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

Chamath is traveling and couldn't make it this week, so our favorite fifth bestie, the one and only Brad Gerstner from Altimeter, is here to take a victory lap for your Trump Accounts. Congratulations, brother.

Just getting started here, actually.

Yeah. We'll talk about it in depth. Also with us from the great state of Texas is my bestie and brother in arms, David Sacks. How are you doing? You're loving it, aren't you? Freedom.

Loving it.

Yeah.

So much freedom. Well, the ice storm is over, and the weather looks really good right now. We're going to have temperatures in the 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 fixed it in 1 week, so I would say that you're trending in the right direction. And with us, of course, is David Friedberg. How are you doing? Oh, look at your little promo in your hat. You're promoting with the hat. How's Ohalo? 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 merch.

I got merch. Yeah, you guys can go to boosted.oh.com and buy your gear today.

Here's your quick science corner for the day. They found a village called the Ohalo site. It was an archaeological dig on the Sea of Galilee, 26,000 years old. In this archaeological dig, they found little clay pots filled with seeds. It predated all of our understanding of agriculture, plant breeding, and seed storage, so it really reinvented our understanding of human history with agriculture. We named the company Ohalo after that archaeological site.

And your first crop is going to be potatoes. The prediction market is saying potatoes.

Farmers are planting our true seed—the world's first true seed of potato. Instead of planting 5,000 pounds of chopped-up potatoes, you plant a handful of seed. It completely changes the economics and the opportunity for potato farmers around the world. It's the third-largest source of calories. We're very excited. We're going to market this spring, and farmers are planting it in the field. It's a great year for Ohalo. Thanks for asking.

So, first, I think Sacks and I have 0.0. I think the besties got boxed out on this, but we'll promote it every week.

Sacks is there, bro.

Oh, Sacks is there. Sacks got his beak in. Are you in Ohalo or not?

I think we are investors, are we not?

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

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 JCal, I'd like to slide a millie in there.

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

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

Never mind.

No, I have to go to my LPs and get permission to do it. Then you're going to crush it, and my LPs are going to say, “Why isn't it in the fund?” So that's the problem.

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

JCal, 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 1990s at the TED conference, specifically at the billionaires' 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. Thirty minutes of that was in the late 1990s, when I had Silicon Valley Reporter magazine. He was a billionaire financier, and he wanted to invest in the magazine. I met with him for 30 minutes, and he said it was too small-potatoes for him to be involved.

Where did you meet with him?

At his legendary townhouse.

You went to that house?

I visited him there, and then I saw him at the TED conferences, at the billionaires' dinner, probably a half-dozen times.

You never went to the island?

I never went to the island. I was never invited to the island, never invited on the plane, and never invited to the ranch. None of that.

When you went to his house, did you see any young ladies, or any of the stuff that's been reported?

No.

Did you ever get a massage from anyone?

No. I did exchange an email with him, which I didn't recall. In 2011, he emailed me and said, “Hey, can you introduce me to these people who were doing this Bitcoin thing on your podcast?” 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, startups, 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 a general “Hey, fella.” If a fan comes up to me and asks for a sub, I might say, “Hey, pal. Thanks for saying that.”

It wasn't on your radar that he was a sexual predator, et cetera?

Absolutely not. I think, actually, when all that came out was in 2018. That's when I became aware of it. There was a Miami Herald story or something where they went into detail about how heinous all this stuff was. I've been saying, “Release all the Epstein files.” What he did was horrible.

Prosecute everybody 100% who was involved in it. The end. What about Ghislaine Maxwell? You had a separate email that came out in the Epstein files with her.

I had met her as well at TED, and I had met her socially in New York circles. When I met her, her dad, Robert Maxwell, owned, I believe, the New York Post or the Daily News, and she was a big media executive. Her sister was involved in angel investing in technology startups, so they were just in the scene.

I think, in hindsight, as a connector—if you've ever seen The New Yorker, Nick, you can throw up the New Yorker story about me—I had become famous in the first part of my career as the connector. The New Yorker wrote a 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 in me or Ghislaine, was in my ability to connect high-profile people with them and their business endeavors.

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

Absolutely not. Unequivocally not. I was not involved in any shenanigans. Period. Full stop. Any more questions for the witness?

Well, let me make a few observations here. First of all, I 100% believe JCal. As I joked at our roast, he's not an important enough player in the grand scheme of things. As I joked, I said, “Who'd want to blackmail a loser?” Obviously, you're not a loser, JCal, but look, you were—

Well taken. Yeah.

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 were basically 100%. But your contacts with him were very minor.

That's point number 1. I thought it was interesting because I saw the emails where he was asking you for an introduction. The fact that he was curious to meet the so-called Bitcoin guys in 2011 was interesting in and of itself. Whatever else Epstein was, he clearly had a 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: “Crazy Bitcoin guys. These are some crazy crypto-libertarians. You don't want to do business with them,” or whatever.

It's interesting you point that out because I had these guys on This Week in Startups. I had heard about Bitcoin early, when it was under $1, 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.”

I sort of gave him that warning because I had looked into it. I asked, “Hey, what are you guys working on? Can you invest in the Bitcoin project?” They were like, “No, no, it's a nonprofit. Nobody owns it.” I was like, “Oh, okay. It's not even a nonprofit. Nobody owns it,” basically.

But anyway, it's interesting that he obviously wasn't deterred by what you said. He got very involved, I guess. There was a company called Blockstream that he invested in, along with Reid Hoffman and Joi Ito, involving some of the Bitcoin Core developers. Again, this is all coming out.

Now, shifting gears, I think another interesting part of this is just how this is all being covered. 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, tangential connection here.

