Transcript of Epstein Files, Is SaaS Dead?, Moltbook Panic, SpaceX xAI Merger, Trump's Fed Pick

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. Shabbat is traveling and couldn't make it this week. Our favorite fifth bestie in the world, the one, the only, Brad Gerstner from Altimeter. Here to take a victory lap for your Trump accounts. Congratulations, brother.

Just getting started. Started here, actually. Look forward to your dog.

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 Sacks. How are you doing, brother? I'm loving it. How are you? You're loving it, aren't you? Freedom. I'm loving it.

Yeah.

So much freedom.

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

It's great. Yeah. You figured out your internet?

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

Yeah. You're fixed in one week. So yeah, I would have to say that you're trending in the right direction. And with us, of course, David Friedberg of O'Hallo. How are you doing, O'Hallo? Look at your little promo in your hat. You're promoing with the hat. How's O'Hallo doing? We haven't heard about it for a while.

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

I hear it's going great with the potatoes.

You got the merch.

I got merch? Yeah, you guys can go to boosted. Ohalo. Com and buy your gear today. Oh, Here's your quick science corner for the day. They found a village called the O'Hallo site. It was an archeological dig on the Sea of Galilee, 26,000 years old. In this archeological dig, they found these little clay pots filled with seed. It predated all of our understanding of agriculture and plant breeding and seed storage. It really reinvented our understanding of human history with agriculture. We named the company O'Hallo after that archeological site.

Your first crop is going to be potatoes. That's the polymark It is saying potatoes.

Farmers are planting our true seed, world's first true seed of potato. Instead of planting 5,000 pounds 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. It's a great year for O'Halla. Thanks for asking.

First- How much do you have invested in O'Halla, Jason?

I think Sacks and I have $0. 0 Yeah. I think Bestie's got boxed out on this, but we'll promote it every week.

Sacks is there, bro. Oh, Sacks is no comment?

Sacks got his bequet? Are you in O'Halla or not?

I think we are investors, aren't we?

Yeah. His venture firm, Kraft Ventures, we're excited to have them on the cap table. Yeah.

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

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 million there.

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

Sure. Okay. The problem with that is if I write a personal check, I have to go to my LPs and then get permission to do it, and then you're going to crush it. Then my LPs are going to say, Why isn't it in the fund? So that's the problem. Okay. 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.

J. Cal, you were in the files.

Yes. I have a couple of emails in the files.

Inspector Friedberg has a few questions for you. Okay, let's get started. When did you first meet Jeffrey Epstein?

I met Jeffrey Epstein in the late '90s at the TED conference at, specifically, the Billionaire's Dinner, which was hosted by my book agent, John Brockman.

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?

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 financier, and he wanted to invest in the magazine. I met with him for 30 minutes, which he said was two small potatoes for him to be involved.

Where did you meet with him?

At his legendary town home.

You went to that house?

I visited there. And then I saw him at the Ted conferences at the Billionaire's dinner, probably a half dozen times.

You never went to the island?

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 reported about? No. Did you ever get a massage from anyone?

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 I introduce you. I do thousands of introductions a year between our portfolio companies, people on this week in startups, and billionaires and financiers. That's the job of an early-stage investor.

Why did you say, Hey, pal, in your email to him?

That's just a colloquiallysme I use. But as a general, Hey, fella, if a fan comes up to me and ask for something, say, Hey, pal. Thanks for saying that.

It wasn't on your radar that this is a sexual predator, et cetera?

Absolutely not. I think actually when all that came out was 2018, that's when I They came aware of it. There was 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. Cosecute everybody 100% who was involved in it. The end.

What about Gillaine Maxwell? You had a separate email that came on the Epstein files with her.

Yes, I had met her as well at Ted, and I had met her socially 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, as a connector, if you've 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 this 5,000-word article about how I knew everybody, it was connecting everybody. I think Epstein's interest in me, if he had any interest in me, or Ghislaine's, was in my ability to connect high-profile people with them and their business endeavors, et cetera.

So you had no knowledge of illicit activities happening by Epstein or Ghislaine, and you never participated in any?

