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Software Stocks Implode, Claude's Hit List, State of the Union Reactions, Trump's Tariff Pivot

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

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  • Market’s Shift From When To If For AI Risk
    • Markets shifted from asking when AI disruption will hit to asking if these businesses will survive at all.
    • David Sacks explains this ‘if’ mindset forces much lower P/E and revenue multiples and a higher discount rate as event risk spikes. Transcript: Jason Calacanis We’ve got a full docket. The Claude Kill List has expanded and an ai fan fiction sub stack tanked your 401k on monday let’s get into it anthropics generational run continues they’re now three for three in tanking Different market sectors in february congratulations this is like they they took the the mantle from brad gerstner uh the market. The Anthropic s*** list. It is. February 3rd, Anthropic announces, hey, we got a legal plug-in for Claude. Cowork. Thomson Reuters. Lexus Nexus. LegalZoom. All down at least 10% since February 3rd. Then on February 20th, Claude Code Security is announced in a limited research preview. Stocks tank again. CrowdTrike. CloudFur. Okta. All down. Then February 23rd, Anthropic announces. Claude can modernize COBOL databases. If you don’t know COBOL, that’s the like oldest coding language in the world. That’s where Sachs learned code when he was in college in the 70s. It’s used for banking, payroll, government. Healthcare. Healthcare. It It runs 95% of ATMs in the US and it powers social security payments. 85% of all COBOL code runs on IBM machines. So IBM decided they would tank 13% on Monday, their worst day since 2000, $31 billion in market cap losses. So let’s stop here before I get into the fan fiction piece. What’s your take here of what’s happening in the market, Shamath? Is this simply people are looking for an excuse to trim their positions because things have been top ticking, all-time highs, and people are just looking for an excuse? Or is this reality? Is this the go-forward reality that AI is going to compress these kind of stocks because it solves a lot of problems? Chamath Palihapitiya I’m going to give you two explanations. I don’t know what percentage I would allocate across the two, but I think one is tactical and one is much more strategic, but I think both are happening. The tactical one is that we’re at a moment in time where a lot of the smart money hedge funds are starting to massively degross. And what that means is they’re trimming a lot of positions and they’re just taking on a lot less risk. Why? I don’t exactly know. It could be motivated by the second thing that I’m going to talk about. But the point is, in a degrossing cycle, you tend to be trimming risk and making your position sizes much smaller. So the longs become less long, the shorts become less short, and you just shrink. And so there’s just general downward pressure. That is a clear behavior right now. But I think the structural change is the more important one. And this is sort of what I talked about this morning. In a normal functioning market, what we are always debating is when a set of cash flows go from becoming highly confident to less highly confident. It’s a when conversation. So when will Coca-Cola’s cash flows be impacted? When will Eli Lilly’s cash flows be impacted? When will Meta’s cash flows be impacted? And the answer to the when gets translated by the public markets into three things. Your price to earnings multiple, where if you invert that number, what that is equivalent to is the yield on the money that you get. So if you’re 20 times PE, that’s a 5% yield. The second is a revenue multiple. And the third is what’s called your weighted average cost of capital, which is to say, if you look at the next 20 to 30 years of earnings, and you want to figure out what that is worth today, You have to discount all of these back, and you have to assume a percentage of interest, effectively, that it takes to get there. And the basic math of this is that when you have a high whack, it’s called, you’re massively discounting these cash flows. When you have a low whack, you’re assuming that these things are very durable. Okay, so what is happening? We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode. Are these cash flows durable at all? Could they fall off a cliff in year three? Is there some AI model that’s going to come around the corner and obliterate this business without me knowing it? And because they’ve shifted into this if mindset, your risk becomes totally different. You have this event risk that you don’t know how to price. And whenever the market shifts into that mode, what you see are that the holders of those equities want a massive margin of safety. What does that mean? They have to take PEs way down. If you used to trade at 40, you should trade at 20. If you used to trade at 20, you should trade at 10. They take revenue multiples down. You used to trade at 10 times revenue. Now you’re going to trade at three times. You take the whack way up. Used to be a 6% discounted weighted average cost of capital. You know what? I’m taking you to 12 or 13. That’s the market’s way of saying, I’m now debating if these things will even exist. And so I need to give myself a huge buffer to own this stuff. That’s what’s happening right now. (Time 0:01:20)
  • Viral Sci Fi Piece Moved Real Markets
    • A viral Citrini Substack sci‑fi post about a 2028 AI collapse reportedly drove Monday’s selloff in financial names.
