Host: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's the All-In podcast. The original Quartet is here. Bizarre David Saxs. How you doing, brother?

David Sacks: I'm good.

Host: You got a busy week. A lot of long posts from you on X. We'll get into it.

David Sacks: Wait. A lot of what?

Host: Long posting. Lot of long posts.

David Sacks: I had like one long post.

Host: Yeah. How's the carpal tunnel going over there? Two long post.

David Sacks: Yeah, that carpal tunnel flaring up. I got a third one teed up. I might use one. You got one in the chamber.

Host: I got one in the chamber, but I was going to save it for the pod. It's a good one.

David Sacks: Oh, coming in hot. I wonder who's going to get this bullet.

Host: We'll let your winners ride.

David Sacks: Rain and we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you. We can all

Host: a cackling of course that's the dick in dictator

David Sacks: is my bestie

Host: Holly Hapatia how you doing brother getting ready for summer jallet have been laid on the bed you're ready to pack it up

Chamath Palihapitiya: opposite I got a lot of travel grinding

Host: oh I forgot you're doing founderled sales so the summer of relaxation's over now he's in the CEO slot. Got to get out there and do those enterprise sales. And of course coming off a pretty hot week. Comment section was on fire.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Very pro- Freeberg. Very pro.

Host: Very Freeberg had perhaps his greatest performance. Also

David Sacks: greatest.

Host: The first performance when he said more than three sentences. What's going on Freeberg? You went off last episode and and then I think you also with the long posts.

David Sacks: You know what's so funny? As the valuation of Oho ticks up, he gets more and more based. I love it.

Host: He is getting

David Sacks: Welcome to the club. Welcome to the club.

Host: He's got trace comm's base.

David Sacks: Unleash the beast.

Host: When you're just a mere singleton, you kind of just keep it to yourself and then all of a sudden it starts to pick up.

David Sacks: Nine figure freeberg. He's like, I got something to lose.

Host: Wait for a 10 figure freeberg.

David Sacks: 10 figure freeberg's like yolo. You also with the long posts you and Nancy Pelosi. uh making sweet sweet

David Sacks: what is being formed in the United States right now is the great American burrow okay the great American polic is being formed

David Sacks: the new oligarchs are taking their seats they're arranging the chairs They're determining who will be chairman of the pilot bureau, who will assign what workforce to do what efforts for them, which $600 million stock trades their families will make to benefit and enrich themselves as they fly around in their private jets on the taxpayers money. And we are watching it all before our very eyes as individual liberties are eroded. I am fired up about it. I see it happening. You know, Sax is on the show this week. You can't just take strays like that.

Host: Freeberg, expand on who the PA bureau is.

David Sacks: Yeah. So, so basically the the pilot bureau is the leaders who elect themselves to dictate the flow of the economy, the allocation of capital, what work individual they're allowed to do, and what what activities they're allowed to do in an unfree society, which is what they're creating. They are the true oligarchs. And this is Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Kana. This is the uh the group that is trying to coalesce power and create for themselves a system whereby they have greater influence, greater control over aspects of the economy. They want to seize the means of production. They want to control education. They want to control media. And anytime there's an effort by an individual enterprise or an individual themselves to go out and build a business and succeed and do something that's outside of their scope and their span of control, they lose their minds over it. And that's what we're seeing. So, I react to their tweeting and their [ __ ] where they're basically trying to contort things about inequality and fairness and justice when the truth is they are the rising empire, the evil empire in Star Wars. They are

David Sacks: the folks who want to take from all of us what we were endowed with when this nation was started and what many people came to this country for, which is individual freedom and liberty. the ability to build a business in peace, the ability to make decisions, to do what you want with your own assets, and to have functionally private property. And they're taking it all away, and they're trying to take it all away. And we're watching piece by piece, step by step. So, they are forming a poll burrow where they can effectively control the economy, control education, control the media, and tell us all what we can and can't do and say. And it's frustrating to me to watch it because it's masqueraded as [ __ ] virtue, as justice, as equity. It's a bunch of nonsense words that they use to try and make themselves seem virtuous when in the end of the day they are fundamentally evil and I hate watching it. So that's why I react so aggressively to it. Freeberg, you I think you said something that's really important which is they they presented as virtue.

David Sacks: That's right.

Host: Put yourself in the body of a person that's probably middle of the roadish but is falling for it. Why do you think they're falling for it?

David Sacks: Because they have needs and wants and desires individually that this person is saying this system, this evil empire will give to you. If you take the knee, we will give you the education for free. We will give you the child care for free. We will give you the food for free. We will give you the the paycheck every week. We will give you, we will give you, we will give you. Those promises in a democratic system like this or in a fake democratic system like this are what make people feel like the the virtuous uh offerings will align with their individual needs and wants. And I think that that's why people say like, okay, that's good. Free childare for all. There is inequality in the world. There is disparity in wealth. There is disparity in asset ownership. and your solution despite you know the the loss of liberty along the way and the loss of economic mobility that arises from what you're offering me and this is really key people don't realize the value of the United States the power of this nation was to give people individual liberty which which unlocks agency to progress yourself to educate yourself to make money to give yourself more assets and more freedom and more flexibility than you had economic mobility is the key to the United States. You do not get economic mobility if the government is giving you a job or giving you money. You lose economic mobility. You become indentured to the government. Everyone wants more. Everyone wants something that they don't have. But the truth is that the more the government is giving it to you, the less you have mobility. The more you are indentured, the more you are enslaved, and the more we are limiting people's ability to progress. And I think that that's what's really so frustrating for me is that people sign up to this, to your point, Jim, and they're like, "Okay, that's great. I get to have this and I get to have that and I get to have that. But at the end of the day, you're giving all of your liberties up. You're giving all of your progress up is what you're saying. And you're looking for them. And you don't have agency to pursue your own personal freedom.

Host: Yeah.

David Sacks: One thing I believe to be 100% true is that no human being that's ever been alive has ever lived up to their true capacity as a human.

Host: Like human agency is limitless.

David Sacks: Limitless.

Host: Limitless. And and the truth is like anytime that you create a system with the government that's giving people stuff, you are taking away people's agency. And so that is what is so so sad about the whole thing is like human agency is the one thing that we have unlimited capacity, unlimited infinite upside. Every human does. and and to and shroud yourself in this government burden thinking that it is a relief.

David Sacks: Well, then that creates helplessness because you're always looking to the government to solve your problems.

Host: The threshold for learned helplessness is far far lower than one may think. I grew up on welfare and my mother was initially a housekeeper and then she was a nurse's aid. She was probably making eight, nine, 10 bucks an hour. My father couldn't get a job. So, we were on welfare and welfare was probably 17, 18, $19,000 a year at the time in Canada. And it's a family of five. But it was just enough that my dad just spent this cycle between drinking and not working, drinking and not working. And he would try in bursts. And you know, I I think that it must have been deeply frustrating for him, obviously. So, I want to be compassionate to the struggle that he went through, but man, I would have thought that 17,000 is not nearly enough support. And so, it would animate you to try to do whatever it took. But could he have gotten a job making 8 n 10 bucks an hour at a store? He could have. He chose not to. And so my recollection of being a ward of the state is that the threshold for that helplessness is far lower than one may think.

David Sacks: Right?

Host: And then if you actually stack all these other things, people will just fall into their worst proclivities and they will be a shell and a shadow of what they could be. My dad was in my mind the giant who had all this potential unfulfilled. And I keep that because I want a positive sense of who he was to me despite all of the ups and downs and the stuff that he went through and how it it negatively affected me at times. But man, if you want a whole country of those people, what happens when you're giving people 30 40 50 60 70 $80,000 a year of stuff? One, at some point you're not going to be able to pay for it. But two, you're going to reduce people to a shell of what their potential is. And that is not good. I have lived it and I am warning all of you. Be careful what you wish for.

