World's First Trillionaire, Anthropic Fable Banned, The New Oligarchs, Iran Peace Deal

Jason Calacanis 0:00 All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's The All-In Podcast. The original quartet is here. Bizarre David Sacks, how you doing, brother?

David Sacks 0:10 I'm good.

Jason Calacanis 0:11 You had a busy week. Got a long post from you on X. We'll get into it. [laughs]

David Sacks 0:16 Wait, a long what?

Jason Calacanis 0:18 Long posting.

Speaker 0:19 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:19 A lot of long posts.

David Sacks 0:20 A long post. I had, like, one long post.

Jason Calacanis 0:22 Yeah. Yeah, how's the carpal tunnel-

David Sacks 0:23 No, I had two

Jason Calacanis 0:23 ... going over there?

David Sacks 0:24 I had two.

Jason Calacanis 0:24 You had two.

David Sacks 0:24 Two long posts.

Jason Calacanis 0:25 Yeah, that carpal tunnel flaring up.

David Sacks 0:27 I got a third one teed up. I, I might use it on the pod.

Jason Calacanis 0:30 Oh, you got one in the chamber?

Speaker 0:31 You got one in the chamber?

David Sacks 0:31 I got one in the chamber.

Jason Calacanis 0:31 One in the chamber.

David Sacks 0:32 But I was gonna save it for the pod. It's a good one.

Jason Calacanis 0:34 All right.

Speaker 0:34 Ooh.

David Sacks 0:35 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 0:35 Coming in hot. [laughs] I wonder who's gonna get this bullet. [upbeat music]

Speaker 0:40 [laughs]

David Sacks 0:42 You gotta let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 0:45 Rainman David Sacks.

Speaker 0:49 And it said-

David Sacks 0:50 We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Jason Calacanis 0:53 Love you, Sacksy.

Speaker 0:54 Queen of Can Rob. A cackling, of course.

Jason Calacanis 1:00 [laughs]

Speaker 1:00 It's the Dick, Dick-tator. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:03 [laughs] It's my bestie, Chamath.

Speaker 1:05 Pauly Hapatia, how you doing, brother? Getting ready for summer? Summer chalets, uh, have been laid on the bed. You're ready to pack it up.

David Friedberg 1:13 Opposite. I got a lot of travel. Grinding.

Jason Calacanis 1:17 Ooh. Oh, I forgot. You're doing founder-led sales, so the summer of relaxation's over. Now he's in the CEO slot. Gotta get out there and do those enterprise sales. And of course, coming off a pretty hot week, comment section was on fire.

Speaker 1:34 Very pro-Friedberg. Very pro.

Jason Calacanis 1:36 Very. Friedberg had-

Speaker 1:38 Very

Jason Calacanis 1:38 ... perhaps his greatest performance, also-

Speaker 1:40 Greatest

Jason Calacanis 1:41 ... the first performance when he said more than three sentences. What's going on, Friedberg? You went off last episode, and, and then I think you also with the long posts.

David Friedberg 1:50 You know what's so funny? As the valuation of Oholo ticks up, he gets more-

Jason Calacanis 1:53 Yes

David Friedberg 1:54 ... and more based. I love it.

Jason Calacanis 1:55 He is [laughs] getting, I think-

David Friedberg 1:57 Welcome to the club. Welcome to the club

Jason Calacanis 1:59 ... he's got Trace comma's based.

Speaker 2:02 Unleash the beast.

David Friedberg 2:03 When you're just a mere singleton, you kinda just keep it to yourself, and then all of a sudden it starts to tick up, and then you're-

Jason Calacanis 2:08 Yeah, all of a sudden, like nine-figure Friedberg, he's like, "I got something to lose."

David Friedberg 2:12 Wait for 10-figure Friedberg.

Jason Calacanis 2:13 10-figure Friedberg.

Speaker 2:15 Yikes.

Jason Calacanis 2:15 [laughs] He's like, "YOLO." [laughs] You also with the long posts. You and Nancy Pelosi, uh, making sweet, sweet-

David Friedberg 2:22 Look, here, here's quote, here's what-

Jason Calacanis 2:23 Oh, he's starting. Oh, he's starting

David Friedberg 2:23 ... here's what's happening. Here's what's happening.

Speaker 2:25 Let him go. [laughs]

David Friedberg 2:28 What is being formed in the United States right now is the great American politburo.

Jason Calacanis 2:33 Oh, here he goes. Here he goes.

David Friedberg 2:33 Okay?

Jason Calacanis 2:33 Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.

David Friedberg 2:34 The great American politburo has formed.

Jason Calacanis 2:37 Oh my God.

David Friedberg 2:37 The New Oligarchs are taking their seats.

Speaker 2:39 Let him go. Let him go. Yeah. Let him go.

Jason Calacanis 2:41 Go, go. Go ahead.

David Friedberg 2:41 The great, the great American politburo is being formed. The new oligarchs are taking their seats.

Jason Calacanis 2:48 Ooh.

David Friedberg 2:48 They're arranging the chairs. They're determining who will be chairman of the politburo, who will assign what workforce to do what efforts for them, which $600 million stock trades their families will make to benefit and enrich themselves as they fly around in their private jets-

Jason Calacanis 3:04 Mm

David Friedberg 3:04 ... on the taxpayers' money, and we are watching it all before our very eyes as individual liberties are eroded. I am fired up about it. I see it happening.

Jason Calacanis 3:12 You know Sacks is on the show this week. You can't just take strays like that.

Speaker 3:15 Friedberg, expand on who the politburo is.

David Friedberg 3:19 Yeah, so-

Speaker 3:19 Who's in it?

David Friedberg 3:19 ... so basically the po- the politburo is the leaders who elect themselves to dictate the flow of the economy, the allocation of capital, what work individual they're allowed to do, and what, what activities they're allowed to do in an unfree society, which is what they're creating. They are the true oligarchs, and this is Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna. This is the, uh, the group that is trying to coalesce power and create for themselves a system whereby they have greater influence, greater control over aspects of the economy. They wanna seize the means of production. They wanna control education. They wanna control media, and any time there's an effort by an individual enterprise or an individual themselves to go out and build a business and succeed and do something that's outside of their scope and their span of control, they lose their [beep] minds over it, and that's what we're seeing. So I react to their tweeting and their [beep] where they're basically trying to contort things about inequality and fairness and justice, when the truth is they are the rising empire, the evil empire in Star Wars. They are-

Speaker 4:25 Mm

David Friedberg 4:26 ... the folks who wanna take from all of us what we were endowed with when this nation was started and what many people came to this country for, which is individual freedom and liberty, the ability to build a business in peace, the ability to make decisions, to do what you want with your own assets, and to have functionally private property, and they're taking it all away, and they're trying to take it all away, and we're watching piece by piece, step by step. So they are forming a politburo where they can effectively control the economy, control education-

Speaker 4:52 Mm

David Friedberg 4:52 ... control the media, and tell us all what we can and can't do and say, and it's frustrating to me to watch it because it's masqueraded as [beep] virtue, as justice, as equity. It's a bunch of [beep] nonsense words that they use to try and make themselves seem virtuous, when at the end of the day they are fundamentally evil, and I hate watching it, so that's why I react so-

Speaker 5:12 Mm

David Friedberg 5:13 ... uh, aggressively to it.

Speaker 5:14 Friedberg, y- I think you said something that's really important, which is they, they present it as virtue.

David Friedberg 5:19 That's right.

Speaker 5:20 Put yourself in the body of a person that's probably middle-of-the-road-ish but is falling for it. Why do you think they're falling for it? Like-

David Friedberg 5:33 Because they have needs and wants and desires individually that this person is saying, "This system, this evil empire, will give to you. If you take the knee, we will give you the education for free. We will give you the childcare for free. We will give you the food for free. We will give you the, the paycheck every week. We will give you, we will give you, we will give you." Those promises in a democratic system like this, or in a fake democratic system like this, are what make people feel like the, the virtuous Uh, offerings will align with their individual needs and wants. And I think that that's why people say like, "Okay, that's good. Free childcare for all." There is inequality in the world. There is disparity in wealth. There is disparity in asset ownership. And your solution, despite, you know, the, the loss of liberty along the way and the loss of economic mobility that arises from what you're offering, and this is really key. People don't realize the value of the United States, the power of this nation was to give people individual liberty, which, which unlocks agency to progress yourself, to educate yourself, to make money, to give yourself more assets and more freedom and more flexibility than you had. Economic mobility is the key to the United States. You do not get economic mobility if the government is giving you a job or giving you money. You lose economic mobility. You become indentured to the government. Everyone wants more. Everyone wants something that they don't have. But the truth is that the more the government is giving it to you, the less you have mobility, the more you are indentured, the more you are enslaved, and the more we are limiting people's ability to progress. And I think that that's what's really so frustrating for me, is that people sign up to this, to your point, Chamath, and they're like, "Okay, that's great. I, I get to have this and I get to have that and I get to have that." But at the end of the day, you're giving all of your liberties up. You're giving all of your progress up.

Jason Calacanis 7:23 You become a ward of the state-

David Friedberg 7:23 You're giving all of your mobility

Jason Calacanis 7:24 ... is what you're saying.

David Friedberg 7:26 Yeah. You're-

Jason Calacanis 7:26 And you're looking for them, and you don't have agency to pursue your own personal freedom. Yeah.

David Friedberg 7:32 One thing I believe to be 100% true is that no human being that's ever been alive has ever lived up to their true capacity as a human.

Jason Calacanis 7:40 I agree with that.

David Friedberg 7:40 Like, human agency is limitless.

Jason Calacanis 7:42 Limitless.

David Friedberg 7:43 Limitless.

Jason Calacanis 7:43 Sure.

David Friedberg 7:43 And, and the truth is, like any time that you create a system with the government that's giving people stuff, you are taking away people's agency. And so that is what is so, so sad about the whole thing, is like human agency is the one thing-

Jason Calacanis 7:59 And by the way-

David Friedberg 7:59 ... that we have u- unlimited capacity, unlimited-

Jason Calacanis 8:01 The-

David Friedberg 8:01 ... infinite upside. Every human does. And, and to, a- and shroud yourself in this government burden, thinking that it is a relief-

Jason Calacanis 8:10 Well, then that creates-

David Friedberg 8:11 ... is, is what's so sad about all of it

Jason Calacanis 8:12 ... learned helplessness 'cause you're always looking to the government to solve your problems. Yeah.

