Alright, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's episode 185. And you're going to be delighted by today's docket. If you're into politics, we move the taping back a day gentlemen, because we knew there would be a presidential debate. So with me to discuss all things presidential debate and the news finance markets, maybe even a little science from our science boy, David Freeberg is the rain man, David Sachs.

Yeah, true. I have a t is frozen. Or he's staring everybody down. How are you, sir? We're about to enter the endgame. Jason. Oh, the endgame is here. Okay, we're in the endgame now. And from a we work in the home office in Pasadena is our friend, the Sultan of science.

He's back to work. He's in his cube. Did you get the TPS reports done? How you doing there? The humble headquarters of Oh, hollow genetics, beautiful lab downstairs. I'll take you on a tour one day. Can't wait to hear my friends gloat and bloat themselves on the show today.

After the debate last night. It's going to be insufferable. I'm looking forward to it. Okay, so you're building the next $10 billion company and we don't get to invest but we do get a tour. Thank you. Good to know. We're better. We brought this every week. We can you guys want to put money and I will open up the round again for you.

And you guys you said this three times when do we wet our beaks? Jekyll's right about this. Actually, that's how you know the winner. The one he doesn't let us invest in is the winner. It's the easiest way to his portfolio. He's like, Hey, can I can I introduce you to a soda pop machine?

Rain Man David. All right, everybody, let's get to the show here enough of the craziness last night was the first presidential debate and there's no easy way to put this. It was an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats and President Biden. Gosh, he looked confused. Lots of slips, lots of gaffes.

If you are under a rock, living in a cave without Starlink and you missed it. Here's a couple clips. Everybody's talking about this one where Biden lost his train of thought for close to 10 seconds, but making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the with the covid, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with.

Look, if we finally beat Medicare, thank you, President Biden, President Trump. Gosh, that was brutal. And the reaction from CNN, even MSNBC's Joy Reid, as far left as you can go, was brutal and candid. And here it is. The knives are out from the Democrats for President Biden. Right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party.

It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers. And they are having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket. And they're having conversations about what they should do about it.

Some of those conversations include, should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside? Other of the conversations are about should prominent Democrats go public with that call because they feel this debate was so terrible? That was painful. I love Joe Biden. I work for Joe Biden.

He did not do well at all. And I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. There is time for this party to figure out a different way forward, if he will allow us to do that. I too was on the phone throughout much of the debate.

My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. And the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic. The people who were texting with me were very concerned about President Biden seeming extremely feeble, seeming extremely weak. This has been, quite frankly, a car accident in slow motion that we've seen over and in building and questioning it.

And as has been pointed out, Joe Biden sought this debate at this remarkably early time because he knew he was losing and he needed to change the narrative. And he did change the narrative. He sunk his campaign tonight. All right, gentlemen, there is absolutely no way any of us could have predicted this.

Oh, wait, Nick, read the room, Democrats. You have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border and some other issues are not in sync with the majority of the country. At some point, the Democrats just have to take a deep look in the mirror and say we fielded a bad candidate who's too old and people don't believe will stand up to scrutiny of like, say, being on the all in pot for two hours, or in the debates, or with a hostile interview or any of those possibilities.

And so, I think if that's the case, we really need to have the Democrats think deeply about maybe fielding a different candidate. And I believe that's what's going to happen in the next 30 to 60 days. So, I'm predicting... You think there's going to be a switcheroo? 100%. I mean, if you just look at the polls, it's 100% there'll be a switcheroo.

Who's the switcheroo? I have no idea. It could be Gavin. It could be anybody. Anything's possible. I think Trump's going to demolish him in the debate. I think he'll sink to 30% in the polls. And then the Democrats will find a way to give him a graceful out, and then they'll field somebody else.

I think the Democrats, as cynical as it sounds, we're waiting to see what happens with this Trump trials conviction, what you call lawfare, what other people call fair use of the law. And then they are going to see how he does in the debates. That's why they moved the debate up in June.

And I think they know to pull the plug on this if it gets too far gone. And they have the ability to do that because all he's got to say is, "You know what? I'm feeling old, and I want us to win, and I'm going to slot somebody else in." All right.

And to wrap this up, prediction markets showing Biden has plummeted to, let's check the number, oh, yeah, 33% in the sharps, as you've referred to them on the program, are basically saying Biden's going to drop out now, 44% chance over on poly market will Biden drop out of the presidential race, and then predicted another one of these prediction markets where you can actually bet real dollars.

It's not a plug for them or commercial, just those happen to be two of the bigger ones. Newsom sits at 14% now, Biden, 33%, Trump at 58%. At the start of the evening before the debate, Biden was at 47%. Post-debate Chamath, we see Biden dropping 47% to 33%. There's nothing like this has happened in modern politics.

Your thoughts, Chamath Palihapitiya, and then Saxe will give you the red meat. Let me just start by saying that President Biden is a person that's given up his whole life to work on behalf of America in the best way that he thought was possible. He's overcome a lot of tragedies.

I think he's worked very hard. He's diligently tried to do what he thought was right on behalf of the people of Delaware and then the United States. My honest takeaway is that that person though is no longer really in charge. And I think that that was very troubling for me.

And it actually makes the last sort of six months make a lot more sense. So I thought the fact that we could not get a response from the White House to be, I took it a little bit actually personally. I was wondering why for someone that had been such an ardent supporter, I couldn't even get an email back when I was consistently asking them to be on the pod.

And now I see that it wasn't just one single act. It was part of a holistic strategy. It was the same strategy that boxed RFK out of the Democratic primary. Because could you imagine if this event had happened when he had to debate RFK in the Democratic primaries, it would have been exposed then.

It's probably partly to explain how the law has been used in New York State, whether you want to call it lawfare or not, but it was a very directed partisan action. And so all of these things are now three data points that are really important. You will not come on an open format show like ours to just speak openly.

None of us were going to attack him or try to corner him or box him in. You prevented other people from actually challenging you and directly asking questions of you in the Democratic primaries. And then you try to put political pressure on your opponents. All of that is systematically about a group of people that are unelected, who are trying to control democracy.

And I think that that's the most troubling takeaway from this. I don't think that you should take away from last night that Joe Biden had a bad debate. I think what we should take away is that there is a person who should be allowed to transition into the sunset and be celebrated for what he's done.

And instead, there are people that, frankly, at the margins are acting pretty unethically and at the limit is actually acting somewhat diabolically to prop this person up so that they can keep power. For example, you've been in situations where you would expect the team that runs a company to be able to stand up and say the CEO is not in a position to run this company anymore.

That's what you would expect if there's good governance and honesty. You know, what was Ron Klain doing as an example when he was doing debate prep? Did he legitimately believe that Joe Biden was prepared for this or mentally capable of actually doing this? And the fact that they are allowing his legacy to be destroyed after 50 years, I think, is really tragic.

Yeah. Well said, by the way, come off sex, your thoughts on what we witnessed last night and the reaction to it. Well, let me speak as a objective and independent political observer, OK, just as independent as you, Jake. Yes, let's do that. Let's be independent today. Yeah, look, anyone can have a bad night.

Certainly. His campaign put out the word that he had a cold and maybe he just had a bad night. I mean, after all, it was media people like Joe Scarborough just saying a week ago that not only was Biden cognitively fine, but in fact, he was the best Joe Biden he had ever seen just a week ago or two weeks ago.

Reid Hoffman was saying that he had a two hour lunch with Joe Biden and Biden was regaling him with details of AI and Gaza and he was good. And so we've heard from all these highly reputable people is that Biden may not present that well in public, but in private, he's just fine.

You're saying they're lying and they lied to the American people. Well, I'm actually taking them at their word because they seem like very trustworthy sources to me. I see no reason to swap out this candidate. I think that anyone can have a bad night and there's no reason and there's no reason whatsoever for the media to be panicking like this.

Satire socks, satire socks is into the chat. Satire socks is into the chat. Well, I mean, look, I just I think that there's no reason for this kind of panic. I believe in democracy and the Democratic primary voters have spoken. This is the candidate who they voted for. OK, and there is there is your message.

