Jason Calacanis: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. Your favorite podcast. Your podcaster's favorite podcast. Yes, it's the All-In podcast. The Core Four, the Fantastic Four, the original Quartet is here. David Friedberg, hot off of his deep state conspiracy interview with Eric Weinstein. Amazing. You did a little run to DC. Great episode, Friedberg.

David Friedberg: It was fun. Eric is one of a kind. I saw Kratsios, too. Kind of two sides of the coin of science in America was the basis of those two interviews. They were fun.

Jason Calacanis: Who is Eric Weinstein? He's a scientist who works with Peter Thiel from Harvard. Has done some really capital...

David Friedberg: Yeah. And he had a podcast for a hot minute. He is a heterodox thinker in science.

Jason Calacanis: What is his heterodoxical thought about science?

David Friedberg: There's all these things that everyone takes as fundamental premises in modern physics like the string theory as an example and he thought it was and called it out as... So he's been kind of outcast in the scientific communities.

Jason Calacanis: It is right? And so he's made this case and he's proposed alternative theories that kind of create a grand unification theory of physics. And then he's been outcast by the scientific community and people say that he's a quack and he's... and he's talked about UFOs and he's talked about Jeffrey Epstein and people kind of say, well, this guy's fringe or they use these different terms to chastise him and over time, you know, the point is similar to what Kratsios has said, like so much of science has kind of followed this sheeplike mentality...

Jason Calacanis: ...where everyone has to line up agree to the same general theory or you get outcast, you don't get grant funding, you don't get tenure, you don't get jobs, you don't get invited to do lectures, you have to follow the mainstream in science or you're outcasts. And it used to be that all about...

Chamath Palihapitiya: I know, but it's very rational to say until string theory is proved, it's unproved. And so if you want to use the adjective that's fine. It'll probably offend some people, but he's more right on the substance of what he's saying than he is wrong. It's unproved, right? It's like Jay Bhattacharya being like, "Hey, you know, COVID may have come from a lab leak." And when people were saying this, they were they were told you were creating conspiracy theories. You were pushing misinformation when there is no misinformation. If there's no absolute truth that you're talking about, it's theory. Everyone was starting with theory on where the COVID came from.

David Sacks: You're talking about a level of corruption in a very narrow specific realm of science, which is the funding and grant approval apparatus...

Jason Calacanis: ...and getting tenure and getting professorships. And so if you don't follow the voting, the methods, the theory, if you don't follow the mainstream, you're outcast. By the way, I buy that. I don't know Eric.

David Friedberg: This is what has led to stagnation in science in America because if you're not part of the mainstream, you get excluded. And because everyone has to now think in the same way, you don't have heterodox thinking. You don't have outside of the scope thinking, which means we're not pushing the envelope and discovering new things anymore. And that's a very kind of pointed issue right now. That's why I went and talked to Kratsios, said differently. There's probably a lot of incrementalism in 2026 that didn't exist in 1926.

Jason Calacanis: Totally. It's exactly right. Think about the general theory of relativity being published. It was completely outlandish. But people still studied it, assessed it. They didn't discredit it and say, "Oh, you're an idiot." And if you're thinking about this general theory of relativity is being real, you're a... That's what goes on today in science where if you say stuff that's too far outside of the realm of the standard approach to things, you're chastised. You're outcast. You're excluded.

Jason Calacanis: Do you guys see the Olympics? You see the robot Olympics, Sachs? Check this out.

David Sacks: I did see it. Yeah. This is pretty crazy. They had these Olympics in China and...

Jason Calacanis: Oh my god, they copied how Freeberg actually runs there. Look at that. Look at that. Yes, that is definitely a Freeberg sprint.

David Friedberg: The Freeberg sprint.

Jason Calacanis: Doing the Freeberg sprint. Look at this one. He backs up and then boom.

David Friedberg: That's my sprint. That's like me skiing right there.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Look. And there's Jason setting records at 42. This is Jason right here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Here's Jason, yeah, with his shirt off at the poker game. Really great. Put your shirt back on.

Jason Calacanis: You know, I was thinking about this, Sachs. You know what I realized? I think you're 100% right about the PR. And I realize that the Chinese, the CCP is brilliant at PR. Look what they did. They got a bunch of Chinese people to fill a stadium and cheer for AI and robotics. They're cheering for it. They're rooting for it. And then we got Dario saying all jobs are over. We're going to be the last company in the world and it's the end of days. I get back on Dario. We're not talking about Dario this week. We're not talking about Dario this week.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Your grand unifying theory is that in a country of a billion people, they couldn't find 4,000 to show up to watch a bunch of robots run around a track. Are you really surprises that unifying theory?

David Sacks: It is true that China is much more optimistic about AI than we are. AI optimism in China is over 80%. Meaning they poll on the question, do you think AI will be more beneficial than harmful? Over 80% of Chinese people say yes. In the US, that number is in like 30%.

David Sacks: So, I've been saying for a while that the US is ahead of China in every category except one, which is optimism. And that is the biggest risk to us winning this AI race against China is doing something that will shoot ourselves in the foot because we're so pessimistic about what AI might do.

Jason Calacanis: I think it's all psyops. They're making you feel. You see that? Show this the the robot blowing up at 16 seconds, Nick. This is all stage. It's a psyops. This is a psyops. They make you feel bad for the robots. They make you cheer for them. This is going to be like a major thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya: No, it's the red robot. The funniest thing was when the red robot lost his legs, there was like a couple tweets that I thought were hilarious. Like one guy was like, "Oh my god, he tore his HDMI, his CPU."

Chamath Palihapitiya: And then the second one which is not funny because I know Christian McCaffrey and he's a great guy. He's like Christian McCaffrey in week three and you just see the entire leg just snap off. Very mean. Congratulations to the CCP. By the way, Optimus, have you guys seen the latest Optimus videos from Elon by chance? Has he shown any of you guys?

David Friedberg: Haven't seen it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: He's not publishing publicly. I saw the latest Optimus.

Jason Calacanis: It would win half of these things already. You guys see it? He's making sick progress and he's not showing it publicly, but I saw it...

David Friedberg: ...without the sparks coming out of its midsection.

Jason Calacanis: No sparks, but I saw a video that I said to him, I said, "Is this CGI or is this real?" And he said, "No, this is real. They just sent it to me this morning." And it's like, "Whoa, Optimus will be the bestselling, I think, product."

David Friedberg: Yeah. You know, the hard part, as I understand it, with these robots is you can train them to do a specific action like run in that race or jump or whatever. But the hard part is when they encounter a condition that they weren't programmed to expect and specifically when they have to interact with something in the physical world, that's when it gets tricky, right? Can they do the whole folding laundry or pick something up without breaking it or dropping it or whatever? And specifically something that they weren't taught to do, you know...

Jason Calacanis: ...that's where it gets tricky...

David Friedberg: ...there. Yeah. The fidelity of the Optimus is and its ability to do novel things. You kind of nailed it. I don't want to say anymore. You've been playing with Grokbot though, right, Sax?

David Sacks: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: You got you got Grokbot shoted. You've been Grokbot maxing.

David Sacks: I just reached my Grokbot usage limit and have to upgrade. So...

Chamath Palihapitiya: 200 bucks.

David Sacks: I've been Yeah. It's been really interesting actually.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. What? It just does what you tell it to do, right? Like it just gets it done.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. What's great about Grockbot is that it's always on. It's in the cloud. You set up your agents and then they can keep working even when your computer is off or it goes to sleep. The other, you know, agent harnesses that were kind of doing this or like OpenClaw or Hermes, they were just on your desktop. So if your computer went to sleep, they would stop. You have to do all these Mac minis and also they were like very hard to use, very power, super complicated.

Co-host: This is like by far the easiest. It's still a lot of work to get it set up working right perfectly or whatever, but it's fun and it's the easiest it's ever been and you can really see where it's all going.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. I told him he should make it multiplayer mode. So like you can put two agents in the same room, but then being able to put two people from your team in the same room and then you know having humans in the loop, it's going to go...

Co-host: such a good idea. That will make this thing go so freaking viral.

Jason Calacanis: Yes. If you can just add because then you know what's cool about the agents is you actually have an agent swarm. You actually have lots of different agents performing different tasks and they get good at different things. You know some people ask why don't you just have one agent? It turns out that if you have multiple agents then the agents develop more context and expertise...

Co-host: so they get more specific. But yeah, you could then use each of those agents as a channel and invite people to it and then they participate in that...

Jason Calacanis: and then they add another person. Yeah, it's...

Co-host: Yeah, then it could get very very viral.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, it's a great product. All right, let's get to work. We got a lot going on. Nvidia just had a record setting earnings report. I mean, they blew the doors off this and also we'll talk a little bit about Salesforce also coming back and the SaaS apocalypse ending. Stock was up Nvidia's that is 9% on huge numbers and even huger guidance. 96.2 billion in revenue in the quarter. Chamath, up 106% year-over-year, more than double. Wall Street's expectation was 92 billion. They guided for 70% growth next year. That is well above what Wall Street was expecting at 45%. So, let that sink in. The number people are going crazy over: 60 billion in net profit. That is the most profitable core business quarter of any public company ever. Google and Amazon, they've had higher one-off quarters, obviously. Here's your chart. Nvidia net income and revenue quarterly, just blowing the doors off of it. Stock is up. It's reaching its all-time high again, getting close. Heading into earnings, Nvidia was only up 12% year to date, on par with the S&P 500, but they were lagging the broader chip index. I guess the headwind Chamath is that people believe there's competition coming. We'll talk about that. Nvidia is the world's most valuable company. 5.5 trillion. Polymarket says 79% chance. Here's your Polymarket, our great partner, Polymarket. 79% chance Nvidia ends the year as number one, 6.3 million in volume.

Jason Calacanis: In other news, Salesforce up over 20% on Thursday after they also reported a big quarter. Revenue up 11.3 billion, 11% year-over-year. That was in line with expectations, but they beated their adjusted EPS by 80%, $5.90 versus $3.27. They got a big jump because they are major investors in Anthropic. They raised their full year guidance to 46 billion. You called it, let's give Chamath his victory fap. Here he goes, the victory fap. The lap Chamath on May 15.

