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Anthropic's Generational Run, OpenAI Panics, AI Moats, Meta Loses Lawsuits

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

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  • Anthropic Turned Coding Into An Enterprise Wedge
    • David Sacks said Anthropic won by betting early on coding as the enterprise wedge, then extending from Claude Code into cowork and agent products.
    • He argued coding became both a recursive-self-improvement path and the gateway into enterprise IT budgets. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Anthropic on a generational run. And OpenAI crashing out a bit, boys. Let’s chop it up here. Just looking at Anthropic, pretty major heater this year. January, they launched Cowork for business users. You know what that does, cron jobs. You can connect to your Gmail, your Notion, whatever it is. And then Opus 4.6, which consensus-wise, everybody thought this is a major step function. Jensen, Michael Dell, everybody’s called it out. Jensen actually called it back in November an inflection point and the first agentic model. And Opus 4.6 has basically, Dell said, hit a threshold that we haven’t seen before in terms of real productivity in Teams. February, they dropped a bunch of clogged code plugins that caused the SaaSpocalypse, not the Sakspocalypse, the SaaS software as a service. David Sacks It was a Sakspocalypse too. Yeah, there was a little bit of that back and forth as well. No, I mean, as a SaaS investor, it was a SaaSpocalypse. Yes, it was a bit of a… Jason Calacanis You were the tip of the spear there. We’ll get into it. David Sacks My exit comps were affected, that’s all. Jason Calacanis Yes. It seems like you may have divested at exactly the right time. All right. $6 billion in run rate was added in February alone. Brad referenced a couple of weeks ago here on the pod. Earlier this week, they announced computer use, a new agentic system for enterprise grade kind of open claw functionality. Now you can use the clawed app from your phone to control your desktop computer. Really slick feature. Here’s the calendar release over the past two months for the team at Anthropic. Dario, come on the pod anytime. Sax, you’ve had a couple of flare-ups, and obviously the administration and the Department of War had their kerfuffle. But just looking at it objectively, what’s your take on the surging Anthropik generational run as I’ve described it here? David Sacks Well, I’ve never been a critic of Anthropik’s products. I’ve always been an admirer of their products. I think last year I gave them credit for MCP. I agree that they seem to be performing very well now. The company made a big bet on coding as the kind of big breakout use case. Whether that was done for business reasons or ideological reasons, I’m not sure. Anthropic is sort of the most AGI-pilled of all the frontier labs. And I think they made this bet on coding as their way to get to recursive self-improvement. As it turns out, it was a very good business move as well because code is the gateway into enterprise and enterprise IT budgets. And so they were able to grow revenue pretty quickly as a result of getting into enterprise. To be the basis for these other product extensions. So like you said, they went from Claude Code to Claude Cowork. The idea being that, well, if you can generate code, you can also generate PowerPoints or spreadsheets. And you do that by generating the code to create that output. So that was the first extension. Now they are extending it to agents. This computer use product is kind of like an open claw knockoff. So it looks like the generational run for Mac mini is just about over. Look, I think they’re firing on all cylinders. My issues with them in the past were related to what I have called the regulatory capture strategy. They do want a permissioning regime in Washington for chips and models, meaning you have to go to Washington to get permission to release new models or to sell GPUs anywhere in the world. I think that’s excessively heavy handed. Their motives for doing that may be pure. It may not be regulatory capture. It may be ideologically motivated. Regardless, I do think it is a form of regulatory capture because it plays into the hands of the big companies and creates moats that new entrants will not be able to overcome. So I have, let’s say, philosophical objection to that part of it. But again, I’m not a detractor of their products by any means. With respect to what happened between them and the Pentagon, I’m not involved in that. I’ve stayed out of military procurement. In general, I don’t get involved in what are called party matters. I just focus on policy matters, which affect the whole space. I saw Emil Michael making this point a couple of weeks ago on our podcast, that if you as a company don’t want your products to be used in war, don’t sell to the Department of War. It’s in the name. But if you do decide to sell to the Department of War, you should expect it to be used for all lawful uses. So I think that was a very pragmatic observation. Again, I just have to underscore this again. I’m not involved in that dispute. It’s the base of a lawsuit right now. And I don’t want someone trying to draw lines between dots that aren’t there. (Time 0:02:25)
  • OpenAI And Anthropic Numbers Are Not Comparable
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said OpenAI and Anthropic revenue headlines mislead because OpenAI is mostly consumer subscriptions while Anthropic is mostly API and enterprise usage.
    • He said differences in revenue recognition make direct run-rate comparisons noisy even if both businesses are strong. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya Chamath before i go to openAI is where I see most of the action, particularly through 80-90, it’s all anthropic all the time. And I agree with Sachs. My philosophical issues with the management aside around their ideology and sometimes how they use some of the capital for things other than tech and R&D. I have issues with those things. But in terms of the quality of that technical team and what they create, it’s head and shoulders above anything else. It allows us to build a vibrant business. Now, do I have issues with how much it costs? Yes. Do I have issues with how fast we’re consuming tokens? Also, But I think those will get sorted out. And those are really tactical issues. So the reason why I think we’re all breathlessly trying to pit open AI versus anthropic is because we want some drama. But the reality is these are very different businesses. And Nick found this tweet, which I thought was really interesting. And because even at the absolute highest level, these things are sort of presented in an apples to oranges way. And there’s like these very basic issues of rev rec that are fundamentally different. And you may say, well, who cares about revenue recognition? While the people that are trying to write the headlines that say one is overtaking the other and this or that sort of miss the fact that they’re in completely different businesses, which Has guided how they even think about growth. And so if you normalize these two businesses, what you would see is OpenAI is still the overwhelming revenue generator in this space. And that over time, Anthropic is catching up. And so this is this little diagram that tries to explain this. OpenAI is three quarters consumer subscriptions, and a quarter API. Anthropic is almost the exact opposite. OpenAI is used by consumers overwhelmingly. Anthropic is used either directly or through things like GitHub and Cursor. OpenAI, as a result, has a very conservative way of recognizing revenue. Ampropics, they sort of recognize gross tonnage as their revenue. And so when you start to hear these things about like, oh, this thing is at $20 billion and OpenAI is at N billion, they’re two totally different conversations. And I think right now, it’s more about the press cycle of trying to create clicks than it actually is about the underlying quality of each business. Both are incredible businesses as this demonstrates. And by the time it goes public, both of these two businesses will have a very clean and I suspect normalized way of telling a story so that you can actually compare. But what I would tell people right now is everybody’s running with numbers to try to create a narrative that I don’t think makes sense or applies to either. (Time 0:08:57)
  • OpenAI Risks Losing Focus By Chasing Everything
    • The group framed OpenAI’s retrenchment as a focus question: dominate consumer, chase enterprise, or risk smearing itself across too many products.