Stand by your man. Stop being a wimp just because your candidate had one bad night. You don't stab him in the back like absolutely not. And I think Van Jones said that Republicans wouldn't do this if Trump had a bad night. You know, he's like, why? Why are we all stabbing Biden in the back?

So look, this is a candidate who you've been supporting for years. This is a candidate who you rigged the primaries for. You boxed out Bobby Kennedy, who, you know, I thought was a fantastic candidate. You basically boxed out Dean Phillips. This is the candidate you wanted just days ago.

You were saying was completely mentally fit. In fact, the best he'd ever been. OK, so you made your bed sleeping. You made your bed sleeping. Stop betraying your candidate like this. It's unseemly. Satire sacks some loyalty, for God's sake. OK, you heard from compassionate Chamath. You got to hear from satire sacks.

Now let's go to morning Friedberg. What do you got this morning? Frank Friedberg. Frank Friedberg. Talk to it, buddy. Go for it. The big loser of last night's debate was the American public. The big winner of last night's debate was probably Russia, China, Iran, maybe the Saudis licking their chops, watching the utter dysfunction in the leadership of the party, in the leadership of the country as it stands today.

A notable mention, I will say, was the debate format. I absolutely love the fact that there were no interruptions, that the mics went mute, that there was no audience and the moderators didn't kind of challenge back and forth and try and make themselves the show. That was very unique and in a presidential debate.

So I actually like the debate format. They stopped interrupting me. Hmm. Thanks for the interruption. I think that, as Saks points out, the biggest issue is that this was front and center. Biden's decline in capacity and aptitude for quite some time. I didn't tell you guys this before, but last October.

A senior member of the Democratic Party reached out to me for a, quote, meeting. I took the meeting in October. And of course, it turns out they were asking me for money. Little did they know, I don't give any money to politics ever. I never have, never will. So they're, they're handlers are morons for bringing this person in to come and talk to me.

In the meeting, I said, you cannot put Joe Biden forward as your candidate. What the hell are you guys thinking? He's like, no, he is completely stable. He is as sharp as he's ever been. I sent him an email, and I'm going to read you what I said to him.

This was in the first, second week of October. I said, Joe Biden does not appear equipped to be president of the United States. I think the continued heralding of Democratic Party leadership of the president's performance and ability to continue to serve into the next term is mind boggling. His inability to conduct even a basic interview or give a clear and concise statement in a candid setting highlights a clear and obvious decline in function since he took office.

It is important for Democratic leadership to find an alternative candidate and message this soon. Doing so I believe will buoy fundraising efforts across yada, yada, yada. I said I would feel uncomfortable with the Democratic majority Senate head in house giving a leader with declining aptitude nearly limitless effect. So I sent this as my response to his follow up request for money.

This was the second week of October. And I wanted to pull up the date on this because it was so apparent back then what was going on. So what's so striking is how long mainstream media and leadership in the Democratic Party have tried to tell an alternative story that was so obviously revealed to be not true last night.

And that is the thing that I think makes me say America is losing because there are a few people that are in charge of controlling the narrative. There are a few people in charge who decide who gets to be the candidate. And those few people are keeping democracy from working effectively, because the raw data, the direct data, imagery, the video, the media content that has come out of Biden over quite some period of time made it so obvious that he was not in full capacity.

And so that was my biggest kind of takeaway is that there's something wrong with the way things are running in this country. You're saying that the media, you're saying the media and the Democratic Party leadership are lying to America. Yeah. And I think because if you of course, the fact that we all had this information, we've seen the videos, we've seen the interviews.

And every time a video or an interview comes out, it has been excused away as, oh, well, he tripped or, oh, you know, it wasn't well edited. And every time there's a story and then when it's fully exposed, it becomes like, well, my God, the fact that they all flipped so quickly is what's so shocking because this was there.

And, you know, if you're on Twitter, you can see these clips being talked about by millions of people. But then media and democratic leadership won't acknowledge that the subversion of democracy is really the real threat to democracy. To your point, you have the right to elect a person up or down.

None of us are choosing to elect a shadow cabinet of handlers to run America. That's not what any of us are signing up for. And I think that's what we have the risk of having for another four years. If this lie isn't exposed. What I what I find unbelievably shocking is all of these data points now just makes so much sense because the through line is, as you said, a coordinated effort to kind of obfuscate his decline.

Like if you thought about this in a different way, if you took a twenty nine year old and a thirty two year old, would you say that they're the same? Absolutely right. If you took a thirty nine and a forty two year old, they're the same. A forty nine and a fifty two year old, they're the same.

But the reality is a seventy nine and an eighty two year old or a seventy eight and an eighty two year old are meaningfully different. And the reason is that because there is significant decline every year, every month, every day. And you're seeing the impact of every week, day and month and year as a president of the United States, where on an eighty two year old body.

And I'm not sure any of us would do much better. But the reality is that when you're at that age, there's a level of transparency that's required and we have the opposite. So take Warren Buffett as the counterfactual to this. Warren Buffett is in his early 90s. But what does he do every year?

He marches tens of thousands of people into Omaha. He sits them down. He sits at the front of a dais with Coca-Cola and peanut brittle and speaks for six to eight hours and is sharp as a tack. Well, the point is, if you decide after those six to eight hours of fully transparent, unedited interaction with Warren Buffett that you don't think he's capable of leading Berkshire, you can sell the stock.

What they don't do is hide him behind the shadows, propping him out and package interviews and all of this other stuff that is un-American and undemocratic. And you see why, because the importance, as Friedberg said, is so high. You probably do have a lot of people outside the United States really questioning what is going on in the greatest country in the world right now, that this can even happen.

And the people that you thought were so anti-Trump, right, that they would do anything to make sure that Donald Trump was unelected. Well, they're actually not that anti-Trump. They're just pro-power, because the thing that they care more about than their hatred of Donald Trump is their desire to stay in power.

Yeah, I think these are all very well said, Frank Friedberg. Nicely done. I mean, how is anyone at this point in time surprised? Like, we have been talking about his cognitive ability for a couple of years here on this podcast. Everybody's been talking about it on Twitter. They've been talking about it on social media.

Everybody's been talking about it at every Christmas, every Thanksgiving for a couple of years right now. And, you know, this long form discussion podcast test is the ultimate test. And I think people need to take that to heart. If you look at the long form podcast, and I'm just saying this to toot our own horn here, it could be Joe Rogan, it could be Tim Ferriss, it could be whoever you want, Lex Friedman.

When you saw RFK, Vivek, Trump, Chris Christie, Dean Phillips come on this podcast, talk for, in some cases, two plus hours, it was clear they were there. And this is completely selfish on the part of Biden's family, the people around him to, you know, stay in power. And the hot swaps coming, I just I'm telling you right now, he is not going to be in this race in the next 30 days.

Well, the hot the hot swap is going to create a free for all Jason. Which is better, better than running somebody who has a 30% chance of winning. And I'm going to take this a step further. This is 25th Amendment territory, this person is not fit to serve as president for the remaining of his term.

What we saw last night was incredibly troubling. He was not there. And I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face for months. This is absolutely disgusting that they did this. This is elder abuse. I don't say that as a joke. I say this sincerely, I remember when my dad had to take the keys away from my grandfather, God rest his soul.

My grandfather wanted to drive that car, you know, the streets of Brooklyn, his station wagon. My dad at some point said this guy keeps clipping other people's mirrors. We got to take the car away. So you know what my dad did? He went to my grandfather, God rest his soul.

And he said, Listen, the car was stolen. And I'm sitting there as a seven year old next to my dad. And I'm like, wasn't stolen. And my dad said, You know what the car was stolen, pop, we can't afford a new car. I'll lend you my car once in a while.

My dad then sold the car for 800 bucks and got out. That's what we need to do. You got to take the keys away from Biden. He's not fit to finish the rest of his term. Period, full stop. And I'm glad everybody else now sees what, you know, half of us saw for the last year.

Well, look, who you're gonna believe the J cows, uninformed, non expert opinion or the expert medical opinion of Dr. Joe Biden with her doctor in education? Well, I mean, the bias is strong. When you see that clip. I mean, play the clip of Biden post. These guys are so deranged.