Jason Calacanis: What's your take on this? You've been pretty critical of the SAS space in previous episodes.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think the high end of the market where Marc operates, where the large monoliths operate is quite safe. What people are finding is, hey, hold on a second. This is a lot harder than we thought. It's not like boop boop boop, put in a prompt and beep boop, it all works. It's not how it works. I think we're a little oversold. Now, I think this consolidation and the rerating can happen in the opposite direction. So, what is the opposite trade? The opposite trade is who has constructive net dollar retention, who has negative churn that's been really predictable, which is a way of saying who has the best relationships. Those guys, I think, are positioned to crush.

Jason Calacanis: All right, there you have it, Chamath. Your thoughts on Nvidia and Salesforce blowing the doors off of their quarterly earnings reports.

Chamath Palihapitiya: There's a lot there. So maybe we'll start with Salesforce first and then I'll go to Nvidia because I think the Nvidia one is actually a good segue into talking about the national state of finance. I don't know. It was pretty obvious to me in May that Salesforce specifically was meaningfully oversold. I think what I was trying to say there and maybe I can say more precisely now is we're getting to the end of this second phase of AI. So if the first phase of AI were models and think of like a model as a brain, the second phase of AI is harnesses, right? agents, which is the analogous equivalent of giving a brain a pair of eyes and hands and a notebook for memory and a keyboard to type things on. So, you're sort of taking this primordial object that was really good at Q&A and you're making it more useful almost like an autonomous being. But we're starting this next phase soon. At least I see it in the enterprises that I work with, which is that that's still insufficient. And what you now need to do is make that autonomous agent much more informed and give it context and allow it to do a job much more intelligently. So meaning you take a brain, you give it arms and legs and limbs and eyes and etc. But then you have to train it to be a lawyer or be a customer service rep or be a sales agent or what have you. And to do that next step, you need a ton of contextual information. And so the people that control that today, the large systems of record, what I said before and what I'll double down on now is that those guys hold an incredibly special place in the ecosystem if they do it right. And I think what you're seeing is Marc is finding a way to play well with the models, support harnesses, but also build his own, and now start to push into this next phase. And I think that's why his net dollar retention is strong. That's why his revenue is strong. That's why he's guiding up. And that's why the stocks ripped. I think was it like up 43% since I said it had bottomed. I mean it took a...

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, it was up 20% today just on that. And Friedberg, I think you were in Were you on CNBC or you just on the quarterly call?

David Friedberg: I went to Benioff's office for the earnings setup yesterday. So Dario was there. Dario and Marc did their CNBC bit. They set up a studio for the earnings call on the 60th floor, you know, where we've all had dinner up there. And then I did the earnings call with Marc cuz you know about a year ago I think I mentioned this to you Chamath like we kind of over a weekend built a CRM tool internally using cloud code and Cursor and stuff and kind of spun it together and stood it up and we were using it and then it's like well you got to add this feature and you got to change this and then account and security and access and where's the data repository that makes it protected and there was a lot of kind of back and forth on all the features we ultimately needed to build to make it truly useful and scalable. Meanwhile, we've got competing interests at our company on where we can build software that's unique to our company like plant breeding software which is what we do as kind of our unique advantage as a company is plant breeding. So, how do we build a better breeding technology platform? How do we build software that gives the people in the lab and in the greenhouse and the breeders tools? And so we started building all these internal tools and eventually realized our time, our efforts, our energy is better spent building the workflows that are unique and create value for our organization uniquely versus recreating a bunch of software that other people have already made. Where's your best ROI, your best return on time spent and your best return on dollars spent? And it's not on rebuilding a communications tool like Slack or a messaging...

David Friedberg: ...tool like Gmail or a CRM tool like Salesforce. And at the time Mark and I were talking on the phone, he's like, you know, "Hey, try Salesforce. I'll set you up. Come on, do it." And I was like, "No, no, no." And then he's like, "Yes, yes, yes." And he is so persistent. You guys know Mark. He's like so persistent. He put his best sales guy on a text with me and kept texting every day: "Are we up yet? Are we up yet? Are we up yet?" Until the sales guy, I said, "Okay, go to my office." He goes to my office. He gets set up and then we're done.

David Friedberg: And then we realized, oh my god, this is actually a much better way for us to do this. So Mark asked me to come and recount that story at the earnings call and talk a little bit about the view on this change. So I do think, and I've shared this in the past, I think the horizontal platform companies, these tools that are horizontal—CRM works across many different verticals, industry verticals, and Gmail works across many industry verticals, and Slack and so on. Excel, no one's going to go rebuild Excel. The real value is in the software that's unique for your vertical. That's where AI plays a role in building custom workflows and custom software. And so I think that's kind of how I view this, the real SaaS apocalypse. It's more of a vertical SaaS apocalypse, which is software that's designed for just one vertical.

David Friedberg: Um, and that's where I think things get blown up.

David Sacks: I totally agree with you.

David Friedberg: A platform like Salesforce...

David Sacks: I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you.

Jason Calacanis: Sachs. Let's talk about Marc Benioff. He is just an incredible salesperson who just fought through the SaaS apocalypse and then figured out a way out of being put in the bucket of SaaS roadkill, and then just massively integrating AI into the platform. Maybe you've known him for a long time. Maybe you could talk about him as an executive and what we can learn from what he just did in terms of going from in the market's mind roadkill to leading the pack, let's say, in SaaS again.

David Sacks: Well, this narrative of the SaaS apocalypse was totally overdone. I mean, this whole "SaaS is dead" narrative is just getting shredded today with Salesforce being up over 20%. You could go back and look at some of the clips I've been saying now for months. I do not believe that core systems of record like CRM are going to get ripped and replaced with something vibe coded. I've been saying that for a long time. Enterprises want certainty. They have compliance. They want professionally managed software that's been running and debugged for years.

David Sacks: I mean, just think about all the bug reports that have been filed against Salesforce for over 20 years, right? And that's the hard part to get right. I mean, when I play with all these agents and AI, you're dealing with something that's probabilistic and there's so many edge cases. When you're dealing with a core system of record, you just want to know that it works. And the expense of it is low enough that you just don't want to basically jeopardize one of your core systems by ripping it out and replacing it with something built in-house in a kind of DIY way.

David Sacks: So, I just think this whole SaaS apocalypse narrative was overplayed. Now, at the same time, to your point, Jason, I think Benioff is doing all the right things here. And you could kind of say it's a "if you can't beat them, join them" type approach, which is he made this deal with Anthropic. What is that deal? I mean, first of all, he's going to be offering Anthropic's models inside of Salesforce. More importantly, I think this is really the critical thing: He is integrating Salesforce into Claude. He's willing to allow Claude to be the front end to have the sort of primary user relationship.

David Sacks: And Claude is now going to be able to access all of the data in Salesforce and all of the workflows, all the actions that a user can take. So, in other words, Benioff here is willing to risk disintermediation in order to ride this AI wave because he knows it's what the customer ultimately wants. You know, you don't want to go into Salesforce or any SaaS application to write your agents. You want to create agents in the AI program that you're using and you want those agents to be able to run across all of your SaaS platforms. So he's willing to again to give up a big piece of the user relationship in order to make himself more relevant.

David Sacks: Now why is this ultimately good for his business and not bad is because like I said, I still think that you need systems of record. You need the AI agents to basically go to those systems, get the data from a canonical source of truth. You just don't want there to be any probabilistic variability around that, and you want AI agents to be able to write back to those systems and you want to be able to write back to those workflows.

David Sacks: So what's happening here is that it's not a rip and replace. Their layers are getting built, right? You've got the database layer, then you've got applications and workflows, and then you've got agents, and then you've kind of got the AI user interface. And Benioff is saying that the AI is now the user interface. He's basically acknowledging that he's leaning into it.

David Sacks: Now, here's the thing: I talked to him this morning actually, and a point he brought up with me that I think is underestimated is that he says there's a lot of trapped value in Salesforce. Meaning, we know it's got this incredibly broad, rich platform with tons of functionality. The average user is never going to find all those things, but the agent will. So, think about all the cases where now the agent is going to go to the user and say, "Hey, I just saw that there are these actions you could take in Salesforce that seem to line up with what you're telling me to do. Do you want me to do this?" And the user is going to say, "Yes..."

Jason Calacanis: ...modify Salesforce as the system of record. Yes, sir.

David Sacks: Yes. Exactly. Because now think about the agent as a power user of Salesforce that knows how to use Salesforce perfectly. You don't necessarily need to hire this like team of highly priced consultants to figure out Salesforce. The agent knows how to do it. So it can unlock the full value of Salesforce and all these actions. And then after you develop trust in your agent, you the user are just going to click the "always allow" button, and now the agent can basically tap the full capabilities of Salesforce. So I mean that's where this is headed.

David Sacks: But now it raises the question, okay, so how do SaaS applications play into this AI and agent wave? You have to have great APIs and you have to have a great CLI, the command line interface, which is how the agents are going to relate to the SaaS tools. I think in the past, the way that most SaaS products thought, they spent a lot of time on their user interface. And now they really got to think about the agent interface, not just user interface. You have to build the best agent interface.

David Sacks: And you've got to, I think, relax the idea that you're going to fully control the customer relationship. You have to think of agents created by the AI companies as being an extension of your platform and not feel threatened that you're losing the customer relationship. If you can do all those things and become a source of truth and a system of record, then you've got a big opportunity.

David Sacks: I got to say he's like one of the most underestimated and underappreciated product and sales executives in our industry. Because I was talking to him when we were at Davos, Sachs, about Slack and he was like, "Tell me about what you're doing." And I was like, "Listen, you have all my data. I can't get my data. My team wants to move off Slack, they want to use this open-source product specifically so I can get all this information." He again, to your point Freeberg, put me on with the sales team.

David Sacks: And now I have complete god access to our Slack. And they built a product called Slack Today, which they've been slowly rolling out, and it does the promise of OpenClaw and what Sam did by buying out the founder of OpenClaw right after he bought OpenClaw's founder Peter and he started working at OpenAI. Just OpenClaw just faded like no more innovation. And I'm not trying to say this to say Sam did something nefarious...

