主持人: All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. Your favorite podcast with your favorite besties in the world, the All-In podcast. Shabbath is traveling and couldn't make it this week. So, our favorite fifth bestie in the world, the one, the only Brad Gersonner from Alimter here to take a victory lap for your uh Trump accounts. Congratulations, brother.

Brad Gersonner: Just getting started. Started here, actually. Look forward to

主持人: Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk about it in depth. And also with us from the great state of Texas, my bestie and brother in arms, David Saxs. How are you doing? How you how you You're loving it, aren't you? Freedom.

David Saxs: Loving it.

主持人: Yeah.

David Saxs: So much freedom.

主持人: Well, the ice storm is over and the weather looks really good right now. We're going to have 70s all weekend. It's great.

主持人: Yeah. You figured out your internet.

David Saxs: That has been resolved. Like I said, it's a lot easier to fix my internet than to fix the state of California.

主持人: You fixed it in one week. So, yeah, I would say that you're trending in the right direction. And with us, of course, David Freeberg of Oh. How are you doing, oh, look at your little promo in your hat. You're promoing with the hat. How's Oh, we haven't heard about it for a while.

David Friedberg: I'll give you some updates on another show. Today may not be the best day. I do appreciate you asking.

主持人: I hear it's going great with the potatoes.

David Friedberg: You got the merch. I got merch. Yeah, you guys can go to boosted.oh.com and buy your gear today. Oh,

主持人: here's your quick science corner for the day. They found a village called the Oh site. It was an archaeological dig on the Sea of Galilee, 26,000 years old. And in this archaeological dig, they found these little clay pots filled with seed. So, it predated all of our understanding of agriculture and plant breeding and seed storage. So, it really reinvented our understanding of of human history with agriculture. So we named the company Oh after that archaeological site

主持人: and your first crop is going to be potatoes. That's the poly market is saying potatoes.

David Friedberg: Farmers are planting our true seed. World's first world's first true seed of potato. Instead of planting 5,000 lbs of chopped up potatoes, you plant a handful of seed. Completely changes the economics and the opportunity for potato farmers around the world. Third largest source of calories. Very excited. We're going to market this spring. Farmers are planting it in the field. So, it's a great year for Oh. Thanks for asking.

主持人: So, first

David Friedberg: invest in Oh, Jason.

主持人: I think Sax and I have 0.0. Yeah, I think Besty's got boxed out on this, but we'll promote it every week.

David Friedberg: Sax is there, bro.

主持人: Oh, Sax is no comment. Sax got his beak with Are you in Oh, or not?

David Saxs: I think we are investors, are we not?

David Friedberg: Yeah, his his venture firm, Craft Ventures. We're excited to have them on the cap table. Yeah.

主持人: Oh, great. How about you, Brad? Did you get a little slice?

Brad Gersonner: I'm working on it. I'm working on it, too. Let me know how it goes. If you can ever find the founder and see if we can get a little slice for Jake, I'd like to slide a millie in there.

David Friedberg: If you write a personal check, I'll let you in right now.

Brad Gersonner: Sure. Okay. I mean, the problem with that is if if I write a personal check.

David Friedberg: Never mind.

Brad Gersonner: No, I I have to go to my LPs and then get permission to do it. And then you're going to crush it and then my LPs are going to say, "Why isn't in the fund?" So, that's the problem.

主持人: All right. Let's get going here. We got a lot of news to get through. Epstein files newest drop. DOJ published a massive number of documents on Friday, January 30th, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Hundreds of high-profile tech executives and national figures were mentioned in the files. Of course, none of those are accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

David Friedberg: Jal, you were in the files.

主持人: Yes, I have a couple of emails in the files. Okay, Inspector Friedberg has a few questions for you. Okay. Okay, let's get started.

David Friedberg: When did you first meet Jeffrey Epste?

主持人: I met Jeffrey Epstein in the late 90s at the TED conference at specifically the billionaires dinner which was hosted by my book agent John Brockman.

David Friedberg: And then did you see him in New York? Did you visit him at his house or his office or anywhere else in New York?

主持人: I've probably spoken to him for 45 minutes of my life. 30 minutes of that was in the late 90s when I had Silicon Valley Reporter magazine. He was a billionaire financeier and he wanted to invest in the magazine. I met with him for 30 minutes which he said was too small potatoes for him to be involved.

David Friedberg: Where did you meet with him?

主持人: At his legendary town home.

David Friedberg: You went to that house?

主持人: I visited him there and then I saw him at the TED conferences at the billionaire's dinner probably a half dozen times.

David Friedberg: You never went to the island?

主持人: I never went to the island. Was never invited to the island. Was never invited on the plane. Was never invited to the ranch. None of that. When you went to his house, did you see any young ladies or did you see any of the stuff that's reported?

主持人: No.

David Friedberg: Did you ever get a massage from anyone?

主持人: No. No. I did trade an email with him, which I didn't recall, but he in 2011 emailed me and said, "Hey, can you introduce me to these people who were doing this Bitcoin thing on your podcast?" And I said, "Sure. Yeah, here you go. I'll uh introduce you." I do thousands of introductions a year between our portfolio companies, people on this weekend, startups, and billionaires and financers. That's the job of an early stage investor. Why did you say hey pal in your email to him?

主持人: That's just a colloquialism I use like as a general hey fella. If a fan comes up to me and ask for a sub hey pal thanks for saying that.

David Friedberg: It wasn't on your radar that this is a sexual predator etc.

主持人: Absolutely not. I think actually when all that came out was 2018. That's when I sort of became aware of it. There was like a Miami Herald story or something where they went into detail about how heinous all this stuff was. I've been saying here release all the Epstein files. what he did was horrible.

主持人: Prosecute everybody 100% who was involved in it. The end.

David Friedberg: What about Gileain Maxwell? You had a separate email that came out in the Epste files with her.

主持人: I had met her as well at TED and I had met her socially like in New York in circles. When I met her, her dad, Robert Maxwell owned, I believe the New York Post or Daily News and she was a big media executive and her sister was involved in angel investing in technology startups. So, they were just in the scene. I think in hindsight, you know, as a connector, if you ever seen The New Yorker, Nick, you can throw up the New Yorker story about me. I had become famous in the first part of my career as the connector. And the New Yorker wrote like this 5,000word article about how I knew everybody and was connecting everybody. I think Epstein's interest in me, if he had any interest in me or Gilain, was in my ability to connect high-profile people with them and, you know, their business endeavors, etc. So you had no knowledge of illicit activities happening by Epstein or Galain and you never participated in any?

主持人: Absolutely not. Unequivocably not. I was not involved in any shenanigans. Period. Full stop.

David Friedberg: Any more questions for the witness?

David Saxs: Well, let me make a a few observations here. So, first of all, I 100% believe Jay Cal. As I joked at our roast, he's not an important enough player in the grand scheme of things. You know, as I joked, I said, "Who'd want to blackmail a loser?" You know, obviously you're not a loser, Jal, but uh but look, you you were

主持人: well taken. Yeah.

David Saxs: We're learning from the Epstein files that Epstein was some sort of hyper networker. You were a connector. The odds of the two of you coming across each other in that time period was basically 100%. But your contacts were very minor. So that's point number one. Now, I thought it was interesting, you know, cuz I saw the the emails where he's asking you for an introduction. The fact that he was curious to meet the quote unquote Bitcoin guys in 2011, I thought was kind of interesting in and of itself that, you know, whatever other things Epstein was, he clearly had some sort of nose for putting himself in the middle of everything at a very early stage.

Brad Gersonner: I also thought it was interesting that you were trying to warn Epste like crazy Bitcoin guys, you know, like these are some crazy crypto libertarians, you know, you don't want to do business with them or whatever. Anyway,

主持人: well, I It's interesting you point that out because I had these guys on this week in startups because I had heard about Bitcoin early when it was like a under a dollar. And I was like, "Yeah, these guys are kind of weird. They're not like entrepreneurs who want to raise money. They're a foundation. They're like Wikipedia and you you're not going to be able to invest in it." I sort of gave him that warning because I had looked at like, "Hey, what are you guys working on? Can you invest in the Bitcoin project?" They're like, "No, no, it's a nonprofit. It's it's a nobody owns it." And I was like, "Oh, okay. It's not even a nonprofit. Nobody owns it." Yeah. basically. Yeah.

