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

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All-In Podcast, episode 273. It's a huge week. Sacks is on the show. We've got Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

I'm the only one left here.

You're the only one left. That's why I made it on. No software CEOs, right, to China?

There are no software CEOs in China.

Interesting. But did you get the invite? What's your status with this administration? You were obviously very famous for being a Democrat on the left.

I'm not a Democrat on the left. I never have been.

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

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

Okay.

Yeah.

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

I hope so.

Yeah.

I'm not a Democrat or Republican.

You're an independent.

I'm an American.

Okay, I like it. Benioff got the invite to the 2 hottest tickets. He got the invite to Windsor Castle in tails, and then he got the invite when King Charles came here, too. I saw he was in tails then, too.

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

I did not go to that one.

All right. We have a big docket here. The Trump-Xi summit has begun. That is the number one story right now after a 2-month delay because of the war in Iran. This is the 1st visit to China since 2017, and the 7th face-to-face meeting for Trump and President Xi. There are 12 hours—15 hours—ahead of us. Today, Thursday, was officially day 1.

Here's what happened. China agreed that the Strait of Hormuz should remain open, with no military commitment, and that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon. So we're in sync on that. On Taiwan, Xi warned that, quote, "If handled poorly, the 2 countries will collide or even clash, putting the entire U.S.-China relationship in an extremely dangerous situation."

Polymarket says Taiwan is safe for 2026: only a 6% chance China invades this year, on $23 million in volume, which is a lot of volume. There's a 17% chance—roughly triple that—that something happens by the end of 2027. There's been a lot of debate. Some people say it will happen after Trump is out of office. Some people think it's going to happen while he's in office.

On trade, Xi committed to buy more soybeans, U.S. oil, LNG, and 200 Boeing jets. He said the talks laid out a vision for constructive, strategic, and stable ties. Trump was effusive in his praise for his friendship with Xi, giving the disclaimer that people don't like it when he praises Xi.

Let's stop here and have a bit of a discussion. Friedberg, you have been a bit obsessed with this relationship and the bipolar nature of it. What are your thoughts here? What is the goal for Trump? What is winning for Trump coming out of this? What is winning for Xi?

Xi made comments in his opening remarks that it would be ideal if the United States and China could avoid the Thucydides trap, which, as you'll recall, we talked about with Graham Allison, and we've talked about several times over the last few years: that as a rising power meets a kind of declining power, there's always some moment where you end up in this kind of state of conflict. The question is, can the U.S. and China avoid conflict and find a path to cooperation? That has happened a few times in history when we've found ourselves in this moment, but it doesn't often happen.

I think the way to think about the opportunity is, if you're in a resource-expansive world where you are increasing productivity and increasing production globally at an accelerating pace, perhaps there's less of a reason to have conflict. Perhaps there's a way that both societies, both countries, can increase the quality of life for their people without taking it away from the other side.

In a world where you're more resource-constrained or resource-static, that becomes less possible. You have to fight and grab land, grab territory, and grab resources from the other side. It seems like, in this moment, when we are seeing these extraordinary technology shifts unlocked by AI, automation, biotech, and all of these kinds of things that could lead to true abundance ahead of us, it's the perfect moment to say, "Hey, maybe the world can be more multipolar. It doesn't need to be unipolar. It doesn't need to be bipolar, but everyone can participate in the expansion of the pie."

I think that's the idealistic way to look at the opportunity in front of the administration and Chinese leadership right now. Is there a way to look at the next 30 years and ask the question: How do we all share proportionally in growing the pie and not find ourselves in a moment of conflict where we assume the pie is static?

That's, hopefully, the message that comes out of this. From an administration's political perspective, it just seems like this is going to be a major coup for the president if he can walk away with a series of trade deals with China that increase job security, increase prosperity, increase income levels, and increase investment in America and American jobs. It would be a huge win.

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

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

I think that you find a resolution and a path forward with China through economic cooperation. It's the largest consumer economy in the world. It's still largely closed off. I think what this was about was bringing some amount of financial firepower with them so that they could start to penetrate that market: planes, cars, chips—very much hard-equipment-type stuff.

I've said this before, but I think the Chinese are very much a top-down, Confucian societal philosophy, whereas Americans are much more bottom-up, kind of an individualist construction. The fact that we're so different actually gives us a lot of room to find cooperation and not find conflict. I think at the center of that is economic cooperation.

I had a friend call me this morning, a very prominent Democrat. He was the one who called out the media, which I was surprised by, and he said, "The media gets it all wrong because they're talking about, 'Why is he bringing these CEOs?' Instead, the reality is that the simplest and surest path to a no-conflict détente with China is economic entanglement."

It has to be bidirectional because, really, for so many years it's been one way, where they're sending us the cheap goods that they've wanted. I think strategically it's good, and I'll just take a slightly different take on what Friedberg said. I think behind closed doors they're probably just figuring out how to divide the pie.

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

Look, China still needs a lot of energy. They also need a lot of critical technologies that America provides. I think there's a trade there, and the quid pro quo is that there are certain regions of the world where we want them to de-escalate their participation, Central and South America being probably the most important. The second is probably the Middle East, and then maybe the third is just to find some reasonable view of the Asia-Pacific region together.

I think there's a trade there to be done, and in that, you kind of start to carve up the world into a pretty easily identifiable bipolar construction.

They also, Marc, need customers to buy their goods, and we've had a bit of mixed signals there. Tariffs, obviously, last year were sticking it to China in a pretty hard way. There was the decoupling after COVID-19: "Hey, we need to be independent—energy, PPE, drugs, chips—from China."

Now we're kind of saying, "Hey, let's come to the table and build connective tissue." So sort that out for us on a business level. Should the 2 countries be deeply entwined? And then how do we manage having too much dependency on China?

Well, you heard it today from President Xi when he said he wants a wider door. That means that he wants the door of business to open even wider between the 2 countries.

We have our absolute best salespeople there. Not just our president, who has to be one of the best salespeople I've ever met, but also we've got Elon Musk, we've got Jensen Huang selling chips—

Kelly Ortberg selling planes—

Kelly selling planes. He's already sold 200. He wants to sell financial services.

Brian is selling soybeans. Brian Sikes, the CEO of Cargill.

You know, Cargill is the world's largest private company, based in Minneapolis, and he is going to come away selling a lot of soybeans. You go through the list of the CEOs. Each one is our best salesperson in this category, and they're going to come back with orders, and it's going to be amazing.