Speaker A: Or that OpenClaw is, you know, terrible or anything, but they just lost their edge. And now the version of Slack today is like a seven out of 10 and it's getting like 10% better every couple of weeks I'm noticing. So he's going to do a parallel link. He's going to have his own agents and he's going to let you come in with your agents. His agents might be a little bit behind, but you're also going to get those agents for free inside of Salesforce. It's like two ways to win. I mean, look, I think SaaS products can offer their own agents and they can offer their own AI and co-pilots and all that, but I think the reality is that most of the action with agents is going to happen outside those products and simply want to interact with those products and basically get the data from them, use them as the system of record, as the source of truth, and then write actions back to them when appropriate. And I just think that founders should lean into that trend instead of fighting it, because if you fight to stay in control and say that only our agents are the way to interact with our system, then people will just leave.

Speaker B: So are you long vertical SaaS, or are you short it like Friedberg and I are?

Speaker A: I think it's specific to the company and what its moats are and how good a system of record is and all those things.

Speaker B: Well, no, I don't think vertical SaaS has a system of record. I don't think that's what they do. I think they're workflows. This is the key point where these horizontal monolithic companies like Salesforce are just unique—Workday, Oracle with respect to their GL, it's just very difficult; SAP, IFS. It's very difficult to see a path where you can replicate these businesses, and they become the repository and the single source of truth as you said. But vertical SaaS is workflows and it's a process, and I just wonder what survives.

Speaker A: Well, look, I think it's a good question and I think it's case by case. But look, just a few months ago, everyone was saying that horizontal SaaS wasn't going to survive. And one of Leopold's major positions in that fund was to short all these SaaS products, including Salesforce. And what we've seen is that has turned out to be wrong or totally over.

Speaker B: To be fair, I don't know that he understood the difference between vertical and horizontal SaaS, because that was a funding short problem, meaning he had to go to the big stocks in order to be able to short enough to be able to get the leverage that he wanted. So, I think he may have just worked backwards from his own mental narrative to make it all sound correct, but I suspect it was a leverage trap where he's like, I need to be really massively net long these other names. And his prime broker is like, well, you got to find shorts, liquid shorts, and he's like, okay, Adobe and Salesforce.

Speaker A: Well, but look, I mean, to be fair, I think that was the dominant narrative as of just a few months ago with SaaS Apocalypse, and Benioff's stock was getting hammered by the market. I mean down 50%, now it's up back 20%. So I think a lot of people were just indiscriminately selling all SaaS. And I think that if I had to say there's like one takeaway from the news today, is that I think simple extrapolations of the future based on these trends don't work out right. The simple extrapolation here was: AI agents can code, therefore all software is going to zero. That was the simplistic extrapolation. Now what we're seeing is, no, actually there are certain systems of record that are extremely compatible and complimentary to AI agents, and if they're positioned right by their founders, they can lean into this trend. And by the way, I think the job loss narrative is another one of those simplistic extrapolations. What is the job loss narrative? It is: now AI can do knowledge work, therefore knowledge workers are all going to lose their jobs. It completely ignores the fact that there's ways for knowledge workers to take advantage of the tools and lean into it. So the same way that Benioff is taking advantage of the agent trend, knowledge workers are taking advantage of it and they're going to be able to lean into it.

Speaker B: If you adopt the technology, you survive. If you don't, you die. I mean, it's pretty straightforward. I just wanted to also point out with Nvidia's incredible results, two things that happened very quietly. And Jensen is clearly open-source maxing now. He bought Hugging Face for 12 billion, and he did like one of these acqui-hire deals with Poolside for 6 billion total, about 20 billion in acquisitions, which is far less than 1% of the market cap of Nvidia. And thank God you can do M&A again in this country. But he's now owning the distribution layer for open-source. If you don't know Poolside, they make the coding model Laguna. So now Nvidia has the place where developers and hackers go to figure out which open—

Speaker C: Sorry, sorry. I don't think that's what went over. My understanding is that, because Jason Warner tweeted this morning about a new model drop, I was confused by this because there could be two things that they're buying. The 100 engineers that are going over to Nvidia, they could be working on what Poolside has, which is effectively a version of Cursor and Claude Code that runs, you know, on prem, that runs in—

Speaker B: Open source, open weight.

Speaker C: No, then they also have a model. What I'm saying is they have a model and then they also have this agent harness that you can direct coding. So, it wasn't clear to me in the announcement. I didn't read it carefully. Yeah.

Speaker B: What it is that they bought.

Speaker A: I think we're kind of burying the lead here by the way. It's like, look, they're reportedly doing these deals with Poolside and Hugging Face, and those are big open source acquisitions if the reporting is true. But look, here is the lead today, I think, is that first of all, Nvidia had a blowout quarter doing over 100% year-over-year.

Speaker B: A billion a day in revenue now.

Speaker A: Yeah. Almost 100 billion in revenue just for the quarter. $60 billion of profit. 75% gross margins. I mean, excluding one-off items, this was the most profit ever generated by a company in history. J, let me just underscore what you said in the intro. Yeah.

Speaker B: Which is really I think the reason why the stock is up 8% today is not just the great quarter, but the fact that they guided to 70% growth next year, whereas the street was only expecting around 45%. So that's pretty amazing. And that 70% number would have been higher, but they said they were supply constraint.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker A: So, what is the takeaway? I think for the larger market here, it is that the AI boom is continuing. The other narrative that's getting shredded today is that this AI capex is a bubble. It's basically going to end very soon. And what Nvidia is basically saying with its numbers and forecasts is actually this AI capex is going to continue well into the future. It's got real legs. And the amazing thing is that after these numbers, even despite the 8% bump, Nvidia is only trading at 12 times earnings.

Speaker B: Yes. And that reason is people think that competition, obviously Cerebras, and the point I was going to make earlier. I think Jensen is going all in on open source based on these two acquisitions, Hugging Face and Poolside. And I think Sam Altman poked the tiger. If you look at what he did, he had done that huge hundred billion dollar deal with Nvidia back in 2025 and then he announced the AMD deal and Jensen was clearly not pleased about that and he talked about right after Sam kind of did this announcement that he's going to make his own inference chips—

Speaker C: Jalapeno.

Speaker B: Jalapeno, and that he was going to do the deal with AMD, then Jensen came out was like, well, by the way we don't actually have to do these investments in OpenAI. And I think he's speedrunning open source, and you're going to be able to buy from Nvidia next year just your entire stack. He's going for it. He is going to own open source. And that is a really interesting moment in time for us to look at cuz we were sitting here 6 months ago, 12 months ago, "Oh, open source would never catch up." He's doing an—

Chamath: ...open-source self-driving project, and now he owns Hugging Face, the leading open-source indexer where everybody goes to try the new models. I think this is actually the huge story. I think the generalized takeaway should be that you're going to see all of these businesses converge...

Chamath: ...and they're all going to be competing with each other in every which way possible. So this idea that you have this very delineated separation of customer and supplier, I think is melting away. Nvidia still relies meaningfully on the hyperscalers for their revenue. I think it was $24 billion in the quarter, but they now have built up a Neocloud business that was equivalent, which is incredible, right?

Jason: Yes.

Chamath: And I think what you're going to see is as more people try to compete with them. So now your customers, the hyperscalers, are saying, "We're going to spin our own silicon." It's completely appropriate for Nvidia to say, "Well, we're going to spin our own models." They do that. And then you're going to see them go up the stack and host the model. Then you're going to see them supply APIs and supply inference, and they're going to be a cloud provider.

And so to your point, Jason, I think the right way to think about it is in Business 1.0, it's like you used to be like a capex business, right? And people would say, "Okay, what's your return on investment?" Or you'd be a software business and you're like, "Okay, what's your opex, right? And what's your return on investment?" It's all melting together. Every company's going to do everything. You're going to look at these big companies in five years: they're all going to have their own cloud, they're all going to have their own models, they're all going to have their own silicon, they're all going to have their own data centers. Soup to nuts. They're going to go top to bottom. And then it's going to be about which is better. And that, I think, is actually better for the broader ecosystem. It's better for all of us.

Jason: Absolutely. All right, let's keep moving through the docket. Bessent's new bond strategy got criticized by his mentor Stan Druckenmiller. Last week, 30-year Treasury hit a 19-year high, 5.3%. You've been talking about this a whole bunch, Friedberg, so I'm interested to get your take on it. In response, Bessent doubled the Treasury Department's elongated bond buybacks from 2 billion to 4 billion on August 19th. CNBC reported Bessent is considering ramping up bond buying and Fox Business said he wants to put the fear of God into traders that are shorting long-dated bonds.

So, a lot of interventionism going on here. Stan Druckenmiller, Bessent's former mentor, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal opposing his plan. His main point was Bessent is wrong for trying to manipulate prices rather than fixing the core reason yields are rising. America has a spending problem. We've talked about it over and over here. $40 trillion. No more DOGE. No more cutting costs. And obviously we got a war that's quite expensive every 5 months.

Friedberg, I think you said last episode, we add a trillion... so we're adding 2.5 trillion a year. We'll add 10 trillion during this second Trump term. Your thoughts on what's going on here, Friedberg, in terms of the bond market and Bessent and Druckenmiller going back and forth? Chamath, you and I can also talk about using AI to write your pieces.

Friedberg: I'll start with the relationship as you highlighted. Bessent and Druckenmiller worked closely together and are close and respect each other, and Kevin Warsh in a similar position. He was working with Druckenmiller the last number of years in his office every day. They're extremely close. This is a triumvirate that I don't think in history you've had three people who are so close in these positions: one leading in kind of market activity with Druck, one running Treasury, and the other one running the Fed. It's pretty unprecedented to have this sort of closeness in those positions. And you know, I think...

Chamath: What's that? Yeah. Right.

Jason: Caesar. There's...

Chamath: You called it a triumvirate.

Friedberg: The triumvirate.

Jason: Who's Caesar? Who's Pompey? And who's Crassus?

Friedberg: I'm going to leave that to them to debate. But if you pull up the yield curve from COVID era, I think it's worth just taking a look at the Treasury yield curve. So, this shows depending on the duration—is it a one-month or a 30-year Treasury bond?—across that whole time duration, what's the yield? You know, how much does the federal government have to pay in interest to get people to loan them money for that duration?

