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Jason Calacanis (00:00:00): Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, your favorite podcast, the all in podcast. We had a huge, huge docket with me again, the core for Chamath Freiberg, Saxe, and your boy, Jake Hal. Topic one. Topic one. Let's get right to it. No small talk, boys. Dario has spoken. Apparently, he listens to the All In podcast, and he was compelled to respond to Gavin Baker's little discussion last week that many people inside or some people allegedly maybe inside of Anthropic believe, quote, that they will be the only private company in the world at some point. Some folks from Anthropic, Sholto Douglas fired back completely false, whoever told Gavin this is lying. And Dario decided he would come out of hiding and he entered the chat with an epic two part essay on regulation sacks. He said, quote, I know the Silicon Valley shorthand where regulation equals regulatory capture equals concentration of power, but always found this to be an overly simplified picture. On messaging, he said, quote, I do not agree my messaging has been disproportionately negative. It has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits. I took a little responsibility quote. By far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us. Most quoted line, the thing that will work is actually curing cancer, not glitzy marketing questions. Sachs, you've been talking about anthropic for a year and a half. He never responded. Gavin comes out and he suddenly is very talkative and responds. What do you take from the fact that he never responded to you? And then he responded to Gavin and then we'll get into the details. Does he not wanna spar with you?
David Sacks (00:01:52): In fairness, Jay Cal, he did respond to me. Mean, I don't want to center myself, the reality is he did not respond to what Gavin said. He easily could have said that what Gavin said he said is untrue, like Sholto did. He did not weigh in on that issue. Instead, he really weighed in on the regulatory capture issue. So that's the thing that I think drew him out here is I think he is a little bit irked by the fact that we keep accusing him of regulatory capture. And this is something I've been saying since last year, that they were engaged in a sophisticated regulatory capture scheme based on fear mongering. And those are the points he's really responding to. And I think the thing that he doesn't like about it is that he feels like it impugns his motives, that he's not pure and pursuing all these regulations for And the right my response to that is, look, there's no question that Anthropic has been extremely aggressive about seeking to implement its preferred regulatory frameworks at both the state and federal level. That is regulatory capture. Now, look, I think that Dario may be sincere in his beliefs. I'm not saying he's doing this for pecuniary reasons. Nonetheless, he is seeking to capture the machinery of the state on behalf of his political agenda. It's just there's not much to debate there, I don't think. There's a few other things to say about this. So let me go to point number two first. He says that he's not responsible for the negativity around AI. That he's been balanced in his portrayal of AI. Oh, really? Do you expect us to have amnesia about the fact that just about a year and a half ago, you said very specifically that within one to five years, fifty percent of entry level knowledge workers would lose their jobs. And this was not just some sort of idle speculation on a podcast. This was something that they engineered and amplified into a full fledged media campaign. You may recall that President Obama even retweeted this, and many other Democratic Party officials did the same thing. Moreover, this pattern repeats itself with the whole anthropic blackmail study. Remember, he's got a team at the company.
David Sacks (00:03:57): They're supposedly studying alignment. They create this highly contrived study where they prompt this model over 200 times until they finally get the headline grabbing result that they wanted. And again, my point here is that this is not just someone just riffing on a podcast about the alignment risk of AI. This is them actually creating a study, engineering that study, and then pumping it to create the headlines they wanted. And Dario and his sister, who's the president of the company, and other executives went on sixty minutes and breathlessly pumped this thing. And since that study has come out, a lot of people looked at it and said, look, this thing is highly contrived, including the UK AI Safety Institute basically said that this thing was created under highly pressurized conditions, and they engineered the result. So these guys have created campaigns to make people fear AI. Why is the public so afraid of AI? They think it's going to take their jobs. They think it's going become the Terminator. It's exactly the fears that Anthropic has put in the media bloodstream. And no company, and you have to say, therefore, no founder or CEO, has done more to promote these fears and pump these fears and amplify these fears than Dario has. And the fact that he can't see that either makes him, I'd say, disingenuous or delusional.
Jason Calacanis (00:05:16): I'm going with the latter.
David Sacks (00:05:18): That's point number one. And I really think that almost everybody who read that who's been paying attention felt the same way. It's like, Daria, you really have a blind spot with respect to your own behavior.
David Friedberg (00:05:29): By the
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:05:29): way, can we talk about that one for a second or no? Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah. Just to build on what you're saying. The issue that we have right now is actually pretty problematic. If I had to take three different vectors of actions and now put them together, you've had a very disjointed, disorganized, and, frankly, pearl clutching, disingenuous AI doom narrative. And it's actually seeded, and now it's growing. And as a result, what's happening? I was really shocked when I saw governor Abbott of Texas put down this executive order around Texas data centers and limiting its growth. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania just did the same thing. Axios reported that the GOP party sent out a memo to the executives at the various AI companies essentially saying, hey. Stop rage baiting people because we're about to lose this critical GOP senate race in Ohio largely around this issue. So you have doomerism, and then you now have mainstream political pushback from both sides of the aisle, which I think is extremely dangerous. And then the third leg of the stool is rising yields.
David Friedberg (00:06:48): By the
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:49): way, the treasury department just doubled its bond buying. If you put all of these things together as a just a casual observer, what I would say is we have made some really stupid unforced errors in The United States. And the coda to all of this is if you put all of these things together, rising yields constrains the money supply in terms of how people want to invest in risk seeking assets because the risk free rate just keeps going up. That causes people to be less likely to invest in all the data centers. Data centers themselves are being shut down. Where does that leave frontier model companies? They're the most at risk. Why? Because they're not investment grade. They're in the worst position in terms of their balance sheets. They're not in a position to then get access to the compute they need to be successful. So even as you grow, you're actually making your problem worse in the sense that you need more and more capacity to sustain that growth that you can't fund because all the negativity has turned people against you. So all roads lead to a big question mark and a and a head scratching moment for me where I'm like, how did we end up in this situation? But whether it was accidental or whether it was well intentioned risk management, whatever it was, we are now in a very precarious situation that we could have frankly avoided.
David Sacks (00:08:07): Totally agree.
Jason Calacanis (00:08:08): Freebert, your thoughts on this anti data center movement or on Dario's going direct and writing the double missive. Do you think he's sincere, delusional, some combination?
David Friedberg (00:08:22): Why don't we steal man it? Yeah. And if we put ourselves in the shoes of a Frontier Lab leader and the leader is seeing capabilities of models that perhaps we don't see because we're working day to day in enterprise settings, making stuff, doing things in a benign, non nefarious way. And they're sitting there and they're pressure testing models, and they figure out, hey. There's ways you can jailbreak models to get them to do things that they're not supposed to do, and then you can use them to do things like design bioweapons, make viruses, make infectious diseases that don't exist today. You could use them to design cyber weapons to get them to go and do things online, like break into bank accounts and take people's money and all these sorts of things. And you can prompt them to do things that could broadly influence society by creating fake media, fake videos, fake images, propagate them through social media, hack the algorithms. I mean, X's algorithm is public, so theoretically, an agent could read it, copy it, understand it, and figure out a way to manipulate the broad public. And so you realize that as you're building these tools where there's a lot of benign positive world leading progressive kind of applications, you see all the bad stuff that could happen with it. And you can keep trying to build systems and keep trying to build ways to stop it from doing that. You can build all your own code that reviews every prompt that comes in, that reviews every API call. And yet somehow a network of agents can be used to do things, and they can start to do things that we don't want them to do. And so let's assume that you're sitting there and you're the executive of the company building this great technology. You believe fully in its capabilities and its benefits to society, its benefits to the economy, but you can't get a grip on how to keep it under control and how to stop social engineering, bioweapons, and cyber weapons. What do you do differently?
David Friedberg (00:10:24): Okay.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:25): So you're bringing up it's an exceptional going down an exceptional path. I love this. There is one thing that you must do if you believe that this is true to further steel man this thing. You cannot obfuscate the thinking tokens of a model then. What do I mean? If you just compare open source models versus the closed frontier models. There is no way for us to understand what the thinking tokens are, meaning you give it a prompt, you get back something, but all the stuff in the middle is obfuscated. Clot obfuscates it. Okay? So do the OpenAI models. And I would say, if I was really afraid, the first thing I would do is try to find a way to unobfuscate these thinking tokens so that you could have a third party actually legitimize what you're saying. Because what's interesting to me is I haven't seen the same doomerism from any open source model company, including NVIDIA. And the thing with the open source models is you can actually see it thinking. So you can see its misalignment in real time. And so instead, we have to basically agree to their interpretation of tokens that we can't see, that only they can see, that they can interpret how they want. And without judging whether it's right or wrong, I would say, give them the benefit of the doubt that they're trying to do the right thing. Make the bloody thing available to other people then. Let somebody else with some amount of judgment as well sit in a room and steel man it with you.
David Friedberg (00:12:01): So then let me make this point. So, Saxx, there was this argument that Demis put out for a FINRA style regulatory system where industry participants that understand technology move quickly and are aligned with commercialization actively review each other's systems and each other's models via an industry consortium that hires and assigns scientists to work on this stuff, and they're just doing it versus having it be owned and managed by the government and create some regulatory capture scheme. But then this week, you were pretty against the FINRA system in your tweets. You seem to be supportive of it the first time around when Demis originally published it. It seems to me that the proposal from Demis that Dario signed up to, Sam signed up to, Elon all signed up to, you're now against, but that could be a solution to if there is genuine concern here given Chamath's points.
David Sacks (00:12:52): Let me
David Friedberg (00:12:52): But the industry can can can kinda police each other.
David Sacks (00:12:54): Let me let me clarify that. I think designing a new regulatory agency for AI that's designed after FINRA, which is a pretty sleepy regulatory agency that writes rules for stockbrokers in a fairly mature industry that's not dynamic at all, is a horrible idea. And by the way, FINRA is widely perceived as just protecting incumbents. And talk to any startup founders who to deal with them. They view FINRA as existing to protect the big banks from disruption. It's it's just not a good model to base regulation after. Now Demas, hold on.
