Transcript of Trump-Xi Summit, Benioff: "Not My First SaaSpocalypse," OpenAI vs Apple, Multi-Sensory AI, El Niño New

All right everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All In Podcast, episode 273. It's a huge week. Saks is out, so we got to get Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

I'm the only one left here. You're the only one left. That's how I made it on.

No software CEOs, right, to China?

There's no software, uh, CEOs in China.

Interesting. But did you get the invite? What's your, what's your status with this administration? Because you were obviously very famous for You know, being a Democrat on the left, um, and I'm not a Democrat on the left.

I never have been. Sorry, bro.

What are you talking about? Yeah, you donated to all these folks and now you're kind of in Trump's camp. What is it?

Listen, um, uh, the number one thing is, hey, I'm here to support the country. That's what I do.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you're right in the middle. You have an allegiance to America.

I hope so. Yeah, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. You're an independent. I'm an American.

Okay, I like it.

Benioff got the invite to the two hottest tickets. He got the invite to Windsor Castle in Tales, and then he got the invite, uh, when Prince Charles came here too. I saw he was in Tales then too.

And also we were at that Saudi dinner too. Weren't you there, Chamath?

I did not go to that one.

All right, well, we have a big docket here. The Trump-Xi summit has begun. That is the number one story right now after a two-month delay because of the war in Iran. This is the first visit to China since 2017. Seventh face-to-face meeting for Trump and President Xi. There are 12 hours, 15 hours ahead of us today. Thursday was officially day one. Here's what happened. China agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should remain open with no military commitment and that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. So we're in sync on that. On Taiwan, this is a little spicy. Xi warned that, quote, if handled poorly, the two countries will collide or even clash, putting the entire US-China relationship in an extremely dangerous situation. Polymarket says Taiwan is safe for 2026, only 6% chance China invades this year. On 23 million volume, which is a lot of volume, 17% chance, roughly triple that something happens by the end of 2027. There's been a lot of debate. Some people say it will happen after Trump is out of office. Some people think it's going to happen while he's in office. On trade, Xi committed to buy more soybeans, U.S. oil, LNG, and 200 Boeing jets.

She said the talks laid out a vision for constructive, strategic, and stable ties. Trump was effusive in his praise, uh, for his friendship, giving the disclaimer that people don't like it when he praises Xi. Let's stop here and have a bit of a discussion. Friedberg, you, uh, have been a bit obsessed with this relationship and the bipolar nature of it. What are your thoughts here, and what is the goal for Trump? What is winning for Trump coming out of this? What is winning for Xi?

I mean, Xi made comments in his, uh, opening remarks that it would be ideal if the United States and China could avoid the Thucydides trap, which, as you'll recall, we talked about with Graham Allison, and we've talked about several times over the last few years, that as a rising power meets a kind of declining power, there's always some moment where you end up in this kind of state of conflict. And the question is, can the US and China avoid conflict and find a path to cooperation, which has happened a few times in history when we found ourselves in this moment, but doesn't often happen. And I think the way to kind of think about the opportunity is if you're in a resource-expansive world where you are increasing productivity and increasing production globally at an accelerating pace, perhaps there's less of a reason to have conflict. Perhaps there's a way that both societies, both countries can increase the quality of life for their people without taking it away from the other side. And in a world where you're more resource constrained or resource static, that becomes less possible. You have to fight and grab land and grab territory and grab resources from the other side.

And it seems like in this moment, when we are seeing these extraordinary technology shifts unlocked by AI and automation and biotech and all of these kind of moments of what could be true abundance, uh, ahead of us. It seems like the perfect moment to say, hey, maybe the world can be more multipolar. It doesn't need to be unipolar. It doesn't need to be bipolar, but everyone can participate in the expansion of the pie. And I think that that's kind of the idealistic way to look at the opportunity in front of the administration and Chinese leadership right now. Is there a way to kind of look at the next 30 years and ask the question, how do we all share proportionally in growing the pie, and not find ourselves in a moment of conflict where we assume the pie is static? That's, I think, hopefully the message that comes out of this. From an administration political perspective, it just seems like this is going to be a major coup for the president if he can walk away with a series of trade deals with China that increase job security, increase prosperity, increase income levels, increase investment.

In America and American jobs, it would be a huge win. And I think that's the tactical stuff that people will be truly looking for. And I think the big strategic question, which I care most about, which is avoiding conflict— is there a way we can chart an economic and cooperative path that doesn't involve eating each other and involves sharing in a bigger pie?

Chamath, why is Trump bringing all of these CEOs with him, and what does success look like, uh, coming out of this meeting?

I think that you find a resolution and a path forward with China through economic cooperation. It's the largest consumer economy in the world. It's still largely closed off. And so I think what this is was about bringing some amount of financial firepower with them so that they could start to penetrate that market. Planes, cars, chips, you know, very much hard equipment type stuff. I've said this before, but I think the Chinese are very much a top-down Confucian societal philosophy, whereas Americans are much more bottoms-up, kind of an individualist construction. The fact that we're so different actually gives us a lot of room to find cooperation and not find conflict. And I think at the center of that is economic cooperation. I had a friend call me this morning, very prominent Democrat, And, you know, he was the one that called out the media, which I was surprised by. And he said, you know, the media gets it all wrong because they're talking about why is he bringing these CEOs. And instead, the reality is that the simplest and surest path to a no-conflict detente with China is economic entanglement. And it has to be bidirectional because really for so many years it's been one way where they're sending us the cheap goods that they wanted.

So I think strategically it's good. And I think, you know, I'll just take a slightly different take on what Friedberg said. I think behind closed doors they're probably just figuring out how to divide the pie.

Unpack that for a second. Divide which pie? The, the globe, the economy, the, the Western Hemisphere versus China?

China still needs a lot of energy. They also need a lot of critical technologies that America provides. And so I think that there is a trade there. The quid pro quo is there are certain regions of the world where we want them to de-escalate their participation in, Central South America being probably the most important, and then the second is probably in the Middle East, and then maybe the third is just to find some reasonable view of the Asia-Pac region together. I think there's a trade there to be done. In that, you kind of start to carve up the world into a pretty easily identifiable bipolar construction.

They also, uh, Mark, need customers, uh, to buy their goods. And we've had a bit of mixed signals there. Tariffs obviously last year, sticking it to China in a pretty hard way. The decoupling after COVID— hey, we need to be independent— energy, PPE, drugs, chips from China. Now we're kind of saying, hey, let's come to the table and build connective tissue. So sort that out for us on a business level. Should the two countries be deeply entwined? And then how do we manage having too much dependency on China?

Well, you heard it today from President Xi when he said he wants a wider door, and that means that he wants the door of business to open even wider between the two countries. We have our absolute best salespeople there, not just our president, who has to be one of the best salespeople I've ever met, but also we've got Elon, we've got Jensen selling chips.

Kelly Ortberg selling planes.

Kelly selling planes. He's already sold 200. He wants to sell 500 more planes.

Financial services. Yeah.

Brian is selling soybeans. Brian Sykes, the CEO of Cargill. You know, Cargill is the world's largest private company based in Minneapolis. And he is going to come away selling a lot of soybeans. So we have a— you go through the list of the CEOs, each one is our best salesperson in this category. And they're going to come back with orders, and it's going to be amazing. And by the way, I think you said it very well. You know, this idea of business is this kind of greatest platform for change. They are working together like never before. Don't forget, this isn't Trump's and Xi's first meeting. These guys really like each other. They have very connected together. You can see they're smiling with each other. They're very— they have a sales orientation. So I expect a lot of order books to come back.

I have a question for you. Are you allowed to sell software in China?

We, uh, well, with the right— the Chinese have a lot of data residency laws. So, uh, you know, we, we do it as we don't have any offices or employees in China. We never have. The only time we end up with any residue in China is when we buy a company. And they have a presence over there, and then we have to divest from it. We have an exclusive partnership with Alibaba. Everything just goes through them, and we, we don't do anything in China.