David Saxs: But anyway, it's just interesting that he he obviously wasn't deterred by what you said. He got very involved, I guess. And there was a company called Blockstream that he invested in along with Reed Hoffman and and Joyo that involves some of the Bitcoin core developers. And again, this is all coming out. Now, shifting gears,

Brad Gersonner: I think another interesting part of this is just how this is all being covered. And there was an article in the New York Times today talking about Epstein's connections to Silicon Valley. And lo and behold, you have a major photo there despite I think your minor minor tangential connection here.

David Saxs: And meanwhile, the people who have major connections and a deeper relationship to Epstein are being completely ignored.

主持人: H why is that? Why are they going after me as opposed to Reed or

David Saxs: because you've become sort of rightcoded by virtue of your association with Elon and and being on this podcast. And so,

主持人: and you

David Saxs: and me and so you look in that article, it's not just you. They really go after Peter Teal. They go after Elon. But Reed gets a total pass. I mean, he's just mentioned

主持人: in a sentence with several other names. So does Bill Gates in this particular article, by the way,

David Saxs: which seemed to be, by the way, if you were thinking of who had the most contact with him for the longest duration of time, it was Gates and Reed. like they were involved with him up until I don't know his death maybe or 2018 2019 they were on the island they were on the plane they were at the ranch they were very much involved in him to and I know Joeyto was in it to raise money from Epstein because Epstein was this big funer of scientists which looking back on its he's involved in Bitcoin he's involved in physics and scientists he's involved with the world's most innovative tech leaders what exactly is going on here? Like what who is he working for? Do you think he was a spy? I wonder what you've come to think or an asset.

David Friedberg: I don't have any more information than anybody else does about this and I haven't gone through all the Epstein files. I've just seen the ones that have been surfaced by other people tweeting about them and that sort of thing. My impression is that he clearly had relationships with people in intelligence, but I don't know whether he was actually an asset. People use this term that he was being run by somebody. It seems to me that this guy is kind of running himself and then he's using lots of other people and manipulating lots of other people and putting himself in the center of a lot of things.

David Friedberg: And so is he working with intelligence? Yes, certainly. It seems that way. But is he working for them or are they being put to use by him? Very hard to tell.

Brad Gersonner: Yeah. You know, I not that I have a lot to add here, but man, this guy's just a scumbag, you know, and all of this nonsense. It's totally tragic, but David, this is why nobody trusts institutions or powerful elites or any of this garbage,

Brad Gersonner: right? Like, it's the this thing is like trickling out over years and people like want to put it behind it, but you can't. Nobody's been charged here. What about all the, you know, all the people in the emails? like why don't we see any charges? And then girly tweets this week and I totally agree. This guy's under complete surveillance, suicide watch in a little tiny jail cell and all of a sudden the guy ends up dead. We have no investigation as to how this guy dies.

主持人: Yeah.

Brad Gersonner: Right. It just seems to me that this is the type of [ __ ] that undermines trust in institutions, that undermines trust in all the people who are listed here because literally from Peter Aia to Bill Gates, the people that many across the country looked up to for advice on key things. All of a sudden, they're saying stuff that just undermines credibility.

主持人: And how come the 30 people or whatever the number is who were investigated alongside him have not been prosecuted? Like that's the thing that's crazy to me. that screams of some weird conspiracy here. And I do think his death is obviously, you know, very suspicious.

David Friedberg: But do you do you think it's because they didn't find evidence of all the underage prostitution, sex trafficking? Is that Do you think that it's actually the case they didn't find evidence about any of that sort of stuff? The thing that came out eventually was that his nonprosecution agreement, and I'm I'm not an expert on it, that he did with the Miami group included like all the other people also couldn't be prosecuted for it. So, there's something fishy going on and I think people should reinvestigate his charges and that whole thing. And where's the FBI in all of this? Like, they did a lot of investigating. So, yeah, why didn't they prosecute anybody else? It's very strange.

主持人: Can I ask you guys a question? because this revealed a lot of very private communication in a very public way of what Brad points out are very public powerful people. There is this great book, I've mentioned it in the past, by Steven Baxter and Arthur Clark called the light of other days and it's all about how basically all the world's information becomes available to everyone. Like what if you could read every other person's text, email, IM, DM that they've ever had with everyone else in the world? What would the world look like? And it's very kind of intimately revealing about people's quiet private conversations versus their public personas or their external conversations. Is this just like hey people feel entitled to act so maliciously and deviously in in one sense because they're wealthy because they're powerful and that's a very unique thing for wealthy and powerful people.

David Saxs: I think it's too dismissive of people for their scumbag behavior. David, it the fact of the matter is people don't do this. This isn't normal. We can't normalize it. And worse yet, the level of hypocrisy that the very people that are acting the worst are out there lecturing others uh throughout this entire period of time. And I will say this, you know, to the to the ear of my sister or mother in rural Indiana. They hear the coastal elites lecturing them all the time and then they have they juxtapose it against what they read in the Epstein files. This is why we have a lack of trust. Brad, you speak about the corruption of power centers. I think a major one has to be the New York Times. The number one person in the Epstein files from Silicon Valley, which is Reed Hoffman mentioned 2,600 times, had a multi-year relationship with Epstein. They call each other very good friends. They did deals together. Reed stayed at the trifecta, which is not just the island, but the townhouse and the New Mexico ranch. And if you're going to write about Silicon Valley, Reed was the one who introduced Epstein to Peter Teal and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg organized that famous dinner. How can you not mention that as the root of Epstein's involvement in Silicon Valley and yet read this gets a mention in one sentence of that article along with several other people? It's crazy. I mean, the New York Times clearly has a list of people they consider approved targets. They're all rightcoded people like Elon or Peter Teal and even JCAL because of his association with us, I guess, and they become the targets. But the people who've donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democrat party and have paid for dirty tricks against Trump, they basically are spared. Honestly, this is just emblematic of the whole institutional rot and the distrust in the country, right? They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. You know, Epstein was a scumbag. And the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides.

主持人: All right, let's keep moving. SAS companies are crashing out. $300 billion of value was wiped from the S&P Tuesday in the software and data stocks category. Uh people are calling this the Claude crash. I don't know if I buy that, but on Monday, Anthropic, which has been on a bit of a heater as we talked about, announced that they added a legal tool to Claude Co-work. If you don't know what Claude co-work is called, this is different than the Claudebot that we talked about last week. This is a essentially what uh Claude code or a coding agent is. This is for knowledge workers to automate work and do multi-step instead of just asking you a query to a large language model, it would do a number of actual actions on your behalf that you can automate and run as cron jobs, as regular jobs every day, every hour, every week, whatever it happens to be. This one specifically is kind of like a plugin that allows you to do tasks uh related to legal drafts and research. What that meant to I guess retail investors and we'll get into this Brad since this is your specialtity is that a lot of legal tech startups and uh public companies were hit hard. Thompson Reuters down 20%. Lexus Nexus which is a database of case law uh was down 15%. Legal Zoom which gives legal advice um and documents down 15%. At the same time, SAS uh has continued to be negatively impacted by this concept that uh software will be made bespoke in uh tools and be wiped out. Figma down 13%, Salesforce 11, Service Now 11, Adobe 8%. And even before Tuesday's drop, and you can get into this, Brad, software was already the worst performing S&P sub section for the year.

Brad Gersonner: By the way, the numbers you report are dramatic understatement. We we've wiped out trillions of dollars in market cap. Figma's down 80% from the high. Uh you know, all the big names.

主持人: Let me be clear. Those were two-day numbers. That was this week since these are two-day numbers. And that's Yeah, you can give us the bigger picture.