These lunatics are so deranged. They thought they won last night. Here's a clip of Joe Biden. Telling Macbeth telling Biden he did good. Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. Let me ask the crowd. What did Trump do? You're not running. Joe Biden's not running.

You're not running. This is a farce. And now the veil is so happy. He looks so happy in that moment getting that approval. I mean, give the man some milk and cookies. I mean, he was literally let the man retire to your point Chamath. Compassionate Chamath said a great like the guy had a lifetime of service, let the guy retire, let him spend time with his grandkids, great grandkids, whatever he's blessed with.

And let's, let's do the hot swap. Now. It's incredible that not a single staff member has resigned. Isn't that incredible? Like, where they see this, Jason, and they have the moral clarity to say, hold on a second, this is really wrong. Not a single one. Yeah, that is really scary.

It's a really good point. And actually, I thought, I thought one of Trump's best moments in the debate, a line that I hadn't heard him say before, is that Joe, you never fired anyone, you know, and he was specifically talking about the Afghanistan withdrawal. But just more generally, when have you ever fired anyone for getting anything wrong?

Whereas I, Trump, fired Comey, I fired other people and I paid a political price for that. But at least I was willing to fire people who do a bad job. You're not. Well, now we know the reason for that is because the original Biden Biden is just the staff.

So why would the staff ever fired themselves. And this is why it's actually important to have a leader at the top to have a commander in chief as opposed to just a shadow government consisting of party apparatchiks. And that's what we have is what the problem is, when the staff gets something wrong, there's no one there to fire them.

How like how does somebody who's worked for Biden for 40 or 50 years, who sat in Camp David helping to do debate prep, at no point have the compassion to say, sir, this is not work, because that would be firing themselves, Chamath. No, no, I know. And it's a rhetorical question.

I'm just saying, there's a more sinister reason. And I think sector pointing it out there, which is they consider Trump such an existential threat, and they want to maintain power that they're willing to do anything to keep power, you know. And, you know, listen, I don't want to get into Trump here, but he's got his own ways to stay in power himself.

This was an embarrassment for America, this debate, the fact that these are the two candidates is a complete embarrassment. Well, I think the real embarrassment for the media was the fact that they were exposed. The fact of the matter is, for months, if not years, they've been saying that this candidate is fine.

He is cognitively fit. In fact, he's the best he's ever been. I've had two hour lunches with him. He's wonderful. That's what they've been telling us. And the reason why their panic was so visceral last night, and all these postgame wrap-up shows is they saw their credibility going down the drain.

They saw that they had been exposed. It wasn't just the fact that Biden was exposed. They were exposed for putting out this North Korea level propaganda for months and years. And everybody should understand these people were part of the cover up. It wasn't just the Biden team who wants to hold on to their jobs.

It was the media, it was this entire Democratic Party apparatus. They're all in on this giant con. I wouldn't have a problem with this, Sax, if it was like Reagan, where they were like, God, he's got 18 months left, we're going to ride this thing out. And yeah, maybe we let him have a quiet thing.

But to actually put them up for another four years is the issue here. If they just said, listen, we can 25th Amendment this guy or let him finish the last six months. That's one thing. But to say we want four more years of this? I mean, how much worse is it going to get?

Hey, what's going to happen right now, I guarantee you is he's out, we're gonna have President Kamala, she's going to get her flowers for four months as she gets to be the first female president of the United States. Then she steps out of the way, she decides she's not going to run because she's got things to do with her family.

And there will be two new people who will be moderates. And then the real election starts in about 15 days. I don't think you need to go into all of those mechanics to get the outcome of a new candidate. All Joe Biden has to do is go into the Democratic Convention and release the delegates.

Yes, of course. Yes, technically. But the problem with releasing the delegates is I do think it creates a free for all, unless the party then exposes this next facet of their plan, which is that they are so in control that they only allow one candidate to go up there.

Oh, they've already got that. Yeah, that's done. And then I think what happens is depending on who that person is, they'll either I think the Democratic Party is probably at risk of a pretty meaningful reset. And I think that these tactics I think are very much seen and understood by the American people.

I think that people do not like this idea that you vote for person A, but instead you get persons B through Z. I don't think that's what anybody thinks the election for the president of the United States should be. It should be two people independently. And then when you see one person that's not really in a position to run faithfully, I actually think that Donald Trump last night showed tremendous restraint and compassion.

I think that is the right way to deal with this situation. I think it's just acknowledging that President Biden is not altogether there. So without making claims of a cold or anything else, this is the security and the well-being and the economic prosperity of the most important country in the world.

Why are we messing around? Let's just put it plainly. The Democratic Party is a collection of interests who wanna remain in power. The Democratic Party is the party of government. Its goal is to allocate money and power from the government to the collection of interests who back the Democratic Party.

In other words, it's basically a collection of interests who wanna loot the republic. Well, obviously, no one's gonna vote for that. So they have to make it about something else. They choose a figurehead. They talk about how this is about saving democracy. They basically invent hoax after hoax, lie after lie to basically maintain their power.

And I think what's happened is the mask has come off. The whole shell game has been revealed. It's obvious that Biden was always a puppet for these interests who are hiding behind him, and now it's all being exposed. - This also goes all the way back to 2016, because if you remember and you look at the real run-up into the 2016 primary, you have to remember President Obama sat Joe Biden down and said, "You cannot run." And the reason was to direct the Democratic Party and establishment and energy towards Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost that election.

There's a very important question here, which is, if Joe Biden had actually run in 2016, you may have actually had him beat Donald Trump in 2016, and he probably would have continued into 2020. This would be a totally different situation for the Democrats. So back to your point, David, all of these backroom shenanigans and negotiating and gerrymandering and politicking and power-broking is not how democracy should work.

As messy as the Republicans are, I have to give ... I tip my hat to them. They run very straightforward, fair, visible, transparent face-offs between people. And you may not like the candidates, but the process is what it's supposed to be. Messy, turbulent, but you see all sides. Whereas this tends to be managed from the inside out.

And I think that that is, as your point, being exposed, and I think that's what really has to stop within the Democrats. They need to open the floodgates. A Bobby Kennedy should have had the chance to run. Dean Phillips should have actually had the chance to run, but they were not, and they were prevented.

And by the way, props to Dean Phillips, who, in a very respectful and compassionate way, was telling the truth from day one. And he was essentially censored. He was not allowed to basically tell you what he- Ostracize. Yeah. He told everybody what he observed in front of his face.

Right. And if people had listened a year ago to Dean Phillips, then the voters in the Democratic primary could have made a different choice. They could have maybe replaced Joe Biden, but the party elders and the powers that be did not let that happen. And now they're in a panic a year later trying to do a hot swap, because it's manifest to everyone, to the American public, that Joe Biden is not fit to serve.

But the real time to... Hold on, let me just speak to the hot swap for a second. The time to do the hot swap was a year ago, when Democratic primary voters could have voted for someone new. The problem you have now, Jay Kal, I actually think that on balance, the hot swap is not going to happen.

Let me just tell you why. I think you make a really good argument for it. Nonetheless, the reason it's not going to happen is that Joe Biden and Jill Biden have come out this morning and said, "There's no way that he's stepping down. It was just one bad night.

He's fit to serve." There is no mechanism to replace a nominee who's already won all the necessary primary votes without their consent. So if the Bidens are saying, "We're not stepping down," there's no mechanism to force them to step down. And that's the situation we're in right now. It's a very simple mechanism.

He's going to capitulate, and you're going to have Obama. Obama's going to give him a call. I guarantee you, Obama's going to talk to him in the next 72 hours. Guarantee the hot swap happens. I'm absolutely willing to make a bet with you right now on it. Let me finish my point.

They can pressure him, and that's what you're talking about is they're going to try and leverage him out. But the truth of the matter is that if they can't find the right leverage points, he does not have to step down. The right leverage point is very simple. He's not going to get any more donations.

Last night, the Democrats who are donating all said, "No more money for Joe Biden." So he's going to have no oxygen. You need money to run these things. Just one other final problem with the hot swap theory is not only is there no mechanism to force Biden to do it, but I don't think there's a consensus right now on who the replacement would be.

