know, Stripe's process is more than only final goods, so it's not like exactly the right... No one says that kind of stuff. Only you said that. Okay, well, look, you could say it's not exactly the right or a fair comparison or something, but, but Stripe mostly is used to sell final goods. So I think it's, uh, I think it's reasonable.And just the other thing I'd say is, uh, you know, people, I think, reasonably think of Stripe as a payments company because, you know, that is certainly what we started out doing and, uh, and it's, uh, certainly the largest line of our business. But the thing we kind of realized a couple years in is that, you know what, business... Like, the- the- the structural, secular thing that's happening is that every kind of money movement is going from being manually orchestrated to being orchestrated by software and there's, you know, some program somewhere making the thing happen. And so because of that, like just because of what we hear from customers and the, the pull there, we're now, you know, helping with lending, we're helping with card issuance, we're helping with treasury and money storage, we're helping with cross border money movement. And so-

   20. PCPatrick Collison6:45

       Stable coins. We gotta talk about stable coins.

   21. JCJohn Collison6:47

       Stable coins, yeah.

   22. JCJason Calacanis6:47

       Now it's got a stable. Hmm.

   23. JCJohn Collison6:49

       Yeah.

   24. JCJason Calacanis6:49

       Why'd you do a stable coin?

   25. PCPatrick Collison6:50

       Stable coins are finally happening (laughs) and they're really useful. Like, we've followed crypto for a long time. The Bitcoin white paper dropped in 2008, the year before we started working on Stripe, and so it's been funny where Stripe and crypto have grown up together. And, you know, we tried to make Bitcoin happen as a payment method on Stripe.

   26. JCJason Calacanis7:08

       Hmm.

   27. PCPatrick Collison7:08

       Just wasn't that good as a payment method. I mean, it's good as a store of value, as kind of a gold substitute, but transactions are slow, transactions are expensive. You never know-

   28. JCJason Calacanis7:17

       Hmm.

   29. PCPatrick Collison7:17

       ... exactly how much you're gonna get because it's not denominated in dollars. The stable coins are now really good if you look at, you know, something on an Ethereum L2 or a Solana or something like that. And so we bought a company called Bridge late last year, who is building the Stripe of stable coins. And so if you're... I mean, I think you guys have talked about them a little bit, but you know, people like SpaceX using them for treasury management, people using them to offer US dollar services to people all around the world. Just, stable coins are, I think the first really big payments use case and I think it's finally coming because the tech is good enough.

   30. JCJason Calacanis7:49

       Is there a moment, guys, where... Is it a regulatory event where you'll say the Visa, MasterCard duopoly can get challenged? Is there a set of boundary conditions that you have written down where when you can check a few of these boxes, you know that it's time for those companies to get dismantled?
3. 20:31 – 34:22

   Jamie Dimon's leaked rant on remote work and bureaucracy

   1. JCJason Calacanis20:31

      about. Let's get to our first story here. It's a kind of a fun one. Jamie Dimon went on a rant about remote work and, and Zoom, uh, in a town hall. And, uh, here's a snippet.

   2. JDJamie Dimon20:42

      A lot of you were on the (beep) Zoom-

   3. JCJohn Collison20:44

      (laughs)

   4. JDJamie Dimon20:44

      ... and you were doing the following, okay? You know, looking at your mail, sending texts to each other about what an (beep) the other person is.

   5. JCJohn Collison20:50

      (laughs)

   6. JCJason Calacanis20:51

      (laughs)

   7. JDJamie Dimon20:51

      Okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff, you know, and if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness and s-... it does, okay? And when I found out that people are doing that... you, you don't do that in my goddamn meetings. You go to a meeting with me, you got my attention, you got my focus, I don't bring my goddamn phone. I'm not sending texts to people. Okay? It simply doesn't work. The young generation is being damaged by this. That mean, they may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. That's not how you run a great company. We didn't build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi-diseased (beep) that everybody else does.

   8. JCJason Calacanis21:36

      Kelson Brothers, tell us about how you run Stripe. Are you remote? Does this resonate with you four years after, uh, we've come out of the pandemic?

   9. PCPatrick Collison21:45

      I love listening to Jamie Dimon rants. Like, I feel-

   10. JCJason Calacanis21:48

       Mm.

   11. PCPatrick Collison21:48

       ... like that's business ASMR. Um...

   12. JCJason Calacanis21:51

       (laughs) Business ASMR.

   13. JCJohn Collison21:53

       That has helped me a great podcast.