David Sacks: The flip side of it, by the way, as you point out, you can't pay for it. What ends up happening is the moment that we find ourselves in today, and we see it in, and we'll talk about Pritskar's law in Illinois that passed this week, but we are now at a moment where we are saying there is no longer private property in the United States. This is one of the foundational rights that the founders of the United States try to create a distinction between these other nations that everyone flees from where a monarchy or a totalitarian government or some communist system says everyone owns everything together or some small number of people own and control everything. And that's what this always comes down to. Whether it's a socialist state or a communist state or a monarchy or some other totalitarian regime, there's a small number of people that own and control everything. And that is the brink that we're on because they are trying to say for the first time ever, there is no longer private property in the United States. That if the government can say everything that you've already paid your income tax on and then you've bought and you now own, the government can take a piece of it every year based on the vote and the budgetary needs of an irresponsible fiscal legislature,

Host: we've lost it all.

David Sacks: And that's where we are. And we see this, it just passed in Illinois. People think it's just crypto, just like they think the billionaire tax is just billionaires.

Host: But anytime the government can take your private property after you've paid your taxes, bought something, and put it in your garage, we are done for.

David Sacks: Yeah, we're going to get that. That is when the pallet burrow has unlimited capacity to tax and take and do what they want.

Host: that's the moment we're at. Well, and the the super sinister part to to dovetail what both of you are saying and to give some grace to your dad Shimath in the studies of learned helplessness for people who you know are trying to guess what that term is who who haven't heard it before psychological condition if you give people a hard problem to solve like an impossible problem to solve they don't solve it then you give them easy problems to solve they don't solve the easy ones and they become depressed and then they attribute their depression to themselves they internalize it in other words if you give people easier problems to solve uh and make them increasingly harder as you go. They become empowered. They have agency. They feel like they can solve problems. And then when they get stuck on something, they don't attribute it internally. And this is the why alcoholism is so pernicious in our society as well is because when you start attributing it yourself and you then you start self-medicating. You try to dull these feelings because you're depressed. And I've had many friends who've gone through it and family members. And this is why having agency is so important. This is why endless unemployment is so dangerous. Uh, and you need to taper people off and you need to give them a chance to be successful. If your dad had taken that $102 an hour job, he would have become the manager. Then he would have become the owner of the place. So the koda to your story is at some point I think and I don't know because my mom doesn't share this with me. There was some kind of breaking point because it was a really violent household. And then near the end of my high school career when I left things got I think materially better and part of it was because he got a job

Host: and ultimately he got a job pretty low-level clerical work at the government but we were so proud of him and he did that until he passed away but it changed him completely. Now, it could also been because he had gotten older, you know, but drank a lot less and was much more regulated.

David Sacks: Yeah.

Host: So, I completely agree with what you're saying. It's a really sad phenomenon and you and you see it sometimes in successful people. They get successful very quick. They don't attribute to their own success. They get up out of bed in the morning. They don't have to get out. They start drinking. They don't take a job. And they're affluent, but they're just not motivated. They don't have purpose. All right, let's get started. We got a huge docket to get through today. SpaceX had a record-breaking IPO and $60 billion cursor deal was quickly consummated as predicted. Friend of the pod Elon Musk took space X public last Thursday. $135 a share. A lot of people got to participate. Robin Hood, Charles Schwab, everybody talking about they got an allocation, one share, 10 shares, and they filled the green shoe 85 billion raise. That's three times what Saudi Aramco raised back in 2019. stock closed up 19% to 161 market cap above two trillion and uh at the taping of this pod $177 not too shabby on Tuesday SpaceX exercised its option to acquire Cursor that's the coding agent that got shd by speaking of Anthropic and Claude they originally used Claude to be the back end of Cursor and then Claude and Anthropic had an internal Skunk Works project they told Curser allegedly they were never going to release it to the public they would never have a coding agent and they did and that led to this incredible opportunity for cursor to make their own model and use Elon's hardware at Colossus. They're doing 4 billion in revenue. So they got bought for 15 times revenue. SpaceX trading I don't know 60 70 times revenue. So a great deal for everybody. SpaceX briefly passed Amazon and Microsoft which is mind-blowing to be the fourth most valuable company. Amazon's revenue in 25717 billion. Microsoft's 2025 282 billion. SpaceX is 2012 only 19 billion. So um they that's corrected a bit and now SpaceX is sitting at seventh largest company right behind TSMC. That's the Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation. So let's just go around the horn here. Congratulations to Elon and the team over there. Elon exercised his Tesla shares that he had coming from his employment uh there. I think he's done a pretty good job as CEO. He got a little bonus. So that sets up potentially Chimath, the merger of the two big companies. Just broad strokes, what's your take from take away from the SpaceX IPO? Seems to have been executed flawlessly. It's an incredible company. It's a one of one. It's just a unique unique animal. I think that the highest price to sales was essentially these last few days and now it's just going to grow into its valuation and generally just grow valuation.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Nick, play the clip. The acquisition was essentially negotiated and the way that it's structured is so that the S1 doesn't go stale. So I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't want to slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S1, have to redo the disclosures, have to redo the risks. The deal is effectively done.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But what's so smart is that where is SpaceX today, let's call it a trillion, where could it be, just for the purpose of this argument, let's say 2 trillion. So when the deal gets done on a stock for stock basis, it's going to be again if it's 60 billion in tomorrow dollars, effectively Elon's gotten a 50% discount.

David Sacks: All right, they'll give that and Okay, sure enough.

Chamath Palihapitiya: What I didn't factor as well is that the revenue run rate would essentially double on top of that. So he essentially got cursor for 15 billion.

David Sacks: You got a good deal,

Chamath Palihapitiya: which is unbelievable. His business intellect is off the charts. That is an incredible deal. And now the consolidation phase will begin and we're going to see Tesla and SpaceX merge and it's going to be glorious.

Host: Sax, you can also take a little bit of a victory lap here. You've been friends with Elon since PayPal days obviously and um you obviously were an investor in SpaceX for a long time. Your thoughts on what this means for the company? Obviously, it's an incredible milestone, but what does it mean for the company going forward? obviously champagne bottles yada yada but what does it practically mean for SpaceX and Elon going forward?

David Sacks: Well, in a certain sense, as we all know, this was the biggest IPO of all time. And so, in that sense, it was a huge milestone for this company that Elon and many other people have been working on for a very long time. I mean, this has been 25 years in the making. When people turn on the TV and they see this, they think that this is just some sort of overnight success. It's not. A lot of people had to work very hard to get to this point. But at the same time that it was this historic IPO, it's also the case that in a certain sense this didn't change anything for Elon. You know, I think when people read that he's the world's first trillionaire, they start to think that he must have gobs of money, a trillion dollars sitting in a bank account, and that's not true. That's not how it works. That's not how wealth is created. He doesn't have one more dollar in the bank than he did the day before the IPO. He doesn't have more stuff. doesn't have more houses or anything that you could buy with money. Literally, his balance sheet is exactly the same. It consists of the same thing. It's just that the public is putting a higher value on the shares of stock in SpaceX that he already owned. And he's not selling. He's under a one-year lockup. And I predict that he'll hold on for much longer than that because creating SpaceX is his life's work. So, you know, you see all these people reacting with tremendous animosity and basically saying that, you know, we can't allow the world's first trillionaire, you know, stuff like that. Look, he doesn't have more cash than he did the day before they

Host: it's paper wealth clearly.

David Sacks: It's that other people are placing a greater value on what he's built.

Host: Yeah.

David Sacks: And I think this is very important for people to understand is that there's a big difference between stuff and then the machines that make the stuff. And I think again this is where wealth comes from is the machines that make the stuff. So you know you go all the way back to hunter gatherer days right the only wealth was in what you could collect hunt gather whatever it's basically the collection of stuff. Then humans develop the ability to create tools and then very sophisticated tools. And then some of those tools are corporations which are almost like cybernetic organisms or combinations of tools, workflows, humans work in them. And it's those corporations that make the stuff. And the way that people get wealthy is that if you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there's a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that that machine might create. And that's where the wealth comes from. It's in the discounted present.

Host: It's not in the stuff. It's in creating a machine that will create stuff for humanity for a long time. And people will put a value on it today.

