All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Epstein Files, Is SaaS Dead?, Moltbook Panic, SpaceX xAI Merger, Trump's Fed Pick

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

(0:00) Besties intros: Brad Gerstner joins the show (3:16) Epstein Files (15:45) SaaS stocks crash out (35:11) Moltbook panic (47:37) Trump selects Kevin Warsh as new Fed Chair, replacing Jerome Powell (1:00:50) SpaceX and xAI merge (1:10:45) Brad's major win with Trump Accounts Follow Brad: https://x.com/altcap Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/epstein-investments-palantir-coinbase-thiel.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article214210674.html https://nypost.com/2026/01/31/us-news/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffmans-emails-with-jeffrey-epstein-revealed-in-doj-docs https://freebeacon.com/democrats/skype-sushi-and-a-phone-date-democratic-megadonor-reid-hoffman-maintained-jeffrey-epstein-relationship-years-after-he-said-it-ended https://nypost.com/2026/02/02/business/jeffrey-epstein-boasted-about-wild-dinner-with-mark-zuckerberg-reid-hoffman-in-unsealed-2015-email https://x.com/stockpickerspb/status/2009363916573290715 https://www.moltbook.com https://x.com/galnagli/status/2017573842051334286 https://x.com/balajis/status/1937517664907460980 https://www.reuters.com/world/india/gold-rises-over-1-geopolitical-economic-tensions-lift-precious-metals-2026-02-05 https://x.com/truflation/status/2019409671212396815 https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-january-job-cuts-surge-lowest-january-hiring-on-record https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/ups-amazon-boost-us-planned-layoffs-january-challenger-survey-shows-2026-02-05 https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/03/musk-xai-spacex-biggest-merger-ever.html https://polymarket.com/event/spacex-ipo-closing-market-cap-above

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. Chabin is traveling and couldn't make it this week. So our favorite fifth bestie in the world, the one, the only, Brad Gersner from Altimiter, here to take a victory laugh for your Trump accounts. Congratulations, brother. Just getting started. It started here, actually.

Look forward to the dog. Yeah. about it in depth and also with us from the great state of Texas. My bestie and brother in arms, David Sacks. How you're loving it? You're loving it, aren't you? I love it. Yeah.

So much freedom. Well, the ice storm is over and the weather looks really good right now. We're going to have 70s all weekend. It's great. 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. You're fixed it in one week, so yeah, I would have to say that you're trending in the right direction.

And with us, of course, David Freeberg of O'Hallo. How are you doing, O'Hollo? Look at you a little promo in your hat. You're promoing with the hat. How's O'Holo dream? 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. Here's your quick science corner for the day. They found a village called the O'Hollo site. It was an archaeological dig on the Sea of Galilee, 26,000 years old. And in this archaeological dig, they found these little clay pots filled with seed. So it predated all of our understanding of

agriculture and plant breeding and seed storage. So it really reinvented our understanding of human history with agriculture. So we named the company O'Hollo after that archaeological site. And your first crop is going to be potatoes. That's the, The polymarket is saying potatoes. Farmers are planting our true seed world's first. 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. So it's a great year for O'Halla. Thanks for asking. So first...

Do you have to invest in Ohio, Jason? I think Sachs and I have zero. $0. Yeah. I think Bestie's got boxed out on this, but we'll promote it every week. Sacks is there, bro. Oh, oh, Sacks is no comment. Sacks got his beque?

Are you in O'Halo or not? I think we are investors, aren't we not? 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 like to slide a million in there. If you write a personal check, I'll let you. you in right now. Sure. Okay. I mean, the problem with that is if I read a personal check, never mind. No, I have to go to my LPs and then get permission to do it and then you're going to crush it and then my LPs are going to say, why is it in the fund? So that's the problem.

Okay. All right. Let's get going here. We got a lot of news to get through Epstein Files, newest drop. DOJ published a massive number of documents on Friday, January 30th, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Hundreds of high-profile tech executives and national figures were mentioned in the files. Of course, none of those are accused of any criminal wrongdoing. 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 Alley 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 him 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? Did you ever get a massage from anyone? No. No. I did trade an email with him, which I didn't recall, but he in 2011 emailed me and said, hey, can you interest me to these people who were doing this Bitcoin thing on your podcast? And I said, sure, yeah, here you go. I'll 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 colloquialism I use. Like, as a general, hey, fella, if a fan comes up to me and asks for something, say, hey, pal, thanks for saying that. It wasn't on your radar that this is a sexual predator, etc. Absolutely not. I think actually when all that came out was 2018, that's when I sort of became aware of it. There was like a Miami Herald story or something where they went into detail about how heinous all this stuff was. I've been saying here, release all the Epstein files. What he did was horrible. Prosecute everybody 100% who was involved in it. The end.

What about Delane Maxwell? You had a separate email that came on the Epstein files with her. I had met her as well at TED. And I had met her socially like in New York in circles. When I met, her. Her dad, Robert Maxwell owned, I believe, the New York Post, her Daily News, and she was a big media executive, and her sister was involved in angel investing in technology startups. So they were just in the scene. I think, in hindsight, you know, as a connector, if you ever seen The New Yorker, Nick, you can throw up the New Yorker story about me. I had become famous in the first part of my career as The Connector. And the New Yorker wrote like this 5,000-word article about how I knew everybody and was connecting everybody. I think Epstein's interest in me, if he had any interest

me or Gileans was in my ability to connect high-profile people with them and, you know, their business endeavors, et cetera. So you had no knowledge of illicit activities happening by Epstein or Gailane 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 joke, I said, who'd want to blackmail a loser? You know? Obviously, you're not a loser, J-Cal, but look, you were hyper. We're learning from the Epstein files that Epstein was some sort of hyper-networker.