    • Chamath Palihapitiya argued if OpenAI must choose one lane, it should pick consumer because ChatGPT has the strongest brand and habit. Transcript: Jason Calacanis And there’s been a lot of strategy change. Open AI, some people are saying, is crashing out in panic mode. Obviously, they own the consumer with ChatGpt they are the verb like you know taking an uber or googling something people consumers always just say hey did you check chat gpt but obviously Chamath Palihapitiya Other large language models are catching up here’s by the way sorry we say something to that jason because like sure you mentor tons of startups sax has done it free has done it. I do it. What is the one thing we tell folks? Focus, focus, focus, focus. A hundred percent. Do one, maybe one and a half things, but do it incredibly, incredibly well. And everything else, you start to bleed and smear. What was that Brad Garlinghouse term? Peanut butter. Peanut butter. Yeah, you smear the peanut butter too far out. So this is a good moment by the way if either of these two companies are in the smearing phase to recalibrate and reset because yeah you just can’t do everything speaking of smears i couldn’t David Sacks Help but notice that emil michael was smeared by an article was it in Lever or something like that? Accusing him of having a conflict in the Anthropic. Did you guys see that? Jason Calacanis I didn’t. Yes. David Friedberg I saw the art. There was an article that said that he was an investor in perplexity. And therefore, he’s conflicted in his negotiation with Anthropic. That’s what the article said pretty much. Jason Calacanis Perplexity is LLM agnostic. That’s a stupid claim. David Friedberg Right. Well, it’s obviously written by people who don’t understand anything about AI really. David Sacks Perplexity is a wrapper. Like you’re saying, it uses multiple AI models. And I don’t think they sell to the Pentagon. They’re not a competitor to Anthropic. And moreover, as I understand it, Emile’s ownership of shares in that company was blessed by the Office of Government Ethics. Nonetheless, I think the timing of this is very suspicious. And it reminds me of what happened to me when I started opposing Anthropic. And all of a sudden, there was that hit piece in the New York Times accusing me of having conflicts. And I’ll just say that Anthropic may pose as this company that’s on the side of the angels, but they’ve hired a number of very seasoned brass knuckle political operatives in Washington. And, you know, members of the Biden administration, Laura Loomer actually just had a piece today on one of them. I’m not going to rehash that. But the bottom line is this is, I think, frankly, a political operation that’s willing to get down and dirty. And they’re not always on the side of the angels. I think they can be quite ruthless. Saks. Jason Calacanis Remember, I told you you get one Biden mention a month in 2026. So you just used it up. So I don’t want any more Biden, Biden, Biden. David Sacks He’s retired. That was not a Biden mention. Jason Calacanis No, but the truth is, these dipshits, whoever wrote this story, the actual best feature or amongst the best features of Perplexity, which is actually got a really great co-work competitor Called Computer I’ve been playing with. I’m not a shareholder, to be clear. There’s no book being pumped here. The Model Council is like the greatest feature that they have. And what is really brilliant about it is you ask it a question, Sax, it will go to all three different major models. You can pick which ones, including open source. Then it tells you where they differ. And it tries to figure out why they differ. This is like one of the great features of the product. I think perplexity is like, could be a really great company as well, even without a language model. But let’s talk a little bit more about OpenAI here. And their market share, because I think you’re correct, Chamath, but they are getting off their game. Here’s what’s going on. Quick look at the consumer market. And obviously, they started with 100% market share, right? They created the category in 2023, dropped down to 85% market share 2024, 75% market share 2025. Chamath Palihapitiya But by how much has the market grown? Jason Calacanis Precisely. So the market is still growing. So in terms of number of searches and queries, they’re obviously growing tremendously, but they have major, major competitors, and the market share is going down. I had my team over at This Week in AI do a more thoughtful analysis of where this is going. And if you take a look at this, there’s three players, and I’d like to get your guys’ take on this, who really haven’t shown up yet. Apple, Meta, and obviously Windows, three of those underrepresented if you give them credit for just getting you know a half point of market share here and starting to intercept which I think those three players were here will be here they’re going to be well under 50 market share and i think chat gpt is going to have some big challenges there on the consumer side while They’re doing this stuff in consumer uh they uh are cutting back on all their side projects so uh you probably heard about the sora video app that’s been shut down this is kind of major News because disney was going to put a billion dollars into opening as part of it and they had done a licensing deal and they were going to integrate sora this you video product, into Disney+. All of that’s now been canceled. The billion is not going in. The billion’s not going in, the licensing deal, all of that. And then in addition, there’s supposedly at OpenAI a newfound foundation focus on chasing Anthropic down the enterprise path. So getting off their game, getting a little discombobulated, perhaps, or maybe getting focused on what matters, which is enterprise, apparently in terms of revenue. OpenAI also offered private equity investors a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% as part of a joint venture that would help PE firms deploy AI and ease the high upfront cost of that. So lots of questions here, Chamath. I don’t know if you’ve tracked this PE model, but obviously a lot of people are doing roll-ups in services, accounting, legal. Josh Kushner’s got a big effort here. A bunch of private equity firms trying to essentially, I guess, and run the transition process and arguably what you’re doing with the software factory at 8090. So your thoughts on OpenAI and this pivot and this private equity? Chamath Palihapitiya I think it makes a lot of sense for OpenAI to focus on a few things and do them exceptionally well. I disagree slightly with your first part, which is I think that people like to make new decisions about new experiences. And I think that OpenAI has incredible consumer mindshare. I just see like how my kids use it. They started there and it’s very hard to get them to switch. Even when I say, hey, have you tried Gemini? They use Gemini. And to your point, the reason is because they stumble into it more. But if you give them a cold navigation experience, they rely on chat GPT. And it’s the same, by the way, on the other side in (Time 0:12:12)
  • Consumer AI May Support Both Subscriptions And Ads
    • David Friedberg pushed back on the idea that consumer AI will be mostly free, arguing people will pay for a service that runs calendars, travel, email, and finances.