David Sacks: because of all the stuff that it'll create in the future. And so just out of nowhere it will appear that all of a sudden you have all this wealth created. But again that wealth is a reflection of all the stuff that this machine will now create in the future. And people need to understand that that process is a good thing because when you think about all the progress that humanity has made, it's not in having more stuff because again that stuff it all goes away right whether it's food or shelter whatever

Host: it it depreciates. It's a wasting asset. The reason why humans are more prosperous is because of all the machinery we've created to make stuff well into the future. And you know again some that stuff can be things like shelter clothes. It can also be medicines and cures and entertainment and all the things electricity all the things that make your life better. We need those machines and someone has got to own the machines and the people who own it are the ones who create it. And the thing that Karl Marx never understood is that it's not this sharp delineation between capital and labor because you can take people who start with nothing. You don't start with nothing. I mean he was a immigrant

David Sacks: to the United States. Slept on the floor zip too.

Host: Yeah. On the floor.

David Sacks: He created these companies. He created these machines from nothing with his own vision and hard work. And he included thousands of other people. So, here's the other thing is just because you're quote unquote labor doesn't mean that you're not also an owner of capital. There's a great story about how there's a welder

Host: who worked at SpaceX who I think has made a million dollars in SpaceX stock transformational. But everybody who's part of these companies and I think this is the magic of the tech industry. It is it is much more inclusive in terms of ownership than any other industry. It's the magic of capitalism in free markets where anyone can participate in that market, anyone can enter that market and ultimately anyone can transition from being labor to capital.

David Sacks: Yes, it's fluid. It's back and forth. If you buy shares in a company and you have the ability to buy them, you just vest them equity

Host: or you start a business and you basically do work, save money, invest your capital and continue to compound the capital to till you get to a point that your labor is worth less than your capital. And that's what ultimately allows this economic mobility, this transition for people. And when you take that away, you destroy that capacity for mobility. That's why capitalism

David Sacks: where we started today. Yeah, that's right. And that's why

Host: we started today with agency.

David Sacks: That's why it's so frustrating to me to watch people denounce Elon's success and denounce the value that the world is putting on this business and on the success because what they're saying is that no future human, no kid that's sitting on a on a floor right now, sleeping on a floor that's poor, should have the capacity to achieve what Elon achieved. No one should be allowed that capacity to transition, to progress, to mobilize themselves. at Freeberg. They're saying you should hate him. You should

Host: by denouncing him. And by denouncing that, you are basically taking that ability away. And you're saying that this is evil. And you're telling all these young kids around the world that are thinking about their future that they are now indentured to a government or to a fixed income for the rest of their lives to perform labor for a fee for the rest of their lives as opposed to having the opportunity to transition, which is what Elon has done and what millions of others have done because of the freedoms in the United States and and other free markets that have allowed this to happen for people. And that is why it's not just about getting wealthy. It's not just about getting rich. It's about having agency to transition yourself and inspiring young people and inspiring young people. Yeah, it's a different kind of transition.

David Sacks: It's a good transitioning. No, you're transitioning from from labor to capital by virtue of sweat equity. You have skills that are valuable that you can then translate into creating something that's valuable. And just just to underscore that point, I mean, you think about SpaceX, it's a machine that makes satellites. It's a machine that makes broadband connections from space. It's a machine that creates launch vehicles,

Host: software,

David Sacks: AI software and so forth and so on. So, it's a machine that makes things that people want and that therefore enhances people's lives. And it's only the market, the public's value that it places on those things that creates the net worth that creates the value of SpaceX's stock and therefore the net worth of someone like Elon. But again, he doesn't have one more dollar than he had before. Well, and to put a finer point on it, you have to earn that by continuing to make the best product in your class. The second Elon satellite Starlink is not as good as the next two or three competitors and there are two or three of them coming right behind him and there's other people doing rockets and obviously he's in a heated competition for LLMs and with Cursor versus Claude Code. It's he's not guaranteed. He has to fight and he's had to fight to win each of those categories. And the second he stops fighting in those categories, he loses and all that equity gets cut like we see when stocks tank because they cannot keep up. So he's had to fight for every inch uh by making the best product. Nothing was given to him. Everything was earned and earned by his team. This idea that like he won the lottery is far. It's a 25 year overnight success story that had three or four distinct points where it was going out of business and he had to scramble. I've always thought that the people that rail on wealth are actually secretly incredibly jealous and want to be extremely rich.

Host: Because I've never heard a coherent argument about why when somebody achieves something that you should dismantle the things that they're building. And what you both of you said are so right. The facicissicitudes of the market can make that number fluctuate wildly. There is a version of the market that has nothing to do with him that judges his stuff in the future as half of what they're judging it today. Nothing stops us from doing that. And all of a sudden, everybody who's breathlessly mad that he's a trillionaire, what do they say now? Because he wouldn't be a trillionaire. He's some version of what he was the Thursday of last week. Right.

David Sacks: Right. Right. And you know to extend my analogy the machines become obsolete very quickly. You know in a capitalist society you can get disrupted and companies get disrupted all the time. If they become stale or calcified if if they don't if they don't invest in maintaining and upgrading their machine they will become obsolete

Host: improving value. And you know what can't get disrupted? You know what can't get disrupted? The one unobstructible monopoly government. And that's the problem. Government is competing for capital and it's competing for markets and it's competing for all these things. And that's why I talk about these people as being evil. They're a pallet burrow. They're basically trying to take away capacity for value creation to make things better. Every generation for society, better medicine, better education, better livelihoods, better homes, everything gets better. But when the government monopolizes it, it doesn't. And that's the competing force that we're up against.

Host: Yeah. And and I want to just add one thing to this which is there is a piece of this that needs to be solved which is people wanted to participate in the success of these companies earlier and we Chimath and I interviewed the head of the SEC and he's working on this but the amount of demand from retail and there was a very innovative thing that Elon did and the team over at SpaceX they gave 20 or 30% of the IPO to retail investors when you opened up your Robin Hood account I don't know if you guys have one or Charles Schwab It gave you a little interface that said, "Hey, would you like to participate in the IPO of SpaceX and you could put in your request." I think six or seven, I was talking to Vlad, maybe 6 or 700,000 Robin Hood users got an allocation. It might have been one share. It could have been 50. That democratization needs to continue because the real uh back to Freeberg's points about being a wage slave or an equity holder and trying to make that transition. Well, people being able to open up Robin Hood and just buy one or two shares and vote with their dollars for 150 bucks that they want this future as opposed to other versions of the future. That's what gives them that empowerment. That's what gives them that agency. Well, what if they could do that earlier? And I've beaten this drum on this podcast and my other podcast for a decade on this, but people knew SpaceX. They were watching these rockets launch for a long time. and they would have placed that bet 10 years ago when the company was worth a hundred billion or 10 billion or you know 500 billion but they weren't allowed to because we have a corrupt system in our government that says rich people the top four or 5% of this country are smart enough to buy private company stocks and the 95% are too stupid to and it's antiquated and it has to change and you should be able to buy whatever you want if you want to buy crypto you can. If you want to buy a private company you can. If you want to play cards with your friends and play bomb pots and watch Dave Freeberg rage quit because he keeps losing at bomb pots when we play. That's Freeberg's right. Let people buy private company stock. It's [ __ ] crazy that we still have this rule keeping poor people poor. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

David Sacks: Can I take a shot at answering Chamas's question? Why why are there so many people who are influential who are resentful of what Elon's done or what other capitalists do? I think it was Joseph Champa who explained this that basically you've got this intelligencia in a society like ours where they don't make things they don't make the machines that make things

Host: they just make words and you know I guess ideas and most of those ideas are just wrong right they're just made up

David Sacks: and they become resentful of the fact that there are all these people who are able to create not just stuff but the machines that make the stuff right and that in our society. That is the thing that creates the greatest reward financially. Why? Because it actually aligns with what's in the greatest value for society. Whereas they produce a bunch of hot air. So it's natural for that class of intelligencia to become resentful and hostile towards the people who are able to amass this great wealth.

Host: I think that the great lie is that there are two sides to the society. That is the rich and the poor. And the great truth is that there are two sides that are the makers and the takers. The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor. And therefore the poor must take from the rich. But the truth is that it's the takers that tell you that lie. That the real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists, people that build, people that make from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets are the makers. And the takers are what Sax calls this intelligencia, the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers. They are the people that watch the rest of society make stuff, build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is. Tell my kids this lesson all the time. I say, "What did you guys make today?" They tell me something they made and I'm like, "Did someone else value it or did you make it just for yourself?" At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day. Whether you make a piece of art, whether you build a house, whether you write a piece of software, whether you build a business, whatever you make, if you're a maker and someone else values it, they become your customer in some way, they become your partner in some way, you've done something valuable. Those are the true engines of progress for humanity. And the takers are the ones that tell the lie that it's rich versus poor because they what they want to do is rip apart the makers and they want to tell everyone you got to be on one side of the other. And they use that lie to get everyone to line up against each other and to give themselves ultimately the control to form the great American pallet burrow which is what they're trying to create. That is what's underway right now. And that is the fundamental great truth and great lie that that we're kind of fighting against at this moment.