David Friedberg (00:13:30): Perhaps the NSA, the National Futures Association, which is also one of these self regulatory organizations in the financial markets a is better alternative because that's a pretty dynamic Okay.
David Sacks (00:13:40): So now what you're saying is very interesting, which is you mentioned the term self regulatory organization or SRO, and there's many different models. And one of them may work. And that's been my point. The one I think is the most appropriate for this circumstance would be something like the MPAA, which does not report to the government at all and was formulated by the motion picture industry in response to the Hays Code. And what the government said is, Get your act together, guys, or we're going have to do it for you. And what the NPA did then was promote standards that then forestalled more intrusive heavy handed government action. So that is basically the model that I said I could get behind. But is that the model that Dario supports? No. Dario and I think Demes wants a FINRA, which is basically this rulemaking regulatory agency that would not only promulgate standards, but also do pre release model testing. Okay? And it would then report into the government and then officially be enshrined in law. And the reason why everyone says, Well, Elon's behind I've talked to Elon about this. Elon does not support an FINRA for AI. What he could get behind is an MPA for AI. And that's my point is Demis wrote something
Jason Calacanis (00:14:55): very high saying on this podcast, Saks, since the beginning. I have been saying MPA self regulate.
David Sacks (00:15:00): I get it. But look, here's my point. Demis wrote something very high level. And so when you say something like, well, everyone supports Demis' idea, there's many versions of Demis' idea.
Jason Calacanis (00:15:10): Yes. I hear
David Sacks (00:15:11): hear be okay, and some of them are bad. And what I'm saying is if it's a FINRA model, that will not work.
David Friedberg (00:15:17): Having spoken to Demis at length about this, I think that the the general framework is SRO in the right structure. However, FINRA is often used as the example of an SRO simply because it is the most well known SRO. But you are correct. I think that there's a mechanism by which this thing needs to operate that is distinct from any other SRO. But the idea being the industry gets together, and to Chamath's point, they get to look at each other's models, they get to police it, they get to have independence, but they don't get to be controlled by government. And that
David Sacks (00:15:49): Well, here's what I think is solve the And and just to be clear, this FINRA for AI AI idea, Dario's behind a demo It's called
David Friedberg (00:15:56): an SRO for AI. SRO.
David Sacks (00:15:58): It's not an SRO because it's not self regulating. It's a regulatory organization, and the S part is a total fig leaf designed to hide the fact that this is a new regulatory agency that reports to the government that does prerelease testing and approval of models. I call it a DMV for AI because I think what's going to happen is all these models are going to get lined up in a queue waiting to get their tests done and then released. And it's going to slow us down horribly. Have you ever been to the DMV It's when ask terrible idea. And it's just a repackaging of what Dario has always wanted, which is an FDA for AI. Now he's saying it's an FAA for AI. You know how long the FAA and the FDA take to approve new products?
Jason Calacanis (00:16:37): Yeah. We mentioned them earlier. Yeah. We'll
David Friedberg (00:16:39): say China's China's advantage. Yeah. Exactly.
David Sacks (00:16:42): China's gonna win if And we do
David Friedberg (00:16:43): Well, I mean
David Sacks (00:16:44): it will become pure regulatory capture.
David Friedberg (00:16:46): You should look at China's rocket that they landed yesterday. You know, it's completely steel. And there's a a good analysis that was done on how quickly they were able to do it from the last time they had an explosion of this. Then they got full steel done, And Elon's still waiting for FAA approval on his steel Starship. You could actually watch it playing out in China where their regulatory agencies are allowing them to move much more quickly. And as a result, they're starting to gain real traction in the space race. And then separately, a lot of biotech has moved offshore from The US for the same reason that you're pointing out, which is the FDA approval cycle is so long and the stages slow people down so much. And China's completely revamped their rules for getting to clinicals and getting to phase three and then completing, that all the biotech investing in the world is now moving to China.
David Sacks (00:17:33): The fact that Dario could want and has called for, including in very recent blogs, a regulatory apparatus modeled after the FAA and that that is the right model for AI, in my view, is completely discrediting. And yes, we will get smoked by China because they will not subject all their companies to these constraints.
David Friedberg (00:17:53): Now Okay. So let's play this out.
David Sacks (00:17:55): Let's play this out. Yeah. Go back to your steel man for a second. Yeah. Yeah. Because I believe that we should not have a DMV for AI does not mean that I'm against AI safety. So let's talk about some of the things that can be done. So first of all, I think it's good that these frontier labs take safety seriously. Sam just came out with a post, I believe yesterday, saying that actually they're going to slow down the release of some of their frontier models because they felt that their safety stack was not keeping up with the capability. Okay, that's responsible. By the way, do you know why I think they're doing that? Because they have huge and ample liability to take responsible steps. Because if they don't, they're going be subjected to all sorts of product liability lawsuits. Look at what's happening to Meta right now. They're getting sued because supposedly their product led to social media addiction, and they're being sued for over $1,000,000,000,000 right now. And this comes on the heel of them losing a $6,000,000 jury trial in Los Angeles where a plaintiff sued them for creating her body image issues. So we are seeing massive product liability lawsuits against big tech companies like Meta and Google. And if OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, and I think they are, they do not want to be next. So these companies have ample reasons for liability protection not to just race out their product. Okay? Safety is part of what they have to get right. Now, how should the industry coordinate with each other? There are tried and true ways of doing this. Companies in the industry publish papers. They publish technical papers. They publish blogs. These are good ways of sharing best practices. They attend symposia and conferences, and they present at these things. They do request for comments as part of open standard setting exercises. There are ways of the industry collaborating on safety in very productive ways.
David Sacks (00:19:45): But what is the common denominator of everything I just said? They are all open. They are not in secret. And that makes those judgments contestable to the point that Jamath made earlier about we need to see the thinking behind this. And what I'm against is these companies meeting in secret, whether it's part of some sort of FINRA or otherwise, to set standards that are not transparent, that are uncontestable. And you know what's gonna come out of that? Regulatory capture and anticompetitive behavior. You can't. There are ways of doing this that will protect the public, that are open and transparent. That is what we should lead towards.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:20): You will not you will not see it happen. And I'll tell you why. Just, again, the technical details matter. If all of a sudden competitor a, b, and c could see every single trace and span that your model generated as an artifact of going from input tokens to output tokens, you're essentially giving away a lot of your recipe. And I just don't think that if Anthropic isn't willing, even if I'm an API customer, to share my thinking tokens from my company with me, they're sure as not gonna share it with OpenAI and anybody else in a room. Okay?
David Friedberg (00:21:00): Okay. Let's and let's just do one more steal, man. So let's say that Dario is successful. And, JK, I'll ask you the question because I've taken over as moderator of the segment. Go ahead.
Jason Calacanis (00:21:10): Yeah. No. I mean, no. Saxe has this is Saxe's wheelhouse. I wanted to hear Let's your
David Friedberg (00:21:13): just let's just No.
Jason Calacanis (00:21:14): To be honest, this is Saxe's wheelhouse. I wanted to hear your whole position.
David Friedberg (00:21:17): Let's just say that Dario is successful. There's some regulatory scheme that's created that does, in fact, this access point, slow down the industry, slow down model development. And China's Frontier Labs make significant progress, and they start to leap ahead. And they get this RSI, this recursive self improvement going, and their models become the best in the world, and they only get better and better and better. JK, I will start with you. Okay. And then we'll go around the horn.
Jason Calacanis (00:21:41): Okay. World's greatest moderator.
David Friedberg (00:21:43): What is the implication for the American worker, for the American business, and for the American consumer in a world where China just has the best AI, and they have all the data center? What happens in our world? What is
Jason Calacanis (00:21:55): the consequence? Because everyone keeps hearing, oh, China will win. China will win. Who cares? What does that actually mean? I don't think China is gonna win. I think it'll be you know, there's not gonna be one person who who takes the whole prize. I think it's gonna be incremental improvement. So I don't think that that matters. I you know, I've been thinking about why this backlash is happening actually for the data centers. And it was kind of shocking to see Abbott come out and Shapiro come out because those two people were the most pro data centers. Right? And if you kind of double click on it, they just wanna make sure you're not tapping into the grid and, you know, the water concern, which we've talked about here is not too serious. But I think it was very performative. And I think you and I were talking about this on the back channel is they both are doing this because their constituents, the people who vote for them, really care about these data centers and they wanna stop them. So then you have to work backwards. Why do they wanna stop data centers so much? Why are Americans so opposed to AI right now? And the perception of AI was already pre baked with science fiction, of course. So we needed to work to get past the Skynet Terminator vision. But Dario told everybody, we're gonna lose our jobs. Elon said, you're not gonna have to work. It was a more world positive view, but he did say that. Sam Waltman did studies on universal basic income and he told everybody, you're not gonna have to work, have UBI. Saying that kind of stuff to people who have to work for a living and who have no savings and who are watching you know, administration after administration not be able to tame inflation, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, and then watching the minimum wage just stay the way it is and barely move while the stock market hits records.
Jason Calacanis (00:23:42): And then all of us, all of us being tech executives get super rich. And you wonder why people now are embracing socialism and why you have Abbott and Shapiro saying, you know what? And Roe Conner worst of all saying, have to be anti capitalistic. I have to be a decel. I have to decelerate. It's because they were supposed to see some relief and they haven't. And then what do people do who do not feel they have any power? They look to find power. And if you look at what's happened, they are sharpening the guillotines. And, you know, that metaphor should wake people up, whether it's, you know, the United Healthcare CEO getting killed or people firebombing Sam Waltman's house. We need to wake up and look at why are people so upset? It's because they can't survive. They're having a hard time with affordability, with their wages. And what two things can they do? They can vote for socialists and they can actually stop data centers. And that's what this is about. Nobody, no no regular rank and file American cares about AI safety. That's not the discussion for them. Yeah. The discussion for them is why am I not getting rich and everybody else is?
