All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Presidential Debate Reaction, Biden Hot Swap?, Tech unemployment, OpenAI considers for-profit & more
Sat, 29 Jun 2024
(0:00) Bestie intros! (1:54) Debate recap and analysis: Hot swap incoming? (16:53) Subverting democracy, power grab, Democratic party shakeup (36:43) Why tech job postings are down significantly from pre-COVID levels (42:43) OpenAI considering for-profit conversion (54:11) The problem with safety-focused AI startups (1:03:20) EU charges Microsoft with antitrust violations for bundling Teams into Office Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://twitter.com/Jason https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://twitter.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@all_in_tok Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7057/Who-will-win-the-2024-Democratic-presidential-nomination https://polymarket.com/event/will-biden-drop-out-of-presidential-race?tid=1719589320811 https://youtu.be/R6hJh-OwoZw https://x.com/KellyO/status/1806505436457189594 https://x.com/WesternLensman/status/1806660589315658003 https://x.com/stoolpresidente/status/1806496453545586779 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ceo-says-company-could-become-benefit-corporation-akin-to-rivals-anthropic-xai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-19/openai-co-founder-plans-new-ai-focused-research-lab https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMnkqY98Cyo https://x.com/benioff/status/1805664701298491623 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwQMMzoeH9s https://x.com/JoeBiden/status/1806739920255320347
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. It's episode 185. And you're going to be delighted by today's docket. If you're into politics, we move the taping back a day, gentlemen, because we knew there would be a presidential debate.
So with me to discuss all things presidential debate and the news finance markets, maybe even a little science from our science boy, David Friberg. Is the Rain Man David Sachs? Yeah. Probably have a tea is frozen or he's staring everybody down. How are you, sir?
We're about to enter the endgame, Jason.
Oh, the endgame is here. Okay. We're in the endgame now. And from a WeWork in the home office in Pasadena is our friend, the Sultan of Science. He's back to work. He's in his cube. Did you get the TPS reports done? How are you doing there, Greenberg?
the humble headquarters of Ohalo Genetics, beautiful lab downstairs. I'll take you on a tour one day. Oh, nice. Can't wait to hear my friends gloat and bloat themselves on the show today after the debate last night. It's going to be insufferable. I'm looking forward to it.
Okay. So you're building the next $10 billion company and we don't get to invest, but we do get a tour. Thank you. That's good to know. Not that we're bitter. We promote this shit every fucking week.
If you guys want to put money in, I will open up the round again for you, and you guys can come in.
You said this three fucking times. When do we wet our beaks?
J. Cal's right about this, actually.
That's how you know the winner. The one who doesn't let us invest in is the winner. It's the easiest way in his portfolio to know. He's like, hey, can I introduce you to a soda pop machine?
Rain Man, David Sack. And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of.
All right, everybody, let's get to the show here. Enough of the craziness. Last night was the first presidential debate, and there's no easy way to put this. It was an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats and President Biden. Gosh, he looked confused. Lots of slips, lots of gaffes. If you are under a rock, living in a cave without Starlink and you missed it, Here's a couple of clips.
Everybody's talking about this one where Biden lost his train of thought for, I don't know, close to 10 seconds. Play the clip.
Making sure that we're able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I've been able to do with the COVID, excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with. Look, if we finally beat Medicare.
Thank you, President Biden. President Trump?
Gosh, that was brutal. And the reaction from CNN, even MSNBC's Joy Reid, as far left as you can go, was... Brutal and candid. And here it is. The knives are out from the Democrats for President Biden.
Right now, as we speak, there is a deep, a wide and a very aggressive panic in the Democratic Party. It started minutes into the debate and it continues right now. It involves party strategists. It involves elected officials. It involves fundraisers.
And they're having conversations about the president's performance, which they think was dismal, which they think will hurt other people down the party in the ticket. And they're having conversations about what they should do about it. Some of those conversations include, should we go to the White House and ask the president to step aside?
Other of the conversations are about, should prominent Democrats go public? with that call because they feel this debate was so terrible.
That was painful. I love Joe Biden. I work for Joe Biden. He did not do well at all. And I think there's a lot of people who are going to want to see him consider taking a different course now. There is time for this party to figure out a different way forward if he will allow us to do that.