The fact of the matter is that Kamala Harris is next in line, and she polls even worse numbers than Biden does. So there's every reason to believe that she would do worse than Biden in the election. And I think it's not going to be easy to basically shiv her and push her aside.

And so you can talk about Newsom, you can talk about Michelle Obama, you can talk about Hillary Clinton. The fact of the matter is that I think you're going to have a big Kamala problem. And because of that, there's no mechanism and there's no clear replacement. I think that although a lot of people are going to say what you said, Jake Al, about the hot swap being desirable, I think at the end of the day, on balance, probably not going to happen.

Although certainly, I admit it could. I'll bet you $10,000 right now to whatever charity you want that Biden will not be the nominee. You could be right, but they've got to work out those two problems. They got to work out those two problems. I'm just offering you a $10,000 bet and I'm not giving you any on straight money.

I would not bet a lot of money on this because I'm not sure. I'm just raising some problems with the hot swap theory. Okay, free bird. You have you've been a little bit silent here. You want to wrap us out so we can get to the next time I'll wrap us up.

I think I'll read the final paragraph of the email I sent to the Democratic Party leader a few months ago. As a coda to this conversation. Here goes. The United States is facing a fiscal crisis, the likes of which the world only sees every few hundred years as world leading nation states overextend themselves take on unaddressable debt loads, increase social programming and eventually collapse under these conditions.

The cost to service the interest alone on our federal debt is now greater than a trillion dollars per year. This already exceeds the discretionary defense budget. The debt service expense will only swell as interest rates are unlikely to decline back to 0%. And I do not subscribe to the easy to refute economic arguments of modern monetary theory.

Simple arithmetic is all that's needed to discredit it. Furthermore, I can identify dozens of federal programs sponsored by Democrats that are not achieving their objectives. Yet we continue to fund them as if they were performing exactly as anticipated when originally conceived. Every federal program should be held to account for performance every year.

If not, they should be defunded. Instead, I see the party pushing new programs that create new expense burdens without first addressing programs that simply aren't working. Accountability is a critical first step in reducing our federal deficit below 7% of GDP. I believe our nation is facing financial and the social peril.

I urge the party to become the quote party of reason and results, put forward leaders that can lead hold government programs that aren't working to account, make sure that every dollar spent on social programming has a measurable impact. And if they fail to deliver results, cut them. The opportunity to be the party of reason and results is wide open.

Myself and many of my friends would scramble for the opportunity to support that party. That's the end of my statement. And I think did you get a response? Then a month later, the handler said, so-and-so has this on their docket. They're going to call you. Never got a call.

Of course. Yeah, because you're not a donor. They only care if you donate and you're not a donor. No, because I donated. I donated and I didn't get anything. All I asked for was a chance to sit down and talk to the president. I think we know why Biden didn't come on the podcast.

I mean, he couldn't. The debate format, to your point, Freeberg, was like the easiest debate format ever. And the greatest thing, I think Dave Portnoy pointed this out on Twitter, like Trump's best strategy was to just let Biden talk, like, just get out of the way and let him talk.

And there was one moment where he's like, I'm sorry. I mean, Trump was pretty graceful here, which is a big statement. He like at one point was like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what he just said. Like, I don't know how to respond to something. I don't understand what his point was.

Hotswap's coming. And I am an undecided voter. I have a big announcement, Sax. I have a big announcement about my vote. You want to hear it? Yeah, let's hear it. Breaking news. I am not voting for Biden. I've eliminated Biden as possible. I was waiting to see what happened last night.

So I knew that now I never was clear about that. I am also eliminated Trump. You've also eliminated Bobby Kennedy. So you have not eliminated Trump or Biden Kennedy. I said, I introduce you to Jill Stein, maybe Cornel West. Let's move forward. Let's move on. Here we go. Who's left?

Bring anybody out. It can't be Weekend at Bernie's part two. I mean, the Weekend at Bernie's joke is real. I mean, it's cruel, and it's real. And my Lord, get it together. All right. There's a really interesting trend going on that I wanted to get everybody's thoughts on AI and corporate efficiency killing tech jobs.

Let's pull up this chart. This somebody shared in our group chat from Fred. These are software developer job postings on indeed. From early 2020. That's pre COVID, obviously to this year, look at this. The number of job postings for developers has absolutely come crashing down by 80%. This is below pre COVID numbers.

In addition to this, we talked about getting back to work, Penske and Dell saying you have to be back in the office starting this fall four days a week or resignation accepted. What are you seeing in your portfolios? Any thoughts on this trend of the major jobs, the high paying elite jobs, Chamath?

Maybe going away? This is a trend we haven't seen in our lifetimes. There's always room for elites at elite companies. And now it seems the demand's gone. What's going on here? I just think that company formation has changed after the end of ZURP. And so I think that that chart speaks more to a couple things.

One is that where typically, people were hiring for software engineering roles, which was a lot of SAS businesses contracted a lot. And the net new amount of SAS startups, also, I don't think materially increased. And so that was one big switch. Second is you went through a whole bunch of layoffs at the big cap tech companies as they reestablish profitability.

I think when you layer those two things, that explains that chart more than the emergence of AI tools. Just practically, what I see is all of these AI tools can add a 10 or 15% lift to an individual person. If you are in a traditional organization, I don't think these things are the panacea that they're marketed as being.

These are not creating 10x engineers. At some point, these tools will be good enough. And at some point, companies will get started from scratch that use those tools and create a level of productivity at one 10th of the workforce, but that hasn't happened yet. So I think that that chart is more about layoffs and contraction in tech more than anything else.

Yeah. And just to explain this chart a little bit more in depth, the 100% number back in 2020, then boosts up to two and a half times that amount, and then comes back down to 60% of that amount. So it's an index, we don't actually have the raw numbers here of the number of developer jobs open or closed.

Sax, your thoughts, what are you seeing in company formation to Chamath's point? And overall, what do you think this means for the American elite workforce, people with, you know, really high end degrees and really high end salary expectations? Well, I agree with Chamath, it's just too soon for AI to be responsible for this.

I mean, the AI productivity gains are just starting, and we're not really seeing job elimination yet or job replacement. I think this is just a symptom of economic weakness. And the main reason for the economic weakness is the rate hike cycle. Remember, we went from practically 0% interest rates to five and a half percent in one year.

And a lot of people were expecting that to cause a recession. That's normally what happens when you get a very, very rapid rate hike cycle is it sucks liquidity out of the economy, and it contracts economic activity and you get a recession. I was one of the people who thought that and that didn't happen.

I think one of the reasons it didn't happen is there was a huge backlog of jobs of sort of open job postings. I think originally, it started at 12 million open jobs. Well, what's happened is the rise in interest rates has created some economic weakness, it's caused a reduction in liquidity and investment, it's created more pressure on companies to be profitable.

And so all those things have cascaded through and what it's doing is it's burning off this job backlog. So we haven't necessarily seen unemployment yet, but we're seeing a reduction in the job postings. And I think that's what's going on. And I would just say that the economy may not be in recession yet, but I just think it's weak.

And this is just one metric showing that. Freiburg, you're running a company now, you're doing hiring qualitatively, what you're seeing in terms of hiring from when you were running production board, you had many companies, people were fighting it out in the peak Zurp era, you know, and giving people incredible, incredible, you know, compensation packets and packages.

And then you also had like sort of people trying to take talent and maybe talent hoarding was going on. It seems to have dramatically switched. We've been putting job postings out and seeing hundreds of people apply for jobs that we would get dozens previously. What are you seeing? What's the game on the field in terms of hiring?

I'm not really, I don't really have a great perspective on this where we hire very specialized people at Ohalo. And in the special specialty field we're in, we're the best in the world. So everyone wants to work here. Got it. I'll answer your question, Jake. I mean, what I see from our portfolio companies is hiring has got easier.

It is way higher, much easier to hire devs, right now software developers than two years ago, no question about it. Yeah. And I think globalization also having a big impact here. I honestly, my theory on this is that because there's not three competing offer sacks from big tech, when you're a startup, you know, trying to land somebody and you're like, we have to beat Uber or Airbnb or Coinbase, you know, like a mid market company, or the Google offer, the Apple offer, the Amazon offer, typically, like a developer would have those three sets of offers.