Host: All right. This broke shortly after we taped our episode last week. We tape on Thursdays, we drop on Fridays, as fans of the show know. Well, the US government has pulled the plug on Anthropic's latest model. You've heard us talk about that as Mythos. They released it as a controlled version called Fable 5. So, there was Mythos, that was the one they held for 30 days while they were doing security cyber security testing. Then they released it as Fable and a bit of a um guardrailed version of it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik told Anthropic to restrict that model to US citizens last week, last Friday. In fact, Anthropic couldn't implement those restrictions or wouldn't in that granular of a way. So, they just decided to do something more conservative and shut it down for everybody. This of course created a lot of hand ringing in the industry, rug pulling, oh my god, we lost this great model and what does that mean if I build my models on top of anthropic? Can I trust them? yada yada. And this was just days after the model was launched on June 9th. How this all started it seems to be that Amazon CEO Andy Jasse who owns a large Amazon is a an early investor in Anthropic and they a large portion of it. He had told the administration uh that there was a security vulnerability in Fable 5 that they were able to bypass to jailbreak the guardrails that Enthropic put on it. Daario said the jailbreak wasn't serious. There seems to be some fingerpointing it back and forth and Daario said it was narrow. separately semaphore a publication um like an email publication reported that the White House acted partially over suspicion that a China linked group had access to Nethos and they weren't supposed to. Why it reported that this group was South Korea's SK Telecom. Now you're saying, "Hey, how does South Korea have anything to do with China?" Well, they have a long-standing or there are long-standing allegations that SK has a relationship with China. The White House previously ordered Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom's access to Mythos. They're kind of like the Verizon 70% market share for telecom in South Korea. According to the Washington Post, Anthropic did not initially disclose it had given Mythos to SK Telecom. And this happened before all the export controls quote badly damaged officials confidence in the company's ability to safeguard sensitive technology. Anthropic says the White House never raised the Chinese access in the fable jailbreak conversations. There's a lot of fingerpointing and perhaps nobody is closer to this except the principles and you David Sax. So tell us what is going on here. Is this politics and political between anthropic in the administration? Is this a misunderstanding or is this, you know, the future of what's to come as these models become more powerful?

David Sacks: Well, let me give you an update based on what I learned. This would have been last Friday and Saturday. So, by that point, I got a readout from various folks at the White House about what happened around the time that that letter was sent to Anthropic. And I then summarized what I learned in that long post on X and no one told me what to say. I just listened to these various officials explain themselves. I also heard from let's say some of the private companies who were involved in this and all I asked was listen I think this context would be helpful to provide. They said sure you can publish it. So I posted my summary of what was happening and whether you agree with the decisions of those officials or not I do think that my post provides a window into exactly what they were thinking at that time. And what this comes down to is a couple of things. So, first of all, like you said, Daario came to Washington a few months ago, this is back in April, and basically said that he had created a cyber weapon called Mythos and he spiked the cortisol level, got everyone really worried, and there was some truth to it in terms of the sense that this model had advanced cyber capabilities, but he got everybody very focused on this problem. So, mission accomplished. They then had this pilot program for Mythos, this trusted partners program. And as a Washington Post reported, Anthropic expanded the program to something like 50 companies or more without consulting the White House. And according to the Washington Post, I can't confir I don't have any firsthand knowledge of this, but I don't have any reason to to question the the Washington Post's reporting on this. They did share Mythos with a company that the White House believes it should not have been shared with. So think about that. They're sharing these capabilities that Daario himself has said is a cyber weapon with parties that the White House and really we're talking about the national security officials believe might have connections to China.

Host: That's SK Telecom according to these.

David Sacks: I'm not going to say who it was. I know that's been reported. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that. Okay. I'm just reporting what was in the Washington Post. But you have to understand that that's the context. So first of all, you got anthropic effectively conducting its own foreign policy here, expanding the mythos preview to groups that the White House didn't have any knowledge of. And then once they found out, the White House, you know, this is really the role of what the White House wanted is, look, we have classified information that you don't have. We know that there are certain groups that shouldn't be getting this. and Anthropic expanded the pilot without consulting which is again sort of bewildering because the whole point of what they were supposedly doing by trying to get this pre-approval regime was to consult with the government. So really that was the predicate for this and apparently again this is according to the Washington Post that's when a conversation started about whether a model like mythos needed to be export controlled. Okay then you have the launch of fable which is basically mythos with guardrails. Again if those guardrails fail then you have a cyber weapon being released to the public. And it wasn't the White House who came to the conclusion that the guardrails failed. It was private companies who were testing Fable, testing those guard rails. And as has been publicly reported, one of them was Anthropic's largest shareholder and cloud partner.

Host: And so,

David Sacks: well, again, I'm not going to confirm, but I think we all can read the publications. Okay.

Host: Yeah.

David Sacks: So, again, normally I wouldn't mention the names at all, but this is all widely reported. Okay. In any event, they I think tried to convey their findings to Anthropic. I think there was some sort of breakdown in communication. I don't really understand, but they felt the need to escalate it to the White House and it's almost like a whistleblower. Okay. U because they have no reason to lie about this. I mean, again, they are anthropic.

Host: Well, they have reason to.

David Sacks: Yeah. I mean, they're partners, so that's even reason to support Anthropic. Obviously, Sachs, they would have told Anthropic first. But the fact that Andy Jasse got involved in this at all means somebody on the team must have said, "Hey, on the security team at Amazon, who has to host these models said, "Hey, this is something that could be a liability for us, Amazon, and could be a national security threat." That's why Andy Jasse made that call because somebody put that into a slack room somewhere or documented it.

Host: They don't do things like that based on a Slack room. Okay. They had somebody in the security team reported it, right?

David Sacks: Amazon. Amazon is part of Mythos preview and they are also testing Fable. Remember, they've got the biggest cloud to protect. We're talking about AWS. They've got teams banging on this and making sure the guardrails are safe. And as has been publicly reported, they came to the conclusion that there was a jailbreak and that this was serious security problem. So, they then escalate to the White House. And again, and this is where my summary takes over based on me hearing firsthand from these officials. They tried to call Anthropic. They tried to call Daario. And there were a number of conversations and the TLDDR of it is Daario refused. Meaning refused their request to take down Fable until this jailbreak could be fixed. And again, the White House was really just, I think, bewildered and confused by that because, again, it's so off-brand for Anthropic. They claim to be the AI safety company. And yet, here the White House is reacting to credible information about a major security threat from Anthropic's own partner. And instead of basically saying, "Yes, we'll react on this right away," they get the Heisman. I mean, just imagine this call. Apparently, again, reportedly the Treasury Secretary of the United States call Daario personally. I mean, why wouldn't this be a 5-minute call? Why wouldn't Dario just say, "Yes, sir. We take security more seriously than anybody else. We'll fix this problem. Thank you for taking the time to call us out of your busy day. We're going to handle it right now." Click. And instead of doing that, you know what the administration heard, and I'm not saying maybe Daario didn't mean to communicate this, but he sort of pedantically argued that this jailbreak wasn't really a serious issue. And we know that to be true because you don't have to take the administration's word for it. Daario then published a blog post that basically conveyed the idea that, well, not all jailbreaks are that bad. And trying to differentiate between good jailbreaks and bad jailbreaks,