Is it significant growing? Is it— what percentage of your revenue is it?

Yeah, it's, it's great. You know, we have— it's a great partnership. Key customers of Salesforce like Louis Vuitton, you know, or Laura Piana. I know Chamath loves Laura Piana.

Yeah.

And you know, Laura Piana sells a lot of sweaters in China. And then, you know, in all other stores all over the world, they use Salesforce, but in China it's Salesforce on Alibaba.

It's still your code, but then it resides in their servers for data residency stuff, their data residency, their, their partnership.

It's a totally unique relationship. It's the only place in the world that we do such a thing.

Yeah, and it has to be— all the data has to be kept in China, all the data has to be accessible by the CCP.

That's why it's so extraordinary, by the way, what Elon has. You know, Elon has Tesla in China, no partnership. He's the only one. He has a phenomenal relationship with Xi. When you look at Xi and Elon together, notice how deferential and respectful they are of each other. And here is these AI cars with all these cameras, American-made, you know, Chinese factories, Driving around China, that is pretty incredible.

How do you think he pulled that off? Is that just a one-off exception?

I think Elon's the greatest salesman in the world.

That's how. I mean, the cynical take on it, Chamath, would be they wanted him there and they wanted to study the company and the innovation, and they have now become the biggest competitor, uh, with their EVs. And so it is a pretty co-opetition, I guess. It would be the cynical way.

I want one of those new BYD Golf, you know, uh, what do you call those with the doors that flip up?

Gullwing.

Gullwing. I want one of those gullwing BYDs. They have some cool cars. Have you seen those?

They're cool, but they're not safe.

They're incredible.

Yeah, they're talking in this, in this, they, they said they're talking about bringing some of those cars to the US. That would be incredible.

I would hollow out the entire automotive industry here if we had $20,000, $30,000 cars from China. It would be the end of the US automotive industry overnight. And, uh, Tim Cook's there. He has to store all his data there. That's been a pretty controversial issue for him because, Friedberg, if anybody has private information or is a dissident, Tim Cook has to give that data over to the Chinese Communist Party. How do you think this plays in America vis-à-vis the midterms, Friedberg? Americans feel The FOMC ignored inflation over 3%, and they look at the Iran war as a betrayal by President Trump, and they look at China as not material to their well-being. So when you look at Trump being on a 6-month timeline for the midterms, and he's only got 2 more years in office after that, you got Xi who's working off of a 100-year playbook. How does that dynamic play out with Trump and the midterms and his core constituency, MAGA, which is now evolving into America first, America only? And this kind of is, is rubbing that group of people the wrong way.

I think the second and third order effects of anything that comes out of China is what's going to be most consequential to the average voter, which is job security and income security and income growth. And then cost of living impact. The cost of living impact would be if there can be some deflationary effect from a trade deal that makes access to goods lower price for Americans. And then anything that America is exporting, there's increased demand. Like there's a follow-on effect to the soybean export market. There's a follow-on effect, obviously, to the oil export market. There's a follow-on effect to, for example, Technology and software being exported. So that increases economic productivity in the U.S. and increases job security income. And then the other side of the trade deal is, can we get stuff that Americans really care about and make it cheaper? Can people now buy stuff at the store that drops in price by 30, 40% where we've kind of tariffed and reduced trade that increases the price of things? So if those deals kind of get worked out, people will see things get cheaper at the store and they'll feel good about kind of their income security.

And I think that could be. Positive. I think that's what's ultimately going to make people make the blue-red decision when they go to the polls in November.

That's the schizophrenic nature of this, Chamath. We have Americans who very much want cheap goods from China, and then we have last year all these tariffs being put on, and we have this great decoupling. So how do you handicap the midterms, Trump's timeline, and Xi's timeline, and what their goals are? And then I guess we'll get to Taiwan after that.

I don't know, it's— I think it's a little bit above my pay grade. But what I will say is that the midterms, I think, are probably going to swing more based on these recent gerrymandering rulings from the Supreme Court and what happened in the Virginia Supreme Court and what's going to happen in the state legislatures of these red states and some of these blue states, more than what's going to come out of this summit with, with President Xi. So let me just put that over here. And I think that money is getting organized. There was an article in the New York Times this week which really surprised me, but the largest donor in the, in this election cycle is Andreessen Horowitz.

Yeah, what is that about?

Yeah, I think it's because they're, they're trying to establish themselves as part of the financial firmament of America, which I think strategically as a business makes a lot of sense. Like, they're in the AUM business, right? So They can't stop at $100 billion of AUM. They're marching towards a trillion. They're going to be the next Blackstone, which I think is an incredible feat. And they're building a juggernaut of a business. But I think they also realize that politics is now a permanent part of that if they're going to be investing in higher quantum, more geopolitically influenced parts of the capital cycle and parts of the economy. So I think the midterms are largely that, the money that's going to be raised plus the gerrymandering that will get done and undone over the next few months. Again, I think the Chinese and the Americans have a very strong incentive to divide up the world. I think the future at this point, you have these critical resource inputs, China has a stranglehold. You have energy and intelligence. AI, where America has a stranglehold on one and an effective stranglehold on the other, which is energy. And I think there's a trade there to be done.

And as long as you can negotiate what a reasonable give and take is, I think they're just going to find common ground. Like, does China really need to be in Chile and Venezuela and Panama? Probably not. Does America have to have an incredibly strong point of view about the Strait of Malacca? Probably not. And so there's probably a trade to be done so that we can get their rare earths, they can get some more oil, everybody can be happy, and we can all find abundance.

Yeah, the, the key issue here is China is— and most people are, you know, China-phobic— but China has serious systematic issues with population, with their real estate, with their GDP. All of this is in decline, and I think Xi, most of all, is concerned about another Tiananmen Square. If he doesn't get more people working, they've had the largest growth of any middle class in history. They have the largest middle class in the world. I think you were referencing that, Mark, with luxury goods and luxury goods providers are going there, but it's tenuous.

People— And that's the number one, by the way, that is the number one point of focus of President Xi. President Xi's focus has been getting 500 million people from poverty into the middle class. Yeah, it's not exactly how we think about the world in the United States. That's the main focus of the political leader, and he's achieved that. That, that has been an incredible accomplishment.

And, but it's at risk right now because their GDP is falling. They need their factories to operate. They're being undercut by other regions. And then, of course, to Taiwan is what they want most of all, and supremacy in, you know, their part of the world.

I'm not convinced of that, actually. Okay, I mean, I think we just kind of said it. To summarize, they want to have, you know, economic success. They want to continue to grow their middle class. They want to continue to have a healthy economy. They want more trade. I thought it was interesting that they're talking about Trump is talking about not only having the Board of East. Now he wants a board of trade. That was a discussion we've never heard before today. Then, uh, we have Xi saying, I want the wider door. Then we have all these folks there selling their products. Two people we didn't mention, the CEO of Visa and the CEO of MasterCard, are on the trip. Now why is that? Because if you look at, you know, commerce in China, it is dominated by companies like Alibaba and, and these organizations who use these super apps It's not really all the way open for a Visa and a MasterCard. That would be incredible for those executives. So in the same way that we wanna sell airplanes, we wanna sell chips, NVIDIA, the Qualcomm CEO Cristiano is also there. We wanna sell soybeans, we wanna sell payment services, we wanna sell everything.

The more economic collaboration and cooperation you can get between the two countries, the more peace you're gonna have.

I think that is the reality.

I agree.

3 hard questions, Mark. Should we be selling them the latest chips? Yes or no, in your mind?