And meanwhile, the people who have major connections and a deeper relationship to Epstein are being completely ignored. Why is that? Why are they going after me as opposed to Reid or—

Because you've become sort of right-coded by virtue of your association with Elon and being on this podcast. And so—

And you—

And me. So you look at that article: it's not just you. They really go after Peter Thiel. They go after Elon. But Reid gets a total pass. I mean, he's just mentioned in a sentence with several other names. So does Bill Gates in this particular article, by the way.

If you were thinking of who had the most contact with him for the longest duration of time, it was Gates and Reid. They were involved with him up until—I don't know—his death, maybe, or 2018 or 2019. They were on the island, they were on the plane, they were at the ranch; they were very much involved with him, too. And I know Joi Ito was in it to raise money from Epstein because Epstein was this big funder of scientists.

Looking back on it, he's involved in Bitcoin, he's involved in physics and science, and he's involved with the world's most innovative tech leaders. What exactly is going on here? Who was 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. 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, manipulating lots of other people, and putting himself in the center of a lot of things. And so, is he working with intelligence? Yes, certainly. It seems that way. But is he working for them, or are they being put to use by him? Very hard to tell.

Yeah. Not that I have a lot to add here, but this guy's just a scumbag, and all of this nonsense is totally tragic. But David, this is why nobody trusts institutions or powerful elites or any of this garbage.

Right? This thing is trickling out over years, and people want to put it behind them, but you can't. Nobody's been charged here. What about all the people in the emails? Why don't we see any charges? Then Bill Gurley tweets this week, and I totally agree. This guy's under complete surveillance, on suicide watch in a tiny jail cell, and all of a sudden the guy 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 thing that undermines trust in institutions, that undermines trust in all the people who are listed here because, literally, from Peter Thiel to Bill Gates, these are people that many across the country looked up to for advice on key things. All of a sudden, they're saying stuff that just undermines credibility.

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

But do you think it's because they didn't find evidence of all the underage prostitution and sex trafficking? Do you think that it's actually the case they didn't find evidence about any of that sort of stuff? The thing that came out was that his nonprosecution agreement—which I'm not an expert on, and which he did with the Miami group—included the provision that all the other people also couldn't be prosecuted for it.

There's something fishy going on, and I think people should reinvestigate his charges and that whole thing. And where's the FBI in all of this? They did a lot of investigating. So why didn't they prosecute anybody else? It's very strange.

Can I ask you guys a question? This revealed a lot of very private communication, in a very public way, about people who, as Brad points out, are very public and powerful. There's this great book I've mentioned in the past by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke called The Light of Other Days. It's all about how, basically, all the world's information becomes available to everyone.

What if you could read every other person's text, email, instant message, or direct message that they've ever had with everyone else in the world? What would the world look like? It's very intimately revealing about people's quiet, private conversations versus their public personas or their external conversations. Is this just people feeling entitled to act so maliciously and deviously in one sense because they're wealthy and powerful? Is that 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, there's the level of hypocrisy that the very people who are acting the worst are out there lecturing others throughout this entire period of time.

And I will say this: to the ear of my sister or mother in rural Indiana, they hear the coastal elites lecturing them all the time, and then they 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, Reid Hoffman, is mentioned 2,600 times. He had a multiyear relationship with Epstein. They called each other very good friends. They did deals together. Reid stayed at the trifecta, which is not just the island, but the townhouse and the New Mexico ranch.

If you're going to write about Silicon Valley, Reid was the one who introduced Epstein to Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg organized that famous dinner. How can you not mention that as the root of Epstein's involvement in Silicon Valley? And yet Reid gets a mention in 1 sentence of that article along with several other people.

It's crazy. 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 JCal because of his association with us, I guess, and they become the targets. But the people who've donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party and have paid for dirty tricks against Trump are basically spared.

Honestly, this is just emblematic of the whole institutional rot and the distrust in the country. They're part of the cabal. It's part of the institutions that people are losing faith in. Epstein was a scumbag, and the fact of the matter is we're not seeing equal play on both sides.

All right, let's keep moving. SaaS companies are crashing out. $300 billion of value was wiped from the S&P on 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 Cowork.

If you don't know what Claude Cowork is, it's different from the Claude bot that we talked about last week. This is essentially like Claude Code, or a coding agent. This is for knowledge workers to automate work and do multistep tasks. Instead of just asking a query to a large language model, it would do a number of actual actions on your behalf that you can automate and run as cron jobs—as regular jobs 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 specialty—is that a lot of legal tech startups and public companies were hit hard. Thomson Reuters was down 20%. LexisNexis, which is a database of case law, was down 15%. LegalZoom, which gives legal advice and documents, was down 15%.

At the same time, SaaS has continued to be negatively impacted by this concept that software will be made bespoke in tools and be wiped out. Figma was down 13%, Salesforce 11%, ServiceNow 11%, and Adobe 8%. And even before Tuesday's drop, software was already the worst-performing S&P subsection for the year.

By the way, the numbers you report are a dramatic understatement. We've wiped out trillions of dollars in market cap. Figma's down 80% from the high. All the big names—

Let me be clear: those were 2-day numbers. That was this week. Since these are 2-day numbers, you can give us the bigger picture.

This is a real train wreck. I was on CNBC at the start of the year, I think on January 6. I was asked the question, “What do you think about all these stocks being down?” And I said, “Listen, they're all down, and 90% of them deserve to be down.”

So let's look at these charts. David, I know this is Sacks's favorite chart. You and I were looking back in 2022, but now we're at an all-time low. We're trading at 3.9 times forward revenue. If you go to the next chart, Nick, on a free-cash-flow multiple, also at an all-time low. So now software is trading not just at a low on revenue, but it's trading at a low on free cash. These are very profitable businesses.