Here's a startup that's willing to give you 1% of the equity. Here's a mid market company and Uber and Airbnb or Coinbase, that's offering you 300k. And then here's the like, incredible $500,000 offer from Amazon or Google, those offers just aren't there. So then it makes for the ability for startups to hire great talent.

This is the best time possible to be a startup, the talent on the field is incredible. Open AI is considering a for profit, profit conversion. And that means possibly an IPO soon. According to reports, Sam Altman recently discussed this with major shareholders like maybe Microsoft, and it's possible OpenAI will become a for profit benefit corporation similar to Anthropic or XAI.

If you don't know what a for profit benefit corporation is a benefit corporation or B Corp in the industry means you have a stated mission that the board is responsible for going after, you know, save the whales, provide AI software for all of humanity, whatever it is, in addition to the standard acting in the interest of all shareholders.

And so this, of course, means OpenAI, which was valued at 86 billion could IPO at some point. What are your thoughts on this? We saw the revenue numbers are crushing it. Any thoughts Chamath on OpenAI IPO? Is that a possibility in your mind? I mean, it makes so much sense for them.

So I think they should do it as quickly as possible. We are in the first inning of what should probably be an enormous tectonic shift in technology. And I think if anything, whoever wins in the first inning usually isn't the one that's winning by the ninth inning. And so I would encourage anybody that's winning right now to monetize, get secondaries, take money off the table as fast as possible, because the future is unknown.

And the more disruptive the technology is, the more entropy there is, which means that there's going to be more changes, not less. And again, I would just look at search as an example, I would look at social networking as an example. When you look 20 years later, the people who captured all the value were not the ones at the beginning who everybody thought was going to win.

And so I think if it plays out similarly, it's important for the people that are in the lead today to recognize it's too early, and they should monetize their perceived success as quickly as they can to the largest magnitude possible. In other words, you might be opening, you might be, you might be my space.

Yeah, grab the bag if you can. Grab the bag. What is it called? Secure the bag. Sorry, secure the bag. Secure the bag, yes. What are your thoughts here? SACs on a potential IPO by Sam and the team at OpenAI and the impact that might have on the wider space?

Well, for a long time on this show, I've been saying that you need to clean up that, you know, convoluted Byzantine corporate structure with all the line charts everywhere. That structure is what created all the problems with this nonprofit board that they had. You've got a for profit entity reporting to a nonprofit board.

It created a culture clash, and as we've said before on the show, it's not a good idea for a startup to innovate on structure. Using a tried and true C-corp is the way to go. You're ready for IPO. If you ever get that far, you don't need to like restructure the company.

It was always funky and weird that OpenAI had this nonprofit structure, and really, they should have fixed it years ago. And like I said, given Elon his equity, given Sam his CEO package, and they didn't do either one of those things, and so now they're left with this crazy org chart that's a mess.

And I'm not even sure, I mean, I think you would want to clean it up as soon as you can, because I think my sense is that the longer you wait on these things, the harder it actually gets. Yeah, the more calcified these things get, yeah. I'm not sure how easy it is to actually fix this thing, but yes, they should fix it.

They should make it a standard C-corp. They should make things right with Elon, because he provided the first 40 million of C-capital. They should make it right with Sam, he should get his CEO comp, and then they should IPO so that the public actually has the ability to invest in this AI wave and ride this wave the same way they did with the whole dot-com boom in the late '90s.

I mean, a lot of those dot-com companies didn't work out, but some of them did. Amazon, Google, and so on. And the public had the opportunity to participate in that huge wave of innovation. And I think we'd go to something like that. We still need more public companies, right?

Freeberg, you got a thought here before we go into superintelligence and Ilya's new company? I don't care if OpenAI's for-profit or non-profit affects a few people that put money in and the employees. It doesn't affect anyone else. Well, no, it will affect the public if they can buy shares and they get to participate.

You could say that about any business, right? OpenAI is one of the leading companies of the AI wave. It is the leading company. It's the leading company. They apparently raised money in an $80 billion valuation. So one could also argue that a company doing $3 billion in revenue, getting an IPO done at $120 billion market cap, maybe the public already missed the big wave.

Well, no, I don't think so. I mean, we saw a lot of these companies that you could have said that about NVIDIA and it basically went up 30x. Yeah, you could say that about any IPO. It could go up, it could go down. But anyway, there's a bunch of people who put money in who are going to make a lot of money if this thing gets to be for-profit.

Yeah, but the trend line is it's doubling revenue, right, year over year. So, yeah. My argument is that it'd be good for OpenAI to clean up its Byzantine cap table and structure, and it would be good for the public to be able to have the opportunity to invest. So it's a win-win.

I'm not saying they have to do it this minute. I mean, I think that it does take time to get your reporting to the level of maturity necessary to be a public company. And you don't want your earnings or your revenue, you don't want your numbers to be volatile.

If you were an employee, Freeberg, and it went out at $120 billion, would you clear your position if you could? Would you sell half your position? I don't know enough. I don't know enough. I'm assuming most of those... Sak, Chamath, anybody want to play along here? Well, I've heard that they've had quite a bit of turnover because there's been pretty good secondary market activity, which means a lot of the employees have cashed out and they've made so much money, just like what's happening at NVIDIA now.

There's very little upside relative to how much money you've already made. So at that point, a lot of the early people start to leave. Cash in your chips. Yeah. So they're trying to hire more people, it sounds like. I heard 70% of employees at NVIDIA are millionaires now. That's a crazy number.

Go ahead, Sak. Well, I was going to say, that question that you asked is really a highly personal question because you could think that OpenAI is a great company that's going to be worth a trillion dollars in the future, but it still makes sense for you to take chips off the table because 100% of your net worth is in that one company.

So... Well, let me ask it that way. You got 90% of your net worth in NVIDIA. I'm sorry, 90% of your net worth. You're a person at OpenAI sitting on $10 million in shares. Do you sell half or all? What would you do personally, Saks? I would take some chips off the table.

I don't... Half? If you were first, if you're like, this is 90% of your net worth, 99% of your net worth. Well, I mean, you're an insider, so maybe you have a lot of information. If you were really bullish on the future of the company, maybe you take 10 or 20% of your chips off the table.

If you're less bullish, maybe it is 50%. So, I don't know. I'd be influenced by my perspective on that, but I think that you could think it's the greatest company in the world and still, it would make sense for you to take some chips off the table because you don't want all your eggs in one basket.

That's a personal diversification decision. And if it was $120 billion valuation with $3 million in revenue, Chamath, and you're trading a 40X or whatever it is times next year's revenue, let's assume they do $5 billion next year, you're still looking at 30X revenue, you would clear? I think these multiples are not really what's going to drive their behavior.

I think OpenAI is running a very strategic game plan to become part of the tech establishment as quickly as they can so that they are on the inside looking out as opposed to the outside looking in. They were able to add the former head of the NSA to their board of directors.

Yeah, what was your take on that, by the way, Chamath? That was interesting. People got pretty- Well, it's how you become part of the establishment. I mean, do you think the former head of the NSA no longer has a security clearance or knows people in the NSA? No, of course not.

And I think that there is a group of people that want to make sure that these kinds of technologies and capabilities are firmly within the hands of the United States apparatus and not anybody else. And so, I think that that pulls them closer to the kinds of folks that could otherwise give them a hard time or regulate them or et cetera, et cetera.

So now what happens is when you have Senate hearings about this stuff, it's more likely that it's confidential behind closed doors, it's under the purview of national security. All these things are beneficial to OpenAI. And then secondly, they were able to get Elon to drop his lawsuit. Conveniently, I think it was like on the same day that the head of the NSA was added to the board of the former head of the NSA.

So, the next logical step is now to create capital markets distribution, which is really about syndicating ownership of the company to all the big deep pools of money so that they are also rolling in the same direction in support of OpenAI. And so, that's what a lot of people don't get.

It's not about valuations or this and that. This is about creating a high level game theory of how to create an international apparatus that supports your corporate objectives. There are a few companies that have done this well and they are now one of them. The only thing left is to get shares into the hands of the Black Rocks, the T-Rows, all the big mutual fund apparatuses of the world that then syndicate to all the individual investors of the world.

