**Jason Calacanis:** Brad Gerstner's here joining us hot after crashing the stock market and popping the AI bubble. Well done, Brad. We're going to get into it. Can we ask OpenAI to just put a moratorium on any more public statements or appearances for another couple months?

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** All of our portfolios, thank you. We're all down 15% this week.

**David Sacks:** Good job, Brad. You decided you'd be a podcaster. You're like, "Hey, let me ask a couple of hard questions here." And you pop the AI bubble.

**Jason Calacanis:** Oh, it's super interesting. Super interesting. If you're not in the industry, Sam Altman appeared on the fabulous BG2 podcast last Friday and it got a little frisky when our fifth bestie here asked what I thought was a completely legitimate, you know, mundane question. Hey, you're making 13 billion.

**Brad Gerstner:** It's actually a softball question to be honest.

**Jason Calacanis:** It was an underhanded pitch.

**Brad Gerstner:** The way that it was asked, I think you did a very reasonable job of asking a good question in a very fair way.

**Jason Calacanis:** So, let's just show this clip here and then I want to go behind the pod with you, Brad.

**Brad Gerstner:** So, I think the single biggest question I've heard all week and hanging over the market is how can a company with 13 billion in revenues make 1.4 trillion of spend commitments? And you've heard the criticism, Sam.

**Sam Altman:** First of all, we're doing well more revenue than that. Second of all, Brad, if you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer.

**Brad Gerstner:** I just enough like, you know, people are...

**Sam Altman:** I think there's a lot of people who would love to buy OpenAI shares. Including myself. People who talk with a lot of breathless concern about our compute stuff or whatever that would be thrilled to buy shares. So I think we could sell your shares or anybody else's to some of the people who are making the most noise on Twitter about this very quickly. We do plan for revenue to grow steeply. Revenue is growing steeply. We are taking a forward bet that it's going to continue to grow. There are not many times that I want to be a public company, but one of the rare times it's appealing is when those people are writing these ridiculous "OpenAI is about to go out of business" and whatever. I would love to tell them they could just short the stock and I would love to see them get burned on that.

**Jason Calacanis:** So Brad, you asked a pretty mundane question. You said it very nicely. I guess we could give Sam a little bit of grace. I don't know if he was being a little cheeky or maybe he's tired of answering the question, but the internet took this and ran with it in a very viral way that he was angry and he was hostile. How did you take it?

**Brad Gerstner:** That's the interesting thing, right? I mean listen, we bust each other's chops all the time. We get feisty with one another. Sometimes it runs amok. We don't know if somebody's being serious or not serious. And Sam and I had a good laugh after. I think Sam was feisty but I think he also intended it as a joke. He knows that I don't want to sell my shares. He knows that I would like to buy more shares in the company. But I think the reason that it went so viral is because it is a super important question. People are really nervous. They're wondering, are we walking into an AI bubble? Like, how can these huge numbers, how can you be talking about 1.4 trillion in spending when you have kind of gap revenue that's been reported to 13 billion this year.

**Brad Gerstner:** So, I was a little disappointed and I tweeted about this afterwards that the feistiness got in the way of the answer. But if you listen to his words during the rest of the segment, he basically said, "Listen, we think we're going to have a hundred billion in revenues over the course of the next couple years." And JCal sent the team a chart that basically just shows The Information's forecast for what OpenAI and Anthropic's revenues are going to be over the course of the next several years. And The Information is reporting that their internal numbers are both over a hundred billion dollars.

