Trump verdict, COVID Cover-up, Crypto Corner, Salesforce drops 20%, AI correction?

Jason Calacanis 0:00 All right, everybody. As you know, there was a big verdict that came out today in the Trump trial in New York City. However, it came right after we were taping. So enjoy this episode, and then at the end, we'll go around the horn and get quick reaction from each of the besties on what they think of the Trump guilty verdict in the New York hush money trial. And a little update on the market close and tech stocks tanking in after-hours trading. Stick with us. Man, whew, what a week I've had.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:32 Oh, you have an intro? Oh, I smell an intro. (laughs)

David Sacks 0:35 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:35 Tell us, J Pal, what was your week like?

David Sacks 0:36 What kind of weekend you had?

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:37 What kind of weekend you had?

Jason Calacanis 0:38 Uh, incredible. You know, I got, uh... Yeah, you know, I've always been a fan of Howard Stern. And, uh, his agent, Don Buchwald, called me. He saw the show last week. This is all true. And, uh, they said they want to start a production company, so I started a production company and I've already got my first show. I'm starting my first show, the pilot.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:56 What is the show?

Jason Calacanis 0:57 Well, here it is. Let me show you. Thanks for asking.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:59 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:01 What you are witnessing is real.

David Sacks 1:03 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:05 The besties are not actors.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:07 Woo!

Jason Calacanis 1:07 The cases are real.

David Sacks 1:09 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:09 Both parties have agreed to settle their dispute here-

David Sacks 1:13 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:13 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:13 ... in our forum, a J Pal production, the Rain Man's Court.

David Sacks 1:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:18 Yeah, it's lawfare. On today's show, Chamath guilty of first-degree unbuttoning?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:24 (laughs)

David Sacks 1:25 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:26 Friedberg accused of plastic perjury?

David Sacks 1:28 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:29 Jason appealing his grifting conviction?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:32 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:32 Throw in the book at Thelonious Fauci.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:35 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:36 Welcome to the stand, Judge David Sacks.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:39 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:39 Hot water burn, baby.

David Sacks 1:40 Nice.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:40 That's really good.

Jason Calacanis 1:41 It's the first show from J Pal Productions.

David Sacks 1:43 If I'm the judge, then what does that make you? Are you like the bailiff, like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:46 He's the bailiff.

Jason Calacanis 1:46 Yeah, I'm kind of like the host. You know, like how you-

David Sacks 1:48 Oh, okay.

Jason Calacanis 1:48 Who's this guy-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:49 He's the punch-up guy.

Jason Calacanis 1:50 ... who does American Idol?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:52 Ryan Seacrest.

Jason Calacanis 1:53 Oh, Ryan Seacrest. I'm like gonna be the new Ryan Seacrest. That's what they envision for me, and that's my first spinoff show. So here we go.

David Sacks 2:00 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:00 Let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sacks. And I said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, guys.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:11 West Side Queen of Quinoa. There's

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:16 a lot of news. My inbox is blowing up. I went over to Threads to see what was going on over there and I got absolutely savaged. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:23 Threads is like all the hall monitors left to one school. Like, if they took the four hall monitors from every school in the country and put them all in one place, that's Threads.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:32 What is Threads? (laughs) That's Threads.

Jason Calacanis 2:33 Threads is like, uh, Zuckerberg's Twitter revenge, killer, that he created. But all the journalists and woke folks went there. And then all the conspiracy theorists took over X and Twitter and, like, freedom of speech in one place and then the hall monitors in the other. But, my lord, the inbound I'm getting, Sacks, on... Uh, apparently you're having a party this Thursday and, uh, a couple of people are coming, a soiree you're having.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:58 Well, it's my birthday. It's my birthday party.

Jason Calacanis 2:59 Oh, yeah. Okay, so there's a little soiree happening. Sacks, enlighten the audience, uh, what are you up to?

David Sacks 3:06 We're hosting an event for President Trump.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:09 (slurps) Oh.

David Sacks 3:10 (laughs) Did you just spit take-

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:12 I'm sorry. What did you say? (laughs) You just spit all your water out. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 3:16 What?

David Sacks 3:17 Yeah, we're, we're hosting an event for the once, once and future president.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:21 Who's we?

David Sacks 3:22 45 and... 45 with soon to be 47.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:25 Who's we?

David Sacks 3:25 As I saw from your own polling data that you tweeted this morning, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 3:28 Oh, God, it's so dark. It's so dark. He's, I mean, the betting markets are just... Basically, they, they seem to have already made their decision. The betting markets, right? And the betting markets, they're not always right, but they were wrong actually about Hillary and Trump, so who knows?

David Sacks 3:43 And poll- polling historically has underestimated Trump's support because people have been reluctant to say they're supporting him for some reason. So, yeah, things are looking very positive for, for Trump right now. But in any event, we're hosting a, a fundraiser for him.

Jason Calacanis 3:58 Oh, wow.

David Sacks 3:58 And, um, he said that he wants to come on the All In pod at some point, so we just need to schedule that.

Jason Calacanis 4:04 All right.

David Sacks 4:04 And by the way, we did this for... Let's not forget, we did this for RFK Jr.

Jason Calacanis 4:10 Yeah.

David Sacks 4:10 He appeared on the pod. We did a fundraiser for him. We did it for Vivek Ramaswamy.

Jason Calacanis 4:14 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 4:14 Came on the pod, we did a fundraiser for him.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:16 We did it for Dean Phillips.

David Sacks 4:18 Yeah, that's right.

Jason Calacanis 4:19 Uh, Chris Christie came on.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:20 And, and Chris Christie came on, although I don't think we technically did a fundraiser, but we would have.

Jason Calacanis 4:25 Hmm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:26 And we've asked President Biden and we have not heard back.

Jason Calacanis 4:29 And, and when we say we-

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:29 So, sorry, let, let, sorry, let me just-

Jason Calacanis 4:31 Yeah, let's ask.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:32 Let me just parse that out.

David Sacks 4:32 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 4:32 So first of all, who's we? And Chamath, would you host a fundraiser for Biden as well as Trump? Absolutely. Look, here's the thing. I am an apolitical person who has to make a difficult decision every four years. And I think most of us are like that. I don't think it's so easy to wake up in the morning and say, "Oh, I'm clearly a Republican," or, "I'm clearly a Democrat." There's parts of both sides that appeal to me. And so you have to make these reasoned decisions. And then that gets even more complicated, right? So the most important thing for me is get as many people on in a position to tell their version of the truth so that you can see an unfiltered version of that truth and decide for yourself. So I was really blown away when I heard Dean Phillips and Bobby, and I thought, there's parts of both of those platforms that I agree with, there's parts that I disagree. And the same thing happened when I sat down with Vivek. I thought that I wouldn't agree with much, I ended up agreeing with a lot. There's a lot of stuff that Trump, in hindsight, again, as I've said before, that he did which was really helpful to America. And one big thing, which had he done, frankly sets up our children, which is these 100-year bonds and defraying the cost of all of this indebtedness far out into the future. So there's many things. And I think there's things that Biden has done that I think we'll look back and say those were good things that he did. And then there are things in the future or today that I think that we could disagree with as well. So the point is, I would like this place...... to be a place where impartiality rules, where we can be on all sides of an issue and just decide what makes the most sense after looking at the facts. And I would like, four years from now, every major political candidate for president to look at All-In as the first place. And I think-

Jason Calacanis 6:18 Great. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 6:18 ... if we can earn that trust and have the integrity to allow all sides to tell a fair story, that is going to be a really powerful thing and an artifact to leave behind for people.

Jason Calacanis 6:28 Well, in fact, RFK believes that we shot him out of a cannon is, I think, what he said or something, and that- that we got the sort of candidacy going. Vivek, I think, also kind of debuted here in a major way. To be clear, All-In isn't hosting the fundraiser, Sax. You and Chamath are. I'm not donating. I'm not going. Friedberg, you're not donating. I don't know if you're going or not. I think you told me you're not go- you're not donating or going. Got it. Okay, you waved us down. Um, and so-

David Sacks 6:55 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 6:55 ... I don't know if that-

David Sacks 6:55 No, look, donating to a political candidate is an, uh, individual choice that each person's going to have to decide if they wanna do it.

Jason Calacanis 7:01 Right.

David Sacks 7:01 Um-

Jason Calacanis 7:01 As Americans, we can do that.

David Sacks 7:03 Yeah, if you're willing to open your pocketbook, which I know, Jason, is not something that you're inclined to do very often.

Jason Calacanis 7:07 No, I mean, I- I- I don't-

David Sacks 7:09 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 7:09 I'm not, like, big into politics and the idea of giving money to politicians, to me, not my thing. You know, I have- I'd rather invest in the next startup-

David Sacks 7:17 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 7:17 ... to be totally honest. If- if I'm gonna put 50K towards something or, God forbid, 250K, for me, I'll put that in a startup. That's what I like to do. But, you know, uh- uh, everybody's different and, you know, for the people who are asking me to not be friends with Sax anymore, I'm gonna be friends with Sax forever.

David Sacks 7:31 Oh.

Jason Calacanis 7:31 We- we love each other.

David Sacks 7:32 Thanks.

Jason Calacanis 7:32 We're besties. And he can have a different opinion than me. I- I'm getting, uh-

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:36 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 7:36 ... absolutely crucified that I'm supporting Trump and how could I be friends with Sax. Go (beep) yourself. Sax is my friend. We have a difference of opinion on some topics-

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:45 Good for you, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 7:45 ... deal with it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:46 That is the- the- good for you.