    • David Sacks still expects a split market where most users take ad-supported AI while a few hundred million may buy premium tiers. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Freberg, let me pull you into this because my base case here is that all consumer queries are going to be free. Apple is going to make them free. They’re already free for Google. I think Meta is going to make them free and actually have a decent product soon and Microsoft, same thing. ChatGPT has decided to push off advertising. They were going to put advertising in it. You remember they got mocked by Anthropic with their Super Bowl ads. So what do you think is going to happen on the consumer side? Consumers generally don’t pay for services. That’s usually 5% to 20% of the market is paid services and everything else is free and ad supported. But it looks like Apple and google are going to just let it rip so that could take the revenue oxygen away from chat chp t so what is your thought here on who wins consumer i don’t think that David Friedberg It’s going to be free i think there’s 290 million subscribers for spotify they’re paying what are paying? 20 bucks a month or something? Jason Calacanis Probably less on average because it’s global number, but yeah. David Friedberg Netflix has 325 million paid subscribers and AI that can book your travel, answer questions for you, track your calendar, do your email, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, Is likely going to be the most valuable, call it meta service that consumers have ever seen. And I think it’s very likely that we’re going to end up seeing many more consumers subscribe to a consumer AI service than we’ve seen even with cable television. I mean, think about your cell phone. Everyone’s paying 50, 60 bucks a month for a cell phone. Chamath Palihapitiya Why not pay 80 bucks a month? No, more. More. You pay 100 bucks. You pay 100 bucks. And by the way, in the pandemic, remember what we saw? The two things that people refused to cancel was not your mortgage payment or any car payment. You were willing to go into arrears and into default. The two things that people would always keep was the cell phone number one and then electricity number two. ChatGPT will be there. David Friedberg I think that’s going to be the case with these consumer apps, J. Cal. I think that they’re all going to be like ultra valuable and they’re going to layer in services on top of them. Like, for example, do you want to watch video embedded in your consumer AI app? Do you want your consumer AI app to, you know, do your finances for you? And it could be that the consumer AI app becomes the new platform, much like the iPhone was for the app economy. There could almost be, whether it’s through kind of connectors, or embedded tools, an incredible ecosystem that were traditionally advertisers actually pay to be embedded and show Up inside of the AI app. And the consumer can either pay for it or the advertiser can pay for it. So I think there’s going to be a very different economic model and still very early days. Jason Calacanis Saks, the numbers right now would be more in my estimation. About 50 million people subscribe to ChatGPT. They got a billion users or they’re trended to a billion. I think they probably hit it in the next month or two. Certainly they had 900 million two or three months ago. So it’s about 5%. Where do you think this winds up? Do you think it becomes, you know, 300, 400, 500 million consumers are willing to pay 20 bucks a month for this? Or do you think it’s more free and the data and the ad supportedness of it go the meta and the Google route? David Sacks I think it’s possible that you could get a few hundred million subscribers for the premium tier. Look, I think most consumers will take the free service in exchange for advertising, right? Some ad supported model, which by the way, I think could be quite successful. When ChatGPT started displacing Google for search, a lot of people were predicting the death of Google’s model because who’d want to look at 10 blue links? I think that’s true, but I think you can do something much more compelling in AI chat compared to just a list of links. So in any event, I think ad-supported models might make a comeback here in addition to premium models. All that being said, though, as an investor, I always liked B2B businesses better than B2C because it is hard to monetize consumers. Their willingness to pay is not that high, and they tend to have high churn rates. Whereas businesses tend to be very sticky, and you can upsell them, and you can get more than 100% net dollar retention year over year. So if you can make an enterprise business work, it’s always been a model I’ve liked. But that being said, obviously, some of most valuable companies in the world are consumer companies. Meta, Google, Apple, these are all consumer-first companies. Look, I think ultimately both models can work. Jason Calacanis Obviously, both can work. The question is, which one? I guess it really comes down to how motivated do we think Google and Facebook will be to build that bridge from their ad networks to their AI offerings. Obviously, Facebook is kind of MIA in all of this, but Google is not. And I think that will be the determinant. Here is… David Sacks Well, Google is going to compete very vigorously for the consumer because it is existential to them. I mean, it’s very clear that search and AI chat are kind of merging into one space. That means that ad links will kind of merge into being in chat advertising. So they have to adapt with that and compete for the consumer. I also think that Google is in an outstanding position to do the whole open claw thing because they already have access to your calendar, your documents, your email. So the agent doesn’t really have to earn your trust because you already trust Google with all of your stuff. So I’m kind of waiting for the Google version of OpenClaw because I don’t really want to share all my documents with some new service. Chamath Palihapitiya They’re the only one that has so much free cash flow that they can almost view it as two separate companies, which it effectively is. GCP over here runs the enterprise play, and then Google Consumer over here runs the consumer chatbot play, and they can keep them segregated. (Time 0:20:23)
  • AI Is Forcing A Repricing Of Software Durability
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said AI forces a basic valuation question: are we pricing software as durable cash-flow businesses or as assets facing constant superintelligent disruption?
    • He used SaaS multiple compression versus Mag-7 resilience to show markets already reward cash durability and punish fragile software narratives. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya By the way, Jason, Kyle, you asked a different question earlier as well, which is around the PE story. And I think the PE story is a window into the rest of the broader market. The real open question is, what are these companies worth? There’s like a very threshold question. It’s sort of like a very important fork in the road right at the outset, which is, do you believe that we’re on a path to super intelligence, where everything is incredible, where there’s Infinite abundance, where you can magically describe things and beautiful things appear, complex things appear, groundbreaking things appear? Or do you believe that it’s good next generational software? And the answer to that question is really important because we’re financing things like it’s the former. Jason Calacanis And GC has a big move in this. Hamant was on the program in January when we did the interview show and he’s got GC buying up and rolling up accounting firms, et cetera, healthcare firms, hospitals, et cetera. This seems to be part of the future of venture capital is taking AI sacks and actually buying out, or I should say big VC, kind of starting to look like private equity, buying out hospitals, Accounting firms, business processing firms in India, putting them all together, and then running them with AI. So any final thoughts on that, Saks, as a business strategy? David Sacks Own the change management around AI. And this is the thing is everyone just kind of assumes that you throw AI over a wall and a business just automatically knows how to use it and drive efficiency from it. And what we’re seeing is it’s pretty difficult. Chamath, you’ve seen that. There’s McKinsey studies showing that like 95% of enterprise pilots aren’t successful. There’s tremendous value, latent value in AI, but it’s hard to know exactly how to deploy it at this point in time. So I guess what these private equity firms are saying is that we know how to drive value from this. And if we own the business and then own the change management, then we’ll be able to create value that way. Chamath Palihapitiya Their business model makes solving this problem existential. And this is sort of along the lines of this essay that I wrote. Let me just give you the thought exercise and you guys react. Today, we live in a world where the whole market is trying to debate what is the PE ratio that you’d be willing to pay. So Facebook is incredibly durable. I’m willing to pay 30 times. NVIDIA is really durable. I’m willing to pay 40 times. Tesla is incredibly asymmetric