**Jason Calacanis:** This is The Information reporting on leaked internal numbers or The Information is taking a guess?

**Brad Gerstner:** No, I think they report this is on leaked internal numbers according to The Information. And so, I think Sam's in his head saying, and he says multiple times on the pod, we're going to have revenues in excess of a hundred billion dollars. And the 1.4 trillion, it's super important to remember this is over a period of five or six years. I estimate about half of that spending is going to be borne by the partners. So now we're talking $700 billion in spending. Spread that over five or six years. In the out years, you're probably talking about $150 billion of capex to OpenAI. So he's probably sitting there saying, and he said we're going to have over 100 billion in revenue. So if we have 150 billion in revenue and 150 billion in capex now it begins to pencil out a little bit more. But importantly he said, and if we don't have those revenues, we've got to match our revenues to our expenses. I think they will just extend or recut the deals in order to make those expenses doable for the company.

**Jason Calacanis:** This is an important point because we don't know, we haven't seen these actual deals and if they have conditions or outs or if they can push it out or they can cancel it. Maybe they have, and that will come out I guess in the public filings. But putting all that aside, the market was not happy about this. Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, Broadcom, who all are the partners we're talking about, were all down 6 to 20%. So this has in fact been a significant correction in terms of the AI boom.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** I think these are totally and completely uncorrelated. Every now and then you have a bad day. I've done thousands of hours on TV. I've had a couple of really bad days. I suspect that if Sam had to do it over, he wouldn't have said what he said in the way he said it. And even if he was joking, he would have practiced it a little bit more and just landed it. So what's actually going on? I think right now we are in a period of getting a little risk off and rebalancing. Why? There are two sets of things that are happening. The first set of things is the market is learning to digest all of the capex that has happened and they're all breathlessly trying to build models that try to predict what the ROI is of that spend. The second part of that is they're trying to figure out how this new spend will actually impact future earnings. And this is less to do with OpenAI, but it has much more to do with the big stalwarts of the Mag 7. Google's earnings were phenomenal. Their AI numbers were blazing hot. Facebook's was terrible. Apple is now in this really interesting place where it seems like they're going to seed their AI business to Google and pay them billions of dollars a year like they get paid billions of dollars a year for search from them.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** The second part is as you go into year end, there's just a little bit of a lull in the market and people are like, "Let me just consolidate. Let me book some wins. Let me get ready for the new year. Let me tax loss harvest." People used to wait until mid December, and now they are smart enough to know that mid December the price action is. And so now this price action starts in mid November. So I wouldn't pin this on Brad and Sam. I just think this is natural market machinations. But to be clear, we are very much getting into a phase of risk-off.

**Jason Calacanis:** Yeah. And this got exacerbated Sachs because on Wednesday, OpenAI decided to be in the news again when their CFO Sarah Friar told the Wall Street Journal she hopes the US government will backstop financing of its 1.4 trillion in data centers. Here's a direct quote, "the backstop, the guarantee that allows the financing to happen." And she said that the federal guarantees would quote "really drop the cost of financing." Of course, it would. And this would allow OpenAI to borrow more money at lower rates from a much larger pool of lenders. That went viral and everybody said, "Oh my god," it started feeding I think the narrative that maybe OpenAI is insolvent in fact and there's no way for them to pay their bills, which obviously is a little bit ridiculous. On Wednesday night, Friar walked back her comments. "I want to clarify my comments. OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments. I used the word 'backstop' and it muddied the point. I was making the point that American strength and technology will come for building real industrial capacity which requires the private sector and government playing their part."

**Jason Calacanis:** Sax, you came over the top and tweeted that there will be no federal bailout. There's plenty of people available to pick up the mantle if OpenAI needed a bailout. You got five major frontier model companies. Grok, Claude, Gemini, plenty of them. So Sax, you came in. Daddy's home and you settled it. Take us through how you think about this as our zar of AI.