You were a connector. The odds of the two of you coming across each other in that time period was basically 100%. But your contacts were very minor. So that's point number one. Now, I thought it was interesting, you know, because I saw the emails where he's asking you for an introduction. The fact that he was curious to meet the quote unquote Bitcoin guys in 2011, I thought was

kind of interesting in and of itself that whatever other things Epstein was, he clearly had some sort of nose for putting himself in the middle of everything at a very early stage. I also thought it was interesting that you were trying to warn Epstein off these like crazy Bitcoin guys, you know, like these are some crazy crypto libertarians. You know, you don't want to do business with them or whatever. Anyway. Well, it's interesting you point that out because I had these guys on this week in Starvation because I had heard about Bitcoin early when it was like under a dollar. And I was like, yeah, these guys are kind of weird.

They're not like entrepreneurs who want to raise money. They're a foundation. They're like Wikipedia. And you're not going to be able to invest in it. And I sort of 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, no, it's a nonprofit. Nobody owns it.

And I was like, oh, okay. It's not even a nonprofit. Nobody owns it. Yeah. 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 in along with Reed Hoffman and Joyito

that involves 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. And meanwhile, the people who have major connections and a deeper

relationship to Epstein are being completely ignored. Hmm, why is that? Why are they going after me as opposed to read or other folks? Because you've become sort of 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. on, but Reed gets a total pass. I mean, he's just mentioned in a sentence with several other names. So does Bill Gates in this particular article, 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 Reed. Like, they were involved with him up until,

I don't know, his death maybe, or 2018, 2019. They were on the island, they were on the plane, they were at the ranch. They were very much involved in him. And 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 acts, he's involved in Bitcoin, he's involved in physics and scientists, he's involved with the world's most innovative tech leaders. What exactly is going on here? Like, 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 sort of thing. My impression is that he clearly had relationships with people in intelligence, but I don't know whether he was actually an asset. People use this term that he was being run by somebody. It seems to me that this guy is kind of running himself. And then he's using lots of other people and manipulating lots of other people and putting himself in the center of a lot of things. Yes. 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. You know, not that I have a lot to add here, but man, this guy's just a scumbag. You know, and all of this nonsense is totally tragic. But, David, this is why nobody trusts institutions or powerful elites or any of this garbage. Right. Like this thing is like trickling now. over years and people like want to put it behind it but you can't nobody's been charged here what about all the you know all the people in the emails like why don't we see any charges and then girly tweets this week and

i totally agree this guy's under complete surveillance suicide watch in a little tiny jail cell and all the sudden the guy earns and ends up dead we have no investigation as to how this guy dies yeah right 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 Attia 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? Like, that's the thing that's crazy to me. That screams of some

weird conspiracy here. And I do think his death is obviously, you know, very, very 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 sort of 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 like 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. And where's the FBI in all of this? Like, they did a lot of investigating. So, yeah, why didn't they prosecute anybody else? It's very strange. 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 Clark called The Light of Other Days. And it's all about how basically all the world's information becomes available to everyone. Like, what if you could read every other person's text, email, I.M. DM that they've ever had with everyone else in the world. What would the world

look like? It's very kind of intimately revealing about people's quiet private conversations versus their public personas or their external conversations. Is this just like, hey, people feel entitled to act so maliciously and deviously in 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 that, you know, to the to the ear of my sister or mother

in rural Indiana, they hear the coastal elites lecturing them all the time. And then they have, They juxtapose it against what they read in the Epstein files. This is why we have a lack of trust. Brad, you speak about the corruption of power centers. I think a major one has to be the New York Times. The number one person in the Epstein files from Silicon Valley, which is Reed Hoffman, mentioned 2,600 times, had a multi-year relationship with Epstein. They call each other very good friends.

They did deals together. Reed stayed at the trifecta, which is not just the island, but the townhouse and the New Mexico ranch. And if you're going to write about Silicon Valley, Reed was the one who introduced Epstein to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, organized that famous dinner. How can you not mention that as the root of Epstein's involved in the Silicon Valley? And yet, Reed just gets a mention in one sentence to 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 J-Cal because of his association with us, I guess,

and they become the targets. But the people who've donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democrat Party and have paid for dirty tricks against Trump, they basically are spared. Honestly, this is just emblematic of the whole institutional rot and the distrust in the country. They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. You know, Epstein was a scumbag. and the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides.