Speaker 8:16 The threshold for learned helplessness is far, far lower than one may think. I grew up on welfare, and my mother was initially a housekeeper, and then she was a nurse's aide. She was probably making 8, 9, 10 bucks an hour. My father couldn't get a job, so we were on welfare, and welfare was probably 17, 18, $19,000 a year at the time in Canada, and it's a family of five. But it was just enough that my dad just spent this cycle between drinking and not working, drinking and not working, and he would try in bursts. And, you know, I, I think that it must have been deeply frustrating for him, obviously, so I wanna be compassionate to the struggle that he went through. But man, I would have thought that 17,000 is not nearly enough support, and so it would animate you to try to do whatever it took. But could he have gotten a job making 8, 9, 10 bucks an hour at a store? He could have. He chose not to. And so my recollection of being a ward of the state is that the threshold for that helplessness is far lower than one may think.

Jason Calacanis 9:35 Right.

Speaker 9:35 And then if you actually stack all these other things, people will just fall into their worst proclivities, and they will be a shell and a shadow of what they could be. My dad was, in my mind, a giant who had all this potential unfulfilled, and I keep that because I want a positive sense of who he was to me, despite all of the ups and downs and the stuff that he went through and how it, it negatively affected me at times. But man, if you want a whole country of those people, what happens when you're giving people 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, $80,000 a year of stuff? One, at some point you're not gonna be able to pay for it, but two, you're gonna reduce people to a shell of what their potential is, and that is not good. I have lived it, and I am warning all of you, be careful what you wish for.

Jason Calacanis 10:25 Hm.

David Friedberg 10:26 The flip side of it, by the way, as you point out, you can't pay for it. What ends up happening is the moment that we find ourselves in today, and we see it in, and we'll talk about Pritzker's law in Illinois that passed this week. But we are now at a moment where we are saying there is no longer private property in the United States. This is one of the foundational rights that the founders of the United States tried to create a distinction between these other nations that everyone flees from, where a monarchy or a totalitarian government or some communist system says everyone owns everything together, or some small number of people own and control everything. And that's what this always comes down to. Whether it's a socialist state or a communist state or a monarchy or some other totalitarian regime, there's a small number of people that own and control everything, and that is the brink that we're on because they are trying to say for the first time ever there is no longer private property in the United States, that if the government can say everything that you've already paid your income tax on and then you've bought and you now own, the government can take a piece of it every year based on the vote and the budgetary needs of an irresponsible fiscal legislature. We've lost it all.

Jason Calacanis 11:39 Yeah.

David Friedberg 11:39 And that's where we are, and we see this. It just passed in Illinois. People think it's just crypto, just like they think that w- billionaire tax is just billionaires. But any time the government can take your private property after you've paid your taxes, bought something, and put it in your garage, we are done for.

Jason Calacanis 11:53 Yeah, we're gonna get into-

David Friedberg 11:54 Because that, that is, that is when the politburo has unlimited capacity to tax and take and do what they want.

Jason Calacanis 12:00 H- here's the real s-

David Friedberg 12:01 That's the moment we're at.

Jason Calacanis 12:02 Uh, well, and the, the super sinister part, to, to dovetail what both of you are saying and to give some grace to your dad- Chamath. In the studies of learned helplessness for people who, you know, are trying to guess what that term is, who, who haven't heard it before, a psychological condition, if you give people a hard problem to solve, like an impossible problem to solve, they don't solve it, then you give them easy problems to solve, they don't solve the easy ones, and they become depressed, and then they attribute their depression to themselves. They internalize it, in other words. If you give people easier problems to solve, uh, and, and make them increasingly harder as you go, they become empowered. They have agency. They feel like they can solve problems, and then when they get stuck on something, they don't attribute it internally. And this is the why alcoholism is so pernicious in our society as well, is because when you start attributing it to yourself and y- then you start self-medicating, you try to dull these feelings 'cause you're depressed, and I've had many friends who've gone through it and family members, and this is why having agency's so important. This is why endless unemployment is so dangerous. Uh, and you need to taper people off, and you need to give them a chance to be successful. If your dad had taken that 10, $12 an hour job, he would've become the manager. Then he would've become the owner of the place.

Speaker 13:11 So the coda to your story is at some point, I think, and I don't know because my mom doesn't share this with me, there was some kind of breaking point because it was a really violent household, and then near the end of my high school career when I left, things got, I think, materially better, and part of it was because he got a job.

Jason Calacanis 13:36 Hmm.

Speaker 13:37 And ultimately he got a job, pretty low-level clerical work at the government, but we were so proud of him, and he did that until he passed away. But it changed him completely. Now, w- it could also been because he had gotten older, you know, but drank a lot less and was much more regulated.

Jason Calacanis 14:00 Yeah.

Speaker 14:01 So I completely agree with what you're saying.

Jason Calacanis 14:03 It's a really sad phenomenon, and you, and you see it sometimes in successful people. They get successful very quick. They don't attribute it to their own success. They get up out of bed in the morning. They don't have to get out. They start drinking. They don't take a job, and, and they're affluent, but they're just not motivated. They don't have purpose. All right, let's get started. We got a huge docket

Jason Calacanis 14:18 to get through today. SpaceX had a record breaking IPO and $60 billion Cursor deal was quickly consummated as predicted. Friend of the pod, Elon Musk, took SpaceX public last Thursday, $135 a share. A lot of people got to participate, Robinhood, Charles Schwab, everybody talking about they got an allocation, one share, 10 shares, and they filled the green shoe, 85 billion raised. That's three times what Saudi Aramco raised back in 2019. Stock closed up 19% to 161, market cap above two trilly, and, uh, at the taping of this pod, $177, not too shabby. On Tuesday, SpaceX exercised its option to acquire Cursor. That's the coding agent that got shivved by, speaking of Anthropic and Claude, they originally used Claude to be the back end of Cursor, and then Claude and Anthropic had an internal skunkworks project. They told Cursor allegedly they were never gonna release it to the public. They would never have a coding agent, and they did, and that led to this incredible opportunity for Cursor to make their own model and use Elon's hardware at Colossus. They're doing 4 billion in revenue. So they got bought for 15 times revenue. SpaceX trading, I don't know, 60, 70 times revenue, so a great deal for everybody. SpaceX briefly passed Amazon and Microsoft, which is mind-blowing, to be the fourth most valuable company. Amazon's revenue in '25, 717 billion, Microsoft's '20, '25, 282 billion. SpaceX's '25 only 19 billion. So, um, they- that's corrected a bit, and now SpaceX is sitting at seventh largest company right behind TSMC. That's the Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation. So let's just go around the horn here. Congratulations to Elon and the team over there. Elon exercised his Tesla shares that he had coming from his employment, uh, there. I think he's done a pretty good job as CEO. He got a little bonus. So that sets up potentially chamath the merger of the two big companies. Just broad strokes, what's your take from- takeaway from the SpaceX IPO? Seems to b- have been executed flawlessly.

Speaker 16:25 It's an incredible company. It's, uh, one of one. It's just a unique, unique animal. I think that the highest price to sales was essentially these last few days, and now it's just going to grow into its valuation and generally just grow valuation. Nick, play the clip. The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S one doesn't go stale. So I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't want to slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S one, have to redo the disclosures, have to redo the risks. The deal is effectively done.

Jason Calacanis 17:11 Hmm.

Speaker 17:12 But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today? Let's call it a trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say 2 trillion. So when the deal-

Jason Calacanis 17:22 Hmm

Speaker 17:22 ... gets done on a stock for stock basis-

Jason Calacanis 17:24 Hmm

Speaker 17:24 ... it's going to be, again, if it's 60 billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a 50% discount.

Jason Calacanis 17:30 Hmm. All right.

Speaker 17:31 Nailed it.

Jason Calacanis 17:32 We'll give that an mm-hmm. Okay. Sure enough.

Speaker 17:34 Well, what I didn't factor as well is that the revenue run rate would essentially double on top of that. So he essentially got Cursor for 15 billion.

Jason Calacanis 17:41 He got a good deal. Yeah.

Speaker 17:42 Which is unbelievable. His business intellect is off the charts. That is an incredible deal, and now the consolidation phase will begin, and we're gonna see Tesla and SpaceX merge, and it's gonna be glorious.

Jason Calacanis 17:56 Sacks, you can also take, uh, a, a little bit of a victory lap here. You've been friends with Elon since PayPal days obviously, and, um, you obviously were an investor in SpaceX for a long time. Your thoughts on what this means for the company. Obviously, it's an incredible milestone, but what does it mean for the company going forward? Obviously, champagne bottles, yada, yada, but w- what does it practically mean for SpaceX and Elon going forward?

David Sacks 18:19 Well, in a certain sense, as we all know, this was the biggest IPO of all time. And so in that sense, it was a huge milestone for this company that Elon and many other people have been working on for a very long time. I mean, this has been 25 years in the making. When people turn on the TV and they see this, they think that this is just some sort of overnight success. It's not. A lot of people had to work very hard to get to this point. But at the same time that it was this historic IPO, it's also the case that in a certain sense, this didn't change anything for Elon. You know, I think when people read that he's the world's first trillionaire, they start to think that he must have gobs of money, $1 trillion sitting in a bank account, and that's not true. That's not how it works. That's not how wealth is created. He doesn't have one more dollar in the bank than he did the day before the IPO. He doesn't have more stuff, doesn't have more houses or anything that you could buy with money. Literally, his balance sheet is exactly the same. It consists of the same thing, it's just that the public is putting a higher value on the shares of stock in SpaceX that he already owned. And he's not selling. He's under a one-year lockup, and I predict that he'll hold on for much longer than that because creating SpaceX is his life's work. So, you know, you see all these people reacting with tremendous animosity and basically saying that, you know, we can't allow the world's first trillionaire, you know, stuff like that. Look, he doesn't have more cash than he did the day before the IPO.

David Friedberg 19:44 It's paper wealth, clearly.

David Sacks 19:46 It's that other people are placing a greater value on what he's built.

David Friedberg 19:52 Yeah.

