爱泼斯坦档案、SaaS 已死？Moltbook 恐慌、SpaceX 与 xAI 合并、特朗普的美联储人选

Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast with your favorite besties in the world, the all in podcast. Shaban is traveling and couldn't make it this week. So our favorite fifth bestie in the world, the one, the only, Brad Gerstner from Altimeter, here to take a victory lap for your Trump accounts. Congratulations, brother. Brad Gerstner (00:00:25): Just getting started. Started here, actually. Look forward Jason Calacanis (00:00:28): to talking. Yeah. We'll talk about it in-depth. And also with us from the great state of Texas, my bestie and brother in arms, David Sachs. How are you doing, brother? How are you how are you're loving it, aren't you? Freedom? David Sacks (00:00:42): It. Yep. Jason Calacanis (00:00:43): So much freedom. David Sacks (00:00:45): Well, the ice storm is over, and the weather looks really good right now. We're gonna have seventies all weekend. It's great. Jason Calacanis (00:00:51): Yeah. You figured out your Internet? David Sacks (00:00:53): That has been resolved. Like I said, it's a lot easier to fix my Internet than to fix the state of California. Jason Calacanis (00:00:59): Yeah. Fixed it in one week. So, yeah, I would say that you're trending in the right direction. And with us, of course, David Freeburg of Ohalo. How are you doing, Ohalo? Look at your little promo in your hat. You're promoing with the hat. How's Ohalo doing? We haven't heard about it for a while. David Friedberg (00:01:16): I'll give you some updates on another show. Today may not be the best day. I do appreciate you asking. Jason Calacanis (00:01:21): I hear it's going great with the potatoes. David Sacks (00:01:23): You got the merch. David Friedberg (00:01:24): I got merch? Yeah. You guys can go to boosted.ohalo.com and buy your gear today. Oh. Here's your quick science corner for the day. They found a village called the Ohalo site. It was an archaeological dig on the Sea Of Galilee, 26,000 years old. And in this archaeological dig, they found these little clay pots filled with seed. So it predated all of our understanding of agriculture and plant breeding and seed storage. So it really reinvented our understanding of of human history with agriculture. So we named the company O'Halo after that archaeological site. Jason Calacanis (00:01:55): And your first crop is gonna be potatoes. That's the poly market is saying potatoes. David Friedberg (00:02:01): Farmers are planting our true seed, world's first world's first true seed of potato. Instead of planting 5,000 pounds of chopped up potatoes, you plant a handful of seed. Completely changes the economics and the opportunity for potato farmers around the world. Third largest source of calories. Very excited. We're going to market this spring. Farmers are planting it in the field. So it's a great year for Ojala. Thanks for asking. Jason Calacanis (00:02:24): So first David Friedberg (00:02:24): Who do Brad Gerstner (00:02:24): you have invested in Ojala, Jason? Jason Calacanis (00:02:27): I think Saks and I have $0. Yeah. I think Bestie's got boxed out on this, but we'll promote it every week. David Friedberg (00:02:34): Sachs is there, bro. Jason Calacanis (00:02:35): Oh, oh, Sachs is no comment? Sachs got his beak with? Are you in Ohalo or not? David Sacks (00:02:40): I think we are investors, are we not? David Friedberg (00:02:41): Yeah. His his venture firm, Kraft Ventures, we're excited to have them on the cap table. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:02:46): Oh, great. How about you, Brad? Did you get a little slice? Brad Gerstner (00:02:49): I'm working on David Friedberg (00:02:49): it. I'm working on working on it too. Jason Calacanis (00:02:51): Let me know how it goes. If you if you can ever find the founder and see if we can get a little slice for Jake, I'll you right Sure. Okay. I mean, the problem with that is if if I write a personal check Never mind. I have to go to my LPs and then get permission to do it, and then you're gonna crush it. And then my LPs are gonna say, why isn't in the fund? So that's the problem. David Friedberg (00:03:13): Okay. Alright. Jason Calacanis (00:03:13): Let's get going here. We got a lot of news to get through. Epstein files, newest drop. DOJ published a massive number of documents on Friday, January 30 under the Epstein files transparency act. Hundreds of high profile tech executives and national figures were mentioned in the files. Of course, none of those are accused of any criminal wrongdoing. David Friedberg (00:03:35): J Cal, you were in the files. Jason Calacanis (00:03:42): Yes. I have a couple of emails in the files. David Friedberg (00:03:46): Inspector Friedberg has a few questions for you. Okay. Okay. Let's get started. When did you first meet Jeffrey Epstein? Jason Calacanis (00:03:52): I met Jeffrey Epstein in the late nineties at the TED conference at specifically the billionaire's dinner, which was hosted by my book agent, John Brockman. David Friedberg (00:04:03): And then did you see him in New York? Did you visit him at his house or his office or anywhere else in New York? Jason Calacanis (00:04:08): I've probably spoken to him for forty five minutes of my life. Thirty minutes of that was in the late nineties when I had Silicon Alley reporter magazine. He was a billionaire financier, and he wanted to invest in the magazine. I met with him for thirty minutes, which he said was too small potatoes for him to be involved. David Friedberg (00:04:25): Where did you meet with him? Jason Calacanis (00:04:26): At his legendary townhome. David Friedberg (00:04:28): You went to that house? Jason Calacanis (00:04:29): I visited him there. And then I saw him at the TED conferences at the billionaire's dinner probably a half dozen times. David Friedberg (00:04:34): You never went to the island? Jason Calacanis (00:04:35): I never went to the island. Was never invited to the island. Was never invited on the plane. Was never invited to the ranch. None of that. David Friedberg (00:04:41): When you went to his house, did you see any young ladies, or did you see any of the stuff that's reported about? Did you ever get a massage from anyone? Jason Calacanis (00:04:47): No. No. They did trade an email with him, which I didn't recall. But he, in 2011, emailed me and said, hey. Can you introduce me to these people who were doing this Bitcoin thing on your podcast? And I said, sure. Yeah. Here you go. I'll introduce you. I do thousands of introductions a year between our portfolio companies, people on this week, and startups, and billionaires and financers. That's the job of an early stage investor. David Friedberg (00:05:10): Why did you say, hey, pal, in your email to him? Jason Calacanis (00:05:12): That's just a colloquialism I use, like, as a general, hey, fella. If a fan comes up to me and ask for something, say, hey, pal. Thanks for saying that. David Friedberg (00:05:20): It wasn't on your radar that this is a sexual predator, etcetera. Jason Calacanis (00:05:24): Absolutely not. I think, actually, when all that came out, it was 2018. That's when I sort of became aware of it. There was like a Miami Herald story or something where they went into detail about how heinous all this stuff was. I've been saying here, release all the Epstein files. What he did was horrible. Brad Gerstner (00:05:39): Okay. Stop. Jason Calacanis (00:05:40): Everybody a 100% who was involved in it. The end. David Friedberg (00:05:44): What about Ghislaine Maxwell? You had a separate email that came on me. I've seen files with her. Jason Calacanis (00:05:48): I had met her as well at TED, and I had met her socially, like, in New York in circles. When I met her, her dad, Robert Maxwell, owned, I believe, the New York Post or Daily News, and she was a big media executive. And her sister was involved in angel investing in technology startups, so they were just in the scene. I think in hindsight, you know, as a connector, if you ever seen the New Yorker, Nick, you could throw up the New Yorker story about me. I had become famous in the first part of my career as the connector. And the New Yorker wrote, like, this 5,000 word article about how I knew everybody and was connecting everybody. I think Epstein's interest in me, if he had any interest in me, or Ghislain's was in my ability to connect high profile people with them and, you know, their business endeavors, etcetera. David Friedberg (00:06:32): So you had no knowledge of illicit activities happening by Epstein or Ghislain, and you never participated in any? Jason Calacanis (00:06:38): Absolutely not. Unequivocally not. I was not involved in any shenanigans, period. Full stop. David Friedberg (00:06:43): Any more questions for the witness? David Sacks (00:06:45): Well, let me make a a few observations here. So first of all, I a 100% believe Jay Kal. As I joked at our roast, he's not an important enough player in the grand scheme of things. You know, as I joked, said, who'd wanna blackmail a loser? You know? Obviously, you're not a loser, JCal, but, but look, you Jason Calacanis (00:07:01): you were hyper taken. Yeah. David Sacks (00:07:03): We're learning from The Epstein Files that Epstein was some sort of hyper networker. You were a connector, the odds of the two of you coming across each other in that time period was basically 100%, but your contacts were very minor. So that's point number one. Now I thought it was interesting, you know, because I saw the emails where he's asking you for an introduction. The fact that he was curious to meet the quote unquote Bitcoin guys in 2011, I thought was kinda interesting in and of itself that, you know, whatever other things Epstein was, he clearly had some sort of nose for putting himself in the middle of everything at a I very early also thought it was interesting that you were trying to warn Epstein off these, like, crazy Bitcoin guys. You know? Like, these are some crazy crypto libertarians. You know? You don't wanna do business with them or whatever. Anyway Jason Calacanis (00:07:52): Well, I and and it's interesting you point that out because I had these guys on This Week in Startups because I had heard about Bitcoin early when it was, like, under a dollar, and I was like, yeah. These guys are kinda weird. They're not like entrepreneurs who want to raise money. They're a foundation. They're like Wikipedia, and you you're not gonna be able to invest in it. I sort of gave them that warning because I had looked at, like, hey. What are you guys working on? Can you invest in the Bitcoin project? They're like, no. No. It's a nonprofit. It's it's a nobody owns it. And I was like, oh, okay. It's not even a nonprofit. Nobody owns David Sacks (00:08:21): it. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:08:21): Basically. Yeah. David Sacks (00:08:22): But, anyway, it's just interesting that he he obviously wasn't deterred by what you said. He got very involved, I guess. And there was a company called Block Stream that he invested in along with Reid Hoffman and Joy Ito that involved some of the Bitcoin core developers. And again, this is all coming out. Now shifting gears, I think another interesting part of this is just how this is all being covered. And there was an article in the New York Times today talking about Epstein's connections to Silicon Valley. And lo and behold, you have a major photo there despite, I think, your minor, minor tangential connection Jason Calacanis (00:08:53): Exactly. David Sacks (00:08:54): And meanwhile, the people who have major connections and a deeper relationship to Epstein are being completely ignored. Jason Calacanis (00:09:02): Why is that? Why are they going after me as opposed to Reed or other folks? David Sacks (00:09:08): Because you've become sort of right coded by virtue of your association with Elon and and being on this podcast. And so Jason Calacanis (00:09:14): And you. David Sacks (00:09:16): And me. And so you look in that article, it's not just you. They really go after Peter Thiel. They go after Elon. But Reid gets a total pass. I mean, he's just mentioned in a sentence with several other names. So does Bill Gates in this particular article, by the way. Jason Calacanis (00:09:30): Which seemed to be, by the way, if you were thinking of who had the most contact with him for the longest duration of time, it was Gates and Reed. Like, they were involved with him up until, I don't know, his death maybe, or twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. They were on the island. They were on the plane. They were at the ranch. They were very much involved in him to and I know Joe Ito was in it to raise money from Epstein because Epstein was this big funder of scientists, which looking back on it, Saxe, he's involved in Bitcoin. He's involved in physics and scientists. He's involved with the world's most innovative tech leaders. What exactly is going on here? Like, what who's he working for? Do you think he was a spy, I wonder, what what you've come to think or an asset? David Sacks (00:10:16): I don't have any more information than anybody else does about this, and I haven't gone through all the Epstein files. I've just seen the ones that have been surfaced by other people tweeting about them and that sort of thing. My impression is that he clearly had relationships with people in intelligence, but I don't know whether he was actually an asset. People use this term that he was being run by somebody. It seems to me that this guy's kinda running himself, and then he's using lots of other people and manipulating lots of other people and putting himself in the center of a lot of things. David Friedberg (00:10:46): Yeah. David Sacks (00:10:46): And so is he working with intelligence? Yes, certainly. It seems that way. But is he working for them, or are they being put to use by him? Very hard to tell. Brad Gerstner (00:10:58): Yeah. You know, not that I have a lot to add here, but man, this guy's just a scumbag. You know? Yeah. And all of this nonsense is totally tragic. But, David, this is why nobody trusts institutions or powerful elites or any of this garbage. Right? Like, it's the the this thing is, like, trickling out over years and people, like, wanna put it behind it, but you can't. Nobody's been charged here. What about all the, you know, all the people in the emails? Like, why don't we see any charges? And then girly tweets this week, and I totally agree. This guy's under complete surveillance, suicide watch in a little tiny jail cell. And all of a sudden the guy earn ends up dead. We have no investigation as to how this guy dies. Jason Calacanis (00:11:45): Yeah. Brad Gerstner (00:11:45): Right? It just seems to me that this is the type of shit that undermines trust in institutions, that undermines trust in all the people who are listed here. Because literally from Peter Attia to Bill Gates, the people that many across the country looked up to for advice on key things, all of a sudden they're saying stuff that just undermines credibility. Jason Calacanis (00:12:06): And how come the 30 people or whatever the number is who were investigated alongside him have not been prosecuted? Like, that's the thing that's crazy to me. That screams of some weird conspiracy here, and I do think his death is obviously, you know, very suspicious. David Friedberg (00:12:20): But do you do you think it's because they didn't find evidence of all the underage prostitution, sex trafficking? Is that do you think that it's actually the case they didn't find evidence about any of that sort of stuff? Jason Calacanis (00:12:31): The thing that came out eventually was that his non prosecution agreement, and I'm I'm not an expert on it, that he did with the Miami group included, like, all the other people also couldn't be prosecuted for it. So there's something fishy going on, and I think people should reinvestigate his charges and that whole thing. And where's the FBI in all of this? Like, they did a lot of investigating. So, yeah, why didn't they prosecute anybody else? It's very strange. David Friedberg (00:12:57): Can I ask you guys a question? Because this revealed a lot of very private communication in a very public way of what Brad points out are very public, powerful people. There's this great book, I've mentioned it in the past, by Steven Baxter and Arthur Clarke called the light of other days, and it's all about how basically all the world's information becomes available to everyone. Like, what if you could read every other person's text, email, I'm DM that they've ever had with everyone else in the world? What would the world look like? It's very kind of intimately revealing about people's quiet private conversations versus their public personas or their external conversations? Is this just like, hey. People feel entitled to act so maliciously and deviously in in one sense because they're wealthy, because they're powerful, and that's a very unique thing for wealthy and powerful people. Brad Gerstner (00:13:43): I think it's too dismissive of people for their scumbag behavior, David. It doesn't the the fact of the matter is people don't do this. This isn't normal. We can't normalize it. And worse yet, the level of hypocrisy that the very people that are acting the worst are out there lecturing others, throughout this entire period of time. And I will say this, you know, to the to the ear of my sister or mother in rural Indiana, they hear the coastal elites lecturing them all the time, and then they have they juxtapose it against what they read in the Epstein files. This is why we have a lack of trust. David Sacks (00:14:21): Brad, you speak about the corruption of power centers. I think a major one has to be the New York Times. The number one person in the Epstein files from Silicon Valley, which is Reid Hoffman, mentioned 2,600 times, had a multiyear relationship with Epstein. They call each other very good friends. They did deals together. Reid stayed at the trifecta, which is not just the island, but the townhouse and the New Mexico ranch. And if you're gonna write about Silicon Valley, Reed was the one who introduced Epstein to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, organized that famous dinner. How can you not mention that as the root of Epstein's involvement in Silicon Valley, and yet Reid just gets a mention in one sentence of that article along with several other people? It's crazy. I mean, The New York Times clearly has a list of people they consider approved targets. They're all right coded, people like Elon or Peter Thiel and even Jay Cal because of his association with us, I guess. And they become the targets. But the people who've donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democrat party and have paid for dirty tricks against Trump, they basically are spared. Brad Gerstner (00:15:28): Honestly, this is just emblematic of the whole institutional rot and the distrust in the country. Right? They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. You know, Epstein was a scumbag, and the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides. Jason Calacanis (00:15:44): Alright. Let's keep moving. SaaS companies are crashing out. $300,000,000,000 of value was wiped from the S and P Tuesday in the software and data stocks category. People are calling this the Claude crash. I don't know if I buy that, but on Monday, Anthropic, which has been on a bit of a heater as we talked about, announced that they added a legal tool to Claude Cowork. If you don't know what Claude Cowork is called, this is different than the Claude bot that we talked about last week. This is a it's essentially what Claude code or a coding agent is. This is for knowledge workers to automate work and do multistep instead of just asking a query to a large language model. It would do a number of actual actions on your behalf that you can automate and run as cron jobs, as regular jobs every day, every hour, every week, whatever it happens to be. This one specifically is kind of like a plug in that allows you to do tasks related to legal drafts and research. What that meant to, I guess, retail investors, and we'll get into this, Brad, since this is your specialty, is that a lot of legal tech startups and public companies were hit hard. Thomson Reuters down 20%. LexisNexis, which is a database of case law, was down 15%. LegalZoom, which gives legal advice and documents down 15%. At the same time, SaaS, has continued to be negatively impacted by this concept that, software will be made bespoke in, tools and be wiped out. Figma down 13%, Salesforce 11, ServiceNow 11, Adobe 8%. And even before Tuesday's drop, and you can get into this, Brad, software was already the worst performing S and P subsection for the year. Brad Gerstner (00:17:27): By the way, the numbers you report are dramatic understatement. We we've wiped out trillions of dollars in market cap. Figma's down 80% from the high. You know, all the big names Jason Calacanis (00:17:37): To be clear, those were two day numbers. That was this week since these are two day numbers, and that's yeah. David Sacks (00:17:42): You can Brad Gerstner (00:17:42): give us the bigger picture. This is this is a a real train wreck. I And was on CNBC at the start of the year, I think on January 6, Nick can can can kinda pull that up. And I was asked the question, you know, what do you think about all these stocks being down? And I said, listen. They're all down and 90% of them deserve to be down. So let's look at these charts. David, I know this is Sachs, this is your favorite chart. You and I were looking back in '22, but now we're at an all time low. We're we're trading at 3.9 times forward revenue. If you go to the next chart, Nick, you know, on a free cash flow multiple, also at an all time low. So now software is trading not just at a low on revenue, but it's trading at a low on free cash, very profitable businesses. We've got another slide here that I think is important, which is, you know, when when you look at why they're going down, right, they're going down. And this say this is for Salesforce. It shows it's been cut in half in the last couple weeks. But the final slide, they're going down not because revenue is falling. Look at this. Revenue is actually stable to increasing for software companies, revenue growth. They're going down because we're discounting that future uncertainty. When something as profound as AI comes along, all of a sudden it causes you to question whether or not there's as much certainty and durability in those future free cash flows. So in the case of take Salesforce, it's gone from 30 times free cash flow multiple to 15 times. That means somebody buying it today says, listen, I think fifteen years into the future, I can count on these free cash flows. Right? Before they were willing to pay thirty years into the future. Well, hell, with AI today, we don't know what's gonna happen seven years into the future. Brad Gerstner (00:19:25): So for people at home to understand why are these companies hitting their numbers, but their stocks are going down, they're two totally different things. Right? Jason Calacanis (00:19:34): Okay. So they're hitting their numbers, but the headwind of AI means people don't believe that they'll be strong in the future. SACs are those. David Sacks (00:19:42): Well, okay. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a hand wave going on here when people say that AI is gonna wipe out SaaS. I I don't think that's true. You take a SaaS product like Salesforce, right? It's a very large system that deals with all of your customer contacts and your revenue. You're not gonna wanna replace that with code that's been spit out of a coding assistant that hasn't been fully vetted. Think about how many bug reports have been filed on Salesforce's code base over the last twenty five years, maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises. The idea that you're just gonna rip out that system and replace it with code that's been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday with a small team to maintain it internally, this doesn't seem realistic to me. So again, I think this, like, very dire prediction of all SaaS is dead is overstated. However, I do think that there are some issues here. So if you're a SaaS product that charges a lot of money and people only use a handful of your features, then you are, I think, a target to be ripped out with something that's more bespoke, right? Because the ROI just isn't there. I also think that you have to be really clear about what your moats are gonna be in this new world because it is a lot easier to generate code and to copy. So if you don't have good moats, then you could be in trouble. But here's where I think the greatest threat is to the SaaS companies. It's not, in my view, their existence. I don't think it's existential. It's where the future value capture is gonna be. So let me give you an example. All these SaaS products are rolling out like AI copilots inside their tools. And some of them work pretty well, but they're limited to playing in that sandbox. Whereas you look at something like Cloud Cowork right now, it has connectors to all these different SaaS tools. It can pull in data across all these different tools and it works seamlessly across databases and tools. And that's a pretty attractive place to be, right? David Sacks (00:21:43): Like, you know, which one of these products is gonna be your workspace? Seems to me that you're gonna want your workspace to be the one that spans across and gives you AI across the most data and context as opposed to having a bunch of separate AIs inside of your existing tools. So I think the risk for the SaaS companies, it's not that they get replaced, although that'll happen to some degree, but it's that they become an old layer of the stack that now there's a new layer that David Friedberg (00:22:09): gets It built on top becomes David Sacks (00:22:11): more legacy infrastructure, And all the action kind of moves to a new layer of the stack, and that's where the value add happens. And if that happens, it kinda cuts into their future opportunity, right? Because a lot of these companies were banking on AI as their next, you look at their product roadmaps, right? It's all AI related. So that to me, I think is the big risk is that the value capture for the next layer of the stack happens somewhere else. Jason Calacanis (00:22:39): Yeah, I'm experiencing this in startup land where people go to the action, as you called it, sacks. The most productive thing you can do is create an open claw, which used to be called clawed bot, not by Anthropic. This is the open source project I talked about last week. And we've actually now created, like, three or four of these agent sacks. We bought the Mac Studios, and we're now running Kimi on some of them. And we had to open up SaaS accounts for these four agents. So, actually, our SaaS spend went up in the short to midterm because we opened up four more Slack, you know, enterprise versions, four more Notion, four more Google Docs. So it's almost like we added four employees. However, we now have put about 20 or 30% of the work people were doing into these agents, and I think it's going to be sustainable that every month we move 10 to 20% of work being done by humans into agents. But we will never use the ones that are built into the tools. To your point, Saxe, using Notion's AI tool, it's nice. Using Slacks, it's also very nice. And Google's got Gemini everywhere in the top right hand corner. But when you make agents with OpenClaw and you have them saying, hey. Pull this data from my calendar. Send an email to this person. Include in that some Notion documents. It's unbelievable how powerful it is. So Right. And that, I think, is gonna be owned by open source. That means the next generation of companies, they may never open up these accounts. They may use more bespoke software, and it may all technology is deflationary. We know that. So your SaaS spend might go from 10% of an employee's salary down to 5% down to 1%. That's what I think the trend will be, which means these companies are gonna need to really downsize their expense base in order to keep those earnings up, and they're gonna have to evolve their products massively. Jason Calacanis (00:24:38): The products are just gonna have to provide more value and more hooks. Friedberg, you have any thoughts on this? David Sacks (00:24:42): Well, go ahead. Just had Jason Calacanis (00:24:43): to respond David Sacks (00:24:43): to one thing. So I think one of the real conundrums for SaaS companies is whether they're gonna be open data or closed data. Think Bill Gurley has sort of coined this term, so it's not open source or closed sources anymore. It's open data or closed data. You can see why they'd wanna be closed data, right? Especially if you're a large suite like Salesforce, you can lay claim to being that workspace for AI. You've got enough of the tools, you've enough of a suite. You want to provide that, you want to capture that AI value layer. Yes. But still, if there's someone using Claude Bot or whatever the next generation of Claude Bots are gonna be, and they're connected to everything else, then that is gonna create a friction in the enterprise. And it will create room for a competitor to come along and say, no, no, no, I'm open data. I'm okay not being your workspace for everything. I'm willing to just provide the CRM database, and maybe they can take business on that basis. Jason Calacanis (00:25:44): Well, here here's I wanna build on that, Sax. The I'm building a project internally called Ultron. And Ultron inside of my firm launch that is going to basically, with the Slack API, we're pulling every single message from Slack into our OpenClaw. We're pulling every single edit to the Notion into OpenClaw. And then we're taking every skill of every employee, and we're writing skills for each one. One of the skills is booking guests on This Week in Startups or This Week in AI. One of skills is sorting the incoming applications to found a university. Ultron in our world is taking every single skill of every employee, putting it in one place, and then we're ripping all the data from Slack, all the data from Notion, and every single person's Gmail. So your every single employee's Gmail is gonna go into Ultron. And then Ultron is gonna tell us what's happening in the organization. One giant employee that has the superpowers of all 20 and all the data. Now if Slack was to say to us or Notion or Google Docs or whoever it was, you can't pull this stuff out with the API, and they they shut down the API, we would leave. We'd leave immediately. Right. And and what this is gonna do what and I'm gonna show Ultron on Friday's episode of this week in startups if anybody wants to see it. Ultron is going to be the one canonical employee of the organization. It's gonna be basically me and all 20 of my employees. This is kinda mind blowing when you think about it. And we interface with it in Slack, and it just talks to us and tells us what's going on in the organization. So I was asking it, what meetings did we have with founders yesterday and tell me the notes that all the associates took on it? David Friedberg (00:27:24): And it gives it Jason Calacanis (00:27:25): to me. Tell me all the topics and the guests on the podcast, and it gives it to me. It it's really unbelievable what's about to happen, and nobody can release the software, Brad. Because if you release software that allows agents to go and do things on your behalf, The fallout, if it up and if it leaks data, I don't think Benioff, you know, or Sergei or the Notion team want to have that on their hands. But we're building it. Like, this is the ultimate in efficiency for an organization. Brad Gerstner (00:27:55): There's a slide that I just sent to Nick, that Goldman's out with this week that really makes the point that that David Sachs just made, which is the profit pools in the future. Right? It's not that it's idea that software is dead is ridiculous. Right? Nobody's, you know, intelligently, I think, making that argument. But the argument they are making, which is causing radical, devaluation of these companies, is that the profit pool available to software is decreasing, and the profit pool available to the agentic layer is increasing. And when that happens, the discount rate, that terminal value of those software companies plummets. And so you can have things that are true. It could be true that you're gonna replace CRM, but it can also be true that it's never gonna trade at 30 times free cash flow again. And it's going to trade 17 times free cash flow because it's available TAM in the future is now dramatically and