By the way, I think you said it very well: This idea that business is this kind of greatest platform for change. They are working together like never before. Don't forget, this isn't Trump's and Xi's 1st meeting. These guys really like each other. They are very connected. You can see they're smiling with each other. They have a sales orientation, so I expect a lot of order books to come back.

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

Well, the Chinese have a lot of data-residency laws. What we do is, we don't have any offices or employees in China.

We never have. The only time we end up with any revenue in China is when we buy a company and they have a presence over there, and then we have to divest from it. We have an exclusive partnership with Alibaba. Everything just goes through them, and we don’t do anything in China.

Is it significant? Is it growing? What percentage of your revenue is it?

Yeah, it’s great. We have a great partnership. Key customers of Salesforce, like Louis Vuitton or Loro Piana—I know Chamath loves Loro Piana—

Yeah.

Loro Piana sells a lot of sweaters in China, and then, in all their other stores all over the world, they use Salesforce. But in China, it’s Salesforce on Alibaba.

It’s still your code, but then it resides on their servers for data-residency purposes.

Yeah. It’s a totally unique relationship. It’s the only place in the world that we do such a thing. All the data has to be kept in China. All the data has to be accessible by the CCP.

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

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

I think Elon’s the greatest salesman in the world. That’s how.

I mean, the cynical take on Xi would be that they wanted him there, and they wanted to study the company and the innovation. They have now become the biggest competitor with their EVs, so it is a pretty good coopetition, I guess. That would be the cynical way to do it.

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

Gullwing.

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

They’re cool, but they’re not safe.

They’re incredible.

They’re talking about bringing some of those cars to the U.S. That would be incredible. It would hollow out the entire automotive industry here if we had $20,000 or $30,000 cars from China. It would be the end of the U.S. automotive industry overnight.

And Tim Cook’s there. He has to store all his data there. That’s been a pretty controversial issue for him because, Friedberg, if anybody has private information or is a dissident, Tim Cook has to give that data over to the Chinese Communist Party.

How do you think this plays in America vis-à-vis the midterms? Americans feel ignored, inflation is over 3%, and they look at the Iran war as a betrayal by President Trump. They look at China as not material to their well-being. So when you look at Trump being on a 6-month timeline for the midterms, and he’s only got 2 more years in office after that, you’ve got Xi, who’s working off a 100-year playbook. How does that dynamic play out with Trump and the midterms and his core constituency, MAGA, which is now evolving into America First, America Only? This kind of thing is rubbing that group of people the wrong way.

I think the second- and third-order effects of anything that comes out of China are what’s going to be most consequential to the average voter: job security, income security, income growth, and then cost-of-living impact. The cost-of-living impact would be if there can be some deflationary effect from a trade deal that makes access to goods lower-priced for Americans.

And then, for anything that America is exporting, there’s increased demand. There’s a follow-on effect to the soybean export market, a follow-on effect, obviously, to the oil export market, and a follow-on effect, for example, to technology and software being exported. So that increases economic productivity in the U.S. and increases job security and income.

And then the other side of the trade deal is: can we get stuff that Americans really care about and make it cheaper? Can people now buy stuff at the store that drops in price by 30% or 40%, where we’ve kind of tariffed and reduced trade, which increases the price of things?

So if those deals get worked out, people will see things get cheaper at the store, and they’ll feel good about their income security. I think that could be positive. I think that’s ultimately what’s going to make people make the blue-red decision when they go to the polls in November.

That’s the schizophrenic nature of this, Chamath. We have Americans who very much want cheap goods from China, and then we had, last year, all these tariffs being put on, and we have this great decoupling.

So how do you handicap the midterms, Trump’s timeline, and Xi’s timeline, and what their goals are? Then I guess we’ll get to Taiwan after that.

I don’t know. No, it’s a little bit above my pay grade. But what I will say is that the midterms are probably going to swing more based on these recent gerrymandering rulings from the Supreme Court, what happened in the Virginia Supreme Court, and what’s going to happen in the state legislatures of these red states and some of these blue states, more than what’s going to come out of this summit with President Xi.

So let me just put that over here. And I think that money is getting organized. There was an article in The New York Times this week that really surprised me, but the largest donor in this election cycle is Andreessen Horowitz.

Yeah. What is that about?

I think it’s because they’re trying to establish themselves as part of the financial firmament of America, which, strategically, as a business, makes a lot of sense. They’re in the AUM business, right? So they can’t stop at $100 billion of AUM. They’re marching toward $1 trillion. They’re going to be the next Blackstone, which I think is an incredible feat, and they’re building a juggernaut of a business.

But I think they also realize that politics is now a permanent part of that if they’re going to be investing in higher-quantum, more geopolitically influenced parts of the capital cycle and parts of the economy. So I think the midterms are largely that: the money that’s going to be raised, plus the gerrymandering that will get done and undone over the next few months.

Again, I think the Chinese and the Americans have a very strong incentive to divide up the world. I think the future at this point—you have these critical-resource inputs; China has a stranglehold. You have energy and intelligence, AI, where America has a stranglehold on one and an effective stranglehold on the other, which is energy, and I think there’s a trade there to be done.

As long as you can negotiate what a reasonable give-and-take is, I think they’re just going to find common ground. Does China really need to be in Chile and Venezuela and Panama? Probably not. Does America have to have an incredibly strong point of view about the Strait of Malacca? Probably not.

And so there’s probably a trade to be done so that we can get their rare earths, they can get some more oil, everybody can be happy, and we can all find abundance.

Yeah. The key issue here is that China is—and most people are Sinophobic—but China has serious systemic issues with population, with its real estate, and with its GDP. All of this is in decline. And I think Xi, most of all, is concerned about another Tiananmen Square if he doesn’t get more people working.

They’ve had the largest growth of any middle class in history. They have the largest middle class in the world. I think you were sort of referencing that, Marc, with luxury goods, and luxury-goods providers are going there, but it’s tenuous.

And that’s the number one, by the way. That is the number one point of focus of President Xi. President Xi’s focus has been getting 500 million people from poverty into the middle class.

It’s not exactly how we think about the world in the United States. That’s the main focus of the political leader, and he’s achieved that. That has been an incredible accomplishment.

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

I’m not convinced of that, actually.

I think what they want—

Oh, I mean, I think we just kind of said it. To summarize, they want to have economic success. They want to continue to grow their middle class. They want to continue to have a healthy economy. They want more trade.

I thought it was interesting that Trump is talking about not only having the Board of Peace; now he wants a Board of Trade. That was a discussion we’ve never heard before today. Then we have Xi saying, “I want the wider door.”