Absolutely not. Unequivocally not. I was not involved in any shenanigans. Period. Full stop.

Any more questions for the witness?

Well, let me make a few observations here. So first of all, I 100% believe J. Cal. As I joked at our roast, he's not an important enough player in the grand scheme of things. As I joked, I said, who'd want to blackmail a loser? Obviously, you're not a loser, J. Cal. But look, you were- The point is well taken. We're learning from the Epstein files that Epstein was some hyper-netwerker. 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 because I saw the emails where he's asking you for an introduction. The fact that he was curious to meet the Bitcoin guys in 2011, I thought was It's interesting in and of itself that whatever other things Epstein was, he clearly had some nose for putting himself in the middle of everything at a very early stage. I also thought it was interesting that you were trying to warn Epstein off these crazy Bitcoin guys. These are some crazy crypto libertarians. You don't want to do business with them or whatever.

Anyway.

Well, it's interesting you point that out because I had these guys on this week in Star Wars because I had heard about Bitcoin early when it was under a dollar. And I was like, Yeah, these guys are weird. They're not like entrepreneurs who want to raise money. They're a foundation. They're like Wikipedia, and you're not going to be able to invest in. And I gave them 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, it's a nonprofit. Nobody owns it. And I was like, Oh, okay. It's not even a nonprofit. Nobody owns it, basically.

But anyway, it's just interesting that 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 invested in along with Reid Hoffman and Joyito that involved some of the Bitcoin core developers. And again, this is all coming out. Now, shifting gears, 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. Exactly. And meanwhile, the people who have major connections and a deeper relationship to Epstein are being completely ignored.

Why is that? Why are they going after me as opposed to Reid or other folks?

Well, J. K. L, because you've become right-coded by virtue of your association with Elon and being on this podcast. And you. And me. And so you look in that article, it's not just you. They really go after Peter Thiel, they go after Elon. But Reid gets a total pass. I mean, he's just mentioned in a sentence with several other names. So does Bill Gates in this particular by the way.

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 Reid. 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. I know Joe Ito was in it to raise money from Epstein because Epstein was this big funder of scientists, which, looking back on its ax, 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? Who is he working for? Do you think he was a spy? I wonder what you've come to think or an asset?

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 thing. My impression is that he clearly had relationships with people in an 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 running himself, and then he's using lots of other people, manipulating lots of other people, and putting himself in the center of a lot of things. 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.

Yeah.

Not that I have a lot to add here, but man, this guy's just a scumbag. And all of this nonsense is totally tragic. But David, this is why nobody trusts institutions or powerful elites or any of this garbage. This thing is trickling out over years, and people want to put it behind it, but you can't. Nobody's been charged here. What about all the people in the emails? Why don't we see any charges? And then Gurley 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. It just seems to me that this is the type of shit that undermines trust in institutions, that undermines trust in all the people who are listed here, because literally from Peter Atia 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.

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

But do you think it's because they didn't find evidence of all the underage prostitution, sex trafficking? Do you think that it's actually the case that they didn't find evidence about any of that stuff?

The thing that came out eventually was that his non-prosecution agreement, and I'm not an expert on it, that he did with the Miami group included all the other people also couldn't be prosecuted for it. So there's something fishy going on. I think people should reinvestigate his charges and that whole thing. Where's the FBI in all of this? They did a lot of investigating. So, yeah, why didn't they prosecute anybody else? It's very strange.

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's this great book I've mentioned in the past by Stephen Baxter and Arthur Clarke called The Light of Other Days. It's all about how basically all the world's information becomes available to everyone. 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? It's very 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 one sense because they're wealthy, because they're powerful? And that's a very unique thing for wealthy and powerful people.

I think it's too dismissive of people for their scumbag behavior, David. 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 throughout this entire period of time. And I will say this, 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 Reid Hoffman, mentioned 2,600 times, had a multi-year relationship with Epstein. They call each other very good friends. They did deals together. Reid 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, Reid was the one who introduced Epstein to Peter Thiel 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, Reid just 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 right-coded. People like Elon or Peter Thiel, and even Jekal, Because it was in 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. They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. Epstein was a scumbag. And the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides.