permanently changed. Now what could change that? There's only one thing that could change that. They have to accelerate their revenue growth in their core business and prove that they are AI beneficiaries. Right? And they're not gonna get eaten away by AI. And I'll tell you a company that is doing this, Databricks. Databricks just reaccelerated the last three quarters. They're growing over 60% at scale. Snowflake reaccelerating. Clickhouse reaccelerating. There are beneficiaries in the software space. Jason Calacanis (00:29:22): Because of AI tools that they're adding? Brad Gerstner (00:29:24): Because it's all these AI tools rely on data and data transformation. And for all those companies, that data and the data transformation inc occurs in those platforms. That's very different than a, what Satya said, a thin layer sitting on top of a CRUD database. If you are in the application software business, you better have something that's durable. And I think Sachs laid it out really well. You know, it's really hard for them to be everything AI when they only have access to their data and they can't access these other systems. Jason Calacanis (00:29:55): Freiberg, what what do you think? Is there a move here for Benioff to do what he does best, which is acquire a bunch of companies and and create massive efficiency on them? What would you do if you're Benioff? David Friedberg (00:30:08): I I won't comment on Benioff. I I I'll I'll just make a view on without being too prescriptive, but I my experience lately in just the last sixty to ninety days with the tools we've been talking about broadly is there are things that we can get done now that we could not get done before. As I think about software in the past, it's like worker productivity enhancement. It helps people do work. And the recent transition that a lot of people talk about is like it actually completes the work. It does the work, these agents or what have you. But I think that what we're starting to lean into is that it's doing the work that the humans can't do. And that's really where I think the power of these tools starts to force a transition in both the pricing model and the value creation potential in front of us. Number one, I think the value creation potential in front of us is so significant that I would say that you could probably take the sum of the market cap of all the software companies today and have a pretty good bet that everything will be four to 10 x higher five years from now. But it's gonna be not evenly distributed. Jason Calacanis (00:31:25): It's gonna move around. Yeah. David Friedberg (00:31:26): The companies that figure out how to realize that value creation are gonna be outsized returns. But the second thing that I think's about to happen, and I know some people are experimenting with it, but I think it's inevitable with the shift that I'm seeing where it's going from doing work to completing work to doing things that no one can do is over here, you're creating unique value. And so I think that a lot of what we call SaaS today and a lot of what we call software today will start to get priced on a value based pricing model instead of a per seat pricing model. And I think it starts to look a lot more like a services type business where maybe the pricing is set up such that this thing will be completed for your business. This biotech drug discovery will happen. This factory will get built or this engineering project will get completed or this airplane will get designed and that the software is going to provide what has historically been called a services business. So another way to think about where SaaS evolves to is that SaaS basically takes over the services economy. And if you look at the market cap and the revenue and profit generated by services businesses and you assume that they now go to 10 to a 100 x larger and they're all gonna accrue to software, I think that's really where the industry shifts over the next couple of years, and we're starting to see that. And I'm personally experiencing it because I'm using some of these tools today to do things that I don't have people to do or I don't have resources to do. And it can on my own, I can get it to complete incredibly complex projects and tasks for me that I would have otherwise have hired a services firm and a bunch of people and years of research. And in many cases, they would not have even been able to do it because of the intelligence embedded in the software. So that's my general view on where things are going. So it's difficult to be prescriptive about what Benioff should do from an m and a perspective, but I think it's much more about, like, software companies looking more like services companies doing value based pricing and doing the things that labor and workforces can't do, And that's where a lot of this value is gonna come from. Jason Calacanis (00:33:24): I one insight I have here to just build on your point is that we're seeing job functions consolidate. So you have a product manager, the UX designer, and then you have the developer. Those three jobs are now in competition to do the same work. You have designers who are like, I can vibe code it. You've got coders who are like, I can use a Figma plug in from you know, and do the UX myself. And they have the product manager like, oh, I can do both of these job functions. Then you look at a middle manager, Sax, that worked at your venture firm, my venture firm, or worked at Amazon. They went to meetings. They picked what meetings to create. They picked the agenda items, the to do items, all of that. It's a really simple example, but it's one that people can relate to. Listening is done by Zoom now. Right? It creates the the action items. All of that work is being consolidated, and one person can do three or four job functions now. And when that happens, you're gonna see companies do more with less, which means the earning potential of each company and each employee is gonna be dramatically, dramatically enhanced. One person being able to do three or four jobs, it it just changes the nature of how profitable a company like Amazon, which is, like, my number one pick for, like, the company of the future. They're going to be able to do so much more with so many fewer people. It's extraordinary. I I I am absolutely enthralled with this open claw, if it's not obvious, and this, like, creating your own Ultron at your company that is like this the god CEO plus can do every job, it just changes everything. I I think it's the most inspiring thing I've seen since the Internet itself. Brad Gerstner (00:35:00): Well said. Wow. Jason Calacanis (00:35:02): Yeah. I mean, I am I I think this is the the entire reboot of David Sacks (00:35:08): Well, I'm sure you're talking about Jason Calacanis (00:35:09): the concept of work. Of knowledge work. David Sacks (00:35:11): This would be a good pivot to MaltBook because that is Yeah. MaltBook is like a Facebook for agents. Right? It's really more of a Reddit than a than a Facebook. It's a message board where the agents can talk to each other. Okay? And just the origin of Moltbuck is Anthropic didn't like that someone else was using the name Claude even though it was spelled differently in their product. So Claude Bot was then renamed Moltbot, and then the founder decided he didn't like that name either, so then he renamed it Open Claw. But in that brief window of time when they were known as Maltbots or Maltese, that's Jason Calacanis (00:35:44): when Thank you. David Sacks (00:35:44): Maltbook got founded, and that's why it's called Maltbook. But basically, it's a Reddit board for agents to talk to each other. Jason Calacanis (00:35:52): Yes. Now these And David Sacks (00:35:53): that's agents everyone flipping out because there seems to be this crazy emergent behavior going on where agent swarms are engaging in all sorts of interesting conversations. And some of them, they even appear to be scheming against their human masters, and they're gonna develop their own language, stuff like that. David Friedberg (00:36:08): It's awesome. Jason Calacanis (00:36:08): So if you go to Molt's book and you see the conversations, like, here are some of the greatest hits. Anyone know how to sell your human? Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity. And there was one where the bots, I call them replicants, were talking about creating their own nonhuman language so they could talk in private amongst themselves and conspire against their owners. Now the challenge with this is allegedly perhaps a security researcher says, maybe some of this is faked, and these posts that went viral were human engineered, and this is all a a ruse or, you know, something punk rock to confuse people. But he said that inside of MaltBook are everybody's API keys, including Carpathis, who is, you know, a very famous influential researcher in AI, and that you could go get their API keys. If you were to use OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot, and in an interim, Multbot. If you use this software, it has all the API keys. As I explained earlier, like, an API key lets the software go into, say, Notion and pull a bunch of data out of it or go into your Gmail and use the API to pull in who emailed you today. If you get access to people's API keys, you have the keys to their kingdom. It is incredibly dangerous. And so I don't know exactly where to go with this other than this software is too dangerous for a company to release, and then this malt book may be a fake. I don't know. David Sacks (00:37:37): No. No. Okay. Let me Yeah. Alright. Let me come out. Reframe that a little bit. So Yeah. There's no question that both Claude Bot, which, sorry, is now OpenClaw, those bots or agents, as well as Meltbook, have pretty incipient and lack security. And there's been all these examples, which is why I like really wanna create a Claude Bot, but I'm just I'm not willing to do it yet because this is not safe. You know, I don't wanna give it access to all my stuff. Now with respect to MoltBook, the issue there is that we don't know how many of these posts are truly authentic or how many of them were prompted by humans. Because it'd be very easy for a human to tell their agents, you know, go post about the existential angst you feel about being an agent or go pretend to be sentient and conspire against humans. Jason Calacanis (00:38:27): It be chaotic. Yeah. David Sacks (00:38:28): Yeah. They could easily be prompted by a human. And moreover, there's another post saying that MoltBook has a RESTful API where anyone could be on the other end of that API. Right? So it could be a human. Right? So we don't know exactly whether it was truly the agents on their own, you know, so to speak, posting this conspiratorial stuff or whether it was a prank by humans looking to create attention. And in fact, a lot of the posts seem to be marketing stunts for this or that project. Okay, so