Jason Calacanis 7:46 And maybe you can learn something from it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 7:48 Sorry, good for you. Sorry, I'll just say, I've heard the same thing and I told friends and others that have reached out, "Why are you associating yourself with people that are doing a fundraiser for Trump?" And I said, "Exactly because I think it's really important that people can have different political interests, different points of view, different beliefs, and still be friends and still have a conversation." If we can model that in any way, I think it moves the needle because this whole thing where you only speak with, only hang out with, only talk to, only have dinner with people that you agree with, I think is exactly what got us in the mess that we're in today.

Jason Calacanis 8:24 So well said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:24 People need to have a broader perspective.

Jason Calacanis 8:26 So well said.

Chamath Palihapitiya 8:27 And- and I- and I- I'll support you guys with whatever, in terms of, like, being your friends, I'm not gonna ever judge you guys in terms of what you believe in or choose to do. We've said this before but, you know, in the end, what do you have? You have your family, you have your children, you have your friends, and hopefully you have work that gives you some purpose. And in all of that, if there are random people that are judging you for one thing, they'll eventually judge you for another thing, and that is not a path to any sort of contentment. I've donated to Bobby Kennedy, I've donated to the Democrats massively, and I'll donate to Donald Trump. And if there's an opportunity to, uh, talk to President Biden and really understand where he's at, I donate to him as well.

Jason Calacanis 9:09 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 9:09 And so, the- the point is that I would like to be an organizing principle, and I would like to replace today the places that I don't trust to organize and give unfiltered access to knowledge, and those things are the mainstream media. And so, I'm willing to put my resources behind being that organizing principle, and I think having a broad cross-section of friends who have different political beliefs is actually a useful thing for a lot of these candidates. Because as it turns out, most people are sort of in the middle, and most people in any given election can be persuaded one way or the other. So, the most important thing that we could do is get all of them, give all of them an opportunity to really tell an unfiltered version of their truth and then let the chips fall where they may. That is the right thing to do for America. That's what democracy means. So this kind of, like, cajoling and bullying in either side I find really distasteful and I find very immature.

Jason Calacanis 10:06 Y- yeah, it's not gonna work.

David Sacks 10:08 What's amazing is, I mean, I really haven't gotten any blowback. You know, there was a question about, people asking me, "Have you gotten blowback from this thing?" And no, not really. I mean, other than the reporter knocking on my door and that kind of stuff, but people really-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:21 Same.

David Sacks 10:22 It hasn't really created blowback, and I think you guys are getting more blowback, and that's an indication of just sort of the cowardly response to it, which is, you know, it's like a cancellation tactic. "We're gonna try and, like-"

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:35 Yes.

David Sacks 10:35 "... go behind your back and ostracize you instead of even telling you to your face what you think." And I think the reason why they're doing that is because, quite frankly, there's a lot of preference falsification going on in Silicon Valley. I know there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who, A-

Chamath Palihapitiya 10:49 Well, we know because of- we know who's coming.

David Sacks 10:53 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 10:53 (laughs) Yeah, you have a list of people who are donating. I mean-

David Sacks 10:55 Yeah. I mean, look, nobody is excited about Biden, okay? Nobody's excited about Biden right now. So, the only question is do they hold their nose and vote for him or do they vote for Trump or do they vote for Bobby Kennedy? But there's a lot of people who I do think support Trump. And look, we've A/B tested this, right? It'd be different if we didn't have four years of Biden and four years of Trump. There's a lot of people who can look back and say that the A/B test we ran indicates Trump. So, I know there's gonna be a lot of people who support Trump, but they don't wanna admit it. And I think that-

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:26 Yeah, then we have this-

David Sacks 11:27 ... this event is gonna break the ice on that, and maybe it'll create a preference cascade where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth-

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:36 And-

David Sacks 11:36 ... which is a lot of people support Trump. And- and-

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:38 And-

David Sacks 11:38 ... it's not just this. It's also Steve Schwarzman came out. I think Bill Ackman's on the edge of coming out for Trump. So, there's a lot of people who are now, like, flipping, and I think it could really start to cascade on itself.

Chamath Palihapitiya 11:50 I think the thing that hasn't happened yet is we haven't actually now started to talk about the contours of a handful of policy things where there is some deep diversion now.... where these candidates are diverging from each other, and I think that that's going to be really interesting to see how much people value that differentiation. I'll give you an example, which is President Trump in the last few weeks has become incredibly pro-crypto. Now, the contours of that, I think we need to define, right? But the question is, is a pro-crypto environment, especially in a world where we think that there's just going to be continued dollar debasement, an important issue, an unimportant issue, or a thing that is a small issue today, but that will be critical for us in 20 and 30 years to get right? That's an example. And there's a handful of these other things that I think that now we have a chance to really double click on, where there really is some differentiation amongst the three presidential candidates, and I think that's healthy as well. And so it's important, again, get their specific thoughts on the record so that we can really figure this out. And I think that over these next few months, I think it's gonna be important to do that. So, I hope President Biden also comes on the pod, quite honestly, and-

Jason Calacanis 13:07 Come on the pod.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:07 ... allows us to ask him the hard questions, and I hope Bobby comes back on actually, and I think Bobby will if we ask him, just to tighten up where he's at now a few months before.

Jason Calacanis 13:18 Yeah, there's definitely a lot of great follow-up questions. I would love to interview Trump. I'll ask him hard questions. I'll respect him as president 45 and as a candidate. So, for people who like, are like, "You have Trump derangement syndrome," like that's just, like, a, a childish thing to say. I, I disagree with his policies. I'll ask him questions. "Hey, why don't you support EVs?" Like, that's a valid question to ask him. Why is he anti-EV? He said all these crazy things about EVs and then apparently he's courting Elon privately. I don't know if that's true or not, but you know, there's, there's hard questions and I'm sure he'll answer them and he's more than capable of doing it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:49 I'm excited.

Jason Calacanis 13:49 I think for me-

Chamath Palihapitiya 13:50 I'm really, I'm really excited for President Trump to come on the podcast. Gonna be great.

Jason Calacanis 13:53 I'd love to have him on. And for me, I'll be totally honest, I think the Democrats have to wake up for a second and just, like, take the temperature of the room, like read the room, Democrats. You have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border and some other issues are not, you know, in sync with the majority of the country. At some point, the Democrats just have to take a deep look in the mirror, James Carville is doing it, a bunch of 'em are doing it, and say, "We fielded a bad candidate who's too old and people don't believe will stand up to scrutiny of, like, say, being on the all-in pod for two hours or in the debates or with a hostile interviewer, any of those possibilities." And so, I think if that's the case, we really need to have the Democrats think deeply about maybe fielding a different candidate and I believe that's what's gonna happen in the next 30 to 60 days. So I'm predicting-

David Sacks 14:41 You think there's gonna be a switcheroo?

Jason Calacanis 14:43 100%.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:44 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 14:44 I mean, if you just look at the polls-

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:45 Do you really think there's a switcheroo?

Jason Calacanis 14:46 ... 100% there'll be a switcheroo.

Chamath Palihapitiya 14:48 Who's the switcheroo?

Jason Calacanis 14:49 I have no idea. Could be Gavin, it could be anybody. Anything's possible. I think Trump's gonna demolish him in a, the debate. I think he'll sink to 30% in the, in the polls, and then the Republicans are gonna find a, I'm sorry, the Democrats will find a way to give him a graceful out and then they'll field somebody else.

Chamath Palihapitiya 15:04 When's the first debate?

Jason Calacanis 15:06 June 17th.

David Sacks 15:07 Can I respond to that, Jason? I saw your tweet basically saying something very similar, that Democrats need to wake up and, you know, recognize the situation they're in. I think this is a case of once you've made your bed, you have to sleep in it. Look, the Democrats have set the table pursuing certain policies for the last three and a half years. We've had an open border, we had so much spending that it fed into this inflation, which jacked up interest rates. We had Ukraine become the central obsession and focus of our politics, which blew up in Biden's face with the whole summer counteroffensive. I mean, I could go on. You have the hostility to crypto, which they're now trying to desperately backpedal on, but you had three years of Elizabeth Warren and Gensler basically making crypto the enemy, and now all of a sudden we're at first and goal, we're at the, like, 10-yard line and you're all of a sudden saying, "Well, just read the room and make all these changes." You can't. You know, I don't think people are gonna be fooled by that. We've A/B tested this thing. We've had three and a half years of Biden, four years of Trump. Who do you like better? And we're, what, how many months are we from pulling the, the lever? Five months?

Jason Calacanis 16:16 Never too late. (laughs) I, I'm telling them to do it.

David Sacks 16:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 16:19 Don't take Sachs' advice. He is a hardcore partisan-

David Sacks 16:22 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 16:22 ... who wants to win desperately. Take J. Kyle's advice. Field another candidate. The worst thing the Republicans could ever deal with is a great candidate who can speak and who's nimble on their feet, because I think people are looking for a choice that's not these two individuals. I'm not gonna say I'm anti-Trump, I'm not gonna say I'm anti-Biden.

David Sacks 16:39 Why don't you support Bobby Kennedy, then?

Jason Calacanis 16:41 I don't think he's gonna have the platform behind him to get enough votes. I think the Democrats need to immediately, this month, in June, do the switcheroo. And if they do, I think they win in a landslide. But anyway-

David Sacks 16:52 They had their chance, they had their chance.

Jason Calacanis 16:53 N- Never too late. They can change anytime.

David Sacks 16:53 They could have gone for Bobby, hold on, they, they drove Bobby out of the party.

Jason Calacanis 16:57 That's not their only chance.