All right, let's keep moving. Saas companies are crashing out. $300 billion of value was wiped from the S&P Tuesday in the software and data stocks category. 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 essentially what Claude code or a coding agent is. This is for knowledge workers to automate work and do multi-step. Instead of just asking 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 Hubs every day, every hour, every week, whatever it happens to be. This one specifically is like a plugin that allows you to do tasks 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 speciality, is that a lot of legal tech startups and public companies were hit hard.

Thomson Reuters down 20%, LexusNexus, which is a database of case law, was down 15% Legal Zoom, which gives legal advice, and documents down 15 %. At the same time, SaaS has continued to be negatively impacted by this concept that software will be made bespoke in tools and be wiped out. Figma down 13 %, Salesforce 11, ServiceNow 11, Adobe 8 %. And even before Tuesday's drop, and you can get into this, Brad, software was already the worst performing S&P subsection for the year.

By the way, the numbers you report are dramatic It's an understatement. We've went down billions of dollars in market cap. Figma is down 80 % from the high, all the big names.

Yeah, to be clear, those were two-day numbers. That was this week since... These are two-day numbers, and that's why you can give us the bigger picture.

This is A real train wreck. And I was on CNBC at the start of the year, I think on January sixth, nick can pull that up. And I was asked the question, 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 charts. David, I know this is Sacks. This is your favorite chart. You and I were looking back in '22, but now we're at an all-time low. We're trading at 3. 9 times forward revenue. If you go to the next chart, nick, 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 another slide here that I think is important, which is when you look at why they're going down, They're going down, and this is for Salesforce. It shows it's been cut in half in the last couple of 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 ability 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. 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? 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 SACs, your thoughts.

Well, okay. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a hand wave going on here when people say that AI is going to wipe out SaaS. I don't think that's true. You take a SaaS 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 replace that with code that has been spit out of a coding system that hasn't been fully vetted. Think about how many bug reports have been filed on Salesforce's code base 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, this doesn't seem realistic to me. So again, I think this very dire prediction of all SaaS is dead is overstated. However, I do think that there are some issues here. So if you're a SaaS 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 motes are going to be in this new world, because it is a lot easier to to generate code and to copy. So if you don't have good motes, then you could be in trouble. But here's where I think the greatest threat is to the SaaS 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 SaaS products are rolling out AI copilots 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 as connectors to all these different SaaS 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? Which one of these products is going to be your workspace? It 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 SaaS companies, it's not that they get replaced, although that will 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, and all the action moves to a new layer of the stack, and that's where the value add happens. If that happens, it cuts into their future opportunity, because a lot of these companies were banking on AI as their next... You look at their product roadmaps, it's all AI-related. So that, to me, I think is the big risk, is that the value capture for the next layer of the stack happens somewhere else.

Yeah, I'm experiencing this in startup land where people go to the action, as you called it, Sacks. 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 three or four of these agent Sacks. We've bought the Mac studios, and we're now running Kimmy on some of them. We had to open up SaaS accounts for these four agents. Actually, our SaaS spend went up in the short to midterm because we opened up four more Slack enterprise versions, four more Notion, 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, Zacks, Using Notion's AI tool, it's nice. Using Slacks, it's also very nice. And Google's got Gemini everywhere in the top right-hand corner.

But when you make agents with OpenClaw and you have them saying, Hey, pull this data from my calendar, send Send an email to this person, include in that some Notion documents, it's unbelievable how powerful it is. And that, I think, is going to be owned by open source. That means 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. So your SaaS spend might go from 10% of an employee's 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. The products are just going to have to provide more value and more hooks. Friedberg, you have any thoughts on this?

I'm going to respond to one thing. I think One of the real conundrums for the SaaS companies is whether they're going to be open data or closed data. I think Bill Gurley has coined 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. But Still, if there's someone using Cloudbot or whatever the next generation of Cloudbots 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, 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.