I think it's irrelevant at this point. I think that the Chinese models are as competitive as these US models, and they've learned to make these models without having the highest-end chips. I think the highest-end chips is kind of more of an ego gratification for us. We have Blackwell, we have this, we have that. But when you look at their models, their models are excellent. They fast follow us, you know, the best models we had 6 months ago they have now.

Should we just sell it to them since they're figuring it out anyway, Mark?

We probably should just sell whatever we can at this point.

Got it.

And I think that, as I said, I think the more economic cooperation and collaboration is better. And if you want peace, I think that this— I think Taiwan, it's kind of a nonsense story.

Well, let's go back to that. Yeah. Freeberg, uh, your take on chips. Should we sell them latest chips? And then Chamath, I want to get the answer to that question from each of you.

I think it's inevitable that they get there. By the way, I do think this is one of the key aspects of this deal. I've said this before, but maybe Taiwan becomes less relevant to the US and to China as both China and the US, um, mainland, uh, fabs. So as we build out our own manufacturing capacity here in the US, and I know we've struggled and there are fits and starts and issues with it and whatnot, but the, the TSMC facility in Arizona is running. They're printing, and if it works and they figure out how to scale it, there'll be other facilities in the U. S. And then China's main landing with Huawei, standing up a lot of facilities. They've got a multi— I think I talked about this on one of the shows— a multi-decabillion-dollar government investment in ensuring competitiveness, not just with fabs, but also with semiconductor manufacturing equipment, so that they don't get cut off on the supply chain with companies like ASML. Blocking sales into mainland. So as they build out their own semiconductor capital equipment systems and their own fabs, does Taiwan really matter? Is there really that much of a security risk to the United States and to China in that sense?

And perhaps what everyone's focused on, which is this pivot point around Taiwan, maybe it's not that the U. S. is selling Taiwan down the river, but it's just that no one gives a shit anymore. So, you know, there may be this kind of cultural moment for China where they want to at some point say, hey, by 2040, which I think is what I've heard they want to be able to kind of, you know, bring Taiwan fully into the sphere, maybe the US shouldn't care that much at that point from an economic and security perspective. So I think that's, that's one of the things that's happening. That—

so you're in the camp of sell the chips to them and it will demotivate the TSMC or the capture of those factories by the Chinese?

Put it this way, I think the more the global productivity index can climb, the better off all humans will be. So the question is, do you really want the West to see their productivity index climb and then you're effectively forcing conflict and forcing issues with the East? Or if we all grow our productivity index, we all make more stuff. Everyone benefits. Everyone has better jobs. Everyone makes more money. Everyone has access to more stuff. The cost of goods comes down for everyone. Doesn't that make the world a safer and more secure place?

Sure.

So I think this idea that like technology should be held to one, uh, side of the world and not given to the other side of the world is inevitably going to lead to conflict or increase the probability of conflict. Whereas if you let technology diffuse and proliferate, everyone benefits and conflict indices go down.

It's because it becomes commoditized, you know, and everybody has access to it, so then it becomes—

you give everyone a higher standard of living, give everyone's economy a boost, and you give everyone less reason to fight with each other.

Since you went there with Taiwan on should we take our arms sales off of the table, Friedberg, and should we ask China to not sell arms to Iran?

Yes, we should ask China to not sell arms to Iran.

Yeah, okay.

I don't know what there is— what is there to talk about there?

Well, because I think what she wants is for us to not sell arms to Taiwan. So would you make that trade, I guess, is what I'm saying?

Oh yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I think in that context That's a, that's a nuanced one. I don't—

that's why I bring it up, because that seems to be—

generally you're right. Yeah, I mean, generally that's probably a, a trade that, you know, that should be kind of—

trade, do the deal.

So you say make the trade.

Chamath, I mean, I kind of know we're 18 months from Taiwan not being an important moment of conversation the way it is today. Why 18 months? Because we are at a point where we're probably 1 to 2 nanometers away from being able to do what we need Taiwan to strategically do for us. And so as we scale up our chip fabs, as we get more capacity— and interestingly, there are these orthogonal technologies being developed. I don't know if you guys saw, but Neuralink was showcasing now a machine that is literally operating at the almost nanometer scale to do the brain operations for the implantation all automatically. So when you, when you have the dexterity and the capability mechanically to make these things, the real reason then is a very different one than what it is today. Today it's economic, and if you take that off the table, I think we'll have a very different attitude to Taiwan. That's number one. Number two, sell the chips. And the reason we should sell the chips is we want NVIDIA to win. We do not want to give enough oxygen for Huawei to then all of a sudden emerge and have a version of a chip that works.

And what Mark said is totally right. These models are catching up. They're almost at the same pace. So the more important thing, Jason, is probably— we should all agree— is just like, let's have a reasonable KYC for how the models get used so that, you know, somebody in a basement doesn't cook up some bioweapon. Meanwhile, sell the chips, proliferate, let Jensen win. I'd rather he win than Huawei win.

Mark, I'm going to give you the last word, but I'm going to force you to answer a hard question. China sets up a blockade around Taiwan and they decide they're taking it, should the US defend it, yes or no?

I've said this for years, I don't agree with Neil Ferguson on that point. I think that this is a nonsense issue. I think China and Taiwan will reconcile. I think that, well, first of all, I do wanna schedule though Chamath for that Neuralink. Next Tuesday, 5 o'clock, we can drill your brain, Chamath. Can I get you in?

What are you trying to do, put some empathy into Chamath? I talked to Elon.

He said it doesn't give you the feedback.

You just throw it right in, there's a— and boom, and then you can get hooked up.

It is the craziest thing.

I know. I got you scheduled at 5 o'clock on Tuesday, Chamath. Hold your hand if you're too nervous.

Yes. And by the way, if I only had a heart. Literally, like, if I only had a connective tissue.

It's gonna make for an even better show.

It would be incredible. Yes, and, uh, I would laugh and I would giggle.

We could get into show tunes here.

Friedberg, I know you're, um, yeah, big on the show.

If I Only Had a Heart.

If I Only Had a Brain.

A heart, a brain, and what's the third one?

If I Only Had a Neuralink.

You gotta give you courage, Friedberg.

Okay, move on.

All right, let's move on here.

Your bit's not working. By the way, I think it's Mom's Kids. Chamath stayed home. I took his kids to The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. It was incredible if you haven't seen it.

Yeah, Chamath was like, to do something enriching with my kids or hit the craps table.

No, I'll be honest with you, I get a little freaked out in large, like, groups of people. Yeah, I get, I get a— no, just, just like when there's a lot of people, I get very nervous.

Really?

Is this because of your newfound celebrity? Is this— is that the issue? No, I always have like—

no, I don't even want to go there. I just have these bad thoughts of like, oh my God, what if something happens? How do we get out?

And like, oh, terrorist attack.

I don't know. Yeah, exactly.

You have panic disorder. Panic?

Yeah, I don't— I don't like these large spaces with lots of people. I get a little winched up.

Anyway, your kids had a great time. Great show.

Tony Robbins lives very near you, Chamath. Don't you think we can get that to happen?

Yeah, let's get Tony Robbins in there to clear that blockage. You're a Tony Robbins guy, Mark. Why are you so into Tony Robbins?

I love Tony Robbins. I had him at my conference this week. It was incredible, actually. He did an incredible presentation for an hour.

Did he unlock for you your success? He claims to, that he has you on the roster of $50,000 a year CEOs.

I am the number one fan of Tony Robbins.

So, I mean, what percentage of your success is attributed to Tony's mentorship?

Hey, if it wasn't for Tony Robbins, I don't think there would be a Salesforce.

So that's No jokes aside. Can you tell us like what, like what, like what were those big kind of blockages and how did you, how did he help you or how did you work through it?

