OpenAI’s Identity Crisis, Datacenter Wars, Market Up on Iran News, Mamdani’s First Tax, Swalwell Out

Summary

The full core four are back, with Friedberg sitting “next door to David Sacks” — not doxxed, the besties insist, because Ken Griffin’s address has been public since the marketing materials. The opening is a meditation on Mamdani-style mansion taxes, London’s non-dom collapse, San Francisco and LA’s transfer-tax dry spells, and pied-à-terre culture. Sacks frames the macro point — when a city loses the rule of law and adopts arbitrary taxes, capital simply flees to the next jurisdiction. Chamath disagrees on aesthetics (“I’m not a big fan of pied-à-terre culture”), but agrees on the structural risk to New York.

The center of gravity is the OpenAI-vs-Anthropic flip in secondary markets, Anthropic now priced higher despite OpenAI’s rumored $850B valuation. Codex is “really good” but the besties argue OpenAI must isolate consumer and enterprise to avoid context switching. Compute is the choke point: Elon’s Colossus is going to 555,000 GPUs, Meta’s Prometheus to 150,000, and Elon just struck a hyperscaler-style deal with Crusoe to rent capacity. Maine just banned data-center construction outright, 40% of contested data centers are being canceled, and Chamath calls Allbirds’ insane 450% rally a canary signal — “we are absolutely compute constrained.” For Anthropic and OpenAI, “it’s a five-alarm fire” to lock down land, power, shell, and chips.

The back half: Eric Swalwell drops out of California’s gubernatorial race in a Biden-2024-style coordinated retreat; Sacks reads the text-message coordination across the Democratic establishment. Chamath delivers the lasting line — “Nancy Pelosi, Stan Druckenmiller, and Warren Buffett are three of the most accomplished investors of all time” — and refuses to back off on his Buffett-pre-vs-post-Reg-FD analysis. The episode closes with The Price David Sacks Is Wrong gameshow (Bored Apes, Allbirds, Theranos) and Friedberg’s deflating verdict on agentic investing: agents on Kalshi and Polymarket “are just not that smart yet” — they have no taste, can’t do anything novel, and require human-in-the-loop.

Highlights

”I’m Not a Big Fan of Pied-à-Terre Culture”

“I’m not a big fan of the pied-à-terre culture. I own one house. I don’t like this whole multiple houses you’re flitter-fluttering everywhere. It ruined London.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 4:25

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Anthropic Flips OpenAI in Secondary Markets

“Growth is king right now in this segment. Growth is the whole damn thing. And if Anthropic is growing faster than OpenAI by a significant clip, the investors right now are going to play it forward.” — David Sacks, 15:58

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”Five-Alarm Fire” on Compute

“I think if you play this out, the real problem again goes back to Anthropic and OpenAI. If I were them, it is a five-alarm fire for them.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 42:22

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Pelosi vs Buffett: Three of the Greatest Investors

“Buffett, Stan Druckenmiller, and Nancy Pelosi are three of the most accomplished investors of all time.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 1:09:19

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”Trump’s Weather Vane Is the Stock Market”

“Trump’s weather vane is the stock market. Like we see vol is up, we see… He gets people nervous, he makes moves, and then he comes back to sort of reality and gets things done.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 1:14:45

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Key Points

• Friedberg next-door to Sacks (0:16) — Pod recorded together in adjacent units
• Ken Griffin doxxing dispute (2:18) — Friedberg: address publicly known since marketing
• Mamdani mansion-tax dog whistle (2:41) — Jason flags risk in week of Molotov cocktail incidents
• Bernie Sanders reverse-it test (3:00) — Jason: imagine GOP outside Sanders’ second home
• Sacks: capital-flight thesis (3:34) — Demand killed by uncertainty over future tax rates
• London non-dom collapse (9:15) — Crippled the parking-asset advantage; capital fled
• LA/SF mansion-tax structures (9:55) — 5-6% transfer taxes on $5M+ properties; volume dried up
• OpenAI/Anthropic compute flywheel (17:07) — Network effects from data scale and reinforcement learning
• Sam closing $120B round (18:25) — OpenAI’s fundraising machine continues
• Codex praised (15:12) — Friedberg: separate consumer and enterprise teams
• Google/DeepMind/xAI/Meta (21:14) — Sacks lays out the contender field
• Anthropic All-In takeover joke (21:51) — Polymarket “37% chance of buying” by year-end
• Anthropic exponential cap (25:26) — Friedberg: even at $80-100B, can’t grow exponentially forever
• Colossus to 555K GPUs (30:30) — Three buildings, $18B
• Prometheus 150K GPUs (30:30) — Meta’s 2026 cluster
• Elon-Crusoe hyperscaler deal (30:39) — Renting out spare capacity
• Maine bans data centers (42:00) — Statewide construction halt
• 40% of data centers canceled (50:40) — More than doubled this year
• Allbirds up 450% (39:13) — WallStreetBets meme; canary in compute coal mine
• Jane Street’s neoscaler bet (39:27) — $1B head-scratcher transaction
• Swalwell out + Congress (59:41) — Resigned from Congress as well
• Biden-style coordinated drop (1:05:08) — Sacks compares to debate-night text-message hot-swap
• Buffett pre-/post-Reg FD (1:09:36) — Chamath defends his bimodal-returns thesis
• Trump’s market weathervane (1:14:45) — Vol forces him back to pragmatism
• Agents investing on Kalshi/Polymarket (1:25:32) — Friedberg: agents have no taste, must be human-in-the-loop
• The Price David Sacks Is Wrong (55:01) — Bored Apes ($13B), Allbirds, Theranos round

Mentions

Companies

• OpenAI (15:23) — $850B valuation; Codex; lost to Anthropic in secondary
• Anthropic (15:23) — Now higher in secondary; growth king
• xAI / Colossus (30:21) — 555K GPUs across 3 buildings
• Meta / Prometheus (30:30) — 150K GPUs
• Crusoe (30:39) — Renting Elon’s spare capacity
• Google / DeepMind (21:14) — Outstanding team in the race
• Allbirds (39:13) — 450% rally, $14 share price
• Jane Street (39:27) — $1B neoscaler investment
• Bored Ape Yacht Club (55:41) — $13B JPEG company in game show
• Theranos (1:27:58) — Game show finale
• Polymarket / Kalshi (1:25:32) — Agentic-investing platforms
• Alpha School (54:32) — Education success Chamath cites

Products & Technologies

• Codex (15:12) — OpenAI’s enterprise lever
• Reinforcement learning (17:37) — Compute flywheel input
• Reg FD (1:09:36) — SEC fair-disclosure rule

People

• Mamdani (2:41) — NYC mansion-tax author
• Ken Griffin (2:18) — Subject of pied-à-terre tax debate
• Sam Altman (18:18) — $120B round in flight
• Dario Amodei (21:53) — Anthropic CEO joke target
• Elon Musk (30:21) — Colossus + Crusoe deal
• Mark Zuckerberg (30:30) — Prometheus build
• Eric Swalwell (59:41) — Out of governor race
• Joe Biden (1:05:13) — Drop-out parallel
• Nancy Pelosi (1:09:19) — Investor-of-all-time framing
• Warren Buffett / Stan Druckenmiller (1:09:19) — Investing GOATs
• Trump (1:14:45) — Market weathervane
• Allen Keating (1:15:44) — Poker antagonist of Chamath
• Travis Kalanick (0:00) — “King of atoms” intro joke

Surprising Quotes

“I’m not a big fan of the pied-à-terre culture. I own one house. … It ruined London.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 4:25

“I have no idea, for example, what they’re doing buying a podcast.” — David Sacks on OpenAI’s strategy, 21:29

“I think if you play this out, the real problem again goes back to Anthropic and OpenAI. If I were them, it is a five-alarm fire for them.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 42:22

“Buffett, Stan Druckenmiller, and Nancy Pelosi are three of the most accomplished investors of all time.” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 1:09:19

“The agents are what you… you have to be human-in-the-loop with the agent. The agent has no taste. The agent can do repetitive tasks.” — David Friedberg, 1:25:54

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We’ve got the core four here and dare I say the king of atoms, the king of atoms, yes. Captain Travis Kalanick is here. How are you doing brother?

David Friedberg: 0:16 I’m pretty good, pretty good. I’m sitting here doing the podcast just next door to David.

Jason Calacanis: 0:22 Ha, yes. There you go.

David Sacks: 0:24 Don’t reveal our locations.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 0:25 Please don’t dox.

David Friedberg: 0:26 I didn’t put my address out there, dude.

David Sacks: 0:28 No, that’s true.

Jason Calacanis: 0:29 Don’t worry, Mondummy did. He’s outside your house right now, asking them to foreclose on it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 0:36 I’m trying to collect 3.9% or something.

Jason Calacanis: 0:40 Yeah, he decided there’s no rich people left in New York, so he’s looking for other cities to tax.

David Friedberg: 0:42 So is it, is it 3.9% a year? Is it per year or is it one time?

David Sacks: 0:45 I don’t know if the percentage has been released yet, but the speculation I’ve seen is 3.9%, but I don’t think that’s final. But yeah, it’s a pied-a-terre tax, so if you have a second home, yeah, every year.

David Friedberg: 0:57 Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 0:58 And by the way, it’s for any home over 5 million. There’s no homes under 5 million in Manhattan. This is not a rich person tax. This is within 15 miles of Midtown Manhattan, you’re paying an extra tax. I don’t know.

David Sacks: 1:12 But only, but J-Cal, only if it’s a pied-a-terre. So what it means is that the most elastic part of the market is what they’re targeting for this tax.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17 Well, it means second homes.

David Sacks: 1:18 Well, you have a—the most elastic part of the market is what they’re targeting for this tax. So in other words, people who don’t live in New York, who just have it as a second or third home, who could buy that property anyway, are now being taxed the most. So what do you think that’s going to do? It’s going to have a massive impact on demand for second homes in New York, which will crash the whole market.

Jason Calacanis: 1:38 Yes. Congratulations Mondummy.

David Friedberg: 1:40 But in a weird way, that’ll be good for housing affordability in New York.

David Sacks: 1:44 Well that, that’s sort of the claim, but I don’t think it’ll be good for it because there’ll be no incentive to build more.

David Friedberg: 1:50 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:52 All units matter. Every time you add units, people upgrade. And it’s not like these are going to be low income housing. Like a penthouse on 57th Street or, you know, in Gramercy, that’s not low income housing. You’d have to break it into seven units. Makes no sense. But by the way, I don’t know if you guys saw the video, not to get too serious, but he’s doxxing a certain billionaire who owns a certain place, and he’s literally pointing at his home.

David Friedberg: 2:18 No, I said that to you, Jason. He’s not doxxing because everybody’s known for years that Ken Griffin bought that place. Everybody knows that address. Everybody knows that unit. We all knew it. It was marketed widely. I don’t think that’s really doxxing. He doesn’t live there, and everybody knew he owned it. It would be very different if it was a place where somebody was keeping their primary residence and you didn’t know and they stood in front of the house. That I would agree with you. I think this one is a little bit more tenuous.