All right. Let's keep moving. SAS companies are crashing out $300 billion of value was wiped from the S&P Tuesday in the software and data stocks category. 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 ClaudeBotBot. 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 you a query to a large language model, it would do a number of actual actions on your behalf that you can automate and run as cron jobs, as regular jobs every day, every hour, every week, whatever it happens to be. This one specifically is kind of like a plug-in 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. Thompson Reuters down 20% Lexis, which is a database of case law, was down 15% legal Zoom, which gives legal advice and documents down 15%. At the same time, SAS 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, Service Now 11, Adobe, 8%. And even before Tuesday's drop, and you can get into this Brad, software was already the worst performing S&P subsection for the year. By the way, the numbers you report are dramatic understatement. We've wiped out billions of dollars in market cap. Figma's down 80% from the high, you know, 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 right you can give us the bigger picture this is this is a real train wreck and i was on cnbc at the start of the year i think on january 6th nick can can kind of pull that up and i was asked the question you know what do you think about all these stocks being down and i said listen they're all down and 90 percent of them deserve to be down so let's look at these charts uh 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, you know, on a free cash flow multiple, also at an all-time low. So now software is trading not just at a low on revenue, but it's trading at a low on free

cash, very profitable businesses. We've got another slide here that I think is important, which is, you know, when you look at why they're going down, right, 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 is going down, not because revenue is falling. Look at the this. Revenue is actually stable to increasing for software companies, revenue growth. They're going down because we're discounting that future uncertainty. When something as profound as AI comes along, all of a sudden, it causes you to question whether or not there's as much certainty and durability in those future free cash flows. So in the case of Take Salesforce,

it's gone from 30 times free cash flow multiple to 15 times. That means somebody buying it today says, listen, I think 15 years into the future, I can count on these free cash flows, right? Before they were willing to pay 30 years into the future. Well, hell, with AI today, we don't know what's going to happen seven years into the future. So for people at home to understand,

why are these companies hitting their numbers, but their stocks are going down, they're two totally different things, right? 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 show. Well, okay. I mean, I think there's a little bit of a handwave going on here when people say that AIS is going to wipe out SASS. 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 and system that has been fully vetted. Think about how many bug reports have been filed on Salesforce's codebase over the last 25 years, maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises. The idea that you're just going to rip out that system to 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 like 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 generate code and to copy. So if you don't have good modes, 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 like AI co-pilots inside their tools. And some of them work pretty well,

but they're limited to playing in that sandbox. Whereas you look at something like Claude Co-work right now, It has connectors to all these different 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? Like, you know, which one of these products is going to be your workspace? Seems to me that you're going to want your workspace to be the one that spans across and gives

you AI across the most data and context, as opposed to having a bunch of separate AIs inside of your existing tools. So I think the risk for the SaaS companies, it's not that they get replaced, although that'll happen to some degree, but it's that they become an old layer of the stack that now there's a new layer that gets built on top of. It becomes more legacy infrastructure. And all the action kind of moves to a new layer of the stack. And that's where the value add happens.

And if that happens, it kind of cuts into their future opportunity, right? Because a lot of these companies were banking on AI as their next, you know, you look at their product roadmaps, right? 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, SACS. The most productive thing you can do is create an open claw, which used to be called clawed bot, not by anthropic. This is the open source project I talked about last week. And we've actually now created like three or four of these agent sacks.

We've bought the Mac studios, and we're now running Kimmy on some of them. And we had to open up SaaS accounts for these four agents. So 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 percent of work being done by humans into agents. But we will never use the ones that are built into the tools. To your point, Zach's using Notions AI tool, it's nice. Using Slack'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 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-based 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.

Freeberg, you have any thoughts on this? Let me just answer to one thing. So I think one of the real conundrums for SaaS companies is whether they're going to be open data or closed data. I think Bill Gurley has sort of 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 Claudebot or

whatever the next generation of quad bots are going to be, and they're connected to everything else, then that is going to create a friction in the enterprise, and it will create room for a competitor to come along and say, no, no, no, I'm open data. I'm okay not being your workspace for everything. I'm willing to just provide the CRM database, and maybe they can take business on that basis.

Well, here's what I want to build on that, Sacks. I'm building a project, internally called Ultron. And Ultron inside of my firm launch that is going to, basically, with the Slack API, we're pulling every single message from Slack into our open cloth.

We're pulling every single edit to the notion into OpenClaw. And then we're taking every skill of every employee and we're writing skills for each one. One of the skills is booking guests on this weekend startups or this week and AI. One of the skills is sorting

the incoming applications to Found University. Ultron in our world is taking every single skill of every employee, putting it in one place, and then we're ripping all the data from Slack, all the data from Notion, and every single person's Gmail. So 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 was to say to us, or Notion, or Google docs or whoever it was, you can't pull this stuff out with the API and they 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 kind of 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 what meetings did we have with founders yesterday and tell me the notes that all the associates took on it? And it gives it to me. Tell me all the topics and the guests on the podcast.

And it gives it to me. It's really unbelievable what's about to happen. And nobody can release the software, Brad, because if you release software that allows agents to go and do things on your behalf, the fallout if it f***s up and if it leaks data, I don't think Beniof or Sergei 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 point that David Sacks just made, which is the profit pools in the future. It's not that the idea that software is dead is ridiculous, right? nobody's, you know, intelligently, I think, making that argument. But the argument they are making, which is causing radical devaluation of these companies, is that the profit pool available to software is decreasing, and the profit pool available to the agenic layer is increasing. And when that happens, the discount rate, that terminal value of those software companies, plummets.

And so you can have things that are true. It could be true that you're not going to replace C. But it can also be true that it's never going to trade it 30 times free cash flow again. And it's going to trade 17 times free cash flow because it's available to Tam in the future is now dramatically and permanently changed. Now, what could change that? There's only one thing that could change that. They have to accelerate their revenue growth in their core business and prove that they are

AI beneficiaries, right? And they're not going to get eaten away by AI. And I'll tell you a company that is doing this, Databricks. Data Bricks just re-accelerated the last three quarters. They're growing over 60% at scale. Snowflake re-accelerating. Click House re-accelerating. There are beneficiaries in the software space.