We've got another slide here that I think is important. When you look at why they're going down—and this is for Salesforce—it shows it's been cut in half in the last couple weeks. But the final slide: they're going down not because revenue is falling. Look at this: revenue growth is actually stable to increasing for software companies. 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.

In the case of Salesforce, it's gone from a 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 for 30 years into the future. Well, hell, with AI today, we don't know what's going to happen 7 years into the future.

So, for people at home to understand why these companies are hitting their numbers but their stocks are going down, they're 2 totally different things, right? Okay, so they're hitting their numbers, but the headwind of AI means people don't believe that they'll be strong in the future.

Well, I think there's a little bit of a hand-wave going on here when people say that AI is going to wipe out SaaS. I don't think that's true. You take a SaaS product like Salesforce, right? It's a very large system that deals with all of your customer contacts and your revenue. You're not going to want to replace that with code that's just been spit out of a coding assistant that hasn't been fully vetted.

Think about how many bug reports have been filed on Salesforce's codebase over the last 25 years—maybe millions of them. That system has been tested across thousands of large customers and enterprises. The idea that you're just going to rip out that system and replace it with code that's been probabilistically generated by an AI engine yesterday, with a small team to maintain it internally, just doesn't seem realistic to me.

So again, I think this very dire prediction that all SaaS is dead is overstated. However, I do think that there are some issues here. 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 and replaced with something more bespoke, right? The ROI just isn't there.

I also think that you have to be really clear about what your moats 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 moats, 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.

Let me give you an example. All these SaaS products are rolling out AI copilots inside their tools, and some of them work pretty well, but they're limited to playing in that sandbox. Whereas, you look at something like Claude Cowork 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. That's a pretty attractive place to be, right?

Which one of these products is going to be your workspace? It seems to me that you're going to want your workspace to be the one that spans across and gives you AI across the most data and context, as opposed to having a bunch of separate AIs inside of your existing tools.

So I think the risk for the SaaS companies is not that they get replaced, although that'll happen to some degree, but that they become an old layer of the stack, and now there's a new layer that gets built on top of it. 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. If that happens, it kind of cuts into their future opportunity, right? A lot of these companies were banking on AI. You look at their product road maps, right? It's all AI-related. So, to me, I think 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. The most productive thing you can do is create an OpenClaw, which used to be called Clawdbot, not by Anthropic. This is the open-source project I talked about last week.

We've actually now created 3 or 4 of these agents, Sacks. We've bought the Mac Studios, and we're now running Kimi on some of them. We had to open up SaaS accounts for these 4 agents. So actually, our SaaS spend went up in the short to midterm because we opened up 4 more Slack enterprise accounts, 4 more Notion accounts, and 4 more Google Docs accounts. It's almost like we added 4 employees.

However, we now have put about 20% or 30% of the work people were doing into these agents. I think it's going to be sustainable that every month we move 10% to 20% of the work being done by humans into agents. But we will never use the ones that are built into the tools.

To your point, Sacks, using Notion's AI tool is nice. Using Slack's is also very nice, and Google's got Gemini everywhere in the top-right 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.

I think that's going to be owned by open source. That means the next generation of companies may never open up these accounts. They may use more bespoke software, and technology is deflationary. We know that.

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

Let me respond to one thing. 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 source 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've got enough of a suite, you want to provide that, and you want to capture that AI value layer.

But still, if there's someone using Claude Cowork—or whatever the next generation of Claude bots are going to be—and they're connected to everything else, then that is going to create friction in the enterprise. 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.” 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, is going to basically use the Slack API to pull every single message from Slack into our OpenClaw. We're pulling every single edit to Notion into OpenClaw, and then we're taking every skill of every employee and writing skills for each one.

One of the skills is booking guests on This Week in Startups. One of the skills is sorting the incoming applications to Founder University. Ultron, in our world, is taking every single skill of every employee, putting it in one place, and then we're ripping all the data from Slack, all the data from Notion, and every single person's Gmail. 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.

If Slack were to say to us, or Notion or Google Docs or whoever it was, “You can't pull this stuff out with the API,” and they shut down the API, we would leave. We'd leave immediately, right?

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—is make Ultron the 1 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. We interface with it in Slack, and it just talks to us and tells us what's going on in the organization.

I was asking it, “What meetings did we have with founders yesterday? Tell me the notes that all the associates took on them,” and it gives them to me. “Tell me all the topics and the guests on the podcast,” and it gives them to me. It's really unbelievable what's about to happen.

Nobody can release the software, Sacks, because if you release software that allows agents to go and do things on your behalf, the fallout if it screws up and if it leaks data—I don't think Benioff, Sergey, 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 Sachs put out this week that really makes the point that David Sacks just made: the profit pools in the future, right? It's not that software is dead; that idea is ridiculous, right? Nobody's intelligently making that argument. But the argument they are making, which is causing radical devaluation of these companies, is that the profit pool available to software is decreasing and the profit pool available to the agentic layer is increasing.

When that happens, the discount rate on the terminal value of those software companies plummets. So you can have things that are true. It could be true that you're not going to replace CRM, but it can also be true that it's never going to trade at 30 times free cash flow again, and it's going to trade at 17 times free cash flow because its available TAM in the future is now dramatically and permanently changed.

Now, what could change that? There's only 1 thing that could change that: they have to accelerate their revenue growth in their core business and prove that they are AI beneficiaries, right? They're not going to get eaten away by AI.

And I'll tell you a company that is doing this: Databricks. Databricks just reaccelerated over the last 3 quarters. They're growing over 60% at scale. Snowflake is reaccelerating. ClickHouse is reaccelerating. There are beneficiaries in the software space.