Jason Calacanis: 2:41 Okay, fair enough. But what I will tell you is it’s a dog whistle. Crazy people—and this thing’s been seen by 30, 40, 50 million people now—it’s a dog whistle to say, ‘That’s the next UnitedHealthcare CEO,’ and in the week that a fire, a Molotov cocktail and a bullet get shot into Sam Altman’s house, it’s deadly serious. And if you— First, I always reverse it. What if a Republican sat outside of Bernie Sanders’ second or third home and said, we should—this is his pied-à-terre, this is his summer home, we should add, you know, taxes to it, and I’m sure you could look up Bernie Sanders’ home pretty easily. So just before you point at people’s homes and say this is the villain, be careful folks, because then if something does happen to that person, like what happened to Sam Altman this week—you feel however you want about him, but nobody deserves to have their house firebombed or shot at, period, full stop.

David Sacks: 3:34 I just think that it’s going to kill the demand for, you know, maybe people who already have a home in New York like Ken Griffin, they probably are just going to suck it up and pay the tax and keep whatever they have. But if you were a person who was thinking about buying a pied-à-terre in New York, there’s no way you would do it now.

David Friedberg: 3:54 Yeah.

David Sacks: 3:55 Because you don’t know what the tax rate’s going to be, and it’s going to keep going up.

David Friedberg: 3:58 After a decade with interest and inflation, you’ve effectively almost doubled the price of your units. So if you’re going to buy a $10 million unit, you’re probably then looking at a $20 million purchase price just to break even after about 10 or 11 years. That’s crazy. The math doesn’t work anymore.

Jason Calacanis: 4:13 And what is the downstream effect of these individuals not coming to New York, going to a Knicks game, going to a restaurant?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 4:20 Nothing.

Jason Calacanis: 4:21 Nothing? They spend money in New York. They have their birthday party in New York. They do all kinds of things.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 4:25 I’m not a big fan of the pied-à-terre culture. I own one house. I don’t like this whole multiple houses you’re flitter-fluttering everywhere. It ruined London. Because when you look at London—

Jason Calacanis: 4:29 Chamath, where do you vacation?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 4:30 I go to a hotel.

Jason Calacanis: 4:32 Okay.

David Friedberg: 4:33 So my point is this, the way that it works is it’s not just pied-à-terre. If you—if you own a home that you fully rent out, but that is not the primary residence of the person who is renting it, it’s also a problem. So this is any, even like a two-week rental or one-week rental or a 30-day rental or even a five-year rental and it was somebody else’s second home, the owner still gets hit. So the rental, the sort of rentals of like folks who want to come to that city or who don’t want to own in that city, but it’s a second place. The second place thing goes away. So maybe this is just good for hotels.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 5:31 I think it’s good for hotels. But if you look at London, it’s probably the best example where there was a lot of people who used London as a place to store assets. Real estate became the primary way in which they would do that. It hollowed out parts of London where it’s not as if it was unlivable, it’s just that it was unlived. Nobody was there. You’d drive around Chelsea, you’d drive around certain parts of London and it was like a ghost town on like a Thursday night or a Friday night.

Jason Calacanis: 5:55 That is an issue, with the land banking. It’s like your Bitcoin is hollowing out a neighborhood.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 6:00 Good, and and there’s something there, but you know what the whole housing thing is complete cap and utter bullshit because if you move to a place like Austin or you are in Nevada or Florida, you see what happens when you allow people to build units. In Austin, three years in a row, rents and housing prices have gone down while net migration has gone up.

Jason Calacanis: 6:23 But that’s been good, right, for Austin, you guys would say? Net good?

David Friedberg: 6:26 Incredible. Amazing.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 6:28 Austin has like roughly doubled as a city over the past decade and yet the rent for, you know, whatever a one or two bedroom apartment’s gone down.

Jason Calacanis: 6:32 Down? That’s incredible.

David Sacks: 6:33 In other words, if you let people build to satisfy the demand you won’t have this problem.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 6:40 And then who’s stopping the building? It’s Democratic cities, it’s NIMBY people, and then in a Republican town, they’re actually building units for affordability. So you have one group saying they care about affordability and they’re doing nothing about it and they’re stopping it. And in another place, they’re like, we’re just going to let you build because it’s your right to build because it’s your land. That’s the approach in Texas. It’s your land, you have the right to develop it, go.

Jason Calacanis: 6:58 By the way, the high end of the market in London has basically turned over and collapsed. Sacks, to your point, like they introduced the stamp tax, which I think is equivalent to this tax that the New York City mayor is proposing. And if you look at London as a guide, the real estate market just bit it at the high end.

David Sacks: 7:14 I don’t think that’s going to be good for that city or even the UK as a whole. There’s a handful of cities where people do what you say, which is kind of park money there.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 7:21 The reason why they do that is because they believe that that city A has the rule of law and B is a unique world-class city that’s going to keep appreciating.

David Sacks: 7:31 And if you have new management that doesn’t really believe in the rule of law that basically keeps imposing all these arbitrary taxes, that money is going to flee and find other kinds of investments. People aren’t going to park their money there. That has to be a bad thing for the city. It’s like, you know, who cares if the top floor of that building where Ken Griffin lives is owned by one guy who isn’t there that much?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 7:46 It’s not going to affect the city that much, but having all these billionaires from all over the world decide to park money in that American city has to be good for the US.

David Friedberg: 7:53 Just like it’s good for the UK. And if you give that up, then again, the money will just go somewhere else.

Jason Calacanis: 7:58 Well, to your point, the other thing is they’re already paying taxes on the property. And because they’re not there very often, they’re not using city services.

David Friedberg: 8:08 So they’re paying taxes on the property, they’re not using city services.

Jason Calacanis: 8:11 They’re profitable to the city. Yeah.

David Friedberg: 8:14 Think about a developer who’s underwriting some new project, you know, the fact that a whale like Ken Griffin is going to overpay in the sense of price per foot for that top floor might make that whole project pencil and this is what contributes to the vitality of New York is there’s constantly development going on, there’s constantly cranes and so you take out that part of the market that in effect… that was price insensitive and was subsidizing all these projects and I think development’s going to dry up to a large degree.

Jason Calacanis: 9:09 He’s paying, he must be paying three or four million in taxes every year and getting no services to your point Travis, good point like all profit for the city.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 9:15 London also did something else which is that they essentially crippled what’s called non-dom status, which is the big tax orb if you moving or parking assets in London. And to your point Sacks, what did all the rich people do? They just redirected themselves to Zurich, to Lugano, to Milan and they they took advantage of more hospitable tax policy in other places. Now, what the people in Britain would tell you, I actually met with the UK government yesterday. They don’t see a meaningfully enough measurable impact yet where they think it’s a five alarm fire. So the real question is is it more of a slow bleed and a slow melt and at some point it’s just hollowed out and it’s very hard to reverse because there’s not going to be a cataclysmic acute moment where people say oh my god we need to reverse these policies. It doesn’t seem like that’s in the offing.

David Friedberg: 9:55 You know, LA did something a little different but similar is they introduced that 5% mansion tax that’s on like all the areas except for like Beverly Hills and…

Jason Calacanis: 10:13 San Francisco has that too.

David Friedberg: 10:16 Yeah, San Francisco got that too. I think it’s actually like 6%. In San Francisco, it’s 6% over 25 million and it starts at 5 million. So there’s a transfer tax, an excess transfer tax above $5 million property that scales up above 25 million to an extra 6% on top of your brokerage commission. So when you sell a house in San Francisco, you’re paying 13% now.

David Sacks: 10:42 Which is why you look at the transaction volume in the LA real estate market and it’s just completely dried up. You know, people aren’t doing the house flipping anymore, like that kind of stuff, because the transaction costs are too high. But it just shows, I mean again, this tax was imposed retroactively. For example, I had my house in SF and then they just take, you know, a couple of rooms of it, and we talked about this on the show in an app. But my my point is just your property is not safe in blue states and wealthy people who have a choice of where to park their money are going to increasingly realize that and they’re not going to buy I think real estate in blue states is dangerous because the political class thinks that they can take a chunk of it. And you know, wealthy people are going to react to that and they’re going to move their money elsewhere.

Jason Calacanis: 11:26 All right, let’s go to topic number one, OpenAI is apparently suffering from a bit of an identity crisis on Sunday OpenAI’s chief revenue officer Denise Dresser sent a four-page memo to employees, obviously it leaked immediately, probably the point of it. And she called out Anthropic. She said their 30 billion dollar run rate is cap, inflated by eight billion due to a revenue share and some accounting with AI model providers, Chamath you pointed that out in the last couple of weeks. Also, she said Anthropic’s story is built on quote, fear restriction and the idea that a small group of elites should control… AI, obviously she’s a fan of the pod. She also laid out OpenAI’s pivoting and she said they are going hard after business customers and they want to win the agent platform layer. If you remember they hired the architect of the open-source project OpenClaude, they didn’t acquire OpenClaude, so Peter Steinberger is working at OpenAI. Cynical people said hey maybe they want his next set of innovations to go inside of OpenAI’s products as opposed to the open-source one. I kind of agree with that directionally. Obviously Perplexity computer is doing really well, they quadrupled their revenue. And I was over at xAI earlier this week with Elon, I can tell you he’s got some very cool stuff coming. And this new model Spud is coming from OpenAI. Here’s your Polymarket 75% chance Spud is released next week. Additionally and we’ll go to the panel in just a second. On Tuesday, two days after this memo came out, obviously people write these memos to go directly to the press, so they’re obviously trying to undercut Anthropic’s valuation and they feel that’s the threat. That’s my take. The FT cited anonymous OpenAI investors who are frustrated with the company’s lack of focus. Here’s the anonymous quote, ‘Quote, you have ChatGPT a 1 billion user business growing 50 to 100 percent a year. What are you doing talking about enterprise and code? It’s a deeply unfocused company.’ And we talked about this, ChatGPT’s market share is going down as the number of users is going up because Gemini and Claude gaining significantly and Meta just last week released their first proprietary model and Apple doesn’t have a product in market yet but they do have a lot of users. So here’s your Gen AI website traffic. Let’s start Chamath with you, your thoughts on OpenAI. Should they be pivoting straight into business, developers, and getting focused on that or should they stay focused on the consumer where they are the verb?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 13:54 As it relates to complex long horizon coding tasks, what I can tell you from my team at 8090 is Codex is better generally than Anthropic. And so what happens is for the more day-to-day work, I think it’s more reliable to use the Claude ensemble of models, but when you’re dealing with something that’s very tricky and very complicated and a little bit more long horizon, Codex is really functional and really good. So I think if you’re looking at it through the lens of OpenAI, what they’re probably saying is hey hold on a second, if we allocate resources and just double down and crush consumer, that’s probably three or four trillion of enterprise value, and then if we slowly refocus the company with the rest of the resources and double down on Codex and do something meaningful in enterprise, we can probably capture two or three trillion there and now all of a sudden you can paint a picture for a seven, eight, nine trillion dollar market cap in the fullness of time, not tomorrow obviously.

David Friedberg: 15:12 But Codex is really good and there’s a business to be had in both. You have to separate the two businesses. You can’t have a lot of overlap because there’s too much context switching. You gotta let the consumer team run and then you gotta isolate the enterprise team and let them do what they think is right.

Jason Calacanis: 15:23 Travis, there was a big debate going on amongst the investors. The FT piece also questioned the $850 billion valuation of OpenAI. Secondary markets have now priced Anthropic higher than OpenAI for the first time. This is the flipping in that people predicted. One investor said OpenAI would need to IPO at a valuation of $1.2 trillion for the last round to make any sense, but there’s no buyers currently at the $850 billion valuation that OpenAI just closed according to Bloomberg. Travis, how do you handicap this race between these two, meaning frontier models?