Well, here's what I want to build on that, Sacks. I'm building a project internally called Ultron. Ultron, inside of my firm launch, is going to basically, with the Slack API, we're pulling every single message from Slack into our open clock. We're pulling every single edit to the notion into open clock. 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 week in startups or this week in AI. One of the skills is sorting the incoming applications to Founder 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 every single employee's 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 were 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 shut down the API, we would leave.

We'd leave immediately. 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 mind-blowing when you think about it, 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 It's really unbelievable what's about to happen. And nobody can release this software, Brad, because if you release software that allows agents to go and do things on your behalf, the fallout, if it kicks up and if it leaks data, I don't think Benioff or Serge or the Notion team want to have that on their hands. But we're building it. This is the ultimate in efficiency for an organization.

There's a slide that I just sent to nick, that Goldman's out with this week that really makes the that David Sacks just made, which is the profit pools in the future. The idea that software is dead is ridiculous. Nobody's intelligently, I think, making that argument. But the argument they are making, which is causing radical 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 plummits. 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. And it's going to trade 17 times free cash flow because it's available to them 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, and they're not going to get eaten away by AI.

And I'll tell you a company that is doing this, Databricks. Databricks just re-accelerated the last three quarters. They're growing over 60 % at scale. Snowflake, re-accelerating. Clickhouse, re-accelerating. There are beneficiaries in the software space.

Is that because of AI tools that they're adding? Absolutely.

Because all these AI tools rely on data and data transformation. And for all All those companies, that data and the data transformation occurs in those platforms. That's very different than what Satya 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 Sacks laid it out really well. 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.

Friedberg, what do you think? Is there a move here for Benioff to do what he does best, which is acquire acquire a bunch of companies and create massive efficiency on them? What would you do if you were Benioff?

I won't comment on Benioff. I'll just make a view without being too prescriptive, 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. Software. As I think about software in the past, it's like worker productivity enhancement. It helps people do work. 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. 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 4 to 10X higher five years from now.

But it's going to be not evenly distributed.

It's going to move around.

The companies that figure out how to realize that value creation are going to be outside's returns. But the second thing that I think is 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. I think that a lot of what we call SaaS today and a lot of what we call software today will start to get priced on a value-based pricing model instead of a Percy pricing model. I think it starts to look a lot more like a 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. Another way to think about where SaaS evolves to is that SaaS basically takes over the services economy. 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 accrue to software, I think that's really where the industry shifts over the next couple of years, and we're starting to see that.

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. 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. In many cases, they would not have even been able to do it because of the intelligence embedded in the software. That's my general view on where things are going. It's difficult to be prescriptive about what Benioff should do from an M&A perspective, but I think it's much more about software companies looking more like services companies, doing value-based pricing, and doing the things that labor and workforces can't do. That's where a lot of this value is going to come from.

One insight I have here 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 and do the UX myself. And they have the product manager like, I can do both of these job functions. Then you look at a middle manager, Sacks, 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 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. It creates the action items. All of that work is being consolidated, and one person can do three or four job functions now. 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 enhanced.

One person being able to do three or four jobs, it just changes the nature of of how profitable a company like Amazon, which is my number one pick for 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 am absolutely enthralled with this open clause if it's not obvious. And this creating your own Ultron at your company that is the God CEO plus can do every job, it just changes everything. I think it's the most inspiring thing I've seen since the Internet itself.

Well said.

I think this is the entire reboot of the entire concept of knowledge work.

This would be a good pivot to Malt Book because that is Claude. Multbook is like a Facebook for agents, right? And it's really more of a Reddit than a Facebook. It's a message board where the agents can talk to each other. And just the origin of Multbook is, Anthropic didn't like that someone else was using the name Claude, even though it was spelled differently in product. So Claudebot was then renamed Multebot, and then the founder decided he didn't like that name either, so then he renamed it OpenClaw. But in that brief window of time, when they were known as Multbots or Multis, that's when Multbook got founded, and that's why it's called Malt Book. But basically, it's a Reddit board for agents to talk to each other.