I too was on the phone throughout much of the debate. My phone really never stopped buzzing throughout. And the universal reaction was somewhere approaching panic. The people who were texting with me were very concerned about President Biden seeming extremely feeble. seeming extremely weak.
This has been, quite frankly, a car accident in slow motion that we've seen over and in building and questioning it. And as has been pointed out, Joe Biden sought this debate at this remarkably early time because he knew he was losing and he needed to change the narrative. And he did change the narrative. He sunk his campaign tonight.
All right, gentlemen, there is absolutely no way any of us could have predicted this. Oh, wait, Nick, play the clip. Read the room, Democrats. You have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border and some other issues are not in sync with the majority of the country.
At some point, the Democrats just have to take a deep look in the mirror and say, we fielded a bad candidate who's too old and people don't believe will stand up to scrutiny of, like, say, being on the all-in pod for two hours or in the debates. or with a hostile interviewer, any of those possibilities.
And so I think if that's the case, we really need to have the Democrats think deeply about maybe fielding a different candidate. I believe that's what's going to happen in the next 30 to 60 days.
100%.
I mean, if you just look at the polls- You really think there's a switcheroo? 100% there'll be a switcheroo. Who's the switcheroo? I have no idea. Could be Gavin, it could be anybody. Anything's possible. I think Trump's going to demolish him in the debate. I think he'll sink to 30% in the polls. And then the Democrats will find a way to give him a graceful out.
And then they'll field somebody else. I think the Democrats, as cynical as it sounds, were waiting to see what happens with this Trump trials conviction, what you call lawfare, what other people call fair use of the law. And then they are going to see how he does in the debates. That's why they moved the debate up in June. And I think they know to pull the plug on this if it gets too far gone.
And they have the ability to do that because all he's got to say is, you know what, I'm feeling old and I want us to win and I'm going to slot somebody else in. All right. And to wrap this up, prediction markets showing Biden has plummeted to, let's check the number. Oh, yeah. 33% in the sharps, as you've referred to them on the program, are basically saying Biden's going to drop out now.
44% chance over a poly market will Biden drop out of the presidential race and then predicted another one of these prediction markets where you can actually bet real dollars. It's not a plug for them or commercial, just those happen to be two of the bigger ones. Newsom sits at 14% now, Biden 33%, Trump at 58%. At the start of the evening before the debate, Biden was at 47%.
Post-debate Chamath, we see Biden dropping 47% to 33%. Nothing like this has happened in modern politics. Your thoughts, Chamath Palihapitiya, and then Sachs will give you the red meat.
Let me just start by saying that President Biden is a person that's given up his whole life to work on behalf of America in the best way that he thought was possible. He's overcome a lot of tragedies. I think he's worked very hard. He's diligently tried to do what he thought was right on behalf of the people of Delaware and then the United States.
My honest takeaway is that that person, though, is no longer really in charge. And I think that that was very troubling for me. And it actually makes the last sort of six months make a lot more sense. So I thought the fact that we could not get a response from the White House to be, I took it a little bit actually personally.
I was wondering why for someone that had been such an ardent supporter, I couldn't even get an email back when I was consistently asking them to be on the pod. And now I see that it wasn't just one single act. It was part of a holistic strategy. It was the same strategy that boxed RFK out of the Democratic primary.
Because could you imagine if this event had happened when he had to debate RFK in the Democratic primaries? It would have been exposed then. It's probably partly to explain how the law has been used in New York state. whether you want to call it lawful or not, but it was a very directed partisan action. And so all of these things are now three data points that are really important.
You will not come on an open format show like ours to just speak openly. None of us were going to attack him or try to corner him or box him in. You prevented other people from actually challenging you and directly asking questions of you in the Democratic primaries. And then you try to put political pressure on your opponents.
All of that is systematically about a group of people that are unelected who are trying to control democracy. And I think that that's the most troubling takeaway from this. I don't think that you should take away from last night that Joe Biden had a bad debate.
I think what we should take away is that there is a person who should be allowed to transition into the sunset and be celebrated for what he's done, and instead there are people that, frankly, at the margins are acting pretty unethically and at the limit is actually acting somewhat diabolically to prop this person up so that they can keep power.
For example, you've been in situations where you would expect the team that runs a company to be able to stand up and say the CEO is not in a position to run this company anymore. That's what you would expect if there's good governance and honesty. You know, what was Ron Klain doing, as an example, when he was doing debate prep?