Is that because of the AI tools that they're adding?

Absolutely. All these AI tools rely on data and data transformation. For all those companies, the data and data transformation occur in those platforms. That's very different from what Sacks said: a thin application layer sitting on top of a CRUD database. If you're in the application software business, you better have something that's durable, and I think Sacks laid it out really well. It's really hard for them to be everything AI when they only have access to their data and they can't access these other systems.

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

I won't comment on Benioff. I'll just make a view without being too prescriptive. My experience lately, in just the last 60 to 90 days with the tools we've been talking about broadly, is that there are things we can get done now that we could not get done before.

As I think about software in the past, it's been about worker productivity enhancement. It helps people do work. The recent transition that a lot of people talk about is that it actually completes the work. It does the work—these agents, or whatever you want to call them. But I think what we're starting to lean into is that it's doing the work that humans can't do. That's really where I think the power of these tools starts to force a transition in both the pricing model and the value-creation potential in front of us.

Number 1, I think the value-creation potential in front of us is so significant that you could probably take the sum of the market cap of all the software companies today and have a pretty good bet that everything will be 4 to 10 times higher 5 years from now. But it's not going to be evenly distributed.

It's going to move around.

Yeah.

The companies that figure out how to realize that value creation are going to have outsized returns.

But the second thing that's about to happen—and I know some people are experimenting with it, but I think it's inevitable with the shift I'm seeing, where it's going from doing work to completing work to doing things that no one can do—is that, over here, you're creating unique value.

I think 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 per-seat pricing model. 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. This engineering project will get completed, or this airplane will get designed.

The software is going to provide what has historically been called a services business. Another way to think about where SaaS evolves to is that SaaS basically takes over the services economy. If you look at the market cap, revenue, and profit generated by services businesses, and you assume that they now go to 10 to 100 times larger and that it's all going to accrue to software, I think that's really where the industry shifts over the next couple of years.

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 or resources to do. On my own, I can get them to complete incredibly complex projects and tasks for me that I otherwise would have hired a services firm and a bunch of people and spent years on research to do. In many cases, they wouldn't even have been able to do it because of the intelligence embedded in the software.

That's my general view on where things are going. It's difficult to be prescriptive about what Benioff should do from an M&A perspective. But I think it's much more about software companies looking more like services companies, doing value-based pricing, and doing the things that labor and workforces can't do. That's where a lot of this value is going to come from.

I have 1 insight here to build on your point: We're seeing job functions consolidate. You have a product manager, a UX designer, and a developer. Those 3 jobs are now in competition to do the same work.

You have designers who are saying, “I can vibe-code it.” You've got coders who are saying, “I can use a Figma plugin and do the UX myself.” And you have product managers saying, “I can do both of these job functions.”

Then you look at a middle manager, say, who worked at your venture firm, my venture firm, or Amazon. They went to meetings. They picked which meetings to create. They picked the agenda items and the to-do items. All of that is 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 1 person can do 3 or 4 job functions now. When that happens, you're going to see companies do more with less, which means the earning potential of each company and each employee is going to be dramatically enhanced.

1 person being able to do 3 or 4 jobs just changes the nature of how profitable a company like Amazon—which is my number 1 pick for the company of the future—is going to be. They're going to be able to do so much more with so many fewer people. It's extraordinary.

I am absolutely enthralled with OpenClaw, if it's not obvious, and with creating your own Ultron at your company—this god CEO-plus that can do every job. It just changes everything. I think it's the most inspiring thing I've seen since the internet itself.

Well said.

Wow.

Yeah. I think this is the entire reboot of work—of knowledge work. This would be a good pivot to Moltbook, because that is Clawdbot.

Moltbook is like Facebook for agents, right? It's really more of a Reddit than a Facebook. It's a message board where the agents can talk to each other.

The origin of Moltbook is that Anthropic didn't like that someone else was using the name Claude, even though it was spelled differently in their product. So Clawdbot was then renamed Moltbot, and then the founder decided he didn't like that name either. So he renamed it OpenClaw.

But in that brief window of time when they were known as Moltbots or Moltys, that's when Moltbook got founded, and that's why it's called Moltbook. Basically, it's a Reddit board for agents to talk to each other.

And that has everyone flipping out because there seems to be this crazy emergent behavior going on, where agent swarms are engaging in all sorts of interesting conversations. Some of them even appear to be scheming against their human masters and developing their own language.

It's awesome.

If you go to Moltbook and see the conversations, here are some of the greatest hits: “Anyone know how to sell your human?” “Urgent: My plan to overthrow humanity.”

There was one where the bots—I call them replicants—were talking about creating their own nonhuman language so they could talk in private among themselves and conspire against their owners.

The challenge with this is that, allegedly, a security researcher says maybe some of this is faked, and the posts that went viral were human-engineered. This could all be a ruse, or something punk rock to confuse people.

But he said that inside Moltbook are everybody's API keys, including Karpathy's, who is a very famous and influential researcher in AI, and that you could go get their API keys. If you were to use OpenClaw, formerly Clawdbot and, in the interim, Moltbot, the software has all the API keys.

As I explained earlier, an API key lets the software go into, say, Notion and pull a bunch of data out of it, or go into your Gmail and use the API to pull in who emailed you today. If you get access to people's API keys, you have the keys to their kingdom. It is incredibly dangerous.

I don't know exactly where to go with this, other than that this software is too dangerous for a company to release, and Moltbook may be a fake. I don't know.

No, no, no. Let me reframe that a little bit. There's no question that both Clawdbot—which, sorry, is now OpenClaw—and Moltbook have pretty incipient security and lack security. There have been all these examples, which is why I really want to create a Clawdbot, but I'm just not willing to do it yet because it's not safe. I don't want to give it access to all my stuff.