David Sacks 19:52 And I think this is, uh, very important for people to understand, is that there's a big difference between stuff and then the machines that make the stuff. And I think, again, this is where wealth comes from, is the machines that make the stuff. So, you know, you go all the way back to hunter-gatherer days, right? The only wealth was in what you could collect, hunt, gather, whatever. It's basically the collection of stuff. Then humans developed the ability to create tools, and then very sophisticated tools. And then some of those tools are corporations, which are almost like cybernetic organisms or combinations of tools, workflows, humans work in them, and it's those corporations that make the stuff. And the way that people get wealthy is that if you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there's a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that that machine might create, and that's where the wealth comes from. It's in the discounted present.

David Friedberg 20:49 Really well said.

David Sacks 20:50 It's not-

David Friedberg 20:51 Really well said

David Sacks 20:51 ... it's not in the stuff. It's in creating a machine that will create stuff for humanity for a long time, and people will put a value on it today-

David Friedberg 21:00 That's really well said

David Sacks 21:01 ... because of all the stuff that it'll create in the future. And so just out of nowhere, it will appear that all of a sudden you have all this wealth created. But again, that wealth is a reflection of all the stuff that this machine will now create in the future. And people need to understand that that process is a good thing because when you think about all the progress that humanity has made, it's not in having more stuff because, again, that stuff all... It all goes away, right? Whether it's food or shelter or clothes, whatever.

David Friedberg 21:30 It's ephemeral, yeah.

David Sacks 21:30 It, it depreciates. It's a wasting asset. The reason why humans are more prosperous is because of all the machinery we've created to make stuff well into the future. And, you know, again, some of that stuff can be things like shelter or clothes. It can also be medicines and cures and entertainment-

David Friedberg 21:49 Electricity

David Sacks 21:50 ... and all the things. Electricity.

David Friedberg 21:51 Yeah.

David Sacks 21:51 All the things that make your life better.

David Friedberg 21:53 So good.

David Sacks 21:53 We need those machines.

David Friedberg 21:55 Yes.

David Sacks 21:55 And someone has got to own the machines, and the people who own it are the ones who create it. And the thing that Karl Marx never understood is that it's not this sharp delineation between capital and labor, because you can take people who start with nothing. Elon started with nothing. I mean, he was a immigrant-

David Friedberg 22:13 Nothing

David Sacks 22:13 ... to the United States.

David Friedberg 22:14 Yeah, slept on the floor at Zip2.

David Sacks 22:15 He came here from South... Exactly.

David Friedberg 22:15 Yeah, sleeping on the floor.

David Sacks 22:17 He created these companies, he created these machines from nothing with his own vision and hard work, and he included thousands of other people. So here's the other thing is just because you're, quote-unquote, "labor" doesn't mean that you're not also an owner of capital. There's a great story about how there's a welder who worked at SpaceX-

David Friedberg 22:34 Yeah. It's crazy

David Sacks 22:34 ... who I think has made $1 million in SpaceX stock. Transformational. But everybody who's part of these companies, and I think this is the magic of the tech industry, it is, it is much more inclusive in terms of ownership than any other industry.

David Friedberg 22:50 It's the magic of capitalism in free markets where anyone can participate in that market, anyone can enter that market, and ultimately, anyone can transition from being labor to capital.

David Sacks 23:00 Yes. It's fluid. It's back and forth.

David Friedberg 23:02 If you buy shares in a company and you have the ability to buy shares-

David Sacks 23:06 Or you just vest them. You just vest them.

David Friedberg 23:07 Yeah, or vest them

David Sacks 23:07 It's sweat equity.

David Friedberg 23:08 Yeah. Or you start a business and you basically do work, save money, invest your capital, and continue to compound the capital till, till you get to a point that your labor is worth less than your capital. And that's what ultimately allows this economic mobility, this transition for people. And when you take that away, you destroy that capacity for mobility. That's why capitalism-

David Sacks 23:30 Back to where, where we started today, yeah?

David Friedberg 23:31 That's right, and that's why-

David Sacks 23:32 We started today with agency

David Friedberg 23:34 ... it's, it's, it's... That's why it's so frustrating to me to watch people denounce Elon's success and denounce the value that the world is putting on this business and on this success.

David Sacks 23:44 Right.

David Friedberg 23:44 Because what they're saying is that no future human, no kid that's sitting on a sh- on a floor right now, sleeping on a floor, that's poor, should have the capacity to achieve what Elon achieved. No one should be allowed that capacity to transition, to progress, to mobilize themselves.

David Sacks 23:59 It's even worse than that, Friedberg. They're saying you should hate him. You should say we hate him.

David Friedberg 24:02 By denouncing him-

David Sacks 24:04 Yeah

David Friedberg 24:04 ... and by denouncing that, you are basically taking that ability away, and you're saying-

David Sacks 24:09 Hear, hear. Hear, hear

David Friedberg 24:09 ... that this is evil, and you're t- telling all these young kids around the world that are thinking about their future that they are now indentured to a government or to a fixed income for the rest of their lives to perform labor for a fee for the rest of their lives as opposed to having the opportunity to transition Which is what Elon has done and what millions of others have done because of the freedoms in the United States and, and other free markets that have allowed this to happen for people. And that is why it's not just about getting wealthy, it's not just about getting rich. It's about having agency to transition yourself and inspiring-

David Sacks 24:41 That's a good transitioning

David Friedberg 24:42 ... young people and inspiring young people. Yeah, it's a different kind of transition.

Jason Calacanis 24:45 It's a great transition.

David Sacks 24:46 It's a good transitioning. No, you're transitioning from, from labor to capital by virtue of sweat equity. You have skills-

David Friedberg 24:50 From-

David Sacks 24:51 ... that are valuable that you can then translate into creating something that's valuable. And just, just to, uh, underscore that point, I mean, you think about SpaceX, it's a machine that makes satellites. It's a machine that makes broadband connections from space. It's a machine that creates launch vehicles and-

David Friedberg 25:10 AI software

David Sacks 25:11 ... AI software and so forth and so on. So it's a machine that makes things that people want and that therefore enhances people's lives. And it's only the market, the public's value that it places on those things that creates the net worth, that creates the value of SpaceX's stock, and therefore the net worth of someone like Elon. But again, he doesn't have one more dollar than he had before.

Jason Calacanis 25:35 Well, and to put a finer point on it, you have to earn that by continuing to make the best product in your class. The second Elon's satellite, Starlink, is not as good as the next two or three competitors, and there are two or three of them coming right behind him, and there's other people doing rockets, and obviously he's in a heated competition for LLMs and with Cursor versus Claude Code. It's, he's not guaranteed. He has to fight-

David Sacks 26:00 Right

Jason Calacanis 26:00 ... and he's had to fight to win each of those categories. And the second he stops fighting in those categories, he loses and all that equity gets cut, like we see-

David Sacks 26:09 Right

Jason Calacanis 26:09 ... when stocks tank because they cannot keep up.

David Sacks 26:12 Right.

Jason Calacanis 26:12 So he's had to fight for every inch, uh, by making the best product. Nothing was given to him. Everything was earned and earned by his team. This idea that, like, he won the lottery is farcical. It's a 25-year overnight success story that had three or four distinct points where it was going out of business and he had to scramble.

Speaker 26:34 I've always thought that the people that rail on wealth are actually secretly incredibly jealous and want to be extremely rich.

David Friedberg 26:41 Of course.

Speaker 26:42 Because I've never heard a coherent argument about why when somebody achieves something that you should dismantle the things that they're building. And what you both of you said are so right. The vicissitudes of the market can make that number fluctuate wildly. There is a version of the-

David Sacks 27:01 Right

Speaker 27:01 ... market that has nothing to do with him that judges his stuff in the future as half of what they're judging it today. Nothing stops us from doing that. And all of a sudden, everybody who's breathlessly mad that he's a trillionaire, what do they say now? Because he wouldn't be a trillionaire. He's some version of what he was the Thursday of last week, right?

David Sacks 27:22 Right. Right. And, you know, to extend my analogy, the machines become obsolete very quickly. You know, in a capitalist society you can get disrupted and companies get disrupted all the time if they become stale or calcified.

David Friedberg 27:36 You don't-

David Sacks 27:37 If, if they don't, if they don't invest in maintaining and upgrading their machine, they will become obsolete.

David Friedberg 27:42 Improving value.

Speaker 27:43 I mean, to your, to your point-

David Friedberg 27:44 And you know what can't get disrupted? You know what can't get disrupted? The one unobstructable monopoly? Government. And that's the problem.

Speaker 27:51 Yeah.

David Friedberg 27:51 Government is competing for capital and it's competing for markets and it's competing for all these things. And that's why I talk about these people as being evil. They're a politburo. They're basically trying to take away capacity for value creation to make things better every generation for society. Better medicine, better education, better livelihoods, better homes. Everything gets better. But when the government monopolizes it, it doesn't. And that's the competing force that we're up against.

Speaker 28:19 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 28:19 And, and I wanna just add one thing to this, which is there is a piece of this that needs to be solved, which is people wanted to participate in the success of these companies earlier. And we, uh, Chamath and I interviewed the head of the SEC and he's working on this, but the amount of demand from retail, and it was a very innovative thing that Elon did and the team over at SpaceX, they gave 20 or 30% of the IPO to retail investors. When you opened up your Robinhood account, I don't know if you guys have one, uh, or a Charles Schwab account, it gave you a little interface that said, "Hey, would you like to participate in the IPO of SpaceX?" And you could put in your request. I think six or seven, I was talking to Vlad, maybe 6 or 700,000 Robinhood users got an allocation. It might've been one share, it could've been 50. That democratization needs to continue because the real, uh, uh, back to Friedberg's points about being a wage slave or an equity holder and trying to make that transition while people being able to open up Robinhood and just buy one or two shares and vote with their dollars for 150 bucks that they want this future as opposed to other versions of the future, that's what gives them that empowerment. That's what gives them that agency. Well, what if they could do that earlier? And I've beaten this drum on this podcast and, and my other podcast for a decade on this. But people knew SpaceX. They were watching these rockets launch for a long time, and they would've placed that bet 10 years ago when the company was worth 100 billion or 10 billion or, you know, 500 billion, but they weren't allowed to because we have a corrupt system in our government that says rich people, the top 4 or 5% of this country, are smart enough to buy private company stocks and the 95% are too stupid to. And it's antiquated and it has to change, and you should be able to buy whatever you want. If you want to buy crypto, you can. If you wanna buy a private company, you can. If you wanna play cards with your friends and play Bomb Pots and watch Dave Friedberg's rage quit because he keeps losing at Bomb Pots when we play [laughs] , that's Friedberg's right. Let people buy private company stock. It's [beep] crazy that we still have this rule keeping poor people poor.