David Sacks 16:59 He didn't start as an in- he didn't start as an independent. He started as-

Jason Calacanis 17:01 I know by his last name that he's a Democrat.

David Sacks 17:02 ... a Democrat, a Kennedy Democrat.

Jason Calacanis 17:04 Got it from the name.

David Sacks 17:04 You had Dean Phillips.

Jason Calacanis 17:05 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:05 Dean Phillips took the chance.

Jason Calacanis 17:07 Yeah.

David Sacks 17:07 And of course he was pushed out, not out of the party, but basically ostracized. They had their chance.

Jason Calacanis 17:13 I think, you know, if I want to be a strategist, this is just a conspiracy theory, I don't want to go to, like, tinfoil hat corner. I think the Democrats, as cynical as this sounds, were waiting to see what happens with this Trump trial's conviction, what you call lawfare, what other people call fair use of the law. And then they are gonna see how he does in the debates. That's why they moved the debate up from June. And I think they know to pull the plug on this if it gets too far gone, and they have the ability to do that because all he's got to say is, "You know what? Uh, I, I'm feeling old and I want us to win and I'm gonna slot somebody else in, but listen, let's go get to this huge job we have today."

David Sacks 17:48 Yeah, I mean, let me translate what you just said, which is the Democrats hope to put Trump in jail using lawfare, and when that fails, they realize that they're gonna lose the election to him and they've got a big problem, so they're gonna try some desperate strategy to find a new candidate, but it's way too late for that.

Jason Calacanis 18:01 I think precisely.

David Sacks 18:03 (laughs) Okay, we agree.

Jason Calacanis 18:05 (laughs) Okay. Thank you for repeating back to me.

David Sacks 18:06 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 18:06 And I, I think the only disagreement we might have there is, I would agree, like, there's lawfare in two of the cases, and I think two of the cases, I think, are, are ... should be pursued. But you know, we can... Uh, intelligent people, as we said at the start of this, can agree to disagree about it. And I think you should all take, if you're a listener to this podcast, you're smart. If you're here, you're smart. You're not listening to two-hour podcasts with us going this deep on issues if you're not a brilliant, smart, and attractive individual. So let's get to the docket and-

David Sacks 18:34 Present.

Jason Calacanis 18:35 Yes, that's what I just said. (laughs) He heard "brilliant and attractive" and he's here.

David Sacks 18:39 Present.

Jason Calacanis 18:40 All right, listen. I, I hate to go into another, um, controversial topic, but the four of us were all on fire about this. Apparently, the, uh, COVID-19 investigation is leaning towards a massive cover-up. There's a sub-committee going on right now. The world's not paying attention to this, but I think some savvy people are, especially over o- on X. There's a lot of great journalists who are doing incredible investigative work. Let me just catch everybody up in the audience real quick here and get the best seats involved. Over the past year and a half, a House sub-committee, uh, has been focused on the origins of COVID-19, and they've been investigating the NIH's ties with gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The sub-committee was painted early on as, like, "This is angry Republicans. This is about mask mandates." It was, like, highly politicized. But it's actually turned out to be very effective, bipartisan investigation. We'll get on, we'll get in on that in, in a minute. But so far, most of the investigation is focused on nailing down this timeline of communication between NIH officials and an organization called EcoHealth Alliance. This is a nonprofit that's focused on infectious disease research. Now, these, uh, committee videos are online. We'll play y- play you one in a moment. But through funding in the NIH, the, uh, EcoHealth organization was awarded research grants to various labs. This included the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the, the infamous one. EcoHealth violated terms of its grants by failing to report that gain-of-function experiments were being conducted in Wuhan. EcoHealth was supposed to report any experiment that exhibited characteristics leading to it being 10 times more infectious. But when that happened, it failed to disclose this research to the NIH. And on May 17th, a deputy director of the NIH acknowledged that the agency funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan via EcoHealth. This is the key, because Fauci initially denied this. During his 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci said, quote, "I totally resent the lie you are now propagating," in response to a question from Rand Paul about the lab leak theory. So Fauchi either didn't know or he lied under oath. Let me pause there for a second. There's a lot more to the story. But when you hear this sort of set-up, Friedberg, our sultan of science, in this, uh, initial setup, what rings, uh, concerning to you, true to you? And then we'll go on and we'll play some clips of this testimony, which is pretty wild.

David Friedberg 21:01 I don't think that pre-the emergence of the pandemic, that there was nefarious motives.

Jason Calacanis 21:09 In other words, their funding of this was not done to create a pandemic. It might've been a mistake in hindsight, but ...

David Friedberg 21:16 Yeah, for, for many years, particularly following the original SARS pandemic, there was a lot of conversations around, "How do we get in front of the next pandemic? How do we figure out what's coming, and how do we prepare for it?" And there was a lot of research that was launched to try and resolve that key question. This is like the movie 12 Monkeys. You guys ever see that movie?

Jason Calacanis 21:38 Oh, it's a fil-

David Friedberg 21:38 I think at one point. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 21:39 Yeah. Sure.

David Friedberg 21:40 It's like, does the effort to try and stop the problem cause the problem? I think that's for ... From my point of view, there's a very high probability that there was some leak that meant that the work that was going on to try and get in front of the next pandemic and understand what we could do to prepare ourselves, and what vaccines could be developed and so on, actually led to the pandemic. So then when that happens, how do you respond when you're sitting in that seat? That's, that's the key question that I think this committee-

Jason Calacanis 22:08 Hmm.

David Friedberg 22:08 ... is uncovering.

David Sacks 22:09 Do you think there was a cover-up, Friedberg? What is your intuition on that?

David Friedberg 22:12 Yeah, I think that these guys definitely didn't want ... I, I think what they were trying to do was prevent that from being the focal point, and protect their own asses at the same time.

David Sacks 22:20 Do you think they should go to jail?

David Friedberg 22:22 I don't know the extent of it yet. I, it'd be good to get more d- information from this whole thing.

Jason Calacanis 22:26 Yeah, so let me cue up those next details, 'cause it n-

David Friedberg 22:27 I will say, this guy that gave testimony last week, where he was, like, deliberately changing the names of people in the email, "Anderson," and he put the dollar sign?

David Sacks 22:35 Right.

Jason Calacanis 22:35 Yeah.

David Friedberg 22:35 So that you couldn't find that email when you did a FOIA search?

David Sacks 22:38 Right.

David Friedberg 22:38 He knew what he was doing.

Jason Calacanis 22:39 He knew what he was doing.

David Friedberg 22:40 Yes, he-

David Sacks 22:40 I don't understand how you could say this wasn't nefarious. This whole thing was nefarious from top to bottom.

Jason Calacanis 22:47 Well, yeah. Let me cue this up here, Sax, and then get your-

David Sacks 22:48 Why are you exonerating it?

Jason Calacanis 22:50 Hold on, let me cue it up. All right, so we started to see some, uh, consequences and accountability. Last week, the US Department of Health cut all funding to EcoHealth. In response to the committee's investigation, they disbarred its president, Peter Daszak?

David Friedberg 23:03 Daszak, yeah.

Jason Calacanis 23:04 Daszak. And so we don't have direct evidence, to be clear, that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak. (laughs) And, you know, just even saying "the lab leak," you know-

David Sacks 23:13 Yeah, we do.

Jason Calacanis 23:14 ... would've gotten this ...

David Sacks 23:15 The Fear and Cleavage site makes it clear that this was a lab leak.

Jason Calacanis 23:19 Okay.

David Sacks 23:19 That's not a naturally occurring virus. The Fear and Cleavage sites were engineered.

Jason Calacanis 23:25 Let's go to that in just one second. And thankfully, this isn't gonna get our YouTube (laughs) channel shut down, because we have freedom of speech back a little bit. But this is where it gets really interesting. Emails were written as "EcoHealth" with a tilde. That's that little squiggly line, uh, instead of an O. And, uh, they would spell "Anderson," uh, with a dollar sign in the E. Christian Andersen, in this example, is a biologist who was reportedly awarded $9 million in grants from the NIH two months after publishing a paper claiming didn- COVID did not come from a lab. And so let's get to some of these clips. Here's a clip of Fauci's former top advisor, David Morens, getting grilled in the hearing.And I'll play two clips and then I'll give it to you, Sax.

Narrator 24:09 On October 25th, 2021, another scientist wrote, quote, "David is concerned about the privacy of texts and other messages from his cellphone to you and me because he has been using a government phone." This came from Tony." End quote. Sir, did you ever have any conversations with Dr. Fauci regarding using personal phone or email to communicate with Dr. Daszak?

24:30 I don't remember it. It's possible. Uh, uh, you know, I, I probably wouldn't have remembered, and I don't remember it.

24:35 On January 18th, you testified that you did not have any conversations with Dr. Fauci regarding EcoHealth. On October 25th, 2021, you wrote, quote, "Peter, from Tony's numerous recent comments to me, they're trying to protect you." End quote. You meaning EcoHealth and Dr. Daszak. Dr. Morens, did you ever have any conversations with Dr. Fauci regarding EcoHealth?

25:02 Well, the ones you just mentioned, I don't have any recollection of that. I-

25:05 No recollection?

25:06 Hmm? No recollection, no.

Jason Calacanis 25:08 All right, so we're on the no recollection train, and then I'll g- give this final clip here. This is (laughs) unbelievable, Sax. Currently, there's a FOIA later, lady, Freedom of Information Act lady, uh, working at NIH to train and help and mentor people on how to avoid having their communications, these are people who we work, who work for us, and she's the FOIA lady at NIH. Play the clip, Nick.