Host: minor ones, major ones,

David Sacks: minor ones, major ones, whatever. You know, again, very off-brand for them. I didn't know until now that that was the case. Remember, this is all downstream of the fact that Daario primed all of these officials to view Mythos as a cyber weapon and to view therefore Fable as a cyber weapon if the guard rails failed. And they already had problems with the Mythos preview being overextended to parties that they didn't approve of. So, look, I think maybe there's room in here to give Daario some grace. Maybe he didn't interpret this correctly, what have you, but this was the way that the administration perceived the situation that they were in as of whatever that date was a week ago, last Thursday, and they reacted by sending the export control letter because they wanted Fable to come down until the guardrails were put in place. Now, we're in a situation where Anthropic is negotiating with the government to try and fix the situation. Look, once you're in one of these situations, it's always harder to extricate yourself than to avoid getting in them in the first place because the trust is broken. The trust is now gone. And look, I hope this does get resolved as quickly as possible because I don't view what the administration did as a policymaking exercise. Some people are saying that this export control letter is now a new type of policy. Now the government has to approve every model release. I don't think that was the intention. I think this was a reaction by the administration to a credible report of a national security threat and they felt that they had no alternative but to react immediately with the tools that they had available to themselves. So, I hope that this problem gets fixed and then we have a serious deliberative policy conversation about what the right hoops should be for models that are cyber weapons

Host: and reviewing those models which yeah, let's pause there because we're going to get into model reviews and what's the best way to do that. Chamath, what's your take on this situation? Uh, in terms of maybe a little bit of I don't know your handicapping of the situation with the relationship with Amazon. I think that's kind of an interesting angle. Or if you have a different angle you want to take.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think the leaders of the Frontier Labs leave a lot to be desired.

Host: Okay.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I think what we're seeing is a consistent pattern of evasiveness and immaturity. And I think that that does a huge disservice to the entire movement of AI. Maybe to connect the dots between this and what Freeberg said, I couldn't agree more with what he said. The key to a vibrant life is rooted in economic mobility. And I think AI is the grand leveler. It is the thing that can enable everyone to have unique amounts of economic mobility because they are unencumbered to figure out what their upper bound is. And against that backdrop, which is an incredibly positive sum view of the world, but I think is accurate, we have to live in this constant doomerism, hype cycle, naivity. And I think it holds us back. How does it hold us back? Tactically, number one, it creates mistrust. I think that Silicon Valley was already decaying in the prestige that it held in American society. When I first came here in 2001, it was a place of misfits that were good intention, that were doing the right thing, that didn't take themselves too seriously, that in success, wasn't ostentatious, that kind of kept their head down. We built important things. Then we veered away from that and we started building less important things. And now we're at a point where we've potentially started to rebuild important things again. But we have this veneer of negativity and mistrust that are created in large part because we just cannot get our [ __ ] together. And the leaders of the Frontier Labs are public enemy number one. And so this entire episode is yet another proof point that you just can't trust these guys. That's number one.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Number two, I think what it creates, which I think is bad, but what it creates is an incredible opportunity for the hyperscalers. And the very simple opportunity is to convince governments all around the world, not just America, that they should be the gatekeeper. A, you can't trust these guys. B, these models are all over the place. C, let us be the ones that provisions them to the world. We will wrap it in KYC. I've been now talking about KYC for a while, right? Who are these customers? Do they have identification? Why are they allowed to run these models? What are they prompting? Let's keep them so that there's an audit trail. All of these things are going to become issues. The Frontier Lab folks made it an issue because of how they've handled all of this up until now. And what does that create now? That creates an oligopoly for AI, the most powerful economically leveling instrument we've ever seen in the hands of maybe a handful of hyperscalers who by the way would make an incredibly compelling argument and they would be right. And the only counterfactual to it would be well trust us guys it should actually be much more open and in a far more distributed environment. If can you imagine the cost and the complexity if you ask the neocaler to build the same robust KYC or the same VPC infrastructure that Amazon and Microsoft and Google have spent decades investing trillions of dollars in. It's an impossibility Jason. So you can take all of those data centers off the map. you can take all of the neocalar market off the map. All of this was preventable. So instead of a diverse, robust open ecosystem giving a tool that is the fundamental unlock for humans, we are now going to debate gatekeeping and duopoly versus oligopoly. They have created a total mess and it's a shame. So instead of people, just to summarize that, instead of people being able to use the model they want from the provider they want, you're going to have to put in your driver's license, your tax ID, your social security number, whatever it is

Host: obvious to Amazon Web Services.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you have to put in your driver's license to buy fertilizer, you're sure as will have to put in your driver's license to use Fable 5, which is the precursor to know how to use fertilizer to make the bomb.

Host: Yeah, as we talked about last week.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Sorry, last thing. Total own goal. And then what does it do? We in Silicon Valley yet again look like people that have just optimized for our own selves. We take ourselves seriously. We take nobody else seriously. We're not willing to play ball. It's unserious. It's immature and it does not help society at large.

Host: Okay, Freeird, there's been some talk about political tribalism here and I'll let you take this one. Anthropic, the only company that doesn't seem to show up when President Trump has CEOs at the White House. backed by Reed Hoffman who funded the lawfare against the White House. Jean Okaro lawsuit, this lawsuit, that lawsuit. There's major beef between the left and the right and anthropics in the middle of it. Is this the White House treating Anthropic differently? And do they have it out for Anthropic? And Anthropic is basically handing him the ability to take these kind of actions. In other words, is this political instead of pragmatic and practical in your mind?

David Sacks: Well, I mean, I think that there there's no regulatory framework today. And so antagonizing the government to create a regulatory framework and then feeling antagonized when they regulate you just seems a little bit weird. And Anthropic seems to be the only one doing that. So I don't know if it's a political motivation as much as it is like some strange set of behaviors from anthropic that that's motivating this perception. Look, I think at the end of the day, we're all losers if the government is going to be picking winners and losers in AI. And we're all losers if we all have to be restricted on accessing these tools. At the end of the day, like I've said before, you know, an entire AI model can fit on a USB drive and you just need to have good hardware to run it. And the value of that model is time bound because at some point a better model is going to come around. So my point being, I think we're all losers if there's one stack that one company owns the whole thing and we all have to put in our ID and the government decides who's the winner and who's the loser. None of us are going to be winners in that sense. That's why I think that there's currently a natural market force for two things. One is more open- source and second is a fragmentation of the AI stack. If you go back to the 1960s, IBM was the predominant provider of mainframe computers. And I don't know if you guys remember this or know this, but like at the time, IBM did the whole stack. They actually made the chips. Yeah. So all of the um you know the I think it was solid logic technology chips that IBM created were were made in house. They made the hardware, they made the operating system, they also made the software and this was the case through the whole mainframe technology era that IBM was the monopoly. They had the whole thing and then ultimately the government had to intervene to get them to disagregate the software layer and that's what actually started the independent software vendor era which is when the software industry really started was after the government said hey we shouldn't have one company that has the whole stack in computing then we get to the 80s and that's when everything disagregated then IBM started buying the Intel chip for the personal computer they had their own OS but ultimately Microsoft came along and made a better OS and then this entire proliferation of the software stack with independent vendors took off and I think that that ultimately is what allowed this industry to progress. The productivity boom that arose from both mainframe computing and desktop PCs was because of this disagregation that happened. I think the same is likely going to have to happen with these AI companies. And you know, I'm not sure that what we're looking at today as being kind of some igopoly of three or four businesses is really where we're going to stand. I think the equivalent on the hardware side is there's going to be multiple chip vendors. There's also going to be multiple clouds. There's also going to be multiple models that run on the clouds. People are also going to run models locally. They're going to use different software factories. They're not just going to use anthropic. They're going to use tools like Salesforce and, you know, 8090 and other things. They're going to run different applications on top of it that are going to be purpose-built or customuilt. So, I think there's very likely kind of a diffusion that's happening right now. If it doesn't happen, it's going to be pretty nasty. But I just think the market forces are so strong for a diffusion of each layer in the stack finding its way to the cheapest, the more available, the more accessible partner vendors that we're very likely going to see these kind of, you know, handful of igopies kind of break down a little bit.

Host: Yeah, I that's my that's my take on this. I'm not sure.