Then we have all these folks there selling their products. Two people we didn’t mention: the CEO of Visa and the CEO of Mastercard are on the trip. Now, why is that? Because if you look at commerce in China, it is dominated by companies like Alibaba and these organizations that use these super apps. It’s not really all the way open for Visa and Mastercard. That would be incredible for those executives.

So, in the same way that we want to sell airplanes, we want to sell chips—Nvidia, Qualcomm; Cristiano Amon is also there—we want to sell soybeans, we want to sell payment services, we want to sell everything. The more economic collaboration and cooperation you can get between the 2 countries, the more peace you’re going to have.

I think 100% I agree.

Three hard questions, Marc. Should we be selling them the latest chips, yes or no, in your mind?

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

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

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

And I think that, as I said, the more economic cooperation and collaboration, the better. If you want peace, I think that this—

I think Taiwan is kind of a circle back to that. Yeah.

Friedberg, your take on chips. Should we sell them the latest chips? Then, Chamath, I want to get the answer to that question from each of you.

I think it's inevitable that they get there. By the way, I do think this is one of the key aspects of this deal. I've said this before, but maybe Taiwan becomes less relevant to the US and to China as both China and the US onshore their fabs.

As we build out our own manufacturing capacity here in the US—and I know we've struggled, and there are fits and starts and issues with it and whatnot—but the TSMC facility in Arizona is running. They're printing. If it works and they figure out how to scale it, there'll be other facilities in the US. Then China's onshoring, with Huawei standing up a lot of facilities.

They've got a multibillion-dollar government investment in ensuring competitiveness, not just with fabs but also with semiconductor manufacturing equipment, so that they don't get cut off on the supply chain, with companies like ASML blocking sales into the mainland. As they build out their own semiconductor capital-equipment systems and their own fabs, does Taiwan really matter? Is there really that much of a security risk to the United States and to China in that sense?

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

So you're in the camp of selling the chips to them, and it will demotivate the Chinese from capturing those fabs?

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

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

It's commoditized, and everybody has access to it. So then it becomes—

You give everyone a higher standard of living, you give everyone's economy a boost, and you give everyone less reason to fight with each other. Since you went there with Taiwan, should we take our arms sales off the table, Friedberg? And should we ask China not to sell arms to Iran?

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

Yeah. Okay.

I don't know what there is—what is there to talk about there? Because I think what China wants is for us not to sell arms to Taiwan. So would you make that trade, I guess, is what I'm saying?

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

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

Generally, you're right. Yeah, I mean, generally, that's probably a trade where you do the deal.

So you say make the trade. Chamath, I mean, I kind of know—

We're 18 months from Taiwan not being an important moment of conversation the way it is today. Why 18 months? Because we're at a point where we're probably 1 to 2 nanometers away from being able to do what we need Taiwan to strategically do for us.

As we scale up our chip fabs, as we get more capacity—and, interestingly, there are these orthogonal technologies being developed—I don't know if you guys saw, but Neuralink was showcasing a machine that is literally operating at almost the nanometer scale to do the brain operations for the implantation, all automatically. When you have the dexterity and the capability mechanically to make these things, the real reason is then a very different one than what it is today.

Today, it's economic, and if you take that off the table, I think we'll have a very different attitude toward Taiwan. That's number one. Number two: sell the chips.

The reason we should sell the chips is we want Nvidia to win. We do not want to give enough oxygen for Huawei to all of a sudden emerge and have a version of a chip that works. What Marc said is totally right: These models are catching up. They're almost at the same pace.

So the more important thing, Jason, is probably something we should all agree on: Let's have a reasonable KYC for how the models get used, so that somebody in a basement doesn't cook up some bioweapon. Meanwhile, sell the chips. Proliferate. Let Jensen win. I'd rather he win than Huawei win.

Marc, I'm going to give you the last word, but I'm going to force you to answer a hard question. China sets up a blockade around Taiwan and decides it's taking it. Should the US defend it, yes or no?

I've said this for years. I don't agree with Niall Ferguson on that point. I think this is a nonsense issue. I think China and Taiwan will reconcile. I think that—well, first of all, I do want to schedule Chamath for that Neuralink.

Next Tuesday at 5:00, we can drill your brain. Chamath, can I get you in?

What are you trying to do, put some empathy into Chamath? I talked to Elon. He said it doesn't. You just drill right in, and boom. Then you can get hooked up. It is the craziest thing.

I know. I got you scheduled at 5:00 on Tuesday tomorrow. Hold your hand if you're too nervous.

And by the way, we finally had a heart—literally—for an even better show.

Absolutely. It would be incredible. Yes, and I would laugh and giggle. We could get into show tunes here. Friedberg, I know you're not big on the show tunes.

If I only had a heart.

If I only had a brain.

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

If I only had a Neuralink.

You've got to give him courage, Friedberg.

Okay, move on.

All right, let's move on here. By the way, I took Tim's kids.

Tim stayed home. I took his kids to The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere. It was incredible. If you haven't seen it—

Yeah, do something enriching with my kids or hit the crafts table.

No, I'll be honest with you. I get a little freaked out in large—

Like groups of people.

Yeah, I get very nervous. No, just when there's a lot of people, I get very nervous.

Really? Is this because of your newfound celebrity? Is that the issue, or have you always been like—

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

Terrorist attack? Panic disorder. I don't know.

Yeah, exactly. You have panic disorder.

Panic disorder.

I don't like these large spaces with lots of people. I get a little wound up.

Anyway, your kids had a great time. Great show. Tony Robbins lives very near you, Chamath. Don't you think we can get that to happen?

Yeah. Let's get Tony Robbins in there to clear that blockage.

You're a Tony Robbins guy, Marc. Why are you so into Tony Robbins?

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

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

I am the number-one fan of Tony Robbins.

What percentage of your success is attributed to Tony's mentorship?

If it wasn't for Tony Robbins, I don't think there would be a Salesforce. So there you go.

Can you actually, no jokes aside, tell us what those big blockages were and how he helped you—or how you worked through them?

Just focusing on the questions. The quality of your questions is the quality of your life. It's that insight, and just asking yourself the right questions: What do you want? What's important to you? How are you getting it? What is preventing you from having it? How will you know that you have it?

No one had ever said that to me. It was just clear to me: Wait, I need to write that down.

Like, what do I really want right now? What is my point of focus?

Mark Benioff

And that is what gave me motivation as soon as I got that clarity. A lot of us do it automatically, but that's not where I was when I was a kid. That's for sure.

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

Mark Benioff

Oh, I've done it many times.

Really?