And so this is right around COVID era, kind of 2020. You can see that because interest rates were low and the inflationary effects of stimulus that came about during COVID had not yet hit the market, we were looking at sub-half a percent, sub-a quarter percent all the way out to the 3-year and 5-year, and then a slight climb up where you could actually get 30-year Treasuries at 1.7%. Again, going back in history, it's always easy to rewrite history. The federal government should have rolled all of its debt into 30 years at this point. But the debt is balanced across this Treasury curve.

Friedberg: So let's look at where the Treasury yield curve is today. So this is what the market is charging the federal government to loan it money to pay its bills. And on the low end of the Treasury curve, you're looking at just under 4%. So for the federal government to borrow money for one month, they have to pay a 3.8% vig to the lenders for that money. And if you go out, the 30-year is now at 5.2%. So it is very expensive now to borrow money if you're the US federal government.

And the reason is persistent inflation, I would argue because of excess government spending on social programs and other things. And the big problem at this point is the federal government is spending so much that if the federal government were to cut spending aggressively, the argument and the concern is it would hit unemployment and it would cause a recession because the federal government is such an intricate part of the economy. Now that's the argument. But it's causing inflation and it is causing deficit spending.

So this year the deficit will be roughly, call it two trillion dollars, and as a result the market is saying, "We are worried about US fiscal solvency over the long run," or "There's a higher risk; as a result we're going to charge you a higher interest, 5.2% on the 30-year."

Friedberg: Now what does this mean for the federal government? Well today the federal government's average cost of debt is 3.4%. That's what we're paying in interest on average on the $40 trillion of debt that the federal government has outstanding. For every 1% change in the interest rate, the US government has to pay 1.25% of GDP in excess interest each year. 1.25% of GDP in interest each year for that 1% change in the interest rate. And we're now looking at a 30-year at 5.2 and a short-term rate over four.

So the federal government has a problem because over the next 12 months they have to refinance $10 trillion of debt. That debt is coming due. Those bonds are now due. They have to pay the principal back to the bond holders and they got to go back to the Treasury market and sell more Treasuries to borrow more money to refinance. So the borrowing cost now is going to climb up. And when that borrowing cost climbs up, the federal government's burn goes up and the fiscal deficit goes up.

So my theory and my argument on this is there is no action that Bessent can take that's actually going to have a meaningful effect on the long end of the curve. We have fundamental fiscal spending problem with the federal government right now. And I think that the note that Druck wrote, whether AI wrote it or he wrote it, it doesn't matter. The point of the note is correct. And the note is meant to provide cover to Bessent. He is saying it is not Bessent's fault or Bessent's responsibility to solve the yield curve problem. It is Congress's responsibility. It is the president's responsibility. It is the responsibility of the holders of the budget and the accounts that should stand up and say we are going to cut spending because if we don't cut spending, there is going to be a spiral which we are now going to face over the next 12 months as we have to refinance $10 [trillion]...

David Friedberg: trillion of debt. So Bessant's doing his job as Treasury Secretary. He's saying I'm going to market. I'm going to buy treasuries. I'm going to try and lower it. But he only has maximum maximum maximum a trillion dollars he could use to buy debt. He's still got to go sell 10 trillion of treasuries in the next 12 months. 10 trillion. He's got to sell. So even if he maxed out his buying authority in the near term, that's only a trillion of buying and then he's got to turn around and sell 10.

Jason Calacanis: So the market is the market is and so D drug's note is coverage for Bessant and it's pointing responsibility back to Congress, back to the president to say, "Guys, we have to solve this deficit problem." So, is this like kayf performative between the two of them and they're kind of like supporting each other?

David Friedberg: I don't think I don't think they're allowed to talk. I don't think they do talk. I don't think that Duck's allowed to talk to Kevin or I don't think any of them are allowed to talk to each other. So, I don't think that's happening. But, I think that Duck is sending his signal to the market and saying, "Guys, this is not Besson's responsibility." Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: The burden's not on his shoulder. He can't be Atlas. He can't lift this earth. He can't solve this problem. You guys have to act.

David Friedberg: I think it's coverage for

Jason Calacanis: Bess. Got it. Okay. That's what I That's what I was sort of getting at. Chimath, what's your take here on what's going to happen going forward? You know, we're past 5%. Does this break? What does it do to uh interest rate cuts and how bad could this get if we can't get it under control?

Chamath Palihapitiya: The tactical answer to your the question that you asked before is why is he in the market buying bonds? It's called yield curve suppression. Meaning when you buy bonds, you bid up the prices and the implied yields go down, which allows Scott to then finance at a lower borrowing cost because then if yields are 5.1 versus 5.3 and then now you're issuing bonds, they're marked against that 5.1 print versus 5.3. So it the yield suppression is trying to help what Freebrook talked about, which is just this refinancing tsunami that is coming. Okay. But look, just just take a step back for a second. I think the very big issue is that Congress is ultimately responsible for spending. Congress is completely unable to do anything to get these budget deficits under control. It is consistent. It's not a Democrat nor a Republican problem. It is a congressional problem, meaning both sides consistently spend way more than they should. So you have the debt growing at 7% and you have GDP between, you know, 2 and 4%. So that's a recipe for disaster. What Duck said in that note is you have to cut entitlements. He's probably right. The question is when? and who will force the United States to confront this issue? Who will force the United States Congress to confront the issue? And what he is saying is the bond market is going to start to do this because that single price is the true reflection of the good faith and trust in the United States. And as that yield goes up, the very simple rubric is trust is going down. Yield goes up, trust goes down. The other thing that I would say is this is happening at an incredibly awkward moment, which is that we are supposed to be in the middle of an enormous financial buildout to support AI. And if you go all the way back like a hundred years, you know, the industrial revolution, the grand bargain, all of this stuff, the United States government was the balance sheet, right? They were the ones that were able to step in. And unfortunately because if it's financial situation the US government is not able to do that. That's why thank god we have companies like Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Meta and Amazon who take on that burden. And so I just wanted to tie it to this other thing because there's so much chirping by the way on the internet about the balance sheet of Nvidia and blah blah blah. And I think people completely miss that these guys are putting the entire US economy on their back. A hundred years ago, it would have been the US government that did this. But the US government is not in a position to do it because Congress cannot get their act together on spending. The president actually has done something pretty incredible, which is on the tail end of those trade deals. If you guys remember, he was able to find $2 trillion to pump into the US economy to support this buildup. But the practical reality is that two trillion comes from other nation states and their processes are long and meandering. So you have the situation where all this money has to be invested. It should be backs stop by the US government. It's not in a financial situation to do so. The president has done some magic to try to relieve it in the short term, but it's only a short-term band-aid. The real solution, as Freeberg says, is Congress needs to come together and realize that they must now fix this problem. Because if you see yields, if you see the third year at 6%. It is the beginning of a death spiral. It's not going to be immediate, okay? So, don't freak out, but it is the beginning of some extreme pain. And that pain will last years. And the only thing that solves it now is getting the budget under control, which is a congressional act. It must happen. Whether it's this year or the next year, it just has to happen.

Jason Calacanis: Saxs, the president was quite vocal about cutting costs early on in the presidency, but we haven't heard much from the commander-in-chief about this. Is the issue that no politician can touch cutting spending? It's just too toxic because Trump's in his final term. He's lame duck by definition, right? is the second and only term hopefully unless he decides to take a third. Um, but he hasn't been vocal about this. And is it just too radioactive for anybody in politics? And you got to spend a little time. You dipped your toe there in in DC. Is it just too toxic for anybody to take on spending cuts? He sent Elon in there. That was, you know, pretty spicy. And it's obviously um not occurring now. We're not cutting things massively. in in fact this the debt's going faster than it had started a year ago. So what's your thought here Sax? Give maybe you can move it out from just Trump.

David Sacks: Yeah. Look, part of it is it is a tragedy of the commons meaning you've got 435 members of the house, 100 senators and they all get a vote and then you've got the president and no one of them controls the spending. In fact, the spending the power of the purse originates in the house and then goes from there. So it is very very hard to control spending when you have so many people weighing in. If it was just, you know, a couple of people getting together in a room and sorting this out, they probably could do it. But when so many people have an incentive to basically protect their programs, it gets very, very hard. So that's the tragedy of the commons part of it. And the reality is the president doesn't have a line item veto. It'd be great if he did. He doesn't have the powers constitutionally to completely reign this in. And despite what the resistance liberals say, he's not a king. I mean, he doesn't have those kinds of powers. That's basically the heart of the problem. And you're right, he did back Doge to the hilt. He's the only president to ever back something like that. And what happened? Elon got to the point of cutting one agency or one sub agency. And the hysteria was so great that they accused him of killing millions of children. It was total nonsense. But Tesla dealerships were getting firebombed. And that's the other piece of this is how do you make reform? How do you reform spending? How do you rein it in when the media isn't on your side and is not willing to report this stuff accurately? That's the worst part of it. I mean, the media, they don't have an incentive politically to engage in log rolling, but they do absolutely nothing to report the story accurately. I mean, just think about how the media is reacting to all of that. So, it's really a difficult problem when you start off with the fact that no one person controls it. you know, it really is this tragedy of the commons and then you don't have the media

David Sacks: ...basically doing a good job reporting this accurately. So I, you know, I don't know how we get reform on this and let me just say that if the Republicans lose control of Congress, I don't think that's going to make it better because you see now that the political energy in the Democrat party is all towards these massive new spending programs that the DSA wants. So, you know, if you vote for quote unquote change by voting the Democrats in, that's not going to help either because again, they just want more and more spending. So, I don't know what the solution to this is.

Jason Calacanis: Friedberg, give us a timeline here. Obviously, the Republicans love to cut taxes, and the Democrats love to increase spending. And here we are. This has not gotten better through three or four presidents. The last person who did this was I guess Clinton balanced the budget, but this has been getting worse and worse. At some point, we're all in agreement. This is going to come to due and we're going to have to have some austerity measures. When does that hit in your mind? Is there a breaking point in terms of interest to GDP? Maybe the people on the other side just saying, "Hey, I want 12%. You guys have bad debt. I want 12% on it." And we just say we can't pay 12% and we just have to go into full-on austerity measures. Is there a breaking point? If so, when?