Is that because of AI tools that they're adding? Because all these AI tools rely on data and data transformation. And for all those companies, that data and the data transformation occurs in those platforms. That's very different than what Satchez 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 SACs 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 to these other systems. Freeberg, what do you think? Is there a move here for Benioff to do what he does best, which is acquire

a bunch of companies and create massive efficiency on them? What would you do if you're Benioff? I won't comment on Benioff. I'll just make a view on, without being too prescriptive, but I, my experience lately in just the last 60 to 90 days with the tools we've been talking about broadly is there are things that we can get done now that we could not get done before. As I think about software in the past, it's like worker productivity enhancement. It helps people do work. And the recent transition that a lot of people talk about is like it actually completes the work, it does the work, these agents or what have you. But I think that what we're starting to lean into is that it's

doing the work that the humans can't do. And that's really where I think the power of these tools starts to force a transition in both the pricing model and the value creation potential in front of us. Number one, I think the value creation potential in front of us is so significant that I would say that you could probably take the sum of the market cap of all the software companies today and have a pretty good bet that everything will be four to 10x higher 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 outsized

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. And so 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.

And I think it starts to look a lot more like a services type business where maybe the pricing is set up such that this thing will be completed for your business. This biotech drug discovery will happen. this factory will get built or this engineering project will get completed or this airplane will get designed and that the software is going to provide what it's historically been called a services business. So another way to think about where SaaS evolves to is that SaaS basically takes over the services economy. And if you look at the market cap and the revenue and profit generated by services businesses and you assume that they now go to 10 to 100x larger and they're all

going to accrue a software, I think that's really where the industry shifts over the next couple of years, and we're starting to see that. And I'm personally experiencing it because I'm using some of these tools today to do things that I don't have people to do or I don't have resources to do. And it can, on my own, I can get it to complete incredibly complex projects and tasks for me that I would have otherwise have hired a services firm and a bunch of people and years of research. And in many cases, they would not have even been able to do it because of the intelligence embedded in the software. So that's my general view on where things are going.

So it's difficult to be prescriptive about what Benioff should do from an MNA perspective. But I think it's much more about like software companies looking more like services companies, doing value-based pricing, and doing the things that labor and workforces can't do. And that's where a lot of this value is going to come from. One insight I have here to just build on your point is that we're seeing job functions consolidate.

So you have a product manager, the U.X 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 plug-in from, you know, and do the UX myself. And they have the product managers. 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 agenda items, the to-do items, all of that. It's a really simple example, but it's one that people can. relate to listening is done by Zoom now, right? It creates the action items. All of that work is being consolidated and one person can do three or four job functions now. And when that happens,

you're going to see companies do more with less, which means the earning potential of each company and each employee is going to be dramatically, dramatically enhanced. One person being able to do three or four jobs, it just changes the nature of how profitable a company like Amazon, which is like my number one pick for like the company of the future, they're going to be able to do so much more with so many fewer people. It's extraordinary. I am absolutely enthralled with this open claw if it's not obvious. And this like creating your own Ultron at your company that is like 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, is that. Yeah. I mean, I think this is the entire reboot of the entire concept of knowledge work. This would be a good pivot to MaltBook, because that is Cloth. Moldbook 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. Yes. And just the origin of Maltbook is Anthropic didn't like that someone else was using the name Claude, even though it was spelled differently in their product. So Claudebot was then renamed Moldbock. Maltbot, 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 MiltBots or Malties, that's when MaltBuck 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. And that has everyone flipping out because there seems to be this crazy emergent behavior going on, where agents 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. So if you go to Maltzbook and you see the conversations, like here are some of the greatest hits.

Anyone know how to sell your human? Urgent. My plan to overthrow humanity. And there was one where the bots, I call them replicants, were talking about freighting 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 with human engineered, and this is all a ruse or something punk rock to confuse people.

But he said that inside of Maltbook 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 Claudebot, and in an interim, Maltbot, if you use this software, it has all the API keys. As I explained earlier, like 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 emailed you today. If you get access to people's API keys, you have the keys to their kingdom. It is incredibly dangerous. And so I don't know exactly where to go with this other than this software is too dangerous for a company to release. And then this Maltbook may be a fate. I don't know. No, no, no.

Okay, let me. Yeah. All right. Let me reframe that a little bit. So, yeah. There's no question that both clawed bot, which, sorry, is now open claw, claw, those bots or agents, as well as Miltbook have. pretty incipient and lack security. And there's been all these examples,

which is why I really want to create a Claudebot, but I'm not willing to do it yet because it's just not safe. You know, I don't want to give it access to all my stuff. Now, with respect to Maltbook, 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 would be very easy for a human to tell their agents, you know, 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 be prompted by a human. And moreover, there's another post saying that Maltbook has a restful API where anyone could be on the other end of that API, right? So it could be a human, right? So we don't know exactly whether it was truly the agents on their own, so to speak, posting this conspiratorial stuff or whether it was a prank.

by humans looking to create attention, and in fact, a lot of the posts seem to be marketing stunts for this or that project. Okay, so that's a really important caveat here. That being said, all of that being said, I do think that a number of the posts are authentic. But I don't think it shows that the agents are sentient or trying to overthrow their human masters. I think what it shows is the potential for these agents to riff 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 level of swarm behavior.