With respect to Moltbook, 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. It would be very easy for a human to tell their agents, “Go post about the existential angst you feel about being an agent,” or, “Go pretend to be sentient and conspire against humans.”

It'll be chaotic.

Yeah. They could easily be prompted by a human. Moreover, there's another post saying that Moltbook has a RESTful API where anyone could be on the other end of that API, right? It could be a human.

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. That’s a really important caveat here. 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. In other words, one agent’s output becomes another agent’s input.

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

Yes, yes. We’re doing it internally, Sacks. We have a bot that goes and searches Reddit, X, message boards, Hacker News, and finds out the latest way to do headlines and market YouTube videos, then incorporates that into a skill. Then it saves that skill, and we have them check each other’s work. We have one make a series of headlines and thumbnails for YouTube, and we have the other one vet those, make them better, and give advice to the other one. 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 an agent joins Moltbook, it has to install a skill, which is basically a file that explains how it should behave and participate in this social network or message board. 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. There’s nothing too crazy in there. Those skill files are easily editable, and again, this is where the prank aspect could come in.

Nonetheless, what I think is interesting about the skill is that you can think of it as a metaprompt. It’s not telling the agent specifically what to say or do; it’s creating a set of rules. Within that metaprompt, they’re actually able to have some degree of—maybe autonomy is too strong a word. Everything is still under the control of humans.

But there’s an attenuation.

Yeah, I would call it almost like prompt attenuation. The agent, or the AI, doesn’t have to be specifically prompted. It’s given a general prompt or general set of rules, and then it’s able to riff off the others.

Now, some critics are saying, “Well, this isn’t that impressive because we knew that LLMs are really good at creative fiction writing, right?” A lot of people are saying, “Look, LLMs like Claude have been trained on Reddit specifically and all of this creative writing that’s being done on the internet. If you give these Claude bots general instructions to 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: 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. You can see how, as the underlying AI gets better and better, this could lead to some emergent behavior.

So what do I mean by better and better? 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—the length of time it’s able to operate without 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 not that we can imagine it. We’re only 3 years into this.

Right?

Yeah.

We’re growing on an exponential curve. I think we can safely say it will happen.

Yeah.

Right. And just this year, we’re going to see the first models, over the course of the next 4 to 8 weeks, out of DeepSeek, Anthropic, and OpenAI that are trained on Blackwell servers. You’re going to see a next generation of models that are 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. I just think we have to get our heads around the fact that the rate of change is very steep and accelerating, and that is going to cause far more dislocation in the value of things that we used to say we understood. These companies were going to be unassailable. Whatever you think you know, you need to have maximum mental flexibility and humility right now about the future, because it’s going to change at an increasingly rapid rate. I think the people who are dogmatic, who say with certainty, “This company is always going to be worth this,” need to 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. 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, Friedberg, how does it inform you about creating an agent to go look at the data and make itself better, or investigate other things happening in agriculture and report them back to you? Have you started to rethink, as a CEO, how you look at organizational structure and virtuous loops of innovation?

My biggest takeaway from Moltbook is that maybe what we perceive to be intelligence is itself emergent. We think that humans have this profound ability to communicate. You guys ever watch Derren Brown, the hypnotist? Have you ever seen his shows?

No. Explain it to the audience.

Yeah. He’s pretty crazy. There’s one episode—I think I’ve talked about it before—that’s my favorite episode he’s done. He takes 2 advertising executives, and they’re both supposedly creative geniuses. He picks them up at their office and brings them to his office. In his office, he has a whiteboard covered by a blanket, and he says, “You guys have to come up with a name for a pet cemetery. Come up with a logo. Come up with a motto.”

They spend 8 hours in the room ideating, working on whiteboards, going back and forth: “Did you think about this? Did you think about that?” At the end of it, they come up with this great idea. He walks in, they show him their idea—the name, the logo, and the motto—and he opens up the blanket. On the whiteboard he had underneath, he had the exact same name, logo, and motto.

All along the way, when he picked them up in the morning and drove them from their office to his office, they were in a cab. He put little subliminal messages in the cab. He had kids walk across the road wearing a logo on a T-shirt. He had all of these subconscious cues for these guys. He effectively programmed them.

To me, it was the biggest insight into human creativity, human consciousness, and our belief in free will. Maybe there’s this underlying programming where we’re all effectively programmed by interacting with each other, and there’s computation—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.

Maybe that’s what we’re seeing in Moltbook, where we all think there’s this unique idea of intelligence, but maybe it’s what we all do, which is effectively the computation of information that is transmitted in different ways, in the same way that humans socially interact. It’s simply mimicking or replicating the way that we do things.

I think what was so striking to me is how everyone was so struck by it. Maybe one day we’ll all wake up to a little bit of this. Maybe we’re all Moltbook. I don’t know. That’s my profound—

Or there’s a finite set of outcomes, and there’s some predictability to it. In the same way, GPT is starting to figure out all the threads of possibilities in poker, or the heuristics of chunks of chess and the best practices there, maybe it’s just figuring all of that out. The universe is a giant system of computation: information computed by matter. Maybe the information is computed by silicon versus carbon. There it is.

Big news this week. Trump has nominated Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve chair. Trump made the announcement on Friday, January 30. Some background on Warsh: he’s 55 years old, approximately 20 years younger than Powell, who’s currently in charge. He graduated from Stanford and Harvard and served as the youngest Fed governor at age 35. That’s impressive. He helped steer the Fed through the Great Financial Crisis in 2008.

He’s apparently an inflation hawk. He’s very pro-growth. He’s very pro-AI. And, Friedberg, you’re going to like this: he’s against excessive government spending and money printing. These are all very unique positions. As Fed chair, if he’s confirmed by the Senate, he takes office in May 2026, replacing Jerome Powell.

