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

Summary

This episode of the All-In Podcast focuses on the disruptive power of AI, the logistical hurdles of the green energy transition, and the current state of American political polarization. The hosts lead with “The Anthropic Shitlist,” detailing how the AI company’s recent product announcements have caused significant market cap losses for legacy tech and service providers like IBM and LexisNexis. They debate whether the economy is entering a “death spiral” where AI-driven efficiency destroys the consumer base, or if Jevons Paradox will prevail — where lowering the cost of software and knowledge work creates an explosion in demand and productivity. Jason Calacanis shares how his firm is already replacing traditional software and junior roles with custom AI “agents,” signaling a shift toward a leaner, “AI-first” corporate structure.

The discussion then moves to the physical constraints of this digital revolution, specifically the “BANANAS” (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) movement hindering data center expansion. The besties criticize local opposition and “lawfare” that delay critical infrastructure, warning that the U.S. risks losing its technological edge to the Middle East and China. They weigh in on President Trump’s “ratepayer protection pledge,” which suggests that big tech companies should fund their own power generation to prevent rising costs for residential consumers. This leads into an analysis of Trump’s record-breaking State of the Union address, where the hosts highlight the deep partisan divide, noting the refusal of Democrats to applaud “common-sense” American priorities as a symptom of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized government.

Finally, the episode touches on a breakthrough in “Science Corner” and a major judicial ruling. David Friedberg highlights the FDA’s approval of human trials for Yamanaka factors — proteins that can reset the “epigenetic clock” to reverse cellular aging — starting with treatments for blindness. The show concludes with an analysis of the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision striking down President Trump’s emergency tariff powers. While the hosts remain divided on the economic impact of tariffs, they largely view the ruling as a healthy sign of judicial independence and a necessary check on executive overreach, calling for a return to bipartisan collaboration to solve the nation’s ballooning deficit and trade imbalances.

Highlights

”We’ve moved from ‘when’ to ‘if’ these cash flows will exist”

“We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode. Are these cash flows durable at all? Could they fall off a cliff in year three? Is there some AI model that’s going to come around the corner and obliterate this business without me knowing it?” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 5:45

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”Every piece of software we wanted to buy or build over the last 10 years, my people are building in 30 days”

“Every piece of software that we wanted to buy or build over the last 10 years that we never got to, my people are building in the last 30 days.” — Jason Calacanis, 23:35

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”Knowledge work may be a transitory phenomenon between computing and AI”

“It may be the case that knowledge work in general is also a transitory phenomenon that only existed between the foundation of the computer or computing tools and the existence of AI generally speaking.” — David Friedberg, 16:06

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”The economy is not a pie, it’s a garden and technology is rain”

“A really good line from another article that was written just a couple weeks ago was ‘the economy is not a pie, it’s a garden, and technology is rain.’ So again, all of this technological innovation is going to increase the growth rate of the garden, it’s not a fixed pie.” — David Friedberg, 31:31

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”We lost 50 billion of revenue from cancelled data center projects”

“Last year we lost almost 5 gigawatts in terms of cancelled projects. This year coming in 2026 we have about 7 that could be cancelled if you use this math. If then you flow that through, OpenAI, Sarah Friar said this, that every gigawatt for her, for OpenAI is about 10 billion of revenue… Now you’re talking about 130 billion of lost revenue over these two years.” — David Friedberg, 36:30

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”First time in human history Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans”

“Phase one clinical trials underway, first time in human history we’re seeing Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans. Literally the tip of the iceberg, there are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins, or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by restoring the epigenome in cells and make them young again.” — David Friedberg, 1:07:02

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Key Points

• Anthropic’s “Kill List” (1:21) - Claude announcements in February tanked three market sectors: legal tech (Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, LegalZoom down 10%+), cybersecurity (CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Okta), and mainframe/COBOL (IBM down 13%, worst day since 2000)
• Market shift from “when” to “if” (3:08) - Chamath explains that investors are no longer debating when AI impacts cash flows but whether those cash flows will exist at all, driving massive repricing across SaaS
• Citrini Research viral Substack (7:28) - A fictional “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” post got 28 million views on X and tanked financial stocks (Amex down 8%, Capital One down 8%, Mastercard 6%, Visa 4%)
• Citrini authorship controversy (9:21) - Sacks reveals co-author attribution was amended post-publication to include a short fund manager with positions in the companies named
• Derek Thompson’s “Nobody Knows Anything” (10:02) - AI conversations described as “a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives” that are more literary than analytical
• SaaS predictability destroyed (12:00) - Sacks explains how SaaS was a predictable “growth annuity” category with reliable ARR and 120% net dollar retention, now disrupted by AI uncertainty
• Friedberg’s consumptive capacity theory (15:31) - Questions whether AI productivity could exceed humanity’s capacity to consume, something never faced in human history
• Anthropic hiring at $570K (18:09) - Anthropic’s job listing for software engineers at $570K contradicts the narrative that AI will eliminate engineering jobs
• Citadel Securities rebuttal (19:13) - Report shows software engineer job postings rising ~10% year-over-year and company formation rapidly expanding
• Aaron Levie on Jevons’ paradox (20:00) - When you lower the cost of something supply constrained, demand goes up; Fortune 500 companies currently spend only 5% on IT
• Jason’s OpenClaw agent experiments (22:35) - Trained 15 employees in one weekend to build agents automating podcast ad sales, content clipping, and employee management
• Agent maestro as the new job (32:24) - Jason identifies “agent maestro” as the emerging role: people who can structure business processes and train AI agents
• Token cost predictions (34:03) - Chamath predicts 10x demand increase but 90% price reduction in output tokens by end of year
• 100 data center projects facing opposition (36:09) - Friedberg documents 100 data center projects facing local opposition, with 20 cancelled in Q2 alone
• Ratepayer protection pledge (40:38) - Sacks describes Trump’s plan requiring tech companies to pay for their own power needs so residential rates don’t increase
• Micron’s 100B fab delayed (48:00) - Micron’s mega fab in New York delayed 1,200 days, 612 of which were spent on environmental impact study, held up by 6 citizens
• State of the Union highlights (51:55) - 108 minutes, longest in 60 years; Trump’s approval rating swung 26 points negative since start of term
• Brad Gerstner double shout-out (54:00) - Friend of the pod Brad Gerstner received two shout-outs from President Trump during the address
• Yamanaka factors clinical trial (1:04:26) - Life Biosciences reached FDA agreement for first human trial of Yamanaka factors to reverse blindness from glaucoma
• SCOTUS strikes down tariffs 6-3 (1:10:12) - Biggest rebuke of executive policy in 91 years; Trump immediately invoked Section 122 for 15% temporary tariffs
• Kavanaugh’s roadmap (1:12:00) - Sacks explains the 70-page Kavanaugh dissent provided alternative legal paths via Section 301 and Section 338

Mentions

Companies

• Anthropic (1:21) - Three consecutive weeks of Claude announcements tanking different market sectors
• IBM (1:33) - Down 13% on Monday, worst day since 2000, $31B market cap loss due to COBOL modernization fears
• Thomson Reuters (1:33) - Down 10%+ after Claude legal plugin announcement
• LexisNexis (1:33) - Down 10%+ after Claude legal plugin announcement
• LegalZoom (1:33) - Down 10%+ after Claude legal plugin announcement
• CrowdStrike (1:33) - Tanked after Claude Code Security announcement
• Cloudflare (1:33) - Tanked after Claude Code Security announcement
• Okta (1:33) - Tanked after Claude Code Security announcement
• Citrini Research (7:36) - Authored viral 2028 AI crash Substack post
• Citadel Securities (19:13) - Published rebuttal report showing rising software engineer demand
• OpenAI (36:30) - Sarah Friar noted every gigawatt equals ~$10B revenue
• Salesforce (13:03) - Used as example of SaaS company that may not be eliminated but could see growth impacted
• Life Biosciences (1:05:29) - First company to receive FDA agreement for Yamanaka factor human trials
• Greenpeace (49:21) - Ordered to pay ~$350M in damages by North Dakota judge for pipeline protest chaos
• Micron (48:00) - $100B mega fab in New York delayed 1,200 days
• Slack (28:08) - Jason’s agent suggested replacing Slack with open-source Mattermost

Products & Technologies

• Claude (1:21) - Anthropic’s AI model, each new capability announcement tanking a market sector
• Claude Co-work (1:33) - Legal plugin integration announced Feb 3
• Claude Code Security (1:33) - Limited research preview announced Feb 20
• OpenClaw (22:35) - Agent platform Jason’s team is using extensively to automate knowledge work
• COBOL (1:33) - Legacy coding language powering 95% of US ATMs and Social Security payments; Claude can now modernize it
• Yamanaka Factors (1:04:26) - Four proteins that reverse cellular aging by resetting the epigenome
• Kimmy 2.5 (30:26) - Open source model handling 80-85% of jobs, lowering token costs massively
• Mattermost (28:08) - Open source alternative to Slack suggested by Jason’s AI agent
• Stablecoins (7:36) - Citrini report speculated agents would displace 3% interchange fees using stablecoin settlement