**David Sacks:** Well, this morning my entire feed was full of comments by people, analysts, consumers, business people, and politicians saying that we can't allow OpenAI to have a federal bailout. And I think they were kind of connecting Sam's original comments or prickliness to what Brad talked about like, hey, do they have the money? Can they justify this with Friar's comments that they need a backstop to say, hey, this company's not solvent. It's going out of business and they're demanding a federal bailout. So, I think that's kind of how the pieces got put together. And what I said is, look, there's not going to be a federal bailout for AI. Not going to happen. We have five major frontier model companies right now, and there are new companies being formed all the time. And if one of them fails, hey, it's going to go out of business and the other ones are going to replace it. So, nobody is talking about a bailout. In fact, I would say that the AI sector is maybe one of the healthiest, meaning most competitive sectors of the entire American economy right now. To the extent that you just love ruthless competition driving innovation, that's what we have right now. So, if one of these companies gets over its skis and ends up going bankrupt, the chips are going to fall where they may. And I've never heard anyone serious disputing that fact.

**David Sacks:** Now, I also made the point, which I think is important, that to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt, I don't think anyone at OpenAI was asking for a bailout. If you watch the video with Sarah Friar, she's clearly searching for the right word to describe what she's trying to say, and then she settles on a word that she now regrets, which is backstop. Definitely not the right word. So, I don't think they are asking for a bailout. I don't know what she meant by backstop. Doesn't make sense. So, I think this is a little bit of a tempest in a teapot. What I think is important and I think maybe where she was going is that I do think that we want to make it easier to build infrastructure in this country and that means making permitting easier, making power generation easier. That's all about regulatory reform. And I think that the goal here is to enable a rapid infrastructure build out without increasing residential rates for electricity, which nobody wants. That's the thing we have to combat. But the way that you solve that problem is by making it easier for these AI companies to stand up their own power generation behind the meter. And that requires regulatory reform. That's what the president has called for is allowing the AI companies to do behind the meter. So no one's talking about bailout. Nobody's talking about backstop. We are talking about making permitting easier and making it easier to do buildout. So build out not bailout.

**Jason Calacanis:** Build out not bailout. Now there was a little bit of sort of reading the tea leaves. There have been times when loans were given to incentivize an industry. So I just want to be clear with you. There's no discussions of like Solyndra type loans.

**David Sacks:** Nobody's discussed any of that with me. So, it's not even on the radar, I would say, from the government standpoint.

**Jason Calacanis:** And why would it be if there's so many people trying to pour capitalist capital into this, Brad, and there's so many people trying to buy your shares in a company making $1 billion that's currently valued at 500 billion, which I think is like a 30 to 40 price to sales ratio. I mean, this company is fully valued and people are still trying to buy the shares.

**Brad Gerstner:** Yeah. I think I was brilliantly said by David. Listen, it's a national imperative that we accelerate the buildout of AI infrastructure across the country. I've said before the $4 trillion that Jensen Huang has estimated will be built out over the next 5 years is 10 times the size of the Manhattan project that was totally federally funded. Okay? And this is all being privately funded. But it wouldn't be possible without the government clearing out of the way the regulatory hurdles. You heard on the pod that power is really the gating issue here and so it's been amazing to see what the federal government is doing. I think that's what Sarah was trying to get to, that they need to have a public private partnership. They're going to do their job, raise their money, backstop was not the right choice of words, but I know and I talked to Sarah this morning about this, are deeply grateful for what the federal government is doing to accelerate the buildout of power and infrastructure. And the federal government can do that without taking risk on their own balance sheet.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** By the way, Sam just posted something about 15 minutes ago. And he was pretty authoritative in addressing the three critical questions. The first thing he says is that we, meaning OpenAI, will end the year on a $20 billion forward run rate which means December revenue will be 1.666 billion at least. So we kind of know where the revenue is going from 13 to 20 over these next few months which is a pretty staggering growth rate. And then he goes and addresses the whole too big to fail and whether they want government sponsorship. And he's pretty unequivocal here. So, I think this is a tempest in a teapot. I think people are on pins and needles. They're agitated. Some people have had no gains. Other people have had incredible gains. Everybody's agitated. I think we are getting in the risk-off phase for at least two or three months. We will be back firmly in risk-on mode in February is my suspicion. But these next few months, I think people will overblow every random little thing.