Did he legitimately believe that Joe Biden was prepared for this or mentally capable of actually doing this? And the fact that they are allowing his legacy to be destroyed after 50 years, I think, is really tragic.
Yeah, well said, by the way. Chamath sacks your thoughts on what we witnessed last night and the reaction to it.
Well, let me speak as an objective and independent political observer. Okay. Just as independent as you, J. Cal. Yes, let's do that. Let's be independent today, show. Yeah. Look, anyone can have a bad night. Absolutely. Got the sniffles. His campaign put out the word that he had a cold and maybe he just had a bad night.
I mean, after all, it was media people like Joe Scoresboro just saying a week ago that not only was Biden cognitively fine, but in fact, he was the best Joe Biden he had ever seen. Just a week ago or two weeks ago, Reid Hoffman was saying that he had a two-hour lunch with Joe Biden and Biden was regaling him with details of AI and Gaza and he was good.
And so what we've heard from all of these highly reputable people is that Biden may not present that well in public, but in private, he's just fine.
You're saying they're lying and they lied to the American.
Well, I'm actually taking them at their word because they seem like very trustworthy sources to me. I see no reason to swap out this candidate. I think that anyone can have a bad night. And there's no reason whatsoever for the media to be panicking like this. Satire sucks. Satire sucks. Satire sucks is into the chat.
Satire sucks is into the chat.
Well, I mean, look, I think that there's no reason for this kind of panic. I believe in democracy. And the Democratic primary voters have spoken. This is the candidate who they voted for. Okay. Stand by your message. Stand by your message. Stop being a wimp. Just because your candidate had one bad night, you don't stab him in the back like this.
Absolutely not.
And even I think Van Jones said, that Republicans wouldn't do this if Trump had a bad night. He's like, why are we all stabbing Biden in the back? So look, this is a candidate who you've been supporting for years. This is a candidate who you rigged the primaries for. You boxed out Bobby Kennedy, who I thought was a fantastic candidate. You basically boxed out Dean Phillips.
This is the candidate who you wanted. And who just days ago, you were saying, was completely mentally fit. In fact, the best he'd ever been.
Okay.
It's...
satire sex has some loyalty for god's sake okay you've heard from compassionate chamath you got to hear from satire sax now let's go to morning friedberg what do you got this morning you get to hear from frank friedberg frank friedberg
Talk to it, buddy. Go for it. The big loser of last night's debate was the American public. The big winner of last night's debate was probably Russia, China, Iran, maybe the Saudis, licking their chops, watching the utter dysfunction in the leadership of the party leaders in the leadership of the country as it stands today. A notable mention, I will say, was the debate format.
I absolutely love the fact that there were no interruptions, that the mics went mute, that there was no audience, and the moderators didn't kind of challenge back and forth and try and make themselves the show. That was very unique in a presidential debate. So I actually like the debate format.
They stopped interrupting me.
Thanks for the interruption, J. Cal.
That's the joke.
I think that as Sax points out, the biggest issue is that this was front and center, Biden's decline in capacity and aptitude for quite some time. I didn't tell you guys this before, but last October, a senior member of the Democratic Party reached out to me for a, quote, meeting. I took the meeting in October. And of course, it turns out they were asking me for money.
Little did they know, I don't give any money to politics ever. I never have, never will. So their handlers are morons for bringing this person in to come and talk to me. In the meeting, I said, you cannot put Joe Biden forward as your candidate. What the hell are you guys thinking? He's like, no, he is completely stable. He is as sharp as he's ever been. I sent him an email.
I'm going to read you what I said to him. This was in the first second week of October. I said, Joe Biden does not appear equipped to be president of the United States. I think the continued heralding of Democratic Party leadership of the president's performance and ability to continue to serve into the next term is mind boggling.
His inability to conduct even a basic interview or give a clear and concise statement in a candid setting highlights a clear and obvious decline in function since he took office. It is important for Democratic leadership to find an alternative candidate and message this soon. Doing so, I believe, will buoy fundraising efforts across yada, yada, yada.