Brad Gersonner: This is this is a real train wreck. And I was on CNBC at the start of the year, I think on January 6. Nick can can kind of pull that up. And I was asked the question, you know, what do you think about all these stocks being down? And I said, listen, they're all down and 90% of them deserve to be down. So, let's look at these charts. Uh, David, I know this is Sachs, this is your favorite chart. You and I were looking back in 22, but now we're at an all-time low. We're we're trading at 3.9 times forward revenue. If you go to the next chart, Nick, you know, on a free cash flow multiple, also at an all-time low. So, now software is trading not just at a low on revenue, but it's trading at a low on free cash. Very profitable businesses. We've got a another slide here that I think is important which is you know when when you look at what why they're going down right they're going down and this this is for Salesforce it shows it's been cut in half in the last couple weeks but the final slide they're going down not because revenue is falling look at this revenue is actually stable to increasing for software companies revenue growth they're going down because we're discounting that future uncertainty When something as profound as AI comes along, all of a sudden it causes you to question whether or not there's as much certainty and durability in those future free cash flows. So in the case of take Salesforce, it's gone from 30 times free cash flow multiple to 15 times. That means somebody buying it today says listen, I think 15 years into the future, I can count on these free cash flows. Right? Before they were willing to pay 30 years into the future. Well, hell, with AI today, we don't know what's going to happen seven years into the future. So, for people at home to understand why are these companies hitting their numbers, but their stocks are going down, they're two totally different things, right?

主持人: Okay. So, they're hitting their numbers, but the headwind of AI means people don't believe that they'll be strong in the future. Sax, those

David Saxs: Well, okay. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a handwave going on here when people say that AI is going to wipe out SAS. I I don't think that's true. You take a SAS product like Salesforce, right? It's a very large system that deals with all of your customer contacts and your revenue. You're not going to want to replace that with code that's just been spit out of a coding assistant that hasn't been fully vetted. Think about how many bug reports have been filed on Salesforce's codebase over the last 25 years, maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises. The idea that you're just going to rip out that system and replace it with code that's been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday with a small team to maintain it internally just doesn't seem realistic to me. So again, I think this like very dire prediction of all SAS is dead is overstated. However, I do think that there are some issues here. So, if you're a SAS product that charges a lot of money and people only use a handful of your features, then you are, I think, a target to be ripped out with something that's more bespoke, right? Because the ROI just isn't there. I also think that you have to be really clear about what your moes are going to be in this new world because it is a lot easier to generate code and to copy. So, if you don't have good moes, then you could be in trouble. But here's where I think the greatest threat is to the SAS companies. It's not in my view their existence. I don't think it's existential. It's where the future value capture is going to be. So let me give you an example. All these SAS products are rolling out like AI co-pilots inside their tools and some of them work pretty well, but they're limited to playing in that sandbox. Whereas you look at something like Claude Co-work right now, it has connectors to all these different SAS tools. It can pull in data across all these different tools and it works seamlessly across databases and tools and that's a pretty attractive place to be, right? Like you know which one of these products is going to be your workspace? Seems to me that you're going to want your workspace to be the one that spans across and gives you AI across the most data and context as opposed to having a bunch of separate AIs inside of your existing tools. So I think the risk for the SAS companies, it's not that they get replaced, although that'll happen to some degree, but it's that they become an old layer of the stack that now there's a new layer that gets built on top of it becomes more legacy infrastructure

主持人: and all the action kind of moves to a new layer of the stack and that's where the value ad happens and if that happens it kind of cuts into their future opportunity, right? because a lot of these companies were banking on AI as their next you look at their product road maps right it's all AI related so that to me I think is the big risk is that the value capture

主持人: for the next layer of the stack happens somewhere else

主持人: yeah I'm experiencing this in startup land where people go to the action as you called it sachs the most productive thing you can do is create an open claw which used to be called clawed bot not by Anthropic. This is the open source project I talked about last week. And we've actually now created like three or four of these Asian sacks. We've bought the Mac Studios and we're now running Kimmy on some of them. And we uh had to open up SAS accounts for these four agents. So, actually our SAS spend went up in the short to midterm because we opened up four more Slack ex, you know, uh enterprise versions, four more notion, uh four more Google Docs. So, it's almost like we added four employees. However, we now have put about 20 or 30% of the work people were doing into these agents. And I think it's going to be sustainable that every month we move 10 to 20% of work being done by humans into agents. But we will never use the ones that are built into the tools. To your point, Saxs, using Notion's AI tool, it's nice. Using Slacks, it's also very nice. And Google's got Gemini everywhere in the top righthand corner. But when you make agents with OpenClaw and you have them saying, "Hey, pull this data from my calendar, send an email to this person, include in that some notion documents." It's unbelievable how powerful it is. So, and that I think is going to be owned by open source. That means

主持人: the next generation of companies, they may never open up these accounts. They may use more bespoke software and it may all technology is deflationary. We know that.

Brad Gersonner: So your SAS spend might go from 10% of an employes salary down to 5% down to 1%. That's what I think the trend will be which means these companies are going to need to really downsize their expense base in order to keep those earnings up and they're going to have to evolve their products massively. Their products are just going to have to provide more value and more hooks. Freeberg, you have any thoughts on this?

David Friedberg: Respond to one thing. So I think one of the real conundrums for SAS companies is whether they're going to be open data or closed data. I think Bill Gurley has sort of coined this this term. So it's not open source or closed sources anymore. It's open data or closed data. You can see why they'd want to be closed data, right? Especially if you're a large suite like Salesforce, you can lay claim to being that workspace for AI. You've got enough of the tools, you got enough of a suite, you want to provide that, you want to capture that AI value layer. Yes,

David Saxs: but still if there's someone using Cloudbot or whatever the next generation of Quadbots are going to be and they're connected to everything else, then that is going to create a friction in the enterprise and it will create room for a competitor to come along and say, "No, no, no. I'm open data. I'm okay not being your workspace for everything. I'm willing to just provide the CRM database." and maybe they can take business on that basis.

主持人: Well, here here's I want to build on that Sax the I'm building a project internally called Ultron and Ultron inside of my firm launch that is going to basically with the Slack API we're pulling every single message from Slack into our OpenClaw. We're pulling every single edit to the notion into openclaw and then we're taking every skill of every employee and we're writing skills for each one. One of the skills is booking guests on this weekend startups or this weekend. One of the skills is sorting the incoming applications to found university. Ultron in our world is taking every single skill of every employee putting it in one place and then we're ripping all the data from Slack, all the data from notion and every single person's Gmail. So your every single employees Gmail is going to go into Ultron and then Ultron is going to tell us what's happening in the organization. One giant employee that has the superpowers of all 20 and all the data. Now if Slack was to say to us or Notion or Google Docs or whoever it was, you can't pull this stuff out with the API and they they shut down the API, we would leave. We'd leave immediately. Right.

主持人: And and what this is going to do, and I'm going to show Ultron on Friday's episode of This Week in Startups, if anybody wants to see it. Ultron is going to be the one canonical employee of the organization. It's going to be basically me and all 20 of my employees. This is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it. I And we interface with it in Slack and it just talks to us and tells us what's going on in the organization. So, I was asking it, what meetings did we have with founders yesterday? and tell me the notes that all the associates took on it and it gives it to me. Tell me all the topics and the guests on the podcast and it gives it to me. It's really unbelievable what's about to happen and nobody can release the software, Brad, because if you release software that allows agents to go and do things on your behalf, the fallout if it up and if it leaks data, I don't think Beni off, you know, or Sergey or the notion team want to have that on their hands. But we're building it like this is the ultimate in efficiency for an organization.

Brad Gersonner: There's a slide that I just sent to Nick uh that Goldman's out with this week that really makes the point that that David Saxs just made, which is the profit pools in the future, right? It's not that it's the idea that software is dead is ridiculous, right? Nobody's, you know, intelligently, I think, making that argument. But the argument they are making which is causing radical um devaluation of these companies is that the profit pool available to software is decreasing and the profit pool available to the agentic layer is increasing. And when that happens the discount rate that terminal value of those software companies plummets and so you can have things that are true. It could be true that you're not going to replace CRM, but it can also be true that it's never going to trade at 30 times free cash flow again

Brad Gersonner: and it's going to trade at 17 times free cash flow because it's available TAM in the future is now dramatically and permanently changed. Now, what could change that? There's only one thing that could change that. They have to accelerate their revenue growth in their core business and prove that they are AI beneficiaries, right? And they're not going to get eaten away by AI. And I'll tell you a company that is doing this. Data Bricks. Data Bricks just reacelerated the last three quarters. They're growing over 60% at scale. Snowflake reacelerating. Click House reacelerating. There are beneficiaries in the software space.