People

• Chamath Palihapitiya (3:08) - Explained the when-to-if market shift and data center opposition economics
• David Sacks (9:21) - Questioned Citrini legitimacy, defended tariff policy, explained ratepayer protection pledge
• David Friedberg (15:31) - Raised consumptive capacity question, presented Yamanaka factors science corner
• Jason Calacanis (22:35) - Shared extensive OpenClaw agent experiments at his firm
• Derek Thompson (10:02) - Writer who called AI discussion “competing science fiction narratives”
• William Goldman (10:02) - Legendary Hollywood screenwriter referenced for “nobody knows anything” quote
• Aaron Levie (20:00) - Box CEO who explained Jevons’ paradox applied to software engineering
• Brad Gerstner (54:00) - Friend of pod who received double shout-out from Trump at State of the Union
• Shinya Yamanaka (1:04:26) - Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered the four proteins that reverse cellular aging
• David Sinclair (1:05:29) - Harvard scientist and Life Biosciences co-founder, controversial for prior resveratrol claims
• Sarah Friar (36:30) - OpenAI CFO, speaking at All-In Liquidity event
• Dan Loeb (38:14) - Third Point founder, confirmed keynote speaker at Liquidity event
• Bernie Sanders (42:00) - Criticized for wanting to stop all data center construction
• Ryan Peterson (29:40) - Posted that Claude for legal works as well as Harvey
• Ilhan Omar (53:23) - Screamed from audience during State of the Union
• Elizabeth Warren (1:02:00) - Stood up for banning insider trading by Congress members
• Elon Musk (21:00) - Described companies as “cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human”
• Susan Rice (1:18:43) - Threatened lawfare against tech companies working with Trump administration
• Bill Gurley (39:18) - Friend of pod, new book “Running Down a Dream” promoted

Surprising Quotes

“An AI fanfiction Substack tanked your 401k on Monday.” — Jason Calacanis, 1:04

“If you can get 5% for owning government bonds, why are we taking excessive risk here?” — Chamath Palihapitiya, 11:51

“SaaS may have been a transitory business phenomenon that existed between the foundation of the internet and the era of AI.” — David Friedberg, 16:06

“The software is building CRM systems for us. It’s building agents for us and it wants to just build all the software stack.” — Jason Calacanis, 28:08

“Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone — BANANAS is replacing the new NIMBY.” — David Sacks, 42:30

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, the All-In Podcast. Today, we have a conspiracy corner episode for you. We’re going over the 9/11 inside job, we’re going over flat Earth, JFK assassination. It’s going to be all conspiracy all the time after our amazing blockbuster episode during ski week. We’re going all conspiracy here. Our guest today, Alex Jones.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 0:25 How many views did it get? Nine views? Not true. Not true. I can carry an episode for at least 400,000 views.

Jason Calacanis: 0:38 I mean, you might, you might. Hey, for people who don’t know, Chamath has his own YouTube channel. He’s got his escape hatch for when this train wreck burns to the ground. He started his own YouTube channel and he’s hedging his bets. Friedberg’s working on his solo project. Everybody’s doing a solo project. The band’s got a lot of solo projects going on.

David Friedberg: 0:54 The Beatles are experimenting. The Beatles are experimenting. We got a Yoko Ono situation going on here.

Jason Calacanis: 0:58 You know what the number one topic for this show was by the All-In AI bot, Sacks? The number one was Dario versus Heggset, the Department of War versus Anthropic was the number one topic selected by our AI bot. As a programming note for folks, that decision will be made end of the day Friday when this podcast comes out, so we will talk about it next week. But let’s get to work. We’ve got a full docket. The Claude kill list has expanded and an AI fan fiction substack tanked your 401(k) on Monday. Let’s get into it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:21 Anthropic’s generational run continues. They’re now three-for-three in tanking different market sectors, Chamath. Congratulations. This is like, they took the mantle from Brad Gerstner tanking the market.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 1:30 The Anthropic shitlist. It is.

Jason Calacanis: 1:33 February 3rd, Anthropic announces, hey, we got a legal plug-in for Claude, Co-work. Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, LegalZoom, all down at least 10% since February 3rd. Then on February 20th, Claude Code Security is announced in a limited research preview. Stocks tank again: CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Okta, all down. Then February 23rd, Anthropic announces Claude can modernize COBOL databases. If you don’t know COBOL, that’s the like, oldest coding language in the world. That’s where Sacks learned to code when he was in college in the 70s. It’s used for banking, payroll, government, healthcare. It runs 95% of ATMs in the US, and it powers social security payments. 85% of all COBOL code runs on IBM machines. So IBM decided they would tank 13% on Monday, their worst day since 2000, $31 billion in market cap losses.

Jason Calacanis: 2:44 So let’s stop here before I get into the fan fiction piece. What’s your take here of what’s happening in the market, Chamath? Is this simply people were looking for an excuse to trim their positions because things have been top ticking all-time highs and people are just looking for an excuse? Or is this reality? Is this the go-forward reality that AI is going to compress these kind of stocks because it solves a lot of problems?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 3:08 I’m going to give you two explanations. I don’t know what percentage I would allocate across the two, but I think one is tactical and one is much more strategic, but I think both are happening. The tactical one is that we’re at a moment in time where a lot of the smart money hedge funds are starting to massively degross. And what that means is they’re trimming a lot of positions and they’re just taking on a lot less risk. Why, I don’t exactly know. It could be motivated by the second thing that I’m going to talk about. But the point is in a degrossing cycle, you tend to be trimming risk and making your position sizes much smaller. So the longs become less long, the shorts become less short, and you just shrink. And so there’s just general downward pressure. That is a clear behavior right now.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 4:05 But I think the structural change is the more important one, and this is sort of what I talked about this morning. In a normal functioning market, what we are always debating is when a set of cash flows go from being highly confident to less highly confident. It’s a when conversation. So when will Coca-Cola’s cash flows be impacted? When will Eli Lilly’s cash flows be impacted? When will Meta’s cash flows be impacted? And the answer to the when gets translated by the public markets into three things. Your price-to-earnings multiple, where if you invert that number, what that is equivalent to is the yield on the money that you get. So if you have a 20 times PE, that’s a 5% yield. The second is a revenue multiple. And the third is what’s called your weighted average cost of capital, which is to say, if you look at the next 20 to 30 years of earnings and you want to figure out what that is worth today, you have to discount all of these back and you have to assume a percentage of interest effectively that it takes to get there.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 5:29 And the basic math of this is that when you have a high WACC, it’s called, you’re massively discounting these cash flows. When you have a low WACC, you’re assuming that these things are very durable. Okay, so what is happening? We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode. Are these cash flows durable at all? Could they fall off a cliff in year three? Is there some AI model that’s going to come around the corner and obliterate this business without me knowing it? And because they’ve shifted into this if mindset, your risk becomes totally different. You have this event risk that you don’t know how to price. And whenever the market shifts into that mode, what you see are that the holders of those equities want a massive margin of safety. What does that mean? They have to take PEs way down. If you used to trade at 40, you should trade at 20. If you used to trade at 20, you should trade at 10. They take revenue multiples down. Used to trade at 10 times revenue, now you’re going to trade at 3 times. You take the WACC way up. Used to be a 6% discounted weighted average cost of capital, you know what, I’m taking you to 12 or 13. That’s the market’s way of saying, I’m now debating if these things will even exist, and so I need to give myself a huge buffer to own this stuff. That’s what’s happening right now. It has a lot of ripple effects that we can talk about. Friedberg and I have talked about this a lot. The most obvious impact is how these tech companies recruit and retain talent, because the biggest thing that it starts to eat into are the cash flows of a business, which really directly tie to stock-based comp and all this other stuff. But let me just stop there. So we are — we have moved away from a when to now an if, and I think that that is a very smart question to be asking. The answer may be for many of these companies that they will survive, but we don’t know how long, and until that becomes clearer, you have to give yourself room to be wrong.

Jason Calacanis: 7:28 You said when then if, did you mean if to when?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 7:30 No, no, no, we’ve always debated when will these cash flows disappear. Now it’s like, will they even exist?