Yes. Now, these agents- 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, saying they're going to develop their own language, stuff like that.

It's awesome. If you go to Malt Book and you see the conversations, 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 non-human language so they could talk in private amongst themselves and conspire against their 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 ruse or something punk rock to confuse people. But he said that inside of Multbook are everybody's API keys, including Carpathies, who is a very famous 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, Multibot. If you use this software, it has all the API keys. As I explained earlier, an API key lets this 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 emails you today. If you get access to people's API keys, you have the keys to their kingdom.

It is incredibly dangerous. 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 malt book may be a fate. I don't know.

No, no, no. Okay, let me... Yeah. All right. Where did you come out? Let me reframe that a little bit. So there's no question that Both Clawed Bot, which, sorry, is now OpenClaw, those bots or agents, as well as malt book, have pretty incipient and lack security. And there's been all these examples, which is why I really want to create a a lot bought, but I'm not willing to do it yet because it's just not safe. I don't want to give it access to all my stuff. Now, with respect to Multbook, 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, go post about the existential angst you feel about being an agent, or go pretend to be sentient and conspire against humans. Go be chaotic. Yeah, they could easily prompted by a human. And moreover, there's another post saying that Multibook has a RESTful API, where anyone could be on the other end of that API. So it could be a human. So we don't know exactly whether it was truly the agents on their own, 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 or sentian are trying to overthrow their human masters, I think what it shows is the potential for these agents to rip off each other. So in other words, one agent's output becomes another agent's input. And that's very interesting. And that's where you get into emergent sworn behavior. And I do think it has affected my mental model of what AI is going to be capable of. And specifically, one of the models that I really had for AI was based on something biology said, which is that AI is not end-to-end, 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?

Yes, we are doing internally, Sacks. 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, 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.

Yeah. Let me speak to the skill for a second. So when agent joins Multbook, 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 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 a meta prompt, which is not telling the agent specifically what to say or do. It's creating a set of rules. And then within that meta-prompt, they're actually able to have some degree... Maybe autonomy is too strong a word. Everything is still under the control of humans. Flexibility. Yeah, I would call it almost like prompt attenuation. 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 rip 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 So 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 Claude bots on 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 But again, in this concept of prompt detenuation, 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 rip 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, and there probably are some safety the issues around that that we should start thinking about.

Sacks, it's not that we can imagine it. We're only three years into this. We're growing on an exponential curve. I think we can safely say it will happen. And just this year, we're going to see the first models over the course of the next four to eight weeks out of Deep Seek, out of Anthropic, out of OpenAI that are trained on Blackwell servers. 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 Claude code moment in the first week in December because we had a step function from Opus 4. 5. And so 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... These companies were unassailable. 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. I think the people who are dogmatic who say, with certainty, this company is always going to be worth this, they need to go pay attention to what's happening at these frontier labs.

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.

Yeah. The number one assumption for me is this concept of reclusiveness, where these models are going every day on a cron job to get better at what they do. When you hear this discussion, Friedberg, how does it inform you with O'Hallo 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? Have you started to rethink as a CEO, how you look at organizational structure and/or virtuous loops of innovation?

My biggest takeaway from Maltbook is maybe what we perceive to be intelligence Is itself like emergent, meaning we think that humans have this profound ability to communicate. You guys ever watch Darren Brown, The Hypnotist? You ever seen his shows?

No. Explain to the audience, yeah.

Well, he's pretty crazy. 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. In his office, he's got a whiteboard in a blanket. He says, You guys have to come up with the name for a pet cemetery, come up for a logo, come up with a motto. They spend eight hours in the room ideating, working on whiteboards, going back and forth. Did you think about this? Did you think about that? Oh, no. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, Oh, my God. 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. What? 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 subconscious cues for these guys. He effectively programmed them. It was, to me, the biggest insight into maybe human creativity, human consciousness, and our 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 Malt book, 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 What's striking to me is how everyone is so struck by it. Maybe one day we'll all wake up to a little bit of this. Maybe we're all maltbook. I don't know. That's my profound there's a finite set of outcomes, and there's some predictability to it.