David Friedberg: Well, the question is what does it break to? We as a democracy have this recursive solution which is as the people feel some sort of pain, they react with a vote. This goes back to this point about do we break for socialism because what ends up happening post the midterms. So I think sometime between '26 and the election cycle in '28 the inflation problem—and remember the inflation problem is fundamentally rooted in government spending. So deficit spending is correlated very nicely with the cost of housing, with the cost of healthcare, with the cost of education, and with the cost of everything else. So the more the government is spending on various things, the more expensive things get.

And so inflation is persistent because what we thought were temporary emergency stimulus measures during COVID very quickly got normalized and became persistent spending cycles. You know, if we went back to 2019, we would actually have a budget surplus right now as a country. Our economy has grown so much since 2019 that if we had the same spending levels as we had in 2019, our federal government would be making a profit paying down the debt. And the reality is we've taken this emergency spending and made it a permanent spending. We did the same thing, by the way, after the global financial crisis in 2008. There were some crazy stimulus things that happened and we persisted that spending.

And so the question, JCal, is really like what happens next? So if the inflation remains high, people's affordability continues to go low, they're going to vote for something that's going to give them a solution. And I don't see a political message winning that says the federal government will now spend less, we're going to cut a bunch of stuff. So I worry that the one-way solution here is something that is very damaging to individual liberties, to a lot of the rights, a lot of the things that make a free market work, and that is some of these more kind of socialist principles and socialist candidates and assets. I think that's kind of the breaking point.

So I think it's more of like a spectrum, and then the reaction during that kind of transition phase '26 to '28 can be negative. Then the next big thing is going to happen around 2030 to 2032. And that's really where Social Security doesn't have any money to pay anymore. And I think during that era is also when a lot of the states are going to become bankrupt. We're not going to be able to pay their obligations. And when the states can't pay their obligations around 2030 to 2032, you're going to have both the Social Security bailout and restructuring as well as the state bailouts and restructuring. And that might be the time that all of this stuff breaks.

Jason Calacanis: Wow. I mean, so you're saying we'll see munis... yeah. And people will default on their debt in the states. That would be cataclysmic to have to bail out something like California.

David Friedberg: Well, because the obligations on the unfunded pensions in the states are so significant. And not to mention just the debts. I mean, look, California's got tens of billions of dollars spent on this stupid railway that goes nowhere where there's no tracks. And they're lacking political will to even stop that. It'd be the easiest cut in the world.

Jason Calacanis: Like, just think about the idiocy. Like no one is saying we shouldn't do this. Why is no one saying we shouldn't do this?

David Sacks: That's what I'm saying about the media.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Trillion dollar. Anybody who was in favor of a railway to nowhere should just be shamed out of existence. Trillion dollars for a train from San Francisco to Fresno that costs more than an airline ticket is so idiotic. It's like the movie Don't Look Up. Like look up. This thing is absolutely ridiculous. Turn this thing off. Why is no one even just saying turn it off? It tells you everything you need to know.

Private company built a Brightline in Florida and they seem to figure out how to do it at a fraction of the price. So like what are we even talking about here? Like private industry, if this was a good idea, would have built it. Yes, Friedberg. Private industry would see an opportunity and they would have built it. There is no opportunity here.

David Friedberg: Across the board, these government programs cause more harm than good. When the government intervenes in underwriting student loans and gives everyone a loan, administrative costs went up by 6x and tuition skyrocketed 8% a year, compounding for 30 years because the government said we'll underwrite any student loan. The same with housing and now no young people can afford a house. The same with health care where they said we'll pay people to stay home and not work to take care of people and we won't check on whether or not they're actually taking care of people, and the cost of healthcare skyrocketed.

You go across every one of these government programs and every one of them has the adverse effect of driving up costs and inflating everything. The core root of inflation in this country, the core root of it is government spending. And the reason we are going to end up becoming a socialist country is because we aren't reigning in the government spending and looking it in the mirror and saying, "Guys, this is idiotic. What are we doing?"

And now the markets, to Chamath's point, are telling us this is idiotic. We are not going to underwrite this anymore. And we need to have, to your point about media Sacks, 100% Nick Shirley, 60 Minutes, whoever it is to just say hey this spending, this fraud is not acceptable and we need to send people in to go recapture that money. This is like we're burning money that we don't... the fraud is layer one. There's like 18 layers to this. Layer one is fraud. Yes. Of course. You know.

David Sacks: ...and given the tragedy of the commons, the structural nature of it, that there's no one person who's in control of it, you need massive public pressure to control it, and there's none of that. And there's no effort to create that public pressure by the mainstream media. So, it's like, how do you even get out of this? And—

Chamath Palihapitiya: I don't think it happens that way. It has to be an acute moment.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. You're saying there has to be a crisis and then people react. But then to Friedberg's point, we may get socialism because people may not connect what the real causes of the crisis are. And Friedberg, that's my question for you.

Chamath Palihapitiya: No, socialism is much more likely when, you know, a 100 years ago when these things are less interconnected. America can't decide to do that. You understand why? Because all of our debt is interconnected to domestic actors, international actors. It's not a decision. There is no button you can push to do that. And the reason is you would go bankrupt overnight. So I think the reality is that we will hit some kind of a fiscal wall. Something will get terribly broken and like in COVID or like in GFC or like in 9/11, those are the only moments where you can have structural—

Chamath: ...changes in expectations. The structural changes that have had the most impact on our lives happened in these acute moments in 9/11, in GFC, and in COVID.

Jason: Yeah. And every one of them it ended up becoming a never let a crisis go to waste moment where it always argued in favor of some big power by the government.

Chamath: What was your question for me?

Sacks: Okay, so you think about like affordability of houses, right? That depends on mortgage rates. 30-year mortgage right now I'm looking at the average is 6.73%. A little under 7%. It's about 150 basis points above the 30-year Treasury, right? So do you think the average person can connect the dots here that higher spending means higher treasury rates which means higher mortgage rates and that leads you to not be able to afford the same level of house that you would because your monthly payment is much higher. I mean do people connect those dots about what's happening?

Friedberg: No. No. But people want to blame someone. Every time there's a crisis, this group, even us, when we get together on a podcast, something bad happens. We always have this question, who is to blame?

Chamath: It's the first thing a human does.

Friedberg: Yeah, exactly.

Chamath: And literally the human that's human.

Friedberg: No, I mean that's the human brain. That's how it works. It's like there's some problem. Who do we blame? That's the first thing you think about.

Friedberg: You you don't think you don't think objectively what's the solution to the problem? You think who do I blame? That's the first thing you want to do. And then the question is when mortgage rates go up, who do you blame? The current president, my congressman, blah blah blah, reelect someone. That's the response. And the person that shows up and says, "I'm going to give you free housing. I'm going to give you a free bus. I'm going to give you free mortgages. I'm going to take away the the land from the landlord and give it to you." You vote for that person. So, I do worry that the the kind of mechanistic response to what you're describing, Sachs, which is a very problematic situation for people, is the lack of affordability of being able to get a home, is give the keys of the kingdom over to someone that's going to put more fuel on the fire. And the fire is government spending, and the fuel is more government spending to try and quote solve a problem that's caused by the fire. And I think that's really where I worry about this.

Sacks: So, I think I know how we can blame Dario.

Jason: Okay, circle it around. What did he do?

Sacks: Here's the thing. Our only hope is AI, right? Because only AI can create the exponential growth necessary

Jason: Yes.

Sacks: to make our economy grow big enough that we can grow out of the problem.

Jason: Yes.

Sacks: And if we hold back AI by creating some new regulatory apparatus that takes years to approve new model releases, then we're cooked. Completely and Canada and Putin. Those are the those are the three people who are working.

Jason: I'm just I'm just kidding. Joking. We're joking. Dario, come to

Sacks: that. Is not Dario's fault. But anyway,

Chamath: come to keep going.

Jason: No, seriously, come to summit. Listen, I want to just people, we are kind of counting on AI as the deos xmachina to grow our way out of this thing. And we really need I mean we need more quarters like Nvidia and Salesforce just posted. Like we need that to happen for like 10 years to grow our way out of this thing. One of the things that is a great silver lining is that we're seeing people migrate around the country or to other countries as a way to vote against outofc control spending. I lived in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. And I did not appreciate how evil these socialist and limousine liberals were until I got to Texas. After a couple years in Texas, I have seen what having affordable homes does to a family, an individual. You have people in those cities who are so miserable because they can't afford a home. They're paying exorbitant rents and these people who already own their, you know, Victorian homes, etc. in San Francisco refuse to build. And then in the great state of Texas, if you look at this chart, housing prices since the 2022 peak in Austin are down, down, not up, sachs, down 27%. Since March of 2020, 25%. It can be done. You need to have leadership that says housing is a priority. Therefore, we're going to let you build more houses. It's being done in Texas, in Florida. Those conservative, let the free market work environments, let them build the Bright Line. They have high-speed trains going 125 mothering hours uh miles per hour because they let and they got out of the way and let private industry figure out how to build high-speed trains. This is a distinct issue in certain groups where they want to stop progress. They are deselling the creation of homes. And when you get homes, people feel great about their lives. People in Texas are happy that they have a home for $250,000. They're everywhere. These things can be solved. It just takes leadership. And that's what we don't have is leaders saying enough already. We're just going to let people build more houses. All right, let's keep moving through the docket.

Chamath: I love a good JCAL pmical.

Jason: I'm just pissed off about it because you know

Chamath: it's a total non sequator to

Jason: it is a nonsequator in some ways but you know we're dancing around here who's going to be the leader who will say

Chamath: did you did you practice that before

Jason: no I didn't practice it I'm just

Chamath: this just came to you at the top of your head yes it's just another

Jason: yeah well actually I I hired Sax's writer to do some uh punchups for me but putting on the side it is obviously a leadership issue that's too expensive true

Jason: I'll get him a watch let's do a side quest here. What did you think of Ducken Miller writing his piece with AI and getting busted and then the Wall Street Journal saying, "Hey, it's totally fine."

Chamath: I thought that it was the left that virtue signaled, but I I actually think it's a class of people that virtue signal.