Jason Calacanis: 7:36 Got it. Okay. So the second part of this story, Friedberg and Sacks, is that a Substack post, fan fiction, taking place in the fictional 2028 global intelligence crisis, went mega viral. 28 million views on X. It was posted Sunday night. It made the market tank on Monday. In this fictional Substack post, the author said there’s going to be essentially a death spiral that happens because of AI. How does that work? Well, first companies embrace AI. Everything goes right. They’re able to cut staff, their margins go up, similar to how Amazon has trimmed their white collar staff. Then they’re so successful at this that they lose their customer base because consumers don’t have discretionary funding to spend. Then it creates a death spiral where the companies keep deploying AI to try to hit the margins, cutting staff, and the entire economy collapses. Dr. Doom level stuff. Unemployment’s at 10%, S&P goes down from 38% highs. After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the 3% interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stablecoin, all the financial stocks got hit on Monday. Amex down 8%, Capital One down 8%, Mastercard 6%, Visa 4%, yadda yadda. Finally, this piece got a lot of pushback. There was a silly piece in it or a section in it where they said AI agents would vibe code their way to displacing DoorDash and that’s kind of silly if anybody’s run a network-based business knows. Sacks, I assume you read this piece or at least saw the fallout from it, what’s your take? And then we’ll go to you, Friedberg.

David Sacks: 9:21 Yeah, well, I know that this Citrini article got passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert. But I’m starting to question how legitimately viral it really was. There’s some information that just came out that the attribution of the article has been amended, meaning the co-authors have been amended to include a short fund that was shorting some of the names mentioned in the article. This is according to another post that just came out. According to this post, the authorship attribution attributed to market-moving was changed after publication to the co-author who is a managing partner of a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named. So, I think that’s point number one is I just wonder did this article truly go viral or did the authors do anything to kind of amplify it? And we just don’t know the answer to that question. But regardless of that, let’s just take the arguments on their face. I think one of the best responses to it was by another writer named Derek Thompson who wrote an article called Nobody Knows Anything, which I think is a reference to a famous take by legendary Hollywood writer William Goldman.

David Sacks: 10:24 In any event, what the article says is no one really knows what’s going to happen with AI in two years never mind 20 years. And so they resort to science fiction writing masquerading as analysis. And the author here, Derek Thompson, says that the conversation about AI is really just a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. And he says that’s not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick, but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply of real-world real-time information about AI’s macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. So in other words, what he’s saying is, look, this guy is writing very compelling science fiction, but there’s no real analytics behind it to defend it. And yes, this could happen. Here’s a prediction market on whether people believe the Citrini report’s going to come true. Something like 12% believe the Citrini scenario is going to happen. But the truth is no one really knows. I mean, there’s other dueling science fiction narratives where AI’s going to create such a world of abundance that we’re not going to need for anything. And just by the way, Derek Thompson is one of the abundance guys with Ezra Klein.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 11:51 This is why the market’s getting whacked. I think that you’re right, Sacks, nobody knows. So if you can get 5% for owning government bonds, why are we taking excessive risk here?

David Sacks: 12:00 Yeah, let me just build on your point about SaaS. So, the reason why there’s so much uncertainty around SaaS is that SaaS used to be such an easily modeled and predictable category. And I saw as a VC, we saw the same story play out across many, many different categories of software. You’d have this initial period where there’d be this experimentation phase, you’d have a bunch of different products that come to market. There’d be a battle. And then the market would eventually settle and there’d be a category leader, and they would capture most of the market share and the vast majority of the market capitalization. And they would have very, very predictable metrics. It was very easy to grade a SaaS business. You look at ARR, annually recurring revenue, you look at the net dollar retention, you want to see, depending on the phase…

Chamath Palihapitiya: 12:46 RPO, RPO, revenue on the performance obligation.

David Sacks: 12:48 Right. And so, you know, these things began to be seen as like an annuity with growth, right? Because a good net dollar retention would be something like 120%, which means that your sort of cohort of existing customers on balance would all renew the next year and actually they would renew at 120% of their previous year’s contract values. And the reason you got that extra 20% is they would buy more seats or there’d be additional products or features they would upsell. It got to be very, very predictable. And so when people were buying software companies at, I don’t know, 13 times ARR, they thought they were buying a growth annuity. And now all of a sudden you got to factor into that, well, wait a second, what if AI disrupts the whole market? What if it doesn’t eliminate — I don’t think AI is going to get rid of Salesforce, but it could eat into their growth opportunity. We just don’t know. What if it changes the pricing model? I mean, it just creates a whole lot of unknowns. And I actually don’t believe in the Citrini or the doomer take on this, but I can see why the market would feel this level of uncertainty given how predictable a category SaaS used to be, just say a year ago.

Jason Calacanis: 13:56 Well, chaos is a ladder, Friedberg, and this means opportunity. So if we look at this and SaaS has headwinds, then is there a winner? Is open source the winner? Or is this all deflationary in your mind, Friedberg? And we just make less money and the earnings of these companies get compressed, the size of them gets compressed? How do you think about it?

David Friedberg: 14:24 I think fundamentally if you’re driving productivity with AI, you’re driving leverage on human time and leverage on capital. The question is how quickly can you drive that up? And that’s a function of how much consumption there is, how much capacity there is for consumption. So on the one hand, I’ll just speak broadly, I think like humans have this desire to improve their livelihoods by roughly 10% every year. Meaning like your income and your ability to purchase stuff that’s new relative to where you were last year have to go up by 10% for you to be happy. If it’s less than 10%, you’re probably unhappy. I think that’s just like an anecdote. Like I think that’s sort of like my rubric for thinking about why are people unhappy or happy. So if your earnings are the same but things are getting more expensive, you’re not happy. If your earnings go up by 10% and things stay the same price, you got 10% more than you had last year, you’re gonna be happy. I just think like all humans are driven by this need to consume more each year than they did last year. So I think for me that’s like the lower limit on consumptive capacity in the world.

David Friedberg: 15:31 The question that we’re now facing which we’ve never faced in human history before is there an upper limit on consumptive capacity. Because AI creates such a profound shift in productivity and in leverage that normally you would say, hey, when we get a new tool and we get new leverage in a system, we build a new technology, we can make more with less. Therefore everyone gets access to more things for the same price or the cost of things that they consume come down by a certain price. But there may be a situation now where the ability to make stuff exceeds the capacity to consume stuff. And that is something that I don’t think we’ve faced before.

David Friedberg: 16:06 And I think that’s sort of where a lot of the models start to break, just general economic models, just general productivity models and general social models. And this goes to the point about like what is everyone going to do. In the same way that I think we’ve argued that maybe SaaS was a transitory business phenomenon that existed between the foundation of the internet and the era of AI, it may be the case that knowledge work in general is also a transitory phenomenon that only existed between the foundation of the computer or computing tools and the existence of AI generally speaking. And if all of that goes away very quickly and all of those people can be redistributed and recast into doing other higher-level more creative things, their productivity goes up by 100x, is there really a consumer on the other end of all of that productivity? Is there really enough consumptive capacity? And I think that’s the profound question that we all face. I don’t think that there’s any limit to productivity.

Jason Calacanis: 17:09 Sorry, is that your way of saying that SaaS goes to zero or that’s your way of saying these companies go to zero?

David Friedberg: 17:19 I’m just saying knowledge work in general.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 17:26 Isn’t this just another dueling science fiction take? I mean, or what’s your evidence for this? Let’s use data. I can show you some data that I think contradicts what you’re saying.

David Sacks: 17:36 In the sense that there is more leverage stacks that people are able to actually deliver… but let me just show you a few data points real quick. Because I think this is relevant. So we’re really talking about the disruption caused by coding assistants right? This is like the first big killer app of AI.

Jason Calacanis: 18:00 And we’ll have agents later, but really it’s all about coding assistants, right? And the ability to more easily create code. That’s what’s creating the disruption to the SaaS category.

David Friedberg: 18:09 Well, so let’s focus on the data we see right now around that. And there are a lot of people who are pointing this out that Anthropic right now has a job listing for a software engineer on their website right now for $570,000. And a lot of people are kind of pointing out, okay, so wait, so what Anthropic is saying is they’re still trying to hire software engineers at a very high wage, but somehow they think these jobs are going to be eliminated?

Jason Calacanis: 18:38 Chamath might apply for that job. He was — yeah, austerity measures. Sounds pretty good to me.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 18:48 No, I’m worried, like, I hope my 8090 team doesn’t see that offer. That’s some big numbers. Our equity is way higher, but our salaries are not that high. I mean, you put these things together, that equity is money good. The reality is those guys are doing five to six billion dollar structured secondaries every year now, or they’re starting to, which means that’s like cash compensation. So for me to match that, I need to be 3X higher than that.

David Friedberg: 19:13 And I think a lot of people are kind of pointing out, well, this is a contradiction. Anthropic doesn’t really seem to be practicing what they’re preaching if they’re paying enormous amounts still for software engineers even as they claim they’re obsoleting the entire category. Something doesn’t quite add up. Citadel Securities did a new report that rebuts that Citrini report and they show a couple of stats here which I think are really interesting. So job postings for software engineers are rapidly rising. They’re showing I think it was roughly a 10% year-over-year increase in the demand for software engineers. On a related note, they also show that company formation is also rapidly expanding. And that may have something to do with AI making it easier to start a business or to get leverage.