Mark Benioff

Yeah, of course.

Okay, there it is, folks.

Mark Benioff

Hey, we can go together.

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

Okay, topic two: AI's impact.

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

A public service announcement coming.

Public service announcement.

Yes.

Nick, just pull up this link. This dog named Scooter needs a home. I promised my wife I would do this. Don't get mad at me. This dog named Scooter needs a home. He's in Baldwin Park. The dog's about to die. He lives in Baldwin Park at Animal Care and Control. They're overwhelmed in L.A. There are so many homeless street dogs being collected. They're all being put to sleep.

Wow.

Someone give this dog a home.

Gorgeous dog.

Scooter.

Good dog.

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

I just don't like these—all these street dogs. They didn't choose the situation they were in, and then they all end up getting pulled in by Animal Care and Control, and they all get put to sleep. It sucks. You're a dog guy. Come on. You have to have a heart.

No, I have a big heart. Chamath, it's $10,000 to keep these dogs alive for another week. Can we count on you for that donation?

Any purebred white golden retrievers in that bunch?

No, they're just mutts. Just mutts.

We have a cat that we got at the shelter, actually. I walked into the shelter looking for a cat. All of a sudden, we're in the shelter, and this cat is coming at my kids. All of a sudden, they're like, “Okay, we'll take this cat.” What is this cat's name?

This cat's name is Cloud.

Cloud.

That's our cat.

Wow.

Absolutely.

Yeah, we have Cloud the cat.

All right. I like it. That's awesome.

All right, AI's impact on software is rippling through the market. Marc, you're on the front lines here. Salesforce is down a whopping 37%—$90 billion in losses for you. ServiceNow is down 42%, Workday 45%. $180 billion in market cap has been lost, and the assumption, Mark, is that AI is going to make it unnecessary for you to use Slack, Salesforce, or HubSpot—whatever it happens to be—that you'll just ask your AI to solve this for you. We'll all look at a piece of glass and have no actual software. The AI will just tell us what to do. What's your response to the fear and the criticism, and how are you managing this massive change internally?

Mark Benioff

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

You bring the sass to SaaS.

Mark Benioff

We've got to bring sass to sassy, you know.

Well, you've always been a sassy guy.

Mark Benioff

Yeah. And number two is, look, the market has re-rated. It's not a mystery. Everybody knows it. You guys have been talking about it for a while. I've been living it. The software market has re-rated. It happens every now and then. There are cycles. I've been doing Salesforce for 27 years and enterprise software for 40, and the market has re-rated. You mentioned HubSpot. They're trading at 2 times sales. I've never seen that before. They just had a great quarter. We saw a lot of great quarters. I looked at the top 10 major enterprise software companies. They all had great quarters, and they're all trading at 2 times sales.

So why? Because of everything you just said. There's a hypnosis around AI, and we haven't seen it show up in the numbers yet. If it shows up in the numbers, maybe people will be right. Right now, all we know is that there's still a lot of enterprise software being sold in the world.

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

Mark Benioff

This is not my first apocalypse. I remember the SaaS apocalypse of 2020, when COVID happened and everything collapsed. There was the great SaaS apocalypse in 2016.

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

Mark Benioff

Well, you're right. It's a lot easier to be a private company right now, where you don't have to be re-rated by the public markets. If you're in the public markets and you get re-rated, that's the reality of being in the public markets.

What I tell my employees—what I just told my employees—is, look, you can't get drunk on the stock price. If you're focused on today all the time and that is how you're getting your emotional state, it's not going to work for you. You have to find a different anchor. I try not to pay a lot of attention to it. I'm focused on my customer success. What is our revenue? We'll do over $46 billion this year, more than $16 billion in cash flow. We have more than 83,000 employees. These are the things that I'm focused on. What is the level of customer success that we're delivering? That's really important. I can't control the stock price. There's nothing I can do, and our employees can't control it either.

They need to believe in the company and the quality of the success they're delivering to customers in the long term. Then you look at the market and you look at these other companies, not just us. They're doing great. I saw some great numbers, but it doesn't really matter. The market has re-rated.

Well, you've got all that free cash flow. You've been great at acquisitions.

Mark Benioff

I've bought some great companies, by the way. Everything's a little cheaper. I like that.

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

I think the low end of the market is basically finished. I think there is no safe space. I think the high end of the market, where Mark operates and where the large monoliths operate, is quite safe. The tell was this week: the deployment-company deal basically shows you what OpenAI is running into.

You have to put in $4 billion. You get all of these folks. You gave them a 17.5% preferred guaranteed return for what? Essentially, to stand up a competitor to Ernst & Young, Andersen, Deloitte, PwC, Cognizant, et cetera. If you just look at that, it doesn't actually mathematically make that much sense if you look at what those companies are actually trading at.

But why is OpenAI doing this? I think it's because, at the high end of the market, where all the action is, people are finding, “Hey, hold on a second. This is a lot harder than we thought.” It's not like, “Boop, boop, boop, put in a prompt,” and beep-boop, it all works. That's not how it works.

And so I think we're—

I think we're a little oversold.

And now I think this consolidation and the re-rating can happen in the opposite direction. So what is the opposite trade?

The opposite trade is: who has constructive net dollar retention? Who has negative churn that's been really predictable? That's another way of saying, who has the best relationships? They are inside the CXOs and the C-suite. They have relationships with the CEOs, they're trusted, and they've been around for 20 years.

Those guys, I think, are positioned to crush because eventually, Jason, the next trade that has to happen is when the public markets become a little bit less breathless about AI and ask one simple question: “Okay, guys, you've spent $3 trillion in the last 4 years. What is the ROI of these tokens?”

What's going to happen is they're going to have to go to guys like Mark and other people and say, “Please sell my tokens.” That's the next shoe to drop, if you had to ask me. So I think you're going to see these revenues, which are way out of whack—the multiples on revenue and multiples on assets—come way back down. I think these go back up, and you'll find a balance.

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

Mark Benioff

I think it's one of the largest in history. Yeah, we want to buy back as much as we can, and I would just say that, at a high level, there are awesome new capabilities. These coding agents are awesome.

Anthropic is awesome. I'm going to probably use $300 million of Anthropic this year at Salesforce for coding. Everything's going to be cheaper to make. It's more efficient. I can do things that I simply could not do before. I can go faster than ever before. I can implement my software and sell it at the same time. I've never been able to do that before.

I can break through obstacles that I've had just by focusing, because I have coding agents and humans working together. Today I have humans, agents, and headless platforms all interoperating like never before. So the opportunity for my own company, and the efficiency that I have in my own company in service and support, in distribution, in marketing, across the board, is unprecedented. What I can do for our customers is unprecedented.