    • Jason Calacanis describes the fan‑fiction scenario where agents cut fees, trigger mass unemployment, and crash consumer demand. Transcript: Jason Calacanis The story, Friedberg and Sachs, is that a sub stack post, fan fiction, taking place in the fictional 2028 global intelligence crisis went mega viral, 28 million views on X, it was posted Sunday night, it made the market tank on Monday. In this fictional sub stack post, the author said there’s going to be essentially a death spiral that happens because of AI. How does that work? Well, first, companies embrace AI, everything goes right, they’re able to cut staff, their margins go up, similar to how Amazon has, you know, trimmed their white collar staff. Then they’re so successful at this that they lose their customer base because consumers don’t have discretionary funding to spend. Then it creates a debt spire where the companies keep deploying AI to try to hit the margins, cutting staff and the entire economy collapses. Dr. Doom level stuff. Unemployment’s at 10%. S&P goes down from 38% highs. After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the 3% interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stable coins, all the financial stocks Got hit on Monday. Amex down 8%, Capital One down 8%, MasterCard 6% fees of 4%, yada, yada. (Time 0:07:40)
  • Viral Research May Hide Financial Motives
    • Viral research can be amplified or even authored by parties with financial stakes, muddying truth and market reaction.
    • David Sacks flagged an amended authorship tying a coauthor to a short fund on names mentioned in the report. Transcript: David Sacks Yeah, well, I know that this Citrini article passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert. But I’m starting to question how legitimately viral it really was. There’s some information that just came out that the attribution of the article has been amended, meaning the co-authors have been amended to include a short fund that was shorting Some of the names mentioned in the article. This is according to another post that just came out. According to this post, the authorship attribution attributed to market moving was changed after publication of the co-author as a managing partner of a $262 million SEC registered Hedge fund who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named. So I think that’s point number one is I just wonder, did this article truly go viral or did the authors do anything to kind of amplify it? And we just don’t know the answer to that question. But regardless of that, let’s just take the arguments on their face. I think one of the best responses to it was by another writer named Derek Thompson, who wrote an article called Nobody Knows Anything, which I think is a reference to a famous take by legendary Hollywood writer, William Goldman. In any event, what the article says is no one really knows what’s going to happen with AI in two years, nevermind 20 years. And so they resort to science fiction writing masquerading as analysis. And the author here, Derek Thompson, says that the conversation about AI is really just a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. And he says, that’s not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick, but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply of real-world, real-time information About AI’s macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. So in other words, what he’s saying is, look, this guy is writing very compelling science fiction, but there’s no real analytics behind it to defend it. And yes, this could happen. Here’s a prediction market on whether people believe the Citrini report’s going to come true. Something like 12% believe the Citrini scenario is going to happen. But the truth is no one really knows. I mean, there’s other dueling science fiction narratives where AI is going to create such a world of abundance that we’re not going to need for anything. (Time 0:09:21)
  • Plan For Higher Demand Even As Productivity Rises
    • When technology lowers the cost of a scarce skill, expect demand to rise, not vanish; plan hiring and retraining accordingly.
    • David Sacks cites Aaron Levy and Jevons Paradox: more productive software engineers will be absorbed across the whole economy. Transcript: David Sacks And again, it all goes back to Jevin’s paradox. But what Aaron says is that when you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate, but there are going to be many other jobs like that. But think about software engineering, even among startups in Silicon Valley, which I think are probably some of the most attractive places for software engineers to work. There’s always been a chronic shortage of them. Then you’ve got the Fortune 500 companies, non-tech companies, which have always had an even harder time hiring technical talent. So you have this massive unfilled need for software engineers across the entire economy. Now you’re going to be able to get a lot more leverage out of software engineers. It doesn’t mean they’re going to get fired. It just means that now maybe you can have a lot more 10X software engineers and those jobs are now being spread throughout the whole economy. I also think, just to put some numbers on this, I think the cost structure of the average Fortune 500 business is something like 5% IT. That includes all of their IT, not just their software. What should it be? What should the percentage of software be in an enterprise cost structure? Elon describes companies as cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human. If you think about the current Fortune 500 company being 1% or 2% software, maybe they should be 50% software. I think what Aaron is saying here is the market for software and software engineers was so constrained by the lack of availability that even if we 10x or 100x the productivity of software Engineers, the demand will be there to absorb this new supply. (Time 0:20:12)
  • Podcast Firm Replaced SDR Work With Agents
    • Jason Calacanis trained his 20-person team to build OpenClaw agents that automate SDR tasks, clipping, and weekly reporting.