to the upside. I’m willing to pay 200 times. And then Caterpillar or John Deere, I’m willing to pay 15 times. I’m just using these as an example. And what it’s effectively signaling to you is how durable all of these cash flows are. And all we do in the public markets when we make an investment is we’re just guessing. When do the cash flows run out? And we try to say, well, here’s how much it’s worth, and here’s how much I’d be willing to pay for today. But if you go back to this example, and you say, well, what if there’s this super intelligence on the horizon? I think it’s fair to ask the question, what is anything worth? And what is anything worth in year 10 or year 15 or year 20? Because if you have infinite abundance and you have all this creativity, won’t all companies be disrupted? And won’t we be in this constant churn of everything getting disrupted all the time? And if you were faced with that problem in the public markets, how would you react? And I think the canary in the coal mine are the SaaS stocks. Yes, we jokingly call it the SaaSpocalypse, but I think it’s much more important. I think it’s a big societal question. How do you view capital markets? How do you view the health of a company in a world where we’ve been told there’s a super intelligence on the horizon that makes everything much more fragile than it was before. And the market reaction is to put all these companies on a spectrum, and they started here in software, and they’re re-rating everything down. And they’re changing the way that things are being framed from price to equity to a multiple of the cash that you have on hand. And I think that has huge implications, mostly to Silicon Valley and largely to employees, because we all sell the dream. We start a company and we’re like, okay, small salary, big equity upside. But that’s implicitly saying in 15 or 20 years, this thing is going to be worth some gigantic number. But if instead, every business gets disrupted every five or six years, all you’re going to end up with is just the cash. And so what should employees do? The rational reaction from employees will say, you know what, I don’t want your equity, give me more money. And if all of a sudden you do that, the valuation multiples and the complexity changes again. So I had my team put this chart together. Okay, what is this? Took a handful of SaaS companies and took the mag six. And I just said, okay, if you take the market cap and you divide it by the annual free cash flow, what that tells you is how many years does it take to get back if you bought a share of stock? How many years does it take from the free cash flow to come back so that you’ve earned back the cost of one share? Snowflake, in 2023, it would have taken you almost 100 years. And where is it now? It’s been cut in half. Service now. It’s last year in Workday. You see it. And I think what this speaks to is the beginning of this re-rationalization in the public markets of saying, if superintelligence is coming, we have to be very careful about what we’re Willing to pay for these things. But if you look on the right-hand side and the Mag-7, what’s so interesting is Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet, the market is completely flipped the other way. And what they’re saying is, we believe that these cash flows are essentially monopolistically durable forever. That’s the only reason why you would walk them up like this, except NVIDIA, which is the most unbelievably accretive, well-run company, highest margins, making $ billion dollars And they’re treating it like they’re treating service now in snowflip i just think it’s so interesting what’s happening i can’t explain this but here this data sort of shows this reset That we’re going through a very complicated reset in the capital what’s (Time 0:26:52)
  • AI Will Create Selective Winners Not Uniform Collapse
    • David Friedberg argued AI will not erase every incumbent equally because some companies will use it to reinvent products and multiply output from existing distribution and customers.
    • He said the real dispersion will come from who integrates agents fastest across software, supply chains, and operations. Transcript: David Friedberg It’s probably generally correct that there will be a decline, but there’s also the selective opportunity. Did you guys see the LP slides that went on the internet from Toma Brava’s LP conference? Chamath Palihapitiya Yeah, those are great. David Friedberg Nick, maybe you could find that they kind of highlight that within the broad market scape, there are companies that are not just going to sit idly by and let AI kind of delete their business Value. But they’re integrating AI themselves, and they’ve got high quality people to do so. And they’re reinventing their product themselves. So they’ve already got a beachhead, they’ve already got customer access, they’ve already got enterprise users. And in fact, if they can integrate AI into their products and into their tools, there’s almost this like selective dispersion that happens in the market. And so the winners are going to win, I think, truly in every market, not just in software, but across every market, including in industrial supply chains, on who is going to implement And utilize AI tools and agents to do work. And it’s going to expand the work productivity of that organization, not just create new features, which is what we focus on when we talk about software companies, but really imagine A complex business being able to do 10 times the output it can do today with the same capital equipment and the same labor force. Chamath Palihapitiya Freeberg, what do you pay for in a world of superintelligence versus in a world of non-superintelligence in terms of the durability of a business? David Friedberg Yeah, it’s hard to say, man. I mean, we don’t know, right? And that’s why all the discount rates are going through the roof. And that’s why the valuations are collapsing, because we just don’t know what multiple or what discount rate you apply or what terminal growth rate or which which effectively implies What do you do in your pa like do you say i don’t think disneyland is going anywhere you know i think there’s some stuff that you could say is the counter ai portfolio and the counter ai portfolio I think it’s like physical experiences halo they call it halo high asset low obsolescence okay that’s a great x yeah i’m not a big investor trader like you guys but that makes a lot of sense I mean I think that’s like intuitively, to me, that seems to be an area where people are going to be spending a lot of time and they’re gonna, they’re gonna have durability in those businesses. I think businesses like Nat gas production, you know, I just bought LNG that Chenier company in here. I bought Chenier, given all the craziness in the Middle East. And, you know, I visited there with Doug Burgum. So it was the first time I’d ever been exposed to this business. And I checked it out. Chamath Palihapitiya That’s a great business. Really well-run business. David Friedberg So I think that’s got durability. Obviously, unless it gets blown up by some enemy, that would be a problem. So the Adams thesis, that TK share. Yeah, Adams, real life, mining is a great one. Obviously, I think the space industry is going to be a lot bigger than we recognize. I actually think there’s probably a 15 to $30 trillion a year economic opportunity on the moon. That kind of a business, like you’re going to see with SpaceX’s IPO, is going to have an insane multiple. So I think to your point, Shemot, there’s a lot of stuff getting steamrolled here with crazy high discount rates where you just don’t know. And there’s a bunch of stuff where the pathway over the next 15 to 30 years is maybe independent or unlocked because of AI. And then there’s a bunch of stuff that’s just unaffected. And that starts to get a higher multiple because that’s where capital starts to flow. Jason Calacanis Saks, there are probably three things that we would agree are great moats for businesses, brands, network effects, and the management team. Those come into play here as well, yeah? David Sacks I don’t know if I would consider a management team to be a moat. I mean, it’s like Warren Buffett says, that you want businesses that are so strong that they could be run by a bunch of monkeys because one day they probably will be. David Friedberg Well, I was thinking more like, obviously, Elon and Tesla is going to just relentlessly innovate. It’s a great point, by the way. And it’s true, especially in the age of agentic AI. David Sacks Yeah, I mean, look, I think, though, that just up leveling a bit, I think you are right that the key question is moats. Because I do think that there are still strong moats in a lot of different kinds of businesses. And a lot of them are very subtle. Like you said, some are network effects. Some of them are the difficulty of producing physical world products, things like that. So there’s a lot of different types of modes out there. And that is the key question. As we enter a world of let’s call it digital abundance. (Time 0:33:47)
  • Agents Could Replace The App And Menu Interface
    • The hosts argued moats may shift from software interfaces toward ecosystems, physical complexity, and agents that hide app switching from users.