Just focusing on, hey, the questions, you know, the quality of your questions is the quality of your life. It's that insight. And just, are you asking yourself the right questions? What do you want? What's important to you? How are you getting it? What is preventing you from having it? How will you know that you have it? Just no one had ever said that to me. And then it was just like clear to me. Wait, I need to write that down. Like, what do I really want right now? What is my point of focus? And that is what gave me motivation. As soon as I got that clarity, I mean, a lot of us do it automatically, but that's not where I was when I was a kid. That's for sure.

Did you run across the coals? Did you do any of that kind of stuff?

Oh, I've many times.

Really?

Yeah, of course.

Okay. There it is, folks.

Hey, we can go together.

Uh, absolutely. We had Tony on the show. I tried to, get in there and understand his psychology, but he just had us do breathing exercises. All right, the, uh, All In Summit is happening again, 5th year in a row. Wow, we've been doing this for a while. allin.com/events, September 13th, 14th, and 15th. We'll have you back, Mark, in year 6, but when you score so highly on a keynote, we give you 2 years off so that we can build up the anticipation. So coming in 2027, our guy, Marc Benioff. But for this year, uh, allin.com/events. Okay, topic 2, AI's impact.

By the way, real quick, can I just do a quick PSA?

A public service announcement.

Public service announcement. Yes, Nick, just pull up this link. This dog named Scooter needs a home. Oh, I promised my wife I'd do this. Don't get, don't get mad at me. This dog named Scooter needs a home. He's in Baldwin Park. Dog's about to die. Lives in Baldwin Park at the Animal Care and Control. They're overwhelmed in LA. There are so many homeless street dogs that are being collected. They're all being put to sleep.

Wow.

Someone give this dog a home.

Gorgeous.

His name is Scooter. Link will be on the YouTube channel. Thank you very much.

Are you getting a little emotional, Freeberg, about this dog being put down?

I just don't like these, you know, all these street dogs. Like, they, they didn't choose that situation they were in, and then they all end up kind of getting pulled in by animal care and control, and then they all get put to sleep. Kind of sucks. You're a dog guy. Come on, you gotta have a heart.

No, I have a big heart.

Chamath, come on, it's $10,000 to keep these dogs alive for another week. Can we count on you for that? Donation.

Any purebred white golden retrievers in that bunch?

No, they're just mutts. Just mutts.

We have a cat that we got at the shelter, actually. Kind of a good story. Walked into the shelter looking for a cat. All of a sudden we're in the shelter, this cat's like coming at, you know, my kids, and all of a sudden they're, okay, we'll take this cat. What is this cat's name? This cat's name is Cloud. That's our cat.

Wow.

Absolutely.

We have Cloud the Cat.

All right, that's awesome.

All right, AI's impact on software rippling through the market. Mark, you're on the front lines here.

Thank you for reminding me.

Yeah, well, I mean, in pain and suffering are lessons, right? I think the Buddha and Tony Robbins both taught us that. And the only way to the other side is through, as you know, Mark. So Salesforce down a whopping 37%, $90 billion in losses for you. ServiceNow 42%, Workday 45%. $180 billion in market cap's been lost. And the assumption, Mark, is that AI is going to make it unnecessary for you to use Slack or Salesforce or HubSpot, whatever it happens to be, that you'll just ask your AI to solve this for you and we'll all look at a piece of glass and have no actual software. The AI will just tell us what to do. What's your response to the fear, the criticism, and how are you managing this massive change internally?

You're right. It's the SaaS-pocalypse. I mean, it's not my first SaaS-pocalypse, honestly, but it's the current SaaS-pocalypse. So we are all now drinking the Salesforce SaaS-brillas and we actually have a pet Sasquatch as well. Yeah, we're all a little more sassy. That's what I would say. That's number one.

You bring the SaaS to SaaS? We got to bring the SaaS to sassy, you know, and then— I've always been a sassy guy.

And then number 2 is, look, the market is rerated. It's not a mystery. Everybody knows, you know, you guys have been talking about it for a while. I've been living it. So the market, software market's rerated. It happens every now and then. There are cycles. You know, I've been doing Salesforce for 27 years, enterprise software for 40, and the market's rerated. So you mentioned HubSpot, they're trading at 2 times sales. I've never seen that before. They just had a great quarter. We saw a lot of great quarters. I looked at the top 10 major enterprise software companies. They all had great quarters and they're all trading at 2 times sales. So why? Because of everything you just said. There's like, you know, hypnosis around AI and, you know, we haven't seen it show up in the numbers yet. If it shows up in the numbers, maybe people will be right. Right now, all we know is there's still a lot of enterprise software being sold in the world.

So you've been through this. It's not your first time.

This is not my first SaaSpocalypse. I mean, I remember the SaaSpocalypse of 2020 when COVID happened and all of it, you know, everything collapsed. There was the great SaaSpocalypse.

What's your strategy?

2016. What's that?

In all sincerity, what's your strategy and how do you deal with, you know, your internal team? Obviously they are compensated through, you know, stock and this is headwind and you have competition for employees from OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. So how do you deal with rallying the troops, and then how do you develop a strategy?

Well, you're right. I mean, it's a lot easier to be a private company right now where you don't have to be rationalized by the public markets. If you're in the public markets and you get re-rated, that's the reality of being in the public markets. And I think that for what I tell my employees, what I just told my employees, is look, you can't get drunk on the stock price. If you are like focused on today all the time, and that is how you're getting, you know, your emotional state, it is not going to work for you. You have to find a different anchor. So I try not to pay really a lot of attention to it. I'm focused on my customer success. How's our revenue? Look, we'll do over $46 billion this year, more than $16 billion in cash flow. We have more than 83,000 employees. These are the things that I'm focused on. What is the level of customer success that we're delivering? That's a really important— I can't control the stock price. There's nothing I can do. And for our employees, they can't control it either. They need to believe in the company and the quality of the success they're delivering to customers in the long term.

And then you look at the market, you look at these other companies, not just us, they're doing great. And I mean, I saw some great numbers, but it doesn't really matter. The market's rerated.

Well, you've got all that free cash flow. You've been great at acquisitions. So I'm sure you're—

I've bought some great companies, by the way.

Cheaper.

I like that.

Yeah. Chamath, what's your take on this? You've been pretty critical of the SaaS space in previous episodes, pointing out, hey, how durable are these revenues? So what's your take?

I think the low end of the market is basically finished. I think there, there is no safe space. I think the high end of the market where Marc operates, where the large monoliths operate is quite safe. And the tell was this week, the deployment company deal basically shows you what OpenAI is running into. So you have to put in $4 billion, you get all of these folks, you gave them a 17.5% preferred guaranteed return. For what? Essentially to stand up a competitor to Ernst Young, Andersen, Deloitte, PwC, Cognizant, et cetera. If you just look at that, that doesn't actually mathematically make that much sense if you look at what those companies are actually trading at. But why is OpenAI doing this? I think why is because at the high end of the market where all the action is, what people are finding is, hey, hold on a second, this is a lot harder than we thought. It's not like boop, boop, boop, put in a prompt and beep, bap, boop, it all works.

It's not how it works.

I think we're a little oversold. Now I think this consolidation and the rerating can happen in the opposite direction. What is the opposite trade? The opposite trade is who has constructive net dollar retention, who has negative churn that's been really predictable, which is a way of saying who has the best relationships, meaning they're inside the CXOs and the C-suite. They have relationships with the CEOs and they're trusted and they've been around for 20 years. Those guys I think are positioned to crush because eventually, Jason, the next trade that has to happen is when the public markets become a little bit less breathless about AI and they ask one simple question. Okay guys, you've spent $3 trillion in the last 4 years. What is the ROI of these tokens? What's going to happen is they're going to have to go to guys like Mark and other people and say, "Please sell my tokens." That's the next shoe to drop. If you had to ask me, I think you're going to see these revenues, which are way out of whack, like the multiples on revenue, multiples on assets, multiples of— they're not even multiples of EBITDA yet.