Narrator 25:35 And as you've said, you previously testified that, uh, you did not delete any federal records. But on February 24th, 2021, you wrote, quote, "I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I'm FOIA'd but before the search starts. So I think we are all safe. Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail." End quote. And the next day, on February 25th, 2021, you wrote, quote, "But I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marge Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs." End quote. Yes or no? Is Marge Moore the FOIA lady you were ref- referring to?

26:11 Uh, she was at the time. I believe she's retired since then.

26:15 Did the NIH FOIA office instruct you on how to delete emails or avoid FOIA?

26:20 No.

Jason Calacanis 26:20 All right, Sax. There's your red meat. Smoking guns everywhere. What do you think?

David Sacks 26:24 Please give me a couple of minutes to kinda lay out what, what happened here. Okay, so Fauci knew very early, as early as February 1st of 2020, that COVID came from a lab leak. The scientists said so. All they had to do was look under a microscope and see the furin cleavage site, which is not naturally occurring. It's something that was added, basically bioengineered to the virus in order to make it more transmissible in humans. So, they knew right away that this somehow came from a lab leak, and Fauci and Collins said in emails that they were gonna begin a brutal take-down, uh, in order to conceal this fundamental truth of the lab leak from the public. Now, why would Fauci need to conceal this? Because he had funded gain-of-function research programs via Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance to conduct, again, gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Moreover, Fauci was personally responsible for reversing an Obama era decision to prohibit gain-of-function research because it was so risky. Fauci wrote op-eds justifying gain-of-function research. He wrote a paper in 2012 which was actually quite candid about the risks of gain of function. He describes the kind of lab leak that could occur and the type of virus that could escape from a, a, a lab because of gain of function, but then he says that it's a risk worth taking. So, this is somebody who funded the Wuhan lab, he funded gain-of-function research, he was personally responsible for lifting the ban on gain-of-function research. He had a lot of reasons to wanna hide the fact that COVID was engineered in a lab and was a lab leak. And so we know that even before this conspiracy to basically defraud the FOIA request, that Fauci had done things like organize that letter to The Lancet which smeared and demonized scientists who were trying to tell the truth, saying that the so-called zoological theory was nonsense, this had to be from a lab. He was doing things like this, and now we have this added piece which is this longtime colleague of Fauci and Collins at NIH, Dr. David Morens, developed a strategy for evading FOIA requests that would expose the truth. He did this by deleting government emails, which is a crime, by using private email to conduct government business, which is also a crime, and then strategically misspelling names and titles to frustrate the FOIA searches. And then (laughs) the craziest part is that Morens foolishly detailed his schemes in emails-

Jason Calacanis 28:59 (laughs)

David Sacks 28:59 ... that Fauci would've seen, that Fauci was on the distribution list of. So, he has no plausible deniability.

Jason Calacanis 29:04 It's literally, like, they're like, "Here's how we can avoid getting caught," in an email. (laughs)

David Sacks 29:09 You have to see the FOIA piece, uh, within the overall picture here, which is-

Jason Calacanis 29:14 Yeah.

David Sacks 29:15 ... Fauci, from the get-go, was lying about the origins of COVID in order to cover up his role-

Jason Calacanis 29:24 In funding it.

David Sacks 29:25 ... in funding this type of research.

Jason Calacanis 29:26 Yes.

David Sacks 29:26 And there was a comprehensive effort by people at NIH, likely at Fauci's direction, to, again, not just cover this up but to smear scientists who were telling us the truth.

Jason Calacanis 29:37 Yes, they went on the offensive in addition-

David Sacks 29:39 And this became the basis-

Jason Calacanis 29:39 ... to trying to cover their, their asses, yeah.

David Sacks 29:42 Yeah. People like Jay Bhattacharya, who then got-

Jason Calacanis 29:44 Got banned on Twitter.

David Sacks 29:44 ... censored and banned on social media.

Jason Calacanis 29:47 And, and by the way, who is a Stanford professor?

David Sacks 29:50 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 29:50 Was banned for speaking up. Chamath, let's zoom out here and, and start thinking strategy and theories of what's going on here. And I have my own, but I'm curious to hear yours first as we go around the horn here. What, what's your take on this?

Narrator 30:02 I would like to make four points, I think, that kind of summarize my view of this. I think what happened here needs a really c-

Chamath Palihapitiya 30:11 ... clear accounting because the implications are far greater than I think people realize. And I think why maybe the four of us have, have always been tugging on this little thread is because each of us instinctively understood that. So the first is, if you just look at the macroeconomic consequences of what COVID did and our reaction, we broke the seal of having absolutely no accountability on massive spending, right? So there are subsidies, there are kickbacks, there are government programs that now number in the trillions of dollars a year, incremental to what we were going to spend if things were the status quo. And the problem is that, and Friedberg has talked about this really eloquently in the past, it's creating a massive debt issue that us and our children and our grandchildren will have to deal with. If we had responded to this pandemic differently, those issues would not have occurred. If we had just kept the economy open because we understood what was going on, we would not have reacted the way that we did, and we would not have nearly as much debt as we had, and we would not have made it okay for politicians to spend trillions of dollars. That is a direct consequence of our reaction to COVID, not COVID itself. The second is we caused billions of people all around the world to take immaturely tested drugs. They were called vaccines. We found out that they were modestly effective at best, and then some of them were designed in some ways to manipulate our DNA and we just don't know what the long-term impacts will be. We see some small issues of myocarditis. We see other issues of all-cause mortality. But the point is, we just don't know, and that would not have happened had we not rushed to force people to stand in a line and get a jab in order to get back to their normal life. That was a direct consequence, not of COVID, but our reaction. The third is what we're realizing right now, is that we had this power-drunk apparatchik, and this is similar to the quote that Mike Pompeo made. When he took over the CIA, what he found, and he said this after when he left, was there were people on the top floor of the CIA building, the seventh floor of the Pentagon, that fundamentally believed that it wasn't the Democrats nor the Republicans that ran the country, but it was them. And I see a similar level of arrogance here, which is this belief that they know better. And so what they did was they committed the greatest sin, which is where the cover-up is way greater than the crime, and they created a setup where all of these things were amplified by their prestige, their perceived scientific knowledge, but what they were really doing was keeping critical information to themselves and then trying to cover it up, Jason. That is so unacceptable when you think of the broad consequences of what happened, and that's what needs to get documented, and I do think there needs to be some form of accountability for that.

Jason Calacanis 33:19 I think it's well said and, you know, just looking at it, I think we are now at the part, point of this conversation and investigation where you can say this is not a bipartisanship issue, and everybody knew, like, we had these conversations on this very podcast, the public knew, something didn't seem right about this. And if you just think about this from first principles of what occurred here, just what occurred here, Schreiber, we funded gain of research to create these super viruses that, that... what I think other people could just as equally call a bioweapon, with the Chinese. Now, we're supposed to be arch-rivals here, we're like these competitors, and then when it came out and it leaked, and of course I don't think it was released on purpose, when it came out, the people who work for us and we trust with our family's safety, who funded this, in order to save their own reputations, to cover their asses, then lied about it, and then, like as you said, Sax, perfectly, they were on the offensive. These people were not elected by anybody-

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:26 That's right.

Jason Calacanis 34:26 ... these people work for us and they failed us. This is a crime against humanity of the greatest cause. People committed suicide, people died because they had depression, our kids lost two years of school-

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:41 Totally.

Jason Calacanis 34:42 ... this generation has lost their education, and now we have burdened them with billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from this. This is a failure-

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:51 No, trillions, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 34:52 ... trillions.

Chamath Palihapitiya 34:53 Trillions. Trillions. Tens of trillions.

Jason Calacanis 34:54 This is a failure of leadership. It is a crime. And when people said, "Prosecute Fauci," they were like, "You're being hysterical. This is ridiculous." These people need to be prosecuted. If you hid this stuff from a FOIA request, you need to go to jail.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:10 Well, Jason-

Jason Calacanis 35:11 There, there needs to be accountability here-

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:13 I think the-

Jason Calacanis 35:13 ... for what they did to society, our children, and the future. I am infuriated by this.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:18 Imagine what happened in the Situation Room or the equivalent, wherever the President of the United States, all these world leaders were coalescing to try to make decisions in that period, they all looked at this "expert." They pointed at Fauci and said, "Lead us out."

Jason Calacanis 35:35 Yes. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:35 And so, do we not think that at any point he was thinking, "How do I do this in a way where I have no fingerprints?" Clearly the answer is, in fact, he was leading from a position of, "How will I not have any fingerprints on this?" And so-

Jason Calacanis 35:47 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:47 ... do we, did we get the best advice? On the margin, I think it's pretty fair to say we could not have gotten it because he was too conflicted. He was figuring-

Jason Calacanis 35:56 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 35:56 ... out how to cover up what happened as opposed to just own it and then help the world get out of it.

Jason Calacanis 36:02 Yeah. I mean, like talk about, like, incinerating your entire career and legacy, but putting that aside, the morality of covering this up. And, you know, so then you have to think, Chamath-This is why I was like, "What is the strategy? What goes through somebody's mind when they decide to do a cover-up this level? Is it just fear of getting caught and their lives being, in their mind, ruined and they're going to do this incredible cover-up?" I actually think that they thought this would become a globally destabilizing moment between the United States and China, and that there could be revolutions. Now, I know that this is now sounding really conspiracy theory, but if you're sitting there and you're like, "What if the public finds out we created this and their grandparents died from it, and their kids didn't go to school because of it?" There'd be riots in the street. But if enough time passes, maybe there's not riots in the street. Well, you know what? This is something that is just so abhorrent that, I mean, people need to really be held accountable. Freeberg, your thoughts.