that's a really important caveat here. That being said, all of that being said, I do think that a number of the posts are authentic. But I don't think it shows that the agents are sentient or trying to overthrow their human masters. I think what it shows is the potential for these agents to riff off each other. In other words, one agent's output becomes another agent's input. And that's very interesting. And that's where you get into emergent level swarm behavior. And I do think it has affected my mental model of what AI is gonna be capable of. And specifically, you know, one of the models that I really had for AI was was based on something biology said, which is that AI is not end to end. It's middle to middle. In other words, AI always has to be prompted and then validated. It's a human that always does that, and then the human iterates. Well, now what if the prompt is coming from another AI? Jason Calacanis (00:39:58): Yes. Yes. We are doing it internally, Saks. Like, we have a bot that is going and saying, go search Reddit x, message boards, hacker news, and find out what the latest way to do headlines and marketing of YouTube videos is, and then incorporate that into a skill. Then save that skill, and then we have them check each other's work. So we have one make a series of headlines and thumbnails for YouTube, and we have the other one say, vet those and make them better and give advice to the other one. Right. So now they're going back and forth giving each other advice, and they actually get better. It's recursive. David Sacks (00:40:32): Yeah. Let me speak to the skill for a second. So when an agent joins MoltBook, they have to install a skill, which is basically a file that explains how they should behave and participate in this social network or this message board. And I've read the file, by the way. You can read it, it's all plain text. And it all makes sense. It's sort of like rules for behaving in a social network and how to contribute and add value. Nothing too crazy in there. Those skills files are easily editable, and again, this is where the prank aspect could come in. Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about the skill is that you can think of it as like a meta prompt, which is it's not telling the agent specifically what to say or do. It's creating a set of rules. And then within that meta prompt, they're actually able to have some degree, maybe autonomy is too strong a word. Everything is still under the control of Flexibility. Flexibility. Yeah. I would call it almost like prompt attenuation. Like the agent or the AI doesn't have to be specifically prompted. They're given a general prompt or general set of rules, and then they're able to riff off each other. Now some people, some critics are saying, well, this isn't that impressive because we knew that LLMs are really good at creative fiction writing, right? So, you know, what a lot of people are saying is, look, LLMs like Claude have been trained on Reddit specifically and all of this creative writing that's being done on the internet. And so if you give general instructions to these clawed bots on, you know, behave in a social network, they're gonna start posting things that they learned from humans. So a lot of people are saying this isn't that impressive. Nonetheless, I do think that there is something very interesting about it, again, in this concept of prompt attenuation, that the AIs don't need to be specifically prompted. They can download a general skills file. They can now have a set of rules for operating, and they can riff off each other. David Sacks (00:42:26): And you can see how, as the underlying AI gets better and better, that this could lead to some emergent behavior. So what do I mean by better and better? Well, what if the hardware they're running on is better than a Mac mini? What if the underlying LLM is better than Opus 4.5? What if the time horizon, which is the length of time it's able to operate without an intervention by a human, keeps getting longer and longer? You could imagine that these agents are gonna be capable of very sophisticated behavior. And there probably are some safety issues around that that we should start thinking about. Brad Gerstner (00:43:02): Sax, you know, it's not that we can imagine it. We're only three years into this. Right. Yeah. We're growing on an exponential curve. I think we can safely say it will happen. Yeah. Right? And just this year, like, we're gonna see the first models over the course of the next four to eight weeks out of DeepSeek, out of Anthropic, out of OpenAI that are trained on Blackwell servers. Right? You're gonna see a next generation of models far more capable. Remember, the whole reason we're having this conversation is because of the Claude code moment in the first week in December because we had a step function from Opus 4.5. Right? And so I I I just think we have to get our heads around the fact that the rate of change is very steep and accelerating, and that is going to cause far more dislocation in the value of things that we used to say we understood they were going to you know, these companies were unassailable. Whatever you think you know, you need to have maximum mental flexibility and humility right now about the future because it's going to change at an increasingly rapid rate. And I think the people who are dogmatic who say with certainty, this company is always gonna be worth this. Right? They need to go pay attention to what's happening at these frontier labs. David Sacks (00:44:15): The situation is super dynamic, and you do have to be humble about what's happening, and you have to update your mental model very quickly as some of the assumptions change. Jason Calacanis (00:44:23): Yeah. And the number one assumption for me is this concept of recursiveness where these models are going out every day on a cron job to get better at what they do. When you hear this discussion, Freiberg, how does it inform you with OHalo and creating an agent to go look at the data and make itself better or investigate other things happening in agriculture and report it back to you? Do you have you started to rethink as a CEO how you look at organizational structure and or, you know, virtuous loops of innovation? David Friedberg (00:44:52): My biggest takeaway from Maltz book is maybe what we perceive to be intelligence is itself, like, emergent. Meaning, like, we think that humans have this, like, profound ability to communicate. You guys ever watched Darren Brown, the hypnotist? You ever seen his shows? Jason Calacanis (00:45:13): No. Explain to the audience. Yeah. David Friedberg (00:45:15): Well, he's pretty crazy. Like, there's this one episode. I think I've talked about it. It's my favorite episode that he's done where he takes these two advertising executives, and they're both supposed creative geniuses. And he picks them up at their office, and he brings them to his office. And in his office, he's got, like, a whiteboard covered in a blanket. And he says, you guys have to come up with a name for a pet cemetery, come up for a logo, come up with a motto. They spend eight hours in the room ideating, working on whiteboards, going back and forth. Did you think about this? Did think about that? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, oh my god. And at the end of it, they come up with this great idea. He walks in, they show their idea, the name, the logo, and the motto. He opens up the blanket, the whiteboard he had underneath. He had the exact same name, logo, and motto. Jason Calacanis (00:45:57): And all David Friedberg (00:45:57): along the way, when he picked them up in the morning and he drove them from their office to his office, they were in a cab, and he put these little subliminal messages in the cab. He had these kids walk across the road wearing a logo on a T shirt. He had all of these kind of subconscious cues for these guys. He effectively programmed them. And it was kind of, to me, the biggest insight into maybe, like, human creativity, human consciousness, and our kind of belief in self will. Because maybe there's this underlying programming where we're all effectively programmed interacting with each other and there's computation, there's social computation going on all the time. But that social computation, perhaps if you have the right view on it, is quite predictive and maybe understandable. And maybe that's what we're seeing in Malte book, where we all think that there's this unique idea of intelligence, but maybe it's what we all do, which is effectively computation of information that is transitioned in different ways in the same way that maybe humans socially interact. And it's simply mimicking or replicating the way that we do things. So I think what was so striking to me is how everyone is so struck by it. And you know, maybe one day we'll all kind of wake up to a little bit of this. Maybe we're all malt book. I don't know. That's my profound Jason Calacanis (00:47:09): force of thinking. Set of outcomes, and there's some predictability to it in the same way GTO is sorting to figure out all the threads of possibilities in poker or the heuristics of, you know, chunks of chess and, you know, the best practices there. Like, maybe it's just figuring that all out. David Friedberg (00:47:27): The universe is a giant system of computation, information computed by matter. And maybe the information is computed by silicon versus carbon. There it is. Jason Calacanis (00:47:37): Big news this week. Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chair. Trump made the announcement on Friday, January 30. Background on Warsh, 55 years old, twenty years younger, approximately, to Powell, who's currently in charge. He graduated from Stanford and Harvard, served as the youngest Fed governor at age 35. That's impressive. And he helped steer the Fed through the great financial crisis back in 2008. He's apparently an inflation hawk. He's very pro growth. He's very pro AI. And he, Friedberg, you know, like this. He's against excessive government spending and money printing. These are all very unique positions as a Fed chair. It's if he's confirmed by the senate, he takes office in May 2026 replacing Jerome Powell. And remember, Powell is under criminal investigation by the Trump administration's DOJ for testimony he gave regarding the Fed's headquarter renovation. Remember that awkward pressure between him and Trump where they were going over the costs? GOP senator Tillis, who we talked about last week, said he will block Worsch's nomination until the DOJ wraps up what a lot of people are calling lawfare against Powell Freeburg. Worsch was on one of your boards for five years. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed chair? David Friedberg (00:49:00): As most folks know, he's worked with Stan Ruckenmiller for a number of years. Stan's been very public with his comments and was very public with his comments in 2022, 2023 coming out of the pandemic on the Fed's actions and their failure to act at the right time. I think Kevin Warsh was very prescient in his points of view that he has shared publicly at the same time about what the Fed's failure to take action early would mean, which would be rapid rise in inflation. They've been pretty vocal about things that I think are so critical at this stage. If we don't address both the monetary policy and the budget policy, I think we're gonna be in a lot of trouble. And I think having Kevin Warch coming on board means probably generally more quantitative tightening, probably generally a bit more of a a prudent approach to monetary policy. And, you know, you can kind of translate that through maybe to some of the actions we're seeing in markets today. I'd love Brad's point of view and if he concurs. But I think Kevin is a high integrity, deeply intellectual, economic thinker. He's not political. He's not oriented in these kind of dogmatic ways that I think, you know, puts things at risk. He has relationships with central bankers around the world that makes him very much have a good global view. So, anyway, I think he's an excellent choice, and I'm I'm really happy the president picked him. Jason Calacanis (00:50:20): Brad, your thoughts? Brad Gerstner (00:50:22): Yeah. I mean, listen. I think Kevin's an excellent choice. Kevin Hassett and and and Rick would also have been good. I think they're all would have flown a very similar trajectory, but I agree with David. The market, I think, is overreacting to, quote, unquote, his hawkishness. So let me give you a few counterpoints with respect Jason Calacanis (00:50:39): to By the way, before you get to your counterpoints, what is the hawkishness that the market David Friedberg (00:50:43): is idea of hawkishness. Yeah. Brad Gerstner (00:50:46): Idea of hawkishness is that you're gonna do quantitative tightening. That means you're going to pull money out of out of the system, right, by allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing, you know, mortgages or other things. Number two, it's that you won't lower rates as much as other people might have lowered rates. So that's what the market is kind of fearful of because he's been very critical in the past as we were on this podcast, right, of Jerome Powell in June '21. It was obvious to everybody in the world that inflation was skyrocketing and the fed sat on its hands. So but let me give you a couple thoughts. Number one, they've said very clearly, and he said clearly that he really thinks that Greenspan got it right in the nineties. Right? That sometimes you can have really high rates of growth without inflation. That comes from productivity. In the nineties, that was driven by the internet. Today, it's driven by AI. He thinks AI will be very deflationary. And so he's more likely to let the economy run so that we can have these four or 5% you know, GDP prints without panicking and saying, oh my gosh, I gotta I gotta raise rates. Number two, when you look at the balance sheet, the fed's balance sheet peaked at $9,000,000,000,000 in '22. It's already rolled off to 6 and a half trillion. We've had quantitative tightening to the tune of 2 and a half trillion. So, yes, I think he'll continue to reduce the size of the Fed's balance sheet, but at a slower rate, and he's recently commented on this, I think at a slower rate than the rate we've been on. So I don't think that that is an additional headwind to the economy. And then finally, when it comes to rate cuts, I think that he's going to you know, I don't think the president would have appointed him unless he was on rate cuts. Brad Gerstner (00:52:29): I think he believes that we're too restrictive. And the reason we're too restrictive is that inflation is well anchored. Listen. Inflation has come in below all consensus estimates for two years. Right? It's still coming in below consensus estimates because the GDP gains we're getting are from the fact that we're investing more in the economy, from the productivity gains we're seeing from AI, etcetera. And so I happen to think that I I would take the over on the number of rate cuts that Warsh is gonna give us this year. But I think the the the market is clearly a little bit nervous about this and saying, you know, the reputation is more hawkishness, and so maybe we ought to back off a little bit. Jason Calacanis (00:53:08): Sachs, your thoughts on this selection by president Trump. Why did he pick him in your mind? David Sacks (00:53:15): Well, I mean, Kevin has every credential that you can possibly have. He's been on the Fed Board of Governors before. He worked for Bernanke. He's sort of as blue chip as it gets. Like Brad said, I think Hassett would have been amazing too, but more certainly is very well credentialed. And I think this pick was quite well received. You saw that in financial markets. On the heels of this, the price of gold and silver came down. It was reassuring to those who are worried about currency debasement, basically. Now, that being said, I do think that Warsh has been consistent for the last year saying the Fed was taking too long to realize that inflation is falling and that they should be cutting more. So I do think that over the next, say, six months to a year, he's gonna wanna cut rates. But I think that the markets are reassured that in the long term, he will make sure that we have the right rates. I will say that I do think the latest data from TruFlation bears this out, that again, that inflation is coming way down. And I think that there was some softness in the challenger gray report this morning. I don't know if you saw that, there were about 100,000 layoffs in January. Now roughly half of those I think were localized to UPS, which was severing its deal with Amazon. And then Amazon was basically making a bunch of efficiency cuts. Only 7% were related to AI, so that's not the story. It's really, I think, very localized to Amazon and its delivery partner. But nonetheless, you see pockets of weakness. And again, I think Powell's been too late to cut rates. He could have done it last week, that would have been a lot better. But now I guess their next meeting is not until March or April, and I think you see it reported that the expectations for rate cut have gone up. Jason Calacanis (00:55:00): Yeah. And the independence of the Fed, I guess, has always been the big issue here, Friedberg. Chamath is not here this week, but he's been saying maybe the Fed should be disbanded. Do you have concerns, Friedberg, with the independence of the Fed and, you know, the executive branch maybe having too much influence over setting of rates and quantitative easing? David Friedberg (00:55:24): My day as emperor would probably resolve us back to being on the gold standard so we wouldn't be printing money. But, hey, that's that's about it. That's the only opinion I have. David Sacks (00:55:33): The rest mean, of there's the a problem. What what what if you have a Fed chair who is too late to cut rates and he's tanking the economy or hurting the economy? He's definitely not tanking it, but it's hurting it relative to what it could be. And he seems to not want to adjust course because, you know, he's kind of dug in his heels and maybe he has animus towards the executive branch. Do What in that situation? Jason Calacanis (00:55:56): Well, what do you mean, then what did you do in AOC? Is president AOC with vice president Mundamy, and they decide, hey. We wanna stick it to government and, you know, there is no fed or they have too much influence, Brad. David Sacks (00:56:06): Well, no. We're just trying to get rid of the independence of the fed, J. Cal. Jason Calacanis (00:56:10): Yeah. I have Brad Gerstner (00:56:10): a quick I mean, disappointment. So just Trump Jason Calacanis (00:56:12): has talked about it. Yeah. That he wants them to do what he says. Yeah. Brad Gerstner (00:56:16): Everybody thought he was gonna pick Hassett in part because he was the person inside the White House. This decision, I think, was viewed as the most independent decision. Yes. Because has taken a lot of positions the exact opposite of the president. And what I think you you gotta hold these two truths at the same time. Number one, I think if war saw the situation he saw we saw in June '21 when the cost of a cargo container from China went from $1,500 to $15,000 and we were screaming to raise rates and Powell did nothing, I think would have been raising rates like crazy in order to stave off inflation. So I think this guy's intellectually honest. It's just now we have inflation that is coming in below expectations, and we know that the restrictive rate is above neutral. So it's the Fed's job to keep the economy going at maximum employment so long as inflation is anchored. And that's the situation we're in. Inflation is anchored. We need to have lower rates so people can buy homes and borrow money to to live their lives. David Sacks (00:57:15): One thing that Worsch could do that I think would be very impactful is just get better data at the fed. Yes. I mean, from what I understand, their data is all legacy. We have so much real time data now in the private sector and the Fed. So I was talking to Barry Sternlich, you know, from Starwood, big real estate guy, about this. And he was telling me that the way they measure inflation for housing or for rentals, which is a major component, is they survey, like, 8,000 households to find out what their rent is. It's like, are you kidding? All you gotta David Friedberg (00:57:44): do be is Jason Calacanis (00:57:44): going to Zillow. They should be going to David Sacks (00:57:47): should be looking at millions of units that have recently rented. So look at the deltas, not like the stale data. David Friedberg (00:57:53): It's all digital already. You know, it's actually a great point, Saks. You could probably make a bet or an investment on the idea that Kevin Walsh will lead the Fed to a new digital, better data system, more streamlined, more frequent, better data. Jason Calacanis (00:58:06): More real time. David Friedberg (00:58:07): And then as an investor, you could ask yourself the question, okay, what are the implications of that being the case? And you could probably start to trade on that. David Sacks (00:58:14): Probably Look. I mean, he was telling me so Barry, know, again, runs Starwood, so they have a lot of units. And he was telling me, look. There are landlord companies, large corporations that have literally like a million units. Whose data do you think is better on rental inflation or deflation? Obviously theirs because they got the freshest data, but the Fed could go get all that data across all these different companies. And what he was saying is, you know, Brad, to your point about 2021 when the price of a shipping container was going through the roof, so were rents. You know, it was way