David Friedberg 30:28 Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Jason Calacanis 30:29 Can I take a shot-

David Friedberg 30:31 Yes

Jason Calacanis 30:31 ... at answering Chamath's question? Why-

David Friedberg 30:32 Please

Jason Calacanis 30:32 ... why are there so many people who are influential, who are resentful of what Elon's done or what other capitalists do? I think it was Joseph Schumpeter who explained this, that basically you've got this intelligentsia in a society like ours where they don't make things, they don't make the machines that make things.

David Friedberg 30:52 100%.

Jason Calacanis 30:52 They just make words and, you know, I guess ideas, and most of those ideas are just wrong, right? They're just made up.

David Friedberg 30:59 You're right.

Jason Calacanis 30:59 And they become resentful of the fact that there are all these people who are able to create, not just stuff, but the machines that make the stuff, right? And that in our society, that is the thing that creates the greatest reward financially. Why? Because it actually aligns with what's in the greatest value for society, whereas they produce a bunch of hot air. So it's natural for that class of intelligentsia to become resentful and hostile towards the people who are able to amass this great wealth.

David Friedberg 31:31 I think that the great lie is that there are two sides to the society, that is the rich and the poor.

Jason Calacanis 31:38 Mm.

David Friedberg 31:38 And the great truth is that there are two sides that are the makers and the takers. The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor, and therefore the poor must take from the rich. But the truth is that it's the takers that tell you that lie. That the real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists, people that build, people that make [beep] from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets are the makers. And the takers are what Sacks calls this intelligentsia, the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers. They are the people that watch the rest of society make stuff, build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is. Tell my kids this lesson all the time. I say, "What did you guys make today?" They tell me something they made, and I'm like, "Did someone else value it, or did you make it just for yourself?" At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day. Whether you make a piece of art, whether you build a house, whether you write a piece of software, whether you build a business. Whatever you make, if you're a maker and someone else values it, they become your customer in some way, they become your partner in some way, you've done something valuable. Those are the true engines of progress for humanity. And the takers are the ones that tell the lie that it's rich versus poor because they, what they want to do is rip apart the makers and they want to tell everyone, "You've got to be on one side or the other," and they use that lie to get everyone to line up against each other and to give themselves ultimately the control to form the great American politburo, which is what they're trying [chuckles] to create. That is what's underway right now, and that is the fundamental great truth and great lie that, that we're kind of fighting against at this moment.

Jason Calacanis 33:34 All right. This broke shortly after we taped our episode last week. We tape on Thursdays, we drop on Fridays, as fans of the show know. Well, the US government has pulled the plug on Anthropic's latest model. You've heard us talk about that as Mythos. They released it as a controlled version called Fable 5. So there was Mythos. That was the one they held for 30 days while they were doing security, cybersecurity testing. Then they released it as Fable in a, a bit of a, um, guardrailed version of it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Anthropic to restrict that model to US citizens last week, last Friday, in fact. Anthropic couldn't implement those restrictions, or wouldn't in that granular of a way, so they just decided to do something more conservative and shut it down for everybody. This, of course, created a lot of hand-wringing in the industry, rug pulling, "Oh my God, we lost this great model," and, "What does that mean if I build my models on top of Anthropic? Can I trust them?" Yada, yada. And this was just days after the model was launched on June 9th. How this all started seems to be that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who owns a large-- Amazon is a, uh, an early investor in Anthropic and they own a large portion of it. He had told the administration, uh, that there was a security vulnerability in Fable 5 that they were able to bypass to jailbreak the guardrails that Anthropic put on it. Dario said the jailbreak wasn't serious. There seems to be some finger-pointing and back and forth, and Dario said it was narrow. Separately, Semafor, a publication, um, uh, like an email publication, reported that the White House acted partially over suspicion that a China-linked group had access to Mythos, and they weren't supposed to. Wired reported that this group was South Korea's SK Telecom. Now you're saying, "Hey, how does South Korea have anything to do with China?" Well, they have a longstanding, or there are longstanding allegations that SK has a relationship with China. The White House previously ordered Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom's access to Mythos. They're kind of like the Verizon, 70% market share for telecom in South Korea. According to The Washington Post, Anthropic did not initially disclose it had given Mythos to SK Telecom, and this happened before all the export controls. Quote, "Badly damaged officials' confidence in the company's ability to safeguard sensitive technology." Anthropic says the White House never raised the Chinese access in the Fable jailbreak conversations. There's a lot of finger-pointing and perhaps nobody is closer to this except the principals and you, David Sacks. So tell us what is going on here. Is this politics and political between Anthropic and the administration? Is this a misunderstanding, or is this, you know, the future of what's to come as these models become more powerful?

David Friedberg 36:20 Well, let me give you an update based on what I learnt. This would've been last Friday and Saturday. So b- by that point, I got a readout from various folks at the White House about what happened.

David Sacks 36:32 Around the time that that letter was sent to Anthropic, and I then summarized what I learned in that long post on X.

Jason Calacanis 36:40 Hmm.

David Sacks 36:40 And no one told me what to say. I just listened to these various officials explain themselves. I also heard from, let's say, some of the private companies who were involved in this, and all I asked was, "Listen, I think this context would be helpful to provide." They said, "Sure, you can publish it." So I posted my summary of what was happening, and whether you agree with the decisions of those officials or not, I do think that my post provides a window into exactly what they were thinking at that time. And what this comes down to is a couple of things. So first of all, like you said, Dario came to Washington a few months ago, this was back in April, and basically said that he had created a cyber weapon called Mythos, and he spiked the cortisol level, got everyone really worried, and there was some truth to it in terms of the sense that this model had advanced cyber capabilities. But he got everybody very focused on this problem, so mission accomplished. They then had this pilot program for Mythos, this Trusted Partners program, and as the Washington Post reported, Anthropic expanded the program to something like 50 companies or more without consulting the White House. And according to the Washington Post, I can't confir- I don't have any firsthand knowledge of this, but I don't have any reason to, to question the, the Washington Post's reporting on this. They did share Mythos with a company that the White House believes it should not have been shared with. So think about that. They're sharing these capabilities that Dario himself has said is a cyber weapon with parties that the White House, and really we're talking about the national security officials believe might have connections to China.

Jason Calacanis 38:22 That's SK Telecom, according to these reports.

David Sacks 38:23 I'm not gonna say who it was.

Jason Calacanis 38:25 Okay.

David Sacks 38:25 I know that's been reported. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that.

Jason Calacanis 38:27 Okay.

David Sacks 38:28 I'm just reporting what was in the Washington Post. But you have to understand that that's the context. So first of all, you got Anthropic effectively conducting its own foreign policy here, expanding the Mythos Preview to groups that the White House didn't have any knowledge of, and then once they found out, the White House ... You know, this is really the role of what the White House wanted is, "Look, we have classified information that you don't have. We know that there are certain groups that shouldn't be getting this." And Anthropic expanded the pilot without consulting, which is, again, sort of bewildering because the whole point of what they were supposedly doing by trying to get this preapproval regime was to consult with the government. So really that was the predicate for this, and apparently, again, this is according to the Washington Post, that's when a conversation started about whether a model like Mythos needed to be export controlled, okay? Then you have the launch of Fable, which is basically Mythos with guardrails. Again, if those guardrails fail, then you have a cyber weapon being released to the public, and it wasn't the White House who came to the conclusion that the guardrails failed. It was private companies who were testing Fable, testing those guardrails, and as has been publicly reported, one of them was Anthropic's largest shareholder and cloud partner. And so-

Jason Calacanis 39:50 Amazon

David Sacks 39:50 ... well, again, I'm not gonna confirm, but I think we all can read the publications, okay?

Jason Calacanis 39:54 Yeah.

David Sacks 39:54 So again, normally I wouldn't mention names at all.

Jason Calacanis 39:56 Okay.

David Sacks 39:56 But this is all widely reported, okay? In any event, they, I think, tried to convey their findings to Anthropic. I think there was some sort of breakdown in communication. I don't really understand, but they felt the need to escalate it to the White House, and it's almost like a whistleblower, okay? Uh, because they have no reason to lie about this. I mean, again, they are Anthropic's biggest partner.

Jason Calacanis 40:21 Well, they have reason to ... Yeah, I mean, they're partners, so that's even reason to support-

David Sacks 40:24 Right

Jason Calacanis 40:24 ... Anthropic. Obviously-

David Sacks 40:26 Right

Jason Calacanis 40:26 ... Sacks, they would have told Anthropic first, but the fact that Andy Jassy got involved in this at all means somebody on the team must have said, "Hey," o- on the security team at Amazon who has to host these models said, "Hey, this is something that could be a liability for us, Amazon, and could be a national security threat." That's why Andy Jassy made that call, because somebody put that into a Slack room somewhere or documented it.

David Sacks 40:50 Oh, no, it wasn't a S-

Jason Calacanis 40:51 That could be-

David Sacks 40:52 They don't do things like that based on a Slack room, okay? They had teams-

Jason Calacanis 40:55 Well, somebody in the security team-

David Sacks 40:56 No, hold on a second

Jason Calacanis 40:56 ... reported it, right?

David Sacks 40:57 Amazon, Amazon is part of Mythos Preview, and they are also testing Fable. Remember, they've got the biggest cloud to protect. We're talking about AWS. They've got teams banging on this and making sure the guardrails are safe. And as has been publicly reported, they came to the conclusion that there was a jailbreak and that this was a serious security problem. So they then escalate to the White House, and again, and this is where my summary takes over based on me hearing firsthand from these officials. They tried to call Anthropic, they tried to call Dario, and there were a number of conversations, and the TLDR of it is Dario refused, meaning refused their request to take down Fable until this jailbreak could be fixed. And again, the White House was really just, I think, bewildered and confused by that because, again, it's so off-brand for Anthropic. They claim to be the AI safety company, and yet here the White House is reacting to credible information about a major security threat from Anthropic's own partner, and instead of basically saying, "Yes, we'll react on this right away," they get the Heisman. I mean, just imagine this call. Apparently, again, reportedly, the Treasury Secretary of the United States called Dario personally. I mean, why wouldn't this be a five-minute call? Why wouldn't Dario just say, "Yes, sir, we take security more seriously than anybody else. We'll fix this problem."