    • David Sacks said if agents become primary, people may stop navigating app walls and simply tell software what to do. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Yeah, the network effect of Apple’s ecosystem, and they have hardware, right? And they’ve been just on that path of making their own silicon. That’s incredibly defensive and they have brand, right? So that is pretty strong for Apple. And then you’d take Tesla, the same thing. You got Elon, relentlessly innovating and it’s hard hardware stuff. And then if you look at Meta and Google, these are incredible brands with great management teams and constantly innovating. Chamath Palihapitiya If I had to bet, I’m going to bet that brands go to zero. Really? Yeah, because I think that when you can make things that are as good or better, and you can make them in a cheaper, faster, better way, people want that abundance more than they want an Affiliation to a brand. Example? So the perfect example is actually what Tesla did to BMW, you know, what Tesla did to Mercedes, what Tesla did to Porsche, what BYD and Geely have done to the car manufacturing cycle in China. This is a fundamentally cheaper, faster, better product. Yes, it’s got a great brand, but nobody’s going to pay a premium for these products. The reason why Y has outsold everything else is because the Model Y is priced better and it’s superior on every operational dimension of comparison. That’s also true for the cars in China. So I think it’s the opposite. I think that brands and the pricing power of brands, other than maybe premium luxury goods, but even that’s eroding. Like, look at the stock. I don’t know, Nick, show the stock chart of LVMH or Ferrari. This is not a commentary on the quality of the actual product, but what this shows is an erosion of pricing power. All of these things are being eroded away. Jason Calacanis Yeah, this would be the value prop. Most people in brands would just say value propositioning. So JetBlue is a value brand. Tesla Model Y, perfect example of a value brand. And if you look at Apple’s recent cohort, what did they focus on? The Apple MacBook. Neo, which is a value laptop, 600 bucks, 700 bucks. Chamath Palihapitiya So they’re even going down market to try to capture that value. And to your point, maybe the right word is abundance. Like the brands that bring abundance, that bring more to the table than their competitors, and they are able to bring more at the same unit cost or less, capture share. That’s probably true. Jason Calacanis You know what’s interesting about that, Shema? As we open up the aperture of this, one of the thesis we talked about here a couple of years ago, I say, what happens with AI disruption, job disruption, et cetera? Costs coming down on cars with Model Y getting cheaper, CyberCab coming in, BYD, obviously, if you go to any foreign country, BYDs are everywhere and they cost 15 grand. Then you look at making the neo that’s a 600 laptop everything getting cheaper seems to be happening i just think it’s very hard to know which these companies can be disrupted a year ago David Sacks On this pod we were saying that google was going to be toast or some of us were saying it okay fine but yeah you know it looked to us ChatGPT was taking a massive share from Google search and The AdWords model was becoming obsolete. Now, because of the success of Gemini and the potential for personal digital assistants, personal agents, I think we’re probably pretty bullish on that company. And look at their stock chart. It reflects that. I mean, I think it’s doubled in the last year. Now you take something like Apple on the other hand, and I’m not saying this is going to happen, but I’ll just throw out a counterfactual, which is what if your personal digital assistant Or a personal agent gets so good that you don’t need to check your phone. You just tell it what to do and you don’t need the wall of apps anymore. I mean, the way that you call an Uber won’t be to punch a few buttons. You’ll just tell it what to do. So you could imagine the phone operating system getting disrupted if the agents are good enough. Chamath Palihapitiya You’re onto something huge because what you’re saying is I can confirm this to you. 89, we sell enterprise software. I’ll tell you three conversations with huge enterprises asked exactly what you just said. And we jokingly called it strangulation as a service, which is they all say the same thing, what you just said. Okay, look, get all this complicated UI out of the way. Get all of these products out of the way. Find a way to create a where I can just write what I need, tell it what I needed to do. It deals with all this complexity in the background. I never want to see these things ever again. And that’s what people want. To your point, they want to be able to like say, okay, pay this with my Venmo or use my MX in this situation or get me that flight in some way and have all these wonderfully smart agents do All the work behind the scenes. And that’s actually tracks with exactly what I’ve seen with OpenClaw, Perplexity Computer, Claude Cowork. Jason Calacanis Instead of going to your Notion, instead of going into your Gmail, instead of pulling up your calendar, you ask it, hey, what’s on my schedule this week? It brings it to you. So you could have a dumb, you know, flat terminal, you know, chat interface on the $100 device, and it would do just as good. David Sacks Just to make the counter argument against myself, I mean, even though I think that you’ll just increasingly tell your agent what to do instead of be clicking around or touching the screen, You still need a dashboard or a user interface to check on it and just see readouts of information. You still need to be able to visualize it. Where is the Uber that I’ve asked to be sent to me? How far away is it? Still want to see it on a map. So I could imagine that even if, let’s say, Siri++ becomes the dominant way of interacting with your iPhone, you’ll still want that Apple user interface. Hard to say. I mean, I see a lot of people out there tweeting that Apple is brilliant for kind of missing the whole AI wave and not spending a lot of money on data centers or CapEx. And then there’s other people who say, well, wait a second, they’re missing critical capabilities. Then there’s a question of, will they be able to make deals for an AI-powered Siri? I don’t know. I think this is very hard to know at this point in time. (Time 0:37:56)
  • Vibe Coding Compressed Months Of Work Into Days
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said 8090 vibe-coded a replacement website overnight and then used Karpathy’s auto-research workflow to double click-through rates.