**Brad Gerstner:** Thank you. Jensen told the FT straight up, quote, "China is going to win the AI race." His argument is that US state-by-state regulations and power constraints are making it harder for US AI companies. As we've discussed here countless times, whereas the CCP is obviously just making it super affordable to run all those GPUs.

**Brad Gerstner:** He's 100% right. I don't know if you guys saw, but Cursor 2.0 launched this week. My team at 8090 use it. It's an incredible product. Guess what they did? They swapped out Anthropic for an open source Chinese model.

**Jason Calacanis:** Do you know what they're using? Is it like Kimmy or what is it?

**Brad Gerstner:** I think it's Qwen. I think they're using a spin of Qwen. Yeah. My point is we are right now running with one hand tied behind our back. We are going to have to deal with 50 different sets of legislation from state legislators who think they know what AI is. They don't. Sax knows. So, there should be a federal framework and that should be it. And then meanwhile, the Chinese open source models get better and better and better. And so we're making technology decisions that tie our wagons to that steel thread. And so Jensen is right. We need to clean this up quickly.

**David Sacks:** I was a little bit disappointed to see it was reasonable for certain politicians, especially Republican ones, to say, "Look, there's not going to be a federal bailout for AI. Great. We all agree. No one's asking for it." But I was a little disappointed to see that some of them were associating a bailout with a single federal framework as opposed to the patchwork of 50 state regulatory regimes. Because if Republican governors think that they're the ones who are going to be writing the rules, they're sorely mistaken about this. 25% of the bills going through state legislatures are in four states: California, New York, Colorado, and Illinois. In other words, the biggest blue states. Those also happen to be the states where these big AI companies are all headquartered with the one exception of xAI which is in Texas. The blue states have the most market power and if they end up creating the regulations, I just think it's naive to think that the AI companies won't write their models to those regulations of the blue states. I don't think that red states are somehow going to find themselves exempted from the blue state regulations that are being imposed.

**David Sacks:** I've talked about on a previous podcast how what the blue states are going for here is to reinsert DEI into AI models to achieve ideological capture. And the way they do this, they don't say we're requiring DEI. They say that we're prohibiting algorithmic discrimination, which means that if the model says something bad about a protected group, you end up with the same end result, which is again ideological capture. I think all Republicans should be opposed to this. There's only one way to stop it, which is with federal preemption. Otherwise, the states will do what they want and the blue states will basically dominate.

**David Sacks:** I think the arguments that make the most sense right now are the commerce clause arguments where look, the Constitution wants to create a single national market for interstate commerce. AI clearly qualifies and let's give President Trump, not Gavin Newsom or JB Pritzker or Kathy Hochul or Jared Polis, the ability to write the rules. Let's have a single federal framework that will prevent ideological capture of AI, keep it unbiased, which every conservative should want.

**Brad Gerstner:** We're in this race to win AI globally and one of the major concerns I have is that AI is becoming deeply unpopular in America. Silicon Valley is losing the battle around AI. Doomers are now scaring people about jobs. They think all these job cuts that are going on in America are the result of AI. And number two, they're seeing their electric bills go up and they think that's also the result of AI. I've talked with a lot of Republican senator and House members who say they are afraid to mention the words AI because their popularity ratings go down. We need to get on the other side of that because that is a losing proposition for America. If what takes hold here is that it's politically popular to push back against AI, then David, I think that's what you're seeing at these state levels with Republican governors as well. And so, you know, I think both of those are false narratives, but we need to get on the other side. In China, they're not going to slow down. So, if we do an own goal here and slow down because we think somehow that this is the path to greater economic growth, it's going to be a real problem, both national security as well as economic security three, five years down the line.