Jason Calacanis 42:19 It's secure. Yeah.

David Sacks 42:19 "Thank you for taking the time to call us out of your busy day. We're gonna handle it right now." Click. And instead of doing that, you know, what the administration heard, and I'm not saying maybe Dario didn't mean to communicate this, but he sort of pedantically argued that this jailbreak wasn't really a serious issue. And We know that to be true because you don't have to take the administration's word for it. Dario then published a blog post that basically conveyed the idea that, well, not all jailbreaks are that bad, and trying to differentiate between good jailbreaks and bad jailbreaks. That wasn't the point.

Speaker 42:51 Minor ones, major ones. Yeah

David Sacks 42:52 Minor ones, major ones, whatever. You know, again, very off-brand for them. I didn't know until now that that was the case. Remember, this is all downstream of the fact that Dario primed all of these officials to view Mythos as a cyber weapon and to view, therefore, Fable as a cyber weapon if the guardrails failed, and they already had problems with the Mythos preview being overextended to parties that they didn't approve of. So look, I think maybe there's room in here to give Dario some grace. Maybe he didn't interpret this correctly, what have you. But this was the way that the administration perceived the situation that they were in as of whatever that date was a week ago last Thursday, and they reacted by sending the export control letter because they wanted Fable to come down until the guardrails were put in place. Now we're in a situation where Anthropic is negotiating with the government to try and fix the situation. Look, once you're in one of these situations, it's always harder to extricate yourself than to avoid getting in them in the first place because the trust is broken. The trust is now gone. And look, I hope this does get resolved as quickly as possible because I don't view what the administration did as a policymaking exercise. Some people are saying that this export control letter is now a new type of policy. Now the government has to approve every model release. I don't think that was the intention. I think this was a reaction by the administration to a credible report of a national security threat, and they felt that they had no alternative but to react immediately with the tools that they had available to themselves. So I hope that this problem gets fixed, and then we have a serious deliberative policy conversation about what the right hoops should be for models that are cyber weapons. And let me pause there and-

Speaker 44:44 And reviewing those models, which, yeah, let, let's pause there-

David Sacks 44:47 Right

Speaker 44:47 ... 'cause we're gonna get into model reviews and what's the best way to do that. Chamath, what's your take on this situation, uh, in terms of maybe a little bit of, I don't know, your handicapping of the situation with the relationship with Amazon? I think that's kind of an interesting angle. Or if you have a different angle you wanna take. I think the leaders of the frontier labs leave a lot to be desired.

David Sacks 45:11 Okay.

Speaker 45:11 I think what we're seeing is a consistent pattern of evasiveness and immaturity, and I think that that does a huge disservice to the entire movement of AI. Maybe to connect the dots between this and what Friedberg said, I couldn't agree more with what he said. The key to a vibrant life is rooted in economic mobility, and I think AI is the grand leveler. It is the thing that can enable everyone to have unique amounts of economic mobility because they are unencumbered to figure out what their upper bound is. And against that backdrop, which is an incredibly positive sum view of the world, but I think it's accurate, we have to live in this constant doomerism, hype cycle, naivety, and I think it holds us back. How does it hold us back? Tactically, number one, it creates mistrust. I think that Silicon Valley was already decaying in the prestige that it held in American society. When I first came here in 2001, it was a place of misfits that were good intentioned, that were doing the right thing, that didn't take themselves too seriously, that in success wasn't ostentatious, that kind of kept their head down. We built important things. Then we veered away from that, and we started building less important things. And now we're at a point where we've potentially started to rebuild important things again, but we have this veneer of negativity and mistrust that are created in large part because we just cannot get our [beep] together. And the leaders of the frontier labs are public enemy number one, and so this entire episode is yet another proof point that you just can't trust these guys. That's number one. Number two, I think what it creates, which I think is bad, but what it creates is an incredible opportunity for the hyperscalers. And the very simple opportunity is to convince governments all around the world, not just America, that they should be the gatekeeper. A, you can't trust these guys. B, these models are all over the place. C, let us be the ones that provisions them to the world. We will wrap it in KYC. I've been now talking about KYC for a while, right? Who are these customers? Do they have identification? Why are they allowed to run these models? What are they prompting? Let's keep them so that there's an audit trail. All of these things are gonna become issues. The frontier lab folks made it an issue because of how they've handled all of this up until now. And what does that create? Now that creates an oligopoly for AI, the most powerful economically leveling instrument we've ever seen, in the hands of maybe a handful of hyperscalers, who by the way, would make an incredibly compelling argument, and they would be right. And the only counterfactual to it would be, "Well, trust us, guys, it should actually be much more open and in a far more distributed environment." It... Can you imagine the cost and the complexity if you ask the neoscaler to build the same robust KYC or the same VPC infrastructure that Amazon and Microsoft and Google have spent decades investing trillions of dollars in?

David Friedberg 48:46 It's an impossibility, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 48:48 Yeah.

David Friedberg 48:48 So you can take all of those data centers off the map. You can take all of the neo-scaler market off the map. All of this was preventable. So instead of a diverse, robust, open ecosystem giving a tool that is the fundamental unlock for humans, we are now gonna debate gatekeeping and duopoly versus oligopoly. They have created a total [beep] mess, and it's a shame.

Jason Calacanis 49:15 So instead of people, just to summarize that, instead of people being able to use the model they want from the provider they want, you're gonna have to put in your driver's license, your tax ID, your Social Security number, whatever it is-

David Friedberg 49:26 It's obvious

Jason Calacanis 49:27 ... to Amazon Web Services or Google.

David Friedberg 49:29 If you have to put in your driver's license to buy fertilizer, you're sure as [beep] will have to put in your driver's license to use Fable 5, which is the precursor to know how to use fertilizer to make the bomb.

Jason Calacanis 49:39 Yeah, as we talked about last week-

David Friedberg 49:40 Sorry, last thing. Total own goal, and then what does it do? We in Silicon Valley, yet again, look like people that have just optimized for our own selves. We take ourselves seriously. We take nobody else seriously. We're not willing to play ball. It's unserious, it's immature, and it does not help society at large.

Jason Calacanis 50:00 Okay, Friedberg, there's been some talk about political tribalism here, and I'll let you take this one. Anthropic, the only company that doesn't seem to show up when President Trump has CEOs at the White House, backed by Reid Hoffman, who funded the lawfare against the White House, Jean, uh, O'Carroll lawsuit, this lawsuit, that lawsuit. There's major beef between the left and the right, and Anthropic's in the middle of it. Is this the White House treating Anthropic differently, and do they have it out for Anthropic? And Anthropic is basically handing them the ability, uh, to take these kind of actions. In other words, is this political instead of pragmatic and practical in your mind?

David Friedberg 50:48 Well, I mean, I think that there, there's no regulatory framework today. And so antagonizing the government to create a regulatory framework and then feeling antagonized when they regulate you just seems a little bit weird, and Anthropic seems to be the only one doing that. So I don't know if it's a political motivation as much as it is like some strange set of behaviors from Anthropic that, that's motivating this perception. Look, I think at the end of the day, we're all losers if the government is gonna be picking winners and losers in AI, and we're all losers if we all have to be restricted on accessing these tools. At the end of the day, like I've said before, you know, an entire AI model can fit on a USB drive, and you just need to have good hardware to run it, and the value of that model is time-bound because at some point a better model's gonna come around. So my point being, I think we're all losers if there's one stack that one company owns the whole thing, and we all have to put in our ID, and the government decides who's the winner and who's the loser. None of us are gonna be winners in that sense. That's why I think that there's currently a natural market force for two things. One is more open source, and second is a fragmentation of the AI stack. If you go back to the 1960s, IBM was the predominant provider of mainframe computers. And I don't know if you guys remember this or know this, but, like, at the time, IBM did the whole stack. They actually made the chips.

Jason Calacanis 52:29 Yeah.

David Friedberg 52:29 So all of the, um, you know, the, I think it was solid logic technology chips that IBM created were, were made in-house. They made the hardware. They made the operating system. They also made the software. And this was the case through the whole mainframe technology era, that IBM was the monopoly. They had the whole thing. And then ultimately the government had to intervene to get them to disaggregate the software layer, and that's what actually started the independent software vendor era, which is when the software industry really started, was after the government said, "Hey, we shouldn't have one company that has the whole stack in computing." Then we get to the '80s, and that's when everything disaggregated. Then IBM started buying the Intel chip for the personal computer. They had their own OS, but ultimately Microsoft came along and made a better OS. And then this entire proliferation of the software stack with independent vendors took off. And I think that that ultimately is what allowed this industry to progress. The productivity boom that arose from both mainframe computing and desktop PCs was because of this disaggregation that happened. I think the same is likely gonna have to happen with these AI companies. And, you know, I'm not sure that what we're looking at today as being kind of some oligopoly of three or four businesses is really where we're gonna stand. I think the equivalent on the hardware side is there's gonna be multiple chip vendors. There's also gonna be multiple clouds. There's also gonna be multiple models that run on the clouds. People are also gonna run models locally. They're gonna use different software factories. They're not just gonna use Anthropic. They're gonna use tools like Salesforce and, you know, eighty ninety and other things. They're gonna run different applications on top of it that are gonna be purpose-built or custom-built. So I think there's very likely kind of a diffusion that's happening right now. If it doesn't happen, it's gonna be pretty nasty. But I just think the market forces are so strong for a diffusion of each layer in the stack finding its way to the cheapest, the more available, the more accessible partner vendors that we're very likely gonna see these kind of, you know, handful of oligopolies kind of break down a little bit.

Jason Calacanis 54:28 Yeah. I, I-

David Friedberg 54:29 And so that, that's my, that's my take on this. I'm not sure-

Jason Calacanis 54:31 I think it's a, I think it's a solid take

David Friedberg 54:32 ... I'm not sure there, I'm not sure there's gonna be a political capture that's gonna happen. It just seems-

Jason Calacanis 54:36 Yeah

David Friedberg 54:36 ... very unlikely.