    • He says agents fetch top podcast advertisers, input data into Pipedrive, and redeploy humans to higher‑value work. Transcript: Jason Calacanis So we had, we have 20 people in our firm, we had 15 of them come in this weekend. And they all got trained over like six or seven hours how to have their own open claw agent, and we started building it. Every piece of software that we wanted to buy or build over the last 10 years that we never got to, my people are building in the last 30 days. As an example, you know, when you’re selling ads for a podcast, you want to check all the other podcasts and what advertisers they have, we trained an agent to go take the top 100 podcasts, Look through the transcripts, figure out who the advertisers are, check those advertisers in pipe drive, tell us when the last time we contacted them, and put it into the sales room. That was an SDR job that we wanted to fill and software we wanted to build. Then we wanted people to have- Sorry, hold on. Chamath Palihapitiya That was a human that you were paying money and now you’ve replaced with software? Or that human still exists, but now they just do it in a better way? Jason Calacanis Redeploying that human. We have a human doing it. We’re going to redeploy them to do other things. And the consistency of this Chema and the accuracy, and then it’s doing it all night long. So we have like seven of these agents in these kind of roles. The next piece we did was we gave my agent, which is like the Ultron, root access to Gmail, Calendar, Zoom, Notion, Slack. And what it’s doing is it’s giving each person, here’s what you got done this week with their manager, here’s the emails you sent, here’s the meetings you took, here the context here Chamath Palihapitiya The threads you were involved in and then it’s helping manage those people and so we are getting all that all that to me says you jason despite all your doomerism seems like you’re growing Jason Calacanis And you’re going to be hiring more people and you’re more productive am i getting this wrong i’m not doomerist what i think’s going to happen in this position but you’re growing and you’re Going to be hiring more. No, no, we’re not going to add more people. Definitely not adding people. The people we have are becoming 10 or 20% more efficient every week because the software we would have paid for or built from another vendor, if we had the time, or we wanted to build custom Software, we had 10 engineers. It’s being built by our open claw agents. As an example, when we make clips for this podcast, other podcasts, we have it go and look at like, this week in startups episode from 10 years, tell us the three best moments, and it makes The clip, it puts the subtitles on it, and then it puts the clip into the slack room. That was something that was going to be a full time job. So we’re getting 10, 20% more efficient. (Time 0:23:02)
  • AI Empowers Companies To Replace SaaS Upsells
    • Internal tooling and cheap models let firms say ‘we can build this ourselves’ during vendor negotiations.
    • Jason notes agents and open source options (e.g., Mattermost) reduce reliance on SaaS upsells. Transcript: Jason Calacanis So the time between like conceiving of a product and publishing it and finding a developer, you don’t even need a developer, you can just publish software. The wake up moment for me was, we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack. And it’s like, yeah, Slack doesn’t have that. But have you considered MatterPost? I’m like, what’s MatterPost? Like, oh, it’s an open source project, I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there. And I was like, oh, don’t do that. We’re only spending 6K a year on Slack or 10K a year. But the software is building CRM systems for us. It’s building agents for us. And it wants to just build all the software stack. So you could, when you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you are working with, you’re going to be able to say to them, hey, we could roll our own. And when you want to upsell us on this latest thing, like you talked about, upselling is such a big part of SaaS. You’re like, I can actually build that software myself internally. I don’t need you to do it. Ryan (Time 0:28:40)
  • Value Capture Unclear Between Models Apps And Chips
    • Which layer captures value (models, apps, or chips) remains unclear and will vary by vertical.