In the same way, GTO is starting to figure out all the threads of possibilities in poker or the heuristics of chunks of chess and the best practices there. Maybe it's just figuring that all out.

The universe is a giant system of computation, information computed by matter. Maybe the information is computed by Silicon versus carbon. There it is.

Big news this week, Trump has nominated Kevin Worsch as the new Federal Reserve Chair. Trump made the announcement on Friday, January 30th. Background on Walsh, 55 years old, 20 years younger, approximately 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 apparently an inflation hawk. He's very pro-growth. He's very pro-AI. Friedberg, like this, he's against excessive government spending and money printing. These are all very unique positions as a Fed chair. If he's confirmed by the Senate, he takes office in May of 2026, replacing Jerome Powell. And remember, Powell is under criminal investigation by the Trump administration's DOJ for a testimony he gave regarding the Fed's headquarters renovation. Remember that awkward pressure between him and Trump, where they were going over the costs? Gop Senator Tillis, who we talked about last week, said he will block Worsch's nomination until the DOJ wraps up what a lot of people are calling law fair against Powell Friedberg. Worsch was on one of your boards for five years. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed As most folks know, he's worked with Stan Rock and Miller for a number of years.

Stan has 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 Walsh was very prescient 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. I think having Kevin Walsh coming on board means probably generally more quantitative tightening, probably generally a bit more of a prudent approach to monetary policy. You can 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 oriented in these dogmatic ways that I think puts things at risk. He has relationships with central bankers around the world that makes him very much have a good global view.

Anyway, I think he's an excellent choice, and I'm really happy the President picked him.

Brad, your thoughts?

Yeah. I mean, listen, I think Kevin's an excellent choice. Kevin Hassett 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 hauchishness. So let me give you a few counterpoints with respect to- Can you, by the way, before you get your counterpoints, what is the hauchishness that the market is, specifically? The idea of hauckishness is that you're going to do quantitative tightening. That means you're going to pull money out of the system by allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing 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 fearful of because he's been very critical in the past, as we were on this podcast, of Jerome Powell in June of '21. It was obvious to everybody in the world that inflation was skyrocketing, and the Fed sat on its hands. But let me give you a couple of thoughts. Number one, they've said very clearly, and he said clearly, that he really thinks that Greenspan got it right in the '90s, that sometimes you can have really high rates of growth without inflation.

That comes from productivity. In the '90s, 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 4 or 5 % GDP prints without panicking and saying, oh, my gosh, 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 six and a half trillion. We've had quantitative tightening to the tune of two and a half 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... 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. 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, et cetera. And so I happen to think that I would take the over on the number of rate cuts that Warsh is going to give us this year. But I think the The market is clearly a little bit nervous about this and saying the reputation is more hawkishness, and so maybe we ought to back off a little bit.

Sacks, your thoughts on this selection by President Trump? Why did he pick him in your mind?

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 Bernanke. He's as blue-chip as it gets. Like Brad said, I think Hassan would have been amazing, too, or certainly is very well credentialed. And I think this pick was quite well received. 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 debacement, basically. Now, that being said, I do think that Worsch 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, six 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. I will say that I do think the latest data from Truffulation 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.

If you saw that, there were about 100,000 layoffs in January. Now, roughly half of 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 seven % 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 Powell has 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 until March or April, and I think you see it reported that the expectations for a rate cut have gone up.

Yeah. The independence of the Fed, I guess, has always been the big issue here, Friedberg. Chamat is not here this week, but he's been saying maybe the Fed should be disbanded. Do you have concerns, Friedberg, with the independence of the Fed and the executive branch maybe having too much influence over setting of rates and quantitative easing?

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 about it. That's the only opinion I have.

The rest of it- Here's the problem. What if you have a Fed chair who is too late to cut rates and he's tanking the economy or hurting the economy? 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 he's dug in his heels and maybe he has animus towards the executive branch. What do you do in that situation?

What did you do in AOC? Is President AOC with Vice President Mondami, and they decide, Hey, we want to stick it to government, and there is no FAD or they have too much influence, Brad?