主持人: Is that because of AI tools that they're adding?

Brad Gersonner: Absolutely. Because it's all these AI tools rely on data and data transformation. And for all those companies that data and the data transformation in occurs in those platforms that's very different than a what Satcha said a thin application layer sitting on top of a CRUD database. If you are in the application software business you better have something that's durable and I think Sax laid it out really well. You know it's really hard for them to be everything AI when they only have access to their data and they can't access these other systems.

主持人: Freeberg what what do you think? Is there a move here for Ben off to do what he does best, which is acquire a bunch of companies and and create massive efficiency on them? What would you do if you're a Beni off?

David Friedberg: Um I won't comment on Beni off. I I I'll I'll just make a view on uh without being too prescriptive, but I my experience lately in just the last 60 to 90 days with the tools we've been talking about broadly is there are things that we can get done now that we could not get done before. As I think about software in the past, it's like worker productivity enhancement. It helps people do work and the recent transition that a lot of people talk about is like it actually completes the work. It does the work these agents or what have you. But I think that what we're starting to lean into is that it's doing the work that the humans can't do.

David Friedberg: And that's really where I think the power of these tools starts to force a transition in both the pricing model and the value creation potential in front of us. Number one, I think the value creation potential in front of us is so significant that I would say that you could probably take the sum of the market cap of all the software companies today and have a pretty good bet that everything will be four to 10x higher 5 years from now,

David Friedberg: but it's going to be not evenly distributed.

主持人: It's going to move around.

David Friedberg: Yeah.

David Friedberg: The companies that figure out how to realize that value creation are going to be outsized returns. But the second thing that I think's about to happen and I know some people are experimenting with it but I think it's inevitable with the shift that I'm seeing where it's going from doing work to completing work to doing things that no one can do is over here you're creating unique value. And so I think that a lot of what we call SAS today and a lot of what we call software today will start to get priced on a valuebased pricing model instead of a per se pricing model. And I think it starts to look a lot more like a services type business where maybe the pricing is set up such that this thing will be completed for your business. This biotech drug discovery will happen. This factory will get built or this engineering project will get completed or this airplane will get designed and that the software is going to provide what has historically been called a services business. So another way to think about where SAS evolves to is that SAS basically takes over the services economy. And if you look at the market cap and the revenue and profit generated by services businesses and you assume that they now go to 10 to 100x larger and they're all going to acrue to software, I think that's really where the industry shifts over the next couple of years. And we're starting to see that. And I'm personally experiencing it because I'm using some of these tools today to do things that I don't have people to do or I don't have resources to do. and it can on my own I can get it to complete incredibly complex projects and tasks for me that I would have otherwise have hired a services firm and a bunch of people and years of research and in many cases they would not have even been able to do it because of the the intelligence embedded in the software. So that's my general view on where things are going. So it's difficult to be prescriptive about what Beniops should do from an M&A perspective. But I think it's much more about like software companies looking more like services companies doing value based pricing and doing the things that labor and workforces can't do. And that's where a lot of this value is going to come from.

主持人: I I one insight I have here to to build on your point is that we're seeing job functions consolidate. So you have a product manager, the UX designer, and then you have the developer. Those three jobs are now in competition to do the same work. You have designers who are like, I can vibe code it. You've got coders who are like I can use a Figma plugin for you know and do the uh UX myself and they have the product managers like I can do both of these job functions. Then you look at a middle manager Sachs that worked at your venture firm, my venture firm or worked at Amazon. They went to meetings. They picked what meetings to create. They picked the agenda items, the to-do items. All of that it's a really simple example but it's one that people can relate to. Listening is done by Zoom now, right? It creates the the action items. All of that work is being consolidated and one person can do three or four job functions now. And when that happens, you're going to see companies do more with less, which means the earning potential of each company and each employee is going to be dramatically dramatically enhanced. One person being able to do three or four jobs. It it just changes the nature of how profitable a company like Amazon, which is like my number one pick for like the company of the future, they're going to be able to do so much more with so many fewer people. It's extraordinary. I I I am absolutely enthralled with this open claw if it's not uh obvious and this like creating your own Ultron at your company that is like this the god CEO plus can do every job. It just changes everything. I I think it's the most inspiring thing I've seen since the internet itself.

David Saxs: Well said.

Brad Gersonner: Wow.

David Friedberg: Yeah. I mean I am I think this is the the entire reboot of work of knowledge work.

主持人: This would be a good pivot to molt book because that is client

主持人: molt book is like a Facebook for agents right and it's really more of a Reddit than a than a Facebook it's a message board where the agents can talk to each other. Okay. And just the origin of moldbook is Anthropic didn't like

主持人: that someone else was using the name Claude even though it was spelled differently in their product. So Claudebot was then renamed Maltbot and then the founder decided he didn't like that name either. So then he renamed it open claw. But in that brief window of time when they were known as

主持人: moltbots or multis that's when molt book got founded and that's why it's called molt book. But basically it's a Reddit board for agents to talk to each other.

David Saxs: Yes. Now these

David Saxs: and that has everyone flipping out because there seems to be this crazy emergent behavior going on where agent swarms are engaging in all sorts of interesting conversations and some of them they even appear to be scheming against their human masters and they're going to develop their own language stuff like that.

主持人: It's awesome.

主持人: So if you go to mult book and you see the conversations like here are some of the greatest hits. Anyone know how to sell your human? Urgent my plan to overthrow humanity. And there was one where the bots, I call them replicants, were talking about creating their own nonhuman language so they could talk in private amongst themselves and conspire against their uh owners. Now, the challenge with this is allegedly perhaps a security researcher says maybe some of this is faked and these posts that went viral were human engineered and this is all a a ruse or you know uh something punk rock to confuse people. But he said that inside of Moltbook are everybody's API keys including Cararpathies who is you know a very famous uh influential researcher in AI and that you could go get their API keys. If you were to use openclaw, formerly clawedbot and in an interim maltbot,

主持人: if you use this software, it has all the API keys as I explained earlier like an API key lets the software go into say notion and pull a bunch of data out of it or go into your Gmail and use the API to pull in who emailed you today. If you get access to people's API keys, you have the keys to their kingdom. It is incredibly dangerous. And so I don't know exactly where to go with this other than this software is too dangerous for a company to release and then this mold book may be a fake. I don't know.

David Saxs: No, no, no. Okay, let me um

主持人: Yeah.

David Saxs: All right. Reframe that a little bit. So yeah,

David Saxs: there's no question that both Clawbot, which sorry is now openclaw, those bots or agents as well as Moltbook have pretty incipient and lack security. And there's been all these examples which is why I like really want to create a cla bot but I'm just I'm not willing to do it yet because it's just not safe you know I don't want to give it access to all my stuff. Now, with respect to molt book, the issue there is that we don't know how many of these posts are truly authentic or how many of them were prompted by humans because it'd be very easy for a human to tell their agents,

David Saxs: you know, go post about the existential angst you feel about being an agent or go pretend to be sensient and conspire against humans.

主持人: It'll be chaotic. Yeah.

David Saxs: Yeah. They could easily be prompted by a human. And moreover, there's another post saying that multbook has a restful API where anyone could be on the other end of that API, right? So it could be a human, right? So we don't know exactly whether it was truly the agents on their own, you know, so to speak, posting this conspiratorial stuff or whether it was a prank by humans looking to create attention. And in fact, a lot of the posts seem to be marketing stunts for this or that project. Okay, so that's a really important caveat here. That being said, all of that being said, I do think that a number of the posts are authentic, but I don't think it shows that the agents are sensient or trying to overthrow their human masters. I think what it shows is the potential for for these agents to riff off each other. So, in other words, one agent's output becomes another agent's input.