David Sacks: I'm not sure I'm not sure there's going to be a political capture that's going to happen. It just seems very unlikely. I I'm I'm going to steal men for the for the good of the pod and also a little bit of my personal belief here. I think if we were to take Anthropic's name out of their series of behaviors in how they handled the release of Mythos, let's just say we put Grock in there, Open AAI or Gemini. Gemini is a good one. Google, they're not totally in the uh in either camp and it's a company that's been around for a long time. So Gemini comes out with a model when they test it. it's incredible at hacking and cyber warfare and they say you know what this is incredible it's super powerful we're going to limit it to 50 partners and those 50 partners include Microsoft etc they happen to have SK Telecom in there they make a mistake they put them in there and we looked at them and we said hey holding the model for 30 days while they test it we'd say thumbs up good move and then one of their partners Amazon says uh hey we were able to jailbreak this and they say okay we're going to put put a couple guardrails on this when we put it out or let's just say second phase after they give it to their 50 partners in control beta they said we're going to open it to the public but we're going to watch every single thing you do I think David you said this is a privacy issue it's pretty standard actually for when you release something like this to monitor it for the first 30 days if you don't want to be have people looking at the results then don't join the beta keep using 4.8 8 don't use the newest one. And so you'd say thumbs up to that as well. Hey, they're giving it only to logged in customers. And if somebody does something dangerous like they try to get it to do nuclear weapons or last week when I asked it about fertilizer regulation, it dropped me out of the model, right? We would give a thumbs up to that. And then if we were asked, hey, by the government to take it down for anybody outside the United States and we said, you know what, we'll take it down for everybody. probably give a thumbs up to that too if Gemini did it. So there is a definite backdrop of beef between Anthropic and this administration. And if you look at the Reed Hoffman connection, you look at Daario who refuses to participate. The people who go work at Anthropic are the people who hate Trump, who hate the Trump administration, they're opting into that. If you look at OpenAI and Grock, those are the people who are largely proTrump. Uh including Greg Brockman and his wife who gave 25 million to Trump. So there's a political underpinning here. In fact, you may not be able to get into this. I understand that. But that's part of what's going on here. I think Anthropic actually did a really good job of rolling out this model and being conservative about it. I think their comms are the problem. Every time Daario talks, it's too much talking and there's too much fear-mongering. So, somebody's got to fix the comms over there to your point, Chimath, because the whole industry is going to need to be regulated. And I think the industry needs to regulate themselves. That's the key to this. We need to have a set of tests that Google, Microsoft, Amazon all agree to Elon, hey, these are the things we should test and they should self-certify each model before asking the government which doesn't understand the models to certify them. The industry should have an industry certification like they do for countless other things. I've talked about the MPAA and the video game industry. We should just self-certify. It's the simplest thing in the world to do. and then we could release the models ourselves without the government getting involved. Anybody else have any thoughts on this before we go on to our next topic? Well, let me just respond to this accusation. You're saying that this is somehow politically motivated. There's just that's just not true. Look, there are anthropic aligned influencers who are trying to spread the story that all of this is basically a beef between me and Anthropic. They're trying to say that somehow I did this, which obviously is untrue. I don't have the power to do it. I'm not a day-to-day employee of the White House and I only got the readout of this once the letter was sent. So, you know, I wasn't involved. Secretary of War Pete Hexath, he wasn't involved. People are trying to make it sound like this was a beef with the Department of War. Just not true. This happened as a result of the things I mentioned, which is they got a report of a jailbreak. Daario had the chance to fix it. He basically said no. Maybe that's not the way he thought he was communicating, but that's what the administration heard. Daario double down that blog post and that had the prior history of expanding the mythos preview to at least one company that the administration felt was a national security threat. That's the reason it happened. It has nothing to do with the be and by the way it was the people in the administration who were most sympathetic to Daario and Anthropic who wanted to reset this relationship after the department of war and then Daario basically blew it.

Host: Yeah, that's

David Sacks: with those people. So, look, I mean, you can just make stuff up if you want.

Host: No, I'm not making it up. Just, you know, I take offense to that, Saxs, because it's your guy, Pete Hexith, who is doing tweets like this. Three months ago, Department of War kicked anthropic out of the building forever. Every passing day proves why this was the right move. I'm not making anything up here. There's serious beef between these folks. If you're saying that like this has nothing to do with this, read the tweet.

David Sacks: That was after the letter was sent. Check the the time stamp.

Host: I get it. No, no, it's totally fine. There is beef between Anthropic and the administration. To say there's not is just sill.

David Sacks: I didn't say there wasn't a prior history. I'm just saying that that wasn't the reason why this happened. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and Department of War. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and me. We were not the parties who were involved.

Host: I don't think you're involved in it. I I didn't say that obviously,

David Sacks: but neither was Department of War. Now, what Hexa's tweet reflects is he feels vindicated. there's a sense of vindication that hey we had a really difficult time with these guys when we did a contract negotiation people may have thought that we were the difficult ones in fact we said they were difficult and communicated in a strange way and now everybody else can see it too. So I think what Hexath is saying there is like hey we told you so but he did not make the decision here. This had nothing to do with it and look at the time stamp of that. It was after all this whole series of events went down. If I'm a shareholder in uh Anthropic, I would have told Dario to show up every time Trump had the CEOs over there and I would have told somebody in that management team to drop a 1025 million check into some ballroom or some America, you know, pack uh just like Greg did at Open AI.

Host: He really didn't need to do that. All he needed to do is that when a cabinet secretary calls you and says that we have a credible national security threat report to us by one of your own most trusted partners that he take it seriously.

David Sacks: I mean he took it down. How more seriously can you take it than taking the whole thing down?

Host: He didn't take it down until after they got the letter which was the whole point.

David Sacks: Yeah. Anyway,

Chamath Palihapitiya: can I jump in here?

Host: Please jump in. Yeah. I had Claude read Machines of Loving Grace and AI policy on the exponential and then I asked it to do

David Sacks: what is that?

Host: Uh those are his two long form essays.

David Sacks: Darios

Host: just just to be clear for the audience.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. And and I asked it to do a psychological analysis and well no I I'm not joking. I mean, I think it's important, you know, and use these as insights into his personality and give me a psychological analysis of him based on these as well as based on the current facts on the ground with mythos. Be truthful, don't protect simply because you are an anthropic model. And then I asked it to refine through the lens of EAC movement and tell me if there's any psychological leanings. Do you want me to read to you movement, just so people know, is the accelerator movement to accelerate society and technology as opposed to decelerate. Uh, okay. I think people understand. Yeah. Let's

David Sacks: Can I read this? Okay. Two paragraphs.

Host: Delusions of grandeur.

Chamath Palihapitiya: No. Well, let me I don't I I'm not saying it to make fun of him. Look, he's built an incredible business. The shareholders, I think, are are doing phenomenally well. I think the revenue run rate of this business continues to accelerate.

Host: All of it's incredible. But I want to understand this person. I am paying millions of dollars. And so, you know, I just want to understand.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Here we go.

David Sacks: Okay. He distrusts other labs, positioning them as racing recklessly. He distrusts authoritarian states because he says they will weaponize AI. He distrusts markets to distribute the gains. He distrusts institutions to move fast enough and post mythos distrusts the government to wield power quote transparently and fairly. That's a very long list of untrustworthy actors. The list of trustworthy ones is conspicuously short and it has a suspicious tendency to resolve towards people who reason the way I do operating under the rules I help design. When your safety framework requires that someone hold the keys and your analysis keeps concluding the other key holders can't be trusted, you've built a machine that outputs me no matter what you feed it. Eak would call that a god complex. The more precise term is epistemic exceptionalism. Not that I am superior, but more my reasoning is the loadbearing one. And the failure of others to reach my conclusions is evidence of their corruption or slowness, not of my error. That's the genuinely concerning pattern, and it's worth naming plainly because it's the engine of the dangerous version. Once you believe your judgment is the uncorruptible reference point, every conflict gets recoded. Government overreach isn't powerful actors have competing interests and I lost. It becomes they failed to be transparent and fair. Losing the Pentagon fight isn't a negotiation he misplayed. It's evidence the system runs on leverage instead of reason. The mythos collision is we shipped a dangerous capability and a hostile state reacted predictably. It's a misunderstanding. The word his company actually used. Notice that misunderstanding presumes that if everyone simply understood correctly, they'd agree with him. That word choice under stress is the closest thing in the public record to the tell. It's not megalamania. It's the quieter, more defensible feeling conviction that disagreement is downstream of error. I thought that was really interesting.