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:50): I would tune your argument by one degree. I
Jason Calacanis (00:24:52): I really
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:24:52): think you're onto something, but the one degree shift is I don't think they think about it entirely that way. I actually think they think about it as if I think about who has won over the last decade, this generation of tech oligarchs who have won are pretty displeasing. They're not aspirational, and they're not the people that one would look up to. They're not Steve Jobs by any stretch of the imagination. And now they look at this other next generation, and they're like, wait. We're gonna go from billionaire, deca billionaire, centibillionaire to now trillionaire, and it's those guys? Those guys are even worse than the last crop. That's exactly what's happening. And so I don't think it's as specific as what you're saying, Jason. I think it's vibes. And the vibes are terrible. And they're looking around. They're like, if we can just slow this down, maybe another batch of people will show up, and they will actually mean to do the right thing and will make me at least feel better. And I won't be so begrudgingly hating the fact that you're about to make a trillion dollars. It is precisely that sensation. And the folks that are at the front of the show on this are not trustworthy. That's what it is.
David Friedberg (00:25:58): Zax, let me ask you my question, and I just I need I need to hear someone answer this question.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:03): Okay, Mike. I'll answer your question. I'd like Yeah.
David Friedberg (00:26:05): So my question again, if there is a regulatory slowdown with AI development in The US and China races ahead, what are the implications for American business, for American consumers? They will how does this actually affect they
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:26:17): will win?
David Sacks (00:26:18): Look. There are big.
David Friedberg (00:26:19): What does What does that mean? Help people understand. So, like, if I'm sitting at home
David Sacks (00:26:22): Okay. Imagine if okay. Let me give you, like, a counterfactual. Imagine if China had won the Internet. Imagine if all the major Internet companies were Chinese
David Friedberg (00:26:31): Well, I right can't. I you to imagine for me. Tell me what what give me a scenario of
David Sacks (00:26:35): what Okay. This So imagine that instead of I know people don't like big tech, but imagine if Google and Microsoft and Meta and all these companies were actually, it was Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and all the rest of them instead. I mean, obviously that would be way worse to The United States. Our economy would not be as vibrant. It would not be as cutting edge. And all that wealth would have gone into China. There are also military or dual use applications of this technology, especially with AI. The algorithms power all sorts of weapons, drones, things like that. So we'll be behind them. I mean, America is not gonna be the number one country in the world economically and militarily if we lose AI. It's just that simple.
David Friedberg (00:27:20): Jamat, do you agree? Like, what's your view of the world, The US, business, consumer, individual in a world where China has one quote in AI?
Jason Calacanis (00:27:30): I don't know if I'm what do you mean by one? I don't I don't
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:33): know what it means.
David Friedberg (00:27:34): Okay. So I'm what I'm
Jason Calacanis (00:27:35): trying to get to you could refine that,
David Friedberg (00:27:36): it'd be easier to answer. The implications of regulatory slowdown. So if we do slow down AI, what are the implications for people? How do the people understand tangibly what that means?
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:46): Yeah. Unless we actually go and ban and I don't even know how one would implement a ban, I think it's just a worthless exercise. Ban open source, I think we're going to be just fine. I think the consumer is gonna win. I think American companies will win, and I think the American economy will win. And the reason why it will win is that what we are finding. I'll give you an example of a really interesting insight. And this is about closed versus open. Okay? Three years ago, all there ever were were models. Yeah? And you would look at some benchmark, and there would be a score of Freiburg. And you would say, wow. The one with the higher score is better. And then in the last few years, what's emerged is what's called a harness. Right? And a harness just wraps the model. Like Codecs or ClodCode or Ermes or OpenClaw, these are harnesses. You know what the interesting thing about open source versus closed source models? When you take a closed source model, it does really well on a benchmark. When you wrap it in its own harness, it decays in capability. When you take an open source model and you use any other open source model, it improves in capability. What is that trying to tell you? What I think we are finding out, and this data is just going to be a tsunami over the next year, is there are all kinds of ways of using open source technologies that are meaningfully more performant and dramatically cheaper than the closed source alternative. Unless America stops us, us being consumers, business owners, from using the cheapest, fastest, best thing, unless they stop us from doing that, we will win. What we are debating at this point is which private American company will win or lose. I go back to the previous argument. I don't think Americans care that much whether any of these closed source companies win or lose. And I think you're seeing that in the policy. So Freeburg, my explicit answer to you is as long as we don't do some draconian thing like trying to stop open source, the American consumer will win.
David Sacks (00:29:51): I got bad news for you, Jamaf. An open source ban is coming. They're not gonna call it that. You know what they're going to say? They're going to say that we simply have to apply the same standards to open models that we apply to close. Okay, here's how they do it step by step. Let me explain how regulatory capture actually works. So first of all, you got to get this regulatory apparatus, okay? Dario wants an FDA for AI, but he doesn't have enough political support for that. So instead, they do this Trojan horse of FINRA for AI. They call it self regulating. It's not really. But anyway, that gets them off the ground. Now they've created the standard setting organization. Now they've got pre release model testing. Then the pressure grows to codify that in law. So that happens next. And then what they do is they say, look, all these standards need to apply equally to all models. But here's the problem with that. Open models and closed models, as you know, are technologically different. Go back to Dario's Senate testimony in, I think it was 2023, where he said that open models, if sufficiently advanced, are dangerous. And why are they dangerous? Because they cannot be centrally monitored and controlled and rolled back with strong, hold on, like
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:57): be a miracle?
David Sacks (00:30:59): Service like the one he hosts. Okay.
Jason Calacanis (00:31:01): I understand, David. Hold on. Hold
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:02): Let just finish the point.
David Sacks (00:31:04): Please. Let me just finish the point, and then you can Yeah. You can respond. Dario basically says that open models are dangerous because of these characteristics they have. And those characteristics are immutable. They're technologically they can't be changed. Once you release an open model into the world, you can't roll it back in. You can't monitor exactly how people are using it because they run it on their own hardware. Dario says this is what makes open models dangerous. So what they're gonna do is they're gonna have the standard setting body say, well, we have to set the standards for AI safety. By the way, Dario and OpenAI, they're going to fund the whole thing. They're going to contribute all the compute. They're going to be behind it. They're going to be the ones coordinating with the government officials. Because frankly, people in government have no idea how to monitor and control and set standards for AI safety. Technologically, this is way beyond them. So they're going to go to these companies and say, tell us how to do it. And so what will happen is the standards will get set and then it'll be a very simple matter of fairness to say that the standards need to apply to open as well as closed models. The open models cannot comply in the same way, and gradually they will be shut off. Shabbat, wanna answer that?
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:12): I understand, but the American economy would cripple overnight. Why
David Sacks (00:32:17): in fact? You're saying regulators have never done things that are
Jason Calacanis (00:32:20): Okay. Let Sharmoth Sharmoth answer it.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:32:22): So let let's take it again, I'll use the example of Coca Cola. Coca Cola is is an extremely profitable, cash generative, well run business. It has existed for, I don't know, a hundred plus years. At this point, it will exist for many hundreds more if left to their own devices. It is a global business. Right? Take Pfizer. Same situation. Well run business. Global business. And now what you will tell them is, unless you tell them, hey, anywhere you operate, you need to follow American rules. Okay. That's one thing. Or it'll say, inside of America, you need to follow our rules, and other governments will have different rules. Now what is Coca Cola to do? Run the slower, more costly, less effective, less valuable model in The United States? Sure. They'll do that. And their US business will cripple. They will have a better flourishing business abroad. They will invest abroad. And what you will see is FDI, foreign direct investment in The United States, go off of a cliff. And what you will see is direct investments into other countries of the world rise. You've seen this, by the way, in China when China made all these moves to cripple the Chinese tech companies. I think this is the best analogy. There
Jason Calacanis (00:33:37): was
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:37): a moment where China was at a fork in the road where the large oligopolists there, the large tech oligarchs, were trying to seize power. And the tip of that spear was when Jack Ma gave that very famous speech on the eve of the IPO of Ant Financial. What happened? Xi Jinping cracked down. They took complete control. They said, we are now operating together. Everybody that is worth anything will have a representative from the Chinese government on their board. We have the golden vote. We're gonna work together. When you look at what happened to foreign direct investment and you look at what happened to their economy, it fell off of a cliff. That will happen here if this happens. So they can try, and everybody will say, okay. And what what the Coke CEO will do is redirect all of his capital allocation to outside of America. So will Pfizer. So will I. So will anybody. And then what are you gonna do? Take away our passports so you can't travel? So I think it will be a very visible way of just destroying The United States. And you can do that if you want to, but you will see it play out almost instantaneously in the equity markets and in the capital allocation of companies.
David Sacks (00:34:44): I agree with you about all the negative consequences if we ban open models, but that doesn't mean it can happen. Look at all the negative consequences of banning data centers. Data centers are gonna be 3% of GDP. It's basically creating all the gains in the stock market.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:34:59): But they're not voting against that. They're voting against two people that they deeply dislike becoming trillionaires. That's what they're voting against.
David Sacks (00:35:06): That's a big part of it. Jayco, what do you think?
