稳定币未来、米莱迷因币、国防部 DOGE、Grok 3 与 Stripe 为何不上市

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. And with me again, a couple of my besties. David Friedberg. You know him as our sultan of science. Lots to get into today, Sultan. How are you doing? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:18): I'm keeping busy. David Friedberg (00:00:19): Thank you. Jason Calacanis (00:00:19): Keeping busy. Jamoth and I on Valentine's Day. We had a little trio. We were on MK Ultra's podcast, and it hit number four. All in podcast, of course, number one. Tremont, reflections on our Megyn Kelly, our triumphant Megyn Kelly Valentine's Spectacular. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:38): It was fine. It was good. Jason Calacanis (00:00:40): Okay. Wow. Thanks. You're such a great performer. You're giving me so much to work with, Chamath, as always. But it was a great, great pod. Shout out to our friend and friend of the pod, Megyn Kelly. And awesome, we've got an incredible duo. For the first time, we've invited a duo to join us in the Red Throne, David Sacks' seat. He's busy saving the country, but we're really excited. The Colson brothers are with us. Patrick Collison (00:01:06): Thank you for having us. You guys wanna hear Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:07): a great lost porn story? John has one for you. John Collison (00:01:10): The last time we met Chamath was eighteen years ago when we were working on our prior startup, Octomatic, with Argent Ankul Tagar. Patrick Collison (00:01:21): You were how old? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:22): They were 17, 18, 19. John Collison (00:01:23): It was one of the San Francisco setups where it was like a two bedroom apartment. There was a few of us living there, I think maybe six people working out of there. A normal number. Exactly. Normal numbers to load up a a two bed apartment with. And then, Chamath, you came and and visited. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:37): This is what's so brutal about this. Okay? I could have invested a dollar. Jason Calacanis (00:01:43): A 1 single dollar. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:45): And I would have made a billion dollars. I remember meeting these guys. And I was with Alan Morgan, who was my boss at the time. I was a junior principal at Mayfield. Jason Calacanis (00:01:54): Shout out to Alan. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:01:56): And I think we tried to guys, I don't know if you remember Patrick or John. I think we tried to invest in in the business or it didn't happen or then you ended up shutting it down, but right away you spun back up and started Stripe. And I just watched from the sidelines the whole way. It is such a first of all, it's an amazing, it's an well, no. It's an amazing place for Silicon Valley where you can, like, see these people just keep pushing the boundaries up and up and up, number one. Number two, the thing that is such a learning for me is, like, why didn't I just pick up the phone and call them at any point in the last seventeen years? Like, what David Friedberg (00:02:28): am I thinking? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:29): It's so brutal. Jason Calacanis (00:02:32): Let your winner ride. Rain man David side. And instead, we It is Oh my god. It's so brutal. Patrick Collison (00:02:50): Two things. One, first, you probably don't remember this, but I remember that meeting that, you know, we offered you, Do you want something to drink? We we did not have a broad selection. I think we had water or milk in the fridge. And and, you asked for a glass of water. And so I went over to the sink, and I realized that we hadn't really been on top of the, the washing up. So I had to sort of gingerly wash a glass for you to get your glass of water, which, can't remember if you touched it over the course of that meeting. But then secondly, like, when we started out with Stripe, like, the fintech sector basically didn't exist. I mean, the the the word hardly existed. And John Collison (00:03:28): Didn't exist. Yeah. Patrick Collison (00:03:29): Yeah. People just didn't think that I mean, you know, teenagers weren't actually teenagers at the time, but, you know, people in their early twenties, college kids taking on, you know, PayPal or the incumbents or regulated financial services or whatever. You know, people just didn't think it was a good idea. So I don't know. You you you certainly were, like, the vast majority of investors we spoke with in the first year or two of Stripe turned us down. So, you were you were not anomalous. Jason Calacanis (00:03:53): John, tell us what that meeting was like. And to just take you back to the moment, here's David Friedberg (00:03:58): a picture. Stop. Stop. Don't. Jason Calacanis (00:03:59): Here's a picture. No striking. Here's a picture of free free nine figure Chima. Oh my god. And this is when he shopped at Macy's. Does that maybe that jogs some memories, John. When that guy walked in with his khakis and that light pink Brooks Brothers shirt, what did you think? John Collison (00:04:19): I don't know. I think you can, you can go back and find historical photos of anyone and use them too. Like, if that's the worst historical photo you have, that's pretty that's pretty lightweight stuff. Exactly. David Friedberg (00:04:28): Jason, do you wanna tell everyone in the audience what Stripe is and Jason Calacanis (00:04:31): I mean, do we have to? Okay. Stripe processes payments. This is a ten plus year old startup that Basically, if you're a startup company and you wanna do transactions, you use Stripe. For example, the all in startup uses Stripe to pay for the tickets. And then we give these guys, for some reason, a half million dollars every year. No discount. They don't sponsor the event. And, they're making a fortune. They got 10,000 employees, and, the company changed the world. John Collison (00:04:59): But we've never been we've never been offered to to sponsor the event. I didn't know this was, this was an option. Patrick Collison (00:05:03): But Well, if you hit us Jason Calacanis (00:05:04): up for a half million last year, I mean, maybe this year, you you can hit you up. That's negotiate it live. John Collison (00:05:10): That's broadly accurate. I would just fact check that it's nowadays not just startups, even though they run on Stripe, but also the world's largest enterprises, Hertz, Amazon, Ford, all these kind of companies. And so Patrick Collison (00:05:20): Marriott. Yeah. John Collison (00:05:21): When we started out with Stripe, we thought it would only be for startups. Like, we thought those were the people who needed a problem solved, and we thought payments was broken for them. And as time went on, we just found out it was kinda broken for everyone. And so David Friedberg (00:05:32): Well, I'm sorry. And is it public how much volume you guys do a year? Do you guys talk about that? John Collison (00:05:36): It's more than a trillion dollars a year. David Friedberg (00:05:37): A trillion dollars a year is processed through your network. Speaker 6 (00:05:39): And Yeah. Patrick Collison (00:05:40): We we worked out to, you know, global GDP is around, a hundred trillion years. So it works out to around 1% of global GDP. Incredible. And you could say, well, you know, GDP is is final goods and and, you know, Stripe processes more than only final goods. John Collison (00:05:54): So it's not No one says that kind Patrick Collison (00:05:55): of the right. You say that. Okay. Well, look, he you could Jason Calacanis (00:05:56): say it's not exactly Patrick Collison (00:05:57): the right or a fair comparison or something, but but Stripe mostly is used to sell final goods. So I think it's I think it's reasonable. And just the other thing I'd say is, you know, people, I think, reasonably think of Stripe as a payments company because, you know, that is certainly what we started out doing and, and it's certainly the largest line of our business. But the thing we kind of realized a couple of years in is that, you know, what business like, the the the structural secular thing that's happening is that every kind of money movement is going from being manually orchestrated to being orchestrated by software. And there's, you know, some program somewhere making the thing happen. And so because of that, like, just because of what we hear from customers and the the pull there, we're now, you know, helping with lending. We're helping with card issuance. We're helping with treasury and money storage. We're helping with cross border money movement. Stablecoins. John Collison (00:06:46): We gotta talk about stablecoins. Jason Calacanis (00:06:47): Yeah. Stable. Yeah. Why'd you do a stablecoin? John Collison (00:06:50): Stablecoins are finally happening, and they're really useful. Like, we followed crypto for a long time. The Bitcoin white paper dropped in 02/2008, the year before we started working on Stripe. And so it's been funny where Stripe and crypto have grown up together. And, you know, we tried to make Bitcoin happen as a payment method on Stripe. Just wasn't that good as a payment method. I mean, it's good as a store of value, as kind of a gold substitute. But transactions are slow. Transactions are expensive. You never know exactly how much you're gonna get because it's not denominated in dollars. The stablecoins are now really good if you look at, you know, something on an Ethereum L2 or Solana or something like that. And so we bought a company called Bridge late last year, who is building the Stripe of stablecoins. And so if you're I mean, I think you guys have talked about them a little bit, but, you know, people like SpaceX using them for treasury management, people using them to offer US dollar services to people all around the world. Just the stablecoins are, I think, the first really big payments use case, and I think it's finally coming because the tech is good now. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:49): Is there a moment, guys, where is it a regulatory event where you'll say the Visa, Master Card duopoly can get challenged? Is there a set of boundary conditions that you have written down where when you can check a few of these boxes, you know that it's time for those companies to get dismantled? John Collison (00:08:05): The behavior we're seeing right now is that stablecoins are most interesting and seeing most adoption where there is some cross border component. And so, you need to manage corporate treasury around the world. You want to send remittances to people in other countries. Often, it's people in other countries who want to hold dollar balances or things like that. What we've always seen is that, I don't know, in The US, things work pretty well. In Europe, things work pretty well. And so we even see this pre crypto where the way people pay for stuff has been radically changing. You know, UPI in India, PIX in Brazil. You have all these designed by central banks, actually really good kind of government run Venmo solutions. Those have all happened in emerging markets broadly and not in The US and Europe. We certainly keep our eyes peeled for that changing at some point. But I think right now I don't know, Pat. Would you characterize it that way that, like, a lot of the interesting stuff we see is happening internationally? Yes. So, you know, with respect to Visa and Mastercard, Patrick Collison (00:08:59): I think an important thing to keep in mind is that most of the interchange fees that are charged to merchants and, you know, you mentioned what we charge the all in podcast, you know, the vast majority of that flows right back to the, to the issuing banks, in the form of interchange. And almost all of that flows right back to the consumers in the form of, you know, the lending that the the the, you know, the cards themselves represent, but then also in card rewards. Like, card card programs are not actually big profit pools, for most of the major banks. And so I think any, you know, any substitute for for Visa and Mastercard in that sense, you know, the sort of a question of, well, are the consumer rewards going to go down? Are the consumer protections gonna go down? Would it be extending less consumer credit? And maybe other points in that space are viable, but, you know, it it is a set of trade offs, and it's not as simple as this this, enormous rent extraction happening. John's totally right. I think the interesting use of stablecoins is cross border is outside The US. I mean, the big use case that's taking off right now is consumers in other countries seeking to hold dollars. You know, we in The US here today, you know, we obviously benefit from having able to do that. The vast majority of people in the world have kind of a are subject to a worse currency, worse in the sense that it's less stable, it's more inflationary, you know, storing savings is is is much less favorable. You know, if you look at the Naira, for example, there are a lot of people in Nigeria. And the the currency there has devalued by a factor of, you know, three or four over the last couple of years. And so that use case of consumers being able to store dollars is really exploding. And we think about this really as kind of an analogy to the to the euro dollar system where, you know, the euro dollar system in the seventies and eighties, this was a way for companies to store dollars and to, you know, have something more stable and and and reliable and so forth. But it was only accept I mean, I think the minimum transaction size was like a million dollars, sent to this kind of a very high barrier to entry. Whereas with stablecoins now, you can be a consumer in Ecuador, and you can have, like, a 10 US dollar balance, and that was just not a product that was accessible to you before. And so I think it's I think it's a really big deal, you know, certainly for people in those countries. And in some sense, also for The US because the dollar status as the world's reserve currency, I think, is is is, you know, Jason Calacanis (00:10:53): in the process Patrick Collison (00:10:54): of becoming much more deeply established. Jason Calacanis (00:10:56): Yeah. That is the huge win for allowing stablecoins and, you know, making them legal, giving them rails, putting aside Tether and all the bans and fugazi stuff they've been doing or have done in all the lawsuits that they've lost and and the bans in different countries. Having USDC, having yours and other ones in The United States means we can regulate them and they have to buy treasuries. And so Exactly. Okay. Dollar supremacy continues and that's fantastic. But right now, all in, just using the example, could accept payment in Stablecoin, correct, with Stripe? We just check a button, we get Stablecoins. Patrick Collison (00:11:34): Yes. Jason Calacanis (00:11:34): Okay. So then the next piece I have is Patrick Collison (00:11:36): we We'll follow-up with you afterwards, to John Collison (00:11:38): make sure we Exactly. Get that going. You can continue. Well, I'm David Friedberg (00:11:39): actually really excited that you guys are gonna be sponsoring the all in summit this year. That's actually exciting. So it's super exciting. Jason Calacanis (00:11:46): Freeberg is great at securing the bet. David Friedberg (00:11:48): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:11:49): The thing that's interesting though is if let's say we had a Millie sitting in our Stripe account, and then we had to pay a venue or pay other vendors. And we're sitting there in, your coin's called Bridge. Is that what it's gonna be called? Or it's called? Patrick Collison (00:12:03): Bridge is the is the company. It's the platform. And, you know, that's like there there was some kind of a stable coin. Correct. Speaker 6 (00:12:09): Correct. Correct. But Jason Calacanis (00:12:10): you'll have a Stripe stable coin at some point. Yeah? Like one meme Bridge John Collison (00:12:12): actually has one already. Patrick Collison (00:12:14): Yeah. Bridge has a a small stablecoin for but we don't need to get into the details. But but Bridge is primarily a set of software APIs. Jason Calacanis (00:12:20): Got it. But you'll obviously have a Stripe stablecoin. Patrick Collison (00:12:22): The point is if you turn on stablecoin acceptance with, you know, for for all in, today that'll use USDC. Jason Calacanis (00:12:27): Perfect. Now could we then go pay people from our Stripe account, and then you could lower our fees if they were also doing stablecoins? Does that exist today, or is that something coming next year? John Collison (00:12:40): Look. You could pay people in stablecoins, but, again, to the point of where you'll see adoption first, ping people via bank transfer in The US, like, yeah, it's not great. It's kinda slow, everything like that. But it's fine. It's not the biggest problem for this. It's really cheap today. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Whereas the people who are using Bridge, it's like Scale AI is, you know, they have to pay the contractors all around the world. And when you Patrick Collison (00:13:03): want to get money John Collison (00:13:03): to people in The Philippines, that starts to get really annoying and expensive. And so just from our point of view, the, like, real hair on fire problem is the international stuff and domestic. And I I assume you're paying domestic suppliers. It'll come later. Patrick Collison (00:13:17): I think you're I think I think you're answering narrowly to, you know, stablecoins. I think everything you you just said is is is right. But I will say, I mean, I think, Jason, your intuition that, man, it's really inefficient annoying to, you know, engage in B2B transactions and to get these invoices paid and just like the whole system. And if you look at most companies, they're losing one, two, three percent of revenue to AP and AR. Now, some of that might be because of the transaction rails themselves. A lot of it broke inefficient processes, where you have humans sending invoices, humans reconciling, and you're trying to line up transfers in your bank account statement and figure out, you know, what corresponds to what and so on. And that's super inefficient. And so we're separately I mean, Sybilcoins would be part of the solution here, but but but there's more to it. Is there Separately, we're trying to solve that with a product called Stripe Billing, which we actually just announced last week, has passed, you know, half a billion in, in ARR. And so, we We David Friedberg (00:14:04): can send an Jason Calacanis (00:14:04): invoice to somebody with Stripe Bank. Exactly. So it's like FreshBooks or whatever those other products in the market are. John Collison (00:14:10): Awesome. Amazing. All the back office. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:14:11): Is there a version of a network effect inside of Stripe for their customers where if I just allowed you guys to just be integrated into my GL somehow and you gave me some kind of Phantom Bank account, why isn't it just a ledger entry if I'm just making a payment from me to somebody else that's also on Stripe? Speaker 6 (00:14:30): The Patrick Collison (00:14:30): thing we really wanna solve is all the calculation, the ID verification, the risk. Like, those are the things that are actually expensive. If you, if you look at this flow, it's where companies lose their money today. Having said that, you're right. You know, we're the fraction of money movement on Stripe where, you know, the two counterparties are both part of the Stripe network is obviously growing. And so I think that'll be another way we can reduce fees over time. Although, again, I I actually think the biggest part of that is is gonna be because we reduce fraud. Like, both counterparties are known. And, like Right. I talked to a company, a a payroll company recently, and they were describing, you know, how big a deal it is for them that, you know, people sign up, you know, fraudulent companies, whatever. And, you know, they can lose millions of dollars in a single attack. And so having some kind of trusted node rather than just, like, routing David Friedberg (00:15:16): routing in an account number, Patrick Collison (00:15:17): that would be a Speaker 6 (00:15:18): really good Patrick Collison (00:15:18): deal for them. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:15:19): Look. You have a very good pulse. And what I would say is that as a subset of the economy, you probably reflect a large part of the global economy. Have you ever been approached or have you ever considered on a regular basis publishing some sort of economic sentiment? One of the big things that we've talked about is how many backward revisions there are to everything from non farm payrolls to GDP, that they've become so unreliable. And so it's very difficult for people that are transacting in market to know what to do. Have you guys ever thought about that? Because I'm sure that you have a much more accurate sense of where the economy is than many other people. Patrick Collison (00:15:56): We have. And I feel a bit rueful, you know, with you asking the question because I feel like on some level, we should have done it. And the thing that makes it kinda tricky is because well, two two two things. One, Stripe online. We're more biased towards innovative companies, you know, whatever. It's that, you know, it's kind of net that out somehow. And, you know, there can be these stories where, I mean, during COVID, like, the online economy was doing great. The offline economy is sort of a different story. So the interpretation can be a bit, tricky. But then just the second thing is the Stripe business is growing so quickly and changing so fast that, again, you know, it's not necessarily representative of of the economy. And even if Stripe is way up year over year, you know, you you have to be a bit hesitant to drawing conclusions from that. Having said that, I think in principle, you could draw, you know, some conclusions. And, you know, one thing we we did look at, was just inflationary data, over the last couple of years. And I think you can construct, and the team did construct a pretty reliable, kind of, leading indicator for inflation. And so we we would like to share that openly because, you know, I think it's I think it's a public good for there to be better and more reliable economic data. Jason Calacanis (00:16:56): Alright. Freiburg, before we get into the doc, you got any question for the boys here? David Friedberg (00:17:00): If you were to kind of build the financial system from scratch today, we've got swift. We've got banks that store assets. We have credit cards and these credit card networks. Then we've got transaction service providers that sit on top of this. What's the right solution if we were to build a financial system for the world from scratch today? And can you guys see a world where we bridge away from the credit card networks, where we move out of some of these legacy systems? Or are they so deeply ingrained in everything that it's it's gonna continue to be this thing where we've gotta build these complicated solutions into and around the legacy of financial infrastructure? John Collison (00:17:40): I'll give my few, and then I'm curious as Patrick has. I would say, firstly, there is just general tech scalability. You know, there's the, you know, the finance industry has its version of the mine shafts for sure, where everything should be, you know, highly scalable and real time. And I think in a way, stablecoins are solving something that you would you don't technically need full decentralization to do, but the ability to make kind of real time payments any hour of the day or night is a useful property. And again, some private systems have also built that. I think a big one for us is trust and the fact that the fraud problem hasn't truly been solved in online payments. A big reason people come to Stripe is basically we are a reputation network across the Internet economy. And so when someone comes and buys something from a Stripe user, 93 of the time, we have seen that card before. And so the merchant can know something and know that they can trust this end user. And it's gotten to the stage now where if someone comes along and buys with a credit card, if they're, you know, signing up with an email address or a phone number or something that we haven't seen before, that is just ipso facto suspicious because, you know, they are coming along and maybe trying to it's a stolen credit card or or or something like that. And so a big part of what Stripe ends up doing is acting as a reputation network to keep fraud out of the system that maybe you would have wanted to design in from from day one. Jason Calacanis (00:19:06): Well, in fairness, Jamoff told told me I could use that credit card anytime I wanted. I don't think he remembered, but I think you need to turn my account back on. And Freeberg, I just got news from our CEO, John. Mastercard just canceled their sponsorship of all in summit. So we're this is costing us a fortune, this podcast so far. Two Patrick Collison (00:19:23): things. One, to your point about just all these different networks and so forth, I think stablecoins are going to be a big part of, a big part of the solution. I actually don't think that's gonna supplant all the consumer facing networks. I think we're gonna see consumer facing networks built upon and that, you know, substantially leverage these things, but I think stablecoins will probably be the common rail. And then just secondly, I think part of what you're hearing is most businesses lose more money to fraud than they do to the kind of pure transaction cost themselves. And, you know, you're hearing us talk a lot about fraud here. And that's because, one, it's just it's it's a huge economic cost for these businesses today. And there's even indirect cost where you make the consumer experience more hostile because you have to protect against, you know, possible fraud. Like, you know, why why do you have to type in all these issues? My bank account. Yeah. Yeah. All the stuff. Exactly. But then secondly, I think these we can just see it in the data. These fraud runs are actually getting worse and harder because, you know, ML, AI, globalization All the deep John Collison (00:20:12): face stuff. Everything. Patrick Collison (00:20:13): Yeah. Exactly. And so, like, you know, various fraud metrics across the and ecosystem are way up over the last couple years. Now on Stripe, actually down by 80%, but it's it's really becoming a cute issue. Jason Calacanis (00:20:23): Alright. And we'll get into, staying private longer and when you guys are gonna pull the IPO trigger later in the show. But we gotta get through this docket. We got so many great topics to talk about. Let's get to our first story here. It's a kind of a fun one. Jamie Dimon went on a rant about remote work and and Zoom, in a town hall. And, here's a snippet. Speaker 6 (00:20:41): A lot of you were on the Zoom, and you were doing the following. Okay? You know, looking at your mail, sending text to each other, and asking who the other person is. Okay? Not paying attention, not reading your stuff. You know? And if you don't think that slows down efficiency, creativity, creates rudeness, and so it does. Okay? And when I found out that people are doing that, you you don't do that in my goddamn meetings. You go to meet with me. You got my attention. You got my focus. I don't bring my goddamn phone. I'm not sending texts to people. Okay? It simply doesn't work. The young generation is being damaged by this. That may they may or may not be in your particular staff, but they are being left behind. They're being left behind socially, ideas, meeting people. In fact, my guess is most of you live in communities a hell of a lot less diverse than this room. That's not how you run a great company. We didn't build this great company by doing that, by doing the same semi disease that everybody else does. Jason Calacanis (00:21:36): Colson Brothers, tell us about how you run Stripe. Are you remote? Does this resonate with you four years after, we've come out of the pandemic? John Collison (00:21:45): I love listening to Jamie Dimon rants. Like, I feel like that's business ASMR. Jason Calacanis (00:21:51): Business ASMR. Patrick Collison (00:21:53): That itself would be a great podcast. Jason Calacanis (00:21:54): I was about to say, I'm subscribing. That's an instant $10 a month subscription. Speaker 6 (00:21:59): What do Jason Calacanis (00:21:59): you think, John? Yeah. John Collison (00:22:00): I don't know. People just said a lot of during the pandemic. Like, do you remember it's like, oh, handshakes are gonna be over. Business travel is gonna be over. Every company is gonna be fully remote. I would say Stripe broadly is in a pretty similar spot to where it was beforehand, which is most people go into an office. Like, most people are, you know, part of our San Francisco office or New York or Dublin or or Singapore or wherever. And then we have a bunch of people also who work remotely. I think kind of obviously, you know, Jamie is right on some points. I think also working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies like Stripe. And there's a lot of people, you know, you see, the kind of the two body problem where it allows a lot of couples where, you know, maybe one partner is assigned to some hospital in Idaho and, like, they don't get to choose what hospital necessarily they got assigned to, and the other person gets to work a a high paying tech job. And so, I don't know. I think when Like, well, like, one Patrick Collison (00:22:56): of the theories for, declining dynamism in The US and declining TFP is that allocation efficiency, of of, you know, people declined as women enter the workforce because now you have, you know, what John describes Remote work is solved. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:23:15): Yeah. Freeberg, you're running a company now. You're the CEO of Valhalla. Tell us, does this resonate with you? What do you think? Especially about younger people, his point in, like, being rude or being focused, being in the meeting, and then, like, maybe there's too many meetings where people are partially paying attention. Maybe there should be half as many meetings and people should be paying attention. What do you think? David Friedberg (00:23:36): Well, there's always room for optimization. We we deal with this too. Too many meetings, too many people. I think what was most striking for me about the Jamie Dimon rant and the resonance it seems to be having, particularly in Silicon Valley and particularly with folks that are in leadership positions or on boards, is that this is another example of what I think is kind of a different tenor for leaders in business right now relative to where we were a few years ago. Leaders are starting to step up and speak their mind and speak more directly and lead from the front rather than lead from the back. I think the last couple of years, and I would say that the whole kind of transition away from wokism and coddled employee workforces, which is something that a lot of folks talk about. I'm I'm not trying to just characterize it. I'm just saying that's the characterization that's been placed on it, is that the employees made the decisions. And then the leaders kind of said, okay. I'm subjugated to the employees' whims and needs. And look at what's gone on with Zuck. He said, you're with me. You're against me. Here's a buyout option. Elon obviously was a exemplar of this at Twitter. We've now Patrick Collison (00:24:39): seen this David Friedberg (00:24:40): become Yeah. Coinbase Brian and his letter. And we've now seen this become, I think, a bit more of a standard in the kind of emergence in the post COVID era that leaders can lead from the front, speak directly, and say this is the way things are going to be. My job is not to coddle my employees. My job is to lead my employees so that our organization, our team, wins and we achieve our mission. That's the objective. It's not to create a family workplace for everyone to be happy all the time. It's to help the organization succeed. And so I think I have heard from people individually. I've seen this tenor shift underway right now. And I think that Jamie Dimon is another kind of exemplar of this that that seems to have some resonance. Jason Calacanis (00:25:18): Alright, Shamath. I want you to respond specifically to this next clip. Let's play the second clip about organizational bloat. Speaker 6 (00:25:25): Every area should be looking to be 10% more efficient. If I was running the department of hundred people, I guarantee you if I wanted to, I can run it with 90 and be more efficient. I guarantee you. I could do it I could do it in my sleep. And the notion, these bureaucracies, I need more people. I can't get it done. No. Because you're you're filling out request that don't need to be done. Your people are going immediately they don't need to go to. Someone told me to approve some as wealth management that they had to go to 14 committees. I am dying to get the name of the 14 committees, and I feel like firing 14 chairman of committees. I can't stand it anymore. Jason Calacanis (00:26:01): Alright, Shmoth. The bloated bureaucracy at big companies, your thoughts? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:06): Well, you know, there's that adage that says something akin to 50% of advertising is useless. We just don't know which 50%. Yeah. I think it's probably true for most corporate structures in general, which is that a lot of the organizational bloat has evolved because of the way that people have responded to how you use technology. So meaning, if you went look back fifty years ago, if you look at that famous picture of the Microsoft early team, they didn't rely on software necessarily. There wasn't Salesforce. There wasn't Workday. There wasn't all of this infrastructure. And so instead, they probably organized by what they were good at, and they just tried to do things efficiently. And I suspect that many companies in the absence of technology found a way to just be very efficient. That started to change when you had these rigid demarcations of where one job ended and another job started. And part of why that happened is because you had all this software that went in and convinced people. This will create efficiency, but in return, the chief marketing officer's job is x, Y, and Z. This is how the roles are defined. This is how people do it. And so I think that the reason why things have become so bureaucratic and bloated is that there is just this propensity to run towards software because you think it's a solution. At best it's a symptomatic aid. It doesn't address the root cause. And in fact, it promotes bureaucracy and it promotes the bloat that Jamie's talking about. And if you look at Jamie's P and L, he spends $16,000,000,000 a year on IT. And I suspect that if you streamline that you'd actually have half as many people because they'd be doing the job in a wholly different way. And by the way, the counterfactual to it is if you look at companies like Facebook or Google or Tesla or SpaceX who designs, and I'm sure Stripe is the same, who designs a lot of stuff internally that's custom built for their org. I think the way that you see this in the revenue per employee and a bunch of these other metrics in terms of the efficiency of those companies. So I think what he is talking about is that he is a victim of this push to productivity, because he would look like a Luddite if he didn't to drop technology. But by adopting the off the shelf stuff, he introduces organizational bloat because these things are demarked very, very rigidly. Jason Calacanis (00:28:27): You got the marketing team, as you mentioned, using HubSpot, and then you got like the sales team using, I don't Speaker 6 (00:28:32): know, Salesforce. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:32): HubSpot, organizational bloat. The other thing I just wanna say on the first topic is I've mentioned this before. Other than engineers who are who are naive, but can be extremely productive from day one, there are very few other job types where naivety is an asset. Most people early in their career are in a j curve where they are negatively contributing. And the whole Speaker 6 (00:28:58): whole goal Jason Calacanis (00:28:58): is that everybody down. Yeah. David Friedberg (00:29:00): And the Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:00): whole goal is that you invest in these people so that they come out of the j curve. There are probably other jobs that are like engineering, but many, many are not. Speaker 6 (00:29:08): And Chamath Palihapitiya (00:29:08): so I think it's important to get the kind of mentoring you get by being in an office. And in the absence of that, I think these young people, like Jamie said, are totally lost. That's that's on them. But then for the company, they're completely unproductive and useless, which is on us. Jason Calacanis (00:29:23): Hey, John. Toby I I don't know if you know Toby from Shopify, but he did this, like, zero based budgeting kinda concept for meetings. He just purged all meetings at the beginning of the year. He just, like, deleted everybody's meetings from the top down. I'm curious how you think about Bloat and just all of these meetings and committees. Do you worry about that at Stripe? John Collison (00:29:43): We know Toby very well, and I don't know. I always feel like, yeah, we should I'm tempted to, take some of, the ideas. Like, we haven't done the meeting deletion one, and you just say, oh, the meetings get recreated, but they measured us and they didn't, it sounds like. And I do always enjoy Toby's perspective, which is I think that, you know, Many organizational problems are in fact software problems. And, you know, you just need to write a script to literally, like, I think he wrote the script to solve the meetings, you know, from the Google calendar instance, but, there's kind of this purity that, you're, you're over intellectualizing your problems. I do agree with Chamath on the remote thing where, like, it's it's very dangerous. One thing that can be dangerous with as CEOs think about this stuff is I think there is these unfair anecdotes that feel unfair that get people really riled up. The quiet quitters, the anti work subreddit. You know, all these talk of people working two jobs. And that generates a lot of energy with corporate leaders, but you don't wanna design your policies around, like, the bottom 5% of the company. That would be a horrible mistake. Yeah. You want to design your policies against the top talent. Do we have some, like, outrageously productive remote people and they're off and, again, the cabin in Idaho somewhere just, you know, co coating up a storm? The thing that we have seen and interestingly, we measured this before COVID because we were doing a lot of remote hiring, and we wanted to see we wanted to see how much we should lean into it, is that it is not good for early career people. We could actually measure it in our productivity data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during COVID, and it's bad from a work point of view. It's also just bad from a personal point of view where they go mad because they're 23 years old, and they're not Jason Calacanis (00:31:19): And they're in solitary confinement. John Collison (00:31:20): Exactly. I mean, yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:31:22): Solitary confinement. It's ridiculous. And by the way, breaking news here. Jamie Dimon now, knows which 2,000 or I'm sorry. 1,739 employees to lay off first. There is a coworker.org petition to get Jamie to retract his statements. So the opt in has been created. John Collison (00:31:41): If I know Jamie, I know he'll be, retracting that statement right away. Jason Calacanis (00:31:45): Absolutely. He will bend to the pressure of those 1,700 mids. Patrick, how do you deal with mids at Stripe? How do you deal with the mids? The people who I'm not saying you have any, but maybe you've run into because you got over 10,000 employees. When somebody's average, that must make you crazy. How do you deal with it? Patrick Collison (00:32:01): No. The median employee at Stripe is awesome. The median employee at Stripe employee at Stripe is is is not the median person in the population at large. Although, I think the median person in the countries we, you know, we employ people that is. Quite competitive. Jason Calacanis (00:32:15): Well, no. I was asking the term mids. Mids are people who are just average people, not the above average stripe people who opt into that. But how do you deal with low performance is kind of what I'm getting at. Patrick Collison (00:32:23): Well, look, you need to have an aggressive performance management culture and to stay on top of that. And look, it's it's not it's it's not good for anyone to keep those people around because nobody likes feeling that they aren't succeeding. And so if those people are you know, their careers aren't advancing, they're not getting, you know, positive feedback from their manager or from their peers, they aren't shipping things like whatever. This is just, like, not a good equilibrium for anyone. So we really try to, you know, stay on top of them. We track it closely. The thing just on this discussion broadly to say is, I think people very readily fall into a kind of normative, moralizing perspective on this stuff. And people should be in the office. They shouldn't be in the office. But like there's a lot of should here. I think it's helpful to just, one, kind of as John referenced with, you know, some of the analysis, just, you know, be quite empirical and objective and just like look at what the data says. And and then second, just recognize there's a lot of heterogeneity. As in people have different preferences. People have different abilities to work effectively, you know, when they're by themselves and, you know, some don't. Organizations are doing different kinds of work. NVIDIA, you know, last I checked is doing pretty damn well. And, you know, Jensen is on the record as saying he, you know, doesn't give a shit about where you work. Coinbase, Shopify, you know, they're all these, you know, remote first companies. And then, you know, I was recently chatted the folks at Jane Street, and they really believe that, you know, being co located and, you know, to share ideas in the trading floor and and so forth is is really important. But I don't think these pictures are or these world views are necessarily contradictory. Patrick Collison (00:33:44): They probably hire different kinds of people or in different kinds of businesses and so on. And so I don't know. I guess I'm just skeptical of flat shoulds in this space. Because many paths to heaven. Jason Calacanis (00:33:54): Yeah. Many paths to heaven. Alright. So let's move on to our next story. The number one just say last sure. Patrick Collison (00:33:59): We should just keep in mind, labor productivity in The US is up, like, 20% in the last ten years. And so just like again, you just you just look at the data. Just the median person in the economy or the average person is, is producing 20% on on an inflation adjusted basis, more than they were ten years ago. Speaker 6 (00:34:13): Yeah. I mean And Jason Calacanis (00:34:14): that's gonna keep ramping up with AI and all these amazing tools that are coming out. We'll leave that on the side for now because that would be an hour long rabbit hole. We could jump down. But we gotta get back into Doge. The number well, I've heard a couple criticisms of Doge. One of them is it's one-sided. We're only hearing about, you know, people on the left doing griffs and and USAID. The other one is, hey, you're you're pointing out little tiny things like USAID. When are you gonna get to defense spending and social security? Well, here we are. Washington Post is reporting that in between doing sets of 47 push ups, defense secretary Pete Hegseth asked senior leadership at the Pentagon to develop a plan to cut 8% from the defense budget each of the next five years. That's compounding 8%. Here's a chart. We're talking about close to 300,000,000,000 in savings over five years if, they hit, which isn't a crazy target, 8% a year. It's just crazy in our country where we haven't even been able to have our defense department pass a basic audit if you've seen those type of reports. Let's pause there and just talk about military spending, CHEMA. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:35:23): I think that military spending needs to sit downstream from technology. Because if you if it doesn't, you're sort of misappropriating the money. And what I mean is that we're inventing incredible capabilities in AI and autonomy. I think that you need to take those things first and figure out how to projectize them because I think that builds the kind of modern war machine we need. Otherwise, what happens I tweeted about this, Nick. Maybe you can find it, but, like, the CBO red flagged a project where the navy was about to appropriate $1,200,000,000,000 to build frigates. Now, there's a body I think of of military planning that says this is a projection of power and so you need to spend this kind of money because people wanna see the big boats and the big iron in the water. Okay. And and maybe there's something about that, But the reality is you can't be spending 3 or $4,000,000,000 a boat and taking, you know, eight, nine, ten years to build these things. It's so this is not sustainable. And part of why they do that is it's not coupled to what's actually happening with respect to innovation, where there are core pockets of companies. Ceramic just announced a $600,000,000 raise today. Saildrone announced hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts with the Navy. Anduril is doing that with the army. So I think that military spending needs to happen downstream from what's actually happening in technology broadly speaking. We don't have that. What you have instead are system integrators with extremely deep connectivity that are able to contract well, not necessarily to invent well. Jason Calacanis (00:37:02): Freeberg, any thoughts there on cutting defense spending? Obviously, we have, to Chamath's point, amazing founders like my guy, Palmer Luckey, cutting the cost of very important, governments. He hates it. That's my guy. He hates it. Oh, no. We it's all a joke, everybody. Calm down. We just have a little early Speaker 6 (00:37:23): for him. David Friedberg (00:37:23): Keep Jason. Jason Calacanis (00:37:24): No. Literally talk to listen. I know all the board members. I got a personal relationship around Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:29): it. He's gonna do everything he goes to your ranch. He loves JHAN. Jason Calacanis (00:37:32): He loves it. He everybody needs a foil. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:37:35): It's all sorts of David Friedberg (00:37:36): problems for the rest of us. You go out and talk shit about people for no reason. It's great. Speaker 6 (00:37:39): What are you Jason Calacanis (00:37:39): talking about? You never talk shit about Stripe? Guys, we don't have any beef with JHAN. David Friedberg (00:37:43): Employees mids for no reason. For no reason. You're just like, oh, what about your mids? Jason Calacanis (00:37:47): That's a hypothetical. Speaker 6 (00:37:48): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:37:48): Okay. I did say that you you guys pocketed 500 large. John Collison (00:37:52): Look. We we can come to the summit and, you know, Palmer style Jason Calacanis (00:37:55): just, like, 100%. Oh my god. Yeah. Long list of things I've said about shoes. John Collison (00:38:00): Please. Please. Please. Jason Calacanis (00:38:01): Yes. Absolutely. Shout out to my guy, Tom Relucky. But what do you think, Friedberg? For serious, let's get back on track here. David Friedberg (00:38:07): Okay. So here's what I here's what I think. If you take defense down to first principles, there was an excellent tweet that we were all texting about yesterday. It may be observation that Trump's negotiations with Russia and China, where there's all of this hemming and hawing about those negotiations being complying with the wants and needs of dictators, may actually be a shift in strategy on the global relationship The United States has with other global powers. In particular, a shift from the objective being about US primacy and The US being kind of the sole great power on Earth to recognizing that that's no longer the case. And that in a multipolar world, we no longer need to invest in wars, need to invest in conflicts, need to invest in defense with supposed allies to try and build up our strength across the globe. And I'm not saying that this is necessarily the right strategy, but it was an observation that maybe the strategic imperative is now to have kind of a a multipolar stance in the world rather than a stance of primacy. And in that framing, you then ask the question, okay. Add make that the case. Now if we do agree that we are all gonna settle into a new world where China, Russia, The United States are not necessarily equal powers, but shared powers, across the globe. In that context, do we need to have as much of an investment in global defense? Do we need to continue to pour dollars into building up arsenals and military bases and troops and stations and positions all around the world? Perhaps not. Perhaps the world gets divided peacefully, and we open up global trade relationships, and everyone benefits economically from the advances in technology and improvements in productivity. And the world order is peaceful but multipolar. Maybe that's the new era that we're entering. And in that context, you don't need as much of a defense. And separately, to Chamath's point, there's different technology that's now in play. We've seen it in the Ukraine Russia context that a $10,000 drone can destroy a $10,000,000 piece of equipment. And China now has drone factories that can output millions of drones each month. David Friedberg (00:40:12): So if China develops this new type of arsenal with millions of autonomous flying systems that can go and attack troops and attack expensive pieces of equipment, Do we really need aircraft carriers? Do we really need tanks? And I think that's the whole HACCEF led, Trump led conversation that's underway in defense right now. Number one, multipolar. Number two, therefore, we don't need as much defense spending. Number three, maybe the defense spending that we do do should account for the new technology on in play in the battlefield, and that really changes the character of how the defense department is structured and how funding is structured. So that's really, I think, the way to look at it versus, hey. Let's just cut defense spending for cutting's sake. And that might be what's going on right now. Jason Calacanis (00:40:53): A holistic view of it. Patrick, any thoughts on, we're seeing in defense tech and, saving money through Doge? Well, obviously, what, Patrick Collison (00:41:03): what, you know, Anduril and others are doing is is pretty amazing. But, you know, we're we're obviously not defense experts, but sort of just bring the credit card merchant, perspective, to bear here. You know, we naturally just go and look at the the time series, and the sort of the data around it. And I guess I'm struck by and, again, maybe I'm getting some of the details wrong here. This is outside of, our zone. But as far as I can tell, the cuts proposed over the next couple years of the for the defense department are of approximately the same magnitude as the reduction in the defense budget that occurred between 2010 and today. And so it's not like this is some unprecedented transformation in DOD budget. We've we've we've done this. And then secondly, you know, as far as I can tell, one of the most ecumenical uniformly shared bipartisan issues in Washington is the inefficiency and the profligacy of defense procurement. You know, Jim Fallow is writing a book about this in the late eighties. You had, you know, Augustine's laws and their whole book about this. Just everyone seems to, you know, fervently believe, that defense procurement is monstrously inefficient. Now, you know, it's possible to make budgetary changes without fixing that, but, obviously, the prospect of meaningful improvement there, seems, seems like it would be, you know, really beneficial. John Collison (00:42:24): And if I can just give a quick book recommendation. You know, this book Boyd by Robert Coram by John Boyd, the air force colonel who, you know, is part of the reformist, movement. I feel like everyone in Silicon Valley has that book on their shelf and no one's actually read it. Speaker 6 (00:42:36): I do. John Collison (00:42:37): But it is a exactly. Patrick Collison (00:42:39): It it is called references sprinkling some oodle loops into your remarks, always helps. John Collison (00:42:44): Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds smart. But, that is a great book, and it's a book about air force procurement, essentially, where he had his, you know, basically, the story of the air force generals of the time wanted planes that were bad, and he had a theory about better fighter jets. And he had his fingerprints all over the f 16 and the a 10 and the f 15 and, various aircraft. And it was a real battle to get the air force to produce better aircraft, and they really you know, the generals really wanted these bad aircraft that they had planned. And so that's a fun read at this moment in time when it feels like we have this similar transition from man to man. Jason Calacanis (00:43:20): Tell us the name of the book. Again, I know there's many books about it. John Collison (00:43:23): It's called Boyd by Robert Coram. Speaker 6 (00:43:25): Got it. John Collison (00:43:25): And it's a it's a really engaging read. It's also just very well written. It's this kind of narrative nonfiction style. Yeah. Speaker 6 (00:43:30): Oh, god. Jason Calacanis (00:43:31): There it is. Okay, everybody. And another book selection from the All In book club brought to you by Stripe. Use the code all in to get a year free John Collison (00:43:41): of Stripe. The Stripe press books. Jason Calacanis (00:43:43): Absolute oh, you do actually have a series of cool books. Yeah. We'll, we'll plug those towards the end. Alright. Sharmap, you added a crypto update. Crypto Corner is back. We had an exciting week of innovation in the crypto space. Last week, Argentine president Millet, who is a hero to a lot of people in, on the right, or for government efficiency, promoted a meme coin. It was called Libra, dollar sign Libra. And, he originally tweeted, this private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of the Argentine economy, with a link to Libra for his citizens to go buy it. And buy it, they did. But he deleted that tweet when this whole thing came apart and said, I was not aware of the details of the project. And after having become aware of it, I decided to not continue spreading it. The market cap ripped to 4,000,000,000. It crashed 95% as these meme coins always do. 74,000 traders lost almost 300,000,000. 20 4 wallets had losses over a million, and Malay has been sued a hundred plus times already. And this just happened last week. He's being investigated by his own government now. And, there is an impeachment, attempt underway by the opposition. Malay's team told CNN that his endorsement of the coin was a mistake. Really? Oh, wow. Going out on a limb there. According to insiders, Millet never actually owned any Libra and was not associated with the coin. I think family members maybe put him up to it. The details of why he promoted it remain a little bit unclear. There's a lot of speculation. Thomas, your thoughts? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:26): It's kind of crazy. I mean, he was on such a positive upswing of momentum. It doesn't make much sense why he got embroiled in all of this. The the problem with this, though, is I think that the cover up is always worse than the crime itself. So the first message was, you know, very Clintonesque, like, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. He was like, I did not endorse it. I just shared it. What's his justification for how he how he, could rationalize what he did? The kid that's behind this thing, Hayden Davis, I think is his name. Jason Calacanis (00:46:03): He was on Coffeezilla. Was an incredible one hour. Did you see that? The Coffeezilla interview. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:46:08): I saw I saw some of the clips on x, and it was pretty brazen because he he essentially said that he had Javier Mallet in his pocket. And then there were text messages that used some pretty colorful language to basically say the same thing. Then on top of that, there were some text messages that seemed to implicate Malay's sister as having got some of the money from all of this. I don't know. The whole thing just makes absolutely no sense. He was doing so much good, and now he's gonna go through this whole cycle of trying to wash his hands of this whole thing. It's a complete waste of time and effort. I don't know why he did this. Jason Calacanis (00:46:42): And there was another, like, interesting little tidbit, Friedberg, friend of the pod, David Portnoy. Supposedly, he's been getting in on this, and he's a gambler, and he loves gambling. And he looks at his gambling, obviously. He had put reportedly millions of dollars into this, and this guy we're talking about gave him his money back. This guy also has something like a hundred million dollars sitting in a bank account anywhere. What's your take on all these meme coins, rebirth? David Friedberg (00:47:08): I don't like them. I don't think that they're k. Like, good. I don't think they're productive. Alright. I think that a bunch of people are gonna put money in and lose money, and a few people are gonna make a lot of money. And, you know, but at the end of the day, it's no different than the people that sell trading cards or the people that create and sell collectibles and get paid for them. And this is just effectively a digital collectibles business. Unfortunately, I think it's, like, amplified by, like, a thousand x because collectibles businesses have friction and they're manual and you gotta ship them. And this creates, a bit more of a digital frenzy where you see the social feedback loop happen really quickly in real time. And that drives these things to a high value, which means people have the ability to lose a lot more than they otherwise would. But, look, I mean, these are not helping the financial system get rebuilt as we talked about earlier. They're not, creating productive value. They're entertainment mechanisms just like any other kind of gambling system might be, and, you know, people can choose to do that if they want. But, personally, I'm not into it. I just think it's stupid, but whatever. Jason Calacanis (00:48:08): Patrick You just did David Friedberg (00:48:09): their own. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:48:10): Do you think these are, like, collectibles, or do you think they are perceived by the people buying them more like securities and more like Bitcoin. They do, to Steelman the other side of the argument. They do trade with a ticker symbol. They are traded, on major platforms like Coinbase and, Robinhood, and people share charts about them. And so where do you stand on it? Hey. You're in the finance business. Meme Coin's good. Meme Coin's bad. Patrick Collison (00:48:41): I'm faced with Dave. I mean, I I well, they seem to me to be maybe analogous to to gambling, which, you know, I don't know that we want to ban gambling, like, if you're able to do it responsibly and you you understand what you're getting into and so forth, like, I guess that's fine. But as you say, judging by the tweets that I see, there are awful lot of ticker symbols and charts and prognostications about future price trajectories and so forth that lead me to think that people are placing somewhat more weight on the asset and security value of these, as compared to the, I don't know, some numinous intrinsic aesthetic value. So yeah. David Friedberg (00:49:29): I just Jason Calacanis (00:49:30): thought it's John, maybe two things could be true here. People are gambling, and they are being presented as financial instruments, and they're trying to trick the suckers at the table. The suckers, in this case, being the people who voted for Malay. To Chamath's point, this is the unbelievable cell phone of the of the decade. John Collison (00:49:48): Yeah. Look. I don't like meme coins. I think they're bad. And I think they're part of, like Patrick said, a a broader suite of things that we need to figure out societally where the legalization of sports betting and combined with highly targeted advertising. I don't know if you guys have seen the stats on, you know, whales in sports betting, losing very large amounts of money. And it's just these heartbreaking tales. And there's a very large number of them of people kind of losing much more than they expected. And I don't know, we have to reckon with these societal questions. I don't think the super easy answer is they come along from time to time. I only learned recently that, state lotteries are relatively recent phenomenon. Like I think it was one state start doing it in the 1970s and then a bunch of the other states followed suit. But it's kind of odd when you step back that, like I've passed a billboard on one zero one, you know, the state of California trying to, you know, get me to buy a lottery. Patrick Collison (00:50:44): Exactly. Negative e b e bet. John Collison (00:50:46): Yeah. It's just like, but, but that's become very normalized. And so I think it's a bucket of hard questions here around, you know, beam coins, sports gambling, whatever. Patrick Collison (00:50:55): I don't know what John Collison (00:50:55): you do, but there's a lot of meme coins are not the only place you find these very heartbreaking stories. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:02): This is the, this is the first time where they've actually talked about, or at least where I saw the details of how this stuff happens, because he laid it out. And there's these people called snipers that go and, like, pump up the bids right as soon as the coin gets launched, and then they're able to so there's, like, this entire mechanism. It's all so shady. Patrick Collison (00:51:22): I was gonna say some there where I I feel like the specific thing within meme coins that's probably most pernicious is, like, the rugging dynamic. And if you hit a meme coin to a girl. But without the without the pump and rug, if it was, like, I don't know, just some mimetic tracker of some sentiment or something, like, maybe that'd be okay. But the the the, like, the particular way in which they seem to be, you know, employed is, like, yeah, some some sort of discontinuous run up and then, well, the rug. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:50): What do you think, JKL? Jason Calacanis (00:51:52): I agree with you, Chama. Millet had the greatest PR run of all time, I think. I mean, he became an inspiration to all of us here in America who were concerned about the deficit and out of control spending and ridiculous departments. We heard Jamie Dimon talking about ridiculous committees and all this nonsense. I don't know if you guys remember, but remember he was like minister of culture, a fueira, and then minister of gender, a fueira. This was the precursor to, of course, Doge, where now we're like USAID deleted, Department of Education deleted, you know, Defense Department minus 8%. And, you know, what I really find terrible about this is that what it means for leadership, what Millet did was he rug pulled the people who put him in office. The people who voted for Millet are the ones who got hurt here. And when you think about leadership at its core, it really is about putting the needs of your constituents ahead of your own interest, the needs of your investors in the case of, you know, if you were running Stripe. Right? You gotta think about all these shareholders. Leadership, you know, at its core is, I think, setting the example. Right? You set the stair the the standard. The moral, the ethical, the vibes, the culture, you set that standard. He had set such a great standard that we all loved. And, you know, the appearance of impropriety is impropriety in my mind. That's the leadership standard that should be here. So even being near this, your sister launching it, your brother launching, whatever it is, he then went on to taunt. This is where I've really, you know, like people make mistakes, but and this is a stupid one to make, but the taunting of his own followers, you know, I'm out on Malay right now. This is what he said. The reality is if you go to the casino and lose money, I mean, what is the claim if you knew that it had these characteristics? This is another failure of leadership. Leaders own their mistakes. They don't attack the victims. Jason Calacanis (00:53:46): You take ownership of it. And the way you should judge people, I think, is what they do when they're given a lot of power and what they do when they make mistakes. Melee is a failure on all of those fronts. It's absolutely abhorrent. That's it. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. No, I'm just, I'm on fire John Collison (00:54:05): about it. Jason Calacanis (00:54:05): I just think it's like really terrible. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:07): Do you need help getting off your moral grandstand now? Jason Calacanis (00:54:09): I do. I do. I do. Actually, yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'm over here. I'm sorry. I actually care about morals, ethics, and leadership. I think that there's a standard set Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:17): by these people. That's what I that's what I think about when I think about you. David Friedberg (00:54:20): Yeah. Of Jason Calacanis (00:54:21): course. Thank you. Alright. With friends like these, call some brothers. Can you imagine? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:26): I can please say they're okay. I'm so annoyed. Can you please say they're Jason Calacanis (00:54:29): all right? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:29): Collison. Yes. Pronounce the goddamn I. Collison. Jason Calacanis (00:54:32): I'm I'm pronouncing the Irish. Okay? We we we speed things up a little bit. We we split together. It's just a little bit different. You wouldn't know this from being from Sri Lanka, a great country Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:42): in a dumpster. Speaker 6 (00:54:42): You guys David Friedberg (00:54:43): wouldn't know why anyone watches this show, would you? Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:54:45): I don't know. There's somehow just jumping to this right now. Everybody says. You got no context for this. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:54:50): It's fine. Every show a train wreck, and we have to get it out of the John Collison (00:54:53): The banter is why why people come. People listen. You know? So So many TV shows are about it's nice to have friends. I mean, you look at friends or how I met your mother. My wife and I are rewatching the West Wing right now, and it's basically Patrick Collison (00:55:04): a show about, John Collison (00:55:04): you know yeah. But it's just like Same more, John. Buddies and loyal to each other and everything. And I think the underlying idea behind lots of TV shows is it's nice to have friends, and I think that's the the success they all impact us. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:16): Swing, by the way, is an is an incredible Which season are you on? It's an incredible show. John Collison (00:55:20): We're up to season four now. Jason Calacanis (00:55:22): God. John Collison (00:55:22): I gotta get in David Friedberg (00:55:23): on the It's five or seven. Five and seven. Speaker 6 (00:55:25): I haven't Jason Calacanis (00:55:25): got in on the West. John Collison (00:55:26): But, of course, Sorkin left after season four. David Friedberg (00:55:28): Season four. John Collison (00:55:29): Many people said, kinda David Friedberg (00:55:31): The whole thing about the great debate that America needs to have, I think it's still, like, the missing aspect of modern politics is Explain the great debate. Yeah. Well, the great debate is, like, let's talk about the topic that's at hand and talk about it on the merit of what's right for their country as opposed to everything being about attacking because the other side brought the idea forward. And now we have to attack the other side and frame the idea as being beneficial to them and hurtful to us. Nothing actually gets resolved because we don't end up having objectivity around these conversations around some of the major issues that the country faces, many of which, by the way, both sides have valid points of view. And if we can kind of have the great debate, if we can have these conversations Speaker 6 (00:56:10): Mhmm. David Friedberg (00:56:10): Like Doge. Right? Like abortion, like, you know, the rights of states, like spending. Like, there are all these things that we should be talking about rather than use that moment as a way to attack the other side politically so I can make sure I've got points and kudos leading into the next election cycle. It's just awful. Anyway, I missed that about the West Wing. It feels like a purist like, just a beautiful, like, way of thinking about Jason Calacanis (00:56:31): how it's Speaker 6 (00:56:31): worth it. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:56:32): I wonder what it would be like to watch the West Wing and then House of Cards back to back. That's something Speaker 6 (00:56:36): I should Chamath Palihapitiya (00:56:37): no. But, sweet, it's like really a juxtaposition, those two different shows. Jason Calacanis (00:56:40): Yeah. But Patrick Collison (00:56:40): they've isn't the West Wing kind of the opposite of what you just said you want the all in to represent? Because I see I see the West Wing as being sort of fully immersed in and representing, you know, one sort of particular worldview. There was, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:56:55): you Patrick Collison (00:56:55): know, there was in some sense, we look back on the nineties of the Clinton years or something as, you know, know, this period of great harmony in the country. And, you know, that harmony might have been great and the economy was doing well and, you know, all the things. But it wasn't exactly a period of I mean, whatever. I wasn't here in the nineties. But, you know, from afar, it did not feel to me when I was eight or whatever as a period of tremendous ideological, debate and fervor and schisms and all the rest. David Friedberg (00:57:18): During the nineties. During the Clinton era, you're saying. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:57:21): Yeah. We and and I think Patrick Collison (00:57:22): I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I think of the west wing as, you know, a kind of recapitulation of the fifty years. David Friedberg (00:57:27): Maybe they were, I mean, maybe they were the compromising party because I mean, tell me another modern democrat president that's had any point of view on balancing the budget and creating a surplus, Jason Calacanis (00:57:38): which Oh, he was David Friedberg (00:57:38): the centrist. Yeah. Was aligned with the Reagan point of view at the time, and he kinda you know, again, as, yeah, J. Cal said, he was a centrist, and he brought brought the the parties closer together rather than farther apart with how they operate. I agree with Patrick. I see. The the thing Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:50): that makes the West Wing a great show is that it's about the insider nature of The White House and The West Wing and where you see these characters like Toby who would never be a star in any other show Jason Calacanis (00:58:02): Mhmm. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:03): Under any other circumstance on any network ever. And instead, he's one of the central quasi good, quasi nefarious bully kind of you know, he was like a the precursor to the Rahm Emanuel archetype in the Obama White House, I think. John Collison (00:58:19): I also find it funny where, you know, the way, Dominic Cummings has talked about just his experience of life in government was that it's so distracting trying to get anything done because, you know, you have some plan, you get up in the morning, and you're gonna go do something that matters for the country, and then you're just instantly by 8AM, you know, sideswiped by Yeah. Some kind of silly controversy of the day. That's basically many of the episodes of the West Wing where they, like, have some actual important thing Totally. That they want to get done, and then they just get waylaid by a silly controversy. Jason Calacanis (00:58:47): Yeah. Seems to me like you're also the product of the technological innovation that occurred during your presidency and during your term. And if you think about Clinton, he got to ride the Internet and this massive economic boom. And you look at, you know, Reagan, the PC boom. I mean, sometimes the timing really matters, I think. Patrick Collison (00:59:09): Though though I think, you know and, again, I'm not any grand expert on the on the Clinton years, but I think, you know, it is interesting where, you know, one of the first acts of the Clinton presidency was the was the deficit reduction act. You know, Dave, to your point, you know, when's the last time that a, you know, a Democratic president, you know, really really cared about the deficit. I think federal spending fell by five points of GDP Speaker 6 (00:59:30): Mhmm. Jason Calacanis (00:59:31): Over the Patrick Collison (00:59:31): course of the of the Clinton presidency, which is really not a small amount. You know? So obviously, there were some kind of structural tailwinds from, you know, technology and the the international and all the rest. So, yeah, a bunch of that was defense, but but, like, nonetheless. So, hey. He John Collison (00:59:44): did it. Jason Calacanis (00:59:44): Well, in the in the last two administrations and you look at California, there were massive windows of surplus, and there were massive windows of a surging stock market over the last eight years. And we plundered and we wasted them by adding 16,000,000,000,000 to the debt during a good time. Like, what's gonna happen during a bad time? Just absolutely brutal. Let's move on. Where do we wanna go here? We got GROC three. We got the China private sector. We got a victory lap for Freeburg. You heard me first? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:00:14): I wanna ask David Friedberg (01:00:14): you guys questions about ARC Institute and the Evo model. John Collison (01:00:17): We should do that. Jason Calacanis (01:00:18): That's the David Friedberg (01:00:18): whole world. Jason Calacanis (01:00:18): Let's do the ARC Institute. Friedberg, why don't you ask the question? David Friedberg (01:00:22): Patrick runs the ARC Institute. Right? Jason Calacanis (01:00:24): Okay. Yes. Patrick Collison (01:00:25): And we're the cofounders, and then there are two scientists. David Friedberg (01:00:27): And you guys are funders of it? Or yeah. Maybe you guys give us the answer to the ARC. Jason Calacanis (01:00:30): A lot of money into this. Yeah. Speaker 6 (01:00:32): Yeah. Patrick Collison (01:00:32): Yeah. So, the ARC Institute is a nonprofit. It does basic biology research. It's in Palo Alto, next to Stanford. It's about 230 people today. And, yeah, John and I are among the funders of us, but there's a there's a bunch of other very generous donors. John Collison (01:00:46): Can you explain the location behind the curiosity driven research that's on the website? Yeah. Patrick Collison (01:00:49): There's kind of two things behind it. So the first is scientist the vast majority of biology scientists today receive NIH grants through basic research. And the NIH grants are, one, just hard to get and annoying to get. You know, scientists spend 40% of their time working on grant overhead and so forth. But worse, like, even more perniciously, the grants are very restrictive in terms of the kind of science they can do. And so we ran a survey of scientists back a couple years ago of top scientists. And four out of five, like 79% of them told us that if they could just spend money however they wanted, if they weren't kinda limited by, you know, what they're prescribed by these NIH grants, four out of five told us they would change their research agenda a lot. And and so I think the analogy here is imagine if there was only one VC firm, and it was run by the government. John Collison (01:01:34): How would that change? Had strong opinions on what kind of companies people should build. Exactly. You know, literally, the Patrick Collison (01:01:41): the the grant panels at the NIH are, they're consensus based, like, explicitly. They've kinda consensus based scoring mechanisms, and they, you know, penalize you if you're doing work outside of your field and so forth. So I we we we kind of we do go to all this work to train these amazing scientists, and then we sort of don't let them pursue their best ideas. That's kinda problem one. And ARC, the the ARC investigators, you know, they're fun to do whatever they want, curiosity driven research. And then the second thing behind ARC is, is this idea that you can kind of divide diseases into three categories. You know, you have infectious diseases, and we we, you know, broadly speaking, know how to, you know, generate cures for and treatments for infectious diseases. We have monogenic diseases, like one genetic mutation or something, and we don't know how to cure those in most cases, but we can we can be, be, you know, screen for them and so on. And then we've you know, what the biologists call it complex diseases where there's some kind of gene environment interaction. That's most cancers, most autoimmune diseases, most neurodegenerative diseases, and so forth. Alzheimer's, things like that. Exactly. And we've never cured a complex disease. And, you know, many of these diseases are very tragic precisely because, you know, we not only we not cured them, we don't even have treatments as, you know, as John says, in the in the case of Alzheimer's, for example. And so, you know, the question is, can we do something about this? And, you know, what would a research agenda and program that, you know, can that can help, you know, shine some light on these complex diseases look like? And our hypothesis, now we'll see we'll see, how much it's borne out. But our hypothesis is that we've gotten a couple of new technologies over the last couple of years. Single cell sequencing, we can sequence the the DNA or the RNA just like in one cell. We've, you know, fancied new functional genomics and CRISPR technologies, so you can make these, you know, fine edits and perturbations, again, even just in a single cell. Patrick Collison (01:03:21): And then, obviously, you have transformers and AI and ML and all this stuff. And this is kind of a new read, think, write loop in biology that just didn't exist a decade ago. And again, the question is, is this powerful enough now to, you know, solve some of these previously intractable diseases? And so yesterday, ARC released this new foundation model for biology. It's the largest biology ML model ever. It's actually, I think, the largest open source AI model ever. Jason Calacanis (01:03:51): This is Evo two you're talking about. Evo, the number two. Evo two. Patrick Collison (01:03:55): Yeah. And so it's not just open weights, like, like, you know, the DeepSeq model or or llama or something. It's actually it's open source since the training code is, is public. And, you know, you can people can read the blog post or the paper or whatever. The thing I find amazing at EVO and that just really surprised me is, so it's trained on 9,000,000,000,000 base pair gene tokens. So, you know, CHETGBT LLMs are normally trained on on, you know, the on on human language. This is a a language model, but it's trained on on DNA, the language of life. And there's only one human genome in the training set. It's mostly other species. And even though it's only seen one human genome, it's state of the art at predicting the pathogenicity of human genome mutations. And so, you know, a famous mutation is the BRCA mutation for breast cancer. Like, it's state of the art at predicting the the pathogenicity, the harmfulness of, of BRCA mutations. Again, it only John Collison (01:04:54): Just like we're human. Patrick Collison (01:04:55): Seen one in humans. It's it's only seen one human genome, and that human, you know, did not have, these pathogenic mutations. And so it's it's kind of learning something deep across the tree of life. And I don't know. I find that pretty cool. David Friedberg (01:05:06): And, sorry, is there a phenotypic dataset that's used in training? So I think, like, you know No. When totally right. And so when you're building models in typical, like, genotype by phenotype models, you're trying to look at the phenotype, the physical characteristics of Speaker 6 (01:05:23): Yes. David Friedberg (01:05:23): The organism. What can it do? What does it look like? What are the features? And then you look at the genome, and so that tells you, hey. These are the specific genes or alterations or mutations that drove this particular phenotype. It's kinda what the model tries to learn over time with the objective being, hey. Can I ask it to define a genotype or a genome based on a phenotype, based on a physical set of characteristics I'm looking for vice versa? Maybe you can just help us understand what what is it trained on and, you know, how did that kind of, you know, prediction in Branca, you know, how how is that possible? Patrick Collison (01:05:55): Great question. So it's totally unsupervised. That is to say, you know, you're just showing us lots of genomes, and any kind of latent structure that it learns is just based on trying to figure out how to kind of organize, that knowledge. But we're not showing it any labeled data or phenotypic, you know, kinda outcome data or, you know, what have you. And so then you're able to you can give it a, genetic sequence and ask relative to its understanding of the genetic universe, how likely is this particular sequence. And so then you can do things like, like, you know, predict anomalousness or pathogenicity or whatever. David Friedberg (01:06:28): Right. Patrick Collison (01:06:28): You can also then kinda using the embeddings of the upper layers. You know, we don't need to get too technical here, but, like, you you can train another model on top of the model. And, and even if you showed maybe only a couple of examples, it learns very quickly, okay, kind of here's, you know, here's how the weights of EVO two correspond to this particular task. And those, those sort of models trained on top, turn out to be, you know, really accurate. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:54): You guys open source the base model or you open source the fine tuned or both? Patrick Collison (01:06:59): We open source the base model, but there there's no kind of proprietary reason we didn't open source the fine tune. It's like it's really easy to produce them and yeah. If anyone wanted one of them, we'd we'd we'd happily share it. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:07:09): Where does it stand in the spectrum of different tools that folks would would use to solve these life sciences problems? There's cell models that are being developed by some, then there's these protein models. Where does this fit? Patrick Collison (01:07:23): This kind of landscape of of, of foundation models in biology, it's obviously very new. So it's, it's a bit of an open question, sort of, how exactly people are gonna find, you know, ways to to to use it and and applications for it. Part of what I think is cool is that proteins and RNA and, I mean, phenotypic expression and everything, you know, all these things sit on top of the DNA. Like, in some sense, the DNA encodes everything because, you know, the the whole organism comes from the DNA. And so I guess the question would be, and, you know, we don't really know yet, is DNA all you need? And with EVO one, we saw some, you know, encouraging suggestions that, for example, you can build really good protein structure prediction models out of a DNA foundation model, even if you don't train on a lot of, you know, protein structure, data. So but I I I'd say just it's a really exciting time, and it's kind of an open question. And I don't know if you analogize EVO two to I don't know whether it's GB two or three or something. But, you know, I I think we're gonna see a similar Cambrian explosion of of applications over the next couple of years. The thing we are really excited about at ARC is is training, yeah, cell state models and trying to better understand, you know, how cells you know, what what causes them to change states. And so we're thinking a lot about that. But but, you know, the reason the the weights are on Hugging Face, and hopefully, we'll be surprised in in what we'll do. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:45): Do you just expect that over time as Stripe continues to grow, you can just take the x some of your own excess capital and other people will do the same and keep funding ARC? And then if there's something that ARC creates or innovates on, if it can generate some amount of money, it would just kind of flow back. Is it meant to be self sustaining, or is it always just going to be via patronage from successful folks that just wanna keep it going? Patrick Collison (01:09:09): John and I are, you know, we are ourselves very committed to us, and, and, you know, we're we're kind of underwriting us, in that regard. But, well, one, we're just lucky where there's a a growing donor pool of other people supporting us. I think it's just better for an institution if it's not kind of beholden to the whims of, you know, one donor or one group of donors or something. So I think that's just a much healthier, structure for us. Now I think there's also a larger group of people who are just becoming interested in science and realizing I mean, you know, Jason was on his, his moral pulpit. My pulpit is that, you know, all is not well in basic research, in The US today. And, again, the way to see this is just talk to the scientists themselves, and they tell you, how kind of inhibited they are and, you know, the the the the kind of problems caused by the strictures and structures, around them. And we don't see ARC as, you know, the answer. Hopefully, it can be sort of one point in the space. But then, you know, there's other people doing cool stuff. You know, Brian Armstrong, of course, started a company in the longevity space, and Yuri Milner and others started Altos. And, you know, this is the people this, the the Chan Zuckerberg, Institute. And so, you know, people are trying different things. But, no, our our ARC is, Speaker 6 (01:10:21): you know, Patrick Collison (01:10:21): we're we're we're a big supporter. And then if if you know, it's possible that ARC over the long term becomes self sustaining, but, you know, that's, Jason Calacanis (01:10:27): Well, that was my next question is Speaker 6 (01:10:28): Yeah. Patrick Collison (01:10:28): It takes a while to get things into the clinic. So, you know, we're not holding out for that tomorrow. Jason Calacanis (01:10:32): Well, I you know, when they, they have this technology transfer department at every major university where when scientists get grants and they work on some innovation, it gets monetized. And so what happens here? Who owns the innovations? How do you license them? Because it would be amazing if it just wasn't based on, I believe, you guys have put over a billion dollars into this. That was my understanding. Is that true? Is this like a you guys are over a billion dollars into this effort? Patrick Collison (01:10:58): Not quite. The numbers yeah. Not quite. The numbers are public. So ARC spends around, a hundred million a year. Jason Calacanis (01:11:04): Oh, okay. Patrick Collison (01:11:05): And it started about three years ago. Oh, okay. So Jason Calacanis (01:11:10): So hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a really significant thing. Patrick Collison (01:11:13): Yeah. And and again, I wanna emphasize, there there are other donors. Yes. So it's it's it's not just us. But, I mean, it's a nonprofit. There there have been spinouts, and there will continue to be. And so if one of those, you know, really if one of those becomes Moderna or, you know, the next Ozempic or something, then, you know, that can be really good for ARC. And ARC might have an endowment and be able to kind of self sustain and so forth. We're we're there's no prospect for us to make money on it in the sense that, you know, it's not a profit. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:11:41): Well, actually, John, you know, just one thing there. I was talking to a friend of mine. You could if this thing actually hits, you could flip this nonprofit into a four profit. I got a guy you could talk to. Oh, quiet. John, go ahead. Yeah. Oh, strays. David Friedberg (01:11:55): On the whole, like, modeling world, we talk a lot about the idea that you can kind of use a computer, state the phenotype or the physical characteristics you want in a biological organism, and have the software resolve the whole genome, all the DNA needed to make that physical organism real. And it can do it from its prediction ability on what genes, what combinations, but we're a couple orders away from that. Right? I mean, I think, like, ultimately, we we always talk about, hey. We wanna be able to define or have the software define the plant that can grow on the surface of Mars. It knows the soil type of Mars. It knows the air. You know, it knows that it's carbon dioxide based. It's 10% of the Earth's atmosphere. It this is what the days the daylight structure looks like. It needs to be wind tolerant. And then the software predicts an organism that might be able to do that. You know? And, obviously, there's a lot of this predictive work going on in proteins. Then the higher order is cells, so single cell organisms, microbial organisms, and then ultimately multicellular organisms of plants, and then finally animals where you could basically create organisms from scratch using software because we have all the other tools to biologically put these pieces together today. But this is a great kind of I I view it as a pyramid. There's a ton of phenotypic data that still needs to be fed and ultimately all to kinda have us all understand protein protein models and and and a lot more to it, but it's a great I Patrick Collison (01:13:16): think that I think that's right. Like, you can, there's there's a certain amount you can probably derive sort of, you know, from first principles just by looking at genomes, I think the really powerful models are gonna need to do exactly what you say and to feed in a lot of ancillary phenotypic and and just kind of, other data, how they fare in different environments. David Friedberg (01:13:34): And so sequencing data got ahead of the phenotyping data because there's so much sequencing data that's come in. So you can do a beautiful job predicting, like, correctness in a genome. But Jason Calacanis (01:13:43): Well, and and Patrick Collison (01:13:43): this and the sequencing data is really nicely digital, whereas Right. You know, the phenotypic stuff, it's like, well, what exactly is the data? Yeah. David Friedberg (01:13:50): Totally. John Collison (01:13:50): Dave, sorry. I've while we're in the science corner, I have Patrick Collison (01:13:52): a question John Collison (01:13:53): for you, Dave, which are strawberries. You might know the answer to this. A bunch of tree species around the world are under attack. So in Ireland, we have this problem of the ash dieback. Ash is kinda Ireland's national tree. They use it to make Hurleys, which is, you know, the for the national sport. And, since the mid twenty tens, you know, especially as the live plant trade has ramped up You do we need to have a Patrick Collison (01:14:12): a hurl for, for for for Jason. For Jason, obviously. Jason Calacanis (01:14:16): Here on the shelf. So today, David Friedberg (01:14:18): American Chestnut here. John Collison (01:14:20): Yeah. No. Exactly. I was gonna reference the American Chestnut as well in The US. But it feels like we have this real problem, and it's so sad where so many beautiful trees are under attack. Patrick Collison (01:14:28): The the the bark the bark beetle in in California and, you know, the the various conifers that we're losing. John Collison (01:14:32): So we gotta solve this. David Friedberg (01:14:34): Black pod disease the black pod fungus and cacao and coffee is being destroyed. T r four is destroying banana right now. Jason Calacanis (01:14:39): Talk is doomed. Let's Speaker 6 (01:14:41): go. No. Jason Calacanis (01:14:41): No. We're not. It's a real, like It is a real this David Friedberg (01:14:44): is a real issue. Patrick Collison (01:14:44): We're down Jason Calacanis (01:14:45): to the science corner here. David Friedberg (01:14:46): So this is, yeah, I mean, this is exactly what we aim to address at o hollow. So in some cases, you can actually silence a gene that's a suppressor of immune function of the organism, which can actually improve disease resistance. Patrick Collison (01:14:58): But how do you do delivery of Vastia? Like, this airborne sprays or what's the yeah. How do how do you how do you treat the tree? David Friedberg (01:15:05): Yep. So ultimately, if you're gonna use a a genomic method, you would transform the genome. So you would edit the genome and you would regenerate a plant or regenerate a tree and then propagate that tree. Speaker 6 (01:15:16): Okay. Patrick Collison (01:15:16): But then, like, we've we've to replant all the trees. We have John Collison (01:15:18): to replant the trees. David Friedberg (01:15:19): We have to replant the trees. And, ultimately, Speaker 6 (01:15:22): we have to John Collison (01:15:23): custom projects? Can we do a little thing on ash in Ireland? David Friedberg (01:15:25): Absolutely. That is some of the work we do. So we announced a few weeks ago a partnership with the University of Florida to use our methods to basically introduce disease resistance for major fungal pathogen that's destroying the Florida strawberry crop. And so that's what we call a trait program at a hollow where we can identify a specific genomic trait that we can go and introduce into that plant. But then you're right. You do have to grow all the plants back and then put them back in the ground. John Collison (01:15:49): That's the second best to to pure extinction, but, I have in in Ireland, I ended up owning this kind of country house and, virgin woodlands where, you know, woodlands that Ireland was used to be fully forested and then was denuded with the arrival of agriculture. And there's, some kind of ancient woodlands on us that are from the original when Ireland was fully kind of covered in trees. And I find the die off of species very sad, and so we gotta get David Friedberg (01:16:17): Yeah. But, no, it's I'm not like, I I'm I'm very optimistic. Like, we know how to address these solutions. We know how to regenerate the trees. We can we can do this quickly. We can resolve these problems. But you are right. There does John Collison (01:16:28): need to be Speaker 6 (01:16:28): a point. Patrick Collison (01:16:28): Askew to the people in Tahoe. Like, you know, the Tahoe Basin has been so worse than decimation. As in decimation is only one in ten, which is, like, you know, half the, half the trees in in Tahoe have been hit by, by bark beetle. David Friedberg (01:16:41): So those are very interesting ones because, in insects, you can actually build very specific defense mechanisms against, insects. But we generally have to improve genetic diversity. And in doing so, you know, there there's a natural resistance because the evolutionary like like, the reason we have a t r four problem in banana, all the world's banana that we grow commercially comes from one original banana clone called dwarf Cavendish. And they took that one plant, they They cut clippings of it, put it in the ground, go another plant, cut clippings of that, and they kept multiplying it. So all the bananas we eat and all the bananas that are planted across tens of millions of acres worldwide come from one original clone. And because of that, this fungus has been exceptionally capable of evolving itself to better eat that banana plant. And so 60¢ of every dollar we spend on bananas today goes towards fungicide. We're spraying these banana trees once or multiple times a week to kill this fungus. We're consuming that. It's super expensive. And if we had genetic diversity, if we had better genetics in the banana programs around the world, we'd be able to radically improve Patrick Collison (01:17:41): the what the administration says you think we need more diversity? Jason Calacanis (01:17:45): Are you in favor of DEI, Freeberg? They cornered you. Freeberg, I got you gotta make one promise to me. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:17:50): Here it comes. Jason Calacanis (01:17:51): You're not gonna start working on raptors. I don't wanna see any of these raptors running around, San Francisco. Okay? Shamatha, your thoughts here on, Science Corner here? It's been a really enthralling one. David Friedberg (01:18:02): The raptors are coming for you. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:04): I find it incredibly inspiring that there's just so much movement in these foundational models. It's incredible. Like, every day just seems like there's something new. The biggest problem that I think that the commercial community is going to deal with is how to actually take advantage of it because your kind of head spins because you don't exactly know where to start. The biological models are are different in that I think it's a much smaller population of people that will use it and I think they do have to figure out how to take these models and and complement the existing pipeline they have. The pipeline they have right now, I think, is pretty brittle. I think we all know that in life sciences. My wife struggles with this a lot is how to complement a very traditional pipeline with this kind of stuff. So I see it firsthand in how she tries to allocate capital towards these problems. On the other side, I just think these foundational models are really incredible. And I think that I was completely wrong on a couple of my earlier thoughts. One thought that I had for a long time was it just seemed like all these base models were asymptoting. And so I was not convinced where all this CapEx would go in a productive way. Like, why are you buying all these NVIDIA GPUs? And then I think if you looked at Colossus, the Elon's Colossus. Jason Calacanis (01:19:28): XAI built the largest data center over a hundred thousand GPUs going to 200,000 in a hundred and twenty two days. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:36): I mean, basically, what he proved was that there are still valuable gains in pretraining. And so the larger the cluster, the more value that there is. Now he also benefits, I guess, from the x feed, but that was really interesting. So now I'm, like, a little bullish on NVIDIA. I'm like, oh my god. If this is true, then all this CapEx may be justified. You could be buying a lot of stuff. Then hey. Look. I I actually also just to maybe riff on this Grok three thing for one second. I had three takeaways. My first takeaway was I was sneakily surprised on the pretraining upside on having a larger cluster. So I think that that's very pro NVIDIA actually, and and it's actually also just really good in general for foundational model makers. So I think, like, that's, like, a really positive thing. The second thing is, I don't know if you watched the live stream, but did you guys hear some of the stuff that these guys had to pull to pull this thing off? One of the most incredible so the way that Elon narrated it was we first had a physical problem, so we just had to search all around the country for one single location where we could actually put a hundred thousand GPUs, and they found it, which was an old Electrolux factory in Memphis. Jason Calacanis (01:20:55): Okay. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:56): That's kind of interesting. That's power. Yeah. He only had, like, 15 megawatts, and he had to get a quarter gigawatt. And so he had to basically buy every useful generator that was available. But then they had to liquid cool it. And so they bought one third of all the portable liquid cooling capacity in America and located it in an on prem. But then they figured out that there was a power problem. So then they took all these Tesla power packs and then had to do power smoothing, which had them had to rewrite all of the power pack firmware. In all of this, you know how we talked about DeepSeek being this moment where we had lost sight in America of, capital being the source of innovation? He proves actually a more generalized rule that I took away from this, which is you always have to have a constraint. So meaning let's say that there's like infinite capital in his case and infinite talent because he can basically recruit anybody he wants. What did he do instead? He created this artificial constraint of time. And so he was just able to say, you're gonna get this done in a moment. And Nick, I showed the, the third graph that the guys at artificial analysis sent to me, I just wanna put it up here because it shows you guys. The quality of Grok three relative to the amount of time that they've spent on this problem is to me what's staggering. So if you just sort of project the rate of change of this, and this is without judging OpenAI or Anthropic or anything else. Those guys have been doing it for years. These guys have been doing it for a year and they did all of this MacGyver engineering and were able to pull this off. So that's my second takeaway is that innovation needs a constraint. Sometimes it's capital, sometimes it's talent and sometimes it's time. And so if you can basically be just completely rigid on one of those dimensions, you can get a great team to create something. So that was an interesting takeaway. And then the third is, I think what this also speaks to is the notion of like a Kurezu, right? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:01): Which is like the Japanese word for like companies that work together while still remaining independent. The conglomerates, yeah. John Collison (01:23:08): Lose partnerships to interlinked Chamath Palihapitiya (01:23:09): companies. Interlinked. Sure. You know, Koreans have chaebols, right? Same job. Japanese have kuretsus, but this is the manifestation of an American kuretsu, which is Elon is able to get engineers from Tesla. He's not just buying the power packs. He had them re engineer the actual firmware in real time on-site. And so there's this, this positive ability to just, like, organize effort and human capital. Like, look, could we all stand up a data center and go and buy $500,000,000 of Powerpacks from Panasonic? Absolutely. It would take a few months. Eighteen. And then when it looked like we need to rewrite the firmware, it would take another eighteen months to your point, Jason. So it's really incredible what what these guys are able to do together. Those are my it was really, really inspiring. John Collison (01:23:55): Shamath, a book I think you might find really fun is, it's called Henry Kaiser, Builder in the American West. But, Kaiser is kind of underappreciated these days. He was the Elon of his time. He started as a road builder of all things. He won the contract to build the Hoover Dam. He built the Hoover Dam. He started a shipyard during World War two. Yeah, exactly. This one cars. He he he decided to make cars. He decided to make airplanes. Stations. The the fame the famous four d Liberty ship. Remember the propaganda win during World War two of, you know, they were able to lay down a bit. That was, at the Kaiser Shipyards. Kaiser Permanente spun out of them as part of their, the Patrick Collison (01:24:30): healthcare program. I I was literally, as Jonathan was saying that, pulling up my notes from the book, and, just he John Collison (01:24:36): was just a complete phenom, and he just kept finding new industries. It's like, oh, building cars. How hard can it be? Oh, building airplanes. How hard can it be? Jason Calacanis (01:24:44): Yeah. I mean, that is the nature of entrepreneurship. The nature of entrepreneurship is doing something delusional and then just letting, you know John Collison (01:24:53): But most entrepreneurs just do one delusional thing once and just stayed in that flare. Like, again, Elon and Henry Kaiser back in the day, it's in the world of atoms, very hard things, short timelines. Patrick Collison (01:25:03): And San Francisco now kind of, at least in the physical domain, stands for a kind of stasis. You know? It takes you ten years to, you know, build anything. But when he had the ship Jason Calacanis (01:25:13): the toilet. Yeah. Patrick Collison (01:25:14): The shipbuilding yards here, he went from zero to a hundred thousand people in Richmond in one year. John Collison (01:25:20): He basically built the city of Richmond, California. Jason Calacanis (01:25:22): How do you how do you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:24): but, guys, okay. Let let's just double. How how do you think these guys pull this off? Jason Calacanis (01:25:30): I don't know. Personal sacrifice. Massive personal sacrifice. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:33): I understand that, Jason, but I'm I'm talking about, like, tactically pull this off where you have to be on-site at some point, organizing this team, directing this team, being able to help isolate these problems, fix them. It just seems impossible to do it once, let alone six I don't understand Jason Calacanis (01:25:50): how to do it. John Collison (01:25:50): I I actually Jason Calacanis (01:25:51): have some insight to this just from knowing Elon. This a lot of these things compound a lot of what he learned in material science doing SpaceX and about making, the engines and then working with metal you see in his production at Tesla and specifically in the cyber truck. He has learned so much about factories. I don't think there's a person on the planet who knows more about factories now, having built a battery factory, a space factory, an engine factory, and a car factory, and now building Optimus on top of that. So these things compound, and then a lot of the engineers will float between the companies. So there are folks who have worked at SpaceX who then go do a tour over at Tesla, etcetera. And a number of those wound up coming into, a job. Patrick Collison (01:26:40): Read you I'm gonna read you a few quotes in this book. I'm just gonna see if they remind you of of anyone. Kaiser's managers challenged convention from the start. As builders, they were experts at coordinating workers, and materials. Kaiser was almost contemptuous of traditional methods. His partners had long since despaired of getting him to follow customary procedures. In preparing his bids for each new job, Kaiser would try to conceive every possible technique that might justify making a bid low enough to win the job. Once the construction was underway, he was forever trying to come up with ideas that would expedite the work. Perhaps more than any other builder, he believed that the faster a job gets done, the lower the costs can be. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:21): That's incredible. Incredible. Jason Calacanis (01:27:23): Well and what happened with Colossus is they had told Elon that it would when he he wanted to use other network operation centers to host Colossus, you know, and he looked. There were none available. And when he did find quotes from them, they told him eighteen to twenty four months. He just determined, hey. If this there's no reason to even do this. If I can't get this done in a, you know, a hundred days or something, why even join the race? I'm gonna be so far behind. And if you look just to wrap this segment up and get onto our final two segments, if you look at these two charts about Grok, it's now, and, you know, listen, these benchmarks in these arenas and testing, there's a lot of controversy around them, and people keep leapfrogging each other. But they they do give us, I think, our best shot at looking at progress. This is the benchmark here for GROC on a bunch of different tests, math, science, and coding. And as you can see, GROC three has now eclipsed Gemini, which is, Google's LLM and DeepSeek from China, Quad, and ChatGPT four o. And so to your point, Shamath, it's pretty impressive. Yeah. It's super impressive. Patrick Collison (01:28:37): Top of the LNSIS, leaderboard. Jason Calacanis (01:28:40): The the thing here, I think, Freeberg, I'd like to get your, comment on is if hardware is the constraint, does that mean that the person who understands hardware and build outs as Chamath was pointing to, does that mean that they by default win Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:58): Yeah. Jason, hold on. This is what's counterintuitive. It wasn't clear because No, it was not. Yes. I would guess that the last couple of iterations, it seemed like OpenAI has moved to what comes after the base model, meaning in the allocation of resources in terms of what they were creating. And so this is what's so counterintuitive. He was like, no. And so I I don't understand what he knew that everybody else didn't know, but that the size of that cluster made no sense. And it could only be a result like this where he basically proved that there was still value in pre training where size actually led to better outcomes. That's that's not that I think that was counterintuitive. Jason Calacanis (01:29:36): Super consequential is my is, I mean, complete agreement with the Chamath and just Freiburg to wrap the segment up and put a bow on it. We see these LLMs. They've made incredible progress as we just heard from EV two or EVO two, I'm sorry, GROC. And we're making these giant gains in space, you know, in work. And it's specifically in space. Dave, do you think this will get us any closer to Uranus? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:03): So sad. Jason Calacanis (01:30:04): So sad. It didn't even land. Okay. Let's do our final. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:06): Don't even don't even acknowledge it. Jason Calacanis (01:30:08): Do not acknowledge it because we'll just do more of it. I tried to get your mouth to do one. He wouldn't do it. Okay. Last two segments, we're gonna talk about staying private longer and when you guys are gonna go public, and then there's an asteroid coming. What do we wanna do first, boys? Do you wanna talk about this asteroid coming, Dave? Is it the end of the world if it hits us? What's going on? David Friedberg (01:30:27): NASA dropped the probability of it hitting Earth to one and a half percent. So every day when the sky gets dark, they can do a better job seeing this asteroid that everyone's freaking out about. So we finally got a good night sky two nights ago. The telescopes were able to get a better trajectory reading on it, and that allows the models to make estimates on the probability of this asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 when it's projected, to cross our orbit. And so right now, the probability is estimated at 1.5% that it will hit the Earth. And based on the size of this asteroid, there's this range. It goes up to 320 feet in diameter, as small as 80 feet in diameter, which actually can have a pretty big effect on how big of an energy release there would be if it actually, you know, hit the Earth. So even on the high end, if it was, call it, 300 feet, it would be the equivalent of, call it, a 20 megaton bomb, which is not insignificant. If it were that big, it would hit the Earth. If it was smaller than that, it would probably just detonate in the air and create a massive shock wave and and firestorm. But the region that it would, decimate would be limited, to probably a couple dozen miles up to a thousand miles of effect. And if you look at the total surface area of the Earth, you know, we're talking about 10 to 15% of the Earth having people that habitate you know, enough people to habitate Probably Jason Calacanis (01:31:48): gonna land in an ocean. Right? I mean Right. David Friedberg (01:31:50): Yeah. So it's one and a half percent chance of hitting the Earth and then call it a 15% chance if it hits the Earth, it's causing loss of life. Speaker 6 (01:31:57): So Jason Calacanis (01:31:57): 10 basis points, it hits the city. One basis point hits the city. Right. David Friedberg (01:32:00): And then it's a function of how big it is. If it's actually as small as 80 feet, then it's not gonna be that significant even if it does get close to habited areas. So, yeah, I'm not losing sleep over over the world. John Collison (01:32:10): Did you come across in your research I feel like this is a real boys are monitoring the situation moment. Did you come across the Tunguska event? Patrick Collison (01:32:18): Yeah. In your research on this? David Friedberg (01:32:19): So that one It's incredible. Yeah. So, I don't you wanna talk about it? Go ahead. John Collison (01:32:23): Yeah. Just, no one knows this. In nineteen o eight, an asteroid hit the Earth. It hit, relatively uninhabited part of Russia. It was a Liberia. First off, the asteroid did not hit the Earth because it got so hot on reentry. There was an airburst, and it was a thousand hiroshimas in size. The explosion, yeah, they have here the 60 meter asteroid, and they have the megatonage somewhere. Wow. It's the, yeah, largest impact event in recorded history. Obviously, there was, you know, stuff before recorded history. It's flattened 80,000,000 trees. Weirdly, basically, no one was killed because it was so uninhabited. But this is quite comparable to the one that NASA is talking about. David Friedberg (01:33:03): That's right. It's about the same size. Yep. John Collison (01:33:04): Exactly. And I think you can take a little bit of reassurance maybe that we have had similar sized asteroids hit before, and there is some existence proof that despite the giant explosion, you know, it doesn't show up in the climactic Yeah. David Friedberg (01:33:16): The Tunguska asteroid was at, like, a 60, two hundred feet. So if if this asteroid is in that range and it hits the Earth, you have this kind of explosion in the air. If it gets above, I think, two fifty roughly is where they think that it doesn't burn up fully in the air, and it actually will strike the Earth. But, yeah, that's, Jason Calacanis (01:33:36): There you go. David Friedberg (01:33:37): This is roughly what we saw happen, what we think the size will be Speaker 6 (01:33:39): Alright. David Friedberg (01:33:39): If it hits. Jason Calacanis (01:33:41): Is there a countermeasure? I don't mean to get all sci fi here. David Friedberg (01:33:44): Great question. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:33:45): No. No. But is there a countermeasure possible? And, like, if this thing was coming, let's say, in five years We do relative to the Earth. Size. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:33:52): Yeah. But relative to the Earth, this is, like, tens of thousands of kilometers an hour. Right? It's it's a it's a very fast moving object. It's pretty small. Right? A 60 feet. So you've now gotta figure out the exact trajectory, get it perfectly right, get a launch off of the Earth, and intercept this thing at the exact moment that you need to to push it off course or detonate something nearby it to to redirect it. So technically, very complicated, very hard to pull off. But this is exactly why we have this planetary defense funding at NASA, which is to track these objects. And this is another example, by the way, where I would say AI can play an important role. And I'd love Patrick and John to opine on this, but I have a a thesis that, like, AI, more than anything, unlocks deeply complicated projects for humans that would otherwise be kind of infeasible in the pre AI era. I think in the post AI era, we're gonna be like, oh, here's all these projects that we do that are like, oh, we, you know, we we on a daily basis, we mine to the center of the Earth, and we get cool, like, rare earth minerals from, like, 500 miles down. And we go to space and colonize the moon and all these crazy things because AI unlocks these large scale projects that would require millions of people to do things in a coordinated way. And AI can be very smart in this way. But I think AI could play a role also in these planetary defense initiative concepts, JKAL, in the future where you can actually build a complete project model in software on how you would actually address this problem and then, you know, go execute it with automation and But, yeah, there's a planetary defense function at NASA. They crack these objects and they're funded to do it. So we hope that NASA continues to get funding to do this work. Very important. And guys, it just came through that NASA just dropped the probability of the impact event to about one third of 1%. David Friedberg (01:35:34): So it's gotten even smaller, which is we can all go to sleep comfortably tonight. Jason Calacanis (01:35:38): Alright. Alright. Now Well, good morning. Everybody's been waiting for. Patrick, John, you founded the company in 2010. It's, fifteen years later. The entire LP industrial complex and venture capitalists everywhere. I'm sure some employees are wondering when will Stripe go public and under what circumstances, and what's the hold up here? Why aren't you public already? John Collison (01:36:03): Yeah. Look. I think people sometimes hold us out to be dogmatic or something on this topic, whereas we feel like so many other people out there in the world are dogmatic. We just try to be pragmatic on us. You know, Keith was on the show, and he would say, you know, he believes companies should go public as quickly as possible. I don't know. Maybe that's the right thing for some companies. But, in at least Stripe's case, that that hasn't been the case. I also think the environment has changed quite a bit where it used to be the case to that to do any return of capital to shareholders, you know, or if you needed any kind of large sums of money, you needed the public markets. That's obviously not true today where, the, you know, stable private markets exist. But we looked and we say, is Stripe better off at the moment as a private or a public company? And, you know, up to this point, we have determined private. That could change at some point, but it's kinda no dogma from our point. The last thing I'll just say is, you know, I think Keith made the argument, people generally make the argument that it is critical for discipline to be public, and public companies run-in a more disciplined fashion. And I think that's hogwash. Like, if you need a 25 year old Fidelity analyst asking you to double click on your CapEx, blah, blah, blah, blah to run the company with discipline, something is horribly wrong at the company and you need new management. And so that argument has never really resonated with me. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:27): Basically, what you guys are saying is for your intellectual perspective, you get a lot more return on the time you spend talking with the private investors you have and your team. And then John Collison (01:37:39): And customers. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:41): And customers. And it would just be dilutive, and you would have your outcomes, quite honestly, if you had to talk to these other folks who are talking to you and 50 other companies, don't really know much of anything, maybe very surface level, and then may actually distract you and force you to make decisions you don't wanna make. Patrick Collison (01:37:57): We're not even that negative. Jason Calacanis (01:37:59): Or not even that negative. Okay. Patrick Collison (01:38:00): I was gonna say, but but it's, there's no spiritual status associated with being public. Like, probably be public. It is a cheaper source of deeper and more liquid capital. And so if you want cheaper and, and more liquid capital, then you know, by all means, go with it. But, you know, it's it's not it's not more moral. And and I think, you know, again, it's it's just helpful to sort of get away from, from that kind of framing. I also think it's noteworthy that if you look at financial services in particular, and we're kind of a company at the intersection of financial services and technology, being private for a long time is is the norm. So, you know, Bloomberg is a private company. Fidelity is a private company. Vanguard is a private company. Jane Street's Street's a private company. Goldman Sachs Citadel. Securities. Citadel. Yeah. Goldman waited a hundred and thirty years to go public. JPMorgan waited seventy years to go public. Visa waited Visa waited fifty years to go public. And, you know, again, those are all, you know, different times in history. So I'm not not saying you can draw, David Friedberg (01:38:52): like, finish the future. Them. Patrick Collison (01:38:53): But I but well, I was just gonna say, I I think the thing of financial services where there's always a tendency, uniquely here, to be kind of pro cyclical. And I think you need to be kind of particularly careful as a public financial services company to avoid some of those temptations and some of those tendencies. And so, you know, I think that that that's a unique dynamic that applies, in our space. And, and then, you know, financial services And if you look at generally. If you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:39:17): look at companies like SpaceX, they're able to provide this yearly liquidity, which actually is probably better because it smooths out a lot of the vol, and then people can get back to work and just kinda Patrick Collison (01:39:26): Are you Jason Calacanis (01:39:26): are you guys profitable, by the way? John Collison (01:39:28): We are profitable. Yeah. Speaker 6 (01:39:29): Yeah. John Collison (01:39:29): And profitable on, like, a fully loaded GAAP net income basis, not like a community adjusted EBITDA stuff. But Jason Calacanis (01:39:36): Shout out Adam Newman. Come on the prod anytime. You gotta wear shoes. John Collison (01:39:42): Yeah. I I I do think we think as it comes, you know, pertains to people joining the business and being compensated. You know? Everyone loves the idea of an IPO pop. But if you look at a bunch of the other fintech companies, you know, Square, really great company, 70% off its 2021 peak, PayPal, eighty percent off their 2021 peak. If you're an employee and you join those companies in 2021, it's not a great feeling. And so, again, I think the, the the lack of vol you know, the the good and the bad is you are not priced every single day by the market, but it's not only a bad thing. Alright. I Patrick Collison (01:40:19): mean, the framework you know, if if I'm trying to predict our actions, like, the framework we use is is kinda two things. One, I I think, you know, what matters is less kind of the returns in a given year and more duration. David Friedberg (01:40:28): And Patrick Collison (01:40:28): so the question is, you know, what enables the best compounding on sort of a ten year time horizon and, you know, what's best for shareholders as you really take kind of the the longer term perspective. And then just what's best for customers and, you know, what, you know, helps you build the best products. And, you know, Jamont, you kinda said it where, you know, at least at at this juncture with business growing at this rate, we want to spend the marginal hour with, with some customer. Jason Calacanis (01:40:46): Yeah. Yeah. And I John Collison (01:40:47): think you guys have gotten this sense, like, this is our life's work. You know, we're not going anywhere. We'll be very happily running Stripe in ten years' time, in twenty years' time. And there's so much going on in this space where we spend a bunch of time talking about stablecoins, talking about AI, everything like that. And it's hard enough to stay ahead in the world of business, you know, without all these distractions, like you said. And so it's just a question of how do you set yourself up to win and do right by anyone in a we're Thor is pretty competitive. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:41:12): I think if you had to steel man the Bill Gurley point of view, there are very few founders that are probably as steely eyed as you guys. And so what I think a lot of board members in most other situations that are not Stripe deal with is what is a good forcing function to keep these folks on track Focused. And focused and thinking in a multi decade kind of way. And they found that the public markets, I think, do that more than anything else. That's probably the most compelling for the folks that would otherwise maybe get distracted. But then for guys like you that can frankly just do it, it's it's great. Alright. It's impressive. It's really impressive. Congratulations. Jason Calacanis (01:41:51): Well, appreciate you guys coming on the program. Come back anytime. You were awesome today. And listen, let's recap what have we learned. People gotta put some pants on and get back to work. Constraint makes for great art. Stripes gone public in 2050. Chamath lost 5,000,000,000, not investing. The Colsons read a lot of books. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:42:10): But I'm still kicking. A lot of them kicking, bro. Jason Calacanis (01:42:13): He's still in the arena? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:42:14): I got a lot of chips still to fire. So let's Jason Calacanis (01:42:16): see what happens. He's gonna fire fire fire. South American president shouldn't have their own meme coins, and life finds a way. We are and and you pronounce a call this on, obviously. I said Collison because, you know, we're down the road in Cary, and we go and get some eggs and bacon sometimes. Okay. Coming to South by Southwest brought to you by the Collison Brothers and Stripe. A All In is headed to the South by Southwest. They're not sponsoring it. I'm joking. All In is headed to South by Southwest on March 13. Me and Freeburg are gonna sit down and do our interviews. Two besties on the future of media and building businesses in this new media ecosystem. We're gonna have a casual party, food, drinks, the whole thing. Event is gonna be, pretty intimate. Couple hundred seats. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:03): When are you guys in this? Jason Calacanis (01:43:05): March 13. You opted out? Me and Freiburg wanna do it? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:09): Oh, Thursday. No can do. Jason Calacanis (01:43:11): Yes. Okay. And, it's by application only with a small $30 registration fee of which Stripe will take $19. Go to allin.com/events to apply. I'm not bitter about it. And programming note, the besties are on a tear. You were on Megyn Kelly last week. And next week, our bestie, Friedberg, is representing us on Celebrity Jeopardy. We can't say what happened, but Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:37): Get the clips ready. Get the clips ready. Jason Calacanis (01:43:40): We are going to do a recap of every single question. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:44): When do you when do you when does it air on Monday? Next week, I think. Jason Calacanis (01:43:47): I don't know. David Friedberg (01:43:48): Wednesday at 9PM. Jason Calacanis (01:43:49): Wednesday at 9PM. Perfect. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:43:51): Before the taping. Yum yum. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Jason Calacanis (01:43:55): There he is. Between Anna Navarro she's from The View. Right? Look. She's pretty great. I've seen clips of her. David Friedberg (01:44:03): She's I should've gotten some counsel ahead of signing up for Celebrity Jeopardy on the lack of upside in doing this, and you will see why. We'll talk next Speaker 6 (01:44:13): week. Bye. Oh, no. Jason Calacanis (01:44:13): You lost that good? You lost it in the bar. To the David Friedberg (01:44:17): view? Spot. You didn't lose Jason Calacanis (01:44:19): to the view, did you? David Friedberg (01:44:21): Look, guys. I'm just telling you Jason Calacanis (01:44:22): Kai's got a 60 IQ. The view put together doesn't have a 60 IQ. David Friedberg (01:44:28): Let me just tell you. Well, we'll talk about it afterwards. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:44:30): I just love this, Henko. Don't tell me they got you on pop culture. Jason Calacanis (01:44:33): You're pretty good on pop culture. David Friedberg (01:44:35): Oh, no. No comment. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:44:36): Okay. Love you guys. I gotta go. Jason Calacanis (01:44:38): Love you. Bye bye. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:44:39): See you Jason Calacanis (01:44:39): next time. Bye, boys. We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David Cyrus. And it said, we open sourced Speaker 6 (01:44:51): And it John Collison (01:44:51): said, we Speaker 6 (01:44:51): open sourced it to the fans, and they've Jason Calacanis (01:44:52): just gone crazy with it. Love you, sis. Sweet of quinoa. Besties Speaker 6 (01:45:02): are gone. Jason Calacanis (01:45:04): That is my dog taking Speaker 7 (01:45:12): We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. Jason Calacanis (01:45:20): Wet your feet.