My gosh, have you seen Anthropic? It is a rocket ship that will not stop, because you can use this product to do these incredible, amazing things and then complement it with platforms like ours. It's impossible to describe what we're going to be able to do for customers. It's going to be awesome.

And never waste a crisis. You've been super focused on the efficiency of the company, headcount, share buybacks, and I'm guessing you're looking at M&A. You just finished up one of your biggest deals ever, Informatica. I think it was $8 billion or $9 billion.

It's been awesome, because none of this stuff works if you don't have context. AI is very probabilistic. It can kind of figure things out, but it needs to be grounded in real data, and it needs to have that semantic layer. That means it needs to be locked down into the truth, into a single source of truth, or it just cannot work well.

Our customers want more harmonized data, federated data, and integrated data, so we bought Informatica. Our customers want our apps to use those large language models to provide not just automation to their employees, but also to their agents, just like we said. If you call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE right now, for the first time in 27 years, you talk to Agentforce: “Hey, Agentforce, what’s happening?”

After it authenticates you and you get in the system, if it doesn't know who you are, boom, it'll auto-escalate you to a human being who says, “Oh, I can see everything you've been doing. You just need to resolve this, this, and that.” So that trinity of the phone, the web, and the human being are all together. It's all made possible by this AI. We just could never do that before. That is awesome.

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

Well, we were the first. The way that our platform is architected—and Chamath, you know it so well because your coding agents and the company you're building can run right on top of it and build awesome stuff as well—is that, number 1, we were the first with an XML API, a SOAP API, a REST API, now an A2A API and an MCP API. We always wanted to have a platform that had every API possible.

Our apps are not hardcoded such that we had to cut the top off of them. They've always been embedded inside our platform. So now we can stream our apps out through a new API called AXL, and I can manifest it into any large language model or device or anything, and it just works better, actually.

I think that when Jack Dorsey wrote that memo, part of what he said is he’s going to try to run his company by building a world model. My initial thought was, well, where is the context, Marc? What you said before: Where's the semantic understanding to create a world model? A lot of it, for a lot of companies, is actually in Slack.

It's in Slack and email. Yeah, those 2 places. I showed you that Slackbot, Jason. The thing is, because you run your company on Slack, all your DMs and all your channels, we're reading that now through the AI, and we can tell you more about your business than you know because Slackbot is reading stuff that nobody knew was happening.

I'm using that myself, but I can then connect it into other things. I have the ability to go into Salesforce and Google and everything. So when I'm on Slackbot, I can ask it any question about my company: What are my top 5 deals? What are my employees upset about? What are the top 3 things I need to focus on? Boom, I get the information because it has the data.

I think you should really look at making Slack more open and cheaper and getting more of that context, because there are limitations in terms of getting your data out based on which plan you're on. It's just too convoluted. But once I upgraded to a higher plan—and it's whatever, $6,000, $12,000, $18,000 for our small company—I was able to get more and more context to my OpenAI, Perplexity Computer, and Claude. We're testing all of those.

Today, literally before I got on the show, I wrote a new prompt: Every 2 hours in our Slack, tell me what decisions are being made, who's making those decisions, and how you would handicap those decisions if you were my chief of staff, if you were a CEO, or if you were a board member. I created personas to now evaluate the decision-making going on.

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

Yes.

And, by the way, in our core Sales Cloud and Service Cloud as well. So I've got to show you what we're doing. It's so fun.

What's your advice if you were running a software company that was around before the AI wave and you're private? There are a bunch of these companies that were supposed to go public and didn't. What should they do? What should those boards do?

Here's some Kleenex for them, for all their tears, because they're—I mean, I talk to these CEOs. They're crying: “What's my market cap? I'm not getting paid for my work.” Guys, grow up. That's what I love about the public markets: They rationalize everything all the time.

So, great, be in the public markets. You want to be in a private market? Your valuation is fantasy land until somebody's actually going to pay you. I just tell them: Focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, and focus on your innovation. How are you going to add value to your customers? That's what's really, truly important.

Friedberg, any thoughts from you? We're doing a big Salesforce implementation at Ohalo, and I would say that one of my observations over the last 6 months, because we've talked a lot about using these generative tools, is we've dropped all the vertical software, but we're doubling down on our investment in horizontal tools.

We're investing heavily in these platform capabilities, and then we're able to build apps and workflows on top of them that are specific to our business, rather than try to buy an off-the-shelf app or workflow tool. So I think there's a really interesting moment right now. We talked about this last time: You could kind of discern between founder and non-founder enterprise software.

I also think there's this vertical-horizontal shift, where they're kind of trading the same right now, but you could probably break them. You could break that trade. So I think there's probably a good arbitrage there.

I think everyone who wants to sell those potato seeds is going to need some tools to sell them. The thing that's cool is that we have 15,000 salespeople now. They're out there selling these products, like Slack, and selling to David and so forth.

But here's the thing that's interesting: In the last 27 years, we calculated somewhere between 20 million and 30 million people we didn't call back. We did not call them back because we didn't have the people to do it. So just this week, I called back 50,000 people through agents so I can qualify them.

I just bought a company called Qualified, so I can qualify the agents and call people back—the BDR and SDR function. I can go outbound. I can do things I could never do before. That is made possible by this AI automation. Link it to the apps, and you can go to another level.

Okay, breaking news. I want to get everybody's take on this. OpenAI, in a breaking-news story, is considering suing Apple over its ChatGPT partnership.

As we all know, 2 years ago, Apple and OpenAI announced that ChatGPT would integrate with Siri, iOS, and macOS. But according to Bloomberg, the deal has gone so poorly for OpenAI that it might sue Apple for breach of contract.

Here are OpenAI's gripes. Apple's ChatGPT integration within Siri requires users to specifically say “ChatGPT” to get results. We probably all experienced this if we haven't given up on Siri, which is the worst personal assistant ever created.

Apple hasn't elevated it to the highest level. It's just disinterested in this product. How do you get there first and remain the worst? Apple hasn't promoted the integration at all, and users are still overwhelmingly going to the standalone ChatGPT app or others.

OpenAI expected billions in subscription revenue from the deal, and it hasn't come to fruition. According to Bloomberg, Apple's side of the story is that they have concerns about OpenAI's privacy practices. Maybe they don't trust the guy in charge over there, which was a recurring theme in the lawsuit.