    • Jason Calacanis said he finally built Annotated.com in a weekend after sitting on the idea and domain for 15 years. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya I’m really excited. You know what Andre’s going to do? What Andre agreed to do is he’s going to do like five or ten minutes of slides on like the future of the world with AI, and then we’ll do a fireside. Jason Calacanis Love it. Chamath Palihapitiya That’s going to be tremendous. Jason Calacanis And you know, he’s been on a heater himself with his recursive GitHub project. Oh, dude, auto research is incredible. And Bill Ackman has a ton of points of view on all of this stuff. Chamath Palihapitiya So we’ll get a lot of his thoughts. I want to give a shout out to Freeberg because when we did the interview with Jensen, he’s like, guys, I was like, I like had a glass of wine on a Sunday. I coded a replacement to my HRIS system. I asked all my team to do it. And I was like, Oh my God, this is incredible. So I asked our folks, I’m like, Hey, I don’t like the website. This is 8090. And the next day they’re like, yeah, we vibe coded a new one. We’ll have it up. And then I’m like, well, do you like the CTAs and how it’s doing? They’re like, no, no, no, no. We put it into auto research and we doubled the click through rate. I was like to freebrook’s point this was this would have been many man months tens of people and instead all these recipes by the way these playbooks you know like the person that runs Growth at open ai publishes his recipes yeah you’ve been claw pilled. That’s it. You’ve been one shotted. It’s really incredible. This is why like I mean, you commented on my post yesterday, I wake up every day and my head spins. I’m like, what is what is going on in the world? David Friedberg It’s crazy. Like every day feels like a new era right now. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya And it’s disoriented. David Friedberg Because I think what’s really interesting is you pull what would have normally been something that’s, call it a period of time out, like a year out or two years out, and you can pull it In and say, I can get that done in three days and I don’t need to hire people. All the sequencing and staging that would normally go into accomplishing something has been reduced and then the time rushes in. So all your ideas rush into you and they’re all immediately accessible. And that’s why it’s like so every day is like, oh my god. It’s disorientating. Jason Calacanis I bought the domain name annotated.com like 15 years ago for four grand. And I wanted to create a service, like a bookmark service where you highlight a paragraph from the New York Times and then you write your comments on it, saves it and you basically have The service. And I was talking to some developer about making it and i literally vibe coded it and the chrome extension this past week and i was like okay i’ve been sitting on this domain and project For like 15 years and i did it in a weekend isn’t it crazy weird it’s like very weird it’s really it’s just makes it feel like a simulation to me that everything can just manifest itself. It’s the Star Trek version of the world. Like remember the replicator sacks, we just say Earl Grey tea at this temperature. That’s happening in business. Now you’re like, CRM system, build annotated.com build this new website for 8090. And it’s a replicator just gives it to you. (Time 0:46:29)
  • This AI Wave Feels Bigger Than Internet And Mobile
    • Chamath Palihapitiya said this AI wave feels far bigger than the internet or mobile transitions because creation speed now resembles a tsunami rather than a normal platform shift.
    • The hosts compared it to Star Trek’s replicator, where describing a system increasingly makes it appear. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya I’ve only felt this feeling twice. Once I was on the outside looking in, I was a derivatives trader in Toronto. I was looking at the first dot com wave and I was like, I got to be a part of this. How do I get to be a part of this? And I got a job and I went AMP and kind of the rest was history. Winamp, the original iTunes. But I missed the wave. Financially, it didn’t do anything for me, but I was in the right place. You got to the beach with a surfboard. That’s all that matters. Then the second wave I crushed and the move to mobile and social. But this wave feels like a hundred times bigger than that. It’s a tsunami by comparison. I had three of these. It’s probably what it’s like to be at Nazare in Portugal. You guys ever see those clips of like that crazy place? 60 foot waves. 100 foot waves or whatever. And you’re just towed in and you’re like, okay, let’s just- Here we go. This could end one of two ways. Let it go. Glory or goodbye. (Time 0:49:20)
  • Meta Lawsuits Exposed A Liability Versus Choice Divide
    • On the Meta verdicts, David Friedberg argued the US overuses tort law and ignores parental and individual responsibility for harmful but legal products.
    • Jason Calacanis countered that liability matters when companies know harms, hide evidence, and intensify addictiveness anyway. Transcript: Jason Calacanis All right. Rough week for Zuck. Two verdicts went against Meta in two days. They were first found liable for allowing child predators to access minors on facebook and instagram new mexico jury ordered meta to pay 375 million in damages the ag’s office there Ran an undercover investigation they created fake child profiles facebook instagram these accounts were contacted by predators people showed up yada yada yada a whistleblower And meta engineer testified that his own 14-year daughter received sexual solicitations on Instagram. Then on Wednesday, an LA jury found meta and YouTube negligent for designing addictive platforms that harmed a young user’s mental health. Basically, the plaintiff in this case, Sachs, said they started using YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine. And she testified that features like notifications, algorithms made the app so addictive that it caused depression and anxiety through that compulsive use. You have some thoughts on this. And we had Jonathan Haidt, right? Didn’t we do an interview together? Wasn’t that one of the first joint interviews? You and I did. You and I did, yeah. Incredible book. David Friedberg These things are obviously addicting. He had a very important point, which is to try and keep kids off cell phones and social media until they’re 16. And he was kind of cheerleading this verdict. But, you know, I’ll take a little bit of a contrarian to the popular kind of sentiment on this. And I’ll just talk broadly about this idea of tort litigation, tort litigation, you know, cost our economy $900 billion a year in the United States, 900 billion a year. That’s how much is spent on the litigation costs, the settlements, the judgments, it’s 3% of GDP, and it’s growing roughly 10% per year. And these civil penalties decided by juries, like they’re, you know, going against big companies like Meta and YouTube, but it’s also food companies, restaurants, everything. Anytime there’s a window to sue someone and extract value from them, tort firms are all over them. You know, it’s called the tort tax now in America. It’s not just losses paid by the companies, because fundamentally, when a big company pays out these tort taxes, they’re going to invest less, there’s less R&D, less product development Costs stay high. There’s new fewer new product launches, and there’s all these crazy restrictions on stuff. So you know, look, I agree, social media causes immense harm, particularly causes harm for kids, kids should not be on social media until they’re 16. Absolutely agree. Maybe adults shouldn’t either be on as adults. But fundamentally, I think there’s an important question that we often ignore, which is who is fundamentally responsible for that harm? You know, should the sugar beet and sugar cane farmers be responsible for diabetes in America? Should the soda companies be responsible, the retailers selling the soda? The FDA for not stopping it all? And fundamentally, I think we have to ask the question, what role does individual choice play and individual responsibility play in this equation? If everything is a liability, what do you think? I think we have to take personal responsibility. I think the parents that are absent, taking care of their children are responsible for harm to their kids. You shouldn’t let your kid play with a gun. You shouldn’t let your kid go to some sketchy neighborhood after hours by themselves. You shouldn’t let your kid play video games 100 hours a week. You shouldn’t let your kids eat nothing but soda and potato chips. You have responsibility as a parent. And I think parents should keep kids off screens and keep kids off social media. Once the harms are known of excess use or the harms are known of exposure to this sort of thing. I think there’s responsibility that sits with the parents. Chamath Palihapitiya What about things like tobacco or processed food? Yeah, this is the key. David Friedberg Yeah. And I look, I mean, the same, the same is true of alcohol. I mean, dude, like alcohol is terrible for you. There’s nothing good about alcohol. But I think I should have a choice on whether or not I want to consume alcohol, whether or not I consume tobacco, whether or not I consume processed goods. And the recognition that it’s bad for you should be publicized by the government should be publicized by the country. Chamath Palihapitiya If I had to summarize, what you would say is product liability law makes no sense. There should be human liability and human responsibility expectations in a society. David Friedberg We never talk about responsibility. We always talk about where the government failed us and where these companies fed us. And we never talk about what did we individually do wrong? How did I individually choose to eat 100 fing sodas a week? How did I individually choose to get my kids addicted to social media? Where the f*** was I as a parent? Like, we don’t talk about our responsibility. And by the way, this fundamentally addresses this point about