And you have everything. You have government connections, you have no real legal overhang. Then the likelihood that an IRS agent all of a sudden decides to audit OpenAI is basically zero. Okay. So, to summarize, a bit cynical, but you're building an ally base that then makes it harder to investigate the company, criticize the company or anything like that, right?

That's essentially what you're saying. I don't think it's cynical. It's like a smart business strategy. Strategy. What's your take on that, Sax? Well, yeah, they're borrowing their way into the deep state. Okay. I mean, the quid pro quo is we will be your vessel. We will be an arm of the intelligence community of the deep state.

We'll give you access to whatever it is you're looking for. And in exchange, you're going to basically protect us and allow us to get rich. And frankly, that's the deal that all the big tech companies have made. They are all in bed with the intelligence community. And we saw this in the Twitter files, where every week for the year before the 2020 election, there were meetings between the trust and safety people, the censorship division of Twitter and the intelligence community.

So these people are working arm in arm. And basically, the big tech companies have given themselves over in a way to this powerful apparatus, this, you know, the deep state in exchange for, you know, they're willing to basically give up power in exchange to be left unfettered to make their money.

I think it's a horrible development for the civil liberties of the ordinary American. But I think that is the reality of what has transpired. Yeah, the number of CIA, former CIA, former FBI, Justice Department people working at the Googles, Facebook's metas apples of the world is like a very large number.

I have family, as many of you know, in law enforcement and in the deep state, I guess, I should call it sex. And they are constantly asking me about job offers they have from these companies and should which one should they go to this is after they've done tours in Afghanistan, and, you know, speaking many different foreign languages, and then all of a sudden, they secure this incredible, you know, three x salary bump by working in big tech.

So there is something to all of this. Ilya announced his new startup. Finally, it's called safe super intelligence, Inc, or SSI. He was obviously an open AI co founder, formerly the chief scientist and co head of super alignment. Last month, he announced he was resigning from open AI after a decade with the company.

And you remember, he was on the board that helped orchestrate Sam Altman's firing. And then he reverse course a few days after and expressed regret in it. Everybody was asking where's Ilya doing all of this on Twitter. The co founders in SSI include Daniel gross, a YC partner, and Pioneer Labs co founder and open AI engineer Daniel Levy.

company's goal right now is in the title develop a safe super intelligence. Here's what Ilya told Bloomberg the company is special in that its first product will be the safe super intelligence and it will not do anything else. Until then, Friedberg is this super intelligence, making safe super intelligence a great business model?

Or is this something else? It's a little bit confusing to come into the market and compete with a throttle or a governor, I guess on your startup. At least that's what some people are discussing. So what are your guys? No idea. I don't know what these guys are doing.

Have you guys looked at this company? I haven't seen anything. Well, I mean, we're just basing it on this question. Yeah. Okay. Okay, quick bounce pass to Zach. Zach. Yeah. Give us your opinion. The caveat what I'm about to say by by saying that I have not heard the pitch directly for this company, I've only read what you've read in the press, what they're trying to do is the safe, super intelligence.

And I'm not bullish about that pitch. Because I think it, it makes the company a little bit schizophrenic. It's working at cross purposes with itself. On the one hand, you're a new company, which means you're behind, you've got to catch up with open AI, or Google, these other companies that now have been creating, you know, models for years.

So you've got to move very fast. On the other hand, you're saying you're going to basically make this very safe. Well, to be frank, safety concerns are a brake pedal. They don't help you move faster. They make you move slower. Yes. And in fact, I think that this is the main reason why Sam Altman either kick these people out of the company or starve their resources until they left.

Remember that when a bunch of these people left open AI, they said that, hey, we were originally promised 30% of the computing resources by Sam. And then he reneged on that promise and give us what we needed. So they all left. Well, I think that was, that wasn't by accident.

I mean, I think that Sam wants to win, he wants to develop AI as quickly as possible, specifically AGI. And he had this group inside the company that frankly, was a lobby for moving slower. So now they have their own startup kicked out. Right. And so I don't but I don't think that's the recipe for winning.

Because no, you're the guys who want to move slower. It'd be like taking the DEI group from Twitter and having them start a new Twitter. Well, I think that's a little bit harsh, because I do think that by all accounts, Carpathia is like a top top notch technologist. And he's one of the leaders in the space.

Yeah, but I do think that he's going to be hamstrung by his own concerns about safety. And I think this is maybe that the tragic situation is, we're going to have this competition by all these different companies to advance AI and the companies that care about safety more than others are going to lose.

And so you have this Darwinian effect going on where there's going to be a race to AGI. And I think that is genuinely a little bit scary for where this this all leads us. But I tend to think that it's not going to be solved by trying to impose the safety governor, as you said, I think maybe the best you can do is impose a truth governor.

So you know, Elon says that we're going to make sure that our model at XAI, the grok model is scrupulously honest, it's not going to lie to you. And I think maybe that's the best you can do is is advance AI to be truthful. But when you start injecting these other safety concerns, I just think it slows you down and hamstrings you.

I think the best way to hit truth is to cite your sources I have been putting into and I don't know if you have you played with four Oh, yet or Claude's new sonnet Jamaat. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it is unbelievably good. If you put cite your sources, it's really starting to understand what you're asking for.

I don't know if you've seen this, but I was asking it. Like I'm hiring some positions, give me the high low average of this position, give me five sources of information, put it in a table, and then average the high, low and median. And it came back to me sacks with an incredible thread, Jamal of this position, and then source glass door, you know, indeed, salary calm, whatever it was.

And I was like, holy cow, this is an hour or two of research or work done instantly. There's an important insight here that I think people are missing, which is that foundational models are quickly becoming a consumer surplus. Every model is roughly the same, they keep getting better and better.

But they're also approaching these asymptotic returns. And what do you do when something approaches an asymptotic return, you need to change a key underlying variable that you use to build these models. And it looks like one of those variables that people are looking at is how you basically take the internet, not as raw data, but then you actually kind of refine it and refine it some more, and then use that as the basis of learning.

And what that does is it drives up model costs to a degree that are probably untenable for most companies, except but for a few. So I think it was Dario Amadei, the CEO of entropic, who said, the cost of a good functional model today is in the billions. But you know, by 2027, it could easily approach $100 billion.

The problem that that represents for Ilya's company, and I wish him the best of luck, but the reality is there isn't $100 billion for him to have, Google will find it, Microsoft will find it, Facebook will find it, Amazon is coming out, open AI will probably find it, Amazon will find it.

But I suspect that these other startups, there just isn't that much money going into AI because the returns don't justify it. So I think the bigger problem that you have is that it's becoming an arms race. It's not dissimilar actually to ride sharing. When people saw Uber's success, they thought, well, this is simple.

And it was, but you had to subsidize losses for decades before that company was profitable. But meanwhile, you had to starve all of these other companies that were funded to compete with Uber until they ran out of money and died. I think that you could make a claim that the AI foundational model market will look similar to that.

One startup can probably win, but there will be a bunch of open source alternatives. They're all asymptotically similar. And so it's an arms race on cost and compute. And I just don't see VCs having the temperament and the wherewithal to fund hundreds of billions of dollars into multiple companies to do that.

Friberg, any thoughts on the latest models? Have you played with them? I'm curious. I have been having tremendous results. There seems like there is, I don't know, I don't want to say a step function, but man, it's a lot better right now. Have you used any of these models?

And are you applying any of them inside of your company? We're using a lot more models. And we're seeing them be very practically applied at the edge. So you don't need to have large models running on a large compute cloud to get practical value. And this is definitely a big, a big point in the industry is that you're getting highly functional, application specific models that can be run in a more local environment on the edge.

So they're not running the cloud on big compute clusters. And there's incredible applications in things like machine vision and control systems. You're going to ultimately see this being I don't know if you guys saw that Chinese dog, we never talked about this. China basically ripped off Boston Dynamics, or at least that's what it looks like.

And they created this military dog, Nick, can you pull up the clip, and then they put machine guns on the back of the dogs back, the models are running locally in these devices. In fact, I think we're gonna have a few demonstrations of this at the at the island summit.