   14. JCJason Calacanis21:54

       I was about to say, I'm subscribing. That's an instant $10 a month subscription. But what do you think, John? Yeah.

   15. PCPatrick Collison22:00

       Uh, I don't know. People just said a lot of (beep) during the pandemic. Like you remember, it's like, "Oh, handshakes are gonna be over. Business travel is gonna be over. Every company-"

   16. JCJason Calacanis22:08

       Hm.

   17. PCPatrick Collison22:08

       "... is gonna be fully remote." I would say Stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot to where it was beforehand, which is most people go into an office, like most people are, you know, uh, part of our San Francisco office or New York or Dublin or, or Singapore or wherever. And then we have a bunch of people also who work remotely. I think, uh, kind of obviously, you know, Jamie is right on some points. I think also working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies-

   18. JCJason Calacanis22:36

       Sure.

   19. PCPatrick Collison22:37

       ... like Stripe. And there's a lot of people, you know, you see, uh, the kind of the two-body problem where it allows a lot of couples where, you know, maybe one partner is assigned to some hospital in Idaho and like they don't get to choose what hospital necessarily they got assigned to and the other person gets to work a, a high paying tech job. And so I don't know, I think when-

   20. JCJohn Collison22:55

       Like one, like one of the theories for, uh, declining dynamism in the US and declining TFP is that allocative efficiency, uh, of, of, you know, people declined as women enter the workforce because now you have the... you know, what John describes this two-body problem where, you know, both people have to make coordinated switches and, uh, and you'll just-

   21. PCPatrick Collison23:14

       Remote work's

   22. DSDavid Sacks23:14

       ... it's remote work's .......................... actually.

   23. JCJason Calacanis23:16

       Yeah. Freeberg, you're running a company now. You're the CEO of Ohalo. Tell us, uh, does this resonate with you? What do you think? Especially about younger people, his point and like being rude or being focused, being in the meeting and then like maybe there's too many meetings where people are partially paying attention. Maybe there should be half as many meetings and people should be paying attention. What do you think?

   24. DSDavid Sacks23:36

       Well, there's always room for optimization there. We, we deal with this too. Too many meetings, too many people. I think what was most striking for me about the Jamie Dimon rant and the resonance it seems to be having, particularly in Silicon Valley and particularly with folks that are in leadership positions or on boards, is that this is another example of what I think is kind of a different tenor for leaders in business right now relative to where we were a few years ago. Leaders are starting to step up and speak their mind and speak more directly and lead from the front rather than lead from the back. I think the last couple of years, and I would say that the whole kind of transition awo-... away from wokeism and coddled employee workforces, which is something that a lot of folks talk about, um, I'm not trying to just characterize it, I'm just saying that's the characterization that's been placed on it, is that the employees made the decisions and then the leaders kind of said, "Okay, I'm subjugated to the employees' whims and needs." And look at what's gone on with Zuck. He said, "You're with me, you're against me. Here's a buyout option." Elon obviously was a exemplar of this at Twitter. Uh, we've now seen this-

   25. JCJason Calacanis24:40

       Coinbase.

   26. DSDavid Sacks24:41

       ... become-

   27. JCJason Calacanis24:41

       Yeah.

   28. DSDavid Sacks24:41

       ... Coinbase Brian in his letter, and we've now seen this become, I think, a bit more of a standard in the kind of emergence in the post-COVID era that leaders can lead from the front, speak directly, and say, "This is the way things are going to be. My job is not to coddle my employees. My job is to lead my employees, so that our organization, our team wins and we-"

   29. JCJason Calacanis25:00

       Hmm.

   30. DSDavid Sacks25:00

       "... achieve our mission." That's the objective. It's not to create a family workplace for everyone to be happy all the time. It's to help the organization succeed. And so I think I have heard from people individually. I've seen this tenor shift underway right now, um, and I think that Jamie Dimon is another kind of exemplar of this that, that seems to have some resonance.
4. 34:22 – 43:51

   DOGE for Defense: Trump ordered the Pentagon to look at cutting the defense budget by 8%/year over the next five years

   1. JCJason Calacanis34:22

      But we got to get back into Doge. The number... Well, I've heard a couple criticisms of Doge. One of them is it's one sided. We're only hearing about, you know, people on the left doing grifts and US aid. The other one is, hey, you're, you're pointing at little tiny things like US aid. When are you gonna get to defense spending and Social Security? Well, here we are. Washington Post is reporting that in between doing sets of 47 push-ups, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asked senior leadership at the Pentagon to develop a plan to cut 8% from the defense budget each of the next five years. That's compounding 8%. Here's a chart. We're talking about close to 300 billion in savings over five years if, uh, they hit, which isn't a crazy target, 8% a year. It's just crazy in our country, where we haven't even been able to have our Defense Department pass a basic audit, if you've seen those type of reports. Let's pause there and just talk about military spending, Chamath.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya35:23