David Sacks: 20:00 There’s a couple of competing effects going on here. And I think Aaron Levie had a really good explanation of why you might see something very counterintuitive happening, and again, it all goes back to Jevons Paradox. But what Aaron says is that when you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate, but there are going to be many other jobs like that. But think about software engineering. Even among startups in Silicon Valley, which I think are probably some of the most attractive places for software engineers to work, there’s always been a chronic shortage of them. Then you’ve got the Fortune 500 companies, non-tech companies, which have always had an even harder time hiring technical talent. So you have this massive unfilled need for software engineers across the entire economy. Now you’re going to be able to get a lot more leverage out of software engineers. It doesn’t mean they’re going to get fired, it just means that now maybe you can have a lot more 10x software engineers and those jobs are now being spread throughout the whole economy.

David Sacks: 21:00 You know I also think just to put some numbers on this, I think the cost structure of the average Fortune 500 business is something like 5% IT. And that includes all of their IT, not just their software. What should it be? What should the percentage of software be in an enterprise cost structure? Elon describes companies as cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human. If you think about the current Fortune 500 company being one or two percent software, maybe they should be 50% software.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 21:41 I think what Aaron is saying here is the market for software and software engineers was so constrained by the lack of availability that even if we 10x or 100x the productivity of software engineers, the demand will be there to absorb this new supply. And so it could lead to this explosion in productivity without the massive job loss.

David Friedberg: 22:01 I think you’re right. I think the thing that I would look at is I would expect OpEx as a percentage of revenue to fall off of a cliff, but within that OpEx, the percentage of it that you allocate to technology and technology related things probably goes way way up than what it is today. Okay Jason, the batch of people that are applying for Launch, has SaaS stopped? Has software stopped?

Jason Calacanis: 22:26 It’s AI first companies obviously, and people are — basically, everybody’s building the great, you know, as we talked about at the All-In Summit, some of these companies are trying to build the best pilot in the world or Waymo’s trying to build the best driver in the world, people are now trying to build the best SDR in the world, the best salesperson, the best executive coach, and so we have been obsessed with Claude co-work but mainly OpenClaw. And so what we did was, and I think it’s not developers that are going to do all this work, it’s knowledge workers. So we have 20 people in our firm, we had 15 of them come in this weekend and they all got trained over like six or seven hours how to have their own OpenClaw agent and we started building it. Every piece of software that we wanted to buy or build over the last 10 years that we never got to, my people are building in the last 30 days. As an example, you know when you’re selling ads for a podcast, you want to check all the other podcasts and what advertisers they have. We trained an agent to go take the top 100 podcasts, look through the transcripts, figure out who the advertisers are, check those advertisers in Pipedrive, tell us when the last time we contacted them and put it into the sales room. That was an SDR job that we wanted to fill and software we wanted to build.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 23:47 So hold on, that was a human that you were paying money and now you’ve replaced with software or that human still exists and now they just do it in a better way?

Jason Calacanis: 23:56 Redeploying that human. We had a human doing it, we’re going to redeploy them to do other things. And the consistency of this Chamath and the accuracy and then it’s doing it all night long. So we have like seven of these agents in these kind of roles. The next piece we did was we gave my agent, which is like the Ultron, root access to Gmail, calendar, Zoom, Notion, Slack, and what it’s doing is it’s giving each person, ‘here’s what you got done this week’ with their manager, ‘here’s the emails you sent, here’s the meetings you took, here’s the contacts, here’s the threads you were involved in’, and then it’s helping manage those people.

David Friedberg: 24:29 Okay but all that to me says you Jason, despite all your doomerism, seems like you’re growing and you’re going to be hiring more people and you’re more productive. Am I getting this wrong? But are you growing and you’re going to be hiring more people?

Jason Calacanis: 24:46 We’re not… no, no. We’re not going to add more people. Definitely not adding people. The people we have are becoming 10 or 20% more efficient every week because the software we would have paid for or built from another vendor if we had the time or we wanted to build custom software we had 10 engineers, it’s being built by our OpenClaw agents. As an example, when we make clips for this podcast or other podcasts, we have it go and look for like a ‘This Week in Startups’ episode from 10 years, tell us the three best moments and it makes the clip, it puts the subtitles on it, and then it puts the clip into the Slack room. That was something that was going to be a full-time job. So we’re getting 10, 20% more efficient. Then I started doing it at home. So I had to take our Instacart, pull out the last 10 orders we did and then tell us what we order most of the time and then it’s going to automatically build a cart for us. Every single knowledge work job is being automated right now and you can take it and if you’re a business process head where you know how to like do a business process and you can structure it and write it with an agent, it’ll just run it every day, every week. We did another agent, how do you make better thumbnails? And we said every Saturday in your skills, so when you build an OpenClaw it has like a soul file and it has a skills file. In the skills file we told it every week go out and look for people discussing how to make better thumbnails on YouTube, how to make better titles. It found this week, Chamath, somebody at MrBeast’s company talk about how they’re using heat maps. It was an article I would have never known. It added it to its skill and now whenever we post a thumbnail it tells us based on its skill that it refines every week how to make that thumbnail better and it’s starting to make the thumbnails. This is becoming recursive. So you keep the same number of people but they get 10 or 20% more efficient. I don’t know what this means for the larger economy, all I know is it’s the most exciting time I’ve had online since the web came out, since the internet came out. It is so much fun to automate all this stuff.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 27:00 The big question that I am thinking about is all these businesses are going to need to batten down the hatches and give themselves room to figure this all out, right? If you take Sacks’s point, if you take your point, JCal, which is the young nimble companies like yours are going to be rapidly experimenting, the bigger, larger companies are going to slowly onboard themselves to start experimenting. All of that means we’re going to get much clearer answers to all of this. But what it also means is that you’re going to have to have time so that you can figure this all out. And if you want to buy yourself time, you’re going to need a ton of cash. And if you’re going to think about saving cash, the one place tech companies literally incinerate cash is how they do compensation. And so I kind of think, like, at some point the next shoe will drop and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock-based comp because they literally incinerate most, if not all of their free cash flow fighting the dilution from stock-based compensation. So if you want five or six years to just be in the arena on the field figuring this out, you’re going to want to kind of be very cash flow generative and really conservative in how you spend your money.

Jason Calacanis: 28:08 Yeah. Sacks, the people who embrace this, I think, become five or 10 times more valuable than the people who are not. That’s where I think the opportunity in the economy is. So unless you think humanity’s going to run out of problems to solve, I think it’s going to be boom. It’s going to be boomtown. And I think people are going to start more companies because the barrier to start a company is no longer three or four million dollars. You could just have two or three people and you start setting up these agents, and man, you can make software, you can do sales, you can do PR. Everything is getting faster and faster and faster. The wake-up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, Slack doesn’t have that, but have you considered Mattermost?’ I’m like, ‘What’s Mattermost?’ ‘Oh, it’s an open-source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, don’t do that. We’re only spending 6K a year on Slack or 10K a year.’ But the software is building CRM systems for us. It’s building agents for us and it wants to just build all the software stack. So you could, when you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you’re working with, you’re going to be able to say to them, ‘Hey, we could roll our own’ and when you want to upsell us on this latest thing like you talked about Sacks, upselling is such a big part of SaaS. You’re like, ‘I can actually build that software myself internally. I don’t need you to do it.’

Jason Calacanis: 29:40 Ryan Peterson just posts on X, ‘Claude for legal seems to work just as well as Harvey by the way.’ Now the SaaS apocalypse is going after private companies though too.

David Sacks: 29:52 Well, I think for a while now there has been a question of which layer of the stack is going to capture all the value. So is it going to be the model companies?

David Friedberg: 30:00 There could be the applications that are built on top of the models or, you know, if there’s a lot of competition at both those layers of the stack, do the chip companies get it all? I think it’s an unclear question.

David Sacks: 30:11 Yeah, I think for any given vertical application, you do have to defend why you think your value prop will be sustainable as the underlying foundation models get better themselves.

Jason Calacanis: 30:26 And it’s open source. Like this week we put up Kimmy 2.5, it can do about 80-85% of the jobs. So we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up. All right, listen, this is TBD, we got a lot more to think about on this topic.