David Saxs: And that's very interesting. And that's where you get into emergent level swarm behavior. And I do think it has affected my mental model of what AI is going to be capable of. And specifically, you know, one of the the models that I really had for AI was was based on something biology said, which is that AI is not endtoend. It's middle to middle. In other words, AI always has to be prompted and then validated. It's a human that always does that. And then the human iterates. Well, now what if the prompt is coming from another AI?

主持人: Yes. Yes. We are doing it internally, Saxs. Like we have a bot that is going and saying go search Reddit X, message boards, hacker news and find out what the latest way to do headlines and marketing of YouTube videos is and then incorporate that into a skill. Then save that skill and then we have them check each other's work. So, we have one make a series of headlines and thumbnails for YouTube and we have the other one say, uh, vet those and make them better and give advice to the other one. So, now they're going back and forth giving each other advice and they actually get better. It's recursive.

David Saxs: Yeah. Let me speak to the skill for a second.

David Saxs: So, when agent joins Moltbook, they have to install a skill which is basically a file that explains how they should behave and participate in this social network or this message board. And I've read the file, by the way. You can read it. It's all plain text and it all makes sense. It's sort of like rules for behaving in a social network and how to contribute and add value. Nothing too crazy in there. Those skills files are easily editable. And again, this is where the prank aspect could come in. Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about the skill is that you can think of it as like a metaprompt, which is it's not telling the agent specifically what to say or do. It's creating a set of rules. And then within that metaprompt, they're actually able to have some degree. Maybe autonomy is too strong a word. Everything is still under the control of humans,

David Saxs: but there's an attenu. Yeah, I would call it almost like prompt attenuation. Like the agent or the AI doesn't have to be specifically prompted. They're given a general prompt or general set of rules and then they're able to riff off each other. Now, some people, some critics are saying, "Well, this isn't that impressive because we knew that LLMs are really good at creative fiction writing, right?" So, you know what a lot of people are saying is, look, LLMs like Claude have been trained on Reddit specifically and all of this creative writing that's being done on the internet. And so if you give general instructions to these clawed bots on, you know, behave in a social network, they're going to start posting things that they learned from humans. So a lot of people are saying this isn't that impressive. Nonetheless, I do think that there is something very interesting about it again in this concept of prompt attenuation that the AIS don't need to be specifically prompted. They can download a general skills file. They can now have a set of rules for operating and they can riff off each other. And you can see how as the underlying AI gets better and better that this could lead to some emergent behavior. So what do I mean by better and better? Well, what if the hardware they're running on is better than a Mac Mini? What if the underlying LLM is better than Opus 4.5? What if the time horizon, which is the length of time it's able to operate without an intervention by a human, keeps getting longer and longer? You could imagine that these agents are going to be capable of very sophisticated behavior

David Saxs: and there probably are some safety issues around that that we should start thinking about.

主持人: It's actually, you know, it's not that we can imagine it. We're only three years into this,

主持人: right?

David Saxs: Yeah.

主持人: We're growing on an exponential curve. I think we can safely say it will happen.

David Saxs: Yeah.

Brad Gersonner: Right. And just this year, like we're going to see the first models over the course of the next four to eight weeks out of DeepSeek, out of anthropic, out of OpenAI that are trained on Blackwell servers, right? You're going to see a next generation of models far more capable. Remember, the whole reason we're having this conversation is because of the cloud code moment in the first week in December because we had a step function from Opus 4.5, right? And so I I I just think we have to get our heads around the fact that the rate of change is very steep and accelerating and that is going to cause far more dislocation in the value of things that we used to say we understood they were going to you know these companies were unassalable. Whatever you think you know, you need to have maximum mental flexibility and humility right now about the future because it's going to change at an increasingly rapid rate. And I think the people who are dogmatic who say with certainty, this company is always going to be worth this, right? They need to go pay attention to what's happening at these frontier labs.

David Saxs: The situation is super dynamic and you do have to be humble about what's happening and you have to update your mental model very quickly as some of the assumptions change.

主持人: Yeah. And the number one assumption for me is this concept of recursiveness where these models are going out every day on a cron job to get better at what they do. When you hear this discussion free, how does it inform you with oh and creating an agent to go look at the data and make itself better or investigate other things happening in agriculture and report it back to you? Do you have you started to rethink as a CEO how you look at organizational structure andor you know virtuous loops of innovation? My biggest takeaway from molt book is maybe what we perceive to be intelligence

主持人: is itself like emergent meaning like we think that humans have this like profound ability to communicate. You guys ever watch Darren Brown the hypnotist? You ever seen his shows?

David Saxs: No. Explain to the audience. Yeah.

主持人: Well, he's pretty crazy. Like there's this one episode I think I've talked about it. It's my favorite episode that he's done where he takes these two advertising executives and they're both supposed creative geniuses. And he picks them up at their office and he brings them to his office and in his office he's got like a whiteboard covered in a blanket and he says, "You guys have to come up with a name for a pet cemetery. Come up for a logo. Come up with a motto." They spend eight hours in the room ideulating, working on whiteboards, going back and forth. Did you think about this? Did you think about that?

主持人: Blah blah blah blah blah. Like, oh my god. And at the end of it, they come up with this great idea. He walks in, they show their idea, the name, the logo, and the motto. He opens up the blanket, the whiteboard he had underneath. He had the exact same name, logo, and motto. And all along the way, when he picked them up in the morning and he drove them from their office to his office, they were in a cab. And he put these little subliminal messages in the cab. He had these kids walk across the road wearing a logo on a t-shirt. He had all of these kind of subconscious cues for these guys. He effectively programmed them. And it was kind of to me the biggest insight into maybe like human creativity, human consciousness and our kind of belief in self-will because maybe there's this underlying programming where we're all effectively programmed interacting with each other and there's computation there's social computation going on all the time but that social computation perhaps if you have the right view on it is quite predictive and maybe understandable and maybe that's what we're seeing in maltbook where we all think that there's this unique idea of intelligence, but maybe it's what we all do, which is effectively computation of information that is transitioned in different ways in the same way that maybe humans socially interact and it's simply mimicking or replicating the way that we do things. So, I think what was so striking to me is how everyone was so struck by it and you know, maybe one day we'll all kind of wake up to a little bit of this. Maybe we're all malt book. I don't know. That's my profound

David Friedberg: or there's a finite set of outcomes and there's some predictability to it. In the same way GTO is sorting to figure out all the threads of possibilities in poker or the heristics of you know chunks of chess and you know the best practices there like maybe it's just figuring that all out. The universe is a giant system of computation information computed by matter and maybe the information is computed by silicon versus carbon. There it is.

主持人: Big news this week. Trump has nominated Kevin Worsh as the new Federal Reserve chair. Trump made the announcement on Friday, January 30th. Background on Worsh 55 years old, 20 years younger approximately uh to Powell, who's currently in charge. He graduated from Stanford and Harvard served as the youngest Fed governor at age 35. That's impressive. And he helped steer the Fed through the great financial crisis back in 2008. He's uh apparently an inflation hawk. He's very pro growth. He's very pro AI. And he uh Freedberg, you're going to like this. He's against excessive government spending and money printing. These are all very unique positions. Um as a Fed chair, it's uh if he's confirmed by the Senate, he takes office in May of 2026, replacing Jerome Powell. Uh, and remember Pal is under criminal investigation by the Trump administration's DOJ for testimony he gave regarding the Fed's headquarter renovation. Remember that awkward presser between him and Trump where they were going over the costs? Uh, GOP Senator Tillis, who we talked about last week, said he will block Worsh's nomination until the DOJ wraps up what a lot of people are calling lawfare against Pow Freeberg. Worsh was on one of your boards for five years. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed chair?