I said I would feel uncomfortable with a Democratic majority Senate head in house giving a leader with declining aptitude nearly limitless effect. So I sent this as my response to his follow-up request for money. This was the second week of October. And I wanted to pull up the date on this because it was so apparent back then what was going on. So what's so striking is how long
mainstream media and leadership in the Democratic Party have tried to tell an alternative story that was so obviously revealed to be not true last night. And that is the thing that I think makes me say America is losing because there are a few people that are in charge of controlling the narrative. There are a few people in charge who decide who gets to be the candidate.
And those few people are keeping democracy from working effectively because the raw data, the direct data, the imagery, the video, the media content that has come out of Biden over quite some period of time made it so obvious that he was not in full capacity. And so that was my biggest kind of takeaway is that there's something wrong with the way things are running in this country.
You're saying the media and the Democratic Party leadership are lying to America.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, but, because if you- Of course they are. The fact that we all had this information, we've seen the videos, we've seen the interviews, and every time a video or an interview comes out, it has been excused away as, oh, well, he tripped or, oh, you know, it wasn't well edited.
And every time there's a story, and then when it's fully exposed, it becomes like, well, my God, the fact that they all flipped so quickly is what's so shocking because this was there. And, you know, if you're on Twitter, You can see these clips being talked about by millions of people, but then media and democratic leadership won't acknowledge them.
The subversion of democracy is really the real threat to democracy. To your point, you have the right to elect a person up or down. None of us are choosing to elect a shadow cabinet of handlers to run America. That's not what any of us are signing up for. And I think that's what we have the risk of having for another four years if this lie isn't exposed.
What I find unbelievably shocking is all of these data points now just make so much sense because the through line is, as you said, a coordinated effort to kind of obfuscate his decline. Like if you thought about this in a different way, if you took a 29-year-old and a 32-year-old, would you say that they're the same? Absolutely, right? If you took a 39 and a 42-year-old, they're the same.
A 49 and a 52-year-old, they're the same. But the reality is a 79 and an 82-year-old or a 78 and an 82-year-old are meaningfully different. And the reason is that because there is significant decline every year, every month, every day, and you're seeing the impact of every week, day, and month, and year as a president of the United States wear on an 82-year-old body.
And I'm not sure any of us would do much better. But the reality is that when you're at that age, there's a level of transparency that's required and we have the opposite. So take Warren Buffett as the counterfactual to this. Warren Buffett is in his early 90s. But what does he do every year? He marches tens of thousands of people into Omaha. He sits them down.
He sits at the front of a dais with Coca-Cola and peanut brittle and speaks for six to eight hours and is sharp as a tack. Well, the point is, if you decide after those six to eight hours of fully transparent, unedited interaction with Warren Buffett that you don't think he's capable of leading Berkshire, you can sell the stock.
What they don't do is hide him behind the shadows, propping him out in package interviews and all of this other stuff. That is un-American and undemocratic. And you see why, because the importance, as Friedberg said, is so high. You probably do have a lot of people outside the United States
really questioning what is going on in the greatest country in the world right now, that this can even happen. And the people that you thought were so anti-Trump, right, that they would do anything to make sure that Donald Trump was unelected, while they're actually not that anti-Trump, they're just pro-power.
Because the thing that they care more about than their hatred of Donald Trump is their desire to stay in power.
Yeah, I think these are all very well said, Frank Freeberg, nicely done. I mean, how is anyone at this point in time surprised? Like, we have been talking about his cognitive ability for...
couple of years here on this podcast, everybody's been talking about it on Twitter, they've been talking about on social media, everybody's been talking about it at every Christmas, every Thanksgiving for a couple of years right now. And, you know, this long form discussion podcast test is the ultimate test. And I think people need to take that to heart.
If you look at the long form podcast, as I'm just saying this to toot our own horn here, It could be Joe Rogan. It could be Tim Ferriss. It could be whoever you want, Lex Friedman. When you saw RFK, Vivek, Trump, Chris Christie, Dean Phillips come on this podcast, talk for, in some cases, two plus hours, it was clear they were there.
And this is completely selfish on the part of Biden's family, the people around him, two people. stay in power, and the hot swap's coming. I'm telling you right now, he is not going to be in this race in the next 30 days.