So the robotic applications are pretty powerful. Machine vision applications are very powerful. And when you see this insane video from China, by the way, this is a totally different topic. You guys seen this? I have seen this. It's this thing goes autonomously into a building, and it can then find its target and eliminate its target with the machine gun on the back.

Incredible. And you can see this becoming like, let's say they build a assembly line, and they put out 10 million 50 million of these things. And these things can now go run autonomously in the field. This is the dark side of small, highly performative application specific models running in an embedded way.

Imagine those are amphibious. And they could travel against, they could travel across water and wind up in another destination. I don't know where would a beach invasion occur. Anyway, that was a very funky tangential aside. All right. We've talked about Microsoft and the bundling issues a number of times here.

Thanks. You had a spicy take on this. Well, the EU just charged Microsoft with antitrust violations over how it bundles teams. They're quote unquote, slack killer into office. Here's a quick chart. Microsoft Teams obviously was bundled. Everybody has it automatically with office. You don't get a choice and they rocketed to 75 million members.

2022 slacks 12 million. You've obviously got a lot of thoughts here. I'm sure to as well. Come on, since you were the early investor in this. Looks like Salesforce just got a big win. Benioff gave some commentary on X Microsoft excels with bundling. It's not it's they're not so secret weapon for dominating new markets.

We know the playbook office plus teams, Windows plus Explorer, Azure plus Visual Studio, 365 plus OneDrive and Xbox plus game Xbox plus game pass. Here's a clip of sacks discussing this on episode 113 of your all in podcast. If Microsoft can basically clone the sort of the breakthrough innovative product, you know, just to say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that bundle.

Yeah. 10% or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other companies. So it can't be a vibrant competitor. And then the next year they'll just raise the price of the bundle.

Right. And they've done that with Slack. They've done that with Okta. They've done that with zoom. Can we have a vibrant tech ecosystem, at least in b2b software, if Microsoft can just keep doing that indefinitely? All right, sacks, you heard your quote there. I'm guessing you're not shocked by this action.

Well, I think the EU made the right decision here. They basically sided with Salesforce who made the complaint and said that Microsoft was engaged in illegal bundling. By combining Microsoft office and teams. And the reality is Microsoft office is a product that every company has to have every, certainly every enterprise has to have.

And by bundling, it means that that enterprise receives the team's product for free until of course the price of the bundle goes up the next year, which it has just about every single year. So what that does is when that enterprise is evaluating the choice of do we use teams or do we use Slack or for example, glue or some other tool teams on the margin appears to be free.

Whereas Slack is something you have to pay for seats. And I think that is, that is illegal bundling. You know, when you have a monopoly in one product and you systematically use it to keep adding new products that again, on the margins appear to be free because you've bundled them.

And I think the EU has done the right thing here, which is push to end the bundling. Every single product needs to have its own a la carte pricing. And when you add together the a la carte prices, it should equal the price of the bundle. So in other words, you don't get anything on the margin for free.

The customer needs to have the discretion to choose what it wants. If we don't do that, I do think that Microsoft will use the power of the bundle to systematically dominate enterprise software. And they won't take on everybody at once. But like I said, they'll every year, they'll add a new product to the bundle.

Chamath what's the what's the middle ground here between the interest of consumers, which is, hey, I'm getting free, a free version of Slack. It's not free, it appears to be free on the margins, because it's not part of the bundle. But then they raise the price of the bundle the next year.

Correct. They boil the frog. So so once they killed, once they pulled the legs out, pull the rug out from under their competition, yes, that competitor is no longer viable. Now they can raise the price of the bundle. Okay. And so it's kind of like dumping in a way.

I mean, this is a very old antitrust argument. When you would dump product in the market to kill a competitor, or you would price under your cost to kill a competitor, right? Yeah, you dump to basically drive a competitor out of business, because there's large cost of entry, there's large capex required to create a new competitor.

And, and this is this is basically what they're doing is they appear to give you they appear to give you the the Slack clone or whatever, for free. But then once they pulled the rug out, they'll increase the price of the bundle. Chamath what's the balance here between say, I don't know, Apple giving away a free note pay note taking app or a free journaling app to consumers and hey, consumers get this benefit of free product versus the bundling concept here with, hey, we'll give it to you for free, but eventually we're gonna boil the frog.

What's your thought of how to adjudicate this, or to execute on it? Microsoft's interest of consumers. Microsoft has been bundling to bundling products to kill competitors for 40 years. The the 10 years that they didn't do it was the 10 years when Steve Ballmer was in charge, during which there was a legal document between Microsoft and the Justice Department, a consent decree that prevented them from doing it.

That consent decree came to be because of this exact strategy. And the most famous example that was the tail end of that process was when they used Internet Explorer and they bundled it with Microsoft Windows and they killed Netscape. Right? So there's umpteen examples of this. So I think that they've gone back to their old playbook.

It's a playbook that you have to remember the executives that run Microsoft have been there for 30 and 40 years. They know this play and they know that it works and they've been rewarded incredibly handsomely by the public markets. So they're gonna keep doing it. Would Slack have sold to Salesforce?

Now, look, I'm not complaining. It was a $27 billion acquisition. But the question is, if it were allowed to compete feature for feature, could it have beat teams? Possibly. Would the board have made, and I was on the board of Slack, a decision to have tried? Possibly. But none of those options were on the table.

Because when you see a product, it doesn't matter how inferior it is, get bundled in, it's kind of DOA. And then you're on a melting iceberg. And so you have to make a very quick decision to preserve enterprise value. So I think what this comes down to is the FTC and the DOJ need to dust off that old consent decree, read it, and figure out whether this makes sense again.

It seems like folks in the EU have more recently read that consent decree than American regulators have. Look, what we've said all along is that the right approach to antitrust is to stop anti-competitive tactics. Bundling is at the top of the list. Instead, what they've stopped is all M&A, which is actually bad for the ecosystem, because you deny risk, capital, or reward.

And you need that reward in order to induce the next stage of risk taking. So again, I think this was a good decision by the EU regulators and the competition authorities in the US should actually be looking to this. Again, it's a better approach than stifling M&A. You are so right on this.

We're so aligned. If you look at, I've been talking to a lot of LPs, and in talking to them, they're looking at corporate credit and P&E deals because they can get a return on those. And then they're looking at venture, and they're saying, "Hey, why is there no M&A occurring?

Where's our DPI? Can you guys sell some of these companies?" It's like, "Yeah, we can't sell them because Lena Kahn's going to scuttle this M&A." And what that means is, in a very real way, we have dollars being taken out of innovation in early stage and being put into privatizing SaaS companies, whatever, real estate deals.

And this is really dangerous for America. We really need more of this. I'll make one last wrap on this topic. I'll take the other side of bundling. Oh, here we go. I think ultimately, if bundling benefits the consumer or the customer from improved prices, I don't buy the antitrust arguments on a lot of these cases.

I don't think that you're keeping competitive solutions in the market if the benefit of the lower cost product is actually there for the consumer or the customer. Supermarkets, for example, do this. So there's a lot of products in the supermarket, like peanut butter, milk, eggs, that have historically been big loss leaders because they get people in the store.

Once they get in the store... They're not monopolies. They're effectively... Peanut butter's not a monopoly. Bundling. Monopoly in what way? The supermarket's not a monopoly. It's fine to bundle commodities, but when a product is a monopoly, and every enterprise must have it... Commodities have finite shelf lives. So you're talking about one week.

And Teams is not a monopoly. Microsoft Office is. When you install it, if Microsoft Office is and 365 is, you can't rip it out. You can't rip it out. There are other options. You have options. There's plenty of options. You have options, but not... And the whole benefit of SaaS is that you can switch all the time.

Those options are on market power. Of course they do. I can switch to Google Docs and save money. Microsoft Office is standard. It's standard in what? In the enterprise market. I don't have to buy it. I don't have to buy enterprise seat licenses for Office. I can buy Google Docs.

SMBs think that way, but enterprises have to have Office. Enterprises don't think that way. Yeah, I mean... They have every option to. Google's competing effectively in the Office space against Microsoft Office. Yeah, but you have to look as the duopoly. Zoom is competing effectively against Teams. Like none of these businesses have a monopoly.