Jason Calacanis 54:37 I, I'm, I'm gonna steelman for the, for the good of the pod, and also a little bit of my personal belief here. I think if we were to take Anthropic's name out of their series of behaviors in how they handled the release of Mythos- Let's just say we put Grok in there, OpenAI, or Gemini. Gemini's a good one. Google, they're not totally in the, uh, i- in either camp. Uh, and it's a company that's been around for a long time. So Gemini comes out with a model. When they test it, it's incredible at hacking and cyber warfare, and they say, "You know what? This is incredible. It's super powerful. We're gonna limit it to 50 partners." And those 50 partners include Microsoft, et cetera. They happen to have SK Telecom in there. They make a mistake. They put them in there. And we looked at them and we said, "Hey, holding the model for 30 days while they test it," we'd say, "Thumbs up. Good move." And then one of their partners, Amazon, says, uh, "Hey, we were able to jailbreak this." And they say, "Okay, we're going to put a couple guardrails on this when we put it out." Or let's just say second phase after they give it to their 50 partners in control beta, they say, "We're gonna open it to the public, but we're gonna watch every single thing you do." I think, David, you said this is a privacy issue. It's pretty standard actually for when you release something like this to monitor it for the first 30 days. If you don't want to be- have people looking at the results, then don't join the beta. Keep using 4.8. Don't use the newest one. And so you'd say thumbs up to that as well. Hey, they're giving it only to logged-in customers, and if somebody does something dangerous, like they try to get it to do nuclear weapons, or last week when I asked it about fertilizer regulation, it dropped me out of the model, right? We would give a thumbs up to that. And then if we were asked, hey, by the government to take it down for anybody outside the United States, and we said, "You know what? We'll take it down for everybody," probably give a thumbs up to that too if Gemini did it. So there is a definite backdrop of beef between Anthropic and this administration, and if you look at the Reid Hoffman connection, you look at Dario who refuses to participate, the people who go work at Anthropic are the people who hate Trump, who hate the Trump administration. They're opting into that. If you look at OpenAI and Grok, those are the people who are largely pro-Trump, uh, including Greg Brockman and his wife, who gave twenty-five million to Trump. So there's a political underpinning here. Sax, you may not be able to get into this. I understand that, but that's part of what's going on here. I think Anthropic actually did a really good job of rolling out this model and being conservative about it. I think their comms are the problem. Every time Dario talks, it's too much talking, and there's too much fear-mongering. So somebody's gotta fix the comms over there, to your point, Chamath, because the whole industry is gonna need to be regulated, and I think the industry needs to regulate themselves. That's the key to this. We need to have a set of tests that Google, Microsoft, Amazon all agree to. Elon, "Hey, these are the things we should test," and they should self-certify each model before asking the government, which doesn't understand the models, to certify them. The industry should have an industry certification like they do for countless other things. I've talked about the MPAA and the video game industry. We should just self-certify. It's the simplest thing in the world to do, and then we could release the models ourselves without the government getting involved. Anybody else have any thoughts on this before we go on to our next topic?

David Sacks 57:55 Well, let me just respond to this accusation. You're saying that this is somehow politically motivated. There's just... That's just not true. Look, there are Anthropic-aligned influencers who are trying to spread the story that all of this is basically a beef between me and Anthropic. They're trying to say that somehow I did this, which obviously is untrue. I don't have the power to do it. I'm not a day-to-day employee of the White House, and I only got the readout of this once the letter was sent. So, you know, I wasn't involved. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, he wasn't involved. People are trying to make it sound like this was a beef with the Department of War. Just not true. This happened as a result of the things I mentioned, which is they got a report of a jailbreak. Dario had the chance to fix it. He basically said no. Maybe that's not the way he thought he was communicating, but that's what the administration heard. Dario doubled down on that blog post and had the prior history of expanding the Mythos preview to at least one company that the administration felt was a national security threat. That's the reason it happened. It has nothing to do with the beef. And by the way, it was the people in the administration who were most sympathetic to Dario and Anthropic, who wanted to reset this relationship after the Department of War, and then Dario basically blew it-

Jason Calacanis 59:11 Yeah, that's the-

David Sacks 59:11 -with those people. So look, I mean, you can just make stuff up if you want and say-

Jason Calacanis 59:16 Oh, no, no, I'm not making it up. Just, you know, I, I take offense to that, Sax, because it's your guy, Pete Hegseth, who is doing tweets like this. [chuckles] "Three months ago, Department of War kicked Anthropic out of the building forever. Every passing day proves why this was the right move." I'm not making anything up here. There's serious beef between these folks.

David Sacks 59:31 Okay. Look at the date.

Jason Calacanis 59:31 If you're saying that, like-

David Sacks 59:32 Look at the timestamp

Jason Calacanis 59:33 ... Pete Hegseth has nothing to do with this, read the tweet.

David Sacks 59:36 That was after the letter was sent. Check the, the timestamp.

Jason Calacanis 59:39 I get it. No, no, it's totally fine. There is beef between Anthropic and the administration. To say there's not is just silly.

David Sacks 59:45 I didn't say there wasn't a prior history. I'm just saying that that wasn't the reason why this happened. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and Department of War. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and me. We were not the parties who were involved.

Jason Calacanis 59:56 Yeah, I don't think you're involved in it. I, I didn't say that, obviously.

David Sacks 59:58 But neither was Department of War. Now, what Hegseth's tweet reflects is he feels vindicated. There's a sense of vindication that, "Hey, we had a really difficult time with these guys when we did a contract negotiation. People may have thought that we were the difficult ones. In fact, we said they were difficult and communicated in a strange way, and now everybody else can see it too." So I think what Hegseth is saying there is like, "Hey, we told you so." But he did not make the decision here. This had nothing to do with it. And look at the timestamp of that.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:31 I-

David Sacks 1:00:32 It was after all this whole series of events went down.

Jason Calacanis 1:00:35 If I'm a shareholder in, uh, Anthropic, I would have told Dario to show up every time Trump had the CEOs over there, and I would have told somebody in that management team to drop a ten, twenty-five million dollar check into some ballroom or some America, you know, PAC, uh, just like Greg did at OpenAI.

David Sacks 1:00:55 He really didn't need to do that. All he needed to do is that when a cabinet secretary calls you and says- That we have a credible national security threat report to us by one of your own most trusted partners, that he take it seriously

Jason Calacanis 1:01:08 I mean, he took it down. Well, how more seriously can you take it than taking the whole thing down?

David Sacks 1:01:12 He didn't take it down until after they got the letter, which was the whole point.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:15 Yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 1:01:16 Can I jump in here?

Jason Calacanis 1:01:17 Please, jump in. Yeah.

Speaker 1:01:18 I had Claude read Machines of Loving Grace and AI Policy on the Exponential, and then I asked it to do-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:26 What is that?

Speaker 1:01:26 Uh, those are his two long form essays

Jason Calacanis 1:01:31 Dario's.

Speaker 1:01:32 Dario's.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:32 Just to, just to be clear for the audience.

Speaker 1:01:34 Yeah. And, and I asked it to do a psychological analysis and-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:38 [laughs]

Speaker 1:01:39 Well, no, I mean, I'm, I'm not joking. I mean, I think it's important, you know? And use these as insights into his personality and give me a psychological analysis of him based on these, as well as based on the current facts on the ground-

Jason Calacanis 1:01:51 [laughs]

Speaker 1:01:51 ... with Mythos. Be truthful.

Jason Calacanis 1:01:53 [laughs]

Speaker 1:01:55 Don't protect simply because you are an anthropic model. And then I asked it to refine through the lens of e/acc movement and tell me if there's any psychological leanings. Do you want me to read to you what it-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:06 E/acc movement, just so people know, is the accelerator movement to accelerate society and technology as opposed to decelerate. Uh, okay. I think people understand. Yeah, let's hear what it said.

Speaker 1:02:15 Can I read? This is two... Okay, two paragraphs.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:16 Delusions of grandeur. [laughs]

Speaker 1:02:18 No, well, let me-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:19 Psychosis

Speaker 1:02:19 ... let me... No, I don't, I don't... I'm, I'm not saying it to make fun of him. Look-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:21 Okay

Speaker 1:02:21 ... he's built an incredible business. The shareholders-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:23 It's incredible

Speaker 1:02:24 ... I think are, are, are doing phenomenally well. I think the revenue run rate of this business continues to accelerate. All of it's incredible, but I wanna understand this person. I am paying millions of dollars, and so, you know, I just wanna understand.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:37 [laughs] Here we go.

Speaker 1:02:38 Okay. He distrusts other labs, positioning them as racing recklessly. He distrusts authoritarian states because he says they will weaponize AI. He distrusts markets to distribute the gains. He distrusts institutions to move fast enough. And post-Mythos, distrusts the government to wield power, quote, "transparently and fairly." That's a very long list of untrustworthy actors. The list of trustworthy ones is conspicuously short, and it has a suspicious tendency to resolve towards people who reason the way I do operating under the rules I help design. When your safety framework requires that someone hold the keys and your analysis keeps concluding the other key holders can't be trusted, you've built a machine that outputs me no matter what you feed it. E/acc would call that a God complex. The more precise term is epistemic exceptionalism. Not that I am superior, but more my reasoning is the load-bearing one, and the failure of others to reach my conclusions is evidence of their corruption or slowness, not of my error. That's the genuinely concerning pattern, and it's worth naming plainly because it's the engine of the dangerous version. Once you believe your judgment is the uncorruptible reference point, every conflict gets recoded. Government overreach isn't powerful actors have competing interests and I lost. It becomes they failed to be transparent and fair. Losing the Pentagon fight isn't a negotiation he misplayed. It's evidence the system runs on leverage instead of reason. The Mythos collision is we shipped a dangerous capability and a hostile state reacted predictably. It's a misunderstanding, the word his company actually used. Notice that misunderstanding presumes that if everyone simply understood correctly, they'd agree with him. That word choice under stress is the closest thing in the public record to the tell. It's not megalomania. It's the quieter, more defensible feeling conviction that disagreement is downstream of error. I thought that was really interesting.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:34 I mean, yeah.

David Sacks 1:04:35 Well, I think, I think it's, like, super accurate. I mean, look, there's no question that Anthropic's whole mantra, and actually Ben Thompson pointed this out in one of his pieces, is that they believe that AI is super dangerous and only they are virtuous enough to basically control the negatives of it. I mean, that is basically their view on it. They-

Jason Calacanis 1:04:55 They're the Jedi. They're the Jedi. They believe that they will bring balance to the universe and that they are the ones who can adjudicate all of these rulings. Yes, they believe they're superior to everyone else, which is why they are a magnet for talent.