      I think that military spending needs to sit downstream from technology, because if you... if it doesn't, you're sort of misappropriating the money. And what I mean is that we're inventing incredible capabilities in AI and autonomy. I think that you need to take those things first and figure out how to projectize them, because I think that builds the kind of modern war machine we need. Otherwise, what happens, I tweeted about this, Nick, maybe you can find it, but, like, the CBO red flagged a project where the Navy was about to appropriate $1.2 trillion to build frigates. Now, there's a body, I think, of, of military planning that says this is a projection of power and so you need to spend this kind of money because people want to see the big boats and the big iron in the water. Okay, and, and maybe there's something about that, but the reality is you can't be spending three or $4 billion a boat (laughs) and taking, you know, eight, nine, ten years to build these things. It's... So this is not sustainable, and part of why they do that is it's not coupled to what's actually happening with respect to innovation, where there are core pockets of companies. Sironic just announced a $600 million raise today.... Saildrone announced hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts with the Navy. Anduril is doing that with the Army. So I think that military spending needs to happen downstream from what's actually happening in technology, broadly speaking. We don't have that. What you have instead are system integrators with extremely deep connectivity that are able to contract well, not necessarily to invent well.

   3. JCJason Calacanis37:03

      Freeberg, any thoughts there on cutting defense spending? Obviously we have, uh, to Chamath's point, amazing founders like my guy, Palmer Luckey, cutting the cost of very important, uh, armaments-

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:17

      He's not your guy. He hates you.

   5. JCJason Calacanis37:17

      That's my guy.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:18

      He hates you.

   7. JCJason Calacanis37:19

      My bestie. Oh, no. We... It's all a joke, everybody. Calm down. We just have a little back and forth.

   8. DSDavid Sacks37:22

      He literally hates you, Jason. He, he-

   9. JCJason Calacanis37:24

      No, I talk to-

   10. DSDavid Sacks37:25

       He literally despises you.

   11. JCJason Calacanis37:25

       Listen, I know all the board members.

   12. DSDavid Sacks37:27

       And he'll never stop-

   13. JCJason Calacanis37:27

       I got a personal relationship with him but-

   14. DSDavid Sacks37:28

       ... till your, till your career has ended.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:29

       He's gonna send one of those drones to your ranch.

   16. JCJason Calacanis37:31

       He loves J Cam.

   17. DSDavid Sacks37:32

       Yeah.

   18. JCJason Calacanis37:32

       He loves it. He... Everybody needs a foil. Uh, and, uh-

   19. DSDavid Sacks37:35

       Creates all sorts of problems for the rest of us when you go out and talk (beep) about people for no reason. It's great. Super awesome.

   20. JCJason Calacanis37:39

       What are you talking about? I never talk (beep) about Stripe. Guys-

   21. DSDavid Sacks37:42

       (laughs)

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:42

       You don't have any beef with J Cam.

   23. DSDavid Sacks37:43

       You just called our employees MIDs for no reason. For no reason, you're just like, "Oh, what about your MID?" Yeah.

   24. JCJason Calacanis37:47

       That was a hypothetical.

   25. DSDavid Sacks37:48

       Yeah.

   26. JCJason Calacanis37:49

       Okay, I did say that you s- you, you guys pocketed 500 large.

   27. JCJohn Collison37:52

       Look, we, we can come to the summit and, you know, Palmer-style just like-

   28. DSDavid Sacks37:56

       (laughs)

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya37:56

       Yes. Yeah.