Those will come way back down. I think these go back up and you'll find a balance.

Yeah. You've initiated what could only be described as an unprecedented massive stock buyback, Mark, $50 billion.

I think it's the one of the largest in history. Yeah, we were, you know, we, we want to buy back as much as we can. And I would just say that, you know, look, at a high level, look, there's awesome new capabilities. Like, these coding agents are awesome. Anthropic is awesome. Like, I am going to probably used $300 million of Anthropic this year at Salesforce coding. Everything's going to be cheaper to make. It's more efficient. I can do things that I just could not do before. I can go faster than ever before. I can implement my software and sell it at the same time. I've never been able to do that before. I can break through obstacles that I've had, you know, just by focusing because I have coding agents and humans together working together. Today, I have humans, agents, and headless platforms all interoperating, never before. So the opportunity for my own company and the efficiency that I have in my own company in service and support, in distribution, in marketing across the board is unprecedented. What I can do for our customers, unprecedented. And, you know, to that point, my gosh, have you seen Anthropic?

I mean, it is a rocket ship. That will not stop because you can use this product to do these incredible, amazing things. And then, and complement it with platforms like ours. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's impossible to describe what we're gonna be able to do for customers. So it's gonna be awesome.

And never waste a crisis. You've been super focused on the efficiency of the company, headcount, share buybacks, and I'm guessing you're looking at M&A. So it's not your first time.

Oh, we just finished up one of our biggest deals ever, Informatica. I think it was $8 or $9 billion. It's been awesome because none of this stuff works if you don't have context. You know, the AI is very probabilistic. That is, it can kind of figure things out, but it needs to be grounded in real data and it needs to have that semantic layer. That means it needs to be locked down into the truth, into a single source of truth. Source of truth, or it just cannot work well. And so our customers want more harmonized data, federated data, integrated data. So we bought Informatica. Our customers want our apps to use those large language models to be able to provide not just automation to their employees, but also to their agents, just like we just said. So like if you call 1-800-NO-Software right now, for the first time in 27 years, you talk to AgentForce. Hey, AgentForce, what's happening? But then after it authenticates you and you get on the system and it doesn't know who you are, then boom, it'll auto-escalate you to a human being who says, oh, I can see everything you've been doing.

Oh yeah, you just need to resolve this, this, and that. And so that trinity of the phone, the web, and the human being are all together. It's all made possible by this AI. We just could never do that before. That is Awesome.

Was it controversial, Mark, to make Slack headless? Was that a big decision or was everybody mostly on board with that?

Well, we were the first to— the way that our platform is architected, and Chamath, you know it so well because your coding agents and the company you're building can run right on top of it and build awesome stuff also. So number one is we were the first with an XML API, a SOAP API, a REST API, Now, a CLI API, MCP API, we always wanted to have a platform that had every API possible. And our apps are not hardcoded where we had to cut the top off of 'em. They've always be embedded inside our platform. So now we can stream our apps out through a new API called AXL, and I can manifest it into any large language model or device or anything. And it just works better, actually.

I think that, you know, when Jack Dorsey wrote that memo, J-Cal, and part of what he said is he, he's gonna try to run his company by building a world model.

Yes.

My initial thought was, well, where is the context mark? What you said before, where's the semantic understanding to create a world model? And a lot of it for a lot of companies is actually in Slack.

It's in Slack and email. Yeah, those two places.

Yeah.

I showed you that Slack bot, Jason. I mean, the thing is, you're all, because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs, all your channels, we're reading that now through the AI and we can tell you more about your business than you know because Slackbot is reading stuff that, you know, nobody knew what was happening. And like, I'm using that myself, but I can then connect it into other things. So I have the ability to go into Salesforce and Google and everything. And so when I'm on Slackbot, I can ask it any question about my company. What are my top 5 deals? What am— Do what are my employees upset about? What are the top 3 things I need to focus on? And then boom, I get the information because it has the data.

I think you should really look at making Slack more open and cheaper and getting more of that context because there are limitations in terms of getting your data out based on like which plan you're on. It's just too convoluted. But once I upgraded to the higher plan and, you know, it's whatever, $6, $12, $18K, for our small company, I was able to get more and more context to my OpenClaw, Plexity Computer, and Claude. We, and we're testing all of those. And today I wrote literally before I got on the show, a new prompt that is every 2 hours in our Slack, tell me what decisions are being made, who's making those decisions, um, and what you would handicap those decisions if you were my chief of staff, if you were a CEO, or if you were a board member. And I created personas to now evaluate decision-making going on. Just—

I have to show you the new version of Slack. You're gonna love it, Jason. And you know that OpenAI and Anthropic and every AI company is standardized on Slack.

Yes.

And by the way, and our core sales cloud and service clouds as well. So I gotta show you what we're doing.

It's so neat.

Yeah, no, no, I'll sit with the team.

So cool and so fun.

What's your advice to, let's say you were running a software company that was like before the AI wave and you're private, There's a bunch of these companies that were supposed to go public, didn't go public. What should they do? What do those boards do? What does the CEO—

Here's some Kleenex for them for all their tears. I mean, I talk to these CEOs, they're crying, "What's my market cap? I'm not getting paid for my work." Guys, grow up. That's what I love about the public markets, they rationalize everything all the time. So great, be in the public markets. You want to be in a private market, your valuation is fantasyland until somebody's actually going to pay you. So I just tell them, hey, you gotta focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, focus on your innovation. How are you gonna add value to your customers? That's what's really truly important.

Freeberg, any thoughts from you?

We're doing a big Salesforce implementation at Ohalo. And I, I would say that one of my observations over the last 6 months, cuz we've talked a lot about using these generative tools is we've kind of dropped all the vertical software, but we're doubling down our investment in horizontal tools. So like we're investing heavily in these platform capabilities that then we're able to build apps and workflows on top of them that are specific to our business rather than try and buy an off-the-shelf app or workflow tool. So I think that there's kind of a really interesting moment right now where we talked about this last time. You could kind of discern between founder-led and non-founder-led. Enterprise software. I also think that there's this kind of vertical horizontal shift where they're kind of trading the same right now, but you could probably break them. You can break that trade. So I think there's probably a good arbitrage there.

All right. I think everyone who wants to sell those potato seeds, you know, it's going to need some tools to sell them. But the thing that's kind of cool is, you know, we have 15,000 salespeople now, so they're out there selling these products like Slack and I'll sell into David and so forth. But here's the thing that's interesting. In the last 27 years, we calculated somewhere between 20 to 30 million people we didn't call back. We did not call them back because we didn't have the people to do it. So just this week, I called back 50,000 people, you know, just through agents so I can qualify. I just bought a company called Qualified so I can qualify the agents, call people back, the BDR, the SDR function. I can go outbound. I can do things I could never do before. That is made possible by this AI automation. Linking it then to the apps, you can go to another level.

Yeah.

Okay, breaking news. I wanna get everybody's take on this. OpenAI in a breaking news story is considering suing Apple over their ChatGPT partnership. As we all know, 2 years ago, Apple and OpenAI announced ChatGPT would integrate into Siri, iOS, macOS, But according to Bloomberg, the deal has gone so poorly for OpenAI that they might sue Apple for breach of contract. Here are OpenAI's gripes. Apple ChatGPT integration within Siri requires users to specifically say ChatGPT to get results. We probably all experienced this if we haven't given up on Siri, which is the worst personal assistant ever created. Uh, Apple hasn't— it's disgraciado to the highest level. Gracias with this product. How do you get there first and you remain worst? Apple hasn't promoted the integration at all, and users are still overwhelmingly going to the standalone ChatGPT app or others. OpenAI expected billions of subscription revenue from the deal, and it hasn't come to fruition. According to Bloomberg, Apple's side of the story is, hey, they have concerns about OpenAI's privacy practices. Maybe they don't trust the guy in charge over there, which was a recurring theme in the lawsuit. And they're annoyed that OpenAI— and here is the palace intrigue— they're upset that OpenAI is building hardware to compete with Apple and that they recruited their design guru, Jony Ive.