David Sacks: 15:58 Growth is king right now in this, in this world, in this segment. Growth is the whole damn thing. And if Anthropic is growing faster than OpenAI by a significant clip, the investors right now are going to play it forward. And they, you know, you start to get network effects around compute, network effects around the number of tokens you’re pushing out for various customers, enterprise or consumer. And ultimately, you know, it’s not great today, but how that plays into reinforcement learning and the things getting smarter over time, there’s so many, there’s so much upside to volume and scale that if they are growing faster at the same size, even if OpenAI’s still growing, but if they are half the growth rate, a third the growth rate, a fifth the growth rate, I’d be worried.

Jason Calacanis: 16:57 And you saw this at Uber specifically when you accelerated away from the competitors like Lyft and DoorDash, yeah?

David Sacks: 17:07 Yeah, you had to. Network effects was the whole thing at the end of the day. And network effects was based on scale. So yes, I’m sort of like coming from my very specific experience. But if you believe there’s network effects with the scale of data that you have and the scale of customers and the revenue that is cash that’s coming in that you redeploy into compute, and so say there’s network effects of large compute… I’d be very worried if I’m OpenAI and seeing somebody growing faster at the same size.

Jason Calacanis: 17:37 So Friedberg, when you look at this race between these two giants, maybe your thoughts on the flywheel as it relates, as Travis is pointing out, to advantages in compute, reinforcement learning, and then also the ability to fundraise. One of the great things that Travis and the team did was as they were pulling away, they just sucked all the oxygen out of the room. using capital as a weapon. So your thoughts, Dave, on this high-stakes game. Because there’s also a point at which, and I’ll just end on this, there’s a point at which you could run off the cliff. You raise so much money and you deploy it so fast and the revenue doesn’t catch up to it, and then you go public and the markets don’t believe the story. So your thoughts, Friedberg.

David Friedberg: 18:18 I don’t know the financials of the two companies well enough. Obviously, Sam has no problem raising money. The guy, didn’t he just close like a $150 billion round or something?

David Sacks: 18:25 120.

Jason Calacanis: 18:26 122 billion.

David Friedberg: 18:28 Largest round ever raised in any market, I think, private or public.

Jason Calacanis: 18:31 Yeah, probably.

David Friedberg: 18:32 Yeah. I mean, that’s crazy.

David Sacks: 18:34 Even public, yeah.

David Friedberg: 18:35 So that doesn’t seem to be an issue. What I’ve noticed is just the pace of innovation at Anthropic is, from my experience, unprecedented. I mean, their release cadence is extraordinary. They’ve basically supplanted OpenAI already with this release they did a few days ago, and then today the new Opus model got dropped. So there’s something about the momentum, not necessarily just in user growth, but in how they’re operating this business, that just seems to be head and shoulders above everyone else in the cadence of upgrades. If I look back six months ago, I think we were pretty heavy on Cursor and Gemini, and now I think we’re probably 90% Anthropic in just the last six months in my organization. There’s something very powerful about the flywheel they have going on.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 19:25 Yeah, but here’s where I’d go, just real quick, Dave, is mad respect on a 120 or 130 billion dollar raise. I mean, this is obviously next level. But you can use capital and investment to acquire scale and network effects associated with it. But if somebody is getting that scale with revenue and let’s call it contribution margin, contribution profit, efficiency will outstrip subsidy. And you can’t just keep raising hundred billion dollar things forever. That’s where the training wheels stop. And if Anthropic is funding theirs through revenue and other folks are funding it through investment, there’s a short-term solve, but the long run is whoever is scaling their actual usage and system and ultimately with contribution profit that then soaks up the need for investment, that’s a very scary machine if you’re competing against it.

Jason Calacanis: 20:30 Which is exactly, Sacks, what the legacy Mag 7 are doing. You have massive profits from Meta’s core business, Google’s core business, that are being redeployed into infrastructure. And even Tesla, which has a lot of profits, and SpaceX, which has a lot of cash on hand, and they’re building out Colossus and other assets. Including Elon is working on building a fab as folks have been talking about. So Sacks, is there a chance for… The legacy companies, the Mag 7s to compete in this, or are we looking at OpenAI and Anthropic are one and two and then everybody else can fight for third place and the bronze as it were?

David Sacks: 21:14 Well, I think Google’s clearly in the mix. I mean, DeepMind has an outstanding team, and I think Elon’s still in the mix with xAI, and then you’ve got Meta also has the resources. They seem to be further behind, but they’re going to compete. Look, let me just go back to the central premise here. I agree that there’s some valid criticism that OpenAI has been unfocused and should be, you know, moving forward, more focused in what they do. I have no idea, for example, what they’re doing buying a podcast.

Jason Calacanis: 21:51 That’s not us. So I don’t know what that was about. If you were going to buy a tech podcast for a few hundred million dollars, I mean, we were here. We’re here. We’re here for you, Dario. Reach out.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 22:00 Small potatoes for you guys though, small potatoes. They can’t afford you. They can’t afford you.

David Friedberg: 22:04 Yeah, they thought we were too expensive. Little did they know, we would have sold out.

Jason Calacanis: 22:08 Punch the ticket, Dario!

David Sacks: 22:13 But look, this other part of the criticism of OpenAI, that they shouldn’t do enterprise, is totally misguided. One of the reasons why they should have been more focused is to do more enterprise and get enterprise more correct. Now, why do I say that?

David Friedberg: 22:31 To Travis’s point about growth rates, it’s true that OpenAI and Anthropic, as of the beginning of Q2, so let’s say two weeks ago, they were both around 30 billion of revenue. And that memo from that OpenAI employee was right that if you compare them on an apples-to-apples basis, that Anthropic is about 20% less because they are including revenue made by their channel partners. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the growth rate, again, to Travis’s point. Let me just put some numbers around this. The OpenAI growth rate’s been around 3 to 4x a year. The Anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year. So they went from, let’s call it, 1 to 10 billion of ARR last year, and by the end of Q1 this year, they were already at 30 billion of, again, let’s call it their revenue. And they’re on their way, you know, like Brad Gerstner was saying on our podcast, I think in the last couple weeks, they’re going to end this year at 80 to 100 billion, at least on the current trajectory. And so you can plot their revenue on a logarithmic graph. I mean, again, no one’s ever seen anything like it before, where every unit on the y-axis is 10x and it’s a straight line.

Jason Calacanis: 23:46 Yeah, that’s crazy.

David Friedberg: 23:48 It’s crazy, right? So if it’s taking Anthropic let’s say one year to 10x and it’s taking OpenAI two years to achieve a 10x, then it’s obvious which one’s going to win. Now, what is the reason for this? It’s because Anthropic was very focused on…

Jason Calacanis: 24:00 Enterprise, specifically coding. And what you’re seeing is that businesses are willing to pay for coding, code tokens, on a metered basis, let’s call it like electricity. The more they use, the more they’re willing to pay. And their usage is continues to scale and scale. Consumer is completely different. I mean, consumer is a thing that OpenAI prioritize. Consumers have a lower willingness to pay. Maybe only three or four percent of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place. And what they want is a $20 a month, all you can eat subscription. So the revenue simply doesn’t scale the same way that enterprise does. And so if you want to tap into the scalable revenue source in the market right now, you have to go after enterprise. So, you know, again, where I would agree with the criticism of OpenAI is maybe they should have been more focused, but they need to be more focused specifically to pursue coding and enterprise. And if they don’t catch up soon, to Travis’s point, then you could see Anthropic take a lead here that, let’s say, over the next one or two years could be insurmountable.

David Friedberg: 25:26 Just by the way, let me just say, say one thing is even though Anthropic’s revenue has followed this graph, this exponential growth very predictably, it can’t do that forever, right? Like, let’s say it does get to 80 to 100 billion this year. Can it really get to a trillion dollars in revenue the year after that? Seems hard to believe, right? And the reason is because as you hit new levels of scale, you encounter new problems. I mean, you’re simply going to run out of compute or electricity, data centers, you know, infrastructure. There are physical limits, or there’s limits in the physical world that you’re going to hit. And there’s already some evidence that Anthropic is hitting some of those limits. Users were complaining, for example, that Claude was thinking less. Did you guys see this? That, you know, a typical Claude prompt, they, they seem to have cut down on the thinking time by about two-thirds. Now I saw someone tweeting today that they just released Opus 4.7, replacing Opus 4.6, and the thinking is back. But, you know, maybe they’re charging more for that, hard to say. But they’re going to hit some sort of physical limits, and I do wonder if over the next year Anthropic will reconsider whether its support for all this like doomer nimbyism was the right call? Because it kind of made sense for them from a business standpoint when their competitors were building data centers and they were just getting compute from the hyperscalers. But now that they’re, I think, going to have to move into the game of building their own data centers, they might regret salting the earth for data centers all over the country. And I wonder if that’ll be the natural limit of their growth is they’ll be hoisted on their own petard of doomer nimbyism. And they’re also using the coding platform to build Anthropic itself better. So that in and of itself is a reason to now coding, you get the double whammy, you can make a better product and you can get paid for it.

Jason Calacanis: 26:56 Yes and no, hold on, because if you look in Twitter, people are panning Claude Desktop, and what they said is…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 27:00 This is all a bunch of vibe coded slop. I think we have to remember, if you keep these agents on task and they’re guardrailed properly, this stuff is a force multiplier. The problem is, nobody knows how to do this really well yet. Nobody has built real products of scale, largely using agents yet. Nobody knows how to give an example of how an org structure should be redefined. Nobody knows how to budget properly. We had the CTO of Uber say, I give up, I’ve hit my token budget. The problems I see it are twofold. The first is just to build on Sacks’s point, all of these frontier labs have a very serious issue, which is both OpenAI and Anthropic are growing so fast that they’re at a point now where they need their own infrastructure. It’s kind of like when you first start building any kind of company, you’re just much easier renting capacity from the hyperscalers.

David Sacks: 27:53 And it’s a dependency, yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 27:55 But then it becomes a dependency, exactly. And now when you’re so big, it’s actually strategically a huge mistake to not have your own compute supply. Why? Because if you look at who’s leading, the frontier labs are leading. And Sacks, to your point, you mentioned this on X, you’re like, there was all this doomerism, but maybe it was tied to compute capacity, because when Bedrock opened up more capacity for Anthropic, all the doomerism went away. You’re left wondering, like, is it really tied to just the fact that they were just trying to throttle usage? So if you’re a frontier lab, you don’t want to have to go through Amazon and GCP and Azure and tin cup for access and capacity. What you’d much rather have is go straight to your customer. On the other side, if you’re Gemini or Microsoft or Meta and you have all this compute, because I saw a stat this week, the hyperscalers control 60% of all the compute. So the game theory there is if you knee-cap the frontier labs, it’ll give you some chance to catch up. And it gives you time to catch up, because no matter what the demand is on the upside, you remember you guys remember like in social networking when Friendster was the cat’s meow?

Jason Calacanis: 28:41 Yeah. Cat’s meow.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 28:42 Cat’s meow.

Jason Calacanis: 28:43 Yeah, cat’s meow.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 28:44 Remember what the biggest problem at Friendster was?

Jason Calacanis: 28:45 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 28:46 Friendster was slow as a dog.