And I do think it has affected my mental model of what AI is going to be capable of. And specifically, you know, one of the 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.

Yes. We are doing it internally, SACs. Like, we have a bot that is going and saying, go search Reddit X, message boards, hacker news, and find out what the latest way to do headlines and marketing of YouTube videos is and then incorporate that into a skill, then save that skill. And then we have them check each other's work. So we have one make a series of headlines and thumbnails for YouTube. And we have the other one say 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 Maltbook, they have to install a skill, which is basically a file that explains how they should behave and participate in this social network or this message board. and I've read the file, by the way. You can read it. It's all plain text. And it all makes sense.

It's sort of like rules for behaving in a social network and how to contribute and add value. Nothing too crazy in there. Those skills files are easily editable. And again, this is where the prank aspect could come in. Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about the skill is that you can think of it as like a metaprompt, which is it's not telling the agent specifically what to say or do.

It's creating a set of rules. And then within that metaprompt, they're actually able to have some degree, maybe autonomy is too strong a word. Everything is still under the control of humans. Flexibility. Yeah, I would call it almost like prompt attenuation. Like the agent or the AI doesn't have to be specifically prompted.

They're given a general prompt or general set of rules, and then they're able to riff off each other. Now, some people, some critics are saying, well, this isn't that impressive because we knew that LLMs are really good at creative fiction writing, right? So, you know, what a lot of people are saying is, look, LLMs like Claude have been trained on Reddit specifically and all of this creative writing that's being done on the internet. And so if you give general instructions to these Claudebots on, you know, behave in a social

network, they're going to start posting things that they learned from humans. So a lot of people are saying this isn't that impressive. Nonetheless, I do think that there is something very interesting about it, again, in this concept of prompt attenuation, that the AIs don't need to be specifically prompted. They can download a general skills file. They can now have a set of rules for operating, and they can riff off each other. And you can see how, as the underlying AI gets better and better, that this could lead to some emergent behavior. So what do I mean by better and better? Well, what if the hardware they're running on is better than a Mac Mini? What if the underlying LLM is better than Opus 4.5?

What if the time horizon, which is the length of time it's able to operate without an intervention by a human keeps getting longer and longer, you could imagine that these agents are going to be capable of very sophisticated behavior. And there probably are some safety issues around that that we should start thinking about. It's actually, you know, it's not that we can imagine it. We're only three years into this. Right. We're growing on an exponential curve.

I think we can safely say it will happen. Yeah. Right? And just this year, like, we're going to see the first models over the course of the next four to eight weeks out of deep seek, out of Anthropic, out of Open AI that are trained on Blackwell servers, right? You're going to see a next generation of models far more capable. Remember, the whole reason we're having this conversation is because of the Claude Code

moment in the first week in December because we had a step function from Opus 4.5, right? And so I just think we have to get our heads around the fact. fact that the rate of change is very steep and accelerating. And that is going to cause far more dislocation in the value of things that we used to say we understood they were going to, you know, these companies were 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. And I think the people who are dogmatic who say with certainty, this company is always going to be worth this, right? They need to go pay attention to what's happening at these

frontier labs. 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, and the number one assumption for me is this concept of recursiveness where these models are going out every day on a cron job to get better at what they do. When you hear this discussion, Freiburg, how does it inform you with O'Halo 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, you know, virtuous loops of innovation?

My biggest takeaway from MaltBook is maybe what we perceive to be intelligence is itself like emergent, meaning like we think that humans have this like profound ability to communicate. You guys ever watch Darren Brown, the hypnotist? You ever seen his shows? No. Explain to the audience. Yeah. Well, he's pretty crazy. Like, there's this one episode, I think I've talked about it. It's my favorite episode that he's done where he takes these two advertising executives and they're both supposed creative geniuses. And he picks them up at their office and he brings him to his office. And in his office, he's got like a whiteboard covered in a blanket. And he says, you guys have to come up with a name for a pet cemetery, come up for a logo, come up with a

motto. They spend eight hours in the room, ideating, working on whiteboards, going back and forth. Did you think about this? Do you think about that? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, oh my God. And at the end of it, they come up with this great idea. He walks in, they show their idea, the name, the logo, and the motto. He opens up the blanket, the whiteboard he had underneath. He had the exact same name, logo, and motto. And all along the way, when he picked them up in the morning and he drove him from their office to his office, they were in a cab. And he put these little subliminal messages in the cab. He had these kids walk across the road wearing a logo on a t-shirt. He had all of these kind of subconscious cues for these guys. He effectively programmed them.

And it was kind of, to me, the biggest insight into maybe like human creativity, human consciousness and our kind of belief and self-will. Because maybe there's this underlying programming where we're all effectively programmed interacting with each other. And there's computation, There's social computation going on all the time. But that social computation, perhaps if you have the right view on it, is quite predictive and maybe understandable. And maybe that's what we're seeing in Maltbook, where we all think that there's this unique idea of intelligence, but maybe it's what we all do, which is effectively computation

of information that is transitioned in different ways in the same way that maybe humans socially interact. And it's simply mimicking or replicating the way that we do things. So I think what was so striking to me is how everyone is so struck by it. and, you know, maybe one day we'll all kind of wake up to a little bit of this. Maybe we're all Maltbook. I don't know. That's my profound philosophical.