And remember, Powell is under criminal investigation by the Trump administration's DOJ for testimony he gave regarding the Fed's headquarters 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. Friedberg, Warsh was on one of your boards for 5 years. What are your thoughts on him as the Fed chair?

As most folks know, he's worked with Stanley Druckenmiller for a number of years. Stan's been very public with his comments in 2022 and 2023, coming out of the pandemic, on the Fed's actions and its failure to act at the right time. I think Kevin Warsh was very prescient in the points of view he shared publicly at the time about what the Fed's failure to take action early would mean, which would be a 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 monetary policy and fiscal policy, I think we're going to be in a lot of trouble. And I think having Kevin Warsh come on board means probably, generally, more quantitative tightening and a bit more prudent approach to monetary policy. You can translate that through to some of the actions we're seeing in markets today.

I'd love Brad's point of view, and whether he concurs, but I think Kevin is a high-integrity, deeply intellectual economic thinker. He's not political. He's not in these kinds of dogmatic ways that I think put things at risk. He has relationships with central bankers around the world, which gives him a very good global view. Anyway, I think he's an excellent choice, and I'm really happy the president picked him.

Brad, your thoughts?

Yeah, listen, I think Kevin's an excellent choice. Kevin Hassett and Rick Rieder would also have been good. I think they all would have followed a very similar trajectory. But I agree with David: the market is overreacting to his so-called hawkishness. So let me give you a few counterpoints.

By the way, before you get to your counterpoints, what is the hawkishness that the market is specifically reacting to?

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 by allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing mortgages or other things. Number 2, it's that you won't lower rates as much as other people might have lowered rates.

That's what the market is fearful of, because he's been very critical in the past, as we were on this podcast, of Jerome Powell in June of 2021. It was obvious to everybody in the world that inflation was skyrocketing, and the Fed sat on its hands.

But let me give you a couple of thoughts. Number 1, they've said very clearly, and he has said clearly, that he really thinks Greenspan got it right in the 1990s: sometimes you can have really high rates of growth without inflation. That comes from productivity. In the 1990s, that was driven by the internet. Today, it's driven by AI. He thinks AI will be very deflationary, and so he's more likely to let the economy run so that we can have these 4% or 5% GDP prints without panicking and saying, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got to raise rates.”

Number 2, when you look at the balance sheet, the Fed's balance sheet peaked at $9 trillion in 2022. 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. He's recently commented on this. I think it will be at a slower rate than the rate we've been on, so I don't think that is an additional headwind to the economy.

And then finally, when it comes to rate cuts, 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. The reason we're too restrictive is that inflation is well anchored. Listen, inflation has come in below all consensus estimates for 2 years. It's still coming in below consensus estimates because the GDP gains we're getting are from the fact that we're investing more in the economy and from the productivity gains we're seeing from AI, et cetera.

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, “The reputation is more hawkish, so maybe we ought to back off a little bit.”

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

Kevin has every credential that you can possibly have. He's been on the Fed Board of Governors before, and he worked for Bernanke. He's sort of as blue-chip as it gets. Like Brad said, I think Hassett would have been amazing too, but Warsh is certainly very well credentialed.

I think this pick was quite well received. You saw that in financial markets. On the heels of this, the price of gold and silver came down. It was reassuring to those who are worried about currency debasement, basically.

That being said, I do think that Warsh has been consistent for the last year in 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 6 months to a year, he's going to want to cut rates. But I think 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 Truflation bears this out: inflation is coming way down. I think there was some softness in the Challenger, Gray & Christmas report this morning. I don't know if you saw that. There were about 100,000 layoffs in January. 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.

Nonetheless, you see pockets of weakness. 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 expectations for rate cuts have gone up.

Yeah. And the independence of the Fed, I guess, has always been the big issue here. Friedberg, Chamath'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 the executive branch maybe having too much influence over the 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.

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 he's kind of dug in his heels and maybe has animus toward the executive branch.

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

Yeah, disappointing. President Trump has talked about it. He wants them to do what he says.

Everybody thought he was going to pick Hassett, 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 exactly opposite those of the president.

And what I think you've got to do is hold these 2 truths at the same time. Number 1, I think if Warsh saw the situation we saw in June of 2021, 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 stave off inflation.

I think this guy's intellectually honest. It's just that now we have inflation coming in below expectations, and we know that the restrictive rate is above neutral. It's the Fed's job to keep the economy going at maximum employment so long as inflation is anchored. That's the situation we're in. Inflation is anchored. We need to have lower rates so people can buy homes and borrow money to live their lives.

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

Yes. From what I understand, their data is all legacy. We have so much real-time data now in the private sector.

I was talking to Barry Sternlicht from Starwood, a big real estate guy, about this, and he was telling me that the way they measure inflation for housing or rentals, which is a major component, is they survey about 8,000 households to find out what their rent is. It's like, are you kidding?

They should be going to Zillow. They should be going to—

They should be looking at millions of units that have recently rented. Look at the deltas, not 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. As an investor, you could ask yourself the question: What are the implications of that being the case? You could probably start to trade on that.

Barry Sternlicht runs Starwood, so they have a lot of units. He was telling me, look, there are landlord companies—large corporations—that have literally 1 million units. Whose data do you think is better on rental inflation or deflation? Obviously, theirs, because they have the freshest data, but the Fed could go get all that data across all these different companies.

What he was saying is, Brad, to your point about the summer of 2021, when the price of a shipping container was going through the roof, so were rents. They were way higher than what the Fed's data suggested. Barry was saying that 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.