David Sacks 1:05:08 Now, what I would say is I don't think that they have a particular problem with the Trump administration per se. What I would say is they got spoiled by the Biden administration because they had totally captured the Biden administration, and the proof of that is the fact that the leaders of the Biden administration's AI policy, not just one of them, but all of them, went to go work in Anthropic, like, the minute the Biden administration was over. I'm talking about officials who were in charge of AI for the NSC, the ones who were in charge of the new AI Safety Institute, which was something that Anthropic basically set up under the Biden administration. The person who was my predecessor effectively as AI tsar, they all went to go work-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:51 So it's-

David Sacks 1:05:51 ... at Anthropic. So I-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:53 There's no politics going on here except it's incredibly tribal. Okay.

David Sacks 1:05:56 No, I just think that they got used to the fact... They, they... I mean, they were incredibly organized for a startup and prioritized government affairs from an early stage, maybe before any other AI company. And I think Dario went to Washington very early on and convinced key officials in the Biden administration of this idea that AI was extremely dangerous and needed to be controlled by the government in some sort of, like, merger between the government and then a very small number of hand-selected companies, two or three of them. It was that message that Marc Andreessen heard, which is what caused... Remember this? When he went to-

Jason Calacanis 1:06:32 Yes

David Sacks 1:06:32 ... go meet with the government and they said, "Don't waste your time investing in different AI companies. We're gonna anoint the winners. There's only gonna be a couple of them. We're gonna create a cartel." I think the way that Anthropic describes it is that they describe competition between AI companies as a dangerous race condition, meaning they all just start racing towards AGI, and therefore safety falls by the wayside, and they want to centralize and control. They see competition as a nefarious force, so they want centralization They effectively want to create a cartel, and that is their view of AI safety. Now, you can see how they could see it in their language as being virtuous, but if you see it from the point of view of what's really happening, which is they're trying to create a monopoly or duopoly or a cartel, it's incredibly self-serving, and that is the danger. And I do think that, you know, a fundamental philosophical question is whether you think competition is a good force or a bad force.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:26 Hmm.

David Sacks 1:07:26 In my opinion, competition is a good force. It's what protects consumers. It gives consumers choice. It also brings out the best in competitors and prevents regulatory capture.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:35 It balances the power, too, right?

David Sacks 1:07:37 Yes, and-

Jason Calacanis 1:07:37 You don't have one person who you're dependent on.

David Sacks 1:07:39 Yes, and it has a greater chance of leading to decentralization. I think centralization is the greatest threat of AI, right? You don't want it to become a totalitarian force. So there, there's a fundamental ideological difference here. But look, you have to say Dario was incredibly successful at resetting the conversation with Mythos. You go back to, I think it was April, and they had just been kicked out of Department of War because of that unsuccessful contract negotiation. And then all of a sudden they come to Washington and declare they've invented this cyber weapon, and they basically freaked everyone out, and they got everyone to basically go along with their idea of some sort of government approval regime. And it's only because I think of their own-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:23 Yeah

David Sacks 1:08:23 ... I don't know, you could say hubris-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:24 Hubris or delusions and-

David Sacks 1:08:25 ... that they misplayed it. Yeah, their delusions or hubris, and they misplayed it, and it ended up getting kicked out under their own nascent-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:33 All right

David Sacks 1:08:33 ... pre-approval regime.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:35 Hey, uh, Friedberg, just one last question for you. If we do tip over into super intelligence and it becomes, like, cataclysmic for humanity and we look back on this conversation, what would have the right thing to do been [laughs] for the government?

David Friedberg 1:08:49 Again, there's this important force that needs to continue to maintain its strength, which is to avoid the natural instinct to control this stuff. This, this happened with the desktop computing revolution and the mainframe computing revolution. Do you guys know there were, like, articles published in Newsweek and New York Times in 1961 that talked about the demise of the workforce because of the computer?

Jason Calacanis 1:09:18 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:09:18 It said, "We've now automated everything. Humans are irrelevant. No one will have a job. The workforce will go away." It was an existential threat in the media at that time. And what happened? The mainframe computer drove productivity. Every individual that worked was able to do 100 times more work. Then the same thing happened with the desktop computer, and that also enabled economic mobility, and it enabled productivity gains, it enabled new industries. And everyone said when that happened, "This is the end of the workforce. No one's gonna be able to get a job anymore. Everyone's getting replaced. It's over. We've got to retrain our entire workforce." In fact, the federal government did this deal in the early '80s. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in workforce training programs that literally did nothing. And it was all about, "Oh my God, we gotta get our workforce ready to transition to the desktop computer industry." You know what ended up happening? People figured [beep] out, and companies figured-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:09 It wasn't that difficult [laughs] to turn on a Windows PC, right?

David Friedberg 1:10:13 And companies figured out how to help employees navigate and transition to higher levels of productivity by taking advantage of this new technology and these new tools. The same thing is gonna happen here. So this whole notion of AGI wipes out everything-

Jason Calacanis 1:10:26 Yeah

David Friedberg 1:10:26 ... and this is the end conclusion, there is a deep arrogance to technologists.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:30 Yeah.

David Friedberg 1:10:30 A deep arrogance, and we know it. It's what drives all of us.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:33 Yes.

David Friedberg 1:10:33 But that arrogance always leads to these existential conclusions. This will cure all cancer. This will solve all disease. This will eradicate all jobs. None of us... And by the way, no one's immune to this arrogance, from Elon to Sam to Dario to all of us. We all assume that this time is different, and everything's about to change completely. And you know what? It [beep] doesn't. We're all part of this long-term continuum of technological and productivity improvements driven by human ingenuity, which unlocks human potential and gives humans more capacity to do more [beep] , and it's [beep] awesome. And there's no job loss and narrative dis- you know, end of the world, and that is driving us all into an insane frenzy. Everyone needs to chill the [beep] out and just let technology do what it does.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:14 Well, and to your point, when, when the desktop computer-

David Sacks 1:11:15 These companies need to stop doom trolling. They need to stop doom trolling.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:18 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:11:18 Do you see that New York Times op-ed? Look, this is all downstream-

Jason Calacanis 1:11:21 Fabulous op-ed

David Sacks 1:11:21 ... this is all downstream of the fact that these AI CEOs have been scaring the daylights out of the public with respect to AI. It was totally unnecessary. And by, by the way, JK, I just want to say one other thing, which is I am not happy about this result. I'm not happy about the fact that Anthropic is in this predicament. Why? 'Cause I don't like the precedent. You know? I hope this does not become precedential. I don't want policy being made out of these types of emergencies. I trust it won't be. I hope this won't become the basis for policy. I hope it's a one-off.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:53 You think they should regulate themselves, as I've been saying?

David Sacks 1:11:56 Well, look, if you go back to April, here's the thing that's really crazy, okay? I just saw that Dario did this interview with, um, Bloomberg, you know, Emily Chang, and he said-

Jason Calacanis 1:12:03 Yeah

David Sacks 1:12:04 ... that by not releasing Mythos in April, the company suffered massively commercially. You know, he's acting like he's doing this great and noble thing for humanity, this great sacrifice. The truth is that if he had released Mythos with no guardrails in April, he would have exposed the company to massive legal exposure because thousands of companies would have gotten hacked, and it would've been very easy to say that was a foreseeable consequence of releasing Mythos with no safety features, no guardrails. Look, right now Meta is being sued, and they just lost a multimillion-dollar verdict because a user accused them of body shaming. Meta and Google are both being deluged with product liability lawsuits right now. So you're telling me that it was this great sacrifice for humanity that you didn't release Mythos when it was patently unsafe back in April? Of course, you had to include the safety features. Of course, you would've exposed yourself to liability that could have put you out of business.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:00 Yes.

David Sacks 1:13:00 That is just good business practice. That is corporate responsibility. You shouldn't deserve this giant pat on the back, and you didn't need- To go to Washington and freak everybody out like this, I mean, you should have quietly done it. You should have quietly-

Speaker 1:13:11 It's a drama queen. Let's just call it what it is

David Sacks 1:13:12 ... You could have quietly gone to the NSA and said, "Listen-

Speaker 1:13:15 They're gonna get kneecapped by the hyperscalers. It's a clear lane for them to say, "Let us be your trusted partners. We'll regulate." You know? And by the way, the hyperscalers, if you look at their balance sheets, the hyperscalers are out over their ski tips. They have trillions of dollars of on-balance sheet and off-balance sheet exposure to AI. The best thing that they can do to underwrite all of that money is to kneecap the frontier labs and play gatekeeper. Charge a toll, take a tax. It is Business 101.

David Sacks 1:13:41 They're gonna say that with the adult supervision. Yeah, I mean-

Speaker 1:13:42 And by the way, as far as the term- That's regulatory capture 101, yes. Move the toll booth. That's not regulatory capture. Yeah.

David Sacks 1:13:48 Well, they're creating a market opportunity for themselves because these companies have doom trolled their way into it that-

Speaker 1:13:55 They've doom trolled their way into it. They can't police ourselves.

David Sacks 1:13:57 Yeah, and it's in the public massively distrusting them.

Speaker 1:13:58 Give us a policeman. That's what I'm saying. Regulatory capture is when you surreptitiously in the dead of night swoop into Washington and introduce some bill as a Christmas tree ornament in a Christmas tree bill. This is literally the exact opposite with the same outcome, I, I agree with you, Jason, which is you bumble [beep] your way into getting kneecapped by everybody around you. No, no, it's... I, I guess an analogy would be they literally walk themselves into prison and hand the hyperscalers the keys and were like, "Please lock us up." [laughs] They clo- they close the door. They're like, "Here. Here." [laughs] Yeah, they close the door themselves. They lock it. They threw the keys out the window. Yes.

David Sacks 1:14:29 Out the room.

Speaker 1:14:29 We're locking ourselves up.

Speaker 1:14:31 All right, the Iran war might be ending. After 110 days, President Trump has announced for the 37th time that the war has ended, and that the initial agreement on June 15 will be codified. A lot of details here, a lot of unknowns. Conflict began obviously on February 28th. Formal signing happens Friday, June 19th in Geneva. Deal was mediated by Pakistan. Extends the ceasefire for 60 days, includes a Lebanon ceasefire. U.S. gets the Strait of Hormuz reopening, which it was open before the war, obviously. Iran commits to not developing nuclear weapons. Iran agrees to destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium under IAEA supervision, and that they will freeze its nuclear program at current levels for 60 days. Iran gets all sanctions lifted and $300 billion in reconstruction. So we spent 100, $200 billion blowing the place up, and we and our partners in the Gulf are gonna spend 300 billion, half a trillion.