Mark Benioff, you know the players. What is going on here?

Yeah. And it's, you gotta upskill.

Do you trust Sam Altman and OpenAI?

I love him, but let's just upscale this conversation just one second. Listen, what has happened? What happened is we have these LLMs, they starting to come out. Every company's kind of chosen a slightly different path. You had Elon, he went out, he had Grok, and he kind of started building these companions and sex sex bots and all this kind of stuff going on. And that was a huge focus of his, the sex bot focus. Then you kind of had OpenAI and they were doing the Sora video thing and they're also doing ad networks and crazy stuff like that. Then you had Gemini and they had the Nano Banana. And then finally you've got Anthropic and they go, we don't know about those sex bots and we don't know about Nano Banana, but we're gonna do coding agents. And it turned out Anthropic was right. And all of a sudden the rocket ship took off and now everybody's like, whoa, where did Anthropic go? Oh, whoa, they're way up there. And then they're all like, we're all gonna do coding agents too. And now they're all resetting and hitting their buttons and going, coding agents, everybody focus, focus, kill Sarah, kill this, get rid of that, sex bots off, you know, cursor on.

Yeah. And that's where we are right now. And so everybody, look, this is what's cool about right now is that everybody, it's such a dynamic moment in our industry. It's so exciting that people have to pivot and you have to be ready to focus and refocus and constantly ask the question, like, what do you want right now? And everyone is changing what they really want. And if you looked at where everybody was a year ago and where they are now, they're in a totally different place. 'Cause we all know that when Anthropic 4.6 hit, Boom, everyone could code in their companies. And before that, they really couldn't. It was a little bit of a productivity improvement, but not as much as we wanted. Now everybody sees this and goes, wow, this is unbelievable. We're even working on technology inside Slack to make it easier for everybody to code. So I think it's gonna be really—

Breaking news, breaking news there.

You're gonna see some cool stuff with Slack and code. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but There's no question that we are in a new moment in coding. I mean, Chamath's got a whole company around it. A lot of people have companies around it. There's gonna be, before coding was all about humans and like, that's where I started. I was 15 years old, Burlingame High School, hands on keyboard, writing video games, you know, BASIC, 68000, 6502, you know, no, no, now it's like, How's that changed your org?

Is it the product manager, the developer, or the UX designer who's now the creator, or did it all blend into one?

It's all blended together.

And who wins? Who wins, Mark?

It's all blended together. And by the way, to Mark's point, the hands-on keyboard thing, most of our engineers just speak. And so one of our guys just has a foot-operated thing and it just like— Oh, that's all they do. Plus it's all talking. Pedal plus WhisperFlow and talking. There is no hands on keyboard anymore.

All right, so let's get back to this story here.

We're going for DolphinFlow at Salesforce. Dolphins on keyboards.

Yeah, mahalo for you. Oh, hello, um, Freeberg. Two questions. One, now that Sam has shut down the sex bots, how are you filling that void? And then number two, uh, thank you, German. And number 2, what's your take on the strained relationship here between OpenAI and the world, and specifically the Apple world?

I don't know what to tell you.

This—

there doesn't seem to be a lot of long-term partnerships with OpenAI.

That's a very, uh, generous way to say it. What should Apple do? Should they just go back to the loving arms of Google where they made $100 billion being partners with them on the search default, your alma mater?

I don't know what to tell— I mean, look, at the end of the day I think Google has a real opportunity to integrate a Gemini assistant into all of your personal information in Gemini and Calendar, your Google Drive, your Google Photos, where all of your personal information sits. It can become your, your point of calendaring, your point of asking it questions about your personal life. Hey, when did I email this person, et cetera. And in the enterprise context, I think that's also up for grabs with G Suite. And so Google has a real chance to kind of own that assistant interface. Maybe Salesforce does too, Mark. Apple obviously has an embedded install piece. How many people are using Apple services for doing all of their mail, for calendaring, for storing their information? I think a good number do.

Oh yeah.

Um, and so, yeah, so that may end up becoming kind of the way that the world silos out is like you'll have an assistant, but the assistant, for it to be truly useful to you individually, it has to have access to all of your information, whether it's in an enterprise context or a personal context. Apple is probably gonna need to either build their own or white label with a partner. Could be Anthropic, could be someone else.

Yeah.

To get this to really work. But, but they're gonna be up against a formidable competitor is my point. 'Cause I think Google Assistant is gonna end up be being kind of a real kickass product once they get this flywheel going.

Apple has the clearest path to becoming, you know, a top 2 or 3 player in AI simply by buying something like Perplexity or Mistral or, or, or some AI lab. And then using their hardware footprint, which is extraordinary. I just got this MacBook with 48 gigs of RAM on it with an M5. It is unbelievable. And the new ones with the, the Studio coming out are going to have a terabyte of RAM. They are going to have a clear path to maintaining your privacy, running local models, and that's going to solve people's problems. It's going to be very easy to index all your images without giving the data. To OpenAI, which nobody trusts, or giving it to Gemini. And that's, I think, a big part of why they picked the current CEO is because he's an engineer and hardware-based. I think the future of this is going to be local models running on extraordinary desktop hardware. And if you have employees on this level of hardware running these models local, like I have started to do, they become 10 times more valuable than the employees not running it. I think Apple's my choice for the next year.

I'm not a huge believer in these local models, and the only, the only reason why is I think you want persistence. You have multiple devices, you have multiple persona, you're using a web browser in one instance, you're using a different computer at home in the other. And the idea that you don't have persistence that follows you around in 2026, I think is a breaking feature. So I think you're not gonna lug around a 5-pound MacBook Pro everywhere you go so that you can get knowledge. Oh wait, you're asking— oh wait, I got a diagnosis from my doctor. Hold on a second. I don't think that's—

you're right.

I think you're both right. You're both right.

The game on the field though is you will, uh, be able to use iCloud for this as well. So it's going to be, you know, um, effortlessly—

so, well, look, give me your opinion on this. I think the thing that you're assuming is that these form factors don't need to change, and I just wonder like, don't we have an iPhone moment that we're just all going to be surprised by, where somebody shows up and they're like, this thing, and you're like, oh my God, that's the thing. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, there is a—

yeah, that, that's— I—

there's enough ingredients here where somebody's going to cook something up. And then you have to think about, Jason, the sunk cost of, like, you know, look, Apple is incredible, but that's the product of 40 years, 30 years of meticulous process optimization. What do you do if the form factor is totally different and the nature of the device is different? How do you pivot that organization?

You're hitting on something very important and it dovetails with another story on the docket. Mira Murati released Thinking Machines' new real-time world.

That was impressive.

This is super impressive. Super impressive. Apple, at the same time, has patented putting cameras into your AirPods. So you're right. And then I use this plot pin, I've talked about it before. These persistent hardware devices, the watch, the earpieces, are going to know your entire reality. They're going to monitor your entire desktop. And this is going to lead to a use of tokens that would be 1,000 times what user— business users are currently using. Because the way Mira's— and we should have her on the pod or at one of our events— the way her model works, Friedberg, is it's watching your desktop, it's listening to all the voices, and then it's watching your webcam all at the same time. And every 200 milliseconds, it's uploading it to two different models. One is deep thinking and looking backwards, you know, at a maybe a 30-second clip, and the other one's in real time. That will 1,000x the need for tokens if people are doing this for 8 hours a day, because it's not the turn-based, here's my latest prompt, here's my question.

I got a response.

It's in real time, always querying an LLM, which is gonna require a hardware upgrade to the average desktop. Marc Benioff, what are your thoughts on this brave new world?