    • David Sacks warns startups must defend why their app adds lasting value as foundation models improve. Transcript: David Sacks Well, I think for a while now, there has been a question of which layer of the stack is going to capture all the value. So is it going to be the model companies or could it be the applications that are built on top of the models? Or if there’s a lot of competition at both those layers of the stack, do the chip companies get it all? I think it’s an unclear question. Totally. Yeah, I think for any given vertical application, you do have to defend why you think your value prop will be sustainable as the underlying foundation models just get better themselves. Jason Calacanis And it’s open source. Like this week, we put up Kimmy 2.5. It can do about 80, 85% of the jobs. So we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up. All right, listen, this is TBD. We got a lot more to think about on this topic. David Sacks Just on this point of a lot of these debates about AI are dueling science fiction narratives, I just think that the Doomer narratives are inherently more appealing to people. I mean, I think it’s partly just, you look at most sci-fi movies are dystopian, not utopian. In addition to that, I think we have a bunch of heuristic biases in favor of the Doomer narrative. (Time 0:29:51)
  • Hire Agent Maestros To Run Business Processes
    • Hire or train ‘agent maestros’ who translate business processes into agent skills and manage them daily.
    • Jason and David Sacks highlight that operators who architect and tune agents will be high‑value non‑developer roles. Transcript: Jason Calacanis And there are certain people in business who are just really good at operations. You were one of them, Sachs, running companies. And that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent, and figure out how to manage them and figure out how to increase their skills. Sure, look, with any new technology. It’s a great job. And it’s not a developer. David Sacks Look, with any new technology, there’s always a huge change management aspect with enterprises because it’s hard for them to adapt and change. And the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones who are going to create an amazing career opportunity for themselves. But it’s hard to do. And that’s going to slow down the rate of change, just the amount of inertia in the economy. (Time 0:32:37)
  • Tokens Demand Explodes As Prices Plummet
    • Token consumption will explode while per‑token costs fall sharply.
    • Chamath predicts a 10x increase in token demand with a ~90% reduction in output token price by year end, driving massive usage growth. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya I think you’re right. I think you’re going to see a 10xing in the demand for tokens. But I also think you’re going to see a 90% price reduction in the cost of an output token probably by the end of this year. So I think that to your point, it’s going to just create an enormous upswell of demand because we’re going to be able to cut the prices of an output token so dramatically. (Time 0:33:57)
  • Local Pushback Is Shaving Gigawatts And Billions
    • Local opposition to data centers is cancelling gigawatts of capacity and billions in potential revenue.
    • Chamath mapped ~25 canceled projects and ~100 facing opposition, estimating 2025–26 lost revenue near $120–130B if trends continue. Transcript: David Sacks Before we… Just to go back to what Jamath was saying there, I mean, you’ve got political forces that want to stop the construction of all data centers in the United States. So if that gains steam, then that’s going to be a huge constraint on any change whatsoever. Chamath Palihapitiya Can I tee this up for you, J. Cal? So I went back this weekend, and I looked at the number of data centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns. And I posted it on X, so Nick, maybe you can put this up. But it was really a very small behavior, which was pushing back on data centers and getting them canceled. We had about 25 projects total, of which 20 were just in Q2 alone. There are 100 data center projects right now that are facing some form of local opposition. So interesting. If you take that 40% number, and you apply this, and then you multiply it by the number of megawatts that they have announced. Last year, we lost almost five gigawatts in terms of canceled projects. This year coming in 26, we have about seven that could be canceled if you use this map. If then you flow that through, OpenAI, Sarah Fryer said this, that every gigawatt for her, for OpenAI, is about 10 billion of revenue. So if you assume that that’s roughly accurate, plus or minus a billion here or there, what that means is that 2025, the industry as a whole lost $50 billion of revenue. And this year, if seven gigawatts gets canceled, it’s about $70 billion. Now you’re talking about $130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that’ll go forward in time that we miss out on. I think that that’s really bad. (Time 0:35:40)
  • Use Ratepayer Pledge To Get Data Centers Built
    • Protect residents by making hyperscalers pay for incremental grid costs or build behind‑the‑meter power.