David Friedberg: 28:47 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 28:47 Yes.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 28:48 And what happened? Then Myspace came in and took all the share, then we came in, Facebook, and we took all their share. So there is a way where you can handicap and knee-cap these companies by throttling compute access to them. So A, they are forced to now go and get in the game, which is weird because, look, OpenAI has tried to displace some of the Stargate spend. I don’t see any path except they’re going to have to do it themselves, and Anthropic will have to do it themselves. But then separately, the other problem is, when you change the subscription model in enterprise and you say, hey, we’re not going to subsidize anymore tokens, what’s going to happen is all these token budgets are going to go crazy and what Friedberg said is going to happen where he’s like, ‘Hey guys, why are you spending all this money? What are you making?’ And you inspect the code and you’re like, ‘What is this slop?’ And you’re not going to add 30, 40, 50% OpEx… It produced nothing. So I think that that’s an open question and that question will become more amplified over the next year as they push the cost off of them. So as Travis said, no more subsidy from the capital. You have to grow into it, but you’re not going to support negative gross margins, so you’re going to pass through the token costs. So I think it’s a very dynamic moment right now for these models.

David Friedberg: 30:21 And if you look at the ranking of these clusters and who has the most, right now, people have forgotten about Colossus, which Elon’s been building.

Jason Calacanis: 30:30 He’s expanding to 555,000 GPUs across three buildings, 18 billion in investment. And then if you look at Prometheus, Meta’s planned 2026, that’s 150,000 GPUs. So this is…

David Sacks: 30:39 Well, Elon just announced a deal. He announced a deal this morning with Crusoe. So Elon’s renting a bunch of capacity, so he’s now getting effectively into the data center business. He’s going to be a hyperscaler.

Jason Calacanis: 30:53 So he’s going to use as much as he can for xAI and whatever’s left over he’ll give to… well, in this case, he’s giving to Crusoe to train their model. He could give…

David Sacks: 31:03 So you’re saying is you might as well overbuild capacity because that way your own models will be in a privileged position and you can sell the rest to your competitors. 100%. But Chamath, to your point about the thing I was saying on X, I actually, I think I was retweeting Mark Andreessen, who pointed out that one of the reasons why Anthropic might have wanted to hold back Mythos is they simply didn’t have the compute to serve it. The model was huge and very expensive to serve, something like…

Jason Calacanis: 31:32 Maybe even 10 or 20 times the token cost of say Opus. They knew Opus 4.7 was coming out, right? So they hold it back knowing that they don’t have the compute to serve it anyway and they save their compute for the next iteration of Opus. And then by holding it back, they create this impression of scarcity and altruism and it turns into this gigantic marketing event for their product because everyone in the government’s like, oh wow, they’re holding it back because it’s so amazing. Now look, I think it may have been genuinely altruistic as well in the sense that Mythos does reveal coding vulnerabilities that people didn’t know about before. And, you know, it does make sense to give time to companies with large code bases to patch these dormant bugs and vulnerabilities. But it’s looking more and more like Anthropic could not have offered that model commercially anyway because it was just too big and expensive. And they need to create space for Opus 4.7. So it’s an interesting theory on what actually happened there.

David Friedberg: 32:32 All right guys, before we go to our next story, some breaking news here. Here’s your Polymarket, gentlemen. I don’t, I don’t know if you’re placing some insider bets here Friedberg, but looks like the All-In podcast Anthropic, now 37% chance of buying the All-In podcast. This is live from Polymarket.

Jason Calacanis: 32:51 By what time?

David Friedberg: 32:52 By end of the year.

Jason Calacanis: 32:53 By end of the year, okay, got it.

David Friedberg: 32:55 By end of the year so…

David Sacks: 32:56 This isn’t real, is it?

David Friedberg: 32:58 Yeah absolutely. They’ve been, people have been trading on this. This is heavily traded.

Jason Calacanis: 33:00 PEPE’s hit 92 million dollars of volume. Yeah, this is the number 3 largest volume market.

David Friedberg: 33:02 No way this is real, dude. There’s no way this is real.

Jason Calacanis: 33:06 Breaking news guys, I don’t control the news flow. This is J-Cal slop.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 33:08 This is no way this is real.

David Friedberg: 33:10 Anybody can create a prediction market I guess. Hey, what’s the volume of that thing?

Jason Calacanis: 33:15 92 million.

David Friedberg: 33:16 It’s not real. 92 million dollars behind it? There’s no way this is real, guys, come on.

Jason Calacanis: 33:20 Guys, it’s all good. Time to upgrade the planes. I just, hey guys, I don’t need the PC-24. I’ll take somebody’s G650, whoever’s got a G650, go up to the 800. It’s going to be trickle down to J-Cal. Let’s do it.

David Sacks: 33:27 Trickle down, trickle down economics.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 33:28 Trickle down avionics.

Jason Calacanis: 33:30 All right, listen. Story number 2, Allbirds. Speaking of data centers, Allbirds just pivoted from ugly sneakers to AI, and the stock has ripped. Talking about peak bubble behavior. Podcast being bought by frontier models and sneaker companies pivoting to data centers. Allbirds, as you know, is the ugliest sneakers on the planet, and this became a massive delusion in our industry that this company was worth billions of dollars. They went public in 2021, this might be one of the peak ZIRP moments, raised 350 million dollars in their IPO. Sacks, were you an investor in this thing?

David Sacks: 33:50 Allbirds? No.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 33:51 No, no, you’re thinking about the scooter company Bird.

David Sacks: 33:54 The scooter company Bird, that’s right. Don’t remind me of the investments that didn’t work. But no.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 33:56 Bird was crazy.

David Friedberg: 33:57 This reminds me of the late 90s where all you had to do was change your name to whatever dot com and you’d get a huge pop in your valuation.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 34:02 Yeah, yes.

David Friedberg: 34:04 And you can spin it out. Barnesandnoble.com became… and then Barnes and Noble, and so the stock crashed and never looked back. There’s your stock chart. They sold off all their brand assets for 39 million, about 10% of what they raised in the IPO. Congratulations to whoever owns those ugly ass sneakers.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 34:16 Why were they worth four billion? They sold sneakers.

Jason Calacanis: 34:18 Collective delusion, collective delusion. People in Silicon Valley liked them and they just thought it was the next Nike.

David Sacks: 34:21 Tulips. It was tulips.

David Friedberg: 34:22 All right, well I think that was an era in Silicon Valley where people rewarded rapid growth without really looking at gross margins or cost of goods sold. People didn’t really make the distinction between software and everything else, right? Where software, you never really had to worry about COGS or gross margin because the incremental cost of serving a customer with software is like almost zero. So people in Silicon Valley weren’t really trained to look at gross margin and then there was this rash of physical world companies that all of a sudden started getting crazy valuations. Travis, quite frankly, you might…

David Sacks: 36:00 The success of Uber might have ushered in this era of, you know, these physical world companies that started getting valued like software companies, even though obviously they didn’t deserve it.

Jason Calacanis: 36:10 David, thank you so much for that shoutout, I really appreciate it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 36:14 You and Airbnb. (Laughs)

David Friedberg: 36:16 Anyway, let’s get back to… no, no, no, hold on. The era of ‘21 is super interesting though, guys. I don’t believe it was a physical versus digital thing. I believe it was a moment in time in the COVID ZERP, massive money going in, we hadn’t seen inflation yet, it was all of that happening, and the investor class was basically deciding, ‘We’re going to look two and three years forward on your current growth.’ And it wasn’t one year forward, it was like two or three years forward, and that’s where these crazy valuations got weird. So if you went from 100 to $300 million in the last year, they’ll play that two, three years forward and go, ‘Oh yeah, you’re totally 20 times bigger. We’ll pay you for that now.’ That’s where it got weird.

Jason Calacanis: 36:46 It got weird. Hey, Bird scooters was valued at two or three billion. They were doing micro-mobility and…

David Friedberg: 36:54 You’re just trolling him, J.

Jason Calacanis: 36:56 I’m not, no, we’re giving everybody their flowers for incredible investments and Sacks, even the mighty Sacks could trip up. Did you sell any shares in the IPO?

David Sacks: 37:03 Well, that was a mystery day. Yeah. No, no, we don’t do that. It was a Series A we did. I mean, look, we got it right in the sense that it was a total phenomenon. But then the cities just cracked down on it and killed it. Look, if the cities had leaned into it, yeah, look, if the cities had reacted differently, if they had leaned into it, if they had created, let’s say, a scooter or like a small EV lane, it could have transformed cities. I mean, it would have been a lot easier to get around. But instead, they banned it, they limited it, they didn’t create designated areas for it, and then the coup de grâce was basically when they would take a city where Bird already had like 80% dominant market share, and then they would say that, ‘Well, we’re going to choose four operators and give them each 25% of say, a thousand scooter allocation,’ and that just killed the economics for everybody.

Jason Calacanis: 37:21 Yeah, there’s no market anymore.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 37:22 Yeah, there’s no market, yeah.

David Friedberg: 37:24 There was no marketplace network effect, right? When they’re basically just picking the winners and deciding the market share.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 37:27 Yeah, you can’t, you can’t compete and splitting it even so then all…

David Friedberg: 37:31 There’s no, there’s no competition, you can’t drive value.

David Sacks: 37:33 Regulatory capture at its worst.

David Friedberg: 37:36 Guys, like, we should watch for this in the autonomous car space too. Cities may get cute and start doing things like that, and…

David Sacks: 37:43 …and what they did on scooters, they could do on cars. Oh, yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah, you’re right. Instead of just letting the market play out, they say, ‘Well, we’re only going to have X number of thousand autonomous cars.’

Jason Calacanis: 37:54 New York is literally doing this right now. They’re doing medallions in New York and Boston fighting, and then the prices, prices go up, the innovation doesn’t get realized, consumers don’t benefit, no one benefits. Basically, you’ve deleted the market.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 38:03 Yes.

David Friedberg: 38:04 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 38:05 And anyway, just to wrap up this story on… The shoe company, they’re now Newbird AI, they bought eight H100s, I think, with $50 million in a convertible note. And—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 39:10 Not eight. Stop. Eight? Really? No, it’s not eight.

Jason Calacanis: 39:11 That was a joke, obviously. The stock’s now at $14 a share, it’s up 450% in the last week. Shout out to Wall Street Bets for staying—for staying solvent longer than the shorts can stay solvent.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 39:24 Can I say something serious?

Jason Calacanis: 39:27 Yes, please.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 39:27 There are a handful of transactions that have happened in the last few days that if you look far away are head-scratchers. So this is one. I don’t know if you guys saw recently but Jane Street did a billion-dollar investment in essentially a neoscaler and then also did a six-billion-dollar compute deal with them. That was like a little interesting. So, what would I like to say about this? I think the thing that the capital markets are getting right is that we are massively compute-constrained. Massively. And those are two problems. One is the power. So if you look at companies like Bloom Energy, it has gone absolutely straight up vertical, nuclear. And the reason is because Bloom has a solution that allows you to use nat gas, that allows you to do something on-site, and critically allows you to get your clean air permits very quickly because it has very, very little emission. And it’s been proven as such. And so instead of waiting for years to get on the grid, if you wanted to build a data center, you can now use their services. The other part that’s going absolutely nuclear is the actual land and the shell because it’s turned out it’s impossible to get these approvals. Now why is that? And I sent Nick an image. The reason is because underneath at the core of it all is there’s a tide that is shifting on AI. The American population is incrementally getting more and more negative on the whole subject matter writ large. And it’s not clear exactly why they’re doing that. Maybe it’s the doomism which we talked about last week, maybe it’s the fear of the job loss that Jason has been talking about, maybe it’s just this idea of yet another wave of innovation that’s only going to benefit a few in an extreme way, minting trillionaires all over the place while everybody else stands still. I don’t exactly know what’s causing it, but the sentiment is shifting. And as the sentiment shifts, the most scaled action that they can take, they’re taking, which is then they are going and voting down data centers. Here’s an example which was insane. A town approves a six-billion-dollar data center build, and then half the—the board gets ousted. Just voted out overnight so that they can put in new people to undo the decision. So if you look at this all around the country, the answer is not, ‘Oh, we’re only going to build in Texas.’ That doesn’t work. There is— Not enough power, there’s not enough grid capacity, there’s not enough nat gas that allows that to happen. Maine just passed the bill that bans all data center building. So, I think the reason why all birds went crazy is a very, very small canary in a very important coal mine, which is we are absolutely compute constrained. I think if you play this out, the real problem again goes back to Anthropic and OpenAI. If I were them, it is a five-alarm fire for them. They more than anybody else needs to get their hands on compute. They need to have land, power, shell, but otherwise that revenue could either slow down or hit a wall and it will not be because of product quality and adoption. It will entirely be because of the Friendster effect. You just couldn’t keep the site up. And I think that that would be a huge, huge problem for everybody.