David Friedberg: 30:41 Just on this point of a lot of these debates about AI are dueling science fiction narratives. I just think that the doomer narratives are inherently more appealing to people. I mean, I think it’s partly just you look at most sci-fi movies, they’re dystopian not utopian. In addition to that, I think we have a bunch of heuristic biases in favor of the doomer narrative. So one of them is the seen versus the unseen. It’s a lot easier to see the jobs that already exist that could be obsoleted than it is to imagine the new jobs and the new business models that haven’t been created yet and that will likely take some great innovator or a genius to think of in order to create. So we have that huge heuristic bias of not being able to see the creation that’s coming. It takes way less creativity to think about the potential destruction. And then finally, I think the other heuristic is just the whole fixed pie fallacy. Most people do tend to think of the economy as a fixed pie. This is why you see so much anger against millionaires and billionaires is because of this idea that if someone’s getting rich it must be at the expense of someone else. That’s not actually the case. The economy itself could be growing larger as a result of someone inventing something new that increases production. A really good line from another article that was written just a couple weeks ago was ‘the economy is not a pie, it’s a garden, and technology is rain.’ So again, all of this technological innovation is going to increase the growth rate of the garden, it’s not a fixed pie. And just because you see an expansion in productivity in one part of the economy does not mean that you’re going to see job loss in another part of the economy.

Jason Calacanis: 32:24 Yeah, I think the job people are not seeing but I’m seeing right now is the person who creates agents, manages them, and is the maestro of the agents. The person who can take the business process, explain it, and train the agent to do it. And there are certain people in business who are just really good at operations, you were one of them Sacks running companies. And that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent, and figure out how to manage them — with any new technology, great job. And it’s not a developer.

David Sacks: 32:51 Look, with any new technology there’s always a huge change management aspect with enterprises because it’s hard for them to adapt and change. And the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones who are going to create an amazing career opportunity for themselves. But it’s hard to do and that’s going to slow down the rate of change, just the amount of inertia in the economy. And also one other constraint is going to be that at some point here we may be token constrained. I mean we may not have enough energy like we’ve talked about. Even though the chips are getting so much better that tokens per second, tokens per watt, and tokens per dollar are all increasing very fast, but we’re still going to probably be constrained in the next couple of years on some dimension whether it’s land, power, shell, or just energy production or maybe chip production. There are real world constraints on just how fast we can scale the infrastructure and that will mean that these hyper utopian or hyper dystopian narratives will be wrong. I don’t think there’s time in the next few years for the whole economy to change in the way that the extremes would present.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 34:03 I think you’re right. I think you’re going to see a 10x in the demand for tokens, but I also think you’re going to see a 90% price reduction in the cost of an output token probably by the end of this year. So I think to your point, it’s going to just create an enormous upswell of demand because we’re going to be able to cut the prices of an output token so dramatically.

Jason Calacanis: 34:25 And by the way, that discussion we had Chamath last week when we talked about the tokens outpacing the employee salary and just where are these tokens all going to come from? That was our most viewed clip or one of the most viewed clips in the history of this podcast, so people are actually really focused on this.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 34:44 I had my team at 8090, we redid our cost model and now we have that as a line item when we think about fully burdened cost of employees. We now factor that in because we’re at a place where some of our engineers are just racking up ginormous bills. And then separately, just general runs that we do for general purpose stuff that we need to just run our product is so expensive. So I am waiting with bated breath for what Sacks said, which is we need an explosion in the capacity that’s available because I do think that the silicon solutions are coming that will cut the cost, but we need a large block of land, power, shell, ready to then turn all this stuff on so that we can actually take advantage of it.

Jason Calacanis: 35:22 Rumors the new Mac Studio’s coming, will have an M5 chip in it and will be language model ready. So that’s the rumor, that they’re building it for models. So that could be an incredible turn of events. Everybody’s desktop running the local model. Sacks, you want to have the final word here?

David Sacks: 35:41 Just to go back to what Chamath was saying there. I mean, you’ve got political forces that want to stop the construction of all data centers in the United States. If that gains steam, then that’s going to be a huge constraint on any change whatsoever.

David Friedberg: 35:54 Can I tee this up for you, J-Cal? So I went back this weekend and I looked at the number of data centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns and I posted it on X. It was really a very small behavior which was pushing back on data centers and getting them cancelled. We had about 25 projects total of which 20 were just in Q2 alone. There are 100 data center projects right now that are facing some form of local opposition. If you take that 40% cancellation number and you apply this and then you multiply by the number of megawatts that they have announced, last year we lost almost 5 gigawatts in terms of cancelled projects. This year coming in 2026 we have about 7 that could be cancelled if you use this math. If then you flow that through, OpenAI, Sarah Friar said this, that every gigawatt for OpenAI is about 10 billion of revenue. So if you assume that’s roughly accurate plus or minus a billion here or there, what that means is that 2025 the industry as a whole lost 50 billion of revenue and this year if 7 gigawatts get cancelled, it’s about 70 billion. Now you’re talking about 130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that’ll go forward in time that we miss out on. I think that’s really bad. We need to figure out a way to nip this in the bud.

Jason Calacanis: 37:31 So confounding because we were sitting here five years ago, ten years ago local municipalities were fighting and giving discounts to try to get these data centers open to get the jobs and get the revenue and now we’ve got people trying to stop them. This is a perfect transition for the state of the union. Before we get there, two important programming notes: All-In is going to host two events in 2026. One of them, Liquidity, May 31st to June 3rd, in Yountville, up in wine country. Chamath has taken control of the event and he has set a standard for who gets on stage.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 38:04 None of you mids can control the programming. I’ll tease two. The first is an incredibly dear friend of mine, the Axe of Axes, Dan Loeb, who founded Third Point, who is an unbelievable investor in literally every domain, private credit, public equities, private tech. He’s a beast. So he’ll be doing a really important keynote. He has not done one of these public speaking slots in a very long time. And then the second is the CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Friar. We’re going to double-click into the entire business model of OpenAI on stage in front of everyone.

Jason Calacanis: 38:56 Amazing. So go to allin.com. If you are an All-In Summit fan, I can’t believe it, Friedberg, we’re going to be in our fifth year, September 13th to 15th.

David Friedberg: 39:10 Only gets better.

Jason Calacanis: 39:18 Can I give a plug to friend of the pod, Bill Gurley? He’s got an amazing new book, Running Down a Dream.

David Friedberg: 39:27 Wait, wait, wait. ‘Running Down a Dream,’ I just want everybody to stop the pod, pause the podcast, I want you to buy three copies. Give it to two young people and a parent you know.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 39:37 It’s a great book. It really is inspiring for kids and Bill Gurley, friend of the pod, he always shows up for us. J-Cal, do an impression for us of what it would be like if you and Bill Gurley started a podcast together.

Jason Calacanis: 39:49 All right, everybody, welcome to the JCBG podcast. I’m your host, Jason Calacanis, and I’m Bill Gurley! And we’re here in Texas at Terry Black’s where we’re getting some beef ribs and we’re going to discuss investing in marketplaces, as well as my new book, ‘Running Down a Dream,’ which will teach your kids how to not be fuckups. And if your kids are fuckups, you can hit them in the back of the head with the book. Texas style.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 40:21 One of the big topics, and I think something you’re working on with President Trump, Sacks, is this energy pledge. I’ve been seeing rumblings about this. Explain what’s going on in terms of getting the country in sync around these data centers and energy.

David Sacks: 40:38 Well, the president announced in the State of the Union last night that he supports a ratepayer protection pledge which requires the major tech companies to provide for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not see their rates go up. I think this makes total sense. I think Chamath, to your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices are going to go up and that shouldn’t be the case. And so the president has said that he’s committed to not allowing residential rates to go up as a result of data centers. Pretty straightforward, you get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers, to pay for the increase in the electricity costs, or you let them set up their own power behind the meter. The president’s been talking about this for over a year, that our biggest AI companies would also become big power companies because we would let them stand up their own power generation behind the meter. So these data centers don’t even have to connect to the grid, they could just do colocation themselves. But also I think that with this ratepayer protection pledge, what you’re going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid. Also they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure. So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the costs to generate it are not all variable. There’s a lot of huge fixed costs in there. So when you increase scale, then you can actually reduce the metered rate. So again, this is really I think the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders who just wants to stop all progress whatsoever.

Jason Calacanis: 42:23 I saw a funny post calling it BANANAS, which is Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

David Sacks: 42:30 BANANAS is replacing the new NIMBY. I think the president’s approach finds a very good balance here, which is, look, we can have progress, just don’t make residential consumers pay for it. Let the big tech companies pay for it themselves. And I think you’ll see more coming out about this from the White House next week.

Jason Calacanis: 42:46 Quite a deft move. Friedberg, how should America be thinking about this great data center buildout, energy usage, if you expand it out over the coming decade? And how do you sell that to the backdrop that you talk about, the socialist movement?