The hot swap is going to create a free-for-all, Jason.
which is better, better than running somebody who has a 30% chance of winning. And I'm going to take this a step further. This is 25th Amendment territory. This person is not fit to serve as president for the remaining of his term. What we saw last night was incredibly troubling. He was not there. And I've been saying this till I'm blue in the face for months. This is
absolutely disgusting that they did this. This is elder abuse. I don't say that as a joke. I say this sincerely. I remember when my dad had to take the keys away from my grandfather, God rest his soul. My grandfather wanted to drive that car, you know, the streets of Brooklyn, his station wagon. My dad at some point said, this guy keeps clipping other people's mirrors. We got to take the car away.
So you know what my dad did? He went to my grandfather, God rest his soul. And he said, listen, the car was stolen. And I'm sitting there as a seven-year-old next to my dad. And I'm like, the car wasn't stolen. And my dad said, you know what? The car was stolen, Pop. We can't afford a new car. I'll lend you my car once in a while. My dad then sold the car for 800 bucks and got out of there.
That's what we need to do. You got to take the keys away from Biden. He's not fit to finish the rest of his term. Period. Full stop. And I'm glad everybody else now sees what, you know, half of us saw for the last year or two.
Hold on. Satire Sacks has a rebuttal.
Okay, go ahead, Satire Sacks. Well, look, who are you going to believe? The J-Cal's uninformed, non-expert opinion or the expert medical opinion of Dr. Jill Biden? with her doctorate in education.
Well, I mean, the bias is strong. When you see that clip, I mean, play the clip of Biden post. These guys are so deranged. These lunatics are so deranged. They thought they won last night. Here's a clip of Jill Biden.
First Lady Macbeth.
Telling Biden he did good.
Joe, you did such a great job. You answered every question. You knew all the questions. And let me ask the crowd, what did Trump do?
You're not running. Joe Biden's not running. You are not running. This is a farce. And now the veil has been lifted.
He looks so happy in that moment, getting that approval. I mean, give the man some milk and cookies. I mean, he was delighted. I mean, literally let the man retire.
To your point, Chamath, compassionate Chamath said it great. Like the guy had a lifetime of service. Let the guy f***. retire, let him spend time with his grandkids, great grandkids, whatever he's blessed with. And let's, let's do the hot swap now.
It's incredible that not a single staff member has resigned. Isn't that incredible? Like, where they see this, Jason, and they have the moral clarity to say, hold on a second, this is really wrong. Not a single one.
That is really scary. It's a really good point. That's really scary. is because there is no Biden. Biden is just the staff. So why would the staff ever fire themselves? And this is why it's actually important to have a leader at the top, to have a commander in chief, as opposed to just a shadow government consisting of party apparatchiks. And that's what we have.
The problem is when the staff gets something wrong, there's no one there to fire them.
How, like, how does somebody who's worked for Biden for 40 or 50 years, who sat in Camp David helping to do debate prep, at no point have the compassion to say, sir, this is not working?
Because that would be firing themselves, Chamath. No, no, no.
The only reason they have a job.
It's a rhetorical question.
I'm just saying.
Yeah, exactly. You don't want the power. Actually, there's a more sinister reason. And I think, Zach, you're pointing it out there, which is they consider Trump such an existential threat and they want to maintain power that they're willing to do anything to keep power, you know? And, you know, listen, I don't want to get into Trump here, but he's got his own ways to stay in power himself.
This was an embarrassment for America, this debate. The fact that these are the two candidates is a complete embarrassment.
Well, I think the real embarrassment for the media was the fact that they were exposed. The fact of the matter is, for months, if not years, they've been saying that this candidate is fine. He is cognitively fit. In fact, he's the best he's ever been. I've had two-hour lunches with him. He's wonderful. That's what they've been telling us.
And the reason why their panic was so visceral last night in all these post-game wrap-up shows is they saw their credibility going down the drain. They saw that they had been exposed. It wasn't just the fact that Biden was exposed. They were exposed for putting out this North Korea-level propaganda for months and years. And everybody should understand these people were part of the cover-up.
It wasn't just the Biden team who wants to hold on to their jobs. It was the media. It was this entire Democratic Party apparatus. They're all in on this giant con.
I wouldn't have a problem with this, Sachs. If it was like Reagan, where they were like, oh, God, he's got 18 months left. We're going to ride this thing out. And yeah, maybe we let him have a quiet thing. But to actually put him up for another four years is the issue here. If they just said, listen, we can 25th Amendment this guy or let him finish the last six months. That's one thing.