Jason Calacanis (00:35:08): Well, I was just gonna add to this. We already know what would happen with AGI Freeburg. Because your original question of like trying to explain to Americans what happens when China wins, we already know what happens when they win. Products get cheaper and you get more access to them. If they solve cancer, what are they gonna do with that solution? They're gonna just keep it for themselves? No, they're gonna sell it to Americans just like they sell phones cheaper, just like they sell cars cheaper and we try to block them. And then what Americans are gonna do, we're gonna lose our jobs to them. And so that would be the way, I I think, to explain it to them. But if we wanna turn this around, this really is just about convincing Americans that they're gonna have jobs and that this is gonna benefit them. The American people are scared of losing their livelihoods. That's the beginning and end of it. And, you know, the the place where I have some expertise is in having invested in zipline and Uber and a bunch of self driving companies. And that's being poor. The money is not the issue here. But the thing that I think is, you know, where this is gonna play out is really on the autonomy and and those jobs. Zipline just did a partnership with Uber. I'm investors in both of those companies, obviously, and they are gonna do a million deliveries a day. Then you'll look at just massive progress by Waymo. They're doubling the number of cars on the road, like every six months or so. Tesla's about to go cyber cap. And what people are perceiving is in their community that you're not gonna have any money staying in their community. Because those drivers, you know, as as much as hand wringing has occurred, that money at least stayed in the community. Oh, they weren't making enough. Oh, they're only making $18 sixteen hours, $21 an hour, whatever it is.
Jason Calacanis (00:36:46): But now we're taking that away from them. And then where does that money go? Where does the money for a robo taxi, Waymo ride, zip line? Where does it all go? It goes up into the cloud and then comes back down into Silicon Valley, polarizing more wealth. And that's where you're gonna see, I will predict it now, they're gonna ban Waymos in New York, Boston, DC, and they're gonna limit them with licenses. We must figure out how to explain to Americans that we're gonna raise the minimum wage, something that when I say we should raise the minimum wage and focus on that, people are like, that's crazy. But when we talk about an an experimental tax cut, people are like, oh, yeah. We do an experimental tax cut. We'll We'll change the cost basis of capital gains. Great, let's try and see what happens. But nobody wants to try to raise the minimum wage. Nobody wants to give people an explanation of where their job will be in the future. And that's where whoever is making the point, think it was Utramath about like, who are the spokespeople here? We need spokespeople who are saying this technology will empower you to get a great job. Paradoxically, the guy who did the best job explaining this were the two guys were Jensen obviously, who said, You're not gonna get replaced by AI, it's gonna be somebody who works with AI. And then Zuckerberg, who said, I'm gonna give you a bunch of free tools in his manifesto going direct. He was like, I'm gonna give you free tools, I'm gonna empower you, you're gonna get agents, your life's gonna get better. Dario and Sam have not done that. In- Meta did a really
David Sacks (00:38:10): great thing. Did a really great thing, which is he created this new program, or it's almost like a training school for like a trade school for people to go and learn how to get these various kinds of jobs, laying fiber, doing these new blue collar construction jobs, which we have a huge shortage of. And that's why it actually is
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:28): so I'm hard hoping to build these your salary or something. It's a great program.
Jason Calacanis (00:38:31): Yeah. Yeah. Mean, we need more of. And so how is Zuckerberg all of a sudden the best spokesperson for our industry?
David Sacks (00:38:38): It's a very low bar. I mean
Jason Calacanis (00:38:39): I guess that's
David Sacks (00:38:40): I mean, this all goes back to the fact that Dario, not exclusively, but again, he was the one who put the most specific numbers on it and therefore made it the most tantalizing and salacious for the media. 50% of entry level knowledge workers are going to lose their job, not in the distant future, as soon as one year. We're not past that one year mark, by the way. Has he updated? Has he said I was wrong? Not really. Sam did, Well, by the is his to his his credit.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:05): To Waltman and Dario should start talking about jobs.
David Friedberg (00:39:08): But Sam actually came
David Sacks (00:39:09): out and said, I was too negative. I was wrong.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:11): He
David Sacks (00:39:12): did. Dario has doubled down as far as I know. He's never recanted. He's an ideologue. So, but, I mean, to your whole point, yes, I agree with you that the animus and anger towards data center flows out of the fears about job as well as other fears about AI. But it's the job loss that is the main concern. And there is no evidence of that. We're now years into the AI boom and there's no evidence of that. We only
Jason Calacanis (00:39:35): see It's the opposite.
David Sacks (00:39:36): Net job creation.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:38): Exactly. It's
David Friedberg (00:39:39): a bit the opposite.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:40): I mean, listen. I was I had I had massive concerns about it.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:44): And I'll also say something else.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:45): Business opportunity is so great. I got seven job openings. So I keep saying
David Sacks (00:39:49): Hold on, hold on. This is important. Hold on, Jake has got an important announcement here.
Jason Calacanis (00:39:53): No, listen, what I've discovered is, if you can convince your team to embrace the tools, so many business opportunities emerge that you wind up hiring people to work for the people in your organization who embrace the tools. So we have become so fast at building the syndicate, building our programs that I'm like, you know, we need to add a couple of people. I thought So we were gonna automate them away and we're at it.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:40:18): I'll just say I'll just say another general point. Silicon Valley has completely lost what made it great. It was a place for weirdos, for people at the fringes, for people that really were idealistic. And it has become something that's far from that now. It is the equivalent of what Harvard used to be. It's a credentialing place. It's a place you come to to say, oh, I came, you know, to Silicon Valley. I worked at a start up. You know, I got into YC. You know, when we came, we used to aspire to meet the Bill Campbells of the world, Mike Moritzes, John Doors. Those folks are gone. We used to aspire to work for Steve Jobs. He's not here. And in that breach, all we have done is focused on making money in every single way that we can. Hand over fist. And I think, again, there's nothing wrong with that except now is a point where we need to do a better job of acknowledging it and trying to do a little bit better. And every time we don't and we're given a chance to to be better and we're not, the hatred builds. The animus, as you said, David, builds. And that's what we're seeing now.
David Sacks (00:41:29): Yeah. There's no question about that. But can I defend Dario? Let me just say something in his
Jason Calacanis (00:41:34): I'm sorry. Guys, my my headphone went out. You said you wanna defend Dario? I'm breaking news.
David Sacks (00:41:39): Actually think he is very idealistic. I don't think money is his main motivation. It's just what are his ideals? He wants to bring forth this new superintelligence, machines of love and grace, that are going to apportion all the resources of society while humans twiddle their thumbs. It's not a vision that the average person believes in or is attracted to. In fact, it's dystopian. And that's why a lot of their messaging is dystopian. And because of that vision, no matter how idealistic his motives, it is why he does not inspire trust. I mean, I actually I don't think he's lying to us, and what he's really trying to do here is capture all the wealth for himself. I actually think he's trying to bring forth this future, but it's not a future that I think the American public wants. And by the way, he should have to defend that. I mean, if you think you are bringing about the singularity, and let's face it, he probably is in the lead to do that, to bring about recursive self improvement, he should defend this future. I see all these people simping on X. So like, oh my god, Dario, thank you for coming forth. Oh, you know, thank you for coming down from Mount Olympus and slumming it with the rest of us on x and finally engaging on social media. You know? And it's like, no. He should have to do that. You know? If you're gonna put yourself in the lead to bring about this crazy future, you should tell us why you're doing that.
Jason Calacanis (00:43:01): Well, and he should speak more. I think this is a key point. And to your point about it's not about money for him, the seven co founders of this is my understanding, it's been documented, I think in a bunch of press reports, but they never talk about it. They donated 80% of their shares. So like 10% of Anthropics in some sort of trust, which at 2 or 3,000,000,000,000, 10% of that's gonna be the largest
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:24): Well, it's gonna be the largest democratic pack. Gonna be the largest
Jason Calacanis (00:43:28): However they use it, but why aren't
David Friedberg (00:43:29): they talking about how to The largest DSA
David Sacks (00:43:32): trillion dollars to EA causes what could go wrong.
Jason Calacanis (00:43:35): Well, I mean, let's hope they put it towards something that actually is humanity positive. But they they and he only they all they all own only like 1.8% each. That's a term of art. Yeah. Well, and then I do think going direct is something you just I think we can move on after this. Is critically important.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:43:54): What have you got to learn? You got an AI to talk.
Jason Calacanis (00:43:56): No. No. No. You gotta the playbook is very simple. You gotta number one, you gotta write it all yourself, which he clearly did. And, you know, Jensen's been doing
David Friedberg (00:44:05): Are you
David Sacks (00:44:05): sure about that?
Jason Calacanis (00:44:06): I don't know. Think so. It felt like it was him.
David Sacks (00:44:08): It felt very Claude like to me.
Jason Calacanis (00:44:09): You you know the Claude voice? I mean, he is the father of Claude.
David Sacks (00:44:13): That's true, actually. Claude could sound like him rather than vice versa.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:44:15): It could be the
Jason Calacanis (00:44:16): other way with causation correlation. But what he did is he did the exact playbook, which is you have to exhaust the audience. You have to go thousands of words like Zuck did, and then you have to get ahead of problems. That's where the leadership is breaking down. You have to talk about what's coming next and then never ever apologize or give an inch. Just attack whoever's attacking you. Fake news.
David Sacks (00:44:39): Right now, I don't think he can win the argument by being transparent because what he's selling is fear in order to motivate the government to give him control to bring about this dystopian future that he believes in. At least that's that's my distillation of of
Jason Calacanis (00:44:55): Just do it, Zuckage. Create a program for tool belt generation. Come up with ideas like that. Do more of that. Freiburg, last you get the last last last last. Go.
David Friedberg (00:45:03): I think that it's worth having a view on whether or not you believe in recursive self improvement. And recursive self improvement is this theory that at some point, an AI model can spin up a whole bunch of agents to do a bunch of work, and they can work together to make a new AI model. And the new AI model is better than the last AI model. And at some point, this all becomes effectively fully automated and self evolutionary. The AI is now improving itself continuously. And that is this idea that you have the singularity as some people would call it, or you have the ASI, the artificial superintelligence that arises from this capacity. But the capacity is recursive self improvement RSF. Anthropic has stated they're not sure if it's gonna happen, but it could, and they're working towards it, and they expect that there's a path to get there. I happen to believe having looked at this and thought about it, I think that it is possible. I think it is likely to happen soon. People I've talked to in industry do think it's real. And there is this kind of philosophical debate because companies have a different view on the path forward where it really needs to be human constructed, human designed, and there isn't this, like, let it all go, let humans detach from the AI, and let the AI evolve. And this is really like out of the movie Her where the thing just takes off and it evolves. But if it does happen and if RSI is a real construct, then you're almost fighting it's like a fool's errand. And it's a fool's errand in the sense that, like, all this idea that you've got human intervention in the stages of model development
Jason Calacanis (00:46:47): You're scaring people again.