human agency, which I think is more critical in this era than ever, because AI is going to flood us with f***ing everything All the time, nonstop. What we choose to do in a world where we’re already getting everything, and how we choose to not take everything that’s being offered to us, I think is a critical part of what’s going to Distinguish human success from human failure. And it’s going to become more apparent in the future. And not everything is about liability. And not everything is about the government failing us. It’s about people making choices. And we don’t talk about it. Jason Calacanis But I’ll counter, I agree, personal choice, super important. What you’re probably leaving out here, which you’re definitely leaving out here, is when these companies know they’re doing something damaging and they do it anyway that was the key David Friedberg To the rjr with the whiskey company what about what about a whiskey company selling whiskey to an alcoholic so what about a potato chip company selling potato chips to an obese person Jason Calacanis I’ll put those two aside because i don’t think we’ve seen major cases about that. But I will say the auto industry knew for a long time about seatbelts. You remember that. And they didn’t deploy them. RJR Nabisco. They knew that these were addictive. And they designed the cigarettes to become more addictive. And they didn’t tell people about the health risks. Asbestos, same thing. Lead paint, same thing. This has happened over and over again, where corporations subvert the release of information to make additional profits. So the question here with Facebook is, did they know how addicted these were? Did they know kids were being assaulted sexually and they could have done something about it or didn’t they? And so agree that there’s too much litigation. David Friedberg That’s absolutely true. The kids being assaulted, absolutely true. Yeah, we agree on that one. Not releasing information about the level of addiction if they had it, that’s certainly bad. Should the product be legal, number one? And if the product is legal, who’s responsible for using it? And where do we draw the line? Jason Calacanis And if we don’t want people to make choice then we shouldn’t put it out there but if you as a corporation know it’s dangerous and then you lean into that if you know uh as is the case with facebook That this is super addicting super damaging to young girls and then you lean into making it more addictive and you don’t put safeguards in place and you can prove that like rjr like asbestos David Friedberg Like what are the safeguards of whiskey what’s the what does a whiskey company put? Age. What safeguards does a casino put? Jason Calacanis Hold on, you asked the question. Age is one. No, but I’m not… (Time 0:50:35)
  • Set Hard Family Rules Around Teen Social Media
    • Set explicit household rules for social apps and do not rely on platforms to self-police teen behavior.
    • Chamath Palihapitiya bans Instagram until 16, allows Snapchat only in high school, and still fights YouTube leakage through school Chromebooks. Transcript: Jason Calacanis The consensus, Chamath, is kids who use this two or three hours a day, this has been across many research studies, is that it’s massively correlated with depression and anxiety and Eating disorders, specifically in young girls, if you get to two or three hours a day of this. So that correlation’s, I think, pretty well established. You pretty famously said, hey, and you worked at Facebook, so you saw this coming, but I think at Stanford 27, 2018 timeframe, you actually had some comments on this. We could either play the clip or you could just describe it, I guess. I said what was obvious to me then, I lost a lot of friends at Facebook when I said it, unfortunately, but essentially what I said was, I don’t let my kids use it and I don’t think that this Chamath Palihapitiya Is a constructive part of a developing child’s diet. I do think that Sachs is right that I view AI chat differently. There are different guardrails that are required so that if you go down some sort of, you know, dark corner, But that’s possible to understand, and the product is architected in a way To create cul-de So if you’re thinking about self-harm or you’re thinking about these other things, social media is very different. It’s an incredibly fast-twitch algorithm, and that’s the optimization. And until the incentive for that optimization changes, these outcomes will continue to compound. I think the interesting thing is that the LA lawsuit was an individual lawsuit. The young woman, I think, was awarded $3 or $6 million. The other one, though, that they lost this week was in New Mexico, and that was for $375 million. And that was more around, I think, child exploitation. Yeah. The thing that I’ll note is that these trial lawyers, which I’m not a fan of either, have been trying, as Sack said, and as Freebrook said, to make these folks a target because there’s So much money on the line. And they’ve been batted back pretty successfully. But this was the first time where they were able to navigate the Section 230 protections that Facebook and Google have typically used to protect themselves, because Google was a part Of the LA lawsuit. And they were able to go down the pathway of product liability language. Now, to Friedberg’s point, I think he’s generally right. I think it’s my responsibility as a parent to take care of myself and my children. But to the extent we don’t change these product liability laws that are on the books, I think the door has been opened and a map has been drawn, which is this is how you navigate around Section 230 and you can get a decisive lawsuit in your favor against these large companies with enormous cash flows. And so I expect that this will be a death by a thousand cuts kind of scenario where folks are just going to rally around this. I don’t think it’s right, but I do think that that’s the rational reaction to what just happened. I mean, look, $6 million to an individual 20-year girl or $375 million, these are huge numbers. And the reality is that I think we’ve opened the floodgates. I do think there should be a better response. And I do think that parents should take a lot more responsibility. But I do hope that these products allow us a kill switch for when our kids are under the ages of 16. Frankly, I would love a kill switch under the age of 18. And there has to be simpler ways to age validate. You know, we used to work around this thing called COPPA compliance. COPPA is bullshit. It’s a nothing burger, like a six-year can vibe code their way around Kappa. So it doesn’t do anything. And so age verification is completely broken. It’s harder to get age verified for a porn site than it is to get un-age verified for Facebook. Same work, Shemath. How did you get around it? David Friedberg Yeah, how do you know that? Shemath, that’s just for uploading. You were uploading at the time, Shemath. This is not your only fan’sof of age. David Sacks We actually deal with this in our new AI framework that the administration released last week, because the number one issue is around online child safety, which I think, again, is mostly About social networking, but it touches on AI. And so it’s kind of gotten lumped together. And I think we’re, I mean, I’m referring now to the White House has said it’s willing to support some form of age assurance technology and parental controls. So look, I think there needs to be a conversation around how true it is that social networking is just a fountain of ills for young people. If that’s true, then why wouldn’t you just disallow it, right? But if it’s unclear, and I think it’s more on the side of unclear, this is me, then it’s up to the parents. And what you want to do is, again, have the age assurance technology and the parental controls and let the parents decide. Chamath Palihapitiya I don’t think that social media is net bad, broadly speaking. But I will tell you that if my child uses it for two or three hours a day for multiple days in a row, they become retarded. Yes, they act weird. And so I don’t know what to tell you, except I would love a kill switch until these kids turn 18 on all these products. Well, you can use this has to do with dopamine, by the way, these what I do instead is I use Apple’s family sharing, but it’s hard. And I’ll tell you why it’s hard. Our schools give our kids Chromebooks and say, use these Chromebooks because that’s the way you’re going to access your LMS, your information, your content, your homework. And you know what’s an integral part of that? YouTube. And then now it becomes a backdoor. So even when we take the devices, I take my devices, we lock them down, you can’t bring them to your room, the whole thing. But if they need to do homework, and I catch them in a little break, I’m like, what are you doing on YouTube? They’re looking at shorts. Of course, that’s what they do. Yes. Jason Calacanis And so it is a whack-a problem for parents i think uh i’ll just give myself the final word here on behalf of the group it’s obviously addicting it’s obviously the industry has not policed Itself nor would they police themselves because they want to get people addicted now so they’re addicted when they’re adults the rest of the world has realized this austral now has 16 enforced, Malaysia 16. Other countries are right behind them, Spain, Germany, UK. And what should happen here in the United States is this should be done with the handset manufacturers. If Android and Apple showed leadership with Facebook and said, we’re going to by default, when you buy a phone, you’re going to have to age verify, you know, kids under a certain age, Which you kind of do already when you create a family plan, like you did, we could solve this problem. And then parents would opt in to giving their kids access to this. No good comes out of kids under (Time 1:02:37)
  • PCAST Reflects A Shift Toward Industrial Competition
    • David Sacks and David Friedberg said the new PCAST is designed around builders and industrial leaders, not just academics, because the US now faces an AI and manufacturing race with China.