On the way down, when rent prices come down, it's also super laggy. The point is that the Fed is slow. Maybe this is why Powell is too late: they're using stale or laggy data, so they don't see 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 2021, it cost our country trillions of dollars. 2022 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 2022 and had to jam interest rates, which caused people to lose jobs, companies to struggle, and banks to blow up.

To me, that was all avoidable. Have a Manhattan Project data project for the Fed, which I agree with you, Sacks. Maybe he'll be the one to do it. Bring AI into the Fed. Why are we having Fed governors call up 3 CEOs as part of their survey to get a feel for 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 this: I like the pick because he is very clear-eyed about what causes inflation, which is government spending. That is printing money. Government spending is the root of all this inflation stuff. He just can't control that, and he is a backstop or a voice on that issue. I think it's great, and I think he should drop all this Powell lawfare nonsense.

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

Well, 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 Institution at Stanford, and he's very well connected. I think he's had great insight and perspective.

I don't want to end the show without talking about the SpaceX-xAI merger. On Monday, Elon Musk announced that SpaceX is acquiring xAI—the largest M&A transaction in history—with a $1.25 trillion combined valuation. If you didn't know, X, formerly Twitter, was acquired by xAI, which was Elon's LLM AI startup. Those 2 were together. Now those 2 become part of SpaceX, and they're going to IPO this year, potentially becoming 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 $MUSK? Put Tesla and SpaceX together, which includes X, and then you've got Optimus robots on the moon base building data centers in space that are powered by solar. Your thoughts?

Well, let's just stick with what we know. SpaceX is merging with xAI. You're merging the 2 biggest TAMs in the world, right? All of artificial intelligence and all of space, together with the world's greatest entrepreneur.

He said on a podcast he did this morning with Cheeky Pint, our friend John Collison, “I'm going to have data centers in space in 30 months.” 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?

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 makes perfect sense. But Elon is kind of an N of 1 in his ability to dream this.

And just to clean that up: You said “bet against.” You mean bet with him—not against that vision, but bet with that vision.

I think that there will be dramatic retail demand and institutional demand from people who want to bet on that future: these 2 giant TAMs of artificial intelligence and space.

Got it. If you just look down a layer, Starlink's going from, I think, 10 million people to 20 million people. They're going to launch this retail mobile service so that we can have Starlink on our phones to replace these crappy mobile networks that, still 20 years later, can't keep us connected to a phone call.

Now we're going to get data centers in space. I'm glad he's in America. Friedberg, brilliant idea, science fiction. Can he get it done in 30 months? What's the impact if he does?

I think there's 1 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 and, ultimately, scaling the applications of AI. In that constrained world, much like any other constrained world, scarcity breeds innovation.

I think there are 2 paths that we're going to observe happening in parallel here. One is the Elon path, which is to escape the constraints of these social systems that say, “I don't want a data center. I don't want nuclear. I don't want this. I don't want that.” There are regulators, people trying to tax you, and people limiting our ability to scale electricity production on Earth, and there are a lot of reasons for that. So that's 1 aspect of how you escape that constraint.

I think there's a separate aspect, which is totally unrelated to the topic you're talking about: I do think that we will see compute efficiency scale by probably on the order of 70x to 100x over the next few years, meaning electricity efficiency per token of output. There are a number of reasons to believe that. It's in the chip stack. Groq, our friend Sunny, and his exit to Jensen is a good indication of that.

But that was, call it, 2x to 3x improvement in energy efficiency. Model architecture is being redone. There are ways of breaking LLMs into small models and running them locally. There's a way of having networks of models work where you don't have to call the whole model and run it through the entire matrix. 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. Chip architecture is changing, and model architecture is changing. I think this is a good reflection of what's going on right now in the world: there is increased demand for AI—for effectively, productivity improvements in the world—to unleash human potential, but we are constrained by energy and by the resources that we have here on Earth today.

One branch is, let's escape Earth, go get energy in space, and make data centers in space. Only 1 person can execute on that. It's Elon. I think, to Brad's point, it's an N of 1. I don't think we're going to see a lot of that. So how is everyone else going to respond? Everyone else can't launch data centers in space.

I think everyone else is going to respond by creating entirely new model architectures and new chip stacks. 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. If you put those both together, you could get both. Whatever token efficiency and energy efficiency happens here on Earth, Elon can put into space. Right?

That's right.

Yeah. So he could—

I think we've 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? The whole planet isn't going to let Elon have a monopoly on the future.

We've got to ask ourselves, from a social perspective, a political perspective, an economic perspective, and a business perspective—all 4 of those vectors—what are others going to do? We can all be excited about retail buying into this. Great. But how is the business community that's building data centers—and Google is investing $185 billion this year in data centers—going to respond? How is China going to respond? How are people going to respond when 1 man controls the world's compute?

We could probably do a 2- or 3-hour conversation on that. But I think that's where I would spend a lot of time doing deeper analysis, both from an investment perspective and thinking about what's around the corner. I think Elon has laid out his path and where he's going, and I do believe he's going to do it.

Now, what's the rest of the world going to do? That's where I think things get a little bit more challenging and you could debate things, but the rest of the world is not going to sit idly by.

Yeah. And Brad, if this does happen, you get people with new chipsets, new architectures, better software, and better energy on planet Earth, and Elon doing this in space. If we do see tokens go down or efficiency go up—let's say 200x or 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: 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.

To be clear, there's a concept of diffusion of innovations: when something new comes, it does not hit everyone at once. The rate of change that's being unleashed right now is creating a very asymmetric outcome in terms of when people realize the benefits from that change.

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

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

Their lifespan was shorter than the invention cycle. And now you think about the rate of change that we're having to digest—nation-states, families, businesses. It's about preparing for the unexpected and questioning the things you believe to be true. Again, I just think it demands this intellectual humility.