David Friedberg: 43:31 The data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of light, so you could put them anywhere. And I think that our policymakers need to be very cognizant of that fact. You have, and we do, connect the internet using high-speed cable, high-speed fiber optic throughout the world. And so theoretically, if we don’t embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry — and it will fundamentally be an industry, because it is almost like the new sort of oil. Where are the oil rigs going to go? Where are the railroads going to go? Where are the telegraph lines going to go? Where are the factories going to go? If we don’t put them here, someone else will put them on their shores, someone else will put them in their country, someone else will put them in their jurisdiction, and a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of the second and third order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere. It’s not going to just go away. The demand is there. The economy is moving forward. AI is moving forward. We live in a world with 196 countries. And data centers do not take up a lot of space. They’re very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the data centers in the world fit under the tip of a pin. And so this is a very small footprint. And if we’re going to give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value creation, we’re being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the world. I would just encourage the system that I think is the right system, where provided data centers are producing their own electricity, that means that you’re taking electricity consumption off the grid because they otherwise are not being used on the grid, and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. So, it’s silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on data centers. As soon as you do that, the companies that use data centers are not going to slow down, they’re going to go put them somewhere else and we’re going to miss out.

Jason Calacanis: 45:47 And it’s such a good point, Chamath, because you were recently in the Middle East and I’ve been there a bunch in Saudi, UAE. These are the folks who built a large portion of those oil refineries and they are savvy to this and what are they doing in Saudi, UAE, Qatar, all of these regions? They’re doubling down, they’re 10x-ing their data center builds. So to your point, Friedberg, either we build them or they’re going to go somewhere else and there are people who are willing to underwrite these and they’re willing to take out the red tape from the process here and move quicker than us. So I think this is a pretty deft move by President Trump to say, hey, you guys should all just guarantee that consumers don’t get impacted. The water thing is a total hoax. The water is recirculated. That’s a hoax. I think this is really smart.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 46:24 I think that what the president is doing and what Sacks is doing is really smart. The thing to keep in mind is that there’s still a risk that prices go up and it has nothing to do with these data centers and it has everything to do with the business model of being a utility. Because what happens is in order to get a license, a monopoly license in an area to provide energy, to generate energy for a community, the exchange works in the following way. You go and you present a CapEx plan to the Public Utilities Commission. That’s effectively your budget that says here are the lines I’m going to upgrade, here are the generators I’m going to upgrade. Independent of data centers, the reality is the electricity consumption of individual Americans is going up because we have more devices, we have cars, we have all of these other things. So what we also have to do is we have to look at how utilities’ business model actually incentivizes them to increase prices by making all kinds of investments. So we have to do a good job of making sure we hold everybody accountable. Because otherwise what you could see is that the data centers take on the burden for themselves but prices still continue to escalate because a utility says I need to spend a billion dollars this year to upgrade my infrastructure and what that allows them to do is take that billion dollars and essentially invest it for a return. That’s the business model of utilities.

Jason Calacanis: 48:00 And this is really happening in blue states. Micron has a $100 billion megafab in New York and there’s a lawsuit by six citizens. And the project has taken 1,200 days between their announcement and the groundbreaking and they spent 612 days on the environmental impact study. People wake up, just go to Texas. Elon built his factory here, the Gigafactory, in under 18 months. This is the great state of Texas, come here, we’ll build it for you and you’ll be done.

David Sacks: 48:41 Yeah, I don’t know why anyone bothers with the blue states anymore. They make it too hard to build.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 48:52 By the way, there are a lot of people in New York who want to work. This is not a case actually of this new fab being unpopular. The majority of people in the area actually want this plant being built, they want the jobs that are going to come there. A lot of people say data centers don’t create a lot of jobs, this is actually a chip fab, so it will create a lot of jobs, a lot of good high-paying jobs. People want it. But six people can stop it with a lawsuit after it’s already been through a two-year environmental review.

David Friedberg: 49:21 It’s not blue and red states, these are nonprofits that get organized to create this kind of chaos. I remember looking at a massive lithium investment in Nevada and the whole point was to domesticate lithium production and what was interesting is this enormous deposit that’s just sitting there ripe for development right before they were about to get environmental approvals, there was a lawsuit by people who wanted to protect the Upper Land Grouse. It’s seared in my mind that the Upper Land Grouse of Nevada is the reason why we do not have domestic national security around lithium and you have to ask yourself why is this possible and it’s possible because you have these environmental nonprofits that can go and create this chaos with absolutely no risk to them. Zero. They can fundraise around it and they can create this chaos. This is an example of Greenpeace. They were pushing back on an oil pipeline to such a degree and they created so much chaos that they were sued and a North Dakota judge just said that he’s going to order Greenpeace to pay damages that should total almost $350 million in connection to those protests.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 50:32 And it should not be the case that six people can slow down a $100 billion investment package. That’s not right.

Jason Calacanis: 50:39 Well I think there’s, and I just want to highlight this important point, there’s not a lot of logic and reason. You guys are right, but I do think there’s a lot of emotion and there’s a huge aversion to Big Tech, a huge aversion to wealth creation by select individuals, select companies.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 51:00 A huge aversion to economic growth that doesn’t benefit everyone, there’s a fundamental kind of underlying “left behind” emotion that drives a lot of this and I’ve said it before, but I think unless there’s systems or mechanisms that get folks to come along with the value creation ahead and help them connect their own lives to the value creation that’s being realized, they’re not going to be supportive because there is this kind of diametric opposition towards big tech, towards the wealth gap, towards value accrual to a select few companies or select few individuals and this fuels and feeds that. So I think fundamentally, maybe it’s not just about giving the data centers their own power capacity, but there’s got to be mechanisms and tools that help the broader population understand or recognize or get some benefit from it as well, where they’re an owner in it or participant in it, because they have the power as we’re seeing, they have the power to stop it, therefore they want to have some benefit for providing authority to do it.

Jason Calacanis: 51:55 And these six people are concerned about housing costs, worker exposure to toxic chemicals, pollution in air and water, greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, flooding of the wetlands, all these things that obviously could be mitigated. All right, let’s keep moving here. We got a lot more docket to get through. State of the Union came in at 108 minutes and it’s the longest in 60 years. Actually the longest since they started tracking this. The theme of President Trump’s State of the Union this year: America at 250, strong, prosperous, and respected. Trump took a bunch of victory laps: inflation, jobs, closing the border, all those have gone really well. But this comes to the backdrop of Trump’s approval rating being super challenged. He started his first year at plus 11.7%, now he’s negative 14.3%, a 26 point swing. Economy started plus 3.4, down to minus 18.2 and trade started at 5.9% and went down to minus 22.7. So let’s call balls and strikes here gentlemen, favorite moments? What were your favorite moments from the State of the Union and just general impressions of one hour and 45 minutes of Trump going to town?

David Friedberg: 53:19 I thought it was great.

David Sacks: 53:23 Favorite moment or two? Well, I had a couple. One was the Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib death stare and them just like losing their minds and screaming. I just thought it was so un-American. The second was when he was calling for law and order and focusing and prioritizing on American citizens and none of the Democrats stood up. I thought that was kind of foolish. It was like obvious things and the Democrats wouldn’t applaud but this time they did, like they did for the hockey team, which I thought was like the right thing to do.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 54:00 And then the fourth thing is just a shout out to our friend Brad Gerstner who got a big shout out from the president.

Jason Calacanis: 54:04 I don’t know, Sacks, if you engineered that or not, but that was fantastic.

David Sacks: 54:08 That was incredible. He got like a double shout out. It was like a double tap.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 54:12 Yeah, that was really cool. Our group chat went crazy. Those are my four highlights.

Jason Calacanis: 54:19 Here’s your clip of Democrats not standing for Americans over illegal aliens. “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.”

David Friedberg: 54:52 Why wouldn’t you stand for that? That’s an easy one to stand for. Doesn’t make any sense.

Jason Calacanis: 55:00 Yeah, I mean, I’m anti-ICE but I’m pro-American and I’m pro-reasonable immigration, like 90% of the country is. So it just doesn’t make any sense. Of course American citizens should be prioritized over illegals. Of course, yes. And then I also think there should be a path to citizenship for people who’ve been here for a while, and I think that’s what the majority of the country thinks as well. Your point is, I can hold two thoughts in my head. I would have stood if he asked me. Yes, obviously we should take care of American citizens first. Yes, and we should deport violent criminals. We’ve been over this like a million times here. This is like consensus.

David Sacks: 55:39 But what do you think is going on in everybody else’s head when they’re like, ‘We cannot stand for this’?