Jason Calacanis: 42:52 Sacks, final thoughts on the data centers and the bill.

David Sacks: 42:54 Well, I think, I think Chamath is right that the, the data centers become very unpopular. Probably in 30 states there’s going to be ban them outright. And then it’s very hard to get projects approved. Look, I think there’s a few reasons for this. One is that there are a lot of, let’s call them real estate developers who are kind of wildcatters who are out there trying to get entitlements. And they did bring a lot of projects up for local permits where they didn’t have a power solution. And there’s no question that local communities do not want the data centers drawing off the grid, thereby increasing residential prices if that data center is not bringing its own power generation.

David Friedberg: 43:34 And the administration agrees with this. This is why the president did the ratepayer protection pledge where we got all the major users of the data centers, you know, all the hyperscalers to agree that they would not build new data centers without bringing their own power. So again, it was designed to be power neutral to the grid, or in fact, it would increase the amount of energy available to the grid because these data centers would give back when they’re not at peak usage. So that’s sort of like category number one is there’s this fear of electrical rates going up. But there’s a couple other categories I think of groups. So the second one was Future of Life and a lot of these like doomer groups saw that data centers were a way to stop AI progress. And there are interviews with some of these doomer folks who say things like we have to meet people where they are, meaning that they’ve been unable to convince people that AI’s going to lead to the terminator, but they can convince them that AI data centers are going to use up their water, for example, which isn’t true. And so the a lot of the NIMBYism has been kind of astroturfed by a lot of the doomer groups which have a lot of money thanks to contributions from a few tech billionaires like we’ve talked about in the past. So that’s category number two. Category number three, ironically, again, is Anthropic itself. It has aligned itself politically with a lot of the doomer groups, a lot of the NIMBY groups. It didn’t seem to matter in the first couple of years because Anthropic had made this strategic… strategic decision not to build its own data centers. So they probably thought that they were just throwing sand in the gears of OpenAI or XAI, their competitors, and they would just rely on hyperscalers to get their compute. And I think that strategy has now backfired in the sense that they apparently have reached the limits of the compute that’s available to them by buying it from a third party and they need to build their own data centers. It’s going to be very interesting to see how they adapt to that and how the message around data centers changes over the next year as those, let’s call it the effective altruists, decide that all of a sudden data centers or certain kinds of data centers might be a good thing because they serve their mission. So, I think that’s going to be a very interesting thing to watch.

Jason Calacanis: 45:44 I’ll tell you the one I think they’re missing, which is that most people in America really are starting to really hate rich people. And there’s no physical space that better represents the wealth in America, the wealth creation that’s happened that a lot of people feel left behind from, than the data center. What other physical space is there to go to? It is the temple of the wealthy. It is the mechanism, the tool, the machinery of the wealthy. It is the way that the rich elite tech kind of political connected billionaires that we’re obviously all attached to are taking from the poor, getting themselves ahead, shooting themselves to space, leaving everyone else behind, and the data center, I think, is the representation of their progress. And it is a representation of the progress that others don’t feel. So that’s why I think it is physically like the manifestation that people want to attack and destroy. There’s very little rationale about, oh, let’s stop AI robots from killing us. I think people just don’t see the value in AI. The average person doesn’t see the value in AI today yet. Like we just talked about, so much of the value of AI is showing up in the enterprise and in the rebuilding of enterprises. But for a consumer’s life to actually be altered in a meaningfully positive way, most people don’t feel that yet. The best thing they see is some medical advice they’re getting on ChatGPT or something, and that’s kind of the end of it for them. So I think there’s a lot of this populism that’s swollen and that’s taken over not just the US, but probably a good chunk of the West, and the data center is the target.

David Sacks: 47:22 It is the pied-à-terre of this space, in a way. This is their attack vector.

Jason Calacanis: 47:24 To David’s point, they’ll probably ban data centers in 30 states. Data centers can output and input at the speed of light, so they can be anywhere. I mean, you know, the reason you put data centers in different states is cheap power, low latency. So maybe you get a couple milliseconds of latency. So the data centers can go anywhere. So as soon as all the states start banning the data centers, the data centers will just go to space, to Iceland, to Texas…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 47:49 Nevada, Texas, and Florida.

Jason Calacanis: 47:52 And then everyone will be forced to move on, Travis. They’ll basically find the next target for populism, which will be something else. The pied-à-terre, the data center, what’s next?

David Sacks: 48:00 acts, you know, this is part of what’s going on right now where we’ve got this kind of level of debt from the— I always bring it back to this because I do think this is at the root cause of populism is the fact that the government promised so much, it’s so inefficient and as a result, it’s destroyed the value of the dollar not given anyone anything that they thought they were getting.

Jason Calacanis: 48:17 And we do have the ratepayer pledge, Sacks, to address the energy issue. That was a big win, I think, and you worked on that, I believe.

David Sacks: 48:25 Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 48:26 But hold on, can I just say something? I think the ratepayer pledge is important. It doesn’t change the business model of the utility. Meaning, what the utility is allowed to do is every year build a budget. And the way that they decide how to charge you is that they are allowed to make investments, right? And then they’re allowed to earn 10%, roughly, on the amount of investment that they make. What do you think their incentive is? Their incentive is to find ways to keep investing and upgrading the infrastructure. So I suspect what you’ll see is independent of what the data centers do on site, which I think is smart and good, and I’m glad you guys did that, it doesn’t slow down the actual fundamental business model of the utility because those are local monopoly licenses that are granted at the state and county level. And so when you go inside and you look at those utilities, what they’re allowed to do is say, well, I’m going to bury the lines underground because there’s a wildfire threat. That’s going to cost 10 billion and they present that, the PUC has to say yes, and they’re allowed to make 10% on 10 billion. So the business model of the utility has to be looked at because it is independent of all of these other things and they have an incentive, like insurance companies, to just walk prices up over time.

David Sacks: 49:46 It’s true. That’s why I think the behind-the-meter is so, so important there, for sure.

David Friedberg: 49:50 But look, I mean, this idea that data centers don’t create jobs is just wrong. I mean, it’s been a huge boon for blue-collar jobs in the construction industry.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 50:00 While they’re building the data center.

David Friedberg: 50:01 Yeah, but that construction could be a wave that goes on for a decade or two decades. I mean, the capex is not going down, it’s increasing. Listen to, for example, what Jensen says about his projections. I mean, it’s not like the capex is a one-year thing. We’re seeing tens of thousands of new construction jobs being created and 25 to 30% higher wages for electricians, carpenters, the guys who hang drywall or pour concrete, create roads, install equipment. I mean, these are blue-collar jobs and it’s creating, again, not just new jobs but also wage increases. It’s a good thing. It’s not a bad thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 50:34 It’s not a bad thing, but it’s not the same as a fab where the jobs are permanent and they’re there, we can debate it all we want.

Jason Calacanis: 50:40 I don’t… you can… there’s about 100 data centers right now that are being contested. The data is for every 100 that are contested, about 40 get canceled. That number is increasing for this year, it’s more than doubled already from what the number was last year. And the total economic value of those 100 data centers right now is about $162 billion.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 51:00 the thing is is that there are permanent jobs because what where’s the energy that’s powering that? Where’s the semiconductors that’s powering that? You know, there’s a lot of

Jason Calacanis: 51:11 We actually had Chase from Crusoe and Michael from CoreWeave on the All-In interview show and they said they’re bringing energy with them. That’s their big thing. BYOE, bring your own energy to the space. They’re bringing in NatGas, they’re bringing in diesel fuel, they’re bringing in solar. BYOE is the new model.

David Sacks: 51:30 Well, can I also say, listen, if you were of the opinion that you didn’t want more data centers in America because it was using up, say, scarce energy resources or something like that, but you weren’t just anti-progress altogether, then what you would want to do is at least see more data center construction among US allies, right? Energy-rich US allies. Well, a year ago, that’s one of the things I worked on was allowing the Gulf states to build data centers with American technology for American companies. And remember the controversy that caused? Everyone accused us that somehow this was like serving China? Well, those data centers are getting bombed and I don’t think they’d be getting bombed right now by Iran if they were serving China.

David Friedberg: 52:01 They’re very strategic, yeah.

David Sacks: 52:02 The IRGC has put these data centers on a list of assets that they’ve threatened to destroy because they’re American assets or they’re assets of our Gulf State partners in partnership with America and American companies. This whole idea that somehow this was a threat to American national security was a total hoax. Just like the data center uses too much water. And what I’m saying is that a lot of the same forces were behind this hoax as are behind these data center hoaxes. Now, Friedberg’s right about the resentments, but those resentments get whipped up and marshaled by people who have an agenda and that agenda is well-funded and strategic and I can tell you in the case of the GCC data centers, Anthropic was adamantly opposed to that and they were lobbying against it and they were against salting the earth against those projects. I think the whole issue’s kind of moot now anyway because I think the data centers have been blown up, but or they’ve been threatened to. But it just shows how ridiculous and what a psyop some of the opposition to these ideas are.

David Friedberg: 52:39 And it’s a self-own in many ways. If you think about who are the top two spokespersons for our industry and what they’re communicating to Americans versus say how the Chinese view AI, which is incredibly positive, we’ve got Dario who says it’s the end of days, everything’s going to be hacked, all your files are going to be hacked, all your accounts are going to be hacked and then on the other and everybody’s losing their job. That’s our top spokesperson in Dario at Anthropic. The other top spokesperson just had a 70,000 word piece written about him where Ronan Farrow said I had a dozen people tell me unprompted Sam Altman’s a sociopath. Those are the top two spokespeople.

David Sacks: 54:00 Those people cannot be the spokespeople for this industry, and this industry’s got to get focused on fixing the big three. Healthcare is going to be dramatically improved by AI, housing could be dramatically improved, I’m not sure who’s working on that, and obviously education, the cost of education. We need somebody out there, a Michael Dell, Jensen, Elon, just explaining how world-positive this could be, because right now AI is as popular as—is less popular than ICE, the Democrats, and the government of Iran.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 54:32 Tell him about Alpha School. On the education side of things, I think you just have to look at Alpha School. It’s—it’s working.