David Friedberg (00:46:49): Just No. I I actually no. This is my point. If RSI is a thing and and by the way, RSI doesn't need lead to some dystopian outcome. It just means that the models improve faster and faster Without humans. And without humans necessarily constructing, architecting, and designing the next evolution. And then you don't necessarily have space for, oh, we just did one big model run every six months. We're gonna go to the government regulator or we're gonna go somewhere and get it approved. There's just this continuous policing and monitoring service that needs to take place at some point. And the truth is that all that you need to pull this off is you don't need governments in The US to say yes or governments in China to say yes or governments anywhere to say gonna say. You need satellites in space. You need some so you need some sovereignty, some space where you can. And I I don't know if it's in space. I don't know if it's with Balaji and the deal he just did in Kazakhstan, and you've got some unique It could be in Iceland. It could be In the ocean.
Jason Calacanis (00:47:46): People are floating it?
David Friedberg (00:47:47): It could be in the ocean. But the the point the point is, if RSI is a thing, you don't have a human process where you're stepping in to run this thing. So you don't necessarily have a cohort of frontier lab scientists running it. Theoretically, an individual that's smart enough or a group of individuals that's smart enough can go spin up an RSI factory anywhere in the world or anywhere in space. And and your attempts to ban the data centers or the attempts to ban or to create a regulatory body, that's why I call it a fool's errand. Because the thing with the open Internet and the thing with compute is all that it needs is the chips and the power and the connection. And if it's got the chips and the power and a communication connection, it can run. And I'm I'm not painting a dystopian view. I'm just saying practically, pragmatically, the the labs are all talking about RSI. And so if RSI is where this goes, then the labs can go and set up data centers in Iceland, in China, in wherever.
Jason Calacanis (00:48:42): Whoever will give them the freedom is
David Friedberg (00:48:44): a Wouldn't great having we be better systems where we actually have those labs based, where we have those data centers based in The US, where we have jurisdiction over them, where we have capacity to monitor and control and police them, rather than just have them sprung up in some random country or some random territory. So I guess my point is we should be attracting and retaining the frontier labs, not trying to
David Sacks (00:49:07): Yes.
David Friedberg (00:49:07): You know, chase them up.
Jason Calacanis (00:49:08): And then here's the famous wait but why image of a human progress going on a nice clip and then, boop, recursive self improvement, and it just goes out of control.
David Friedberg (00:49:18): And I'll tell you why I think RSI is a legitimate How close
Jason Calacanis (00:49:21): are we to it? That's, I think, what people would want to know. How close do people You
David Friedberg (00:49:25): know, honestly, time there's there's a massive problem with time dilation in AI model development. And and what I mean by that is we would typically consider some sort of thing that takes a linear amount of time. There's a certain amount of compute to get somewhere. There are changes that happen that are nonpredictable, that you don't actually know what the next phase, what the next step change takes in terms of time. The time models change a lot in terms of AI model development. And that's what's so crazy to make it so hard to predict, which is why no one's really good at predicting when is AGI happening, when's the next breakthrough happening. And then all of a sudden, everyone's like, oh my god. We're in the singularity. They just solved eight unproven math theorems in a week off of some model that's fairly cutting edge. It's now gonna be the second cutting edge model. So it's moving very quickly. But a lot of the the models are this mixture of experts concept where you've got these kind of smaller models that call each other to do things, and then you wrap it up and you call it a big model. And those smaller models, it seems over time, look a lot more like you see in biology where you have genes. A gene makes a protein and proteins interact in really complicated ways that we don't fully grok. Networks of proteins do things, and then they complete tasks. And I think the same evolution is likely to happen with the models where they break down into smaller models, and that makes them so much more efficient, and that makes them so much more performant. And we're seeing a lot of this in in how a lot of the models are evolving. We call it a model, but it's actually many models underneath it that work together. And so if the models actually do evolve this way, then RSI is the perfect system for figuring out the right path, which is how many sub models are there? What does each sub model's functions look like?
David Friedberg (00:50:59): How do they call each other? That evolution is likely going to happen without a human architect behind it. It's gonna be developed through a test and deploy system, and it's gonna be fully automated. And that's why this approach to actually solving that problem ends up becoming the future of how model development takes off, which is why I think RSI is probably the future. And when that happens, again, it's just wherever the data center and the power is.
David Sacks (00:51:24): I remember a few years ago, everyone was like, oh, AGI is imminent. AGI is imminent. And then where is it? I mean I mean, maybe we're already
Jason Calacanis (00:51:31): I think we're soaking in it.
David Sacks (00:51:32): Okay. Fine. Would it turn out to be the terminator? Right.
Jason Calacanis (00:51:36): No. That would be superintelligence. I mean, artificial general intelligence is like as smart as any human. Superintelligence is
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:42): like you're getting towards what
David Sacks (00:51:43): I get it. Freiberg talking
Jason Calacanis (00:51:45): about. That's far off.
David Sacks (00:51:46): Do do I think RSI could possibly happen? Yes. I think there's lots of black swans that could happen. It's very hard to assess the probability of those things. What I do know is, like you're saying, I don't think some new government regulatory agency will stop it if that's the thing because it won't be technically sophisticated enough. All it will do actually is concentrate power around that thing. It'll limit the options. You know, when it comes to age let me talk about AGI.
David Friedberg (00:52:12): We just wanna have that technology in this country is my point.
David Sacks (00:52:15): I just
David Friedberg (00:52:16): wanna go back to the to the point I was asking earlier. Why do we not want China to win? Because we want the best labs. We want the first breakthrough system to be here,
David Sacks (00:52:25): not video the argument. Dario actually made this argument in the context of trying to ban export of chips, which is one of his hobby horses as Anthropic has really been behind a lot of the political activity to restrict NVIDIA's sales internationally. And the argument was that we want to have a data center full of geniuses in The US, and that eventually, you know, what AI is going be used for is you're going to be able to create all these agents that are basically Nobel Prize winning level scientists. And if we have thousands or millions of those and China has only dozens or 100, whatever, then we're going to win everything. And that was the whole argument. But now we're basically banning the data centers. We're not going to have those data centers full of geniuses. And he's done his best to restrict sale of chips to our allies as well. So I guess our allies aren't going to have the data centers either. So we are totally shooting ourselves in the foot. And probably it would be a good thing if Dario really does believe in the data centers full of geniuses idea that he was arguing for last year, he should come forward and say, We're making a big mistake by over regulating data centers. Here's how we should do it. I haven't heard him step up in that way. And it makes you kind of question, do you only fight for the doomer side of the argument or are there versions of the positive side that you're willing to fight for politically? Now, Friedberg, your just one last point about RSI. I think this is really important is, look, again, black swan, very hard to say if it's gonna happen. I, you know, I do think that we're headed for AGI or already in AGI or whatever. But the most important thing about AGI is that we have choice. Like I'd much rather have multiple AGIs than just one, right? So for example, Elon says that the way to keep AI or AGI aligned is to make it maximally truth seeking.
David Sacks (00:54:15): I kind of like that, right? That's the way to prevent it from becoming woke. What anthropic says is the way to keep it aligned is to have this clawed constitution that is full of liberal values and you train it on that, and they've kind of got this EA ethicist or whatever who's writing these things. So there's different approaches. I kinda want all of them to produce sophisticated AI to keep checks and balances, to keep these things in check. What I don't want is just a Skynet or, you know, like a woke Skynet is sort of the worst possible outcome. And, you know, if we're gonna go like sci fi for a second, you know, there was like a Terminator TV show.
Jason Calacanis (00:54:51): Yes. That was pretty good. I think they stopped. It was
David Sacks (00:54:53): pretty good. It got canceled. This was like years and But years anyway, what they figured out in the show, like the plot was that the way they finally defeated Skynet was they created a good AGI to take on Skynet. They realized like humans just couldn't do it by themselves. So they created a choice. Maximally good. Yeah. They trained it to be more Benevolent. You know, benevolent towards humans. So in any event, and if you're gonna get, like, really sci fi about it, I look. I think choice has to be our hallmark. Competition has to be our hallmark. We want multiple winners here. We don't want a small number of elites guardrailing this thing. And that is what you will get if you head in this FAA FINRA direction.
Jason Calacanis (00:55:33): Breaking Friedberg, new nickname club, just dropped. There it is. This is what you sounded like, Freiberg, Doc Brown, Marty, Marty, your future is not predetermined. You can make your own future. You can use RSI. Doc Brown. I'm not trying to
David Friedberg (00:55:52): be an advocate for RSI. I'm trying
Jason Calacanis (00:55:54): to be pragmatic about the future.
David Friedberg (00:55:55): You're back. If if RSI is the way things are gonna go, you definitely don't wanna be trying to regulate AI to stall out because someone else will win it. And then you're literally handing the keys to RSI to them because they're suddenly gonna be able to get there faster. And you don't wanna be on the data centers because then they're gonna be off-site.
Jason Calacanis (00:56:12): Alright. There is a peculiar story this week. Andreessen Horowitz is allegedly being investigated. This is all according to a Bloomberg report, that they're being investigated by the Department of Justice for over a year. This is all according to Bloomberg under something called section eight of the Clayton antitrust act. This is a 1914 law. It's like over a 100 years old prohibiting interlocking directorates, which I guess is like old timey English for directors, like board of directors. And the conflict seems to stem from Ben Horowitz being on Databricks board while another partner from Andreessen Horowitz, Martin Casado, sits on Five Trains board. I don't know what if you guys have heard about this story. It was, like, one of the top stories this week. Obviously, Pat Dreesen and Ben Horowitz have been all in with Trump and big big donators. Put that into the mix as you will. Why is this happening now?