**David Sacks:** Yeah, can I build on that actually? So in terms of the public discourse, it's true that the doomer narratives have had this tremendous effect that you can see in the poll numbers and then the politicians feel like they can basically play into that in one way or another. But where do these narratives come from? Three big tech billionaires who are on the left contributed over a billion dollars to these doomer think tanks. Basically was Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn and Vitalik Buterine. And from Open Philanthropy and from some of these other entities, they have spun up hundreds of these astroturfed organizations that are spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars to spread these doomer narratives. People need to understand that these narratives are coming from somewhere. They're astroturfed. I don't think they're true and the narratives are contradictory.

**David Sacks:** So, let me give you an example. Right now, the two biggest narratives that we're seeing on social media and in mainstream media are number one, the idea that there's a huge AI bubble right now. In other words, it's all totally fake. The other biggest narrative is that AI is on the verge of super intelligence and we're all going to get replaced. In other words, AI is completely real and super powerful. Well, these two things are contradictory. If it's a bubble, it's not going to be on the verge of super intelligence. And if AI is really that powerful, then obviously on some level this economic activity is justified. So these narratives are completely contradictory. I think that it's possible to believe in neither one of them, which is where I'm at. But it makes no sense for people to believe in both. And you literally have the same people on social media and in mainstream media pushing both of these doomer narratives. So I think we need to increase somehow our immune defenses or our antibodies. We need to improve our antibodies to these memes that are being pushed out by groups that have these weird doomer ideologies like effective altruism and they literally just want progress to stop on AI. And if we do that, like Brad's saying, China will end up winning this AI race. Progress in AI is not going to stop. It'll just all be in China.

**Jason Calacanis:** Brad, let's talk brass tax before we move on to our next topic about ChatGPT and their revenue. If they're at 20 billion in revenue run rate, I think it's pretty well known their majority of their revenue is consumer. 75% is the number I heard. You can tell me if that aligns with your estimates as well. And it cost 20 bucks a month, 240 a year. That's about 60 million paid subscriptions a year. And then on the other side, you got Anthropic, which has got the opposite, right? They're mostly APIs. And do those roughly correlate with what you know, Brad?

**Brad Gerstner:** Well, I would just say they correlate with what The Information has reported as leaked data from both companies and that makes them both the fastest growing companies in the history of Silicon Valley.

**Jason Calacanis:** Two challenging questions for you since you have a big bet here. Google, Apple make these products free. They have pretty robust ad networks. That's a massive headwind. And then on top of that, in the startup community, we just talked about cursor. People are not trusting OpenAI and their API anymore because they know OpenAI is creating competing services. And so there is a big movement in the startup community to not use OpenAI's API products. How confident are you that with those two headwinds, free for consumers and better products, and startups are realizing, hey, Sam has to make a lot of money. Therefore, he's going to do what Microsoft did. How concerned are you about the revenue growth?

**Brad Gerstner:** Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm betting in the super cycle. This is the biggest super cycle of all of our lives. I'm an investor in OpenAI and Anthropic and Google and Microsoft and Nvidia, etc. And so, I don't think you have to make the call right now, one of these companies winning. The fact of the matter, as Sax said, we have one of the most vibrant and competitive ecosystems of in AI in the world. I love the fact that Sundar is coming off the mat swinging. I think Gemini 3 is going to be great at Google. They may in fact make it free. I think Apple, I love seeing Apple pay Google to make Siri better. I think that's going to be a great consumer experience. And the only way that OpenAI wins is they got to build a product that we all love. You've seen those cohort curves. The reality is they are the verb at the moment. It's theirs to lose in consumer. The cohort curves are things of dreams, right? This is the retention rate, the engagement rate as people stay with the service longer. And then by the way, Anthropic's numbers, despite cursor doing some of their own thing, Anthropic's numbers are off the charts. I think that this market is as big or bigger than current estimates are out there, but it's not going to be a straight line up and to the right. We're going to have these moments as Chamath said of risk-off panic just as we did with internet just as we did with mobile just as we did with cloud. The key here is as an investor is conviction. There is a massive conviction tax to be paid. If you lack conviction and sell when these things are down, I'm going to bet on the super cycle. But I'm betting over a much longer period of time than most people.