Jason Calacanis: 54:41 All right, so that’s your story, Chamath. That’s the story of Allbirds, the most overvalued startup, but we’re going to play a little—cue the music here—we’re going to play a little game show for everybody. This is The Price David Sacks is Wrong. Yes, this is The Price is Wrong. The price of the startup, Travis, is wrong. And this is the game show where we guess which overvalued disaster are we talking about. First off, hailing from Austin, Texas, an enforcer in the PayPal Mafia, it’s Mr. David Sacks. Welcome to the program, David Sacks. Are you ready to play?

David Sacks: 55:13 I’m ready to play. Let’s do it.

Jason Calacanis: 55:17 You ready to play? Okay. Here we go. The Price is Wrong. This startup was once valued at over $13 billion. Their main business model? Selling JPEGs for fake internet money. People lost their minds and started spending millions of dollars on monkey images. Play the thinking music, please. David Sacks, can you name that startup? Once 13 billion? 13 billion for—

David Sacks: 55:41 13 billion for—is it—is it like the Bored Apes thing?

Jason Calacanis: 55:47 Okay, you’re closing in. Remember, format it in the name of a question. If they’re selling JPEGs for fake internet money—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 55:51 Me, me, me, pick me, pick me, pick me!

David Sacks: 55:54 Oh, I think I know what you’re talking about. All right, let Chamath do it. I can’t remember.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 55:58 OpenSea! OpenSea!

Jason Calacanis: 56:01 Correct! 100 points for Chamath Palihapitiya. Okay, an amazing steal, an amazing steal. And next up, he puts the dick in dictator, hailing from Palo Alto, California, it’s your favorite DoorDasher, Chamath Palihapitiya. How long you been DoorDashing there, Chamath?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 56:27 Nine years.

Jason Calacanis: 56:31 Nine years. You like that? What do you like about it? Is it the interaction with the people? Is it the tips? Is it stealing a couple of French fries? What do you like about being a DoorDasher there?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 56:34 I typically take four fries, I lick the burrito.

Jason Calacanis: 56:36 Oh! Licking burritos? Did he just say licking burritos?

David Sacks: 56:39 This is why we need robot delivery, robot delivery drivers. I mean, this is—it’s coming.

Jason Calacanis: 56:42 It’s coming. Okay. We don’t want our French fries being licked. All right, next startup. Let’s get the music going here. This startup once valued at $4 billion, allowed you to talk to other people on your mobile device during COVID, and you could listen to mid-VCs—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 56:58 Yes, yes, yes, I got it, I got it, I got it!

Jason Calacanis: 57:00 It’s called Generic Startup Device. Can you name that overvalued startup?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 57:03 Oh my god, it’s called Clubhouse.

Jason Calacanis: 57:05 Oh my god, he’s on a heater. That’s 200 points for Chamath Palihapitiya. Hey, that’s a lot of DoorDashes. He is going to do very well here in the final round. Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 57:13 Amazing memory. How soon we forget.

David Sacks: 57:16 I couldn’t replace any of these names.

Jason Calacanis: 57:18 Okay, finally streaming in from a potato field at an undisclosed location in Idaho, it’s it’s Dr. David Friedberg. Uh, you’re you’re in the potato sciences correct, Mr. Friedberg?

David Friedberg: 57:30 Potato sciences. Sorry.

Jason Calacanis: 57:32 You like the potatoes. You have a favorite potato dish? Is it the scalloped? You what do you like to do with your potatoes, mashed?

David Friedberg: 57:37 What is your name Mr.—what is the host’s name? What is your name, host?

Jason Calacanis: 57:40 It’s it’s me Jocular J-Cal. Let’s go. Here we go. Jocular J-Cal here at the helm.

David Friedberg: 57:45 Jevicular? Jevicular?

Jason Calacanis: 57:47 Jevicular? It’s Jevicular Calacanis. And what do you like there on the potatoes? What’s your favorite there? You like a a creamy mash? A little au gratin? Little little cheesy? You liking the cheese?

David Friedberg: 57:58 I like the cheese.

Jason Calacanis: 57:59 Okay, very good. Okay David, this startup which was once valued at $270 million—this is your favorite, I understand you’re a vegan—they sold juice. These juice packets went into a juice machine and were branded as the next iPhone, the iPhone of juice. Can you name—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 58:17 Oh, I know it. I know it. I know it. I know it. I know it. Pick me.

Jason Calacanis: 58:19 —that overvalued startup? David Friedberg.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 58:21 I know it. I know it. Pick me.

David Friedberg: 58:22 Juicero. Juicero. Juicero.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 58:24 Wait, are you—wait, are you searching? It looks like he’s searching.

Jason Calacanis: 58:26 Oh my god. Are you on your device? He looks like he was on his device.

David Sacks: 58:29 Internet free.

David Friedberg: 58:31 This is internet free. Internet free.

Jason Calacanis: 58:32 Internet free there. All right folks, there you have the clear winner Chamath Palihapitiya. Tell him what he’s won. He’s won a trip to Temptations 2 in Cabo. You’re going directly to Temptations 2, an adult resort. Uh, that’s for you and two of your friends. Okay, enjoy Temptations 2 Chamath Palihapitiya.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 58:46 Two of your friends. You can bring your—you can bring your throuple.

David Friedberg: 58:51 What fun game this is.

Jason Calacanis: 58:53 I think this is going to need to become a regular feature of the pod.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 58:55 Great game.

David Sacks: 58:56 Everyone forgets the unicorns that don’t work. They just like disappear into the ether.

Jason Calacanis: 58:59 All right. There you go. You won a pied-à-terre on a—you got a tax bill in New York. You got a pied-à-terre available to you as our first-place winner Chamath Palihapitiya. DoorDasher, Palo Alto, pied-à-terre. All right. Listen, uh, there’s been a lot of shenanigans going down in D.C., the most boring city in the world where apparently everybody’s getting a little frisky after hours. TMZ launched a news bureau. Eric Swalwell is out of the Governor’s race. There’s a lot of dark stuff that’s been released. He is innocent until proven guilty but it’s not looking good.

David Sacks: 59:41 He also resigned from Congress, J-Cal.

Jason Calacanis: 59:44 And he resigned from Congress as well. And Friedberg, our investigative journalist now working as a stringer for TMZ. Friedberg, what have you— learned. What’s in Friedberg’s view?

David Friedberg: 60:01 I haven’t learned anything. I just… my uh…

Jason Calacanis: 60:04 Okay. You have an analysis then maybe.

David Sacks: 60:06 My anecdote on this is back in December when it was first rumored that Swalwell was going to run for governor, I started making some calls to various folks to be like, hey, you know, what do we think of this guy? Is he going to be a good candidate? You know, obviously I and a lot of other people before they evacuate the state care a lot about the future of California. So I started checking around. I spoke to several people who independently told me that there’s knowledge about this guy sending, you know, pics to employees and that this guy has a bunch of stuff that’s going to come out about him. So I heard all of this not from one person but from several different sources. This was back in December going into January. And I largely kind of dismissed it because I was like, if this is true, this would have all come out already. I’m like, there’s no way this is true. If it was true, like people would have talked about it, they would have made a thing about it. If multiple people are telling me about this, then I’ve got to assume that it’s a rumor that’s being used to block him from running for governor versus it being a real thing. Because multiple people had this knowledge and this information. So this was December, January where I had these conversations. And at that point nothing had come out. So I was like, okay, it doesn’t seem like this is real. And then everything that I had been told started to come out in the last week. So the striking aspect of all of this for me was how much knowledge there was about these various incidents with the guy, how so many people had this knowledge and how no one had actually brought the knowledge to bear, which begs the question why did they not do what was right by the victims? Or why did the victims sit on the sidelines waiting for the right moment to all come out together? Because this was broad knowledge within a community of people and they made the choice not to bring it forward with that knowledge. And that’s what was so striking to me about this whole thing. I had honestly dismissed the whole thing as just being rumormongering to try to besmirch the guy. And it turned out that these were all being held back purposely and deliberately for a very particular moment in time when they were all brought forward to be used.

Jason Calacanis: 62:26 And let me just be clear, these are all allegations. Nothing’s been proven in court. He does get his day in court. Whether it looks, etc.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 62:31 Absolutely and and again…

Jason Calacanis: 62:33 we just want to make sure there’s a bunch of alleged’s here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 62:35 No matter how bad it looks etc.

David Sacks: 62:37 Yeah, alleged. And all that I’m saying is that people had told me about these supposed claims five months ago, four months ago, multiple people, and had chosen not to bring it forward and that the victims had not come forward publicly with these claims. And then there was this coordinated effort to bring everything forward at the same moment. And that’s what was so striking to me is just how coordinated all of this was.

Jason Calacanis: 62:57 Who’s controlling it? Who do you think…

David Friedberg: 63:00 Like is there like a meeting? Is there like a council of…

David Sacks: 63:03 Nancy Pelosi.

David Friedberg: 63:05 Jesus Christ, it’s so…

Jason Calacanis: 63:08 I don’t know if that’s true.

David Sacks: 63:09 Well, I don’t… not just her.

Jason Calacanis: 63:10 I’ll tell you my sense of it. My sense of it is that there’s certain insiders and he’s not an insider. And those insiders are like the Katie Porters of the world. Katie Porter I think is who the Democratic establishment wants to be governor. She’s an insider to national Democrats, she’s an insider to California Democrats, and I think that she’s the preferred candidate. Tom Steyer…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 63:32 She’s a spousal abuser.

David Friedberg: 63:34 I don’t know that Katie Porter is like this ultimate insider,

David Sacks: 63:38 but I think there are, look, there are clearly insiders. The Democratic Party is a machine that exists to siphon off as much money as possible from the public till to the interests that support the party. And it’s their gravy train. And they’re not going to let anyone stop that gravy train.

David Friedberg: 63:52 I don’t know if it’s just the Dems, Sacks.

David Sacks: 63:54 Hold on one second, they’re not going to let that gravy train stop for one second. Now, the Democratic Party had a huge problem in this California governor’s race, which is that the Democratic field was very fragmented. And so the two Republican candidates actually were polling the highest and so the… just so the viewers have context, California has this weird jungle primary system where the top two go to a runoff. They don’t have a Democrat lane and a Republican lane, they just take the top two jungle primary and then they go to the runoff. Even today, still, Hilton and was it Bianco whatever… they are polling at both around like 14 or 15% and if the election were held today, you’d have two Republicans in the runoff. So the Democrats needed to winnow the field down and have fewer candidates. In addition to that, they must have been concerned that all this oppo on Swalwell would come out once it was him versus say Steve Hilton, and they didn’t want it to come out later when they could lose the election. So, the powers that be made the decision to lance the boil. Probably there was a conversation with him to tell him to get out of the race but he didn’t listen. And by the way, remember this feels a lot like what happened with Joe Biden when he had to drop out of the presidential race. Remember…

David Friedberg: 65:11 It does sound surprisingly like that.

David Sacks: 65:13 The whole Democratic establishment and all the mainstream media were saying that Biden was sharp as a tack, okay? And then he had that disaster debate performance with Trump and it became clear that…

Jason Calacanis: 65:32 Hot swap.