It's one small step for man, one giant leap towards AGI. I think that you said it really well. I mean, we've been so kind of think the LLM is the be-all end-all, we're gonna go to AGI. I don't really understand how large language models, which are only about language and words, and we know how it works, it's one word, one word, therefore the next word is this, is going to get us to where we want to go to, which is Minority Report or all the science fiction movies that we've seen. But what we saw in, and I think Jason, you'd really articulated that super well, by the way, multisensory models. And multisensory models, well, here's a good one. Oh yeah, I'm a multisensory model in a biological computer. I'm a multisensory model. I've got these eyes, ears, mouth, you know, work sometimes, some brain, heart, whatever, and some other things going on too that I don't even understand. And it's all running in this biological computer. I'm not exactly a large language model, though I do have one sometimes. So I would say that multisensory models are the next big wave for AI. And then, but we're still not at AGI at that point.

But those demos, like the demo of that model, that was pretty— everyone should see, like, that was pretty awesome. And then I think we can kind of say, hmm, where are we now on this, on the path? But I think every model company is kind of go, hold on, pivot, you know, again, pivot, right? Say pivot. Everybody's pivoting and you're going to have to pick your poison. And where are you going next? And you can't do everything. You can't do everything.

You said you were spending $300 million on tokens with Anthropic. Now imagine what this would do to an average employee if they needed 1,000 times the tokens they have now. So instead of spending $150K in tokens, you got to spend $100 million.

But you have some— I don't think that's true. I think we're getting brainwashed on that. Okay, so I think that's a mistake to think that way. See, I think we are wasting a lot of these tokens. So I'm like coding— here's my— I think I can convince you this. So here's a— here we're using $300 million of Anthropic this year, and we're coding, we're coding, we're coding, right? The vast majority of those tokens don't need to go to Anthropic. There needs to be some intermediary layer that's saying, okay, that one has to go to Anthropic, but these ones can handle by smaller models.

You need a maestro that can route it to the most affordable for the job.

No, we're like, it's such an early moment. You know, it's an early moment. And to your— and I want to connect back to what you said before, which was brilliant, Jason, which was the importance of the edge because the edge and the cloud are going to come together. Okay. And yes, you're going to have more distributed intelligence. It's going to work together. That's going to make a ton of sense what you said. What Chamath said was also completely right. You were both right. Then you combine it to this idea. Let's put it together where we're going. Yes, we're going to have more distributed intelligence. We're going to have intelligence on the edge. We're going to have multisensory models. And yes, you're going to do coding and it's going to be more efficient though. So to think that it's going to be always so expensive, that is just the moment of time that we're at right now. And I think there's going to be a hot new company that's going to come along and say this: I'm going to sit between you and Anthropic and OpenAI, and I'm going to make sure that they only— you only need their tokens when you actually need them.

And that is not really where we are right now.

Yeah.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Like, totally.

You're like, uh, it's like, oh, I need a shower. And okay, great, all the water. No, no, no, I just need some water. I don't need a lot of the water.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right, listen, we, uh, have two final topics here. We could talk about Anthropic unrolling the dark SPVs and the impact that has on the market, or we can go to everybody's favorite science corner.

I'll do both. Just do a quick, uh, around the, around the neighborhood.

Yeah. Okay, lightning round on, uh, we'll do SPVs last. Friedberg, what do you got in science corner? Everybody, all this, all the Friedberg fans are just distraught when we skip it.

So let's give it a good one. Mark, do you like Science Corner? No, you do.

I do.

Come on.

Yeah, only if it's about the oceans.

Mark is the greatest salesman in Silicon Valley. He loves it all and he wants to hear more.

Mark, how did you learn sales?

How do we become half as good as you?

I'm not a good sale— I'm like a, I'm a geek.

You are, but you know how to like it.

A Tony Robbins seminar, let's go. Okay, walk over the coast together. Let's roll.

Going to Tony Put out the coals, we're walking across them.

Nick, let's pull up the first chart. This science corner is about the dreaded El Niño season that is coming up. And so this is a forecast for sea surface temperature anomalies. And basically what this means is that the ocean at this point has heated up so much that there's now a forecast on ocean temperatures that are going to exceed anything we have seen in recent history. So we're kind of looking at temperatures that might be 4 degrees above normal. That doesn't sound like a lot, but let's just look at this image. That top image is the sea surface temperature anomaly. That means how different the sea surface or the ocean temperatures are. Why does that matter? And this is compared to 1877 when we had the biggest El Niño year ever. And I'll explain what that means in a moment. But why does this all matter? The reason is the oceans are the battery of weather. What happens at one part of the year is that the oceans absorb heat energy and absorb, absorb, absorb, gets hotter and hotter and hotter. And then that heat energy is released into the atmosphere. And then the atmosphere drives the weather events that happen all over the world.

And it becomes somewhat predictable that you can estimate what the weather over the next year is going to be like based on how the temperatures are sitting in the ocean today. And at this point, there is so much excess energy stored up in the oceans. I'll give you guys a statistic. It's about 11 million terawatt-hours. The whole planet Earth uses 25,000 terawatt-hours in a year. So 11 million extra terawatt-hours of energy is currently stored up. That's 500 years worth of human energy in this ocean. And over the next few months, that energy is going to be released into the atmosphere, and that will absolutely 99% confidence that will make the upcoming year the hottest year on record by far that humans have ever experienced, or at least that we've experienced in recent history where we didn't have data going, going back a long time. It changes the trade winds, which changes how a lot of the weather evolves from a normal season. It changes the moisture in the atmosphere in certain parts of the world. And I'll just give you some highlights of what this means over the coming year. There will be major atmospheric river events where you just get water dumped on you in the Southwest, in California, in the Gulf Coast.

You'll have very low snowfall and very high heat waves in the northern part of the US going up to Canada. You guys remember all those fires a couple years ago in Canada, interior regions of the US, like in Phoenix and, and so on. They're already seeing temperatures at 106 degrees in May. A Super El Niño, like is forecasted for this year, could extend that duration of these heat domes. Which could create temperatures that we've never seen in those areas. Southern Argentina, Chile, Brazil could see record-shattering heat waves. And this is where things start to get a little nasty, because when that happens, the crops start to fail. And in many parts of the world— Brazil, India, Australia— these are critical, uh, local consumption for large populations, but also major ag export markets. So if Brazil's crop fails, if Australia's wheat crop fails. Australia's wheat crop goes to places like Indonesia and the Philippines. Hundreds of millions of people depend on that, that wheat crop. Hundreds of millions of people depend on the exports out of Brazil. Brazil's the world's largest ag exporter. And the scariest one of all is if the monsoons fail, which is now a very high probability event in India.

150 million farmers in India that depend on their agricultural output, or they don't make any money, they can't survive. And 1.5 billion people that depend on that food. So the importance of this El Niño event goes beyond just like an interesting weather anecdote. But if you think about the second and third-order effects of this over the next year, you could see energy prices spiking and electricity spiking and the grid failing in parts of the Southwest, commodity prices spiking all over the world. And then you would see places like, uh, India, the Philippines, Vietnam starting to face some sort of unrest if there isn't enough food supply that's coming into those markets. And then the question in India is a really nasty one because there isn't a really good solution. India and markets like it that are significantly dependent, uh, on having their monsoon event, but also are currently facing a shortage of nitrogen-based fertilizer because of the crisis with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, which we've talked about as a double whammy. So over the next year in South Asia, you could see a calorie deficit and a major kind of economic crisis that starts to emerge.

So this El Niño event, I just wanted to kind of bring it up as an interesting science corner because the data now seems pretty confirmed that over the next few months we're going to have this record-breaking El Niño, and these are the sorts of consequences that will play out over the next year.

This is fucking scary. Goddamn. What do you do about the food problem? That's a big problem.