But to say we want four more years of this. I mean, how much worse is it going to get?
Hey, what's going to happen right now, I guarantee you is he's out, we're going to have President Kamala, she's going to get her flowers for four months as she gets to be the first female president United States, then she steps out of the way she decides she's not going to run because she's got things to do with her family. And there will be two new people will be moderates.
And then the real election starts in about 15 days.
I don't think you need to go into all of those mechanics to get the outcome of a new candidate. All Joe Biden has to do is go into the Democratic Convention and release the delegates. Yes, of course. Yes, technically.
But the problem with releasing the delegates is I do think it creates a free-for-all unless the party then exposes this next facet of their plan, which is that they are so in control that they only allow one candidate to go up there.
Oh, they've already got that.
Yeah, that's done. And then I think what happens is depending on who that person is, they'll either... I think the Democratic Party... is probably at risk of a pretty meaningful reset. And I think that these tactics, I think are very much seen and understood by the American people.
I think that people do not like this idea that you vote for person A, but instead you get persons B through Z. I don't think that's what anybody thinks the election for the president of the United States should be. It should be two people independently. And then when you see one person that's not really in a position to run faithfully,
I actually think that Donald Trump last night showed tremendous restraint and compassion. I think that is the right way to deal with this situation. I think it's just acknowledging that President Biden is not altogether there. So without making claims of a cold or anything else, this is the security and the well-being and the economic prosperity of the most important country in the world.
Why are we messing around?
Let's just put it plainly. The Democratic Party is a collection of interests who want to remain in power. The Democratic Party is the party of government. Its goal is to allocate money and power from the government to the collection of interests who back the Democratic Party. In other words, it's basically a collection of interests who want to loot the republic.
Well, obviously, no one's going to vote for that. So they have to make it about something else. They choose a figurehead. They talk about how this is about saving democracy. They basically invent hoax after hoax, lie after lie to basically maintain their power. And I think what's happened is the mask has come off. The whole thing, the whole shell game has been revealed.
It's obvious that Biden was always a puppet. for these interests who are hiding behind him. And now it's all being exposed.
This also goes all the way back to 2016, because if you remember and you look at the real run up into the 2016 primary, you have to remember President Obama sat Joe Biden down and said, you cannot run. And the reason was to direct the Democratic Party and establishment and energy towards Hillary Clinton, who ultimately lost that election.
There's a very important question here, which is if Joe Biden had actually run in 2016, you may have actually had him beat Donald Trump in 2016, and he probably would have continued into 2020. This would be a totally different situation for the Democrats.
So back to your point, David, all of these backroom shenanigans and negotiating and gerrymandering and politicking and power broking is not how democracy should work. As messy as the Republicans are, I have to give, you know, I tip my hat to them. They run very straightforward, fair, visible, transparent face-offs between people.
And you may not like the candidates, but the process is what it's supposed to be, messy, turbulent, but you see all sides. Whereas this tends to be managed from the inside out. And I think that that is, as your point, being exposed. And I think that's what really has to stop within the Democrats. They need to open the floodgates. A Bobby Kennedy should have had the chance to run.
Dean Phillips should have actually had the chance to run, but they were not and they were prevented. And by the way, props to Dean Phillips, who in a very respectful and compassionate way was telling the truth from day one. And he was essentially censored. He was not allowed to basically tell you what he... He told everybody what he observed in front of his face.
Right, and if people had listened a year ago to Dean Phillips, then the voters in the Democratic primary could have made a different choice. They could have maybe replaced Joe Biden, but the party elders and the powers that be did not let that happen.
And now they're in a panic a year later trying to do a hot swap because it's manifest to everyone, to the American public, that Joe Biden is not fit to serve. But the real time to, hold on, let me just speak to the hot swap for a second. The time to do the hot swap was a year ago when Democratic primary voters could have voted for someone new.
The problem you have now, J. Cal, I actually think that on balance, the hot swap is not going to happen. Let me just tell you why. I think you make a really good argument for it. Nonetheless... The reason it's not going to happen is that Joe Biden and Jill Biden have come out this morning and said there's no way that he's stepping down. It was just one bad night. He's fit to serve.