   30. JCJohn Collison37:56

       ... pop off everything.
5. 43:51 – 1:00:18

   Crypto Corner: Milei's Memecoin embarrassment

   1. JCJason Calacanis43:51

      Uh, Crypto Corner is back. We had an exciting week of innovation in the crypto space last week. Argentine President Milei, who is a hero to a lot of people in, uh... on the right, uh, or for government efficiency, promoted a meme coin. It was called Libra, $Libra. And, uh, he originally tweeted, "This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy," uh, with a link to Libra for his citizens to go buy it. And buy it they did. (laughs) But he deleted that tweet when this whole thing came apart and said, "I was not aware of the details of the project, and after having become aware of it, I decided to not continue spreading it." The market cap ripped 4 billion. It crashed 95% as these meme coins always do. 74,000 traders lost almost 300 million, 24 wallets had losses over a million, and Milei has been sued 100 plus times already. And this just happened last week. He's being investigated by his own government now, and, uh, there is an impeachment, uh, attempt underway by the opposition. Milei's team told CNN that his endorsement of the coin was a mistake. Really? Oh, wow. Going out on a limb there. According to insiders, Milei never actually owned any Libra and was not associated with the coin. I think family members maybe put him up to it. The details of why he brought it remain a little bit unclear. There's a lot of speculation. Chamath, your thoughts.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:26

      It's kind of crazy. I mean, he was on such a positive upswing of momentum. It doesn't make much sense why he got embroiled in all of this. The, the problem with this though is I think that the coverup is always worse than the crime itself.

   3. JCJason Calacanis45:39

      Hm.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:39

      So, the first message was, you know, very Clintonesque, like, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." He was like, "I did not endorse it. I just shared it" (laughs) was his justification for how he, how he, um, could rationalize what he did. The kid that's behind this thing, Hayden Davis, I think, is his name.

   5. JCJason Calacanis46:03

      He was on Coffeezilla. It was an incredible one-hour... Did you see that, the Coffeezilla interview?

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:08

      No, I saw, I saw some of the clips on X and it was pretty brazen because he, he essentially said that he had Javier Milei in his pocket, and then there were text messages that used some pretty colorful language to basically say the same thing. Then on top of that, there were some text messages that seemed to implicate Milei's sister as having got some of the money from all of this. I don't know, the whole thing just makes absolutely no sense. That he was doing so much good, and now he's gonna g- go through this whole cycle of trying to wash his hands of this whole thing is a complete waste of m- time and effort. I don't know why he did this.

   7. JCJason Calacanis46:42

      And there was another, like, interesting little tidbit. Uh, Friedberg, uh, friend of the pod, David Portnoy, supposedly he's been getting in on this and he's a gambler and he loves gambling and he looks at his gambling obviously. He had put reportedly millions of dollars into this, and this guy we're talking about gave him his money back. This guy also has something like $100 million sitting in a bank account anywhere. What's your take on all these meme coins, Reber? I don't like them.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:10

      Hm. (laughs)

   9. JCJason Calacanis47:10

      I don't think that they're-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:12

       Okay.

   11. JCJason Calacanis47:12

       ... like, good. I don't think they're productive.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:15

       All right.

   13. JCJason Calacanis47:15

       I think that a bunch of people are gonna put money in and lose money.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:18

       (laughs)

   15. JCJason Calacanis47:18

       And a few people are gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, but at the end of the day, it's no different than the people that sell trading cards or the people that create and sell collectibles and get paid for them. And this is just effectively a digital collectibles business. Unfortunately, I think it's, like, amplified by, like, 1,000 x. Hm. Because collectibles businesses have friction and they're manual and you gotta ship them. And this creates, um, a bit more of a digital frenzy where you see the social feedback loop happen really quickly in real time, and that drives these things to a high value, which means people have the ability to lose a lot more than they otherwise would. But, look, I mean, these are not helping the financial system get rebuilt, as we talked about earlier. They're not, uh, creating productive value. They're entertainment mechanisms just like any other kind of gambling system might be. And, you know, people can choose to do that if they want, but personally, I'm not into it. I just think it's stupid. But whatever. Patrick- Each to their own. Yeah. Do you think these are like collectibles or do you think they are perceived by the people buying them more like securities and more like Bitcoin? They do, uh, to steel man the other side of the argument, uh, they do trade with a ticker symbol. They are traded, uh, on major platforms like Coinbase and, uh, Robinhood.... and people share charts about them, uh, so where do you stand on it? You're in the finance business. Meme coins good, meme coins bad?

   16. JCJohn Collison48:41

       I'm ￠ basically with Dave. I mean, uh, uh, well, they seem to me to be maybe analogous to, to gambling, um, which, you know, I don't know that we want to ban gambling. Uh, like, if you're able to do it responsibly, and you, you understand what you're getting into and so forth, like, I guess that's fine. But as you say, (laughs) judging by the tweets that I see, there are an awful lot of ticker symbols and charts and prognostications about future price trajectories and so forth, that lead me to think that people are placing so much more weight on the asset and security value of these, uh, as compared to the, I don't know, some numinous, intrinsic, uh, aesthetic value.

   17. JCJason Calacanis49:28

       Yes.