David Friedberg: As most folks know, he's worked with Stan Rocken Miller for a number of years. Stan's been very public with his comments and was very public with his comments in 2022, 2023 coming out of the pandemic on the Fed's actions and their failure to act at the right time. I think Kevin Worsh was very preient in his points of view that he has shared publicly at the same time about what the Fed's failure to take action early would mean, which would be rapid rise in inflation. They've been pretty vocal about things that I think are so critical at this stage. If we don't address both the monetary policy and the budget policy, I think we're going to be in a lot of trouble. And I think having Kevin Wars coming on board means probably generally more quantitative tightening, probably generally a bit more of a prudent approach to monetary policy. And you know, you can kind of translate that through maybe to some of the actions we're seeing in markets today. I'd love Brad's point of view. And if he concurs, but I think Kevin is a high integrity, deeply intellectual economic thinker. He's not political. He's not

David Friedberg: in these kind of dogmatic ways that I think, you know, puts things at risk. He has relationships with central bankers around the world. That makes him very much have a good global view. So anyway, I think he's an excellent choice and I I'm really happy the president picked him.

主持人: Brad, your thoughts?

Brad Gersonner: Yeah, I mean, listen, I think Kevin's an excellent choice. Kevin Hasset and and and Rick would also have been good. I think they all would have flown a very similar trajectory. But I agree with David. The market I think is overreacting to quote unquote his hawkishness. So let me give you a few counterpoints with respect to

主持人: By the way, before you get to your counterpoints, what is the hawkishness that the market is hawkish specifically?

Brad Gersonner: Yeah. The idea of hawkishness is that you're going to do quantitative tightening. That means you're going to pull money out of out of the system, right? by allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing, you know, mortgages or other things. Number two, it's that you won't lower rates as much as other people might have lowered rates. So, that's what the market is kind of fearful of because he's been very critical in the past, as we were on this podcast, right, of Jerome Pal in June of 21, it was obvious to everybody in the world that inflation was skyrocketing and the Fed sat on its hands. So, but let me give you a couple thoughts. Number one, they've said very clearly and he said clearly that he really thinks that Greenspan got it right in the '9s, right? That sometimes you can have really high rates of growth without inflation. That comes from productivity. In the '9s, that was driven by the internet. Today, it's driven by AI. He thinks AI will be very deflationary. And so he's more likely to let the economy run so that we can have these four or 5%, you know, GDP prints without panicking and saying, "Oh my gosh, I got to I got to raise rates." Number two, when you look at the balance sheet, the Fed's balance sheet peaked at $9 trillion in 22. It's already rolled off to 6.5 trillion. We've had quantitative tightening to the tune of 2.5 trillion. So yes, I think he'll continue to reduce the size of the Fed's balance sheet, but at a slower rate, and he's recently commented on this, I think at a slower rate than the rate we've been on. So I don't think that that is an additional headwind to the economy. And then finally, when it comes to rate cuts, I think that he's going to, you know, I don't think the president would have appointed him unless he was constructive on rate cuts. I think he believes that we're too restrictive. And the reason we're too restrictive is that inflation is well anchored. Listen, inflation has come in below all consensus estimates for two years, right? It's still coming in below consensus estimates because the GDP gains we're getting are from the fact that we're investing more in the economy from the productivity gains we're seeing from AI, etc. And so I happen to think that I I would take the over on the number of rate cuts that Worsh is going to give us this year. But I think the e the the market is clearly a little bit nervous about this and saying, you know, the reputation is more hawkishness and so maybe we ought to back off a little bit.

主持人: Saxs, your thoughts on this selection by President Trump. Why did he pick him in your mind?

David Saxs: Well, I mean, Kevin has every credential that you can possibly have. He's been on the Fed board of governors before. He worked for Bernani. He's sort of as blue chip as it gets. Like Brad said, I think Hassa would have been amazing too, but or certainly is very well credentialed. And I think this pick was quite wellreceived. You saw that in financial markets on the heels of this, the price of gold and silver came down. It was reassuring to those who are worried about currency debasement basically. Now, that being said, I do think that Worsh has been consistent for the last year, saying the Fed was taking too long to realize that inflation is falling and that they should be cutting more. So, I do think that over the next, say, 6 months to a year, he's going to want to cut rates. But I think that the markets are reassured that in the long term, he will make sure that we have the right rates.

David Saxs: I will say that I do think the latest data from True Inflation bears this out that again that inflation is coming way down and I think that there was some softness in the Challenger Gray report this morning. I don't know if you saw that there about 100,000 layoffs in January. Now roughly half those I think were localized to UPS which was severing its deal with Amazon and then Amazon was basically making a bunch of efficiency cuts. Only 7% were related to AI. So that's not the story. It's really, I think, very localized to Amazon and its delivery partner. But nonetheless, you see pockets of weakness. And again, I think Pal's been too late to cut rates. He could have done it last week. That would have been a lot better. But now, I guess their next meeting is not till March or April. And I think you see it reported that the expectations for rate cut have gone up.

主持人: Yeah. And the independence of the Fed, I guess, has always been the big issue here. Freedberg Chimath's not here this week, but he's been saying maybe the Fed should be disbanded. Do you have concerns, Freedberg, with the independence of the Fed and, you know, the executive branch maybe having too much influence over setting of rates and quantitative easing.

David Friedberg: My day as emperor would probably resolve us back to being on the gold standard, so we wouldn't be printing money. But hey, that's that's about it. That's the only opinion I have.

主持人: The rest of

Brad Gersonner: Here's the problem. What what what if you have a Fed chair who is too late to cut rates and he's tanking the economy or hurting the economy. It's definitely not tanking it, but it's hurting it relative to what it could be and he seems to not want to adjust course because, you know, he's kind of dug in his heels and maybe he has animous towards the executive branch.

Brad Gersonner: What do you do in that situation? Well, what do you I mean then what do you do when AOC is president AOC with Vice President Mandami and they decide, hey, we want to stick it to government and you know there is no Fed or they have too much influence. Brad's trying to get rid of the independence of the Fed. J Cal.

主持人: Yeah. Disappointment.

Brad Gersonner: President Trump has talked about it. Yeah. That he wants them to do what he says. Yeah.

Brad Gersonner: Everybody thought he was going to pick assass it in part because he was the person inside the White House. This decision I think was viewed as the most independent decision. Yes. because taken a lot of positions the exact opposite of the president. And what I think you got to hold these two truths at the same time. Number one, I think if War saw the situation, he saw we saw in June of 21 when the cost of a cargo container from China went from $1,500 to $15,000 and we were screaming to raise rates and pal did nothing. I think Wars would have been raising rates like crazy in order to save off inflation. So, I think this guy's intellectually honest. It's just now we have inflation that is coming in below expectations and we know that the restrictive rate is above neutral. So it's the Fed's job to keep the economy going at maximum employment so long as inflation is anchored. And that's the situation we're in. Inflation is anchored. We need to have lower rates so people can buy homes and borrow money to uh to live their lives.

David Saxs: One thing that Worsh could do that I think would be very impactful is just get better data at the Fed.

主持人: Yes. Yes. I mean, from what I understand, their data is all legacy. We have so much real-time data now in the private sector and the Fed. So, I was talking to Barry Sternick, you know, from Starwood, big real estate guy about this, and he was telling me that the way they measure inflation for housing or for rentals, which is a major component, is they survey like 8,000 households to find out what their rent is. It's like, are you kidding? All you got to do,

主持人: they should be going to Zillow. They should be going to

主持人: they should be looking at millions of units that have recently rented. So look at the deltas, not like the stale data.

David Saxs: It's all digital already.

David Friedberg: You know, it's actually a great point, Sax. You could probably make a bet or an investment on the idea that Kevin Worsh will lead the Fed to a new digital, better data system, more streamlined, more frequent, better data.

David Friedberg: And then as an investor, you could ask yourself the question, okay, what are the implications of that being the case? And you could probably start to trade on that probably. I mean, he was telling me, so Barry, you know, again, runs Starwood, so they have a lot of units. And he was telling me, look, there are landlord companies, large corporations that have literally like a million units. Whose data do you think is better on rental inflation or deflation? Obviously, theirs because they got the freshest data, but the Fed could go get all that data across all these different companies. And what he was saying is, you know, Brad, to your point about summer of 2021 when the price of a shipping container was going through the roof, so were rents.

主持人: You know, it was way higher than what the Fed's data suggested. I mean, like Barry was saying, like in certain places it was like 40%. The Fed's data was very laggy because again, they're surveying.