David Sacks 1:15:34 No, no, no, we're not, we're not on the hook for a dime, J Cal.

Speaker 1:15:36 Okay, I was just saying, so, so some people in the Gulf who are gonna be involved in this, uh, and we'll get into it. Access to... Iran's gonna get access to their frozen assets, and, uh, the U.S. is going to remove its forces from the region after the final deal. A lot of stuff not defined yet will be deferred, uh, like Israel's sign-on to this deal, and, uh, bunch of spicy comments happening there, and Iran's nuclear enrichment going forward, that's not resolved. Iran's ballistic missile program, that's kind of important. That's also not yet resolved, so I'll stop here. Obviously, there's a lot in play. Many people said the reason to vote for Trump was because he would never start wars. Started a couple. What's your take on where we're at today, Sacks?

David Sacks 1:16:23 Well, I think this deal is a tremendous achievement for the president. I think that it was very difficult to get. I think the Iranians are not easy to negotiate with.

Speaker 1:16:31 You'd think. [laughs]

David Sacks 1:16:32 Let's review this deal. Number one, it reopens the Strait of Hormuz. That means all the oil will flow and all the other vital materials that are necessary for the global economy. So that's number one. Number two, we have a commitment from them not to pursue a nuclear program and to collect all the nuclear materials. Number three, there's a ceasefire of the war on all the different fronts. Four, this will not cost us a dime. There is a reconstruction fund, but we're not paying for it. I don't see why that's a problem for us.

Speaker 1:17:00 Who's paying for it?

David Sacks 1:17:00 And I guess it's something that the Iranians will do in combination with the Gulf States, but it's not, the U.S. is not on the hook for that money. We're not paying a dime. And then lastly, this could lead to a rapprochement with Iran, which I think could be a good thing, 'cause I don't think we need to be at war with that country forever. And look, what is the alternative to this deal? I'm seeing a lot of people, it's easy to take potshots and criticize the deal, but what is the alternative to this? I'm hearing neocons who basically want us to put ground troops in and try and effectuate a regime change in Iran. This is what I'm hearing. I heard John Podhoretz say this. I'm hearing other neocons say this. I mean, are you serious? Are we really gonna escalate this war by putting ground troops in? Who exactly do you want to go fight? What I heard John Podhoretz say is, "Well, we have a volunteer army, so they signed up for this." No, they didn't. They signed up to protect America, not to go charging into, uh, Iran, which is basically a mountain fortress. I've heard estimates it would take over a million troops, and even then-

Speaker 1:17:59 Oh

David Sacks 1:17:59 ... it might not be successful. We sent half a million to Iraq, and Iran is three times bigger as a country, and it's a mountain fortress. So that would be a suicide mission. That would be insane. Nobody wants that. I'm not sending my kids to fight that war. You don't want to send your kids to fight that war. If John Podhoretz and the neocons want to do it, let them send their kids and their family. If Reza Pahlavi wants to go to Beverly Hills and muster an army from his legion of supporters, let him try and do that. I don't think they will sign up for it.

Speaker 1:18:29 [laughs]

David Sacks 1:18:29 I think they're living too well in Beverly Hills. Okay, nobody wants to fight that war. That is the alternative here, okay? So if we're not gonna send in ground troops, and we're not gonna continue the bombing, 'cause what's the point? We already hit every... We already flattened every military target above ground in that country. So what is the point of continued bombing?

Speaker 1:18:48 Sacks, it's important to heal-

David Sacks 1:18:50 Won't do anything. Then we might as well... Hold on. If-

Speaker 1:18:51 Okay

David Sacks 1:18:51 ... my point is, if we're not gonna send in ground troops, 'cause it makes no sense, we're not gonna continue the bombing, 'cause it makes no sense, then we might as well try what's behind door number three, which is a deal here that will try to create a peace. Remember, we're only at the MOU stage of this, but let's give peace a chance here. I don't understand these people who just want this war to go on forever. Haven't we tried that before? The forever wars of Iraq- And Afghanistan, we're really gonna sign up for another one of those? I don't think so. So look, it's easy for people to take potshots at the president here, but I think this is by far the best of all the alternatives.

David Friedberg 1:19:27 Sacks, the long-term issue has been the enrichment of uranium to the point that it can be used as a nuclear weapon. Is, is it part of the deal that all that enriched uranium that we do know there's a stockpile of gets removed from the country? 'Cause if that goes, I personally feel very good about let the citizens deal with what they have to deal with. But yeah-

David Sacks 1:19:47 That's what they've said. This, this is part of the MOU. They will not only agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon, they will give up their nuclear material, this enriched-

David Friedberg 1:19:55 Yeah, that's a big deal

David Sacks 1:19:56 ... uranium.

David Friedberg 1:19:56 If all that enriched uranium comes out of the country, I think it's a very big deal because even if they restarted the program, even if they resourced the equipment, rebuilt the intelligence to do it, et cetera, et cetera, it's gonna take years to a decade to 15 years plus to build enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon. That would kind of be the natural setback, if you will, that provides some defense for the conditions that we really care about. I didn't realize that was in the deal. I thought the deal was just that they would make a, quote, "commitment to stopping a program," but if all that enriched uranium's coming out, that's a really big deal.

David Sacks 1:20:29 Well, they still have to define it. You know, again, this is at the MOU stages, at the level of high-level principles. They have to define exactly how that program's gonna work, but what they get in exchange is relief from the sanctions, and they get a, a more normalized relationship with the U.S.

David Friedberg 1:20:43 Yeah. Yeah.

David Sacks 1:20:45 There's an incentive there for them, you know, if they're willing to basically give that up.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:48 Chamath, you have a, you have any, uh, take here? You wanna check in or no?

Speaker 1:20:51 I think the market's going to the moon.

Jason Calacanis 1:20:53 [laughs] The market's going to the moon.

Speaker 1:20:54 [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:20:55 Uh, I'll just add I'm glad if this, uh, gets consummated, and it was a huge blunder for Trump to do this. And obviously he's trying to get out of it, should have never done it, but here we are, and I hope it resolves, and I hope the people of Iran are free eventually.

David Friedberg 1:21:10 Do you think, do you think it's worth it, JCal, to have gone through what we went through over the last couple of months if all of the Iranian enriched uranium is gone, their missiles are, are depleted, and they have no capacity to enrich uranium again?

Jason Calacanis 1:21:21 I mean, I, I, I-

David Friedberg 1:21:21 Like, do you think-

Jason Calacanis 1:21:21 Yeah

David Friedberg 1:21:21 ... just, just looking back, like if you just put-

Jason Calacanis 1:21:23 Sure

David Friedberg 1:21:23 ... this all together summarily-

Jason Calacanis 1:21:24 Yeah

David Friedberg 1:21:24 ... and said, "Hey, like there was this big war and this stuff that happened and all the-

Jason Calacanis 1:21:28 It's, it's a great question

David Friedberg 1:21:29 ... the, the loss of life-

Jason Calacanis 1:21:29 I mean, I-

David Friedberg 1:21:29 ... and, and like suddenly this, this real risk of nuclear proliferation."

Jason Calacanis 1:21:32 A- as I've said from the beginning of this, we don't have complete information, so, you know, for a venture capitalist, capital allocators, entrepreneurs can speculate all they want, but w- we don't see what Trump sees, right? So I'll, I'll, I'll... You have to be humble enough to know we don't know what information he had in all of this. But the trimming of the grass, the, the hedging, you know, of the garden approach that Israel had been taking all this time, that was the right approach. Isolating dictators, waiting them out is always the better approach than starting full-scale wars with them because you don't know what could happen in an escalation, so simply not worth the risk. Much better to just send the air troops in and clean it up. And, and we did not need to, you know, go collect this, uh, you know, material obviously 'cause we have these bunker busters, and we can just slam it every X number of months, and that would've been a much better approach, just like we've contained North Korea for all this time, and, you know, we contain other dictators with weapons.

David Sacks 1:22:27 North Korea has a nuke.

Jason Calacanis 1:22:28 But I know that-

David Sacks 1:22:29 What are you talking about? North Korea has a nuke.

Jason Calacanis 1:22:31 No, no, but we've contained them. Uh, th- and we actually did have this discussion with Graham Allison about, "Hey, w- why didn't we contain that one when we had a chance?" That was a mistake by other presidencies to, to allow them to get this far. And then once they have it, it's really hard. And in this case, it was working very well. Every 18 months, we bombed the facilities. It was fine. We didn't need to start a full-scale war, and, uh, we're probably gonna just wind up where we were at the start of all this. But I hope that at some point the people of Iran are free. That, that's my, you know, true hope. But people have to... We, we can't enforce democracy in the Middle East. We've learned that [laughs] over and over and over again. The people have to take... You know, uh, they have to lead their own revolution. We can't facilitate it. All right, listen, another amazing episode of the All-In Podcast for your sultan of science-

David Sacks 1:23:20 I'm going all in

Jason Calacanis 1:23:20 ... the dictator and the Rain Man. Yeah, David Sacks. I am the world's greatest moderator, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

Speaker 1:23:27 Love you boys. Bye-bye.

David Sacks 1:23:31 I'm going all in. Let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:23:34 Rain Man David Sacks.

David Sacks 1:23:36 I'm going all in. And instead, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Jason Calacanis 1:23:42 Love you, bestie. Ice Queen of Kin Wong.

David Sacks 1:23:44 I'm going all in. Let, let your winners ride. Let, let your winners ride.

Jason Calacanis 1:23:51 Besties are back.

David Sacks 1:23:52 Gold, gold 13. [laughs] That is my, uh, dog taking a piss in your driveway, Sacks. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:23:56 Wait, no, no, it's-

David Sacks 1:23:59 Oh, man. [laughs]

Jason Calacanis 1:23:59 I came into my avatar room. Meet me at Blinks. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy 'cause they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. The feet. Wet your feet.

David Sacks 1:24:12 Wet your feet.

Jason Calacanis 1:24:14 Feet. [laughs] We need to get merch. Besties are back.

David Sacks 1:24:16 I'm going all in. I'm going all in.