That's a big problem. And this is the commodity market.

Sorry, did this happen the last time we had an El Niño?

Yes. So when we have El Niños, there's a severity of these sorts of events happening.

No, I mean, did we have a food shortage problem in the last El Niño?

Oh yeah. When we have El Niños, there's food shortages that come out of Australia, Brazil. You see these events. That's a regular part of the thing. The problem this year is the index is so off the charts. It is so far beyond anything we've seen, and it's correlated obviously with the severity that it triggers a crisis that may be, you know, really difficult to manage in a lot of places. So the US is a net ag exporter. So from a US perspective, our big issues to worry about are the fire season. By the way, this does decrease Atlantic hurricanes. You're going to have fewer hurricanes this year in the, in the South. But, you know, you have these kind of major storm events that happen in California, the heat waves, electricity prices. We're probably more stable than other parts of the world. But think about the Brazil, the ag export market is such a significant part of the economy and Brazil has a debt problem. That this could end up becoming an economic problem in some parts of the world, including Brazil. So the commodity markets are trading this El Niño event pretty actively right now.

It's become kind of a focal area for a lot of folks in commodity markets.

Can your super seeds help or no?

That's a longer-term solution. But I mean, look, we're like, at the end of the day, having— it's actually a good point, but having genetics, crop genetics that can adapt to a more rapidly changing climate is going to be critical over the next couple of decades.

Uh, that's a big kind of macro for another part of this, Friedberg, that as certain places heat up, they actually become viable places to put crops, i.e., Canada or the northern part of the United States. So we're seeing the actual places you can grow certain crops, independent of genetic modification, is expanding. In other words, farmland's expanding because of global warming.

Right. So we increasingly grow soybeans in Canada. That was not the case, uh, two decades ago through both plant breeding where we've made the genetics adapt, but also the warmer temperature, the shorter winters and whatnot. They've been able to grow that, that crop further north. But if you guys go back a couple of years, there were major heat waves and droughts in Australia.

Huge fires.

Yeah.

Huge fires. But remember that wheat goes to Indonesia. It goes to Vietnam. It goes to these countries with hundreds of millions of people dependent on it. And then they got to go scramble and find it elsewhere. Now, on a global basis, there's always a, a bit of a give and a take. But in a year like this, when you have this much energy pumped into the atmosphere, you may not have the give and the take, and that's where things start to buckle.

All right.

So, uh, yeah, it's just like an early warning sign. I know I've given food warnings, food crisis warnings twice before on the show.

You gave a really good one for Ukraine 4 years ago, and it turned out that that warning resulted in a negotiation to allow wheat to flow out of Ukraine that Russia, Ukraine, and other folks made a specific carve-out in their war to make sure that famine didn't spread.

Yeah, and the fertilizer export was negotiated at the start of the war as well, which was critical. Yeah, uh, for sure.

But I think you played a role in raising awareness for that, so I'll give you credit there, Freeberg. Mark, uh, thanks for coming on the program. Sorry that, uh, at the end of the program we all want to commit seppuku here, but you know, we have Dr. Doom and he, uh, he always loves to end the show. There he is.

Why don't we wrap this up with an upbeat Do you want to wrap with an upbeat anthropic story or something?

Avengers: Doomsday, starring David Friedberg, coming to the Marvel franchise in December. Yes, you thought Robert Downey Jr. was playing him. It's actually Friedberg. Here's your meme. It's not Mark Benioff's first time here in the Saspocalypse. Oh no.

There it is.

First time.

Oh, come on.

He's like, I've been through this before, boys. I'm buying my stock back.

Somebody cut that rope.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, listen, uh, I'll just lightning round this one. And Propik has had enough of the shenanigans of the multi-tiered, multi-layered SPVs being sold to dentists for 10% load-in fees. I think we all knew this day was coming since it's becoming the Wild West. They called out specific platforms and they said we're going to negate them. Chamath, tempest in a teapot, or long overdue love punishment for bad actors.

Love. Mark said it right. All these companies should go public and get evaluation and, and focus on the higher order bit. And all of these ticky-tacky mechanisms that people can use to stay private longer need to get a bullet put in its head. And these SPVs are the worst, the layered SPVs on SPVs on SPVs. By the way, I, and I will guarantee you this, Once SpaceX goes public, once Anthropic goes public, once OpenAI goes public, you're going to see a litany of these lawsuits back and forth between the purveyors of these SPVs. They should not be allowed. They should be all negated if possible. You can't— now you can't unbreak the egg, so I guess you just have to call it what it is. I hope every company adopts this, and I hope as a result these companies go public sooner and they rationalize their equity structure faster. I think it's the right thing to do. So I like the fact that Anthropic is—

Just say it, Chamath. Disgraciado.

Well, it's not disgraciado. I just think that you are going to have a lot of— Yeah. Well, you're going to have a lot of people that are going to be very upset once this SpaceX thing comes out because inevitably, because it happened in Uber, somebody gets screwed in a layered SPV somewhere that they didn't know and they're going to be like, "What happened?" Read the fine print.

You're getting double carry and you paid 10% on the load-in fee and you paid a price 10% over what the last round was. So it's a recipe for disaster. The fine—

recipe for disaster.

Recipe for disaster. Hey, Mark, great job. Thanks so much.

Great to be with you.

Yeah, come back. Yeah, that was great time. You were great. Hey, uh, you're Pete. There's a— we have a fan question here. This is a fan question that came in written by your PR department. They want to know, when you do your charity work, uh, or your innovation as a founder, are you more You know, at this stage in your career, you're known for both of these things. Are you more Steve Jobs or more Lorraine Powell right now? What— your PR department worked very, very deeply on that question.

They know the answer.

They fainted.

Yeah. The best decision I ever made. The best. Okay. When I started Salesforce, we put 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit, and 1% of all of our employees' time into a foundation. Today we've done more than 10 million hours of volunteerism. We've given away more than a $1 billion in grants.

Hmm.

And we run over 50,000 nonprofits for free on our platform. That's just Salesforce. Every, I, every company should do this. It's amazing. pledge1percent.org. That's my advertisement for the show. Everybody should jump on the 1-1-1 platform. Best decision I ever made 27 years ago, irrespective of, I've obviously done a huge amount of personal philanthropy too. 5 hospitals.

You just did one really.

All those things.

You did one that was really, I think, personal. Uh, Susan Wojcicki tragically died of cancer and major—

You're gonna get me crying. Let's not go there. This is not— You're talking about my best friend. Bestie. My bestie.

She was a special person, huh?

She's a star.

The best. She was the best.

Just, I mean, I'm not kidding.

You're—

I'm not kidding. Tell the audience what was so unique about Susan. Tell them what you're— It's a good time to do a remembrance.

She— this was one of the great people on the planet. Incredible woman, mother of 5 amazing children, um, and 2 amazing sisters. Great family. Uh, everybody knows Anne, her sister, her sister Janet at UCSF. I'm sorry, my eyes are tearing up. I'll just tell you that, you know, she contracted a very rare form of cancer, passed away too young. A couple years ago now, um, and she was on our board. She was one of the great people of all time. I'm so grateful that her family is focusing on building a new foundation to go after this rare cancer. Uh, we're backing it. I think everybody should. Um, look, everyone should try to be a Susan. She was one of the absolute greats. And, uh, I have an altar in my office. When you come to see me, you'll see what the photos of her and me and I think about her every single day, and my heart just stays with her, her husband Dennis, all the children, the sisters, the whole Wojcicki family. Amazing. And one of the great institutions in Silicon Valley. We're lucky to have the whole family.

Yeah, she was fantastic.

Well said.

All right, well said. Rest in peace, Susan Wojcicki.

Thank you.

All right, we'll see you all next time on the—

Love you, boys—

podcast.

Love you, boys. See you guys. Aloha.

Thanks for— bye-bye.