Jason Calacanis: 55:45 These two sides, I mean, I think it’s like the tariff thing, it’s like the ICE thing. These two sides cannot work together. It’s just the most polarized it’s ever been. Trump is not the kind of guy to reach across the aisle, the Democrats are now digging in. So we just have a dysfunctional government where, in a more functional time period, like under Clinton, let’s say, or Bush, people would have gotten together and they would have said, ‘Yeah, of course tariffs are done in Congress, that’s the law. What are your thoughts, Mr. President? How can we support your tariff program?’ But now it’s like, ‘We don’t work together. We don’t actually have discussions anymore. There’s no bipartisan collaboration.’ All these politicians are disgraceful across the board. They should be working together for the American people. If the president wants to do tariffs, they should be reasonable about it and give him the power to do reasonable tariffs and he should be reasonable and say, ‘Hey, I understand that’s your power, let’s get together and we’ll chop it up and let’s have dinner together.’ But they’re just too polarized. It’s just disgraceful where this country has gotten to. I blame both parties.

David Sacks: 56:49 Whenever the Democrats get smoked out as being radicals and extremists, you always want to basically say ‘a pox on both your houses’ and blame the Republicans and Democrats equally. The fact of the matter is the president said to the audience, to the members of Congress, hey, if you agree with this statement, stand up. And of course every single Democrat sat there stone-faced and refused to applaud or acknowledge what he was saying. This was a very easy test for the Democrats to pass. In fact, it was a political risk for the president because it was so easy for the Democrats to demonstrate that they’re operating in good faith and that they’re willing to be bipartisan and they’re not extremists and they’re actually commonsensical and logical. And they completely failed the test. And by the way, it wasn’t just on that one. Let me just tell you some of the other ones where they refused to applaud. So they refused to applaud the grieving families of innocent American women and children murdered by criminal illegal aliens. They refused to applaud for securing our homeland and ending the invasion of criminal illegal aliens. They refused to applaud for unifying against political violence. They would not even do a polite clap for Erica Kirk and unifying against political violence. They refused to applaud for keeping violent criminals locked up. They even refused to applaud for lower prescription drug prices for millions of Americans because it was President Trump who orchestrated that policy. And there were so many other examples like that. And I think the reason why this speech was so effective — and by the way, it’s not just me saying it, something like two-thirds of the people that CNN polled said it was highly effective and something like three-quarters of CBS News viewers said it was highly effective — is because the president laid out 80-20 issue one after another, or even 90-10 issues or 95-5 issues. I mean, these were all issues where the overwhelming number of Americans I think agree with the policy the president laid out, and in every single case the Democrats wouldn’t even give it polite applause. And that is different than in the past. It’s because the Democrats have become a party of radicalism and extremism. I think the big line of the night was when Trump just sort of said ‘these people are crazy.’ He said it in almost a mournful and regretful way. He doesn’t want them to be crazy. He wants them to be rational so he can work with them.

Jason Calacanis: 59:56 And I mean, just to point the other side, this has been going on for a couple of State of the Unions. The Republicans didn’t stand for the Democrats often and it’s a bit of showmanship, but the truth is Trump is the divider-in-chief, he always is attacking people, he’s always mocking people, so they don’t want to play ball with him.

David Sacks: 1:00:16 He’s counter-punching. You have no choice in politics, you gotta counter-punch.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:20 No, I don’t think so. That’s actually the problem with that philosophy, Trump’s philosophy of we have to counter-punch, we have to attack, we never have to apologize, we never have to be reasonable. That’s part of what’s broken down in our politics and these two sides should work together. We should go back to bipartisan. I think Trump is the mirror of that. He has been hostile towards these Democrats, he doesn’t give them an inch, they should be more collaborative. That’s what the balance of power between the executive branch and Congress and the Senate — this is how it’s supposed to work. And these two sides need to learn how to get back to listening to each other, understanding each other’s positions, and then finding a middle ground. And that’s why the Democrats lost last time, because they didn’t have the common sense to say, ‘Hey, everybody wants the border closed.’ Kamala Harris was too dumb to just say, ‘Yeah, we should have closed the border, it’s closed now.’ Anyway, the whole thing is a mess. I understand you got to fight for your team.

David Sacks: 1:01:29 You just made the key point. Underlying the optics and the polarization, you have issues. And on those issues, President Trump is on the side of the American people, the issues where 80% of the American people agree. Some huge percentage thinks that the Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota was an outrage, and the president is right to point that out. And what’s the Democrats’ reaction? You’ve got Ilhan Omar screaming from the audience at him.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:00 She’s a loon. I mean, at the end of the day, they did stand. He did have Elizabeth Warren stand for stopping Nancy Pelosi from trading stocks and that gave Trump his best one-liner of the night. And they stood for Iran too, stopping Iran from being nuclear. I give Elizabeth Warren credit for that. There you go, you don’t have to punch her back. Pass the Stop Insider Trading Act without delay. See, that’s something bipartisan. That’s what you need to get the country back to.

David Sacks: 1:02:37 But hold on, this disproves the point you were making before. You said that it was polarization. She stood up for that. That’s why he’s so good is he’s in the moment and he’s reacting to what’s happening in the chamber, he’s not just reading from a teleprompter and he nailed it. But look, that moment disproves what you were saying, because this is not just about polarization. On that issue, Elizabeth Warren was willing to stand because she actually, to her credit, wants to ban insider trading by members of Congress. But on the rest of those issues, like securing the border, she did not stand. Why? Because she does not agree with the President on that issue.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:14 We just have to get back to these sides working together. That’s my personal feeling. Friedberg, any thoughts on the theatrics and Trump’s first year writ large and the sort of back and forth and is there any hope that these two teams could collaborate at some point on something like say the ballooning deficit, which Trump has not gotten under control in his first year and it’s going to be 2.5 trillion dollars added?

David Friedberg: 1:03:45 There’s probably one thing they can agree on is just keep the money flowing.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:48 They’ll both give a standing ovation for burn more capital and put us more in debt. Well said, my guy David Friedberg. Sultan of Science, it is your time to shine. The world’s greatest moderator has decided we’re going directly to Science Corner.

David Sacks: 1:04:04 But what do you need me for?

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:06 This is very important for you. Friedberg’s going to talk.

David Sacks: 1:04:10 Wait, wait, wait, are we doing any more topics after this or can I just leave?

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:13 Yes, tariffs. Yes, we’re doing tariffs. Listen, you can go. Let him cook. Let him cook. Friedberg, tell us about this Harvard scene.

David Friedberg: 1:04:26 Speaking of science, I think that there’s a very important moment happening right now. We’ve talked a number of times on this show about Yamanaka factors. These are four proteins that were discovered by Shinya Yamanaka that we found later that when applied to cells, mammalian cells, can actually reverse the age of those cells, reset the epigenetic clock, reset the epigenome, which is the little markers on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off, back to a youthful state. Extraordinary groundbreaking work that was done that won the Nobel Prize, led to the foundation of several companies. There’s a Harvard scientist named David Sinclair. He’s a bit of a controversial character. Do you guys know him?

David Friedberg: 1:05:29 So Sinclair is kind of bemoaned a little bit by the scientific and academic community for being a little too over-hypey, snake oil salesman, as some folks have claimed, because years ago he sold a company to GSK saying resveratrol would reverse aging and he made $720 million on that and it didn’t end up working, and he’s promoted certain supplement companies and so on. So I want to preface with that before I kind of underwrite what he’s saying. But he’s a co-founder of a company called Life Biosciences, and they’ve reached a major agreement with the FDA to be the first company to treat humans with Yamanaka factors. Specifically what they’re doing is they’re going to be delivering these Yamanaka factors, these proteins that rejuvenate cells and make them youthful again, into the eye. And so their first indication is to actually inject them into the vitreous fluid in the eyeball and they’ll affect the retina in the eye to address people that have gotten blind from glaucoma or one of these kind of stroke-like diseases that happen in the eye. And the expectation with this phase one clinical trial is that the delivery of these Yamanaka factors into the eye will rejuvenate the retina, make it youthful again, and restore vision. If it works, which is expected to, because we see this result happen in animal models, it could be an extraordinary breakthrough not just in terms of blindness but in terms of the first human application of Yamanaka factors to reverse aging.

David Friedberg: 1:07:02 The way they’re doing it is they’re actually packaging up DNA that will make these proteins into viruses, an AAV virus that is delivered into the eye. The virus will then go into the retinal cells and then will deliver this payload for this DNA to make these proteins in the eye cells. And it can be turned on and off amazingly, they’ve created a switch mechanism in it where the protein production, the production of these Yamanaka factors, can be turned on and off by taking an antibiotic called doxycycline. So the person that gets the delivery of this drug takes the antibiotic, turns on the production of these Yamanaka factors and then theoretically their eye cells will de-age, will get youthful, and their vision will be restored. So phase one clinical trials underway, first time in human history we’re seeing Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans. Literally the tip of the iceberg, there are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins, or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by restoring the epigenome in cells and make them young again. So this is the beginning of a wave of what I think will be the most extraordinary revolution in human therapeutics and ultimately could lead to, some people would argue, the fountain of youth.