Zoom's had the legs kicked out from under it. Yeah, Zoom, I would argue, is getting demolished. Slack just stopped growing. Look, once they put Teams in the bundle, Slack stopped growing. What's the monopolistic lock-in? The amazing thing about SaaS is that there's no switching cost. There's no switching cost.

What? I don't think we're debating that. I think what we're debating is the sales practice where Microsoft says, "Well, you need Office, you need Windows, and you need 365. Or, sorry, Active Directory. Well, if you'd like all of these things, we're going to give you this product for free as well, and they're going to be tightly integrated." Then when you go to Slack, you have to pay more.

And then you think to yourself, "Well, how do I go back to my CFO and say, 'I need an extra $1.2 million a year for this enterprise license to Slack'?" And then people say, "Well..." That's my point. You're saving money if you stick with Microsoft. They're giving you a discount.

Because once they kill Slack, they'll just raise the price of the bundle. That's the point. That's a theory. And if that's true, that should be prosecuted. I don't think that the idea of a bundle... Which applies under the Microsoft Internet Explorer action. But that's the violating action. That's my point.

Why can't you just make Microsoft... The idea of having a bundle should not be a violating action. No. All Microsoft has to do is they've got a price of the bundle. Allocate that price across all the components of the bundle so people can buy each product a la carte.

That's all. They can still sell a bundled offering. If at the end of the day, that sum is cheaper than you buying the alternative a la carte from third-party vendors, that is a great deal for you as a customer. It can be cheaper. But the point is... What we're talking about here is proactively keeping competition.

And I think that creates a good competitive dynamic. But maybe I'm thinking two first principles on this. I think you're missing something here, Preebh, which is what happens then when, let's just say Slack, there wasn't a suitor for Slack. Okay, let's take the internet browser example because I think it's better.

If you didn't have a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company prop up a product because they just felt like it, i.e. Chrome and Google, you would have had Microsoft run away with the core interface for the internet. We don't know how that would have turned out. So by luck, we've had some modicum of consumer choice, but it's not as if Firefox did well.

Firefox went to basically irrelevancy. Netscape went to zero. So there are examples where when Microsoft has done this, they can starve the market of choice over long periods of time. And I think if you're, hold on, hold on a second. So if your whole point is, well, let's just bet on the largesse of other large companies, that's a bad bet.

But I will show you multiple counterexamples. Google Meet does not dominate market share. Again, you're talking about the largesse. You're talking about the largesse of companies. You're talking not about competitive practices. Find me venture-funded people, risk-taking people who need a return on investment. Google is the worst example. They have the most indiscriminate forms of spending.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be allowed to. - I'm sorry, I'm giving you a counterexample to the point about bundling. - No, that's not a counterexample. - Or they have Google Wave or any of these other nonsense products that didn't work. You know, I'm not calling Google Meet a nonsense product.

- The point of a healthy product environment and market is not that one incumbent and another incumbent can create their own crappy versions. It's that you could theoretically have an open market where somebody can be funded with nominal amounts of capital and compete effectively. That isn't possible in many markets and software because of these kinds of strategies.

So what you're reduced to are these huge companies with this product sprawl. I don't think those are good products. And I think we're lying to ourselves to say that they are. Google Meet is a terrible product, okay? - Brutal. - So whatever they're competing with is a terrible alternative.

- That's my point. And they've lost market share. They have not won market share by bundling. - And if you try to find a real competitor to build an alternative to it, they're not able to get funded because the venture investor says, "No, I can't." And that's the market power that stifles competition.

That's what this is about. - And if you, as an entrepreneur, come up with a much better product than Google Meet, a VC will say, "Wow, we can go and blow up the side of the hull of that ship." - I totally disagree with you. - "Let's go after it." - I don't think there's a single person.

- Microsoft bought Skype how many years ago for eight and a half billion dollars and then Zoom came around. - If left unchecked, Microsoft will, I mean, Zoom is a standalone, unbundled product. And they totally dominated the market while everyone else has been doing bundling. - The bottom line is, if left unchecked, you will see people abuse this.

It is not a big ass to have a la carte pricing and that will make the playing field much, much more competitive. - The Zoom example is a terrible one. And the reason is that P&L would have a hole blown on the side of it if they did not have 90% of their R&D and OPEX in China.

So, but for the grace of God and Eric's strategic thinking, they were able to survive. But that is a perfect example of a company that would absolutely not have existed had they not had a labor arbitrage. That is not the basis of a competitive and fair market. And you cannot expect people going off to all four corners of the world and trying to do all these gymnastics to viably compete against the Microsoft and a Google.

- I would argue-- - That is not what-- - Figma, Adobe. Adobe has a bundling solution. If you guys have ever tried to sign up for Adobe or end your subscription, it's nearly impossible. - Yeah, they just had action taken against them for that. - They've got these insane practices.

They make you buy everything to get access to one thing. - Well, look what they did. - And then Figma comes along and Figma kills the market. They come in and they're like, "We're a better product." Better markets do win even with bundling. That's my argument. - I think the interesting thing with Adobe is that they have a product suite that's used in a narrow field.

I think what Saxe is saying is, Adobe is about a sort of vertical system of record. I think what the thing about Microsoft, and you could probably say about Google is, but less so, but definitely for Microsoft, is they are these very horizontal, broad, amorphous systems of record that you cannot easily replace.

There aren't people running around building nine of the 19 things that Microsoft gives you in the bundle. That's the problem. - Okay, well-- - The debate continues. - Furthermore, I mean, on this very show, we are arguing that the Figma acquisition should go through because it created a new market for web designers, whereas Photoshop was basically for graphic designers.

- No, but Saxe, it doesn't compete with Photoshop. It competes with some of their other design programs, but that's, anyway. - All right, we're not gonna settle it here. - I think there's a difference between a bundle and a suite. Suites are okay. Bundling, when you already have a monopoly in the relevant part of the bundle, that's the problem.

- Bundling is when you take a wrench and a can of peanut butter and put them together, and you're like, "Here, you're gonna take them both." You're like, "Well, I only need the wrench." "Well, you're gonna take the peanut butter." And they're like, "Well, I already have peanut butter, "so I don't need to buy new peanut butter." - I mean, we saw this in the cable providers and DirecTV as well.

You know, just, you can't-- - It only works if you're a monopoly. - Not pay for ESPN even if you don't like sports. All right, listen, another amazing episode for compassionate Chamath, satire Saxe, and the frank-- - Satire Saxe wants to say one more thing. - I just have a perfect wrap up-- - Please.

- Okay, satire Saxe, go ahead, what's your-- - Well, I wanna-- - Continue the gloating, here we go, satire Saxe. - No, let's put this tweet by Joe Biden, President Biden. - Oh, God, it's the elder abuse. - No, I wanna compliment Joe Biden on continuing to fight. You keep fighting, Joe.

Do not let the media get you down. One bad night is not a reason to get out of the race. All these people stabbing you in the back, they're basically ingrates and backstabbers. You're doing just fine. - All right, and from candid Calacanis-- - Who? - And from candid Calacanis to the Democratic Party, desgraciad, your disgrace, what you did to the American people with this rope and dope is ridiculous.

- Desgraciad. - 20, desgraciad! 25th Amendment, get this guy out of office, President Kamala, hot swap it, Dean Phillips, let's go. We'll see you all next time on the "All In" podcast. - We are back. - Love you, boys. (upbeat music) - We'll let your winners ride. - Rain Man David Sachs.

♪ I'm going all in ♪ - And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. - Love you, Wesley. - The queen of quinoa. ♪ I'm going all in ♪ ♪ Let your winners ride ♪ ♪ Let your winners ride ♪ ♪ Let your winners ride ♪ - Besties are gone.

(laughing) - That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway, Sachs. (laughing) - Oh, man. - My avatars will meet me at-- - We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy 'cause they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

(upbeat music) - What are the beat, what are the beat? - What are the beat, what are the beat? - We need to get merch. - Besties are back. ♪ I'm going all in ♪ (upbeat music) ♪ I'm going all in ♪ you