Host: I mean,

David Sacks: well, I think I think it's like super accurate. I mean, look, there's no question that Anthropic's whole mantra, and actually Ben Thompson pointed this out in one of his pieces, is that they believe that AI is super dangerous, and only they are virtuous enough to basically control the negatives of it. I mean, that is basically their view on it.

Host: They're the Jedi. They're the Jedi. They believe that they will bring balance to the universe and that they are the ones who can adjudicate all of these rulings. Yes, they believe they're superior to everybody else, which is why they are a magnet for talent.

David Sacks: Now, what I would say is I don't think that they have a particular problem with the Trump administration per se. What I would say is they got spoiled by the Biden administration because they had totally captured the Biden administration. And the proof of that is the fact that the leaders of the Biden administration's AI policy. Not just one of them, but all of them went to go work at Enthropic like the minute the Biden administration was over. I'm talking about officials who were in charge of AI for the NSC. the ones who were in charge of the new AI safety institute, which was something that Anthropic basically set up under the Biden administration. The person who is my predecessor effectively as AIAR, they all went to go work at Anthropic. So

Host: there's no politics going on here except it's incredibly tribal. Okay.

David Sacks: No, I just think that they got used to the fact they they I mean they were incredibly organized for a startup and prioritized government affairs from an early stage, maybe before any other AI company. And I think Daria went to Washington very early on and convinced key officials in the Biden administration of this idea that AI was extremely dangerous and needed to be controlled by the government in some sort of like merger between the government and then a very small number of hand selected companies, two or three of them. It was that message that Mark Andre heard which is what caused remember this when he went to go meet with the government and they said don't waste your time investing in different AI companies. We're going to anoint the winners. there's only going to be a couple of them. We're going to create a cartel. I think the way that Anthropic describes it is that they describe competition between AI companies as a dangerous race condition. Meaning they all just are racing towards AGI and therefore safety falls by the wayside and they want to centralize and control. They see competition as a nefarious force. So they want centralization. They effectively want to create a cartel and that is their view of AI safety. Now, you can see how they could see it in their language as being virtuous. But if you see it from the point of view of what's really happening, which is they're trying to create a monopoly or duopoly or cartel, it's incredibly self- serving. And that is the danger. And I do think that, you know, a fundamental philosophical question is whether you think competition is a good force or a bad force. In my opinion, competition is a good force. It's what protects consumers. It gives consumers choice. It also brings out the best in competitors and prevents regulatory capture.

Host: It balances the power too, right? If you don't have one person who you're dependent on.

David Sacks: Yes. And it has a greater chance of leading to decentralization. I think centralization is the greatest threat of AI,

Host: right? You don't want to become a totalitarian force. So there there's a fundamental ideological difference here. But look, you have to say Daario was incredibly successful at resetting the conversation with mythos. You go back to I think it was April and they had just been kicked out of Department of War because of that unsuccessful contract negotiation and then all of a sudden they come to Washington and declare they've invented this cyber weapon and they basically freaked everyone out and they got everyone to basically go along with their idea of some sort of government approval regime and it's only because I think of their own

David Sacks: I don't know you could say hubris

Host: hubris or they misplayed it. Yeah. their delusions are hubist and they misplayed it and it ended up getting kicked out under their own nent pre-approval regime.

David Sacks: Hey uh Freeberg, just one last question for you. If we do tip over into super intelligence and it becomes like cataclysmic for humanity and we look back on this conversation, what would have the right thing to do been for the government? Again, there's this important force that needs to continue to maintain its strength, which is to avoid the natural instinct to control this stuff. This this happened with the desktop computing revolution and the mainframe computing revolution. You guys know there were like articles published in Newsweek and New York Times in 1961 that talked about the demise of the workforce because of the computer. They said, "We've now automated everything. Humans are irrelevant. No one will have a job. The workforce will go away." It was an existential threat in the media at that time. And what happened? The mainframe computer drove productivity. Every individual that worked was able to do a hundred times more work. Then the same thing happened with the desktop computer and that also enabled economic mobility and it enabled productivity gains, enabled new industries. And everyone said when that happened, this is the end of the workforce. No one's going to be able to get a job anymore. Everyone's getting replaced. It's over. We've got to retrain our entire workforce. In fact, the federal government did this deal in the early 80s. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in workforce training programs that literally did nothing. And it was all about, oh my god, we got to get our workforce ready to transition to the desktop computer industry. You know what ended up happening? People figured out.

Host: It wasn't that difficult to turn on a Windows PC, right?

David Sacks: And companies figured out how to help employees navigate and transition to higher levels of productivity by taking advantage of this new technology and these new tools. The same thing is going to happen here. So this whole notion of AGI wipes out everything. And this is the end conclusion. There's a deep arrogance to technologists. a deep arrogance and we know it. It's what drives all of us.

Host: But that arrogance always leads to these existential conclusions. This will cure all cancer. This will solve all disease. This will eradicate all jobs. None of us. And by the way, no one's immune to this arrogance. From Elon to Sam to Daario to all of us. We all assume that this time is different and everything's about to change completely. And you know what? It doesn't. We're all part of this long-term continuum of technological and productivity improvements driven by human ingenuity which unlocks human potential and gives humans more capacity to do more. And it's awesome and there's no job loss and narrative, you know, end of the world and that is driving us all into an insane frenzy. Everyone needs to chill the out and just let technology do what it does.

David Sacks: Point these companies need to stop doom trolling. They need to stop doom trolling. Do you see that New York Times oped? Look, this is all downstream. This is all downstream of the fact that these AI CEOs have been scaring the daylights out of the public with respect to AI. It was totally unnecessary. And by by the way, JK, I just want to say one other thing, which is I am not happy about this result. I'm not happy about the fact that Anthropic is in this predicament. Why? Cuz I don't like the president. You know, I hope this does not become presidential. I don't want policy being made out of these types of emergencies. I trust it won't be. I hope this won't become the basis for policy. I hope it's a good

Host: You think they should regulate themselves?

David Sacks: As I've been saying,

Host: if you go back to April, here's the thing that's really crazy. Okay, I just saw that Dario did this interview with um Bloomberg, you know, Emily Chang, and he said that by not releasing Mythos in April, the company suffered massively commercially. You know, he's acting like he's doing this great and noble thing for humanity, this great sacrifice. The truth is that if he had to release Mythos with no guardrails in April, he would have exposed the company to massive legal exposure because thousands of companies would have gotten hacked. And it would have been very easy to say that was a foreseeable consequence of releasing Mythos with no safety features, no guardrails. Look, right now, Meta is being sued. They just lost a multi-million dollar verdict because a user accused them of body shaming. Meta and Google are both being delused with product liability lawsuits right now. So, you're telling me that it was this great sacrifice for humanity that you didn't release Mythos when it was patently unsafe back in April? Of course, you had to include the safety features. Of course, you would have exposed yourself to liability that could have put you out of business. That is just good business practice. That is corporate responsibility. You shouldn't deserve this giant pat on the back. And you didn't need to go to Washington and freak everybody out like this. I mean, you should have quietly done it. You should call it what it You could have quietly gone to the NSA and said, "Listen,

Chamath Palihapitiya: they're going to get kneecapped by the hyperscalers. It's a clear lane for them to say, "Let us be your trusted partners."

David Sacks: And by the way, the hyperscalers, if you look at their balance sheets, the hyperscalers are out over their ski tips. They have trillions of dollars of onbalance sheet and offbalance sheet exposure to AI. The best thing that they can do to underwrite all of that money is to kneecap the Frontier Labs and play gatekeeper, charge a toll, take a tax. It is business 101. They're going to say they're the adult supervision.

Host: And by the way, capture 101. Yes. That's not regulatory capture.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah.

David Sacks: Well, they're creating a market opportunity for themselves because these companies have doom trolled their way into it. That

Host: they've doom trolled their way into it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Give us a policeman. That's what I'm saying.

David Sacks: I capture is when you surreptitiously in the dead of night swoop into Washington and introduce some bill as a Christmas tree ornament in a Christmas tree bill. This is literally the exact opposite with the same outcome. I I agree with you, Jason, which is you bumble your way into getting kneecapped by everybody around you.

Host: No, no, it's I guess an analogy would be they literally walk themselves into prison and hand the hyperscalers the keys and were like, "Please lock us up."