**Jason Calacanis:** Stock market pulling back as Chamath just said. Hey, we're going to be risk off. And we have been getting a lot of data, a lot of hand wringing going on, Brad. GDP growth. Hey, maybe that's mostly due to AI. The unemployment rates ticking up, inflation's ticking up. Lots of concerning signs. Help us make sense of this, Brad.

**Brad Gerstner:** I think Chamat teed this up perfectly, which is, let's rewind the clock a little bit to April of this year. I think on an intraday basis, the NASDAQ was down 20% year to date in April. We're now up 20%. So, a 40% move higher in a few months. Same with the S&P. I think it was down over 10%, now it's up 14% on the year. So, we've had some pretty massive moves. The first one is just there's growing signs the consumer is pulling back. And you heard it out of Chipotle, you heard it out of Cava, you heard it out of JetBlue. And the nature of it is we have this two-tier economy. The low-end consumer is faltering. The higher-end consumer is hanging in there. But the consumer thing is making people nervous.

**Brad Gerstner:** Now, compounding that is US credit card delinquencies are now back to 2009 levels. So you have okay, consumer cracking a little bit, delinquencies, and now we're seeing regional banks roll over, etc. We're seeing the credit markets beginning to crack a little bit. The good news about this is we still have firepower. This earnings season, earnings have come in really strong. We have 70% of companies that are beating by wide margins. But the real question is as we roll into next year. Scott Besson on the one hand is saying, "Listen, in Q1, we're going to have some big tax refunds because of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and he thinks that'll give it a boost." But clearly, you hear them pounding the table that we need to get rates down. I tend to agree the low-end consumer who pays a lot on their credit cards, on their car loan, etc., is clearly hurting. We see these layoffs, these layoffs are are hurting some of these people as well.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** Yeah, it used to be the case that as goes Main Street, so goes Wall Street or vice versa. The unfortunate reality is that there's a handful of companies that have bids that are, as you said, totally speculative and well into the future, but they are so well bid and they're so highly valued that they drag the entire indices forward. Even though underneath the waterline, you're leaving 493 companies behind. And the reality is that those companies that more accurately reflect what's happening to middle income America are not doing so well. And so we need to find some visible wins in the domestic policy arena. I think that that's what we need now because if you think of each year of a presidency as an act in three parts, I think act one was tariffs. I think act two has been foreign policy. And now it's an opportunity for act three to refocus on domestic earnings and the domestic wealth effect of middle income Americans.

**Jason Calacanis:** 29 days ago I talked to you guys a little bit about the net approval rating here and how the country is feeling. And you can see Trump's net approval rating 9.4. It's gotten worse. Here's the numbers from November. It's gotten 30% worse. Now Trump's down 13%. I attribute it, I think, to the fact that we've had all this layoff news. Inflation ticked up to 3%, everybody knows it was down at 2.3. We had made great progress on it, but now it went back up. If you look at this next chart, it's super interesting. What gets all the press is the foreign policy. But if you look at where the country feels Trump has fallen short, it's where he's strongest or where he was elected for being so strong. Look at these last three here, Chimath. The economy, 63% believe Trump has fallen short. Looking out for the middle class, this is the one that should be the most disturbing. 65% of the country believes he's fallen short and inflation and the cost of living, 66%.

**Jason Calacanis:** If you look at this next chart, this one has been trending online and I've been talking about unemployment and I've been attributing it to AI. I know some people think I'm crying wolf here, but the statistics are starting to trend towards my position, I believe. And if you look at people who are aged 20 to 24, they're at 9.2% unemployment and it is spiking. Why is it spiking? I can tell you from the front lines, as companies cut and they use AI to solve problems they're saying hiring young people and training them is not as rewarding or efficient as training an AI to do the same task.