    • David Sacks and Chamath endorse a Ratepayer Protection Pledge so data centers don’t raise residential electricity bills. Transcript: David Sacks That he supports a ratepayer protection pledge, which requires the major tech companies to provide for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not See their rates going up. I think this makes total sense. I think, Chamath, to your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices are going to go up. And that shouldn’t be the case. And so the president has said that he’s committed to not allowing residential rates to go up as a result of data centers. It’s pretty straightforward. You get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers to pay for the increase in the electricity costs, or you let them set up their own power behind the meter. The president’s been talking about this for over a year, that our biggest AI companies would also become big power companies because we had let them stand up their own power generation Behind the meter. So these data centers don’t even have to connect to the grid. They could just do co-location themselves. But also, I think that with this ratepayer protection pledge, what you’re going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices. Because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid. Also, they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure. So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the costs to generate it are not all variable. There’s a lot of huge fixed costs in there. So when you increase scale, then you can actually reduce the metered rate. So again, this is really, I think, the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders, who just wants to stop all progress whatsoever. I saw a funny post calling it bananas, which is build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. So this is the bananas is replacing the new NIMBY. So you just can build absolutely nothing. I think the president’s approach finds a very good balance here, which is look, we can have progress, just don’t make residential consumers pay for it. Let the big tech companies pay for it themselves. (Time 0:40:40)
  • Tiny Footprint Huge Economic Upside For Data Centers
    • Data centers have tiny land footprints but outsized economic value; if we block them, other countries will capture that value.
    • David Friedberg argues data centers fit under a pin yet drive large second‑order industries and jobs. Transcript: David Friedberg Data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of light. So you could put them anywhere. And I think that our policymakers need to be very cognizant of that fact. You have and we do connect the internet using high speed cable, high speed fiber optic throughout the world. And so theoretically, if we don’t embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry, and it will fundamentally be an industry because it is almost like the new Sort of oil. Where are the oil rigs going to go? Where are the railroads going to go? Where are the telegraph lines going to go? Where are the factories going to go? If we don’t put them here, someone else will put them on their shores. Someone else will put them in their country. Someone else will put them in their jurisdiction. And a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of The second and third order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere. Jason Calacanis Such a good point. David Friedberg So it’s not going to like just go away, but the demand is there. The economy is moving forward. AI is moving forward. We live in a world with 196 countries. And data centers do not take up a lot of space. They’re very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the data centers in the world fit under the tip of a pin. And so this is a very small footprint. And if we’re going to give up hundreds of 1000s of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value creation, we’re being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the world, I would Just like encourage the system that I think is the right system. And we talked about this last time, we’re provided data centers are producing their own electricity, that means that you’re taking electricity consumption off the grid because they Otherwise are not being used on the grid, and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. So it’s silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on data centers. As soon as you do that, the companies that use data centers are not going to slow down. They’re going to go put them somewhere else, and we’re going to miss out. (Time 0:43:31)
  • First Human Yamanaka Trial Targets Blindness
    • David Friedberg outlines the first human trial using Yamanaka factors delivered by AAV into the eye to restore vision.