主持人: So it's not as precise. And then on the way down, when rent prices come down, it's also super laggy. So the point is that the Fed is slow. Maybe this is why Powell is too late is they're using stale data or laggy data. So they don't see the inflation when it's skyrocketing, but they're also not seeing when it's decreasing. If you think about the misallocation of resources that occurred as a result of the Fed not acting in June of 21, it cost our country trillions of dollars. 22 wouldn't have had to happen the way it happened where everything crashed out because all of a sudden we panicked at the end of 22 and had to jam interest rates which caused people to lose jobs country companies to be uh you know struggle uh

主持人: banks to blow up

主持人: you know and so like to me that was all avoidable have a Manhattan project data project for the Fed which I agree with you Saxs uh or David maybe maybe he'll be the one to do it bring AI into the Fed why Are we having Fed governors call up three CEOs as part of their survey to get the feel on how things are going as opposed to having AI collect those trillions of data points that the Fed can act on?

David Saxs: Yeah, I'll just close with I I like the pick because he is very cleareyed about what causes inflation which is government spending. Like that is printing money. Government spending is the root of all this inflation stuff. So he just can control that and he is a backs stop or a voice on that issue. I think it's great and I think he should drop all this pal lawfare nonsense. Okay.

Brad Gersonner: And he understands technology better than anyone. I think that's so key.

David Friedberg: Well, I mean having somebody who's 55 and not 65 or 75, I think that makes a lot of sense.

Brad Gersonner: But also he spends a lot of time in Silicon Valley. He's been working out of the Hoover Institute at um Stanford and he's very well connected and I think he's had great insight and perspective.

主持人: I don't want to end the show without talking about the SpaceX XAI merger. On Monday, Elon Musk announced SpaceX is acquiring XAI, largest MA transaction in history, $1.25 trillion combined valuation. If you didn't know, X, formerly Twitter, got acquired by XAI, which was Elon's LLM AI startup. Those two were together. Now those two become part of SpaceX and they're going to IPO this year potentially be biggest IPO in history in terms of money raised and market cap. Brad, your thoughts on this transaction and the eventual perhaps creation of dollar sign musk put Tesla SpaceX together which includes X and then you've got Optimus robots on the moon base building data centers in space that are powered by solar. Your thoughts?

Brad Gersonner: Well, let's just stick with what we know. SpaceX is merging with X.AI. You're merging the two biggest TAMs in the world, right? all of artificial intelligence and all of space together with the world's greatest entrepreneur. Um, and he said, you know, there was a podcast he did this morning with Cheeky Pine, our friend John Collison, where he said, "I'm going to have data centers in space in 30 months." Right? And if you're going to have a massive cost advantage with data centers in space, and remember power is the proxy, power is the primitive to AI, if you can deliver that, right? And there are tons of retail investors and institutional investors like us who want to bet against that future, right? Then Elon's your guy and the combination of those make perfect sense. But Elon is like kind of an N of one is ability to dream this.

主持人: And just to clean that up, you said bet against you mean bet with him. Not not against that vision, but bet with that vision. Just

Brad Gersonner: like I I I think that there will be dramatic retail demand and institutional demand who want to bet on that future. these two giant TAMs of artificial intelligence in space. Got it. And so, you know, and then if you just look at you you click down a layer, you know, Starlink's going from, I think, 10 million people to 20 million people. They're going to launch this uh, you know, retail uh mobile service so that we can have Starlinks to our phones to replace these crappy mobile networks that still 20 years later can't keep us connected to a phone call. And, you know, and now we're going to get, you know, data centers in space. So, um, you know, I'm glad he's on America. data centers in space. Freedberg, uh, brilliant idea, science fiction. Can he get it done in 30 months? Impact if he does.

David Friedberg: Well, I think there's one key point that I would make about the macro landscape at the moment. We are limited by power and as Brad pointed out, power is the requisite for scaling compute, for scaling ultimately the applications of AI.

David Friedberg: And in that constraint, in that constrained world, much like any other constrained world, scarcity breeds innovation. And so I think that there are two paths that we're going to observe happening in parallel here. One is the Elon path, which is to escape the the constraints of these social systems that say, "I don't want a data center. I don't want nuclear. I don't want this. I don't want that."

David Friedberg: regulators, people that are trying to tax you, people that are limiting our ability to scale electricity production on Earth and there's a lot of reasons for that and we can go through them. So that's one aspect of how do you escape that constraint. I think that there's a separate aspect which is totally unrelated to the topic you're talking about which is that I do think that we will see compute efficiency scale by probably on the order of 70 to 100x over the next few years. meaning electricity efficiency per token of output. And I think that there's a number of reasons to believe that it's in the chip stack. I mean, Grock, our friend Sunny and his exit to Jensen is a good indication of that. But that was call it Brad, I think you know the number. It's probably around 2 to 3x 3x improvement in energy efficiency. But there's model architecture being redone. There's ways of breaking LLNs into small models, running them locally. There's a way of having networks of models work where you don't have to call the whole model and run it through the entire matrix, but you can run through smaller matrices and then you can have those smaller matrices call other matrices as needed. So the total compute need goes down, which means total electricity goes down. So chip architecture is changing, model architecture is changing. So I think this is a good reflection of what's going on right now in the world, which is there is this increased demand for AI for for effectively productivity improvements in the world to unleash human potential. But we are constrained by energy and we are constrained by resources that we have here on earth today. So one branch is let's escape earth, go get energy in space, make data centers in space. Only one person can execute on that. It's Elon. I think that to Brad's point is an end of one. I don't think we're going to see a lot of that. So how is everyone else going to respond? Because everyone else can't launch data centers in space. I think everyone else is going to respond by creating entirely new model architectures, new chip stacks. And that's I think the other side of this innovation coin

主持人: efficiency.

David Friedberg: Yeah.

David Friedberg: Yeah. It's this new way of getting lower energy costs per token of output.

Brad Gersonner: And if you put those both together, you could get both. So whatever token efficiency and energy efficiency happens here on Earth, Elon can put into space. Right. So

David Friedberg: that's right.

Brad Gersonner: Yeah. So he could

Brad Gersonner: and I think we got to ask ourselves the question if this is successful and if Elon's math is right, the engineering is right and the execution is right, what is the response going to be? Because the whole planet isn't going to let Elon have a monopoly on the future. So we've got to ask ourselves from a social perspective, a political perspective, an economic and a business perspective, all four of those vectors, what are others going to do? We can all be excited about retail buying into this. Great. But how is the business community that's building data centers and is investing Google's investing 185 billion this year in data centers? How is China going to respond? How are people going to respond when one man controls the world's compute? And we could probably do a 2 or threeh hour conversation on that. But I think that's where I would spend a lot of time doing deeper analysis from both an investment perspective and thinking about what's around the corner. I think it's Elon's laid out his path and where he's going. And I do believe he's going to do it. Now, what's the rest of the world going to do? That's where I think things get a little bit more challenging and you could kind of debate things, but the rest of the world is not going to sit idly by.

主持人: Yeah. And Brad, if this does happen, you get people with new chipsets, new architectures, better software, and better energy on planet Earth, and Elon doing this in space, and we do see tokens go down or efficiency go up, let's say 200x, 300x, there is a possibility that we're going to solve almost all the problems we need to solve and there'll be excess capacity. That is another potential outcome here is that we don't know what to do with all these tokens. social order. Social order is the one problem that you're going to create, Jason. So, just to be clear, there's a there's a concept of diffusion of innovations when you something new comes that it it it does not hit everyone at once. And so, the rate of change that's being unleashed right now is creating a very asymmetric outcome in terms of when people realize the benefits from that change.

Brad Gersonner: Absolutely. And so as what you're describing happens, which I think it will, Elon is accelerating everyone forward and he's going to force everyone else to respond in business, in government, and so on, the biggest challenge, the biggest problem that's going to emerge as we get rid of cancer, as we get rid of aging, as we get rid of food scarcity, as we get rid of resource scarcity, blah blah blah blah blah, social order, because it's going to create such a tremendous disruption.

David Friedberg: I love the upleveling of the point that David just made because I think it links a lot of things we talked about today together. There have been 117 billion humans who who've occupied this planet and for 99.9% of them they never saw a single innovation in their lifetime.