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:09): I can tell you. Yeah. Enemy of Andreesen Horowitz, jealous of their returns, says, what are we talking about? Do they not understand how venture works? Like, is it like you invest in one company, you can invest in another? I don't understand.
Jason Calacanis (00:57:23): What did Bloomberg say? They said they've been under investigation for this conflict as described between these two companies.
David Friedberg (00:57:29): Which mean which means which means that NME reported them to the DOJ and then said to Bloomberg they're in an investigation.
Jason Calacanis (00:57:36): Well, that's why I bring it up. It's like it seems so odd. Then the time Which to
David Friedberg (00:57:40): me, like, seems, I will make a speculative guess. The CEO of one of these companies is pissed off that the other partner is on the other board and reported it to the DOJ and reported it to Bloomberg at the same time.
Jason Calacanis (00:57:53): Interesting. Alright. Well, there you have it, folks. Moving on in the docket. I think we made quick work on that one.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:57:59): Let me let me let me just say, you know, you've been seeing, like, the distribution of, like, Cursor and then SpaceX. Andreessen Horowitz is on fire. They are crushing it.
David Sacks (00:58:12): They've had two
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:12): Congrats to that.
David Sacks (00:58:13): Events in the last few weeks.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:14): I mean, my god. Congrats to that.
David Sacks (00:58:16): Did they make how many billions did they
David Friedberg (00:58:18): make on going.
David Sacks (00:58:19): Well, it's Cursor and didn't they make a lot
Jason Calacanis (00:58:22): money off of OpenRouter? Well, OpenRouter
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:24): just went out for 7. Yeah. The OpenRouter was like a OpenRouter was more like an Amoeboosh. It was like 6 or 700,000,000. But the
Jason Calacanis (00:58:30): the cursor was decent. Yeah.
David Friedberg (00:58:33): It was
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:33): like an appetizer, but SpaceX was the main course. That's like $1,517,000,000,000. Yeah. Now you're talking
David Sacks (00:58:38): about Just the way, even if you wanna say that VC firms should not invest in competitors, the reality is that startups exist in a very dynamic environment. They frequently pivot and change their business models. Two companies that start off in totally different spaces can end up competing with each other. So now these are different board members, and they can probably set up a, you know, firewall Yes. Between
David Friedberg (00:59:01): Yeah. Very easily found.
Jason Calacanis (00:59:02): Sorry. These are
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:03): not these are not filing companies. Confidential information do any
Jason Calacanis (00:59:06): of these private businesses have? Oh, and and by the way, Andreessen Horowitz could also just put an independent director in there and just be done with it. So, like, if if this was some ticky tacky, very important thing, I don't know why the DOJ is on this.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:20): Friedrich is right. No. Because when you when you make a claim to the DOJ, they technically if they open a file, you are technically under investigation.
David Friedberg (00:59:28): Yes.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:29): So then you can you can report that to a buffoon reporter who doesn't know from Shinola, and they'll just repeat it. It means nothing.
Jason Calacanis (00:59:37): Alright.
Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:37): And then the DOJ is doesn't tell you that that you're under investigation, and they also don't tell you when it's closed. Same as the NSA. It's just a one way PR ratchet for an enemy to exact some sort of chaos. AA just crushing it. God bless them. God speak to them.
Jason Calacanis (00:59:52): It is interesting that there's even this rule, but we had some
David Friedberg (00:59:57): Could not give up.
Jason Calacanis (00:59:57): It. So, let's keep moving. I want you, Friedberg, to join me and SACS with Bestie Chamath at the All In Summit happening September thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth in Los Angeles, all Carolina has been announced. And, hey, guess who's headlighting the party? The same guys who sell out Madison Square Garden. I know that Friedberg has a personal relationship. Go ahead. Tell everybody who's gonna I'm be always using a
David Friedberg (01:00:20): guest here. Which is gonna be awesome. So we'll have them at the closing party. It's gonna be great. And then we're also doing another Wow. Full takeover at Universal Studios. We got a whole party at Universal, which was awesome last year, where Sax and
Jason Calacanis (01:00:35): I were with Yes.
David Friedberg (01:00:36): Diplo on stage. JK, you were there too. Oh. That was great.
Jason Calacanis (01:00:39): Yeah. I was on stage dancing.
David Sacks (01:00:40): Who's Diplo?
Jason Calacanis (01:00:42): Diplo's right. The DJ. Diplo. You're Diplo. Love James Gunther. We blew our minds. Come to
David Friedberg (01:00:48): that concert. We have other special unannounced guests that we're not gonna announce. So this is it. We're done making announcements.
Jason Calacanis (01:00:53): Alright. We know the democrats have been favored to take the house in the midterms, which are just around the corner. Polymark has them at 88% favorites. But Polymarket now has the Dems at 52%, basically a toss-up. Current balance of power, GOP, 53 seats, Dems, 47, which means, I guess, the Dems have to flip four of those without losing any. 35 seats are up in 2026. There are some special elections going on in Florida and Ohio. 23 of those 35 seats are held by Republicans. Big races to watch Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. On February 25, the day before the Iran war started, GOP was favored 60 to 41. It's been as high as 70%. Here's your poly market. Sachs, what do you take from this? Why are the Republicans set to get trounced in the midterms?
David Sacks (01:01:49): Well, first of all, polls are notoriously wrong in the summer before an election, and there's some data on this. So we should just if you're gonna cite polls, let's just actually talk about the topic of whether political polls are even accurate.
Jason Calacanis (01:02:02): These are polls. This is polymarket, just to be clear. The polls are slightly different, yeah.
David Sacks (01:02:06): Get People betting Yeah. But the polls are shaping public opinion right now. So political scientist Patrick Graffini analyzed over 3,000 polls over the last four election cycles, every two years since 2018. And what he saw is that there is a huge bias. The preponderance of polls in all four cycles favored the Democrats. And the average polling error across all the polls was D plus 3.7 relative to the election outcome. And I think this polling problem has become even worse recently. And you see it where there seems to be an oversampling of young progressives in these polls. Because it's not just the fact that the polls favor Democrats over Republicans, they also favor the DSA Democrat over the more moderate or centrist Democrats. And you've seen this in a few elections where the DSA candidate was supposed to win by a lot, and then they basically eked it out or actually lost, like in Wisconsin. So in any event, I just think that the polls are very unreliable at this time of the year. And a lot of the polls have They're actually created as internals by campaigns to motivate their donors.
Jason Calacanis (01:03:17): So basically people are upset, then they throw people out of office. That's just the trend. And that's what happened over and over again. Yeah?
David Sacks (01:03:25): No. I just think that the polls somehow are oversampling Democrats and progressives and have a bias. That's what the data is showing. So I just wouldn't read too much into this right now. I do think that the Democrats, I think it is legitimate to say that they are a favorite to win the house. I think the Senate right now is a toss-up, and I would say that the Republicans will ultimately keep it, if I had to predict, right now. And I just think that when you get back from Labor Day, that's when the campaign for the midterms really starts. And I think that Republicans need to focus on the right messages in this campaign. And I think there are plenty of good ones. They just have to remind him
Jason Calacanis (01:04:03): What
David Sacks (01:04:03): are they? Good things
Jason Calacanis (01:04:04): What what are the what would you say the top three they should focus on?
David Sacks (01:04:07): Well, look, everyone's been over indexing on the war, and that's been the focus of the news. And hopefully, the kinetic phase of that is over and doesn't restart. And assuming that's the case, I think the Republicans can remind the electorate of everything that's happened over the last couple of years. I think there is a good story to tell. So first of all, remind people that the border has been sealed for the last year and a half. We haven't just slowed Biden's invasion. We've stopped it completely. Contacts at the border have fallen off a cliff to the lowest level in fifty years. Illegals aren't even really trying to cross the border anymore. It's been so successful. Second, sealing the border and deporting hundreds of thousands of the worst criminals has actually made the country much safer. Murders have dropped around 20% year over year, and the murder rate is the lowest in seventy years. So that's number two. Third, deaths from drug overdoses have dropped twenty percent, again, thanks to tougher border enforcement. Fourth, Americans saw a 17% increase in tax refunds, thanks to the president's no tax on tips and no tax on overtime and no tax on social security. So these are real increases in take home pay as a result of those tax cuts. Also, the tax provisions in Big Beautiful Bill incentivize new equipment buying. We talked about the accelerated depreciation. And perhaps that's why small business optimism just reached its highest level in nearly a year. And more small businesses are saying they plan to hire in the months ahead. So I think we do have a strong economy. Prescription drugs and auto insurance costs both fell last year after increasing a lot during the Biden administration. I think prescription drugs has had their steepest annual decline since 1963. So there are positive things to talk about there. Everyone made a big deal of the surge in egg prices at the start of the administration, but few have bothered to note that there's now been a 39% decrease year over year in July.
David Sacks (01:05:57): So look, there are many good things I think for Republicans to talk about. They just have to kind of remember everything that's happened in the last two years.
Jason Calacanis (01:06:03): Okay. Freiberg, you have thoughts on what is going to happen this midterm and what people are making their decisions based on?
David Friedberg (01:06:14): Things are expensive. People can't afford housing, health care, or education, and are leaning towards this DSA concept. There was a frightening statistic on young conservatives embracing socialism.
Jason Calacanis (01:06:27): Really? Wait. The the conservatives like MAGA folks, you're saying, are embracing socialist tendons.
David Sacks (01:06:37): How do they conservatives then?
Jason Calacanis (01:06:39): Well, guess, I'm sensibly they're flipping or they're changing the composure of the issues they care about in some way.