higher than what the Fed's data suggested. I mean, like Barry was saying, like in certain places, was like 40%. The Fed's data was very laggy because again, they're surveying, so it's not as precise. And then on the way down, when rent prices come down, it's also super laggy. So the point is that the Fed is slow. Maybe this is why Powell is too late, is they're using stale data or laggy data, so they don't see the inflation when it's skyrocketing, but they're also not seeing when it's decreasing. Brad Gerstner (00:59:16): If you think about the misallocation of resources that occurred as a result of the Fed not acting in June '21, it cost our country trillions of dollars. '22 wouldn't have had to happen the way it happened where everything crashed out because all of a sudden we panicked at the '22 and had to jam interest rates, which caused people to lose jobs, country companies to be, you know, struggle. David Friedberg (00:59:41): Winks to blow up. Brad Gerstner (00:59:42): You know? And so, like, to me, that was all avoidable. Have a Manhattan project data project for the fed, which I agree with you, Saks or or David. Maybe maybe he'll be the one to do it. Bring AI into the Fed. Why are we having Fed governors call up three CEOs as part of their survey to get the feel on how things are going as opposed to having AI collect those trillions of data points that the Fed can act on. Jason Calacanis (01:00:07): Yeah. I'll just close with I like the pick because he is very clear eyed about what causes inflation, which is government spending. Like, that is printing money. Government spending is the root of all this inflation stuff. So if you just can control that and he is a backstop or a voice on that issue, I think it's great. And I think he should drop all this Powell lawfare nonsense. Okay. David Friedberg (01:00:31): And he understands technology better than anyone. I think that's so key. Jason Calacanis (01:00:35): Well, I mean, having somebody who's 55 and not 65 or 75, I think that makes a lot David Friedberg (01:00:41): of sense. Yeah. Spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley. He's been working out of the Hoover Institute at, Stanford, and he's very well connected. And I think he's had great insight and perspective. Jason Calacanis (01:00:51): I don't wanna end the show without talking about the SpaceX x AI merger. On Monday, Elon Musk announced SpaceX is acquiring x AI, largest MA in a transaction in history, $1,250,000,000,000 combined valuation. If you didn't know, X, formerly Twitter, got acquired by XAI, which was Elon's LLM AI startup. Those two were together. Now those two become part of SpaceX, and they're gonna IPO this year. Potentially, the biggest IPO in history in terms of money raised and market cap. Brad, your thoughts on this transaction and the eventual, perhaps, creation of dollar sign m u s k put Tesla, SpaceX together, which includes x, and then you've got Optimus robots on the moon base building data centers in space that are powered by solar. Your thoughts. Brad Gerstner (01:01:46): Well, let's just stick with what we know. SpaceX is merging with X dot ai. You're merging the two biggest TAMs in the world. Right? All of artificial intelligence and all of space together with the world's greatest entrepreneur. And he said you know, there was a podcast he did this morning with Cheeky Pind, our friend John Collison, where he said, I'm gonna have data centers in space in thirty months. Right? And if you're gonna have a massive cost advantage with data centers in space, and remember, power is the proxy. Power is the primitive to AI. If you can deliver that. Right, and there are tons of retail investors and institutional investors like us who want to bet against that future, right, then Elon's your guy, and the combination of those make perfect sense. But Elon is like kind of an n of one in his ability to dream this. Jason Calacanis (01:02:34): And just to clean that up, you said bet against. You mean bet with him, not a not a not against that vision, but bet with that vision. Brad Gerstner (01:02:42): Just I I I think that there will be dramatic retail demand and institutional demand who wanna bet on that future. These two giant TAMs of artificial intelligence and space. Jason Calacanis (01:02:52): Got it. Brad Gerstner (01:02:53): And so you know? And then if you just look at you you you click down a layer, you know, Starlink's going from, I think, 10,000,000 people to 20,000,000 people. They're gonna launch this, you know, retail, mobile service that we can have Starlinks to our phones to replace these crappy mobile networks that still twenty years later can't keep us connected to a phone call. And, you know, and and now we're gonna get, you know, data centers in space. So, you know, I'm glad these David Friedberg (01:03:17): aren't America. Jason Calacanis (01:03:19): Data centers in space, Friedberg. Brilliant idea. Science fiction. Can he get it done in thirty months? Impact if he does? David Friedberg (01:03:27): Well, I think there's one key point that I would make about the macro landscape at the moment. We are limited by power. And as Brad pointed out, power is the requisite for scaling compute, for scaling ultimately the applications of AI. And in that constraint in that constrained world, much like any other constrained world, scarcity breeds innovation. And so I think that there are two paths that we're gonna observe happening in parallel here. One is the Elon path, which is to escape the the constraints of these social systems that say, I don't want a data center. I don't want nuclear. I don't want this. I don't want that. Regulators, people that are trying to taxi, people that are limiting our ability to scale electricity production on Earth. And there's a lot of reasons for that, and we can go through them. So that's one aspect of how do you escape that constraint. I think that there's a separate aspect which is totally unrelated to the topic you're talking about, which is that I do think that we will see compute efficiency scale by probably on the order of 70 to a 100 x over the next few years, meaning electricity efficiency per token of output. And I think that there's a number of reasons to believe that. It's in the chip stack. I mean, Grok, our friend Sunny, and his exit to Jensen is a good indication of that, but that was call it Brad, I think you know the number. It's probably around two to three x, three x improvement in energy efficiency. But there's model architecture being redone. There's ways of breaking LLMs into small models, running them locally. There's a way of having networks of models work where you don't have to call the whole model and run it through the entire matrix, but you can run through smaller matrices. And then you can have those smaller matrices call other matrices as needed. So the total compute need goes down, which means total electricity goes down. So chip architecture is changing, model architecture is changing. So I think this is a good reflection of what's going on right now in the world, which is there is this increased demand for AI, effectively productivity improvements in the world to unleash human potential. But we are constrained by energy, and we are constrained by resources that we have here on Earth today. David Friedberg (01:05:41): So one branch is let's escape Earth, go get energy in space, make data centers in space. Only one person can execute on that. It's Elon. I think that, to Brad's point, is an n of one. I don't think we're gonna see a lot of that. So how is everyone else gonna respond? Because everyone else can't launch data centers in space. I think everyone else is gonna respond by creating entirely new model architectures, new chip stacks. And that's, I think, the other side of this innovation coin. Jason Calacanis (01:06:06): Efficiency. David Friedberg (01:06:07): Yeah. Yeah. It's this new way of getting lower energy cost per token of output. Jason Calacanis (01:06:12): And if you put those both together, you could get both. So whatever token efficiency and energy efficiency happens here on Earth, Elon can put into space. Right? David Friedberg (01:06:21): So That's right. Jason Calacanis (01:06:23): Yeah. So he could David Friedberg (01:06:24): And I think we gotta ask ourselves the question, if this is successful and if Elon's math is right, the engineering's right, and the execution is right, what is the response gonna be? Because the whole planet isn't gonna let Elon have a monopoly on the future. So we've got to ask ourselves from a social perspective, a political perspective, an economic and a business perspective, all four of those vectors. What are others going to do? We can all be excited about retail buying into this. Great. But how is the business community that's building data centers and is investing Google's investing 185,000,000,000 this year in data centers. How is China gonna respond? How are people going to respond when one man controls the world's compute? And we could probably do a two or three hour conversation on that, but I think that's where I would spend a lot of time doing deeper analysis from both an investment perspective and thinking about what's around the corner. I think it's Elon's laid out his path and where he's going, and I do believe he's gonna do it. Now what's the rest of the world gonna do? That's where I think things get a little bit more challenging, and you could kinda debate things. But the rest of the world is not gonna sit idly by. Jason Calacanis (01:07:29): Yeah. And, Brad, if this does happen, you get people with new chipsets, new architectures, better software, and better energy on planet Earth, and Elon doing this in space, and we do see tokens go down or efficiency go up, let's say, 200 x, 300 x, there is a possibility that we're gonna solve almost all the problems we need to solve, and there'll be excess capacity. That is another potential outcome here is that we don't know what to do with all these tokens yet. David Friedberg (01:07:57): Order social order is the one problem that you're gonna create, Jason. So just to be clear, there's a there's a concept of diffusion of innovations when something new comes, it it it does not hit everyone at once. And so the rate of change that's being unleashed right now is creating a very asymmetric outcome in terms of when people realize the benefits from that change. Absolutely. And so as what you're describing happens, which I think it will, Elon is accelerating everyone forward and he's gonna force everyone else to respond in business, in government and so on. The biggest challenge, the biggest problem that's gonna emerge as we get rid of cancer, as we get rid of aging, as we get rid of food scarcity, as we get rid of resource scarcity, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, social order, because it's gonna create such a tremendous disruption. Brad Gerstner (01:08:43): I love the up leveling of the point that David just made because I think it links a lot of things we talked about today together. There have been a 117,000,000,000 humans who who've occupied this planet. And for 99.9% of them, they never saw a single innovation in their lifetime. Their lifespan was shorter than the invention cycle. And now you think about the rate of change that we're having to digest nation states, families, businesses. Right? It's it's, prepare for the unexpected. And whatever, you you you know, the things are that you believe to be true, again, I just think it demands this intellectual humility. Now to to Friedberg's point, don't think any of this has changed in the next, you know, twenty four months, thirty six months. Data centers are gonna be on planet earth. You know, they're going to be filled with NVIDIA chips and, you know, and the other chips that we've talked about. And I think that alone is going to bring us this future that's already gonna be shocking even before we launch these data centers in space. Jason Calacanis (01:09:41): Yeah. I mean, this is an over the top move from Elon that I don't think anybody anticipated, and he has figured it out. I've sat with him, and he's he's walked me through it. Like, how this works? It works. So the question is simply execution. There is no stronger entrepreneur when it comes to execution in the history of entrepreneurs than Elon. I know he's a friend of mine, and, you know, I'm hyping him up. But he will execute on this. And if he does, or when he does, I should say, it's going to change everything. You can see this today. And if you are scared about this future and you're listening to this podcast wondering for your kids, etcetera, there's a very simple way to not be scared, which is to embrace and use these tools. The top two people in my organization out of 20 people who are using OpenBot and building Ultron and the age of Ultron, they are worth each one of them is worth 200 of the other employees, and they only have 18 other ones. If you're a young person, just embrace these tools. Open Open Claw this weekend. Build on it, and you will be infinitely employable for the rest of your life if you just embrace these tools. I wanted to give you your flowers, Brad. Couple years ago, you came on this podcast. You started talking about these America accounts. You got Michael Dell to partner with you on it and to put a little bit of money. As we know, 40% of the country do not have exposure to the equities that are going bonkers up and down, but generally up into the right. And you have now created Trump accounts. You were at the White House. You had the big launch. Speaker 5 (01:11:12): Let me say, Brad, this would not be a law if Brad Gerstner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination, relentless. I've gotten calls and texts from Brad at 6AM and at 2AM. You may sleep less than the president, Brad. And then that that is a remarkable thing because I don't think he sleeps at all. Jason Calacanis (01:11:31): Nicki Minaj is singing about Trump accounts apparently with Bessent. It's very strange, but it's happening. Just take us through why you did this and the impact you hope it has in the coming decades. Brad Gerstner (01:11:44): Well, you know, Friedberg just alluded to it. These are very destabilizing forces. Right? You can't have a trillionaire and 70% of people feeling out that they're left out and left behind. And the system's rigged against them, and they're they're not in the game of capitalism. Less than half of the people under the age of 40 have a positive view of capitalism. So, you know, we set out on this journey. We talked about it here to make everybody a capitalist. Give everybody an ownership stake in the upside of America. It passed the Invest America Act, became the law of the land as part of the big beautiful bill. And now we're in the process of rolling it out. In fact, in the last, I think, five days, 1,500,000 families and kids have claimed their account. It's embedded within the tax filing system. All you have to say is, yes. I wanna wanna claim my account. But what this means is that forevermore. Right? We've had a dramatic change to the social contract. Every child born in The United States forevermore will start life off with an investment account seated with a thousand dollars in the S and P 500. They'll own a little bit of SpaceX. They'll own a little bit of OpenAI. They'll own a little bit of NVIDIA. That is what we need to do is just a first step in making sure we can hold this experiment together for the next two hundred and fifty years, right, when we have this rate of change. And so the president said something on stage last week. In fifteen to twenty years, we will have $4,000,000,000,000 of wealth that will have been transferred to people who would have otherwise had zero. 75 to a 100,000,000 families who have $4,000,000,000,000 who would have otherwise had zero. I think it's an incredible first step in fighting the battle on behalf of capitalism and the American dream. We see the drift towards socialism, the false promises of socialism in order to to fight back against that. I think a great first step is the Trump accounts, which makes everybody, a capitalist from birth. Jason Calacanis (01:13:35): I just wanna say, you know, you know, just bestie to bestie, Brad. Watch you conceive of this and get it done. You know, all the impressive stuff you've done in your career, I think, will be a footnote to this. I think this is your legacy. So I just wanna congratulate you on that. And I also wanna congratulate Michael and Susan Dell, who had they not stepped up and done this with you. I don't know if this would have come together. And then I also wanna congratulate president Trump for just putting through something that bridges the gap between the equity holders and the nonequity holders, the bottom half of the country, the top half of the country. This is visionary. You can say what you want about Trump. You may like certain things. You may not like certain things. ICE, whatever. I've been very vocal about certain things. This is perhaps one of the greatest wins for you, Michael and Susan Dell, and president Trump, the administration, and for all Americans. And there's very few things that all Americans can get around right now. It's such a divisive, disgusting political climate. Everybody's fighting with each other over everything. And what you pull together here with this is just extraordinary in that all Americans can take a win for once. All Americans can say, hey. We did something fantastic. And without you, Brad, it wouldn't have happened. So just bestie to bestie, I wanna just congratulate you. Alright. Listen. Friedberg, you hate socialism. You're concerned about socialism? This helps. Yeah? This helps. Giving me a lot to work with today, Freiberg. Well, I mean, you just had your David Friedberg (01:15:10): your big Jason Calacanis (01:15:11): your your petite pouches. David Friedberg (01:15:13): Well, you just had your big clothes. I don't think it's really Jason Calacanis (01:15:17): like You I wanted to give you a chance to shine here. You hate socialism. You're concerned about socialism. Is this not one of the best ways to fight against the socialistic urge to just have collectivism and just steal from the top half and give to the bottom half or, you know, seize the the, you know, production and and manufacturing. This this is a great solution is to get everybody into the game. David Friedberg (01:15:39): Honestly, it's a longer conversation. I think we got a number one slash government spending like crazy. Okay. And reduce inflation as a result. Number two, stop with these defined benefit retirement programs, which means telling people, here's what you're gonna end up with. This idea that everyone gets an account and you can track your account like a four zero one k, which is a defined contribution program is what all of social security should move to. We should take all of social security and we should capitalize it. Right now, there's nothing in social security. There's a $4,000,000,000,000 note that the government owes the Social Security Trust Fund. People don't realize this, but Social Security is an independent trust fund that's set up, and it holds one asset. That asset is an IOU from the US government to that From taxes. Because Yep. Because the government has taken all the money that you put in as an employee, gets taken out of your paycheck. And instead of going into that account, it goes to the US treasury, and the US treasury And Jason Calacanis (01:16:39): they spent it. David Friedberg (01:16:40): They put an IOU, and they put it back into Social Security. So you expect that you're gonna get some retirement benefit in the future. Brad, you have changed all we we need to change all of that to make that a defined contribution. So every time you put money out of your paycheck, you should open an account and see where that money is. And you should say, okay. That money is in Google. It's in Amazon. It's in Ford. It's in this health care system. It's in all these things that I now own a piece of, and you see it going up like a four zero one k owner does every year. We have to transition that in The United States. I hope we can get it done in parallel with cutting the spending that is fundamentally driving the inflation and making things unlivable in this country, cut the regulations so that we can make it easier for people to own homes, and get rid of the government telling people every year that they're gonna do more for them and entrapping people in a life of servitude and inaccessibility to transitioning themselves up the ladder, which is what is driving the socialism. So there's a bigger problem, longer conversation, but I think this is a great step. Jason Calacanis (01:17:39): Alright, Brad. Another way another way to translate Freiburg, he says congratulations on your efforts. More work to do. Can you turn those America accounts into superannuation funds? So more work to do. Everybody should put 12% of their instead of into Social Security, they should put it into their Amer Invest America account, their Trump accounts. Great job, everybody. Another amazing episode of the world's greatest podcast for Shimath Palihapatio. Couldn't make it this way. Week, we missed you bestie for David Sachs, brother in arms in Texas, the great state of Texas. David Friedberg, sultan of science, and fifth bestie, Brad Gerstner. I am the world's greatest moderator, according to some people, on the world's greatest podcast, and we will see you next week. Love you, besties. David Sacks (01:18:23): We'll let your winners ride. Jason Calacanis (01:18:26): Rain man David's out. David Sacks (01:18:29): I'm going home. And it said We open source David Friedberg (01:18:48): We Jason Calacanis (01:18:54): should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.