David Friedberg 37:02 What would you guys do if you're sitting in a policymaker's seat today and you're being offered by scientists this ability to go and figure out what the next big virus will be and start to make plans for getting in front of it by understanding the biology of these viruses, by seeing where they're going to evolve to, and by trying to get in front of the next pandemic so that we can protect the population? Do you guys support that sort of research and what are the questions you ask? So let's, you know, rewind 15 years. Pretend Fauci doesn't get to make those decisions, you guys are the policymakers and folks say, "SARS just happened. We want to do this research. We want to figure out-"

Jason Calacanis 37:39 Yeah. I mean, Freeberg-

David Friedberg 37:39 "... how to get

David Sacks 37:39 What do you do and how do you, how do you answer that?

Jason Calacanis 37:41 There's a really simple, there's a really simple question. If anybody who's watched any kind of science fiction or knows the history of this kind of research, which is don't do this in a population center and wha- how will you prevent it from breaking out?

David Friedberg 37:53 Right. Right.

Jason Calacanis 37:53 Like literally, that's job one. If you're gonna-

David Friedberg 37:56 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 37:57 Even if you're not going to...

David Sacks 37:59 (laughs)

David Friedberg 37:59 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 37:59 Like literally every science fiction film-

David Friedberg 38:01 It's so true. It's so true.

Jason Calacanis 38:02 ... has this. It's like, put it on an island and there's an island off Long Island where they keep these things.

David Friedberg 38:06 Mm.

Jason Calacanis 38:06 I forgot the name of it. Is it Plum Island or something? We'll look it up.

David Sacks 38:09 Yeah. And by the way, there, there are internal NIH emails that suggest that COVID leaked from a level two facility, they call it BSL-2, which does not operate with the top level biohazard safeguards. So they knew the Wuhan lab was not at the level of safeguards that it should have been. But look, I would go deeper and say that why would you do this kind of research at all? I mean, you are deliberately-

Jason Calacanis 38:34 Right.

David Sacks 38:34 ... manipulating viruses in order to make them transmissible in humans. This was a bat virus that was not transmissible to humans. It was bio-engineered, they add the furin cleavage site to allow it to gain access to human cells.

David Friedberg 38:47 Yeah. So S- Sax, I am gonna push back because that is not conclusively true. What you're saying is something that some people have claimed, but there are other scientists, including papers published recently in The Lancet and other, like, pretty reputable, like, medical journals and research journals that indicate that the evolution seen in the furin clea- cleavage site can be traced back to an evolutionary origin, not necessarily to a human engineered origin. So I want to just make that clear that that is a possibility.

Jason Calacanis 39:14 Okay.

David Friedberg 39:14 I'm not dismissing it, but I'm not supporting the other side. I'm saying we have work to do to figure this out.

Jason Calacanis 39:18 Okay.

David Friedberg 39:18 Just to be clear.

David Sacks 39:19 It's a possibility that's so remote. I mean, look, I, I heard Professor Jeffrey Sachs talking about this in a recent interview, and he went through the whole history. He said there's like 200 of these coronaviruses in this, like, class or category, and there's not one furin cleavage site among any of them.

David Friedberg 39:36 Right.

David Sacks 39:36 So can you say that there's not a one in a-

David Friedberg 39:38 Well, so, so, so, so let's go back to my...

David Sacks 39:40 ... billion chance of it happening naturally?

David Friedberg 39:40 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. But so back to your question-

David Sacks 39:42 But it's a very, very, very low probability event.

Jason Calacanis 39:44 But let me punch up your question, Freeberg, because if you-

David Friedberg 39:46 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 39:46 ... if your question is what should you do?

David Friedberg 39:49 I want to ask you guys, what do you do? So like-

Jason Calacanis 39:50 Yeah.

David Friedberg 39:50 ... forget about, oh, there's bad guys. Fauci's a bad guy. Like, what do you do to protect the world against the next pandemic?

David Sacks 39:56 Number one, you don't do this type of gain of function research. Number two, if you are gonna do it, you don't do it at a level two facility like the Wuhan lab. Number three, when the virus leaks from the lab, you don't basically lie about it and conduct a cover-up campaign that smears the reputation of honest scientists. Number four, when you're hauled into the Oval Office in response to this once in a century pandemic, you don't pretend like you're America's doctor and you have all the answers when, in fact, you're the guy who created this problem.

Jason Calacanis 40:29 You own it. There's an idea. You own it. And you know what? Like, the question really em- embedded in, in your question, Freeberg, I think is, is gain of... Is there any argument to doing gain of function? If so, how? And then, is there any reason to research, you know, the bat dung or whatever material they get it from, you know, from those caves and take it out of the caves? I could see the latter, Chamath, of like, hey, this exists in nature, you study it on an island somewhere far away from everybody with massive controls. The gain of function seems like, literally feels like the speech from Jurassic Park. Like...

David Sacks 41:04 I think it's nutty.

Jason Calacanis 41:04 Why would you do this?

David Sacks 41:05 Hold on. When you, when you listen to these people-

Jason Calacanis 41:06 And Jurassic Park took place on an island for a reason.

David Sacks 41:09 There are many scientists who are opposed to gain of function research. They thought it was unduly risky and didn't have-

Jason Calacanis 41:13 Then Obama.

David Sacks 41:14 ... offsetting benefits. And that is exactly why Obama banned it. Very good decision.

Jason Calacanis 41:18 Yeah.

David Sacks 41:19 To me, this whole idea that we need to s- to amplify these viruses in order to find out what would happen if this happened naturally is insane. You didn't have this dilemma-

Jason Calacanis 41:31 It's deranged.

David Sacks 41:31 ... till you created it.

Jason Calacanis 41:32 Yes. I agree.

David Sacks 41:32 This is nutty. This is nuts.

David Friedberg 41:34 It's nuts.

Jason Calacanis 41:35 Go ahead, Chamath.

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:35 There are,

Chamath Palihapitiya 41:36 there are examples we know. I'll just point to two. Let's just say the attempted overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014. You can go back to Iran-Contra as yet another example. And you can add gain of function research now, which is, again, I'll just go back to when there are these lifelong bureaucrats that believe they're above the law, that there's this sensation that they can pull the levers of power silently behind the scenes because they know better. And then what they're doing, as you guys said, is they are controverting the desires of the people. So whether you like President Obama or not, he's duly elected by the people and when he says this isn't allowed, it shouldn't be allowed.And when you instantiate chaos and wars and all of this other stuff, overthrows in all of these other places that then create all these long-tail effects, they're not done with, really, America's support. They're done by a small group of people who think they know better. And I think that we've created that kind of a problem that needs to get fixed. And so I think that there... This has to be an example where you can make them an example, because otherwise, it will keep happening. And there are other parts of the American bureaucracy where people are in charge of very critical and important decisions, and I suspect 99% of them are good, earnest, honest people doing the right thing for America. But it's just the law of large numbers. There will be one or two, and all it takes is one or two who get drunk with that power. And so unless that there's a check and balance on that dynamic, we'll have more issues of this. And as the world gets more sophisticated and we rely more on experts... I hate to say this, guys, but you have to be more skeptical of experts. As much as you think an expert is an expert, you have to fight the tendency of saying, "I'm gonna abdicate all of my intellect onto you, and you decide."

David Sacks 43:36 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 43:37 I think you have to find a way of just gut-checking. And Sachs said this critical thing. If I was the president of the United States in a pandemic, I didn't need the COVID t- to teach me this example. But if I'm trying to solve a very technical and hard engineering problem, what I always do is I bring a cross-section of people in a room. Typically, some of them have to have disagreeing opinions, and I make them intellectually fight it out.

David Sacks 44:04 Yep.

Chamath Palihapitiya 44:04 And my job is to observe. And in that, I apply my judgment. I'm not nearly as smart as them, I'm not nearly technically as trained as them, but that is a process that works. And I'm just questioning, it couldn't have happened here because, as Sachs said, if you basically bury the reputations of the folks that are pushing back, you could never bring them inside the room in the Oval and have a conversation with them and say, "Hey, Jay Bhattacharya, give us the red team version of what you think is happening."

David Sacks 44:31 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 44:32 And that is a real problem.

David Sacks 44:33 Steel man the argument, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 44:33 Steel man the opposite side.

David Sacks 44:35 Let me build on a point Chamath made, which is, I think we have to ask the question, what type of government do we really have? You know, we call ourselves a democracy, but are you a democracy when the elected leaders come and go, and the really powerful bureaucrats running th- the government, running these agencies, stay for decades and decades, and if the president disagrees with their policy, they can just wait them out? Fauci wanted to do gain-of-function research, maybe, by the way, at the behest of DOD, we don't know. Could have been a bioweapon or bio-defense program. There's a lot more to this that we don't even know about yet. In any event, it's clear he was passionately committed to funding gain-of-function research. He just waited for his opportunity and implemented it as well. Victoria Nuland in the State Department, passionately committed to basically bringing Ukraine into NATO and using that to essentially provoke a regime change operation in Russia. Again, she just had to wait for her opportunity to basically keep pushing these policies for decades. These are the people who are really running the- What's the solution then? ... American government.

Chamath Palihapitiya 45:40 How would you change it?

David Sacks 45:41 We have to turn these things over, these organizations, or get rid of them.

Chamath Palihapitiya 45:44 We talk about term limits for politicians. Maybe we actually need term limits for the administrative apparatchik that runs all these critical organizations.