David Sacks: 65:33 Yeah, and you could just see that the text messages were flying during the debate between the Democratic party insiders and by the time that debate was over they had congealed on a new position which is that Biden had to step aside. And then Nancy Pelosi was reported as having gone to the president and said ‘we can do things the hard way or the easy way’. Imagine that, like telling the president of the United States we can do things the hard way or the easy way. And then Biden disappeared for a week and magically he stepped aside by tweet. Remember that? He published a statement that appeared to be done by an autopen, people were speculating whether he was even behind this or the… stop pushing him to do it. The whole thing was extremely weird. But he, you know, was clearly muscled out of it. Just a few days before, he had said I’m not leaving the race, no matter what. I mean, it was like straight out of that Wolf of Wall Street meme, ‘they’re not getting me out of here.’ And then a few days later, he’s resigning by tweet. And again, Nancy Pelosi appears to be the figure at the center of both these things. She’s the one…

Jason Calacanis: 66:23 Exactly. Wait, hold on. Pelosi is reported as having been Swalwell’s mentor. I guess she found him roughly 20 years ago to run for Congress in the first place. When the Republicans wanted to kick Swalwell off of the Intelligence Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, for allegedly being involved with that Chinese spy, Fang Fang, it was Pelosi who protected him.

David Sacks: 66:48 So she’s sort of been a central figure in his career. I’m not saying she approved of anything he did, but there’s no way that that button gets pushed without going to Pelosi for the sign-off, right? I mean, she’s like the boss of this operation. And I think that the same thing happened to Swalwell that happened to Biden, is they went to him and said, ‘We can do things the hard way or the easy way.’ He was too dumb to listen and they did things the hard way.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 67:17 Yeah, shout out Nancy Pelosi, incredible day trader and shout out to our friend of the pod, Ro, who’s now beaten Nancy Pelosi. I think his trades this year, he’s actually even beaten Pelosi.

Jason Calacanis: 67:24 Really? Yeah, Ro Khanna has traded $600 million of stock.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 67:31 He trades more frequently than Citadel Securities!

David Friedberg: 67:34 What? I mean, it’s incredible. Yeah, where’s his P&L? I want to get in on that.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 67:37 The congressman you’ve been supporting for years, Sacks, is a great stock trader. He’s…

Jason Calacanis: 67:41 Apparently we should have been talking to him not about tax, we should have been talking to him about trade.

David Sacks: 67:51 There were things I liked about Ro Khanna. I mean, he did support freedom of speech with the whole Twitter thing. You know what it was, is that the Overton window shifted so much. I supported him. Yeah, when I supported Ro Khanna, freedom of speech was a big issue and he was one of the only Democrats to support that. He was also, I think, the only member of the Progressive Caucus to support a diplomatic track for Ukraine, which I supported and I gave him credit for that. And yeah, I knew that he was in favor of wealth tax, but I thought that was just a very unserious proposal that, you know, wasn’t in play in any way. Well, the Overton window shifted so much that now the wealth tax really is a possibility. So, you know, things have changed.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 68:30 Here it is. Shout out to our boy Ro Khanna. Look at this. Right about now Chamath’s thinking about making a managing director offer here. Ro, if it doesn’t—if you get booted out of office, you could become a managing director at Social Capital or something.

David Friedberg: 68:44 That’s like statistically, even if you had insider information, making that much money is like very hard.

Jason Calacanis: 68:51 Holy cow, Nancy Pelosi is going to shiv Ro Khanna next for not giving her the inside track on whatever he’s betting on. What did he…

David Friedberg: 69:00 Well look, any, as we all know, any investor can have a good quarter or year, but to put up the kind of returns that Nancy Pelosi has done over decades is nothing short of miraculous.

Jason Calacanis: 69:11 It’s generational. It’s generational run. Give her her [beep] flowers.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 69:14 She’s substantially better than Warren Buffett.

Jason Calacanis: 69:17 I mean, it’s Buffett… by the way, whenever you…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 69:19 Buffett, Stan Druckenmiller, and Nancy Pelosi are three of the most accomplished investors of all time.

Jason Calacanis: 69:27 Whatever you did to the poor Buffett fans, Chamath, they are incredibly angry at you for desecrating his legacy.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 69:36 I didn’t desecrate his legacy. I pointed out one unavoidable fact which is his returns are bimodally distributed, pre and post Reg FD. When you have to follow the rules of disclosure, everybody’s returns got knee capped. When there was no disclosure rules, his returns were off the charts. That’s just a mathematical truism. Now, what’s interesting to note is the reason why Nancy Pelosi’s returns are so consistently good is Reg FD does not apply to people in Congress.

David Friedberg: 70:10 That should be the takeaway.

Jason Calacanis: 70:12 Yeah, we gotta- we gotta stop them. They gotta just-

Chamath Palihapitiya: 70:15 They can learn things in their committee meetings. In fact there are situations where things are disclosed and then they are trading in real time.

Jason Calacanis: 70:21 Shout out to the SCIF. Yeah, get out of the SCIF quick and get that trade in.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 70:25 So I have enormous respect for Warren Buffett and what he’s done. It’s- he’s the GOAT of GOATs. But the returns post-Reg FD are- they are just materially worse than they were pre-Reg FD and that’s just a-

Jason Calacanis: 70:41 What’s he going to do with that cash position, Chamath? Speaking of Buffett, they have what, 300 billion sitting there?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 70:46 The market- the market is in a very complicated moment right now. If you look at historical indicators of value, so if you look at Shiller as an indication of value, it’s peaking. If you look at the Buffett Index, it’s peaking. So there are things that when you look at it, look like all-time highs and- the problem with that is you would say, “oh man”, but there’s this weird dispersion happening in the market. Dispersion means literally a few companies are hitting all-time highs, I think it’s like eight or nine, and everybody else is not. So it’s a really complicated moment. It’s hard to understand what’s going on, but he’s got a lot of cash. If he’s sticking to his knitting, he’s looking at the Shiller Index and he’s looking at his own indicator which shows all-time highs and he’s waiting for a correction.

David Sacks: 71:27 He’s not really in charge anymore. Like Berkshire Hathaway is not Warren Buffett anymore, even though he’s the big owner, he’s not really doing it.

Jason Calacanis: 71:37 But I mean the fact that they’re sitting on that massive pile of cash says something that they’re not putting it to work in the market says they don’t see an opportunity yet. Sacks, Travis, I’m curious your takes, either one of you can go in whichever order you want, on how is the market crushing it while we’re in week seven of a war and we put a hundred billion dollars or something into this military activity in Iran and- And the market is pricing it in, shrugging it off and we’re hitting all-time highs. Sacks, I don’t know if you feel comfortable going yet.

David Sacks: 72:06 I’ll go first. Yeah, I mean look, I think it’s pretty straightforward, which is that in the wake of the meeting in Islamabad, that the market is feeling confident and pricing in that the war is going to get resolved. The president also recently said that it’s very close to being wrapped up, the military objectives are close to being achieved and he’s made it sound like it’s going to be resolved. Yes, a deal was not signed in Islamabad, I always thought that was an unrealistic expectation that these two countries, which are at war with each other and in fact have had hostile relations for almost 50 years, are going to resolve all their differences in 24 hours. It’s not realistic. But the impression that the market I think has and clearly is trading on this is that that war is going to be what Donald Trump said, which is an excursion and something that is on its way to being resolved, that they’ve made progress. And J-Cal, you’re right, the whole week has just been incredibly strong. I think by Tuesday, the market had recovered all of its losses since the start of the war. I think it made a new high yesterday on Wednesday and is making new highs, fresh highs today on Thursday. So you just have to say that at the present time the market thinks, and I would consider the stock market to be the ultimate prediction market, that this war is on its way to being resolved. Just to qualify, I’m not speaking as a member of the administration.

Jason Calacanis: 73:33 Of course.

David Sacks: 73:34 I’m not saying that I know something, okay?

Jason Calacanis: 73:36 You don’t know anything. Do not aggregate this. No clipping.

David Sacks: 73:39 I’m not representing anyone and I don’t know anything different than what any of you know. I’m just saying that I think this is what the market is clearly pricing in and I’m paying attention to what the statements are of the president and vice president.

Jason Calacanis: 73:58 And this Travis, you and I were talking the other day while you were slaughtering me in backgammon when you won our eight-point match, you’re almost caught up. About the taco trade, now Trump always chickens out. You have a theory about Trump always cares about optics, unpack it for us, Travis.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 74:21 Yeah, so while I was beating you in backgammon.

Jason Calacanis: 74:24 Oof.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 74:25 I sort of had the - you know there’s like the insight is because J-Cal asked me and the insight is as like - and I think this maybe is just the more simple view of things, which is Trump’s weather vane is the stock market. Like we see vol is up, we see the VIX is really high, but you know what? The S&P is trading in this band that’s actually fairly tight given the crazy shit that’s going down. And everybody’s nervous but actually he moves in the policy space, he does not let the S&P go down too low. People also get the sort of the panic-in thing now, which is…

David Sacks: 75:00 He gets people nervous, he makes moves, and then he comes back to sort of reality and gets things done as pragmatic and probably the better parts of what he might be, you know, what he does well, and people are pricing that in.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 75:14 So there’s all the things Sacks is saying about the nuances and the details, but the sort of super high level, like I’m in low Earth orbit view, is like the stock market is Trump’s weather vane. And he will go to the place that makes the stock market come up. And if he’s going and if it’s up and it’s too high, he almost feels like it’s too easy, so he makes it hard on himself again. And then he brings it back up. And the traders are getting used to it, I think. That’s my impression.

Jason Calacanis: 75:44 Yeah, it’s like playing poker with Chamath with Allen Keating. It’s just like, how is this guy solvent? He’s literally playing every hand of poker, he’s losing tons of money, and then all of a sudden by the end of the night, he hits two big pots and he’s got the nuts both times, and he pulls out of the stall. What’s your take on the market today, Chamath?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 76:03 Yeah, I mean, I’ll just do it again. But I think the Shiller PE, Nick, I sent it to you, shows near all-time highs. Then the second is the Buffett Index, which is the sum of all US equities divided by GDP, is also at all-time highs. So this would generally mean that you need to be increasingly a little bit more risk-off. But then the opposite side of that, and I sent you a third one, and this is why it’s so confounding, is you have signals showing everything, which typically doesn’t happen. And this is this dispersion point where when you see this performance and it’s up 5% in the first, you know, half of April, typically the market is up almost 32% on average for the rest of the year. And we were already up, as Sacks said, you know, 7.5% already in the first half of April.

David Friedberg: 76:52 I’m trying to read this graph, this is crazy. I don’t even know what’s going on.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 76:57 This is just the — just the dispersion. But the — the idea of all of this is I think we’re in a moment where you can find a piece of data to underwrite your bias. And I think that’s where there is a lot of danger. I don’t know, for me personally, I’m generally more risk-off right now. And more importantly, I’m waiting for these IPOs so that I can, to be very honest with you, delever and get some chips off the table. I think that it is crucial that this SpaceX IPO get done ASAP. And then I think it’s even more crucial that one of Anthropic and OpenAI front-run the other one and get out first. And the first two charts are the reasons why.

David Friedberg: 77:40 It’s fairly obvious to me what’s going on here. You have these multiple trends going at the same time. The reason people are — traders are valuing this, and I think there is some smart money in the market right now, is what you’re seeing in terms of the earnings potential of these companies as they deploy AI, as they have unlimited intelligence, and the top employees at the top companies become…

Jason Calacanis: 78:00 10 or 20 or 30 times more productive. That’s never been seen before. Microsoft Office may have made you 30% more efficient, the Internet may have made you 50% more efficient, but none of these things made you 10 times. And you had a really interesting point that you slipped in earlier Chamath, which was nobody knows how to harness these things yet, right? And it’s producing slop.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 78:19 The truth is 10% of people do know how to harness it, 20% maybe. And I watch this in my own organizations and I watch it in 600 portfolio companies. The ones that do deploy it correctly, they are running the table on the ones that are not. So the efficiency boom that we’re going to see at these companies, whether it’s Meta or Uber or Airbnb, whoever executes it properly is going to be phenomenal. The earnings will be insane.