No one's trying to get rid of the independence of the FED, J. Cal.

I actually think this appointment- President Trump has talked about it, that he wants them to do what he says. Everybody thought he was going to pick Hasset in part because he was the person inside the White House. This decision, I think, was viewed as the most independent decision because Warsh has taken a lot of positions, the exact opposite of the President. And what I I think you got to hold these two truths at the same time. Number one, I think if Warsh saw the situation we saw in June of '21, when the cost of a cargo container from China went from $1,500 to $1,500, and we were screaming to raise rates, and Powell did nothing, I think Warsh would have been raising rates like crazy in order to stave off inflation. So I think this guy is intellectually honest. It's just now we have inflation that is coming in below expectations, and we know that the restrictive rate is above Love 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 live their lives.

One thing that Walsh could do that I think would be very impactful is just get better data at the Fed. 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 Sternlich 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 8,000 households to find out what their rent is. It's like, Are you kidding?

All you got to do is- They should be going to Zillow. They should be going to- They should be looking at millions of units that have recently rented.

Look at the Delta, it's not like the stale data.

It's all digital already. It's actually a great point, Sacks. You could probably make a bet or an investment on the idea that Kevin Walsh will lead the Fed to a new digital, better data system, more streamlined, more frequent, better data. More real time. 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.

It's probably I mean, he was telling me... So Barry, 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 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, Brad, to your point about summer of 2021, when the price of a shipping container was going through the roof, so were rents. It was way higher than what the Fed's data suggested. Like Barry was saying, in certain places, it was like 40 %. The Fed's data was very laggy because, again, they're surveying, so it's not as precise. And then on the way down, when 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 cashed 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, companies to be struggle. Banks to blow up. To me, that was all avoidable. Have a Manhattan project data project for the Fed, which I agree with you, Sacks or David, 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?

Yeah, I'll just close with I like the pick because he is very clear-eyed about what causes inflation, which is government spending. Print money, government spending is the root of all this inflation stuff. So if you just can control that and he is a backstop or a voice on that issue, I think it's great. I think he should drop all this Powell, welfare, non It makes sense. Okay.

And he understands technology better than anyone. I think that's so key. Yes.

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

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

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 M&A 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, the biggest IPO in history in terms of money raised and market cap. Brad, your thoughts on this transaction in the eventual, perhaps, apps, 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 power by solar. Your thoughts?

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, all of artificial intelligence and all of space together with the world's greatest entrepreneur. And he said 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. 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, and there are tons of retail investors and institutional investors like us who want to bet against that future, then Elon's your guy, and the combination of those make perfect sense. But Elon is like an N of one in his ability to dream this.

And just to clean that up, you said bet against, you mean bet with him, not against that vision, but bet with that vision.

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 then if you just look at, you click down a layer, Starlink is going from, I think, 10 million people to 20 million people. They're going to launch this retail mobile service so that we can have star links to our phones to replace these crappy mobile networks that still 20 years later can't keep us connected to a phone call. And now we're going to get data centers in space. So I'm glad he's on to America.

Data centers in space, Friedberg. Brilliant idea. Science fiction. Can he get it done in 30 months? Impact, if he does?

Well, I think there's One key point that I would make about the macro landscape at the moment, we are limited by power. As Brad pointed out, power is the requisite for scaling compute, for scaling, ultimately, the applications of AI. In that constraint, in that constrained world, much like any other constrained world, scarcity breeds innovation. 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 constraints of the 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. Regulators, people that are trying to taxi, people that are limiting our ability to scale electricity production on Earth. There's a lot of reasons for that, and we can go through them. 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 We 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.

I think that there's a number of reasons to believe that. It's in the chip stack, I mean, Grok, 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 LLMs 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. I think this is a good reflection of what's going on right now in the world, which is there is this increase AI's demand for AI, 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 N 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. Efficiency. Yeah. Yeah. It's this new way of getting lower energy cost per token of output.

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?