David Sacks 45:52 Right, it's called the deep state, right? You, you ever hear the expression deep state? Sounds con- conspiratorial. It's not. It's just the permanent bureaucracy. We elect a president, but h- but how many people does the president actually appoint? A couple hundred? You know, 99.9% of the people running the government are there permanently. Well, and then I'll just say here, I wanna give a shout-out to the journalists Katherine Eban and... Uh, Katherine Eban and Emily Kopp. I know that people also have no faith in journalists. These are two journalists I think you could have tremendous faith in and who are gonna win Pulitzers because they've been doggedly pursuing this. And you have to wonder why this is not the top story on the news networks and why this isn't the head of, you know, The New York Times or the, or, or The Washington Post. Like, there needs to be much more coverage of what's going on here. I don't understand why this- Well, you wanna know why? ... isn't what we're talk- Because The New York Times- Yeah, because Trump takes every headline, yeah. I don't think it has anything to do with Trump. I think it's got everything to do with the fact that The New York Times was covering for Fauci. Fauci has been there- Oh, yeah. ... Fauci's been there for decades. He is a major source for The New York Times, just like he was a major funder of grant programs, right? So there's a lot of people who have developed a dependency on Fauci. I mean, everyone, again- Free information. You think access journalism is what's going on here. He gave them access- There's no question that The New York Times- ... they were in his... Yeah. ... was covering for this. The New York Times definitely promoted the idea that anyone pushing the lab leak theory was somehow a conspiracy theorist or a nut. And you have to lay on top of all this, Sachs, it's a political environment, right? They were pushing that whole crazy wet market theory and the- Well, the wet market theory- ... pangolin. (laughs) The pangolin. (laughs) The pangolin. Remember the pangolin?

Chamath Palihapitiya 47:26 We needed Jon Stewart to dismantle-

David Sacks 47:28 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 47:28 ... the pangolin theory.

David Sacks 47:30 You know, in relation to that, these wet markets have spread massive viruses and, and, you know, all kinds of things, and they do need to be... There was like a UN report on like, "Hey, we have to upgrade these people-" That's why it was a great cover story. "... have to stop doing live markets." That was a great cover story. I don't know that it was a great cover story. I think it was a logical theory to pursue to the end point of eliminating it, because they... Around Wuhan, there are a lot of these wet markets. It is completely conceivable that a person who was in that lab went to a wet market and it spread via the wet market. This is why we need a full investigation, folks, because all these theories could come together, and there are more cards to turn over, which one of you alluded to. Like, who knows what the, the turn in the river are gonna be here? Like, what did China know? What did our government and China know? Maybe they are making bioweapons. Maybe they're doing even worse stuff that we don't know about. Maybe there's all kinds of rogue programs that are being... That are occurring here. That's why we need to keep digging and digging, the American public.

Jason Calacanis 48:27 ... must hold these people accountable, and they need to tell us who else was involved. Because if Fauci's involved and this guy's involved, there's other people. I want to hear from everybody.

David Sacks 48:38 There's many crazy parts of this, but I think maybe the craziest part of the whole thing is that when the pandemic happens and the elected government of the United States, the president needs to pull in the resources to manage a policy response, who do they pull in? Fauci, the guy who created the problem.

Jason Calacanis 48:54 Yeah.

David Sacks 48:54 It's kinda like when they have Nuland be our chief diplomat in the State Department, and she's fomented the coup in Kiev in 2014. It's again, these, these bureaucrats are doing the exact opposite of what they're supposed to be doing. They're not protecting public health-

Jason Calacanis 49:08 They have to take ownership of this and being honest, yes. Hmm.

David Sacks 49:11 But I think to answer your question, what do we do about it? I think we just gotta clean out the stables here.

Jason Calacanis 49:14 Yeah.

David Sacks 49:15 I think we just gotta disband some of these government departments. Why do we have so many? This whole alphabet soup of three-letter agencies. I think Vivek Ramaswamy had the right idea. Let's just-

Jason Calacanis 49:24 Yeah.

David Sacks 49:24 ... get rid of a bunch of these things. Start over.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:26 Zero-based budget.

Jason Calacanis 49:27 Absolutely.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:27 Zero-based budget the whole government.

Jason Calacanis 49:28 Start over. Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:29 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 49:29 And just go right through each one. Like if, and, and you know what? It should be a bipartisan issue. But there's so much money involved, and this is one of the challenges in a capitalist system is there's so much money, there's so much grift to go around that when something like this happens and there's an opportunity to, I don't know, make a vaccine and, and, and you know, put a couple of billion dollars into this light-speed thing, which was a great idea seemingly, uh, everybody lines up. "Okay, yeah, sure, we'll get involved. We'll take some of that money. Yeah, buy a billion shots from us."

Chamath Palihapitiya 49:56 President Trump is really onto this because he's the one that really coined the term the deep state and went after it. And if you think about the other side, right? The people that are there, it must be very discomforting to hear because a lot of those people are folks that worked hard, tried to go to good schools, get educated, and join an infrastructure to move a country forward 'cause they believe in the country and the values of America.

Jason Calacanis 50:20 Yeah, sounds like a noble, noble mission, right?

Chamath Palihapitiya 50:22 But over long periods of time, most people come and go and then there's a small cohort of folks that sort of end up ossifying and running the top parts of this permanent bureaucracy. And I think Sax is right. They start to observe just the simple principle that all these folks come and go, yet I'm still around. President comes, president goes. Undersecretary comes, undersecretary goes. The secretary of this comes and then they go. And so they start to believe that they're really in charge, and that's where the deep state idea comes from.

Jason Calacanis 50:56 At least we're in a democracy where these hearings are occurring. I just wanna give kudos to, in addition to those two journalists, to the people on this subcommittee who are doing it in a bipartisan way, and they will be, and they're being relentless. I think that's the honorable thing to do. I encourage them and those investigative journalists to be relentless in pursuing-

David Sacks 51:17 And kudos to Rand Paul too. Remember when he-

Jason Calacanis 51:18 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:18 Rand Paul, yeah.

David Sacks 51:19 ... was, he was in the for-

Jason Calacanis 51:20 I mean, profiling courage. People were like, "This guy's a loon."

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:22 Yeah. No, Rand Paul had it right.

David Sacks 51:23 But to, to your point about what does this mean for our democracy, I wanna just bring up the Semafor article where they polled young people and young voters, they despair over US politics. They describe the United States as a dying empire led by bad people.

Jason Calacanis 51:38 I mean-

David Sacks 51:38 After what we've learnt about COVID, and I would argue also the whole background to the Ukraine war-

Jason Calacanis 51:44 They're not wrong.

David Sacks 51:45 Is this, right, exactly. They're not wrong.

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:47 Their intuition is, their intuition is right.

Jason Calacanis 51:49 Yeah, from the mouths of babes. I mean, if bad is, I mean, if they covered this up in the way it's looking like, I would call this behavior not bad, I'd call it evil, because it was premeditated.

Chamath Palihapitiya 51:59 And then look, the point is, we're supposed to have this check and balance from the media. But when the media is complicit because they like to be in those halls of power, that's where, that's where these feelings come from. I think the latest stat that I saw is I think more than 52% of Americans now believe that the mainstream media is untrustworthy. And that's a-

Jason Calacanis 52:18 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:18 ... really terrible place to be, which means you're basically-

Jason Calacanis 52:21 Where do you get truth?

Chamath Palihapitiya 52:21 ... you're consuming something that's just fundamentally not true.

Jason Calacanis 52:24 I mean, burn it down. I mean, that, that's the conclusion any logical person would come to is just burn it down. This, it makes no sense that they would try and cover this up. The right thing for Fauci to do is say, "Hey, listen. We didn't do gain-of-function, you know, under Obama. We did do it here. It's obviously been a mistake. We need to never do it again. And here's the roadmap to make sure that we protect people from the next one. Thank God this one didn't kill children the way it's killing old people." And, uh, by the way, this is gonna crack open. I encourage you all to be vocal about this and to watch on Monday, because Dr. Fauci is scheduled to appear in a hearing for the same subcommittee, and that is going to be explosive, I think.

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:01 W- live streamed on YouTube. We'll put the link in the

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:04 show notes.

Jason Calacanis 53:05 Since we're in the don't trust anybody and have your own sovereignty and we're in libertarian moment, let's go to our crypto correspondent. It's Crypto Corner with Chamath. (laughs) So it's my, it's part of my production company. I'm now doing Crypto Corner with Chamath. That'll be next week's cold open. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:23 (laughs) I thought it would be good to talk about crypto for a couple of reasons. One is because we just had the halving at the end of April when this is-

Jason Calacanis 53:32 Oh, did that happen?

Chamath Palihapitiya 53:33 The halving is where, just for folks that don't know, the way that Bitcoins are created is by solving these complex mathematical algorithms that take a lot of time and energy and, and money. And when you solve it, you get rewarded with some number of Bitcoin. And roughly every four years, that reward gets cut in half. It's called the halving. And this week, I saw somebody who reminded me all of this, and I just wanna give this guy a proper shout-out. So his name is Wences Casares. And Wences, in Silicon Valley, I would say, really was agent zero of Bitcoin. He was the one in 2010 that introduced it to me. I remember he reminded me of this story actually. We were at Warren's Hummus.