David Friedberg (01:06:46): 53% of self identified conservatives 40 support government run grocery stores. Not democrats, conservatives. Take that in. First line of this Wall Street Journal article. July 2026, Fox News poll found that 61% of Republicans view capitalism favorably down from 72% in 2019. While the share who feel strongly favorable has fallen from 54 to 41%, The share who say the system is rigged towards the wealthy has climbed from 30% in 2018 to 42% amongst Republicans. So I don't think that this is a principle line in the sand anymore. I think that the the problem with unaffordability, which I would argue continuously, and I've argued it since the first day of the show, is a function of government spending. The more government spends on education, health care, and housing, the more expensive those things get rather than the opposite. They're supposed to be able to provide access to those things. But when the government intervenes in those markets, those things get more expensive, and no one wants to kind of acknowledge or admit that in either party. And I've been to DC enough now to know that no one actually acknowledges or cares about this point, that they all think that their job is to get more money out of the government for their constituents, every single person and every party. There's very few principled conservatives. Many of them are conservatives by title, by party affiliation, but they're not conservatives by principle in the traditional sense, small government, free markets, etcetera. And I think that this is the motivating factor. I I would argue if you take the the look at the macro cycle, the macro cycle being we've printed so much money. We've got so much debt. The thirty year is now at 5.3% this week. It continues to hit new twenty year records every day. We, I think, are gonna continue to face a problem of unaffordability.
David Friedberg (01:08:53): And, ultimately, there is going to be some sort of big movement towards more socialist policies that we're gonna see play out between now and 2028. It's why I continue to believe, I think someone like an AOC becomes president. I think there's gonna be a wave this year, and then there's gonna be a bigger push in 2028 because I don't see the arithmetic or the fiscal situation changing to actually alter the affordability landscape. I just don't. I I don't know what you could do from a policy perspective, and I don't hear either party talking about actual solutions to solve this affordability problem between now and 2028. And then the other kind of big problem that I've talked about is assets. Middle class people, people that worked in private companies, people that don't depend on Social Security or public pension funds, they've all had four zero one k's and owned homes. So they have seen their net worth climb with asset inflation surge. So the top 50% of Americans have 178,000,000,000,000 of net worth, and the bottom 50% of Americans have 6,000,000,000,000 of net worth. It's not the billionaires. It's the the whole middle class. The middle class has all the wealth in The United States, and that's because they've owned assets. They've owned houses, they've owned stocks. Houses and stocks have surged in value. And so if you don't own a house and you don't own stocks, you were left behind. And so I don't see how from a a public policy perspective, we don't find ourselves walking down this very nasty winding dark path of socialism because the alternative policies that could be put in place to solve these problems are not being put forth by either party right now. So I do think that there's gonna be a big socialist embrace. I've said this obviously for a number of years, and I think we're gonna see this play out in this midterm, and that's gonna create the the momentum going into '28. And, look, I mean, this this polling data is very worrying. It's not just the democrats.
David Friedberg (01:10:47): It's not just a party based system. It's the horseshoe. It's the 63 of Americans that are living paycheck to paycheck that can't afford. That's the Americans that are gonna vote for this system. And it doesn't matter what party it is. They're just gonna vote for it.
Jason Calacanis (01:11:01): Shabbat, 20¢ on the dollar going to our interest approximately on the federal side. Inflation, we thought we would get there. It's been three or 4% for the whole year. Haven't been able to get down to two. And the GDP concept, which we talked about here, getting to growth again. And if we can get it, we can grow our way out of it. That is hasn't happened as well. Obviously, the war, big disappointment for many folks in both parties who were promised no war. And here we are six months into it. What do you think is gonna happen over the next through the midterms and then into 2028 and to free birth point? Any way to get out of this? Is this a death spiral, or is this something we can course correct out of in your mind?
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:47): I think that we can course correct. I just think it takes will. And I think that we need corporate America to step up and do their part of the job. And we need governments mostly to get out of the way and not have any harebrained schemes on new inventive legislation that they think can solve the problem. I don't trust any polls. Just to be clear, I don't believe this polling data. And I think that we've gotten into a very dangerous point, which we already got into with the media, where the media lies. We all now know that the media lies, and the media can't be trusted. I would like to now go out on a limb. I don't think it's much of a limb, though. Pollsters lie, And I don't think you can trust them either. And I think that the media acts in concert with pollsters to find the data that allows them to write the headline that hopefully allows them to get the clicks. So I would just start there. Pollsters, trash. Media, trash. So what is really happening on the ground? I don't know. But I don't trust what this data tells me. Now what do I know is helping and hurting the incumbent sitting president? I think that if we, as in corporate America, get ourselves in a position to actually present the better face of capitalism, we allow the system as it stands to continue to work. And I think all of these things, if we don't wake up, are telling us that corporate America is not trustworthy anymore. Corporate America is not aspirational. Corporate America does not do the things that engender some amount of trust and respect. And specifically in Silicon Valley, we've completely lost the script because we've gotten to the far, far, far end of that. And everybody is in it for themselves to such a degree that it's either pearl clutching on the one hand or getting your hand caught in the cookie jar on the other.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:03): I posted the cookie jar thing that Anthropic did on the health care side.
Jason Calacanis (01:14:08): Cookie jar.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:14:09): Why are we why are we in this? I mean, it's just so avoidable. Those are headwinds for the incumbent president. Even if he has nothing to do with it, what is a tailwind? I think getting out of the Iran war can be a massive tailwind. I think structurally solving energy on behalf of American citizens can be a tailwind. I think making sure that all of the long term and medium term investments of GDP can actually come and bear fruit can be a tailwind. All of those things, there are still a lot of levers to be pulled between now and November. And so those can create pretty meaningful tailwinds. But the headwinds, unfortunately, are pretty strong, and it requires some real coordination that the White House is gonna have to do to get a bunch of these corporate CEOs in the room, to get a bunch of these Silicon Valley CEOs in the room, and to tell them, guys, enough of this bull Play nice in the sandbox because you're about to lose the standard operating procedure that allowed you to exist in the first place. Yeah. And they need to get this message clearly.
Jason Calacanis (01:15:17): Yeah. And I I can tell you the exact reason Democratic socialism is gonna win, continue to win. And these far left Democratic candidates are gonna dominate. And it's, you know, it's the Republicans' fault. They had all three branches of government here really tightly in their control. And if you look at what the podcast bros and the podcast referencing stack is responding to And I listen to them, you know, not every episode, but I I I dip in and out of Tucker, who is now making his own political party, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, you know, all these folks who were all in for Trump. They cite Epstein investigation, which okay. Whatever. I don't think it's particularly material, but it is to them. The Iran war is obviously top of what they believe is the problem here because they were promised that wouldn't happen. And then it's to your point, Freiberg, this inflation thing has not been solved, and it just keeps going. And we're gonna be sitting here, I think, in another six months or twelve months talking about, my lord, every investigation possible into the Trump administration. And we need to start looking at what what what would be things to your point, Shama. I thought you summarized some of the the broken parts of capitalism, I think well, but we got to get granular about it. And I brought up last week just the edge behaviors in capitalism where we over optimize. I felt the delivery providers at Saks and I had a pretty party debate about it last week. Were just being too clever, squeezing too much out of the last mile, quite literally on Amazon's part. How we treat the people who are at the bottom of the employment stack is what's causing this And not being able to solve the cost of homes and not making that a focus, not being able to solve the cost of childcare, not being able to move the minimum wage. I think we have to look at all of these things and say, that's Trump should look at all of those things and he should build the second half of his term just around those things. No more crypto stuff, no more wars, no more attacking our allies, all of this performative stuff and and just mistakes.
Jason Calacanis (01:17:34): They gotta go away and we gotta focus on what he sold people on. People feel they were sold that this would be a populist presidency that took care of the working man and woman in this country, and it has been the opposite. Sax, I'm sure you have some On thoughts and we'll give the final
David Sacks (01:17:51): the inflation thing, because you talked about it and Friedberg's talked about it. I mean, basically you're saying the cost of living is going drive everyone to socialism. I agree there's some risk of that, but let's break it down into a little bit more nuance here. If you look at where the most inflation has occurred, it's always in those sectors of the economy that the government's most involved. Health care colleges housing, where the government has massive amounts of subsidies and regulation, it only seems to make the problem worse. Kind of makes sense that if the government's paying for something, then the providers have a huge incentive to charge as much as possible. And in fact, a lot of them engage in fraud as well. So we know these areas are rife with abuse. But those are the areas that are most inefficient and where you see the price going through the roof. I mean, hospital services, man, that's like just exponential just about. And then if you look at the areas where we've had not just no inflation, but actually prices have come down, it's in all the tech areas. It's basically TVs or computer software, cell phones, things like that. The prices have come down a lot. By the way, this chart is showing all the way from 2000 to 2026. So it's a twenty six year timeframe. And during that time, overall inflation went up 96%. So the price level almost doubled in that '26 period. Fortunately
Jason Calacanis (01:19:16): On average.
David Sacks (01:19:17): On average, that's right. But like I said, with certain things like healthcare becoming 300% almost more expensive, whereas computer software went down by 67% in real dollars. Meanwhile, the average hourly wage grew 135%. So at least the average hourly wage grew by about 40% more than the inflation level, but obviously it still bites that you have all this inflation. I guess my point is just how do you solve it? We know that you bring prices down through vigorous competition, not through more government interference in these markets. And unfortunately, what happens is that socialism causes the problem. And then what happens is that groups like the DSA argue that the way to solve the problem is through more socialism. So it's a disease that claims to be a cure. And then people take it and they take more of it and the disease gets worse and worse. And that is the spiral that I think we risk being in.
Jason Calacanis (01:20:16): We are in a socialist death spiral now. All this spending now is We're
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:22): not in a death spiral. Take it easy.