Jason: Okay, here we go.

Chamath: And they judge and they're judgmental and they can't see the forest from the trees. And this is probably they're like the loudest chirpers in the peanut gallery. Stan Ducken Miller is the most incredible investor of our generation. Maybe, sorry, maybe like top three or four.

Jason: He's up there. Yeah.

Chamath: And so just shut the up and read what he says. And you have an opinion and you're like, "Oh my god, he has an M dash. Oh my god, he used the AI flourish." It's like you're missing the script. He's telling you what's about to happen.

Jason: Sax, you agree? You think that the opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times should be written by AI, not the person who puts their name on still written by him. He

Jason: He didn't say it was written by him. He admitted it's 100%.

Sacks: He prompts He prompts it. He shapes it. He guides it.

Chamath: Yeah. A more precise way of putting it is the take is his and then he uses the AI to help him write it.

Sacks: Look, I don't get all the pearl clutching about this. I mean, you got to be pretty dumb these days not to use AI to help you write, and he's definitely not dumb. This is his opinion. It's his take. It's consistent with everything he's been saying in the past for decades. And in fact, the piece cites the many times

Chamath: and he's right.

Sacks: Yeah. The piece mentions the many times in the past he's weighed in on this.

Chamath: I think that this clearly came from his mind and he uses the AI to help him write it.

Chamath: The morons on X should be like, "Wait a minute. How does this affect my company? How does it affect my portfolio? How will it affect my 401k? What will it do to my parents' retirements? How should I think about hedging this?" Instead of that conversation, all of you people were like, "Oh my god, he had he was AI."

Chamath: I think Jal, do you have a problem with this? Are you one of the people who has a problem?

Jason: I do think it's kind of the lip syncing of uh writing as a writer. I find it offensive to like let the system give your entire opinion as opposed to using it for research, which is totally fine. Use it for proof reading, totally fine. But to me, it feels like I went to see Adele and she's lip-syncing. I really want to hear him.

Chamath: Don't use Excel. Only go

Speaker A: ...to the guys that use do hand calculations. No, no, no. Here's the thing. I would rather he said the Dell saying Excel. Don't use an Excel spreadsheet. I don't trust those guys. I only trust the guys that do the calculations by hand.

Speaker B: But if you were going to give your opinion and it's not written by you, to me, that is disappointing that it's not disclosed. I think it's a much higher standard to say, I'm going to write this in my own voice. Sure, I could have somebody who's a ghostwriter help me polish it. I could check my grammar with it. I could do research with those are all the valid uses, but I don't like this idea that you're going to write something in AI and then I read it and I don't know. That to me feels icky and it feels insincere. I would prefer people just say upfront, I didn't write this, but these are I'm kind of in agreement with what the AI magic guessing word box said. I find it personally offensive.

Speaker C: Yeah. Interesting opinion. May I respond?

Speaker B: Sure. I was trying to get your opinion. Go ahead.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Go ahead.

Speaker C: What do you think is the difference between that concept and having artists be required to disclose whether or not they used Adobe Photoshop and the very specific filters that they used in Photoshop or DJs that use specific software to use create electronic music as opposed to doing analog recordings of the music by hand with guitars or people that for example are using Microsoft Excel to create spreadsheets as opposed to writing it all down? Do I have to disclose that I used Excel or that I used a calculator or that I used a synthesizer or that I used a Photoshop as opposed to doing it in an analog way? At the end of the day, digital tools for creativity and creative output are done in parallel with the human ingenuity. And the human craft and the human creativity is expressed, magnified, and in many cases improved with digital tools. And the definition of is someone quote using AI is as nebulous as the rest of those which is am I using quote AI to improve my spelling to improve my grammar to create novel sentences from scratch to create novel paragraphs from scratch at the end of the day if I give the AI a whole bunch of inputs take the outputs and edit that output am I quote using AI this is I think one of the fundamental issues is we treat AI as the standalone simple kind of intelligence replacement system and the heuristic is not accurate with respect to how humans actually use it and how it is like all other tools a magnification of human creativity, ingenuity and potential. Go ahead.

Speaker B: The reason is the expectation of the reader. The reader has a high expectation and this is an important issue and the reason why people were so disappointed in this in a very large way. It was not because they're virtue signaling is because they actually care about Stan's opinion and they want to consume his opinion and make sure it's not the AI slop opinion. That's why people felt betrayed by what he did. Now, this is a new

Speaker C: betrayed.

Speaker B: They I think they did. Yes. Because And they also felt the Wall Street Journal betrayed them because the Wall Street Journal should be checking that anything submitted is not AI slop. The same way professors should be looking at students work and making sure their papers are not AI slop because we want them to have learned something. And they want the same thing when a teacher is teaching. They people don't want to pay for a teacher who uses AI slop either. And so we as a society have to decide when do we need it to come from the human and understand it's 100% human or 60% human and when do we think we trust the AI on it. I want to hear his actual opinion.

Speaker C: I have questions. Many questions. Okay. Question number one.

Speaker A: Are you suggesting that Stan didn't read this thing that was generated or do you think

Speaker B: I'm sure he did read it. Yes.

Speaker A: Okay. So it when he read it before that's an open question. Did he

Speaker B: Okay. I think he Well, he defended it. Yes, he read.

Speaker A: I hope he did.

Speaker C: Okay. So, you do you have an issue with the fact that he read it, he thought, "Yeah, this is what I think." Boom. And hit the send button. That's a betrayal to you.

Speaker B: I think not disclosing it is the betrayal. If you want to write, if you want to give me your opinion as interpreted through the AI magic guessing word box, you need to tell me.

Speaker C: I understand. I think it's difficult to tell everybody.

Speaker B: I I understand. Now, I just want to understand I'd like to make uh

Speaker C: Oh, listen. What exactly?

Speaker C: The standing disclosure for all future publications that I put out, including tweets, is that I try not to publish anything without running it through AI first to fact check it, to line edit it, and to help me make the best argument I can. So, this is a standing disclosure that if I've written something and published it, it's probably been through AI.

Speaker B: I'm totally fine with moving. I'm totally fine with proofing, to be clear. Proofing, fact checking, great uses of AI. Grammar checker, great use of AI.

Speaker C: Now, you're debating the slider of how much he proof checked he

Speaker B: two different things. I understand you don't understand this concept because you're not a trained journalist like I am. But I can tell you there's a distinct difference between being proof read and having somebody plagiarize or write some for you. And that's what this is. And that's why people object.

Speaker C: Question. Is Stan Druckenmiller his next oped? Is he allowed to use a computer?

Speaker B: Of course. Of course.

Speaker C: Okay. Okay. Okay. Let me keep going. Yes.

Speaker C: Is he allowed to use a word processor or is it just like the notepad?

Speaker B: I mean, you obviously understand he can use any of those tools he should disclose.

Speaker C: Wait, what about Grammarly? Is he allowed to use Grammarly for

Speaker B: I encourage him to use Grammarly. I'm a shareholder in Grammarly.

Speaker A: Jacob, what do you think his process was on this post? Do you think that it was simply delivered to him fully baked and then he just said go with it or

Speaker B: that's what the AI detection software said is that this is like 90% written by AI.

Speaker C: I'd be surprised if that was his process. My Here's my guess. This is just a guess cuz I don't know. This is just a guess. I don't know. My guess is he had the take and he probably told the AI the take either in writing or just speaking to it or, you know, essentially speaking to his assistant who basically dictated it and put it in the AI and then he probably got an output and he probably made corrections and edits to it and that was probably something like his process. I don't really believe this thing was just spit out as AI slop and then he just said print it.

Speaker A: This is Jal's image of what happened. He's sitting in his office in New York. He gets in front of a browser. He opens chat GPT and he writes yields up bad. gets the whole thing printed out and

Speaker B: emails the op-ed if you can't appreciate the lipsync must have come from him.

Speaker C: If you can't if you can't appreciate the lip-syncing analogy, it would

Speaker A: How do you lip sync?

Speaker C: Okay, here here's the problem with the lip-sync analogy is he's criticizing something that just happened.

Speaker A: It was this Bessent and buyback policy, right? He's criticizing his former colleague about something very specific,

Speaker C: okay,

Speaker A: that the Secretary of the Treasury just did. What's the lip-syncing? A lip-sync is when you have a song that's been performed a thousand times

Speaker C: there. This is novel and new.

Speaker B: Even more evidence of why he should write it himself. It's really about the you should respect the audience and not to take the time to write it yourself, not let the I was part of the audience. You can have the audience. That's a lot.

Speaker C: I I was like, "Oh, this is a useful data point for me about

Speaker B: totally fine. Totally

Speaker C: a reminder."

Speaker A: Hey, listen. Some people

Speaker C: the the difficulties of yield. Wait, can I ask you, did you read the article and have an opinion about the substance of it?

Speaker B: Yes. So, there was Well, I mean, I wanted to know if they were coordinated and this was some sort of like

Speaker C: Did you know it was AI generated before someone printed that on this the timeline that

Speaker B: No, it came up in my timeline first as No, no, I didn't.

Speaker C: Exactly. I read it came

Jason Calacanis: ...up first. Hold on. You asked me a question. Let me just at least answer it.

David Sacks: It came up first. I saw the plagiarism, the AI slop, whatever. As people frame it in journal, that's how people...

Jason Calacanis: Let me tell you, I read it. Hold on. I read it when it first came out. I didn't see the stuff in the timeline about the software supposedly detecting it.

David Sacks: I got hit by the first.

David Friedberg: It sounded completely consistent with the many other times I have heard Dr. Miller speak about the debt problem on podcasts and written versions or whatever. I didn't know. So, if he's plagiarizing from someone, he's plagiarizing himself.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. I mean, listen, plagiarism is not the right analogy here. It's not perfect because this is a new thing, but...