David Sacks: They closed the door. They closed the door themselves. They lock They threw the keys out the window. Yes, we're locking ourselves up. All right.

Host: The Iran war might be ending after 110 days. President Trump has announced for the 37th time that the war has ended and that the initial agreement on June 15th will be codified. A lot of details here. A lot of unknowns. Conflict began obviously on February 28th. Formal signing happens Friday, June 19th in Geneva. Deal was mediated by Pakistan. Extends the ceasefire for 60 days. Includes a Lebanon ceasefire. US gets the straight of Hormuz reopening which it was open before the war. Obviously, Iran commits to not developing nuclear weapons. Iran agrees to destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium under IEA supervision and that they will freeze its nuclear program at current levels for 60 days. Iran gets all sanctions lifted and $300 billion in reconstruction. So we spent 10020 $200 billion blowing the place up and we and our partners in the Gulf are going to spend 300 billion half a trillion.

David Sacks: We're not we're not on the hook for a dime, Juel.

Host: Okay. I was just saying there's some people in the Gulf who are going to be involved in this. Uh and we'll get into it. Access to Iran's going to get access to their frozen assets and uh the US is going to remove its forces from the region after the final deal. A lot of stuff not defined yet will be deferred. Uh like Israel's sign on to this deal and uh bunch of spicy comments happening there and Iran's nuclear enrichment going forward. That's not resolved. Iran's ballistic missile program that's kind of important. That's also not yet resolved. So I'll stop here. Obviously there's a lot in play. Many people said the reason to vote for Trump was because he would never start wars. Started a couple. What's your take on where we're at today, Saxs?

David Sacks: Well, I think this deal is a tremendous achievement for the president. I think that it was very difficult to get. I think the Iranians are not easy to negotiate with.

Host: You'd think,

David Sacks: let's review this deal. Number one, it reopens the straight of Hormuz. That means all the oil will flow and all the other vital materials that are necessary for the global economy. So, that's number one. Number two, we have a commitment from them not to pursue a nuclear program and to collect all the nuclear materials. Number three, there's a ceasefire of the war on all the different fronts. Four, this will not cost us a dime. There is a reconstruction fund, but we're not paying for it. I don't see why that's a problem for us.

Host: Who's paying for it?

David Sacks: I guess it's something that the Iranians will do in combination with the Gulf States, but it's not the US is not on the hook for that money. We're not paying a dime. And then lastly, this could lead to a reproach mall with Iran, which I think could be a good thing because I don't think we need to be at war with that country forever. And look, what is the alternative to this deal? I'm seeing a lot of people, it's easy to take pot shots and criticize the deal, but what is the alternative to this? I'm hearing neocons who basically want us to put ground troops in and try and effectuate a regime change in Iran. This is what I'm hearing. I heard John Pador say this. I'm hearing other neocons say this. I mean, are you serious? Are we really going to escalate this war by putting ground troops in? Who exactly do you want to go fight? What I heard John Pador say is, "Well, we have a volunteer army, so they signed up for this." No, they didn't. They signed up to protect America, not to go charging into Iran, which is basically a mountain fortress. I've heard estimates it would take over a million troops, and even then it might not be successful. We send half a million to Iraq, and Iran is three times bigger as a country, and it's a mountain fortress. So, that would be a suicide mission. That would be insane. Nobody wants that. I'm not sending my kids to fight that war. You don't want to send your kids to fight that war. If John Pador and the neocons want to do it, let them send their kids and their family. If Raza Palavi wants to go to Beverly Hills and muster an army from his legion of supporters, let him try and do that. I don't think they will sign up for it. I think they're living too well in Beverly Hills. Okay? Nobody wants to fight that war. That is the alternative here. Okay? So, if we're not going to send in ground troops and we're not going to continue the bombing cuz what's the point? We already hit every We already flattened every military target above ground in that country. So what is the point of continued bombing? Then we might as well hold Hold on. If my point is if we're not going to send in ground troops because it makes no sense, we're not going to continue the bombing because it makes no sense. Then we might as well try what's behind door number three, which is a deal here that will try to create a peace. Remember, we're only at theou stage of this. But let's give peace a chance here. I don't understand these people who just want this war to go on forever. Haven't we tried that before? The forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan. We're really going to sign up for another one of those. I don't think so. So, look, it's easy for people to take pot shots at the president here, but I think this is by far the best of all the alternatives.

Host: Sax, the long-term issue has been the enrichment of uranium to the point that it can be used as a nuclear weapon. Is is it part of the deal that all that enriched uranium that we do know there's a stockpile of gets removed from the country? Because if that goes, I personally feel very good about let the citizens deal with what they have to deal with.

David Sacks: That's what they've said. This this is part of theou. They will not only agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon. They will give up their nuclear material. This

Host: Yeah, that's a big deal. If all that enriched uranium comes out of the country, I think it's a very big deal because even if they restarted the program, even if they resourced the equipment, rebuilt the intelligence to do it, etc., etc., it's going to take years to a decade to 15 years plus to build enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon. That would kind of be the natural setback, if you will, that provides some defense for the conditions that we really care about. I didn't realize that was in the deal. I thought the deal was just that they would make a quote commitment to stopping a program. But if all that enriched uranium is coming out, that's a really big deal.

David Sacks: Well, they still have to define it. You know, again, this is at theouou stage is at the level of highle principles. They have to define exactly how that program is going to work. But what they get in exchange is relief from the sanctions and they get a more normalized relationship with the US.

Host: Yeah. Yeah. There's an incentive there for them, you know, if they're willing to basically give that up.

Chamath Palihapitiya: You have any uh take care or you want to check in or no? I think the market's going to the moon. The market's going to the moon. Uh I'll just add I'm glad if this uh gets consummated and it was a huge blunder for Trump to do this and obviously he's trying to get out of it. Should have never done it, but here we are and I hope it resolves and I hope the people of Iran are free eventually. Do you think it's worth it, Jal, to have gone through what we went through over the last couple of months if all of the Iranian enriched uranium is gone, their missiles are are depleted and they have no capacity to enrich uranium again? Do you think just just looking back like if you just put this all together summarily and said, "Hey, like there was this big war and this stuff that happened and all the loss of life and like suddenly this this real risk of nuclear from the beginning of this we don't have complete information. So, you know, for venture capitalists, capital allocators, entrepreneurs can speculate all they want, but we don't see what Trump sees, right? So, I you have to be humble enough to know, we don't know what information he had in all of this, but the trimming of the grass, the the hedging, you know, of the garden approach that Israel had been taking all this time, that was the right approach. Isolating dictators, waiting them out is always the better approach than starting full-scale wars with them because you don't know what could happen in an escalation. So, simply not worth the risk. much better to just send the air troops in and clean it up and and we did not need to, you know, go collect this uh you know material obviously because we have these bunker busters and we can just slam it every x number of months and that would have been a much better approach just like we've contained North Korea for all this time and you know we contain other dictators with weapons.

Host: North Korea has

Chamath Palihapitiya: What are you talking about? North Korea has a nuke. No, no, but we've contained them. And we actually did have this discussion with Graham Allison about, hey, why didn't we contain that one when we had a chance, that was a mistake by other presidencies to to allow them to get this far. And then once they have it, it's really hard. And in this case, it was working very well. Every 18 months, we bomb the facilities. It was fine. We didn't need to start a full-scale war. And uh we're probably going to just wind up where we were at the start of all this. But I hope that at some point the people of Iran are free. that that's my, you know, true hope. But people have to we we can't enforce democracy in the Middle East. We've learned that over and over and over again. The people have to take, you know, they have to lead their own revolution. We can't facilitate it. All right, listen. Another amazing episode of the All-In podcast for your Sultan of science, the dictator, and the Rainman. Yeah, David Saxs. I am the world's greatest moderator, and we'll see you next time. Byebye, you boys. Bye-bye.

David Sacks: We'll let your winners ride.

Host: Rainman David.

David Sacks: And it said, "We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it."

Host: Love you, Queen of

David Sacks: Besties.

Host: That is my dog taking your driveways. Oh man, my appetiter will meet.

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

Host: Wet your feet your feet.

David Sacks: That's going to be good. We need to get our

Host: I'm going all in.