They're annoyed that OpenAI—and here is the pièce de résistance—is building hardware to compete with Apple and that it recruited Apple's design guru, Jony Ive. Marc Benioff, you know the players.

What is going on here?

Yeah, you have to trust Sam Altman and OpenAI. I love him. But let’s upscale this conversation one second. What has happened? We have these LLMs starting to come out, and every company has chosen a slightly different path.

You had Elon: he went out, had Grok, and started building these companions and sex bots and all this kind of stuff. That was a huge focus of his—the sex-bot focus. Then you had OpenAI doing the Sora video thing, and they’re also doing ad networks and crazy stuff like that. Then you had Gemini and the Nano Banana. Finally, you’ve got Anthropic, and they go, “We don’t know about those sex bots, and we don’t know about Nano Banana, but we’re going to do coding agents.” It turned out Anthropic was right.

All of a sudden, the rocket ship took off, and now everybody’s like, “Whoa, where did Anthropic go?” Oh, whoa, they’re way up there. And then they’re all like, “Where are they all going to do coding agents, too?” Now they’re all resetting and hitting their buttons: “Coding agents. Everybody focus, focus. Kill Sora. Get rid of that. Sex bots off. Cursor on.” That’s where we are right now.

Everybody—this is what’s cool about right now—it’s such a dynamic moment in our industry. It’s so exciting that people have to pivot, and you have to be ready to focus and refocus and constantly ask the question, “What do you want right now?” Everyone is changing what they really want.

If you looked at where everybody was a year ago and where they are now, they’re in a totally different place, because we all know that when Anthropic 4.6 hit, boom, everyone could code in their companies. Before that, it was a little bit of a productivity improvement, but not as much as we wanted. Now everybody sees this and goes, “Wow, this is unbelievable.” We’re even working on technology inside Slack to make it easier for everybody to code. So I think it’s going to be really—

Breaking news there.

You’re going to see some cool stuff with Slack and code. I’m not ready to talk about it yet, but there’s no question that we are in a new moment in coding. Chamath has a whole company around it. A lot of people have companies around it.

There’s going to be a before and after. Coding used to be all about humans, and that’s where I started. I was 15 years old at Burlingame High School, hands-on keyboard, writing video games—BASIC, 68000, 6502. Now it’s like everyone—

How has that changed your organization? Is it the product manager, the developer, or the UX designer, or the creator? Or did it all blend into one? And who wins? Who wins?

It’s all blended together. And by the way, to Jason’s point, the hands-on-keyboard thing, most of our engineers just speak. One of our guys just has a foot-button-operated thing, and it just goes like that, too.

Yeah. Wispr Flow. That’s all they do. Flow Plus.

It’s all talking. Pedal plus Wispr Flow and talking. There are no hands on keyboards anymore. We’re going for dolphin flow at Salesforce.

Dolphins on keyboards. Mahalo for you. All right, Friedberg, 2 questions. One, now that Sam has shut down the sex bots, how are you filling that void? And number 2, what’s your take on the strained relationship here between OpenAI and the world, and specifically the Apple world?

I don’t know what to tell you. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of long-term partnerships with OpenAI. That’s a very generous way to say it. What should Apple do? Should they just go back to the loving arms of Google, where they made $100 billion being partners with them on the search default?

I mean, look, at the end of the day, I think Google has a real opportunity to integrate a Gemini assistant into all of your personal information—Gmail and Calendar, your Google Drive, your Google Photos, where all of your personal information sits. It can become your point of calendaring, your point of asking it questions about your personal information: “Hey, when did I email this person?”

In the enterprise context, I think that’s also up for grabs with G Suite. Google has a real chance to own that assistant interface. Maybe Salesforce does too, Marc. Apple obviously has an embedded install base. How many people are using Apple services for all of their mail, for calendaring, for storing their information? I think a good number.

Yeah. So that may end up becoming the way that the world silos out. You’ll have an assistant, but for the assistant to be truly useful to you individually, it has to have access to all of your information, whether it’s in an enterprise context or a personal context.

Apple is probably going to need to either build its own or white-label with a partner. It could be Anthropic; it could be someone else—to get this to really work. But they’re going to be up against a formidable competitor, is my point, because I think Google Assistant is going to end up being a real kick-ass product once they get this flywheel going.

Apple has the clearest path to becoming a top-2 or -3 player in AI simply by buying something like Perplexity or Mistral or an AI lab and then using their hardware footprint, which is extraordinary. I just got this MacBook with 48 GB of RAM on it with an M5. It is unbelievable. The new ones with the Mac Studio coming out are going to have a terabyte of RAM.

They have a clear path to maintaining your privacy and running local models, and that’s going to solve people’s problems. It’s going to be very easy to index all your images without giving the data to OpenAI, which nobody trusts, or giving it to Gemini. That’s, I think, a big part of why they picked the current CEO, because he’s an engineer and hardware-based.

I think the future of this is going to be local models running on extraordinary desktop hardware. If you have employees on this level of hardware running these models locally, like I have started to do, they become 10 times more valuable than the employees not running it. I think Apple’s my choice for the next year.

I’m not a huge believer in these local models. The only reason is that I think you want persistence. You have multiple devices and multiple personas. You’re using a web browser in one instance; you’re using a different computer at home in the other. The idea that you don’t have persistence that follows you around in 2026, I think, is a breaking feature.

You’re not going to lug around a 5-pound MacBook Pro everywhere you go so that you can get knowledge. “Oh, wait. You’re asking, ‘Oh, wait. I got a diagnosis from my doctor. Hold on a second.’”

I don’t think that’s the game on the field. The game on the field, though, is—

You will be able to use iCloud for this as well. So it’s going to be effortless.

So, well, look, give me your opinion on this. I think the thing that you’re assuming is that these form factors don’t need to change. I just wonder: don’t we have an iPhone moment that we’re all going to be surprised by, where somebody shows up with this thing and you’re like, “Oh, my God, that’s the thing”? Do you know what I mean?

There are enough ingredients here where somebody’s going to cook something up. Then you have to think about the sunk cost. Apple is incredible, but that’s the product of 30 or 40 years of meticulous process optimization. What do you do if the form factor is totally different and the nature of the device is different? How do you pivot that organization?

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

That was impressive.

It’s super impressive. Apple, at the same time, has patented putting cameras into your AirPods, so you’re right. I use this Plaud NotePin—I’ve talked about it before.

These persistent hardware devices—the watch, the earpieces—are going to know your entire reality. They’re going to monitor your entire desktop, and this is going to lead to a use of tokens that would be 1,000 times what users and businesses are currently using.