   18. JCJohn Collison49:29

       So, yeah, it seems-

   19. JCJason Calacanis49:30

       John, uh-

   20. JCJohn Collison49:30

       It's-

   21. JCJason Calacanis49:31

       John-

   22. JCJohn Collison49:32

       Yeah.

   23. JCJason Calacanis49:32

       ... maybe two things could be true here. People are gambling, and they are being presented as financial instruments, and they're trying to trick the suckers at the table. The suckers, in this case, being the people who voted for Malay, to Chamath's point. This is the unbelievable self-ohm of the, of the decade.

   24. JCJohn Collison49:48

       Yeah, look, uh, I don't like meme coins. I think they're bad. And I think they're part of, like Patrick said, a, a broader swathe of things that we need to figure out societally, where the legalization of sports betting and combined with highly targeted advertising, I don't know if you guys have seen the stats on, you know, whales in sports betting losing very large amounts of money. And it's just these heartbreaking tales, and there's a very large number of them, of people kind of losing much more than they expected. And I don't know, we have to, to reckon with these societal questions. I don't think there's super easy answers. They come along from time to time. I only learned recently that, um, state lotteries are a relatively recent phenomenon. Like, I think it was one state started doing it in the 1970s, and then a bunch of the other states followed suit. But it's kind of odd when you step back that, like, I pass a billboard on 101-

   25. JCJason Calacanis50:40

       For Powerball.

   26. JCJohn Collison50:41

       ... for, you know, the state of California trying to, you know, get me to buy lottery tickets.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya50:44

       Sell a negative EBEV bet.

   28. JCJohn Collison50:46

       Yeah, just like, but that's become very normalized. And so I think there's a bucket of hard questions here around, you know, meme coins, sports gambling, whatever.

   29. JCJason Calacanis50:54

       Mm.

   30. JCJohn Collison50:55

       I don't know what you do, but there's a lot of... Meme coins are not the only place you find these very heartbreaking stories.
6. 1:00:18 – 1:18:04

   John and Patrick break down the Arc Institute and its new Evo 2 AI model

   1. JCJohn Collison1:00:18

      should do that. The model is cool.

   2. JCJason Calacanis1:00:18

      All right, let's do the Ark Institute. Freeberg, why don't you ask the question?

   3. DSDavid Sacks1:00:22

      Patrick runs the Ark Institute, right?

   4. JCJason Calacanis1:00:24

      Okay, yes.

   5. JCJohn Collison1:00:25

      I'm one of the co-founders and then there are two scientists who, who run it.

   6. DSDavid Sacks1:00:27

      You're one of the co- And you guys are funders of it or... Yeah, maybe you guys give us the intro to Ark Institute.

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:00:30

      They put a lot of money into this, yeah.

   8. DSDavid Sacks1:00:32

      Yeah.

   9. JCJohn Collison1:00:32

      Yeah, so, uh, the Ark-

   10. JCJason Calacanis1:00:33

       Big check.

   11. JCJohn Collison1:00:33

       ... Institute is a nonprofit. It does basic biology research. It's in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It's about 230 people today. And, uh, yeah, John and I are among the funders of it, but there's a, there's a bunch of other very generous donors. Can you explain Patrick's idea of curiosity-driven research that's on the website? Yeah. There's kind of two things behind it. So the first is scienti- the vast majority of biology scientists today-... receive NIH grants doing basic research, and the NIH grants are, one, just hard to get and annoying to get. As you know, scientists spend 40% of their time working on grant overhead and so forth. But worse, like even more perniciously, the grants are very restrictive in terms of the kind of science they can do. And so we ran a survey of scientists back a, a couple of years ago, of top scientists, and four out of five, like 79% of them told us that if they could just spend money however they wanted, if they weren't kind of limited by, you know, what they're prescribed by these NIH grants, four out of five told us they would change their research agenda a lot. And, and so I think the analogy here is imagine if there was only one VC firm and it was run by the government. (laughs) How would that change the-

   12. DFDavid Friedberg1:01:35

       And that VC firm had strong opinions on what kind of companies people should build.