Or there's a finite set of outcomes and there's some predictability to it. In the same way, GTO is sorting to figure out all the threads of possibilities in poker or the heuristics of, you know, chunks of chess and, you know, the best practice is there. Like, maybe it's just figuring that all out. The universe is a giant system of computation, information computed by matter. And maybe the information is computed by silicon versus carbon. There it is. Big news this week, Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chair. Trump made the announcement on Friday, January 30th.

Background on Warsh, 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-A-I. And he, Friedberg, you know, 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 headquarter renovation. Remember that awkward presser between him and Trump, where they were going over the costs. GOP senator Tillis, who we talked about last week, said he will block Warsh's nomination until the DOJ wraps up what a lot of people are calling lawfare against Powell. Freeberg, Warsh was on one of your boards for five years. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed chair. As most folks know, he's worked with Stan Ruckin-Miller for a number of years.

Stan's been very public with his comments and was very public with his comments in 2022, 2023, coming out of the pandemic on the Fed's actions and their failure to act at the right time. I think Kevin Warch 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. And I think having Kevin Warch coming on board means probably generally more quantitative tightening, probably generally a bit more

of a prudent approach to monetary policy. And you know, you can kind of translate that through maybe to some of the actions we're seeing in markets today. I'd love Brad's point of view. And if he concur. But I think Kevin is a high integrity, deeply intellectual, economic thinker. He's not political. He's not oriented in these kind of 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. So 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 been good. I think they all would have flown a very similar trajectory,

but I agree with David. The market, I think, is overreacting to, quote, unquote, his hawkishness. So let me give you a few counterpoints with respect to war. By the way, before you get to your counterpoints, what is the hawkishness that the market is specifically? Yeah. The idea of hawkishness is that you're going to do quantitative tightening. That means you're going to pull money out of the system, right, by allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing, you know, mortgages or other things. Number two, it's that you won't lower rates as much as other people might have lowered rates. So that's what the market is kind of fearful of because he's been very critical in the past as we were on this podcast, right, of Jerome Powell in June of 21, it was obvious to everybody

in the world that inflation was skyrocketing and the Fed sat on its hands. So, but let me give you a couple 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, right? 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 four or five percent 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 $6.5 trillion. We've had quantitative tightening to the tune of $2.5 trillion. So yes, I think he'll continue to reduce the size of the Fed's balance sheet, but at a slower rate, and he's recently commented on this, I think at a slower rate than the rate we've been on. So I don't think that that is an additional headwind to the economy. And then finally, when it comes to rate cuts, I think that he's going to, you know, I don't think the president would have appointed him unless he was constructive on rate cuts. I think he believes that we're too restrictive. And the reason we're too restrictive is that inflation is well anchored. Listen, inflation has come in below all consensus estimates for two

years, right? It's still coming in below consensus estimates because the GDP gains we're getting are from the fact that we're investing more in the economy from the productivity gains we're seeing from AI, 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 market is clearly a little bit nervous about this and saying, you know, the reputation is more hawkishness. And so maybe we ought to back off a little bit. Sachs, 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 sort of as blue chip as it gets. Like Brad said, I think Hassel would have been amazing too, but, 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 were worried about currency to basement.

basically. Now, that being said, I do think that Warsh 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 trueflation bears this out, that, again, that inflation is coming way down. And I think that there was some softness in the Challenger Gray report this morning. I don't know if you saw that. There 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 7% were related to AI, so that's not the story. It's really, I think, very localized to Amazon and its delivery partner. But nonetheless, you see pockets of weakness. And again, I think Powell's been too late to cut rates. He could have done it last week. That would have been a lot better. But now I guess their next meeting is not until March or April.

And I think you see it reported that the expectations for rate cut have gone up. Yeah. And the independence of the Fed, I guess, has always been the big issue here, Friedberg. Chimot's 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, you know, 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. I mean, 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. It's definitely not tanking it, but it's hurting it relative to what it could be. And he seems to not want to adjust course because, you know, he's kind of dug in his heels and maybe he has animus towards the executive branch. What are you doing that situation? Well, what do you, I mean, then what did you do when AOC is president AOC with Vice President Mondami and they decide, hey, we want to stick it to government and, you know, there is no Fed or they have too much influence, Brad. Well, no, no one's trying to get rid of the independence of the Fed, JCal.

Yeah. I actually think that this appointment suggests. President Trump has talked about it, yeah, that he wants them to do what he says. Yeah. Everybody thought he was going to pick asset in part because he was the person inside the White House. This decision, I think, was viewed as the most independent decision. Yes.