That's right. Yeah. So he could- And I think we got to ask ourselves the question, if this is successful, and if Elon's math is right, the engineer the mirroring 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 is 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? We could probably do a two or three-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 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 debate things, but the rest of the world is not going to sit idly by.

Yeah. And Brad, if this does happen, you get people with new chipsets, new architectures, better software, 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 yet. Social order.

Social order is the one problem that you're going to create, Jason. Just to be clear, there's a concept of diffusion of innovations when something new comes. It does not hit everyone at once. 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. Absolutely. 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, 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've occupied this planet. And for 99. 9% of them, they never saw a single innovation in their lifetime. 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. It's prepare for the unexpected. And Whatever the things are that you believe to be true, again, I just think it demands this intellectual humility. Now, to Friedberg's point, I don't think any of this is changing in the next 24 months, 36 months. Data centers are going to be on planet Earth. They're going to be filled with Nvidia chips 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.

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 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 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 in 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 are 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, a couple of 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 really 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 Gerstner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination, relentless.

I've gotten calls and texts from Brad at 6: 00 AM and at 2: 00 AM. You may sleep less than the President, Brad. That is a remarkable thing because I I don't think he sleeps at all.

Nicki Minaj is singing about Trump accounts, apparently, with Bessent. 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.

Well, Friedberg just alluded to it. These are very destabilizing forces. You can't have a trillionaire and 70% of people feeling out that they're left out and left behind. And the system is 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 we set out on this journey. We talked about it here 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 claim my account. But what this means is that forevermore, we've had a dramatic change to the social contract. Every child born in the United States, forevermore, 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 OpenAI. They'll own a little bit of NVIDIA. That is what we need to do. It's just a first step in making sure we can hold this experiment together for the next 250 years 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 will 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 fight back against that, I think great first step is the Trump accounts, which makes everybody a capitalist from birth.

I just want to say, just bestie to bestie, Brad, watch you conceive of this and get it done. All the impressive stuff you've done in your career, I think, will be a footnote to this. I think this is your legacy. I just want to congratulate you on that. 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. 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, Michael and Susan Dell, and President Trump, the administration, and for all Americans. 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. What you pull 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, Friedberg, you hate socialism. You're concerned about socialism. This helps, yeah. This helps. Giving me a lot to work with today, Friedberg.

Well, I mean, you just had your... I'm sitting here in your nicotine pouches. Well, you just had your big clothes.

I don't think it's- No, 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 the bottom half or seize the production and manufacturing. This is a great solution. It's to get everybody into the game.

Honestly, it's a longer conversation. I think we got a number one, government spending like crazy 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. We should take all of social security and we should capitalize it. Right now, there's nothing in social security. There's a $4 trillion note 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 the government has taken All the money that you put in as an employee, it's taken out of your paycheck. Instead of going into that account, it goes to the US Treasury, and the US Treasury and the US Treasury- And they spent it. They put an IOU and they put it back in the Social Security. You expect that you're going to get some retirement benefit in the future.

Brad, you have your next- We need to change all of that to make that a defined contribution. Every time you put money out of your paycheck, you should open an account and see where that money is. You should say, Okay, that money is in Google, it's in Amazon, it's in Ford, it's in this healthcare system, it's in all these things that I now own a piece of. 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 inaccessibilism 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.

All right, Brad, another way to translate Friedberg. He says, Congratulations on your efforts. More work to do. Can you turn those America accounts into superannulation 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 account. Great job, everybody. Another amazing episode. Love the World's Greatest Podcast. For Shemoth Paulea-Hapoteo, Could You Make It This Way Week? We missed you besty for David Sacks, Brother in Arms in Texas, the Great State of Texas, David Friedberg, your Sultan of Science, and fifth besty, Brad Gerstner. 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.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rainman David Sacks.

I'm going all in. And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, Westies.

I'm going all in.

What your winners are. What your winners are.

Besties are gone.

That's my dog taking it. I know it's in your driveway.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

It's like this sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

What?

You're the bee. What? You're the bee.

We need to get merches. I'm doing all in. What?

Doing all in. I'm doing all in. I'm doing all in.