Jason Calacanis: 78:43 Maybe I’m an idiot, but it has not translated into a tsunami of more revenue and more profit for me yet. Maybe I’m the only one and maybe it’s everybody else but me, but I haven’t seen it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 78:58 I see it in a lot of companies. So, I think in private companies, we have two companies that are just examples. Micro1, which is doing data, you know, dark pools of data for these language models, and they have built technology that allows them to build data and allows them to collect data to help the large language model companies grow and they are on a tear by using this to identify and find great people who can then contribute to these corpuses. And then we have one, TaxGPT, that is making the accountants—I think they have 6 or 7 percent of all accountants using their platform. They’re just ripping the productivity of accountants. Okay. Jason, you agree with me—I hope you can agree with me with the following statement.

Jason Calacanis: 79:32 I hope you can agree with me with the following statement. Small companies nibbling at the edges is not where these guys will build a multi-trillion dollar market cap.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 79:43 I think we’re both in alignment. Big companies, dumb companies, slow to implement new technology, startups—

Jason Calacanis: 79:48 No they’re not—

Chamath Palihapitiya: 79:49 No they are! Dumb when it comes to implementing new technology. They’re always the laggards when it comes to implementing new technology.

Jason Calacanis: 79:54 No they’re not—no they’re not. The reason that they are slow is not because they are dumb. The reason that they are slow is their business is much more sophisticated and much more complicated than many other businesses. And what I’m saying is if you can’t prove that this works in the big-time, prime-time, big-league use cases, it’s a toy. Right, Sacks, where do you stand? Are you in the JCal position—the startups are showing the way, they’re being massively efficient, they’re growing revenues like we’ve never seen in the startup community before with less people—or are you in the Chamath camp, hey big companies are not having a drop to the bottom line and they’re smart? Or both things are true. Where do you stand, Sacks? Be the adjudicator of this case.

David Sacks: 80:30 I mean honestly I’m probably closer to you JCal, I hate to say that. Because look, I think people are still figuring out how to drive business value out of AI. And change management is hard, and the bigger the company, the harder it is. So what’s happening right now is there are a lot of transformation projects at large enterprises that are failing. There’s like a big McKinsey study on that. But if you look at activity from the bottom up, I think it’s very interesting and it’s becoming more interesting.

David Friedberg: 81:00 thing and over the last several months obviously with coding reaching a new level we’re starting to see very interesting things happen there and obviously the revenue that’s now being generated from these coding models is you know again it’s exponential like we’ve never seen before so the ROI is finally there at the model layer meaning before you know people were saying that it’s a bubble because you had all this massive capex at the data center level and there was no ROI coming at the model layer now we have the ROI at the model layer and I guess we’re sort of questioning whether the ROI will be there at the application layer but in any event I think things are progressing I mean look I’m fundamentally bullish on this whole thing.

Jason Calacanis: 81:43 Okay. No, no, sorry, let me be clear. Hold on. Okay, go ahead Chamath.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 81:45 Obviously I’m bullish. I’m in this space. I’m doing it.

Jason Calacanis: 81:49 You’re in the arena.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 81:50 We have seen in every single wave, in the mobile wave we needed consumers to show up at scale so we needed consumer experiences and it was very obvious that there were these consumer businesses that were going to be if not already incredibly incredibly profitable. Google and Facebook were profitable within the first few years they never looked back and all I’m trying to point out to you guys is there is not one great example yet if we believe enterprise is where all the money is and if we believe that’s what’s going to underpin these trillion dollar valuations just please somebody show me a couple of good examples of scaled profits.

Jason Calacanis: 82:30 Okay. Fair enough. Travis, final word here on…

David Sacks: 82:33 But by the way can I say one other thing? I think Chamath has a good point about being risk-off right now because if you just look at valuation metrics they do seem to be quite high and I’ve seen other versions of those metrics as well so look it’s very very hard to time the market I don’t try but I think you could make an argument just based purely on valuation levels not events that you want to adopt a more conservative posture right now.

Jason Calacanis: 82:43 Of course.

David Sacks: 82:44 I think the bet you’re making then Travis is are these valuations so high right now on the standards that the efficiency that AI could bring to these companies is not real enough to continue the growth from here?

Jason Calacanis: 82:58 It’s not a catalytic enough technology and you know when you look at standard…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 83:22 No, it’s the opposite. No, all these traditional companies have horrible valuations. They’ve been crushed. So my point is if AI is real, the upside is also real. All I’m saying is the details, guys, matter. It’s very hard to take a very complicated business and all of a sudden quote-unquote transform it. It’s not as easy as it sounds. That word is easy to say.

Jason Calacanis: 83:44 Change management for sure. Travis, go ahead. Final word. Final word from Travis please.

David Sacks: 83:47 Two things, first is when it comes to big companies I think the big thing about let’s call it the autonomous enterprise is change management is the big boy and in change management actually is about all the people.

David Friedberg: 84:00 people that already work there, the middle managers, the technocrats, the bureaucrats, the… whatever, the crats. And getting the change management going, the change management going there is, it’s a human thing and it’s very tricky with very complex processes, many of which are not even documented. And in theory, it’s just all going to happen real fast, but in practice, like that’s hard. So that’s part one. Part two, what I’m seeing with true tech companies, real companies, public, I would say public, like hardcore public companies, I mean like, you know, founder-led, you know, folks that are really cranking, public companies and tech companies that are sort of up-and-comers, I talk to CEOs across the board and they’re like, they are fired up about the development, the sort of the productivity and deployment schedule and like the new features they’re able to roll out much, much, much faster because they’ve pivoted their cultures sort of very pro-AI development. And I’m getting like almost at this point a consistent feedback from real founder CEOs that like this stuff’s real and it’s not just hype. Now there are folks pushing, you know, selling their book that are like, oh we’re at AGI and all this. Anybody who’s worked with these agents and done the AI dev stuff… there’s a lot of good stuff, but they’re not, they’re not that smart yet. They’re just not that smart. Anybody who’s done like, I’ve had a side quest where I’m just investing, I have agents investing and betting on Kalshi and Poly and, you know, these other places, and it’s silly how dumb the agents are, even their best agents, to be honest. The agents are what you… you have to be human-in-the-loop with the agent. The agent has no taste. The agent can do repetitive tasks. The agent is not going to do something novel and they quickly can get lost in the forest if they’re not. We had to spend a lot of time, we had to spend a lot of time with our investing agents getting them on board with the idea that if you want to make money investing, you can’t be on both sides of the same bet.

David Sacks: 86:22 Yeah.

David Friedberg: 86:23 You know what I mean?

David Sacks: 86:23 There it is.

David Friedberg: 86:24 It’s just like, that’s where we’re at. It’s the AGI is not here and it’s kind of silly for folks I think to sort of suggest it is.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 86:30 Absolutely.

Jason Calacanis: 86:33 Hey guys, we gotta wrap. Travis, you didn’t get to play the Price is Right. I have two more. You guys want to do a bonus round of the Price is Right?

David Friedberg: 86:39 Yeah, do it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 86:40 Do it, do it.

David Sacks: 86:42 See if Travis gets it.

Jason Calacanis: 86:43 Okay, two more. But you guys can steal. You guys can steal here. Let me get my background music. I gotta give me the music. Travis, you’re going to get to do the bonus round here. Hello everybody, we got Travis Kalanick. He’s here. He is a professional water sports player from Tallahassee, Florida. How’s it going? Down there in Tallahassee, Florida, I understand you do a little handiwork to pay the bills, but you spend your most of your time out there on the lakes and the oceans doing water sports. Yeah, you like the water sports?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 87:09 I love the water sports. I do, I’m doing water ski lessons on the weekends if anybody’s interested.

Jason Calacanis: 87:15 All right, I’ll be out there in Tallahassee, Florida. Okay now, here we go. It’s your job to figure out ‘The Price is Wrong’. The Price is Wrong!

Chamath Palihapitiya: 87:27 So funny. Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 87:29 The price is wrong here. Here we go. This is a bonus round. All right, and this startup raised 900 million at a 9 billion dollar valuation. This is a big one. This is a big one. Before dissolving in 2018, and their famously deep-voiced founder CEO is currently serving an 11-year sentence in a federal prison. Yes. Can you name that mispriced startup? Can you name the mispriced startup?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 87:58 It rhymes with Shmeranos.

Jason Calacanis: 88:01 Shmeranos, okay, you’re closing in here. Be careful, you have to form it into a question. You could lose to Sacks or Friedberg.

David Sacks: 88:08 Theranos.

Jason Calacanis: 88:09 Theranos, okay, very good. 100 points, you’re on the board. And here is your next one. This is your next one. Okay, this is the overtime. All three players get to play this one. Whoever zooms in first and says it, this is your final mispriced startup here. The price is wrong on this startup. Here we go.

David Sacks: 88:21 Come on, Chamath, you can do this. Come on, Chamath.

David Friedberg: 88:24 You got this now.

Jason Calacanis: 88:25 You can do this. Come on, Chamath. You got this now. Here we go. This short-form, mobile-first streaming platform raised 1.7 billion from top investors. Jeffrey Katzenberg…

David Friedberg: 88:42 Ah, wait! What is it called?!

David Sacks: 88:43 You gotta yell it out! Jeffrey Katzenberg’s company! Jeffrey Katzenberg… Quibi, Quibi, Quibi!

Chamath Palihapitiya: 88:48 Quibi!

Jason Calacanis: 88:50 Yes! There’s your champion everybody. Let’s tell him what he won. He’s apparently he’s won a pied-à-terre in downtown East Austin. A pied-à-terre in East Austin by the airport. God knows what shenanigans are going down there. I think if you need methamphetamine or a date, you’re going to have an easy time there, Chamath. Okay. Oh hey Chamath, I’m getting hammered with people who want to come to the sold-out Liquidity. 500 was the cap you put on it. You’ve been dicking around as dictator. Can we add 50 seats?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 89:22 I think we can add 50 or 100. I don’t know, Lisa, can we add 100? Get a simulcast room going.

Jason Calacanis: 89:31 All right, we’ll see you all. Oh and the All-In Summit tickets are on sale. Go to allin.com and yeah, don’t get shut out of the summit folks because this happens every time. You guys email me two months out, the tickets have been sold out for four months, so get your tickets now at allin.com. Another amazing episode and we’ll see you next week.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 89:57 Bye-bye.

David Sacks: 89:59 Bye-bye.

Jason Calacanis: 90:00 Rainman David Sacks. Let your winners ride. And then Sacks. We open-sourced it to the fans and they’ve just gone crazy with it. Love you, Besties. The Queen of Quinoa!

Chamath Palihapitiya: 90:20 I saw a dog taking a shit in your driveway, Sacks.

David Sacks: 90:26 Oh, man.

David Friedberg: 90:28 I had to have the asteroid meet me at the airport.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 90:30 We should all just get oil and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all these systems… it’s like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

Jason Calacanis: 90:40 Wet your beak! Wet your beak! Wet your beak!

Chamath Palihapitiya: 90:43 We need to get merch.

Jason Calacanis: 90:44 Besties are back!