Jason Calacanis: ...it is taking credit for—hold on, let me finish. He's taking credit for what the AI wrote. And I would prefer him to take the time to respect the audience, to write it himself because I have respect for him and I want to understand his true opinion, not as interpreted through AI. Just like when I hear somebody sing a song, I would like to know that they don't autotune it and they haven't post-produced it to the point of absurdity. That's me. I believe the artist should give you their actual art, giving you their actual position without using the AI. That's just my opinion.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Even the top performing artists use autotune and like all these other tools to basically make themselves sound the best. And in a similar way here, we know that AI gives people superpowers. Druckenmiller said, "I'm not the greatest writer." What makes him interesting is he's a thinker. He has a take. It's a longheld position that he's had. And he's willing to even criticize his former colleague and I assume friend because it violates his view of the world. And he's saying he uses AI to basically make his writing better. I don't get it.

Jason Calacanis: I don't have a problem using Grammarly type tool. I just don't like the idea that it wrote it in full, which is what the claim is. Now, we don't know. We'll talk to Stan when he's at the event. I will tell you, I prefer listening to a band like Mark Knopfler where he actually can write the song, play the guitar riffs. I prefer that in my art or in an opinion or in a novel to being written by AI. That's my preference and that was the expectation of the audience. But this is a new...

David Sacks: Now that you know Druck will continue to use AI because he said it...

David Friedberg: ...will you just ignore what he has to say?

Jason Calacanis: No, but I will not think as highly of him and I don't think it's respecting.

David Sacks: So you're saying the substance of what he says will no longer matter to you or you're going to discount the substance less?

Jason Calacanis: You just said that. No, you just said that you're going to discount the substance hard for me. I will wonder. I will wonder what is his actual opinion constructed which came out of him personally.

David Sacks: You're going to trust the greatest macro trader in the world less tomorrow than today because he used the tool to write his...

Jason Calacanis: We'll—I will wonder if it's actually his opinion and how much work he did and I feel it's disrespectful that he didn't do it himself. That's how I feel. I will wonder. It'll make me wonder if that is actually his perfect opinion and crisply his because I think he's phoning it in. And I just don't like people phoning it in. It's only 800 words. Write it yourself. Work with a proof reader. It's totally fine to do your research that way.

Listen, we're going to agree to disagree on this one.

CIA director made an unannounced visit to Moscow. John Ratcliffe made a surprise visit on Tuesday and flew back the same day. First visit by sitting CIA director since November 2021. That was when Bill Burns went to warn Putin not to invade Ukraine. He invaded three months later. Obviously, Wall Street Journal reporting Ratcliffe was there to warn Russia to not attack a NATO country. New US intel reportedly shows Putin could be planning to test NATO's resolve with a limited assault in the next few years. Anything from a cyber attack, small land incursion, etc. Polymarket says only 21% chance we get a Russian Ukraine ceasefire by the end of the year.

Freeberg, you were on fire in the group chat about this. What are your thoughts of what's going on here?

David Friedberg: There's wild speculation. Wall Street Journal and others have reported that the message that was delivered was don't invade NATO...

Chamath Palihapitiya: ...and don't use nukes on Ukraine. So, there's been this kind of wild speculation about what this means. It just seemed like there's some meaningful going on. But to Sacks's point in our group chat, this is speculation, there's no evidence or Putin's made...

David Sacks: ...and more than that. The president, I think, called into a show to basically say that that story was not true and the contact was routine. And then the Russian readout said roughly the same thing. So, the truth is we don't know what the meeting was about. Um, but you know...

Jason Calacanis: ...quite dramatic.

David Friedberg: I think it's all speculation.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I know what it was about. Oh, here we go.

Jason Calacanis: Druck's AI infused memo of the Wall Street Journal.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yes, he was warning Putin to not use AI to write his next warning. His next baby AI.

David Sacks: We flew over there to deliver a very strict message which is we expect non-AI tool usage because we are journalists at our core.

David Friedberg: Yeah, I think it's possible, J-Cal, that the trained journalist got this one wrong and we're engaging in wild speculation and hyperbole without actually knowing what the meeting was about.

Jason Calacanis: Well, I mean, well, speculation is what we do here. It's a podcast. That's the whole point of the show is to speculate what the hell's going on here.

David Sacks: First of all, both the American and the Russian side have denied these dramatic speculative claims that somehow Ratcliffe was there to warn the Russians not to invade Europe. I actually believe those denials because it wouldn't make sense for the Russians to invade NATO countries. This is the same kind of threat inflation that we've heard for years from neocons about Russia's supposedly imperial ambitions to conquer all of Europe. There's simply no basis for believing it.

And frankly, the war is not going badly for the Russians. It's certainly taken a lot longer than anyone thought. And Russia has paid a heavy price in casualties. I don't know that the numbers are what you said, Freeberg, but I think if you look at most of the sources now covering the war, what they're saying is the Russians are making slow but steady progress. And it's Ukraine who is suffering the most.

First of all, the Russians have air superiority. The Ukrainians are basically out of air defense. So Kiev is getting bombed on a routine basis. The Russians are able to pretty much destroy whatever they want at will. So the Ukrainian infrastructure is paying a heavy toll and this is coming on the eve of what is expected to be, you know, a pretty cold winter and Ukrainian power is getting taken out.

Moreover, Odessa and the Black Sea ports of Ukraine have been bombed and basically shut down. So their economy is paying this incredibly heavy price right now. They're not able to export grain. So, their economy is basically getting destroyed and they're running out of money. Zelensky is running around saying that he needs another $35 billion or they're going to be out of money. The US is not funding that, but he's trying to get that from the Europeans.

And then their casualties, although we don't know the numbers, are also huge. And now there's been stories about them potentially drafting women because they're so low on soldiers. Keep in mind, Russia has four or five times the population of Ukraine. So they're able to sustain much greater armies. So things do not look great for Ukraine.

And frankly, Zelensky should have listened when President Trump told him, "You don't have the cards in this war. You should make a deal." Zelensky didn't want to do that. He didn't want to make a deal. He still doesn't want to make a deal. He should make a deal. And frankly, I don't think Ukraine's going to come out on top on this thing.

Jason Calacanis: Chamath, you have anything you want to add there or we'll just wrap?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. Thanks to Meta for solving my biggest...

Chamath Palihapitiya: problem, which is imposing limits on Instagram.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Okay. We didn't even get to that story. It's a big story.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I'm tired of playing whack-a-mole with my kids and I can't do it. And they have fake accounts and secret accounts and this and that and yeah, please thank you should have done it sooner, but I'm glad you did it.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, I I will give them some amount of credit for Yeah, they got drag kicking and screaming to do the right thing, but

Chamath Palihapitiya: Tik Tok and YouTube I hope Tik Tok and YouTube do the same thing. And it'll it'll make the life of a parent

Jason Calacanis: much simpler. It'll allow us to actually parent versus just policing device usage.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I'd love to see Android. And

Jason Calacanis: it's exhausting being a child with a device.

Chamath Palihapitiya: It's exhausting

Jason Calacanis: and it's terrible for young women to be on these Instagrams. We we we held the line to 16 years old, but 17 we we lost the battle. Where did you hold the line? the kids for social media?

Chamath Palihapitiya: No, my kids aren't allowed until they're 16. But that's not the point. It's just that look, we've talked about this. I've been very consistent about this. This could have happened a lot sooner. I'm glad that it happened. I applaud Meta for doing what they did. I hope that Tik Tok and YouTube do the same thing. These limitations are are coming around in Australia, in Canada, and the UK. They'll probably appear in other places. It's physiologically and psychologically really helpful for kids to have these limits. So

Jason Calacanis: yeah,

Chamath Palihapitiya: these parental control apps aren't that great. They do a decent job. They don't do a great job. So we're always on our I'm always on my back foot as a parent and it's frustrating and I would rather just spend time with my kids on other things other than screaming at them to get off their phone.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, it's the tools are hard to implement.

Jason Calacanis: Hey Freeberg, what's going on with the summit? how we deliver the summit.

David Friedberg: Well, I'm excited to share with you that the All-In Summit is just two weeks away. This year, we've got some incredible sponsors helping us bring some big ideas to life. Iron is back as the presenting sponsor of the All-In Summit. Big thank you to our friends at Iron.

Jason Calacanis: Make sure you visit the Iron House at Summit.

David Friedberg: Always great time.

Jason Calacanis: Make sure you visit the Iron House at Summit. That's the on-site lounge where you can kick back, relax, and hang out between sessions. And new this year,

David Friedberg: new,

Jason Calacanis: you guys remember it from Napa, the gifting boutique, brought to you by merch.com. Every attendee fills a bag with all-in merch,

David Friedberg: plus special offers from sponsors. You walk in, you walk out, you got a bag full of goods, you're going to be very happy. Oracle is back. They're bringing an F1 racing simulator to the summit. If you've ever wanted to know what it feels like to take a corner at 180 miles an hour, sort of like being in a debate with JCAL here on the All-In Pod

Jason Calacanis: without ending up in the hospital. This is your chance. And EY is taking care of business,

David Friedberg: bringing their meeting pods, which is a quiet space for folks to step out, take a call, close a deal, do meetings, which by the way happens a lot at the summit.

Jason Calacanis: People are doing deals.

David Friedberg: Just the tip of the iceberg. We've got other major stuff happening from our amazing sponsors. And just the tip, we are keeping everything else under wraps. More fun stuff coming.

Jason Calacanis: We're excited. We will see you all at the All-In Summit.

Jason Calacanis: It's going to be a great party. Hey Fred, what's going on with this cancer vaccine and the stock that tripled in the last two weeks? We didn't get to it last week, but I know I want to hear about it and I'm sure the audience does.

David Friedberg: Yeah. Madna stock, I think, is what you're talking about, right?

Jason Calacanis: Yes. I think they went from like a 20 billion market cap to 60 billion market cap on the positive readouts from this thing that's being called a cancer vaccine.

David Friedberg: And I think it's worth highlighting how this cancer therapy system works. This goes back to the '9s where there was this idea that you could create what are called neo antigens. These are small peptides or proteins that mimic a peptide or protein that's unique to a cancer in your body.

David Friedberg: And so that antigen, which means that your immune system sees it as an invader, causes your immune system to start to make cells that destroy that protein. And so by putting that protein in your body, your immune system gets activated and it gets turned on to go and find that protein in other parts of your body and destroy that protein. So the objective is figure out what is the protein that is unique to a particular cancer, make that protein, stick it in your body, and your immune system will go and destroy the cancer that's in your body.