    • Life Biosciences’ trial uses doxycycline to switch factor expression on/off for retinal rejuvenation in glaucoma patients. Transcript: Jason Calacanis The world’s greatest moderator has decided we’re going directly to science corner. This is your time to shine. And it’s Sax’s time to drop a deuce. Chamath Palihapitiya Sax went immediately. Yeah, he has to drop a deuce. What’s up? Jason Calacanis What do you need me for? This is very important for you. Freeberg’s going to talk. David Sacks Lightning round for Science Corner. Go, Freeberg. Wait, wait, wait. Are we doing any more topics after this, or can I just leave? Chamath Palihapitiya Yes, tariffs. Yes, we’re doing tariffs. David Sacks Wait, why would we do that? Because I want to get patient. You’re going to put the audience to sleep. I’m not saying Science Corner doesn’t have its audience. Listen, you can go take… But why wouldn’t we do… Yeah, exactly. Look at you. You’re like screaming. You’re screaming. Let him do his work. Let him cook. Let him cook. Jason Calacanis Freeberg, tell us about this Harvard study. David Friedberg Speaking of science, I think that there’s a very important moment happening right now. We’ve talked a number of times on the show about Yamanaka factors. These are these four proteins that were discovered by Shinya Yamanaka that we found later that when applied to cells, mammalian cells can actually reverse the age of those cells, reset The epigenetic clock, reset the epigenome, which is the little markers on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off back to a youthful state. Extraordinary groundbreaking work that was done that won the Nobel Prize led to the foundation of several companies. There’s a Harvard scientist named David Sinclair. He’s a bit of a controversial character. Do you guys know him? I think you guys, one or two of you may have met him. Jamal, you ever met him? I followed him. I’ve seen his stuff. So Sinclair is kind of bemoaned a little bit by the scientific and academic community for being a little too over-hypey snake oil salesman, as some of folks have claimed, because years Ago, he sold a company to GSK saying resveratrol would reverse aging. And, you know, he made $720 million on that, it didn’t end up working. And he’s promoted certain supplement companies and so on. So I want to preface with that before I kind of underwrite what he’s saying with this next thing. But he’s a co founder of a company called life biosciences. And they’ve reached a major agreement with the FDA to be the first company to treat humans with Yamanaka factors. Specifically, what they’re doing is they’re going to be delivering these Yamanaka factors. These are these proteins that rejuvenate cells and make them youthful again, into the eye. And so their first indication is to actually inject them into the vitriol fluid in the eyeball. And they’ll affect the retina in the eye to address people that have gotten blind from glaucoma, or one of these kind of stroke-like diseases that happen in the eye. And the expectation with this phase one clinical trial is that the delivery of these Yamanaka factors into the eye will rejuvenate the retina, make it youthful again, and restore vision. If it works, which it’s expected to, because we see this result happen in animal models, it could be an extraordinary breakthrough, not just in terms of blindness, but in terms of the First human application of Yamanaka factors to reverse aging. The way they’re doing it is they’re actually packaging up DNA that will make these proteins into viruses, AAV virus that is delivered into the eye, the virus will then go into the retinal Cells, and then we’ll deliver this payload for this DNA to make these proteins in the eye cells. And it can be turned on and off. Amazingly, they’ve created a switch mechanism in it, where the protein production, the production of these Yamanaka factors can be turned on and off by taking an antibiotic called Doxycycline. So the person that gets the delivery of this drug takes the antibiotic, turns on the production of these Yamanaka factors, and then theoretically, their eye cells will de-age, will Get youthful, and their vision will be restored. So phase one clinical trials underway, first time in human history, we’re seeing Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans, literally the tip of the iceberg. There are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by restoring The epigenome and cells and make them young again. So this is the beginning of a wave of what I think will be the most extraordinary revolution in human therapeutics, and ultimately could lead to you know some people would argue the fountain Chamath Palihapitiya Of youth is this just a talk study so is it mechanism yeah well they’ll see results they’ll see results but they’re gonna they’re gonna keep dosing low but you will see results god that’s David Friedberg Gonna be incredible it’s gonna be incredible by the way the number of other folks that are gearing up for phase one using if not the Yamanaka factors, other factors that they’ve identified Or designed as an alternative to Yamanaka factors, again, to rejuvenate the cells. And just to remind folks, the way this works is it was discovered that these proteins, when they go into a cell, they take all of those little markers that sit on top of your DNA that turn Genes on and off, and they create a system that causes them all to move to the right place. So it resets the markers so that those cells will start to operate like they’re supposed to when they were young again. It’s going to be incredible. Yeah. Jason Calacanis Do you think like, in all seriousness, people’s knees or joints or where do you think it could flow to next? Arthritis. David Friedberg Yep. And and by the way when applied and if it’s distributed in the skin they’ve seen some results in monkeys where like wrinkles go away it like literally makes these cells all work youthful Again and so a lot of the damage that happens over time is not damage to dna it’s damage to the epigenome it’s the parts that sit on top of the dna that genes on and off, and they get moved to The wrong place as you get older. And by resetting them and getting them back to the right place, boom, the cell is young again, the organ is young again, and suddenly you look and act and feel young again. It’s an incredible technology. We’re just at the early stages, the early innings of turning it into therapeutics. (Time 1:04:01)
  • Court Loss Doesn’t End Tariff Agenda
    • SCOTUS struck down Trump’s emergency tariff authority but left alternate legal routes and political momentum intact.