    • Friedberg cited China publishing 50% more scientific papers than the US last year as evidence of the urgency. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Topic be amazing president donald trump 47th president of the united states announced his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It’s called PCAST. Sachs, you have now, am I correct in saying, moved from the czar of crypto and AI to now the leader of PCAST? Is that the correct way to frame this? David Sacks Well, the president has appointed me to be a member of his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and to co-chair it along with Michael Kratzios, who’s the director of OSTP. I’m still an AI advisor, but I do it on behalf of PCAST now. So you remember last year I was in SGE, we got up to 130 days. I used that time up and the president appointed me to this new role, allows me to continue being a technology advisor, in fact, on a wider range of issues. So before it was AI and crypto. Now it’s whatever PCAST wants to study or talk about or make recommendations. I think in addition to AI, other areas that are interesting are nuclear power, quantum computing, advanced semiconductors, all these different areas. I think we’ve got some biotech. Thank you, Friedberg. And we have some incredible people who are now on PCAST to kind of run with this. Jason Calacanis Yeah, I’m looking at it. Mark Andreessen, Sergey, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, David Friedberg, Jensen, Lisa Su, Mark Zuckerberg, and some other folks there that maybe not as recognizable by the audience. How were they selected? The only criticism I’ve seen of this is lots of business leaders, great. Lots of technology, great. But maybe a little light on the scientists. David Sacks Well, I don’t know. We have people who’ve won a Nobel Prize for physics on there. Talking about people who are experts in, like I mentioned, quantum computing, fusion, nuclear, biotech, pretty much everything across the board. I would say that one difference between this PCAST and previous ones is you have more doers, more builders, people who’ve actually created products or companies, we think that’s a Good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? I mean, is it a bad thing that Marc Andreessen invented the first internet browser, or Jensen invented the GPU? If you’re going to make recommendations about advanced semiconductors, don’t you want to have someone who actually invented some of the key products in the space? Jason Calacanis The big question, of course, Zach, is, as we’ve seen here with Science Corner, is how do you plan on staying awake for these meetings if it’s going to be like all science is usually when You take your bio break? Well, it’s science and technology. David Sacks So I’m going to focus on the tech stuff. Got it. And then we got Freeberg to focus on the science stuff. Got it. Jason Calacanis So Freeberg, this is incredible. You’ve joined President Trump’s administration now. David Friedberg I will say I’m honored to be invited and appointed by the president. And I appreciate Sachs and Michael Kratzios. You look back at PCAST, it’s kind of rooted in FDR when he formed this Council of Advisors on Science, when nuclear physics and quantum mechanics was starting to kind of reinvent what Was possible in the world. We’re sort of at a similar era today because arguably AI is reinventing what is possible in the world. And I think there’s this kind of acute moment that we find ourselves in in this extraordinary race against China. I’ll give you a statistic. 10 years ago, China published 50% of the number of scientific research papers and peer-reviewed journals as the United States. Last year, they published 50% more than the United States. This is across all disciplines and domains, including physics, material science, chemistry, biochemistry, broad life sciences. There’s this moment that we’re in right now where both the world is being reinvented by AI, but there’s this extraordinary race with China, not just in fundamental research and discovery, But in the industrialization of new discoveries and new technologies, you could feel it in DC this week, I was at the Hill and Valley Forum. But literally everyone in Silicon Valley, everyone in DC is like, absolutely honed and focused in on what is going on in China. It used to be in biotechnology, for example, that China was kind of a copycat and a me too, or they were really good, for example, in manufacturing. But it is now the case that in many subdomains, China is becoming the scientific leader in biotechnology and in life sciences. And that is a scary thought, because ultimately, China could end up engulfing the entire pharmaceutical industry, and basically becoming the leader in things like medicine, but Most importantly, foundational things like AI. So I just want to defend and speak for a moment about the choice about putting what I would say are like industrial science and technology leaders on this commission, because this is A moment where there’s an industrial race, not just a discovery race underway. That’s why this moment is so critical. Anyway, I’m very appreciative to have an opportunity to serve and thankful to David for his leadership. Jason Calacanis In related news, Chamath will be joining the President’s Advisory Council on Bomb Pots and Wagering. He’ll be joining that. And when I saw this, Saks, I saw PC and I was like, oh, is it podcasting? I’m in. Finally, I’ve been invited to the President’s Council on Podcasting. So big, big news coming. I don’t want to tip anybody’s cards. David Sacks We’ll let you know when that happens. Yeah, absolutely. Jason Calacanis When the President’s Council on Podcasting emerges, me and Lex Friedman will make our way to Washington, D.C. To serve. David Sacks I want to thank the president as well, and it’s a great honor to be named to co-chair this. It is, like Freeberg was saying, this is a fairly august body that goes back a long time. I think the modern incarnation was created in 1990 by George Herbert Walker Bush. So this has been around for over 30 years. In its current formulation, I think we have a slightly different take on it, which is we’re going to have these builders and doers on there. Like Freebrick said, we got some catching up to do on our industrial policy. We have named 15 people. There’s still nine more slots. We can have up to 24. So I think it’s possible that at some point there’ll be a second round and if we’re missing some expertise, they can be filled in. Obviously that’s up to the president. He can decide later who else might join this. (Time 1:12:50)