The way Mira’s model works, Friedberg, is it’s watching your desktop, it’s listening to all the voices, and then it’s watching your webcam all at the same time. Every 200 milliseconds, it’s uploading it to 2 different models. One is deep thinking and looking backward at maybe a 30-second clip, and the other one’s in real time.

That will 1,000x the need for tokens if people are doing this for 8 hours a day, because it’s not the turn-based, “Here’s my latest prompt. Here’s my question. I got a response.” It’s in real time, always querying an LLM, which is going to require a hardware upgrade to the average desktop.

Marc Benioff, what are your thoughts on this brave new world?

It’s 1 small step for man, 1 giant leap toward AGI. I think you said that really well. We’ve been thinking that LLMs are the be-all and end-all. We’re going to go to AGI. I don’t really understand how large language models, which are only about language and words—and we know how it works: it’s 1 word, 1 word, therefore the next word is this—are going to get us to where we want to go, which is Minority Report.

Agreed.

All the science-fiction movies that we’ve seen.

But what we saw—and I think, Jason, you'd articulated that super well, by the way—was multisensory models. And multisensory models? Well, here's a good one: Oh, yeah, me. I'm a multisensory model in a biological computer. I'm a multisensory model. I've got these eyes, ears, mouth that work. Sometimes some brain, heart, whatever, and some other things going on, too, that I don't even understand. And it's all running in this biological computer. I'm not exactly a large language model, though I do have one sometimes.

So I would say that multisensory models are the next big wave for AI, but we're still not at AGI at that point. But those demos, like the demo of that model—that was pretty awesome. Everyone should see it. And then I think we can kind of say, “Hmm, where are we now on this path?”

But I think every model company is kind of going, “Hold on. Pivot.” Again, pivot. Everybody's pivoting, and you're going to have to pick your poison and decide where you're going next. You can't do everything.

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

I don't think that's true. I don't think that—I think we're getting brainwashed on that. I think that's a mistake to think that way.

See, I think we are wasting a lot of these tokens. So, my coding—here's my—I think I can convince you of this. We're using $300 million of Anthropic this year, and we're coding, we're coding, we're coding, right? The vast majority of those tokens don't need to go to Anthropic. There needs to be some intermediary layer that's saying, “Oh, that one has to go to Anthropic, but these ones can be handled by smaller models that can route it to the most affordable model for the job.”

It's such an early moment. It's an early moment, and I want to connect back to what you said before, which was brilliant, Jason, about the importance of the edge, because the edge and the cloud are going to come together. And, yes, you're going to have more distributed intelligence. It's going to work together. That makes a ton of sense, what you said.

What Chamath said was also completely right. You were both right. Then you combine it with this idea. Let's put it together where we're going. Yes, we're going to have more distributed intelligence. We're going to have intelligence on the edge. We're going to have multisensory models. And, yes, you're going to do coding, and it's going to be more efficient, too.

So, to think that it's always going to be so expensive—that is just the moment in time that we're at right now. And I think there's going to be a hot new company that's going to come along and say, “I'm going to sit between you and Anthropic and OpenAI, and I'm going to make sure that you only need their tokens when you actually need them.”

And that is not really where we are right now.

Does that make sense, what I'm saying? You're like—

It's like, “Oh, I need a shower.” “Okay, great. All the water.” “No, no, no. I just need some water. I don't need all the water.”

Yeah.

Okay. All right. Listen, we have 2 final topics here. We could talk about Anthropic unrolling the dark SPVs and the impact that has on the market, or we can go to everybody's favorite Science Corner.

Well, do both. Just do a quick round around the neighborhood.

Yeah, okay. Lightning round. We'll do SPVs last. Friedberg, what do you got in Science Corner? All the Friedberg fans are just destroyed when we skip it, so let's give it a good one. Marc, do you like Science Corner? No, you do.

I do.

Come on. Yeah.

Only the oceans.

Marc is the greatest salesman in Silicon Valley. He loves it all, and he wants to hear more. Marc, how did you learn sales? How do we become half as good as you?

I'm not a good salesman. I'm a geek.

You are, but you know how to—

Call it a Tony Robbins seminar. Let's go. Walk over the coals together. Let's roll.

We're all going to Tony. Put out the coals. We're walking across them.

Nick, let's pull up the first chart. This Science Corner is about the dreaded El Niño season that is coming up. This is a forecast for sea-surface-temperature anomalies. Basically, what this means is that the ocean at this point has heated up so much that there's now a forecast for ocean temperatures that are going to exceed anything we have seen in recent history.

We're looking at temperatures that might be 4° above normal. That doesn't sound like a lot, but let's just look at this image. That top image is the sea-surface-temperature anomaly. That means how different the sea-surface, or ocean, temperatures are. Why does that matter? This is compared to 1877, when we had the biggest El Niño year ever. I'll explain what that means in a moment.

The reason is that the oceans are the battery of weather. At one part of the year, the oceans absorb heat energy and get hotter and hotter and hotter, and then that heat energy is released into the atmosphere. The atmosphere drives the weather events that happen all over the world, and it becomes somewhat predictable. You can estimate what the weather over the next year is going to be like based on how the temperatures are sitting in the ocean today.

At this point, there is so much excess energy stored up in the oceans. I'll give you guys a statistic: It's about 11 million terawatt-hours. The whole planet Earth uses 25,000 terawatt-hours in a year. So, 11 million extra terawatt-hours of energy is currently stored up. That's 500 years' worth of human energy in this ocean.

And over the next few months, that energy is going to be released into the atmosphere. That will, with 99% confidence, make the upcoming year the hottest year on record by far that humans have ever experienced—or at least that we've experienced in recent history, where we didn't have data going back a long time. It changes the trade winds, which changes how a lot of the weather evolves from a normal season. It changes the moisture in the atmosphere in certain parts of the world.

I'll just give you some highlights of what this means. Over the coming year, there will be major atmospheric-river events where you just get water dumped on you in the Southwest, in California, and on the Gulf Coast. You'll have very low snowfall and very high heat waves in the northern part of the U.S., going up to Canada. You guys remember all those fires a couple of years ago in Canada?

Interior regions of the U.S., like Phoenix and so on, are already seeing temperatures of 106° in May. A super El Niño is forecast for this year, which could extend the duration of these heat domes and create temperatures that we've never seen in those areas. Southern Argentina, Chile, and Brazil could see record-shattering heat waves.