    • David Sacks notes Section 122 invocation buys time and Kavanaugh’s dissent maps alternate statutory paths for future tariffs. Transcript: Jason Calacanis SCOTUS struck down Trump’s emergency powers tariffs. Last Friday, SCOTUS voted 6-3 against President Trump’s YEPA tariffs. Six judges voted against. Three conservatives, Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, and three liberals via Bloomberg. This is the biggest rebuke of existing executive policy in 91 years since SCOTUS struck down FDR’s first New Deal in 1935. UPenn, Wharton Analysis, says the tariffs collected, about $175 billion to date, 50% of all tariff duties, might wind up being refunded. This is going to take some time to sort out in the courts. 2,000 importers have already filed for refunds. We talked about it here. I think the majority of people felt like this is the way the decision would go. And we talked about here that there were other options for President Trump to pursue. He immediately said he was not deterred and invoked a 15% global tariff across the board via section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. Here’s your poly market. Will the court force Trump to refund tariffs? 18% chance, but spiked to 40% after the SCOTUS decision. How will Congress react? Poly says 3% chance Congress passes any tariffs by March 31st. So again, as I referenced earlier, these two sides just can’t seem to work together, and that would have resolved the whole thing. Saks, you want to give us your take here? David Sacks First of all, I don’t think that the tariffs are going away. What the court basically indicated, especially the 70-page Kavanaugh dissent, is that there’s multiple alternative bases in law for the tariffs in existing law. So for example, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 enables temporary 150-day tariffs of up to 15% to address balance of payments issues. And the president has already invoked this. So we are now operating under that. What the 150 days is going to do is by the administration time to substantiate via studies and agency reviews what it needs to prove in order to invoke more sweeping tariff authority Under Section 301 of the Trade Act and under Section 338 of the Tariff Act. Section 301 authorizes tariffs responding to unfair foreign trade practices. Section 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs against countries discriminating against U.S. Commerce. The Kavanaugh dissent actually provided a roadmap for the administration to put in place tariffs using one of these alternate bases. So I think that one way or another, the tariff policies of this administration and the favorable trade deals that they allow us to strike with many nations, they will continue. And I think the court seems to know that because the majority’s opinion as concurrences collectively said nothing about how the administration should go about refunding the tariff Revenue already collected. I think that if they expected this decision to end the tariff policies altogether, they probably would have said something about that. And I think that brings up a really important point just on the merits here, which is why would we want to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to a bunch of importers when we’re trillions Of dollars in debt? And I’ll just say that the people who originally predicted that somehow these tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy, those predictions all prove not to be true. So I think that this is ultimately, I think, going to be a popular policy. The administration will figure out a different way to do it. (Time 1:10:17)
  • Court Independence Boosts Institutional Trust
    • A nonpartisan Supreme Court decision against an allied president can restore faith in checks and balances.
    • David Friedberg applauds the court’s independence after ruling 6–3 against Trump’s emergency tariff power. Transcript: David Friedberg Feel assured and comforted in the fact that i think a lot of people view the supreme court as having a high degree of partisanship. The fact that the president, despite having a majority of what others would think were kind of politically aligned appointees on the court, had a ruling that he did not want, I think Should give everyone good faith that the system that the founders set up is working, that there is a judicial branch that adjudicates the law against the executive branch when they Think that it doesn’t map. And I think that that was very important to see. So, you know, I clearly, the debate about tariffs, the economic effect of tariffs, the security structural trade relationship effect of tariffs, and the importance of that is a separate Conversation. But I do think that the read of the law being what I would say is nonpartisan with respect to the court’s action is important and probably very valuable. Jason Calacanis I’ll reiterate that. This is a great moment, I think, for the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful decision. And I think we need to think about executive power a whole bunch, whether it’s Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs. We have this beautiful system set up by the founding fathers. I know it’s frustrating. Gridlock’s frustrating. Having to work together is frustrating. Trust me, we all come to this podcast every Thursday. We have to work together. It’s hard to work together. You’ve got to learn to work together. And we don’t want an executive branch that can unilaterally just roll over the other branches. And that’s going to end. (Time 1:15:50)