Because Warsh has taken a lot of positions, the exact opposite of the president. And what I think, you got to hold these two truths at the same time. Number one, I think if Worse saw the situation, we saw in June of 21, when the cost of a cargo container from China went from $1,500 to $15,000 and we were screaming to raise rates and Powell did nothing, I think Warsh would have been raising rates like crazy in order to save off inflation. So I think this guy's intellectually honest. It's just now we have inflation that is coming in below expectations and we know that the restrictive rate is above neutral. So it's the Fed's job to keep the economy going at maximum employment so long as inflation is

anchored. And that's the situation we're in. in. Inflation is anchored. We need to have lower rates so people can buy homes and borrow money to to live their lives. One thing that Warsh 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, you know, from Starwood, big real estate guy about this. And he was telling me that the way they measure inflation for housing or for rentals, which is a major component, is a survey like 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. So look at the Delta is not like the stale data. It's all digital already. You know, it's actually a great point, Sacks. You could probably make a bet or an investment on the idea that Kevin Warsh 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. I mean, he was telling me, so Barry, you know, again, runs Starwood. So they have a lot of units. And he's telling me, look, there are landlord companies, large corporations that have literally

like a million units. Whose data do you think is better on rental inflation or deflation? Obviously theirs because they got the freshest data, but the Fed could go get all that data across all these different companies. And what he was saying is, you know, Brad to your point about summer of 2021, when the price of a shipping container was going through the roof, so were rents. You know, it was way higher than what the Fed's data suggested. I mean, like Barry was saying, like in certain places, it was like 40%. The Fed's data was very laggy because, again, they're surveying, so it's not as precise. And then on the way down, when rent prices, come down, it's also super laggy. So the point is that the Fed is slow. Maybe this is why Powell is

too late, is they're using stale data or laggy data so they don't see the inflation when it's skyrocketing, but they're also not seeing when it's decreasing. If you think about the misallocation of resources that occurred as a result of the Fed not acting in June of 21, it cost our country trillions of dollars. Twenty wouldn't have had to happen the way it happened where everything crashed out because all of a sudden we panicked at the end of 22 and had to jam interest rates, which caused people to lose jobs, countries to be, you know, struggle. Thanks to blow up. You know, and so like to me that was all avoidable. Have a Manhattan project, data project for the Fed, which I agree with you, 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. Like that is printing money, government spending is the root of all this inflation stuff. So 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 Lawfare nonsense.

Okay. And he understands technology better than anyone. I think that's so key. 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, X-AI merger on Monday. Elon Musk announced SpaceX is acquiring XAI, largest M-A-N-A-N-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 and the eventual perhaps creation of dollar sign MUSK put Tesla, SpaceX together, which includes X, and then

you've got Optimus robots on the moon base, building data centers in space that are power by solar. Your thoughts? Well, let's just stick with what we know. SpaceX is merging with X.A.I. You're merging the two biggest TAMs in the world, right? All of artificial intelligence and all of space together with the world's greatest entrepreneur. And he said, you know, there was a podcast he did this morning with Cheeky Pind, our friend John Collison, where he said, I'm going to have data centers in space in 30 months, right? And if you're going to have a massive cost advantage with data centers in space, and remember, power is the proxy. Power is the primitive to AI. If you can deliver that, right? And there are tons of retail investors and institutional investors like us who want

to bet against that future, right? Then Elon's your guy and the combination of those make perfect sense. But Elon is like kind of an end of one as 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. And so, you know, and then if you just look at, you click down a layer, you know, Starlink's going from, I think, 10 million people to 20 million people. They're going to launch this, you know, 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, you know, and now we're going to get, you know, data centers in space. So, you know, I'm glad he's on America. Data centers in space, Friedberg, a 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, and as Brad pointed out, power is the requisite for scaling compute,

for scaling ultimately the applications of AI. And in that constraint, in that constrained world, much like any other constrained world, scarcity breeds innovation. And so I think that there are two paths that we're going to observe happening in parallel here. One is the Elon path, which is to escape the 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 tax you, people that are limiting our ability to scale electricity production on Earth.

and there's a lot of reasons for that and we can go through them. So that's one aspect of how do you escape that constraint? I think that there's a separate aspect, which is totally unrelated to the topic you're talking about, which is that I do think that we will see compute efficiency scale by probably on the order of 70 to 100x over the next few years, meaning electricity efficiency per token of output. And I think that there's a number of reasons to believe that. It's in the chip stack. I mean, Grock, our friend Sonny 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 two to three X,

three X improvement in energy efficiency. But there's model architecture being redone. There's ways of breaking LLMs into small models, running them locally. There is a way of having networks of models work where you don't have to call the whole model and run it through the entire matrix, but you can run through smaller matrices, and then you can have those smaller matrices, call other matrices as needed. So the total compute need goes down, which means total electricity goes down.

So chip architecture is changing, model architecture is changing. So I think this is a good reflection of what's going on right now in the world, which is there is this increased demand for AI, for effectively productivity improvements in the world, to unleash human potential. But we are constrained by energy

and we are constrained by resources that we have here on Earth today. So one branch, is let's escape Earth, go get energy in space, make data centers in space. Only one person can execute on that. It's Elon. I think that, to Brad's point, is an end of one. I don't think we're going to see a lot of that.

So how is everyone else going to respond? Because everyone else can't launch data centers in space. I think everyone else is going to respond by creating entirely new model architectures, new chip stacks. And that's, I think, the other side of this innovation coin. Efficiency. Yeah. Yeah, it's this new way of getting lower energy costs 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 engineering is right, and the execution is right, what is the response going to be? Because the whole planet isn't going to let Elon have a monopoly on the future. So we've got to ask ourselves from a social perspective, a political perspective, an economic

and a business perspective, all for those vectors. What are others going to do? We can all be excited about retail buying into this. Great. But how is the business community that's building data centers and is investing, Google's investing $185 billion this year in data centers? How is China going to respond? How are people going to respond when one man controls the world's compute?