David Sacks 54:15 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:15 And he's like, he's Argentinian Gr- he's Argentinian, so I'm gonna try to copy his accent. "Eh, Chamath, uh, you net to buy the Bitcoin." So I heard the story, I fell in love with it. I remember I called my family office, I'm like, "Buy me a million of these things." And he was like, or $1,000,000 worth.And he was like, "Are you crazy?" And I was like, "No, this is just a little appetizer. We'll get to the-"

David Sacks 54:33 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 54:34 "... main, main course." Anyways, he has done a phenomenal job of understanding and proselytizing Bitcoin, and I wanna thank him because he really put me onto this. But he mentioned something to me when I saw him a couple of days ago, which is, "You should really look at the pattern of Bitcoin after a halving." And so I was really curious, and so I had a guy on my team, Quentin, put this together. So Nick, let me just... Let's go to the first page. So why is this interesting? So here's a little Bitcoin price analysis for you guys. So there's been a couple of halving cycles that have happened, and I asked him to go back and look at the price performance one month after a halving, three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and 18 months after a halving. And what you notice is that there are these moments initially where essentially when you go through a Bitcoin halving, people are sort of reassessing what's happening and they're trying to figure it out. That's sort of what I would say is, happens in the first month and roughly what also happens in the first three months. But then within six months to a year and 18 months of these things, there are these crazy price appreciation cycles that happen. So that's what this page shows, which is, you know, 18 months after the first halving, the Bitcoin price returned 45X. After the second halving, it returned almost 28X. And after this third halving, it returned almost an 8X, which is really incredible returns in such a short period of time. If you go to the next page. And so if you, if you graph that, this is what it starts to show, which is what is this price performance after each of these halving cycles. Now why is that interesting? Well, it's interesting because on top of this halving, which theoretically if history is a guide, we should see some price appreciation. Obviously, the other thing that's happened is we've commercialized Bitcoin, and we talked about this sort of as my big prediction for 2024, which is these ETFs are really going to allow Bitcoin to cross the chasm and have its sort of central key moment, right? And so if you apply the averages, and again these are just averages, they're by no means predictions, okay? So I just wanna qualify that. These are just-

David Sacks 56:52 Yeah, this is not financial advice.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:54 This is not financial advice. These are just guesses.

David Sacks 56:56 It's just data.

Chamath Palihapitiya 56:57 We took these and we applied it to the price of Bitcoin. And if you go to the next page, you start to see what could happen if you just take the average of the last few cycles. So 'cause the first cycle was so extreme, and you start to apply-

David Sacks 57:11 Oh, so you're just doing cycle two and three here, to be clear.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:13 Just the averages of cycle two and three, and what you-

David Sacks 57:16 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:16 ... start to see is some really meaningful appreciation. And when I talked to Wences about this, how he explained it, which I, which makes a lot of sense to me, is there are a lot of countries that will never look at Bitcoin credibly, even if they support it. The US may be one of those. But there is an increasing body of countries that will become dual currency, and they will look at their local currency, and then they will look at Bitcoin, and they will say-

David Sacks 57:45 Hm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 57:45 ... "Both of these two things are needed. One, when you're transacting on a daily basis for random goods and services, and two, when you need to buy a permanent asset that needs to have residual value, you'll use something like BTC." And I think that's a very powerful concept. And if you look at what this price chart could indicate is that if this thing starts to get to these levels of appreciation, it is going-

David Sacks 58:11 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:11 ... to completely replace gold and start to become something that has transactional utility for hard assets. And I think if you marry that with this worry that some folks have about dollar debasement, you start to see some really interesting opportunities. So I just thought that this was a interesting thing that he, that he... Here's our disclaimer. Interesting thing-

David Sacks 58:32 Yeah, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:32 ... that he put me on. I thought I'd share that with you. I'll publish this on Twitter, but that's your crypto corner for the year, folks.

David Sacks 58:38 I think it's really interesting how the crypto community is getting organized into, uh, basically a lobby to advocate for its interests because they've been so-

Chamath Palihapitiya 58:46 It's the biggest lobby in America. Did you know that?

David Sacks 58:48 Yeah, they've been so targeted over the last few years because Gensler and Warren have been on a crusade to basically make crypto illegal or drive it offshore. Well, every action has a equal and opposite reaction. And now the crypto people have basically had a political awakening and realized they have to get involved in the political system.

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:08 Yeah.

David Sacks 59:08 Just as a matter of defense, self-defense. And- Shout out SBF. So they're getting- He's, he was a pioneer. Well, not like that. I mean, that guy was a crook. No, I mean, he was dropping money on everybody, yeah. Remember Colin? But he was-

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:19 Did you guys hear this, did you hear this rumor that-

David Sacks 59:21 He was doing that, uh, uh, to basically push for regulatory capture. Remember? Yeah. I think it's-

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:26 Did you guys hear this?

David Sacks 59:26 This is different.

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:27 I think it's a nuanced point.

David Sacks 59:27 Yeah, I agree. It's a nuanced point.

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:28 Did you guys hear this rumor... Did you guys hear this rumor that SBF was gonna put a billion dollars into the election and convince Tom Brady to run as a Republican?

David Sacks 59:36 And give... No. Give the billion to Trump.

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:38 Oh, sorry. Give the billion to Trump.

David Sacks 59:39 He was gonna give Trump a billion to not run.

Chamath Palihapitiya 59:42 Okay.

David Sacks 59:43 And, and then get Tom Brady to run. I mean, this person had delusions of grandeur. He thought he was a Jedi knight, uh, and he's like literally in Jabba's Palace right now. I don't know what this... I mean, what a lunatic he was. I mean, talk about delusions of grandeur, Sax. This guy thought he would just drop a billion dollars and convince somebody not to run for government. I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna get a regulatory... You know, back to the young people we talked about in the previous story. I think the reason they're attracted to crypto is because it doesn't have government control, and since if you don't trust the government and you see the government over and over and over again cover things up or the grift or make decisions that are not in your generation's best interest, why wouldn't you opt out of their financial system? And you know what? There's a lot of them, and they have... They're getting organized. To your point, Sax, I think we're gonna have a crypto framework, and-

Jason Calacanis 1:00:33 It's worth probably five points in this election. What do you think, Sacks? How many points is being the pro-crypto candidate worth in this election? One, two, three points of votes? Four points? It's, it's gotta be something.

1:00:44 That's hard to-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:44 If young people show up, it'll be, it'll be, it could be 500 basis points. I mean, young people do not show up to vote because there isn't an issue that they care about.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:52 Correct.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:00:52 But there's 50 million Americans that own crypto. 50. Five, zero.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:57 Okay, so if 10% of them are, like let's say that's their single issue-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:01 No, JCALK. No, J-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:01 ... that's five million votes.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:02 No, no, no. There's a, there's a plausible case where 40 million of those folks show up because you're talking about a structural part of their wealth creation, right? So for example, like, you know, Biden, President Biden talked about giving people a head start by eliminating their debt. That's a narrow issue and the reason it's a narrow issue, there's just as many people that don't have debt and just as many people that paid off their debt and it creates a lot of haves and have-nots, right?

Jason Calacanis 1:01:28 Hm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:28 And there's all these rules around who will get the debt relief, et cetera. You end up touching four or five million people maximum. But if there are 50 million people who have now decided to have at least a hedge against the establishment and the traditional financial system, and you are threatening to take that wealth away-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:50 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:01:50 ... I could see how 80% of those folks show up to the ballot box and say, "All right, which one of you will just leave me alone?" And if the answer is President Trump, then they're all gonna vote for President Trump.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:59 I think this is, like, such a great issue for, uh, political candidates to embrace and it's just such a simple framework, I've said it a dozen times. Create a sophisticated investor test, let a thousand flowers bloom, people can make whatever crypto projects they want. But to buy it, you just have to take a simple test, like a driver's license, so that you don't risk your entire net worth or whatever. If you do, you're an informed buyer of crypto. Just make a sophisticated investor test and let's move on. Chamath, just since we're in Crypto Corner, before we leave Crypto Corner, when is my Ape gonna be worth money again?

1:02:31 (laughs)

1:02:32 When will my Ape go back up?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:02:33 Never.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:34 Oh, so my Ape's not coming back. Okay, so I guess I shouldn't have done that. All right, the-

1:02:39 Wait, how's, how's, uh, Sacks' coin doing? We had Sacks' coin and we had, um-

1:02:43 Oh, gosh.

1:02:44 ... was it JCALK coin?

1:02:44 My coin went crazy, but that was a pump and dump scheme that we had nothing to do with. I will never sell you a coin until I do. I just wanna let everybody know that.

1:02:53 (laughs)

1:02:53 If you get a DM from me, I am not selling J coin until you hear it first. I would literally do an angel investing coin immediately if there was a framework for it. It would be the greatest idea ever to have, like, a J coin and I could just, like, put it into startups and then people could buy and sell it. It'd be like this ongoing evergreen venture. Where's my J DAO? I, I-

1:03:15 Well...

1:03:15 ... I love DAOs-

1:03:16 ... yeah.

1:03:16 ... and I love, I love the idea of a, of an angel investing coin, but man, a startup coin would be brilliant.

1:03:22 Yeah, the Jason coin is basically at zero. It, man, it, it was worth-

1:03:26 The S- the Sacks' coin-

1:03:27 ... like a billion dollars.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:03:27 It's down to eight grand.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:28 Yeah.

1:03:29 $8,000 US dollars.

1:03:29 To be clear, I didn't have anything to do with Sacks' coin either, but I was more amused by it than anything else.

1:03:33 Yeah, well my friend-

1:03:34 Um-

1:03:34 ... decided to (laughs) tell everybody he was gonna buy some and then straight to the moon. (imitates space ship) (laughs)

1:03:41 Yeah, moon.