   13. JCJohn Collison1:01:39

       Exactly. I mean, you know, li- literally the, the, the grant panels at the NIH are, um, they're consensus-based, like explicitly. They've kind of consensus-based scoring mechanisms and they, you know, penalize you if you're doing work outside of your field and so forth. So hey, we, we, we kind of, we do, go to all this work to train these amazing scientists and then we sort of don't let them pursue their best ideas. That's kind of problem one in Arc, the, the Arc investigators, you know, they're funded to do whatever they want, curiosity driven research. And then the second thing behind Arc is, uh, is this idea that you can kind of divide diseases into three categories. You know, you have infectious diseases, a- and we, we, you know, broadly speaking know how to, you know, generate cures for and treatments for infectious diseases. We have monogenic diseases like one genetic mutation or something and, eh, we don't know how to cure those in most cases but we can, you know, we can at least screen for them and so on. And, and then we have what the biologists call complex diseases where there's some kind of gene environment interaction. That's most cancers, most autoimmune diseases, most neurodegenerative diseases and so forth.

   14. DFDavid Friedberg1:02:34

       Alzheimer's, things like that.

   15. JCJohn Collison1:02:36

       Exactly. And we've never cured a complex disease. And, you know, and many of these diseases are very tragic precisely because, you know, we, not only have we not cured them, we don't even have treatments as, you know, as John says, uh, in, in the case of Alzheimer's for example. And so, you know, the question is, can we do something about this and, you know, what would a research agenda and program that, you know, can, that can help, you know, shine some light on these complex diseases look like? And our hypothesis, now we'll see, we'll see, uh, how much it's born out, but our hypothesis is that we've gotten a couple of new technologies over the last couple of years. Single-cell sequencing. We can sequence the, the DNA or the RNA just, like, in one cell. Eh, we've, you know, fancy new functional genomics and CRISPR technologies, eh, so you can make these, you know, fine edits and perturbations, again, even just in a single cell. Eh, and then obviously you have transformers and AI and ML and all this stuff. And this is kind of a new read, think, write loop in biology that just didn't exist a decade ago. And again, the question is, uh, is this powerful enough now to, you know, solve some of these previously intractable, uh, diseases? And so yesterday Arc released this new, uh, foundation model for biology. It's the largest biology ML model ever. It's m- it's, uh, it's actually I think the largest open source AI model ever.

   16. JCJason Calacanis1:03:51

       This is EVO2 you're talking about.

   17. JCJohn Collison1:03:53

       Exactly.

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:03:53

       E-V-O, the number 2. EVO2.

   19. JCJohn Collison1:03:55

       Yeah. And so it's not just open weights like, uh, like, you know, uh, the DeepSeq model or LLaMA or something. It's actually, it's open source and it's the training code is, uh, is public.

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:04:05

       Mm-hmm.

   21. JCJohn Collison1:04:05

       And, you know, it's, you can, people can go read the blog post or the paper or whatever, but the thing that I find amazing about EVO and that just really surprised me is, so it's trained on nine trillion base pair gene tokens. So, you know, uh, ChatGPT, LLMs are normally trained on, on, you know, the, on human language. This is a, a language model, but it's trained on, on DNA, the language of life. And there's only one human genome in the training set. It's mostly other species. And even though it's only seen one human genome, it's state of the art at predicting the pathogenicity of human genome mutations. And so, you know, a famous mutation is the BRCA mutation for breast cancer. Like, it's state of the art at predicting the, the pathogenicity, the harmfulness of, uh, of BRCA mutations. Again, it only saw one human-

   22. DFDavid Friedberg1:04:54

       Despite never having seen one in humans.

   23. JCJohn Collison1:04:56

       It's, it's only seen one human genome and that human, you know, did not have, uh, these pathogenic mutations. And so it's, it's kind of learning something deep across the tree of life and I don't know, I find that pretty cool.

   24. DSDavid Sacks1:05:06

       And sorry, is there a phenotypic data set that's used in training? So I think, like, you know-

   25. JCJohn Collison1:05:11

       Nope, totally unsupervised.

   26. DSDavid Sacks1:05:13

       ... when you're typically... Right. And so when you're building models in typical, like, genotype by phenotype models, you're trying to look at the phenotype, the physical characteristics of-

   27. JCJohn Collison1:05:23

       Yes.

   28. DSDavid Sacks1:05:23

       ... the organism. What can it do?

   29. JCJohn Collison1:05:25

       Yep.

   30. DSDavid Sacks1:05:25

       What does it look like? What are the features? And then you look at the genome and so that tells you, hey, these are the specific genes or alterations or mutations that drove this particular phenotype is kind of what the model tries to learn over time with the objective being, hey, can I ask it to define a genotype or a genome based on a phenotype, based on a physical set of characteristics I'm looking for or vice versa? Maybe you can just help us understand what, what is it trained on and how, you know, how did that kind of-

Episode duration: 1:45:40