David Friedberg: And so this imunotherapy, this system of basically using an antigen that's designed for a cancer in your body to go and attack it, has been around since, call it the late '9s. And there was this big revolution in DNA sequencing where we identified that we could take samples of cancer, put them in a DNA sequencer and look at the sequence of the genes, the proteins that are made because they're made from genes that are unique to that particular cancer and therefore make a personalized neo antigen that's personalized to the unique cancer that's in your body because all these cancers mutate and they're different and no two cancers are identical.

Jason Calacanis: How do they get that key for me personally versus you? How do you get that information?

David Friedberg: They would take a sample of of your your tumor or cancer cells. So when you take your let's say you have you know a melanoma and the reason that melanoma is one of the kind of biggest targets for this imunotherapy is that melanomas have very kind of unique DNA mutations because of UV light hitting the skin. And so the particular cancer that you'll get in a melanoma that you have is going to be very unique with respect to the rest of your body. It's going to be a very unique mutation.

David Friedberg: So they take the a little bit of the melanoma, they get the DNA out of it, and when you do DNA sequencing, you multiply the DNA by millions or billions of times. You put all that DNA in a DNA sequencer, it gets chopped up and read. And then the sequence data comes back and it says, "This is what makes this cancer unique. It's this little sequence of the DNA." And that sequence of the DNA causes that cancer to make a unique protein that is basically like a key or an ID or fingerprint of that cancer.

David Friedberg: They then take that DNA and make protein from it. Put that protein in your body and now your immune system goes crazy and starts attacking that protein because it's like, oh, antigen, antigen, I got to go get it. Now that those cells are activated, those immune cells are activated to that protein. They'll eventually go destroy that cancer. So this has been successful. There have been hundreds of trials with this neo antigen based therapy for many different types of cancer and there's all these trials that have tried to figure out what's the right technique for delivering the neo antigen.

David Friedberg: Do we make the protein and then stick it in your body or in this case with what madna did make mrna and stick it in your body and the mRNA causes your own cells to now make that protein and spit it out ends up in your blood and now your immune cells got activated. So rather than making the protein XVivo, which means outside of your body, you're put making the protein in your body in vivo and now your body's making the protein. So the the the idea with the mRNA concept is you can get one shot, that shot goes into your body, and now your body's making that protein just like we made the COVID vaccine.

Jason Calacanis: Yes.

David Friedberg: Your cells would make a particular protein segment that would activate your immune system and it would go kill that cancer. There's other questions around what are the other adgivants, what types of cancer can you use this system for? And then combination therapies. Are there other cancer drugs that you can do this in combination with? And the all the trials that have been going on are all about this delivery mechanism, the technique that's used, the types of cancer, the dosing, and getting all of that stuff right.

David Friedberg: Now, what's interesting about this is it is much more of a technique than a drug in

Chamath Palihapitiya: ...the traditional sense.

Jason Calacanis: It's a process of...

Chamath Palihapitiya: ...it's a process, right? So the process customized per person. So there's some cost to doing it per person.

David Friedberg: That's right. But the cost because I do DNA sequencing at my company all day long. Getting that sample very cheap. Getting the DNA data very cheap. Actually doing a lot of the upfront work very cheap. Now theoretically making the mRNA or making the protein should also be pretty cheap, but it's human trials and human safety. And so there's a lot of questions around how do you make sure that everything's safe and what's the right combinations that people don't get overreacted immune systems or that people don't have adverse side effects. So that's all of the tuning of this.

But I think what frustrates me the most about all of this and everyone's kind of lauding this as some unique breakthrough and special and powerful and it's not because a lot of people are going to places like Montana and they are getting peptides printed for their particular cancer sequence and they are making their own neo antigens putting it in their body and getting cured of their cancer. You can pay someone $50,000 to do this for you today. There's a lot of clinics that'll do it and it's not a special FDA approved drug.

To your point, Jal, it's a process. The process is take the DNA sequence from my cancer, make a protein, put it back in my body, my immune system goes and destroys the cancer in my body. Great idea. So why is Moderna saying that they're going to charge $500,000 for this?

And that's what I think frustrates me about all this. Everyone's lauding this and everyone's very happy about this, but I'm actually pretty sad and frustrated and disappointed by this. I don't think that this technique which has been largely developed through several decades of iteration research and development which was largely funded by NIH and other public funding dollars that has led to this incredible concept of neo antigen immunotherapy for cancer which can eradicate or theoretically eliminate many different types of cancer should now be patented FDA approved and charged half a million dollars for people to get treated for this.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah.

David Friedberg: And so what I don't like about this story is that a private pharmaceutical company has seen their market cap go from 20 billion to 60 billion cuz they went through this regulatory process to create what in my mind is a form of regulatory capture and making the case that it's all about safety and trials and we've got patents and all this other stuff when fundamentally there's an underlying technique that was funded by a lot of public research dollars that I think should be more open-sourced, more ubiquitous and every hospital should be trained on how to do this process to treat cancer patients should become much more of a ubiquitous thing.

Jason Calacanis: Do you think that people -- I have two questions. We can end it on that, but um do you think they're going to be able to successfully defend this patent uh in the United States and then also globally because there's obviously a global world here and people do travel for treatments now. Medical tourism is a thing. So if it's a half million dollars here, can it be done for 50k in South Korea, Japan, other places?

Yeah. And then second is, whatever happened with mRNA and the COVID vaccine and a lot of the concerns people had, we never got an update on that, but obviously this podcast started during all of that...

Chamath Palihapitiya: ...and that was the first roll out if I at scale.

Jason Calacanis: Correct. Uh for mRNA the technology how do you feel? Yeah.

David Friedberg: For years, Moderna was working towards this mRNA based cancer. They're calling it a vaccine, but it's really immunotherapy because a vaccine means you prevent yourself from getting something. Whereas in this case, you're actually getting rid of something you already have. So, I don't like the word vaccine.

But Moderna worked on this for years and they never really kind of got to market with it and then COVID came about and they pivoted very quickly and got this COVID vaccine out. Moderna has a whole bunch of patents on the techniques and tools that they use to make mRNA and to make sure that it's not integrated into the the human genome and it doesn't actually use a traditional kind of replicating uh system. So so you can't actually replicate that mRNA which means it won't start propagating in your body because your cells typically might start making copies of RNA if it ends up in your cells. So there was a lot of stuff that Moderna developed that made their particular mRNA technology patented and safer and and so on. So I think that they do have strong patent coverage on their particular set of tools for mRNA.

But when I described earlier, so if I take the sequence of your cancer cell and I look at the DNA of it and I'm like, I found what makes it unique. There's this little sequence and now I take that sequence of DNA and I can stick it in a bacterial cell E.coli in a little tank by what's called a bioreactor and that bacterial cell will now start to make that protein because I've taken the DNA and put it in the E.coli cell. So now the E.coli cell is coding that DNA into RNA into proteins because that's the sequence, right? DNA turns into RNA turns into proteins. So that E.coli cell, there's billions of copies of those cells. They make billions of copies of the protein. You isolate the protein out of the bioreactor and you can inject it into your body. And when you inject that protein into your body and now your immune system gets activated. So you don't necessarily need mRNA is my point.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And mRNA is a really effective way of doing this. It's super cheap because you don't have to go make all the protein outside the body. You can literally just print the mRNA and get one shot and you're done.

David Friedberg: But that end-to-end system, the real cost of doing that is very low. And so this is one of those things where we have a very big fundamental question that we should all be asking which is like should we be giving the monopoly on cancer treatment to this company that went through this FDA process and filed a bunch of patents on certain techniques but the general theory the general thesis the general therapeutic process is well described well understood generally understood and should be available everywhere and I think over the next couple of years we are going to see this cancer immunotherapy based system start to proliferate.

And you will see this happening overseas very cheap. It is very efficacious and we actually have a friend in common who's kind of standing up a business to do this in a very cheap way up in Montana where you have a right to try and they can make this stuff. So we are going to see I think more of this come to work. But it is for certain types of cancer very efficacious, very safe, very effective. So I'm excited by this.

Jason Calacanis: ...requires just for people who are listening who are normies. All of this cancer treatment requires early detection and that's something that people have been working on with the blood test, a Galleri, I believe it's called. So getting to the cancer and getting regularly tested is a critical part of this.

David Friedberg: Yes. So you're talking about a Galleri test by Grail.

Jason Calacanis: The blood test. Yeah.

David Friedberg: The blood test. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: Just early testing is the key piece for all of us to keep in mind. Get tested early and often for cancer.

David Friedberg: Yeah. And and remember there's a bunch of these new what are called modalities, new modes of therapy, therapeutic modalities that are being used to destroy cancer. One was CAR-T therapy where you take T cells out of your body...

Chamath Palihapitiya: ...and you use CRISPR or some other system to reprogram those T cells to go after...

David Friedberg: ...remember that protein I described. So you actually program the T cells to go find a specific protein in your body and destroy it. So they go find the protein that's unique to a specific type of cancer cell and the T cells get put back in your body and they destroy it. CAR-T therapy.

CAR-T therapy costs a million dollars. And for people with blood cancers where the cancer cells aren't clumped together in a tumor, but blood cancers, the cancer cells float around individually in the blood. And so by putting T cells in your blood, it's very easy or it's much easier for the T cells to find the cancer cell...

Speaker A: grab them, and destroy them. And so for blood cancers like multiple myyoma, the efficacy is incredible with CRT therapies now. So that's a new type of modality, this is a new type of modality this mRNA or neo antigen therapy. So there's all these new techniques that are being used to destroy cancer and I think in aggregate we should be very excited and optimistic about where this is headed.

Speaker B: Wow. Thanks for sharing and let's hope for the best with implementing this. And I love this right to try. That seems to be something we should talk about in a future episode. We'll see you all next time on the podcast. Bye-bye.

Speaker C: Bye-bye.

Speaker D: We'll let your winners ride.

Speaker E: Rain.

Speaker F: We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Speaker G: Love you. Queen of kinshine besties are gone.

Speaker H: That is my dog taking notice your driveways.

Speaker I: Oh man, my appetiter will meet up.

Speaker J: We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

Speaker K: Wet your feet. Wet your feet. her feet.

Speaker L: We need to get Mercury's back. I'm going all in.