Jason Calacanis (01:20:25): We're not in a death spiral. No, I mean,
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:20:27): it's great. It's great for you to say because it sounds like really like you got some real hot take. We're not there. America is doing fine. We are cranking. The economy is great. There are things that need to be fixed. I would say start with corporate America. Let's get our act together, and let's start doing things that are honorable, interesting, and aspirational.
Jason Calacanis (01:20:49): Yeah. I think you totally missed the point. I think the real point here is if you hadn't started the war, we wouldn't have the same inflation issues. We wouldn't have the same expense issues, and this would be a totally different picture. And it was his job, Saxe, when he promised the American people he would focus on affordability. And he had control of both houses and the presidency, and he's willing to do any executive order on crypto, on wars, on anything, but he didn't do any executive orders on affordability. And that's the failure of
David Sacks (01:21:16): this president. Maybe you missed the point where Tomas said it'd be a tailwind to get out of this war. I think the kinetic part's already over, by the way.
Jason Calacanis (01:21:22): Let's hope. I mean, it just should never have been started.
David Sacks (01:21:26): But in any event, look, the president passed his economic program last year on Big Beautiful Bill, I think it's working. We're seeing a huge investment boom. We're seeing small business confidence rise to its highest level in a long time. They are saying they're going to create more jobs over the next year. I think the economy is doing pretty well. I mean, we do have these issues. I'm not saying we don't. And spending is a long standing problem. Can't disagree with you there. However, I don't think Democrats have the solution to the problem And the Democratic socialists definitely don't have the solution to the problem because they
Jason Calacanis (01:21:55): want That's my point. More to the spending. Mean, by are way, to see now incentivizing young people in the Republican party to embrace socialism. Moderates are embracing socialism. They're all looking at it saying, well, that sounds better. If Trump won't be a populist, maybe these people are the populist. And that's what I mean by the death file because they're gonna just keep spending money. They're gonna increase the velocity of spending. You be right,
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:22:18): which is scary.
David Sacks (01:22:19): By the way, that's what
Jason Calacanis (01:22:20): I don't think we're like in it now. We're kind of we're risking going.
David Sacks (01:22:24): Just one last point. They did a cost estimate of the policy platform proposed by the DSA. Remember, we've talked about that before. And the estimate is that it would project new federal spending of between $71,000,000,000,000.02 12 Under million
Jason Calacanis (01:22:41): over a How could you 100 spend less if you get rid of all cops? That's an estimate. Wait. Did you by the way, total There's no prison. There's no cops.
David Friedberg (01:22:48): Entirety of the American population, 182,000,000,000,000. 182,000,000,000,000.
David Sacks (01:22:53): Okay. But I'm just saying that's how much the TSA program would cost. If you guys believe that the root of our problems is overspending and basically too much government, unfortunately
Jason Calacanis (01:23:04): This is not the
David Sacks (01:23:05): TSA is gonna No.
David Friedberg (01:23:06): But here's what's gonna happen, and I'll just let me just walk through the sequence of events. Sequence one, they they enact a policy starting in 2028 with the comrade AOC in charge and the Politburo, Ro Khanna, secretary of housing and urban development, and the rest of the Politburo organizing themselves to launch these new programs. Those new programs get launched and costs balloon. The bond market sells off thirty years. And so now the thirty year yield spikes 7%, 8%, maybe more. Things become more unaffordable. So then the question is, okay. Well, we can't bridge it from a fiscal perspective. We can't just get the Fed to start buying bonds. There's not enough buying power there to bring rates down, to bring inflation down. So we need more income. So now we need to pass a national asset seizure tax. And there's not enough money in the billionaire class or the 50 millionaire class. The total net worth of all people that are worth over $50,000,000 is only 23,000,000,000,000. You could take 10% of their net worth, and it would only cover three months of fiscal spending, today's fiscal spending. So at the end of the day, the only way to get there is to start doing massive taxation, seizures. And so seizures, seas.
David Sacks (01:24:21): So this just came out this week
Jason Calacanis (01:24:23): Cato.
David Sacks (01:24:23): By
Jason Calacanis (01:24:24): Cato Cal.
David Sacks (01:24:25): By Cato Institute. And again, it shows the low end of the DSA spending, 71,000,000,000,000. The high end is 211,000,000,000,000. Now you compare that to things like corporate profits or private sector wealth, corporate profits are only 35,000,000,000,000. The Forbes 400, all the wealth of the Forbes 400 is only 6,600,000,000,000. So it's less than 10% of the low end of DSA spending. I
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:24:52): I keep telling you, this is not about mathematical realism. This is about anger towards a class of people that are increasingly odious and mispriced.
David Friedberg (01:25:03): But people also can't afford to buy a house. People are 35 years old with roommate. People and people go to the grocery store, and they're shocked at the fact that they have to spend an entire paycheck or a third of a paycheck to buy groceries.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:15): It's not it's not that it's not that people wanna buy a yacht. It's that the yacht class are just
Jason Calacanis (01:25:21): Well, no.
David Friedberg (01:25:21): I mean, well, no. I mean, look. In every socialist revolution, every revolution we've seen historically around this, there is always an elite branch of society, and they're typically classified different ways. It's it's wealth, it's Jews, it's some race, it's immigrants. There's some there's some organizational assignment, some identity assignment that says this At is the cause of the end of the day, the dysfunction of the relationship between government and all the other organizations that make up that society. Those organizations can be states. They can be private companies. They can be the NGOs. It is the dysfunction of the government's relationship with the other organizations that fundamentally causes things to become more expensive and dysfunctional, and the actual market for getting access to things for the individual fails. And at that point, you have to identify. And you don't identify the government because the government is the aggregate of all the people. No. Of not. The gov and and and remember, the government is the system, the means of action. So for the people to organize, they have to organize the government to go and then they have to have an alternative system to go and destroy.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:29): You have to point the finger, and you have to point the finger at somebody. And if you're gonna scapegoat somebody in 2026, the best class of people to scapegoat are the billionaires and, frankly, even better than them.
David Friedberg (01:26:40): The trillionaires, at the end the day, trillionaires. Right? The data center is the temple where the billionaires and trillionaires pray. It's where they go to make their sacrifices. It is their gathering spot. So I think the data center is this, like, you know, temple on the mount. It's the avatar. So that's why I think the data center gets tied up in all of this. There's no rational discourse about data centers. It's like No.
Jason Calacanis (01:26:59): No. No. Look. You're
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:00): if you take it through the Renee Gerard lens, everything maps. It's like the billionaires will be scapegoated and the trillionaires will be, I mean, even worse. And because that will allow the catharsis that will allow society to reset and realize, wait a minute. Oh my gosh.
David Friedberg (01:27:16): Yeah. There's a generation of that, though. There's a generation ahead.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:19): And only then can Yeah. It is a long process.
Jason Calacanis (01:27:21): It is a long Here's an idea. Next president or Trump in his second half, just putting it out there, do an executive order that you're gonna build like a million homes, 2,000,000 homes. If you can have executive orders, if you can start wars without the approval of congress how it works. What's that?
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:38): You know that that's not how it works.
David Friedberg (01:27:40): Right? There are local He
Jason Calacanis (01:27:41): pulled out all the stops. Of course. But he pulled out all the stops for getting data centers green lit. We know that. And he worked with the state governments. I'm talking about him coming on saying, you know what? We did a great job for the data centers. We did a great job for the crypto industry. And now we're gonna do two We're great gonna do two great things. We're gonna make trade shows. We're gonna make trade schools, and we're gonna make affordable homes. I'm just gonna make that the next twenty four months. We're gonna figure out a way to mobilize the private sector, mobilize the public sector. We're gonna make more homes and we're gonna get you a great education that turns into a job. That would be a great thing for Trump to do.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:17): The federal the federal government does control the largest amount of land in The United States.
David Friedberg (01:28:22): So it
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:23): could do something on federal land without the need for a bunch of other state and local gobbledygook. So there is
Jason Calacanis (01:28:27): Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:29): Now it may not be located in places that actually make sense for commerce and for people to live or that are already living there because I don't think it really abuts most cities. So unfortunately, it's not in his control. Even if you wanted to just kinda say, let's make this happen.
Jason Calacanis (01:28:47): I think if the president can go spend a couple 100,000,000,000 on this war, he can go spend a 100 couple billion on homes that are affordable. And maybe you can't put them in Manhattan, but he can put them other places and he should fight for the regulations to get just like he fought for the regulations on data centers and energy. He made an appoint on this very podcast at the AI summit. Hey, we're gonna clear all the pathways to nuclear, to nat gas. We're gonna
David Sacks (01:29:12): beautiful clean It's called federal assistance, is great. I'll give him
Jason Calacanis (01:29:16): credit for that. Now do it. Now do it for homes. Let me see you do it for homes, Trump. Use that same energy.
David Sacks (01:29:22): Just passed a housing bill. Just actually just passed a housing bill.
Jason Calacanis (01:29:26): When's the last time we heard Trump?
David Sacks (01:29:28): Unfortunately, it was written by Elizabeth Warren, so I don't know how good it is. But
Jason Calacanis (01:29:31): Yeah. Anyway, I'm just giving him the solution to save his legacy. Alright, everybody.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:36): As always, you're looking out for everybody. I'm looking
Jason Calacanis (01:29:37): out for everybody. Audience.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:40): Nostraconis. Thank you.
Jason Calacanis (01:29:42): Nostraconis is also looking out for you.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:44): Okay, rap. I gotta go. Come on.
Jason Calacanis (01:29:45): Alright, everybody. It's been another amazing.
Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:47): Love you, boys.
Jason Calacanis (01:29:48): Nice to be back on podcast. Good time to get back. Let's go. Bye bye.
David Sacks (01:29:56): We'll let your winners ride.
Jason Calacanis (01:29:58): Rain man David Saxon. I'm going home.
David Sacks (01:30:02): And it said we open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
Jason Calacanis (01:30:26): We 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.