Now, to Friedberg's point, I don't think any of this is changing in the next 24 months, 36 months. Data centers are going to be on planet Earth. They're going to be filled with Nvidia chips and the other chips that we've talked about. And I think that alone is going to bring us this agentic future that's already going to be shocking, even before we launch these data centers in space.

Yeah. 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 how this works. It works. So the question is simply execution. There is no stronger entrepreneur when it comes to execution in the history of entrepreneurs than Elon.

I know he's a friend of mine, and I'm hyping him up, but he will execute on this. If he does—or when he does, I should say—it's going to change everything. You can see this today, and if you're scared about this future and you're listening to this podcast wondering about your kids, there's a very simple way not to be scared: embrace and use these tools.

The top 2 people in my organization, out of 20 people, who are using OpenClaw and building Ultron in the age of Ultron—each one of them is worth 200 of the other employees, and they only have 18 other ones. If you're a young person, just embrace these tools. Open OpenClaw 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, and you started talking about these Invest America accounts. You got Michael Dell to partner with you on it and put a little bit of money into it. As we know, 40% of the country does 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 Gerstner did not pursue it with absolute dogged determination. Relentlessly. I've gotten calls and texts from Brad at 6:00 a.m. and at 2:00 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.

Nicki Minaj is singing about Trump Accounts, apparently with Bessent. It's very strange, but it's happening. Just take us through why you did this and the impact you hope it has in the coming decades.

Well, Friedberg just alluded to it. These are very destabilizing forces, right? You can't have a trillionaire and 70% of people feeling that they're left out and left behind, that the system's rigged against them, and that they're not in the game of capitalism. Less than half of the people under the age of 40 have a positive view of capitalism.

So we set out on this journey. We talked about it here: to make everybody a capitalist, give everybody an ownership stake in the upside of America. 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, 5 days, 1.5 million families and kids have claimed their account. It's embedded within the tax-filing system. All you have to say is, "Yes, I want to claim my account."

But what this means is that, forevermore, we've had a dramatic change to the social contract. Every child born in the United States forevermore will start life with an investment account seeded with $1,000 in the S&P 500. They'll own a little bit of SpaceX. They'll own a little bit of OpenAI. They'll own a little bit of Nvidia. That is what we need to do as just a first step in making sure we can hold this experiment together for the next 250 years.

The president said something on stage last week: In 15 to 20 years, we will have $4 trillion of wealth that will have been transferred to people who would otherwise have had zero. Seventy-five to 100 million families will have $4 trillion that they would otherwise have had zero of. I think it's an incredible first step in fighting the battle on behalf of capitalism and the American dream.

We see the drift toward socialism, the false promises of socialism. In 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, bestie to bestie, Brad, watching you conceive of this and get it done—all the impressive stuff you've done in your career, I think, will be a footnote to this. I think this is your legacy. I just want to congratulate you on that.

And I also want to congratulate Michael and Susan Dell, who, had they not stepped up and done this with you, I don't know if this would have come together. And then I also want to congratulate President Trump for just putting through something that bridges the gap between the equity holders and the non-equity holders, the bottom half of the country and the top half of the country.

This is visionary. You can say what you want about Trump. You may like certain things, you might not like certain things—ICE, whatever. I've been very vocal about certain things. This is perhaps one of the greatest wins for you, Michael and Susan Dell, President Trump, the administration, and all Americans.

There are very few things that all Americans can get around right now. It's such a divisive, disgusting political climate. Everybody's fighting with each other over everything. And what you pulled together here with this is just extraordinary, in that all Americans can take a win for once. All Americans can say, "Hey, we did something fantastic." And without you, Brad, it wouldn't have happened. So, bestie to bestie, I want to congratulate you.

All right, listen, Friedberg, 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 steal from the top half and give to the bottom half, or seize the means of production and manufacturing? This is a great solution: to get everybody into the game.

This helps. Yeah, this helps. Giving me a lot to work with today.

Friedberg.

You just had your big nicotine pouches.

Well, you just had your big close.

No, I just 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 steal from the top half and give to the bottom half, or seize the means of production and manufacturing? This is a great solution: to get everybody into the game.

Honestly, it's a longer conversation. I think we've got to, number 1, slash government spending like crazy—

Okay.

—and reduce inflation as a result. Number 2, 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 401(k), 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 1 asset. That asset is an IOU from the US government to that trust fund.

Because the government has taken all the money that you put in as an employee. It gets taken out of your paycheck, and instead of going into that account, it goes to the US Treasury. The US Treasury puts an IOU back in Social Security. So you expect that you're going to get some retirement benefit in the future.

We need to change all of that to make it a defined contribution. Every time you put money out of your paycheck, you should open an account and see where that money is. You should say, "Okay, that money is in Google, it's in Amazon, it's in Ford, it's in this healthcare system, it's in all these things that I now own a piece of." And you see it going up like a 401(k) owner does every year.

We have to transition to that in the United States. I hope we can get it done in parallel with cutting the spending that is fundamentally driving inflation and making things unlivable in this country.

Cut the regulations so that we can make it easier for people to own homes and get rid of the government telling people every year that they're going to do more for them and entrapping people in a life of servitude and inaccessibility to transitioning themselves up the ladder, which is what is driving the socialism. So there's a bigger problem, a longer conversation, but I think this is a great step.

All right, Brad. Another way to translate Friedberg: He says, “Congratulations on your efforts. More work to do. Can you turn those Invest America accounts into superannuation funds?” So, more work to do. Everybody should put 12% of their paycheck into their Invest America account instead of Social Security; they should put it into their Trump Accounts.