1:03:41 It was pretty funny. Uh, I, it's hilarious. I have some, uh, I've only, we've only bought crypto twice. We have some Doge, uh, which I bought during, like, the, our, our Doge phase a couple years ago. And then, uh, my wife recently bought Bitcoin, you know, at a very low price when everybody was talking about it around Thanksgiving. And, uh, my, my, her Bitcoin went phenomenal and my Doge is at breakeven now, so I've spent two years just on the pendulum. But who knows? Maybe Doge will become a thing again. I love Doge.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:15 All right, we have a bellwether of sorts here. Salesforce dropped more than 20% after reporting earnings. We should talk about the state of SaaS, software as a service, if you're not in the industry. Salesforce had its worst day in the markets, uh, in nearly 20 years on Thursday, and that's when we taped this. They lost about $40 billion in market cap, or as we say in the industry, two figmas. On Wednesday, Salesforce missed Q1 revenue estimates for the first time since 2006. Revenue was up, 9.1 billion, 11% year over year, but about 40 million below Wall Street expectations. So they're doing great, but Wall Street is concerned for a reason. We'll get into what that is. Net income was 1.5 billion, 7x year over year because they've been doing a lot of cuts over there. Free cash flow was six billion, up 43%. Profits are up huge because r- if you remember, those activist investors came in and, uh, had Benioff really revamp the structure of the business, uh, and the footprint of the business. But guidance for Q2 down. Salesforce projecting 7% growth, relatively low for them. Friedberg, you and I were talking about this. Like, what, what are your thoughts here on what's happening in the markets? And then we, we had the side discussion, which we didn't docket, but I think it's worth bringing up here and dovetailing, which is, it does seem like the consumer, which this is an enterprise story, but the economy is cooling off. Consumers, I think, are running out of money. The YOLO economy is finally, I think, at its end. What does it say to you, Friedberg?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:05:46 Well, I think the key question, to your point, is there a macroeconomic reason for a slowdown in their business? They're forecasting for this next fiscal year revenue growth of only 8 to 9%, and for this next quarter, it's basically a flat revenue quarter relative to the past quarter. So for this fiscal year, 38 billion of top-line revenue, nine billion of operating cash flow. And with the market cap coming down by 20%, the stock's at a $200 billion valuation. So it's trading at, you know, call it roughly 20 times their operating cash flow forecast with sub 10% revenue growth. And that's basically where Treasuries trade, right? 'Cause Treasury yields, for a 30-year Treasury, you can get 4.7% today.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:31 Yeah, I was about to say, almost five.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06:33 You know, that's about 20x, right? So that's about where the multiple is on the Salesforce stock.

David Friedberg 1:06:38 So I think it really begs the question on, you know, is there a macroeconomic force where the enterprise is spending less because-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:44 Of course.

David Friedberg 1:06:45 ... of, you know, a revenue slowdown in the economy, which we saw in the latest GDP report? That's number one that could be driving this and will affect ultimately the multiple for all these enterprise SaaS companies. Or number two, is there a shifting underway in the SaaS business model, that the premium that SaaS companies were able to charge and the pricing model on a per-seat basis and the dollars that they're able to charge per employee or per user, um, is so significant relative to what that enterprise can build themselves now with the commoditization available to them under this new era of AI and the ability to build tools internally, or the ability for competitors to emerge with significantly underpriced alternatives because they can-

Jason Calacanis 1:07:26 Hm.

David Friedberg 1:07:26 ... use generative AI to make software that can compete? And then there's this other question, 'cause Salesforce has been leaning in heavily on the generative AI capabilities that they're offering their customers, and it seems like the question is, are enterprises waiting to see the value of that generative AI service capability? Is it worth paying for today? Should I wait and see? Or is it actually indicating that there's a big commoditization and generative AI underway?

Jason Calacanis 1:07:52 Okay. Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:07:52 Meaning why do I have to pay Salesforce a bunch of money when I can use some open source third-party tool or some more freely available tool?

Jason Calacanis 1:07:58 So Chamath, uh, Freyberg presented two options here, one of them macroeconomic slowdown, the other one, hey, software, you know, belt-tightening is happening inside the enterprise, and it's cheaper to make, so maybe we have a- a- a deflationary kinda situation inside companies. I- I- I guess this is adjacent, that last part of his theory, uh, is adjacent to the 8090 mission you're on with your new startup, and maybe this... Is this an or, or an end in your mind, Chamath? Is it both these things?

David Friedberg 1:08:25 But sorry, before you answer, the third point I made was that generative AI itself-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:29 Generative AI might... Yes, and the third point?

David Friedberg 1:08:30 ... it may not be a product line. It may not be enough to charge for, given all the-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:34 Got it.

David Friedberg 1:08:34 ... open-source tools out there.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:34 Yes, and there's a big question mark about the AI new software. Will people pay for it? So Chamath, take those three. What are your thoughts?

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:08:41 I think that if you look at what happened before, we had a cycle where very large monolithic software was replaced by these SaaS vendors, and Salesforce led that charge and they- they led the, in many ways, the definition of the cloud. So that was amazing. That was this one big cycle. And before that, that monolithic... Those monolithic software vendors were replacing, like, mainframes and very archaic stuff. This is sort of this third disruptive cycle. We're gonna go through a process of ripping and replacing these legacy products. And so gen AI is just a- an enablement layer that allows you to deliver functionality to people. And I think what you're gonna find is that it allows you to deliver that functionality at much, much cheaper. To your point, that's the whole point of 8090, and we... You know, we always joke, "Was Salesforce gonna get 8090?" Yeah, because you can deliver 80% of the features at a 90% discount pretty easily today. And what you can't deliver today will get much, much easier in a year, in two years, in three years, for sure in 10 years. So I think what the market is voting with their dollars is that these large, lumpy, monolithic software companies that need big, 50, $100 million customers, they're not gonna find them soon because those customers will realize that you could get, you know, what Freyberg said, what you need for 10 million or five million or one million or 500,000 and, in some cases, free. And so the cost structure of your organization makes no sense, and so you're gonna have to go through this very complicated cycle of recycling, you know, the business model, which unfortunately will mean tons of layoffs. And that's not a today thing, but over these next five and 10 years, that's probably what's gonna happen. And it doesn't mean Salesforce is a bad company, it's just that it is on the wrong side of the life cycle. And the odds are overwhelmingly such that a bunch of small companies will flood this opportunity and provide s- cheaper, smaller, more flexible capabilities.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:54 Sacks, obviously, you made your bones in the SaaS business over the last two decades, at least. What are your thoughts here on the challenges? I just interviewed Owen McCabe from Intercom, and he says he thinks the seat model is gonna change, and obviously, if there's less people at companies, (laughs) there's less seats, and that may be a headwind that you just can't win against, so maybe a consumption model has to happen or a different pricing model. But what are your thoughts on what's happening at Salesforce? And then open the aperture there and tell us what you think is gonna happen in terms of how corporations either decide to make that, you know, build-or-buy decision.

David Sacks 1:11:31 Well, I think it's pretty amazing that Salesforce lost something like 40 billion of market cap because of a revenue miss of 40 million. You know, it's amazing how these relatively small, in percentage terms, misses in revenue or earnings drive such huge changes in- in market cap.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:48 That's quite a ripple, isn't it?

David Sacks 1:11:50 Yeah. I mean, look, my view is that... I don't have a strong view about the stock, but my sense is it's probably a buying opportunity. I mean, I think Salesforce is still a great company. Marc Benioff's a great CEO. He's always positioned the company to chase after whatever the current thing is, so obviously, he was one of the first to realize that s- software was headed to the cloud, evangelize for the cloud. Then when the social networking revolution happened, he launched Chatter, which was a competitor to- to my product, Yammer, back then, but he was ahead of the curve on- on social in the enterprise. Then it was big data and they launched Einstein. Now, they've got AI and they're gonna be doing a bunch of different things there. So my guess is he's gonna figure out how to take advantage of this- this AI trend for the company. They're not gonna miss it. They're not gonna get caught totally flat-footed.So you're like, I don't have a, a super strong point of view on it as an investment, but-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:51 What about the bigger picture?

David Sacks 1:12:52 ... I still think it's a good company.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:53 Open the aperture there, with the SaaS first-

David Sacks 1:12:55 Well, I think the bigger picture-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:56 ... and pricing and how many people work at these companies, and then if the per-seat model is the model, and then people are gonna have less humans working at companies, uh, and do more with less, how, what does that mean for SaaS at large?

David Sacks 1:13:07 I'm honestly not worried about the per-seat model. I mean, the point of a pricing plan should be to align revenue expansion with ROI, meaning the more value that a customer gets from your product, the more they're willing to pay. And you just need some proxy for measuring that. Seats are a good proxy. It's a good way to measure how much value the customer's getting out of your product, because the more seats they're buying, the more value they must be getting. Yes, you could do it some other way. You could basically meter data usage. You could meter API usage. Sure. Those models will work for other kinds of companies, but I don't think there's gonna be a huge disruption to the seat model, is my sense. Look, I think the bigger issue here is that their forecast was soft, right? They are forecasting, what, sub 10% revenue growth.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:59 Yeah. They're going to-

David Sacks 1:14:00 And, and this is why the stock got punished, and I'm seeing that a bunch of SaaS companies are kinda hurting today now in the wake of this. They're down, like, 5%, not 20.

Jason Calacanis 1:14:10 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:14:10 But, so I wonder if what the market is wondering is whether there's a more general slowdown that we're on the precipice of.

David Friedberg 1:14:19 I don't think that that explains 40 to 20% drop in a day. I think typically these public market investors internalize a bunch of fears, and they don't execute on those fears, and then when given (laughs) an opportunity, they just barf it all out because it's, like, now it's acceptable. And so to your point, David, like, it was such, like, a, an insignificant revenue miss so as to not even be important, quite honestly. But the reason it's down 20% is I think folks have internalized a different set of