David Sacks: 1:08:22 Is this just a tox study? So is it safety…

David Friedberg: 1:08:25 Phase one, 1A. They’ll see results, they’ll see results, but they’re gonna keep dosing low but you will see results.

David Sacks: 1:08:31 God, that’s going to be incredible.

David Friedberg: 1:08:33 It’s gonna be incredible. By the way, the number of other folks that are gearing up for phase one using if not the Yamanaka factors, other factors that they’ve identified or designed as an alternative to Yamanaka factors, again to rejuvenate the cells. And just to remind folks, the way this works is it was discovered that these proteins when they go into a cell, they take all of those little markers that sit on top of your DNA that turn genes on and off and they create a system that causes them all to move to the right place. So it resets the markers so that those cells will start to operate like they’re supposed to when they were young again.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:08 It’s going to be incredible. Do you think, where do you think it could flow to next? Knees or joints?

David Friedberg: 1:09:16 Arthritis? And by the way, when applied and if it’s distributed in the skin, they’ve seen some results in monkeys where wrinkles go away. It literally makes these cells all work youthful again and so a lot of the damage that happens over time is not damage to DNA. It’s damage to the epigenome. It’s the parts that sit on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off. And they get moved to the wrong place as you get older. And by resetting them and getting them back to the right place, boom, the cell is young again, the organ is young again and suddenly you look and act and feel young again. It’s an incredible technology. We’re just at the early stages, the early innings of turning it into therapeutics. Again, the discovery goes back to 2006 and now we’re starting to see it get into clinics.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:59 So, let’s rejuvenate some hairlines on this podcast. That would be next up.

David Friedberg: 1:10:04 Speak for yourself. What are you talking about bro? My hairline’s incredible. I’m 50.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:12 I mean it’s not bad for 50. I’ll give you credit. You’re holding your own. All right, let’s talk about our final topic: SCOTUS struck down Trump’s emergency powers tariffs. Last Friday, SCOTUS voted 6-3 against President Trump’s tariffs. Six judges voted against, three conservatives: Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch; and three liberals. Via Bloomberg, this is the biggest rebuke of existing executive policy in 91 years since SCOTUS struck down FDR’s first New Deal in 1935. Penn Wharton analysis says the tariffs collected about 175 billion to date. 50% of all tariff duties might wind up being refunded. This is going to take some time to sort out in the courts. 2,000 importers have already filed for refunds. We talked about it here. I think the majority of people felt like this is the way the decision would go. And we talked about here that there were other options for President Trump to pursue. He immediately said he was not deterred and invoked a 15% global tariff across the board via Section 122 of the Trade Act. Here’s your Polymarket: Will the court force Trump to refund tariffs? 18% chance, but spiked to 40% after the SCOTUS decision. How will Congress react? Polymarket says 3% chance Congress passes any tariffs by March 31st. So again, as I referenced earlier, these two sides just can’t seem to work together and that would have resolved the whole thing. Sacks, you want to give us your take here?

David Sacks: 1:11:52 First of all, I don’t think that the tariffs are going away. What the court basically indicated, especially the 70-page Kavanaugh dissent, is that there’s multiple alternative bases in law for the tariffs in existing law. So for example, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 enables temporary 150-day tariffs of up to 15% to address balance of payments issues, and the president has already invoked this, so we are now operating under that. What the 150 days is gonna do is buy the administration time to substantiate via studies and agency reviews what it needs to prove in order to invoke more sweeping tariff authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act and under Section 338 of the Tariff Act. Section 301 authorizes tariffs responding to unfair foreign trade practices; Section 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs against countries discriminating against US commerce. The Kavanaugh dissent actually provided a roadmap for the administration to put in place tariffs using one of these alternate bases. So I think that one way or another, the tariff policies of this administration and the favorable trade deals that they allow us to strike with many nations, they will continue. And I think the court seems to know that because the majority’s opinion and concurrences collectively said nothing about how the administration should go about refunding the tariff revenue already collected. I think that if they expected this decision to end the tariff policies altogether, they probably would have said something about that. And I think that brings up a really important point just on the merits here, which is why would we want to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to a bunch of importers when we’re trillions of dollars in debt? And I’ll just say that the people who originally predicted that somehow these tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy, those predictions all proved not to be true. So I think that this is ultimately going to be a popular policy. The administration will figure out a different way to do it, and I predict that future administrations, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, will keep some version of the tariffs in place because I think that they will be ultimately popular on a long-standing basis.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:13 Chamath, your thoughts?

Chamath Palihapitiya: 1:14:15 I think we’ve proven the experiment has been successful. What was the experiment? We needed to smoke out what the right balance of trade should be between the United States and all of its partner countries. I think that what we uncovered is that for the most part, they were structural imbalances that were made not because they made economic sense for America, but it was just part of a hodgepodge of globalist drivel that people just bought into. And if you strip all that stuff away, we had a hollowed out manufacturing class and we have a hollowed out middle class, and the tariffs will create more equality for the American worker in the end. So now I think the debate should be about how to implement these in a structural and permanent way. I think we talked about this before, that this was sort of expected and there are many other mechanisms. I think the president activated one of them immediately. I don’t think this is going away and I don’t think it should go away. So I think now the point is Congress really should ratify these things because it is clear that it was the right thing to do. And if they don’t, then the president still has a lot of room to get these done, but these make smart economic sense in my opinion.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:32 Friedberg, any thoughts on the ruling? Does it give you some respect for the courts that they made a judgment not along party lines for once?

David Friedberg: 1:15:45 Yeah, and I think that all Americans should feel assured and comforted in the fact that I think a lot of people view the Supreme Court as having a high degree of partisanship. The fact that the president, despite having a majority of what others would think were kind of politically aligned appointees on the court, had a ruling that he did not want, I think should give everyone good faith that the system that the founders set up is working, that there is a judicial branch that adjudicates the law against the executive branch when they think that it doesn’t map. And I think that that was very important to see.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:43 I’ll reiterate that. This is a great moment I think for the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful decision and I think we need to think about executive power a whole bunch, whether it’s Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs. We have this beautiful system set up by the founding fathers and I know it’s frustrating, gridlock’s frustrating, having to work together’s frustrating. Trust me, we all come to this podcast every Thursday and we have to work together. It’s hard to work together, but you gotta learn to work together and we don’t want an executive branch that can unilaterally just roll over the other branches. And that’s going to end, I think Trump’s going to lose the midterms and we’re going to get to more chaos again and we might as well start this reconciliation process of these two sides stopping their lawfare against each other and working together for the American people on the important issues. The tariffs, there are some fundamentally important things that Trump was doing there and they were working. Could have been chaotic, that’s a reasonable criticism of them because business owners didn’t know what to do. So Trump did it in a chaotic way, that’s just a fact. He should have done it in a more thoughtful way and the Congress should have been alongside him saying, ‘Hey, what tools do you need? How can we help support this? We know that there’s trade imbalances. We know that people are being unfair. Let’s work together as one America to negotiate these things.’ So both sides start having dinner together, start playing cards together, and do what we do here on this podcast, which is you fight it out, you argue, but then you come together and try to find some resolutions for this stuff. So they should go and tell Trump, ‘Hey, we’ll approve all the tariffs you did. We will not force you to get refunds.’ The Congress should come out and just say that. And then they should say, ‘Hey, when you want to do them in 2026, just run them by us or ask us for some parameters that you want. And let’s just be thoughtful about it. These are our concerns.’ That’s it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

David Sacks: 1:18:43 Well I just want to make one point. Do you think Susan Rice is going to respect your call for comity and basically working together kumbaya?

David Friedberg: 1:18:53 I want the esprit de corps.

David Sacks: 1:18:55 No I don’t. I think both sides… She just had a diatribe where she basically said that Republicans, and actually not just partisan Republicans, but even tech companies that merely were working with the administration, should expect to get prosecuted. She was basically outright saying she and the Democrats are going to pursue lawfare as soon as they get back in charge.

Chamath Palihapitiya: 1:19:14 Ridiculous. They’re absolutely going to do that. Just like when Trump got in, he went after Comey, he went after Jerome Powell. The lawfare is happening on both sides. Both sides need to drop the lawfare, we need to get rid of these pardons, they’re ridiculous, and we have to be a team.

David Friedberg: 1:19:30 So let’s just get some esprit de corps and teamwork going in Washington, D.C. and that’s what we should vote for in the midterms. We should vote for moderates who want to work together and in 2028, we should have some kind of moderates on tickets that want to work together. That would be better for all Americans. This kind of chaos is not good, folks.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:46 All right, listen, it’s been another amazing episode of the All-In Podcast. Your favorite podcast. Like, subscribe, whatever the hell you want to do on your own time. For David Sacks, David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, love you boys. I am the world’s greatest moderator, J-Cal. See you next time. Bye-bye.