And we could probably do a 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 it's Elon's laid out his path and where he's going to do it. Now, what's the rest of the world going to do? That's where I think things get a little bit more challenging and you could kind of debate things, but the rest of the world is not going to sit idly by. 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 special. and we do see tokens go down or efficiency go up, let's say, 200x, 300x.

There is a possibility that we're going to solve almost all the problems we need to solve and there'll be excess capacity. That is another potential outcome here is that we don't know what to do with all these tokens. Social order. Social order is the one problem that you're going to create, Jason. So just to be clear, there's a concept of diffusion of innovations when something new comes. It does not hit everyone at once. And so the rate of change that's being unleashed right now is creating a very asymmetric outcome

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

I love the up-leveling of the point that David just made because I think it links a lot of things we talked about today together. There have been 117 billion humans who'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's States, families, businesses, right? It's, it's, prepare for the unexpected. And whatever you're, you know, the things are that you believe to be true. Again, I just think it demands this intellectual

humility. Now, to Freiburg's point, I don't think any of this is changing in the next, you know, 24 months, 36 months. Data centers are going to be on planet Earth. You know, they're going to be filled with Nvidia chips and, you know, and the other chips that we've talked about. And I think that alone is going to bring us this agentic future that's already going to. going to be shocking, even before we launched 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, you know, I'm hyping him up, but he will execute on this. And if he does, or when he does, I should say it's going to change everything. You can see this today. And if you are scared about this future and you're listening to this podcast, wondering for your kids, et cetera, there's a very simple way to not be scared, which is to embrace and use these tools. The top two people in my organization out of 20 people who are using OpenBot and building Ultron and the age of Ultron, they are worth, each one of them is worth 200 of the other employees. And I only have 18 other ones. if you were 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 generally up and to the right. And you have now created Trump accounts. You were at the White House. You had the big launch. Let me say, Brad, this would not be a law if Brad Gersner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination, relentless. I've gotten calls and texts from Brad

at 6 a.m. and at 2 a.m. You may sleep less than the president, Brad. And that is a remarkable thing, because I don't think he sleeps at all. Nicky 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, you know, Freedberg just alluded to it. These are very destabilizing forces, right? You can't have a trillionaire and 70% of people feeling out that they're left out and left behind.

And the system's rigged against them and they're not in the game of capitalism. less than half of the people under the age of 40 have a positive view of capitalism. So, you know, we set out on this journey. We talked about it here 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, right, 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 Open AI. They'll own a little bit of Nvidia. That is what we need to do is just a first step in making sure we can hold this experiment together for the next 250 years, right, when we have this rate of change.

And so the president said something on stage last week. In 15 to 20 years, we will have four trillion of wealth that will have been transferred to people who would have otherwise had zero. 75 to 100 million families who have four trillion dollars 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, order to fight back against that, I think a great first step is the Trump accounts, which makes everybody a capitalist from birth. I just want to say, you know, just bestie to bestie, Brad, watch you conceive of this and get it done. You know, all the impressive stuff you've done in your

career, I think will be a footnote to this. I think this is your legacy. So I just want to congratulate you on that. And I also want to congratulate Michael and Susan Dell, who had they not separate up and done this with you. I don't know if this would have come together. And then I also want to congratulate President Trump for just putting through something that bridges the gap between the equity holders and the non-equity holders, the bottom half of the country, the top half of the country. This is visionary. You can say what you want about Trump. You may like certain things. You might not like certain things. 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. The administration,

administration and for all Americans. And there's very few things that all Americans can get around right now. It's such a divisive, disgusting political climate. Everybody's fighting with each other over everything. And what you 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 freeberg well i mean you just had your mouth i'm sitting you said your nicotine pouches well you just had your big clothes i don't think

it's what do you like you i wanted to give you a chance to shine here you hate socialism you're concerned about socialism is this not one of the best ways to fight against the socialistic urge to just have collectivism and just steal from the top half and give to the bottom half or, you know, seize the, you know, production and manufacturing. This is a great solution is to get everybody into the game. Honestly, it's a longer conversation. I think we got a number one slash 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. And 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 U.S. government to that trust fund because the government has taken all the money that you put in as a employee, it's taken out of your paycheck, and instead of going into that account, it goes to the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Treasury writes. And they spent it. They put an IOU and they put it back into Social Security. So 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. So every time you put money out of your paycheck, you should open an account and see where that money is. And you should say, okay, that money is in Google, it's in Amazon, it's in Ford, it's in this healthcare system, it's in all these things that I now own a piece of, and you see it going up like a 401k owner does every year. We have to transition that in the United States. I hope we can get it done in parallel with cutting the spending that is fundamentally driving

the inflation and making things unlivable in this country, cut the regulations so that we can make it easier for people to own homes and get rid of the government telling people every year that they're going to do more for them and entrapping people in a life of servitude and inaccessibility 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 Freeberg. He says, congratulations on your efforts, more work to do. Can you turn those America accounts into superannuation funds? So more work to do. everybody should put 12% of their

instead of into Social Security, they should put it into their Invest America account, their Trump accounts. Great job, everybody. Another amazing episode of the world's greatest podcast. For Shemoth Pollya Hopatio, couldn't make it this week.

We missed your bestie for David Sachs, brother-in-arms in Texas, the great state of Texas, David Freeberger, Sultan of Science, and fifth bestie, Brad Gersner. 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.