This is where things start to get a little nasty, because when that happens, the crops start to fail. In many parts of the world—Brazil, India, and Australia—these are critical markets for local consumption by large populations, but also major export markets. If Brazil's crop fails, or if Australia's wheat crop fails, Australia's wheat crop goes to places like Indonesia and the Philippines. Hundreds of millions of people depend on that wheat crop. Hundreds of millions of people depend on the exports out of Brazil. Brazil is the world's largest agricultural exporter.

And the scariest one of all is if the monsoons fail, which is now a very high-probability event in India. There are 150 million farmers in India who depend on their agricultural output; otherwise, they don't make any money and can't survive. And 1.5 billion people depend on that food.

So, the importance of this El Niño event goes beyond just an interesting weather anecdote. If you think about the second- and third-order effects of this over the next year, you could see energy prices spiking, electricity prices spiking, and the grid failing in parts of the Southwest. You could see commodity prices spiking all over the world. And then you would see places like India, the Philippines, and Vietnam starting to face some sort of unrest if there isn't enough food supply coming into those markets.

The question in India is a really nasty one because there isn't a really good solution. India and markets like it are significantly dependent on having their monsoon event, but are also currently facing a shortage of nitrogen-based fertilizer because of the crisis with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, which we've talked about as a double whammy. So, over the next year in South Asia, you could see a calorie deficit and a major economic crisis start to emerge.

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

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

That's a big problem, and the commodity markets are going wild for this right now.

Did this happen the last time we had an El Niño?

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

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

Oh, yeah. When we have El Niños, there are food shortages that come out of Australia and Brazil. You see these events. That's a regular part of the thing.

The problem this year is that the index is so far off the charts. It is so far beyond anything we've seen, and it's correlated, obviously, with the severity. It triggers a crisis that may be really difficult to manage in a lot of places.

The US is a net exporter, so from a US perspective, our big issues to worry about are the fire season. By the way, this does decrease Atlantic hurricanes. You're going to have fewer hurricanes this year in the South, but you have these major storm events that happen in California, heat waves, and electricity prices. We're probably more stable than other parts of the world.

But think about Brazil. The ag export market is such a significant part of the economy, and Brazil has a debt problem. This could end up becoming an economic problem in some parts of the world, including Brazil. So the commodity markets are trading this El Niño event pretty actively right now. It's become a focal area for a lot of folks in commodity markets.

Can your super seeds help, or no?

That's a longer-term solution. But at the end of the day, having crop genetics that can adapt to a more rapidly changing climate is going to be critical over the next couple of decades. That's a big macro.

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

Right. So we increasingly grow soybeans in Canada. That was not the case 2 decades ago. Through both plant breeding, where we've made the genetics adapt, and warmer temperatures, shorter winters, and whatnot, they've been able to grow that crop further north.

But if you guys go back a couple of years, there were major heat waves and droughts in Australia.

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

All right. So, yeah, it's just like an early warning sign. I know I've given food warnings—food crisis warnings—twice before on the show. He gave a really good one for Ukraine 4 years ago, and it turned out that warning resulted in a negotiation to allow wheat to flow out of Ukraine, that Russia, Ukraine, and other folks made a specific carve-out in their war to make sure that famine didn't spread.

And the fertilizer export was negotiated at the start of the war as well, which was critical.

Yeah, for sure. I think you played a role in raising awareness for that. So I give you credit, Friedberg. Marc, thanks for coming on the program. Sorry that at the end of the program we all want to commit seppuku here, but you know, we have Dr. Doom, and he always loves to end the show. There he is with an upbeat. Do you want to wrap with an upbeat? Avengers: Doomsday, starring David Friedberg, coming to the Marvel franchise in December. Yes. So you thought Robert Downey Jr. was playing him. It's actually Friedberg. Here's your meme. It's not Marc Benioff's first time in the SaaSpocalypse.

There it is. First time.

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

Somebody cut that rope.

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

I love what Marc said. He said it right. All these companies should go public, get a valuation, and focus on the higher-order bit. All of these ticky-tacky mechanisms that people can use to stay private longer need to get a bullet put in their heads. And these SPVs are the worst—the layered SPVs on SPVs on SPVs.

By the way, I will guarantee you this: once SpaceX goes public, once Anthropic goes public, once OpenAI goes public, you're going to see a litany of these lawsuits back and forth between the purveyors of these SPVs. They should not be allowed.

They should all be negated if possible. You can't—now, you can't unbreak the eggs. So I guess you just have to call it what it is. I hope every company adopts this, and I hope, as a result, these companies go public sooner and they rationalize their equity structure faster. I think it's the right thing to do. So I like the fact that Anthropic is—

Just say it: discriminatory.

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

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

Hey, Marc, great job. Thanks so much for coming back. You guys were great. Come back anytime. Hey, there's a fan question here. This is a fan question that came in written by your PR department. They want to know: when you do your charity work or your innovation as a founder, at this stage in your career, you're known for both of these things. Are you more Steve Jobs or more Laurene Powell Jobs right now? What a very, very deep question your PR department worked up.

The best decision I ever made—the best—when I started Salesforce, we put 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit, and 1% of all of our employees' time into a foundation. Today, we've done more than 10 million hours of volunteerism. We've given away more than $1 billion in grants, and we run over 50,000 nonprofits for free on our platform. That's just Salesforce. Every company should do this. It's amazing. Pledge11%.org. That's my advertisement for the show. Everybody should jump on the 111 platform.

The best decision I ever made 27 years ago. Irrespective, I've obviously done a huge amount of personal philanthropy to 5 hospitals.

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

You're going to get me crying. Let's not go there. This is not your time. My best friend. Bestie. My bestie.

She was one of the great people on the planet. Incredible woman. Mother of 5 amazing children, 2 amazing sisters, and a great family. Everybody knows Anne, her sister, and her sister Janet at UCSF. Sorry, my eyes are tearing up, but I'll just tell you that she contracted a very rare form of cancer and passed away too young a couple of years ago now. She was on our board. She was one of the great people of all time.

I'm so grateful that her family is focusing on building a new foundation to go after this rare cancer. We're backing it. I think everybody should. Look, everyone should try to be a Susan. She was one of the absolute greats, and I have an altar in my office. When you come to see me, you'll see it, with the photos of her and me, and I think of her every single day.

My heart just stays with her, her husband Dennis, all the children, the sisters, the whole Wojcicki family. Amazing. One of the great institutions in Silicon Valley. We're lucky to have the whole family.

Yeah, she was fantastic. Well said. Rest in peace, Susan Wojcicki.

Thank you.

All right. We'll see you all next time on the podcast.

Love you boys.

See you guys. Aloha. Thanks for everything. Bye-bye.