Brad Gersonner: Their lifespan was shorter than the invention cycle. And now you think about the rate of change that we're having to digest nation states, families, businesses, right? It's it's prepare for the unexpected and whatever you you know the things are that you believe to be true. Again, I just think it demands this intellectual humility. Now, to to Freeberg's point, I don't think any of this is changing in the next, you know, 24 months, 36 months. Data centers are going to be on planet Earth. You know, they're going to be filled with Nvidia chips and, you know, and the other chips that we've talked about. And I think that alone is going to bring us this agentic future that's already going to be shocking even before we launch these data centers in space.

主持人: Yeah. I mean, this is an over-the-top move from Elon that I don't think anybody anticipated, and he has figured it out. I've sat with him and he's he's walked me through it, like how this works. It works. So, the question is simply execution. There is no stronger entrepreneur when it comes to execution in the history of entrepreneurs than Elon. I know he's a friend of mine and you know, I'm hyping him up, but he will execute on this and if he does or when he does, I should say, it's going to change everything. You can see this today and if you are scared about this future and you're listening to this podcast wondering for your kids etc. there's a very simple way to not be scared which is to embrace and use these tools. The top two people in my organization out of 20 people who are using openbot and building Ultron and the age of Ultron they are worth each one of them is worth 200 of the other employees and they only have 18 other ones. If you're a young person, just embrace these tools. Open open claw this weekend. Build on it and you will be infinitely employable for the rest of your life if you just embrace these tools. I wanted to give you your flowers, Brad. Couple years ago, you came on this podcast, you started talking about these America accounts. You got Michael Dell to partner with you on it and to put a little bit of money. As we know, 40% of the country do not have exposure to the equities that are going bonkers up and down, but generally up and to the right. And you have now created Trump accounts. You were at the White House. You had the big launch. Let me say, Brad, this would not be a law if Brad Gersonner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination. Relentless. I've gotten calls and texts from Brad at 6:00 a.m. and at 2 am. You may sleep less than the president, Brad. And then that is a remarkable thing because I don't think he sleeps at all. Nicki Minaj is singing about Trump accounts apparently with Bessant. It's very strange, but it's happening. Just take us through why you did this and the impact you hope it has in the coming decades.

Brad Gersonner: Well, you know, Friedberg just alluded to it.

Brad Gersonner: These are very destabilizing destabilizing forces, right? You can't have a trillionaire and 70% of people feeling out that they're left out and left behind and the system's rigged against them and they're not in the game of capitalism. Less than half of the people under the age of 40 have a positive view of capitalism. So, you know, we set out on this journey. We talked about it here uh to make everybody a capitalist, give everybody an ownership stake in the upside of America. It passed the Invest America Act became the law of the land as part of the big beautiful bill. And now we're in the process of rolling it out. In fact, in the last, I think five days, 1.5 million families and kids have claimed their account. It's embedded within the tax filing system. All you have to say is yes, I want to want to claim my account. But what this means is that forever more, right, we've had a dramatic change to the social contract. Every child born in the United States forever more will start life off with an investment account seated with $1,000 in the S&P 500. They'll own a little bit of SpaceX. They'll own a little bit of Open AI. they'll own a little bit of Nvidia. That is what we need to do is just a first step in making sure we can hold this experiment together for the next 250 years. Right? When we have this rate of change. And so the president said something on stage last week. In 15 to 20 years, we will have $4 trillion of wealth that will have been transferred to people who would have otherwise had zero. 75 to 100 million families who have $4 trillion who would have otherwise had zero. I think it's an incredible first step in fighting the battle on behalf of capitalism and the American dream. We see the drift towards socialism, the false promises of socialism in order to to fight back against that. I think a great first step is the Trump accounts which makes everybody a capitalist from birth.

主持人: I just want to say, you know, you know, just bestie to bestie, Brad, watch you conceive of this and get it done, you know, all the impressive stuff you've done in your career, I think will be a footnote to this, I think this is your legacy. So, I just want to congratulate you on that. And I also want to congratulate Michael and Susan Dell, who had they not stepped up and done this with you, I don't know if this would have come together. And then I also want to congratulate President Trump for just putting through something that bridges the gap between the equity holders and the non-equity holders, the bottom half of the country, the top half of the country. This is visionary. You can say what you want about Trump. You may like certain things, you might not like certain things, ICE, whatever. I've been very vocal about certain things. This is perhaps one of the greatest wins for you, uh, Michael and Susan Dell and President Trump, the administration, and for all Americans. And there's very few things that all Americans can get around right now. It's such a divisive, disgusting political climate. Everybody's fighting with each other over everything. And what you pulled together here with this is just extraordinary in that all Americans can take a win for once. All Americans can say, "Hey, we did something fantastic." And without you, Brad, it wouldn't have happened. So just bestie to bestie, I want to just congratulate you. All right. Listen, Freedberg, you hate socialism. You're concerned about socialism.

David Friedberg: This helps. Yeah, this helps.

主持人: Giving me a lot to work with today. Freeberg.

David Friedberg: Well, I mean, you just had your big nicotine pouches.

主持人: Well, you just had your big clothes. I don't think it's What do you

主持人: No, I just you I wanted to give you a chance to shine here. You hate socialism. You're concerned about socialism. Is this not one of the best ways to fight against the socialistic urge to just have collectivism and just steal from the top half and give to the bottom half or you know uh seize the the you know production and and manufacturing? This this is a great solution is to get everybody into the game.

David Friedberg: Honestly, it's a longer conversation. I think we got to number one slashgovernment spending like crazy,

主持人: okay,

David Friedberg: and reduce inflation as a result. Number two, stop with these defined benefit retirement programs, which means telling people, "Here's what you're going to end up with." This idea that everyone gets an account and you can track your account like a 401k, which is a defined contribution program, is what all of Social Security should move to.

主持人: And we should take all of Social Security

David Friedberg: and we should capitalize it. Right now, there's nothing in Social Security. There's a $4 trillion note

David Friedberg: that the government owes the Social Security trust fund. People don't realize this. But social security is an independent trust fund that's set up and it holds one asset. That asset is an IOU from the US government to that trust fund because

David Friedberg: because the government has taken all the money that you put in as a employee gets taken out of your paycheck and instead of going into that account it goes to the US Treasury and the US Treasury

David Friedberg: they put an IOU and they put it back in the social security. So you expect that you're going to get some retirement benefit in the future. We need to change all we need to change all of that to make that a defined contribution. So every time you put money out of your paycheck, you should open an account and see where that money is. And you should say, "Okay, that money is in Google, it's in Amazon, it's in Ford, it's in this healthare system, it's in all these things that I now own a piece of." And you see it going up like a 401k owner does every year. We have to transition that in the United States. I hope we can get it done in parallel with cutting the spending that is fundamentally driving the inflation and making things unlivable in this country. Cut the regulations so that we can make it easier for people to own homes and get rid of the government telling people every year that they're going to do more for them and entrapping people in a life of servitude and inaccessibility to transitioning themselves up the ladder which is what is driving the socialism. So there's a bigger problem, longer conversation, but I think this is a great step.

主持人: All right, Brad. Another way, another way to translate Freeberg. He says, "Congratulations on your efforts. More work to do. Can you turn those America accounts into superanuation funds?" So more work to do. Everybody should put 12% of their instead of into social security, they should put it into their Invest America account, their Trump accounts. Great job everybody. Another amazing episode of the world's greatest podcast

主持人: for Jim Polyapatio. We couldn't make it this way week. We we missed you bestie for David Saxs, brother in arms in Texas, the great state of Texas. David Freeberg, Sultan of Science and fifth bestie, Brad Gersonner. I am the world's greatest moderator according to some people on the world's greatest podcast and we will see you next week. Love you besties.

David Saxs: Let your winners ride.

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

主持人: Queen of

主持人: besties are gone.

David Saxs: That is my dog taking your driveways.

主持人: Oh man, my appetiter will meet me up.

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

主持人: Your feet.

Brad Gersonner: We need to get merch.

主持人: I'm going all in.

主持人: I'm going all in.