**Jason Calacanis:** Zohran Mamdani has won New York City. The Dems won across the board. Zohran won every burrow except Staten Island. He's self-proclaimed Democratic socialist. Some people think he's a communist. And he's the first Muslim mayor and the youngest in over a hundred years. Big promises seem to have resonated with young folks, especially women in New York: affordability, rent freezes, free public transit, higher taxes on the rich.

**David Friedberg (clip):** My contrarian belief is that we'll see a dramatic rise in socialist movements in 2025 in the United States. We're going to see an unleashing of economic growth because of deregulation and AI. There's going to be some parts of the economy that are going to be big winners and some parts of the economy that are going to be big losers. When you have this sort of a change this fast, there are often large contingents of people that are left behind. And when that happens, I do think that the socialist policies and the socialist movements gain steam. Growth does not mean that it benefits everyone equally.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** Peter Thiel predicted this in 2020. Thiel said, "From the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it." This has been floating around for years and I think Thiel yet again has seen the forest from the trees many years ago. So yeah, what is happening? I think that we've put our finger on it. We need to come back and now focus on domestic policy and fix some of these core pernicious issues.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** One is clearly that we now need to address how student loans are underwritten. We cannot allow generation after generation of people to graduate from degrees that they don't quite understand with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that they have zero chance of paying off. That is a horrible way to start your life. And we have not done right by these folks. We need the free market to be able to tell somebody, as hard as it may sound, to hear that an art history PhD will cost you $800,000 so that the people that take it have the money or are willing to bear that cost. Meanwhile, if you became an electrician, it would only cost you 40 or 50,000 and you could have an incredible life. My point is that we need to differentially price degrees based on the value and the earnings power that it creates for people. That is a policy level initiative that needs to cascade through America. That cannot happen if the government is not working. So we need to fix that.

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** This was the first moment in years where I have now become sympathetic to this idea of student loan forgiveness. I was never sympathetic to this idea. I am sympathetic to it now.

**Jason Calacanis:** Why are you sympathetic to it, Chama?

**Chamath Palihapitiya:** Because I think that we should have fixed this problem a long time ago. We should have not allowed these loans to be underwritten the way that it was for so long.

**David Sacks:** Okay. So, look, I just on the narrow loan forgiveness point. So, I actually agree that maybe loans should be forgiven if you get a total overhaul of the system. What you don't want to do is acknowledge that all the loans are bad and they need to be written off and then continue making them. And that was the problem with, I think, the Biden loan forgiveness program is he's going to write off trillions of dollars of loans while keep funding the system without any reform. So, let's talk about a big reform package where we completely re-underwrite how we do this and maybe some loan forgiveness can be part of that so that we don't have all these kids graduating who are basically socialists because they're so deeply in debt they're never going to own capital in the system.

**David Sacks:** By the way, JCal, maybe the fact that all these millennials are socialists might have something to do with the fact they're unemployable. Who the hell wants to hire young Lenin 2.0 communist revolutionary to be in their company if they don't believe in capitalism. How are they going to work their way up through a capitalist system? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all these kids are socialists and junior communist revolution rather than blaming our favorite scapegoat AI.

**Brad Gerstner:** Yes. So, the debate was at Stanford sponsored by the economics department on whether or not billionaires should be allowed to exist in America. I can't talk about what we debated in the room as Chattam House rules, but I will tell you this that a preponderance of people on their way in, you know, thought that they should ban billionaires in the United States. I think it's a fundamental fight for the soul of America going on right now. This goes to the very basic premise of the American dream. Is there economic mobility in America? But I think Republicans have to get real about this. I think they have. The president ran on a main street agenda. He passed the Invest America Act, I think he absolutely gets what's at stake. 70% of people feel left out and left behind. They feel like the system is rigged against them. And when you have somebody like Mandami who comes along and promises everything under the sun for free, that he can solve all of these problems, I think it's very enticing for young people who are frustrated.