There is no mechanism to replace a nominee who's already won all the necessary primary votes without their consent. So if the Bidens are saying we're not stepping down, there's no mechanism to force them to step down. And that's the situation we're in right now.
It's a very simple mechanism. He's going to, he's going to capitulate and you're going to have Obama. Obama's going to give him a call. I guarantee you Obama's going to talk to him in the next 72 hours. Guarantee the hot swap happens. I'm absolutely willing to make a bet with you right now on it.
Let me finish my point. Yeah. They can pressure him. And that's what you're talking about is they're going to try and leverage him out. But the truth of the matter is that if they can't find the right leverage points, he does not have to step down.
The right leverage point is very simple. He's not going to get any more donations. Last night, the Democrats who are donating all said no more money for Joe Biden. So he's going to have no oxygen.
You need money to run these things. All right, look, just one other final problem with the hot swap theory is not only is there no mechanism to force Biden to do it, but I don't think there's a consensus. right now on who the replacement would be. The fact of the matter is that Kamala Harris is next in line and she pulls even worse numbers than Biden does.
So there's every reason to believe that she would do worse than Biden in the election. And I think it's not going to be easy to basically shiv her and push her aside. And so you can talk about Newsom, you can talk about Michelle Obama, you can talk about Hillary Clinton. The fact of the matter is that I think you're going to have a big Kamala problem.
And because of that, you know, there's no mechanism and there's no clear replacement. I think that although a lot of people are going to say what you said, J. Cal, about the hot spot being desirable, I think at the end of the day, on balance, probably not going to happen, although certainly I admit it could.
I'll bet you $10,000 right now to whatever charity you want that Biden will not be the nominee.
You could be right, but they've got to work out those two problems. They've got to work out those two problems.
I'm just offering you a $10,000 bet and I'm not giving you any straight money.
I would not bet a lot of money on this because I'm not sure. I'm just raising some problems with the hot swap theory.
Okay, Freeberg, you've been a little bit silent here. You want to wrap us out so we can get to the next topic? I'll wrap us out.
I think I'll read the final paragraph of the email I sent to the Democratic Party leader a few months ago as a coda to this conversation. Here goes.
The United States is facing a fiscal crisis the likes of which the world only sees every few hundred years as world-leading nation states overextend themselves, take on unaddressable debt loads, increase social programming, and eventually collapse under these conditions. The cost to service the interest alone on our federal debt is now greater than a trillion dollars per year.
This already exceeds the discretionary defense budget. The debt service expense will only swell as interest rates are unlikely to decline back to 0%. And I do not subscribe to the easy to refute economic arguments of modern monetary theory. Simple arithmetic is all that's needed to discredit it.
Furthermore, I can identify dozens of federal programs sponsored by Democrats that are not achieving their objectives, yet we continue to fund them as if they were performing exactly as anticipated when originally conceived. Every federal program. should be held to account for performance every year. If not, they should be defunded.
Instead, I see the party pushing new programs that create new expense burdens without first addressing programs that simply aren't working. Accountability is a critical first step in reducing our federal deficit below 7% of GDP. I believe our nation is facing financial and thus social peril.
I urge the party to become the, quote, party of reason and results, put forward leaders that can lead, hold government programs that aren't working to account, make sure that every dollar spent on social programming has a measurable impact, and if they fail to deliver results, cut them. The opportunity to be the party of reason and results is wide open.
Myself and many of my friends would scramble for the opportunity to support that party. That's the end of my statement. Did you get a response? Then a month later, the handler said, so-and-so has this on their docket. They're going to call you. Never going to call.
Of course. Yeah, because you're not a donor. They only care if you donate. And you're not a donor.
No, because I donated. I donated and I didn't get anything. All I asked for was a chance to sit down and talk to the president.
I didn't come on the podcast. I mean, he couldn't. The debate format, to your point, Freeberg, was like the easiest debate format ever. And the greatest thing, I think Dave Port and I pointed this out on Twitter, like Trump's Best strategy was to just let Biden talk, like just get out of the way and let him talk. And there was one moment where he's like, I'm sorry.
I mean, Trump was pretty graceful here, which is a big statement. He like at one point was like, I'm sorry, I don't understand what he just said. Like, I don't know how to respond to something. I don't understand what his point was. Hotswap's coming. And I am an undecided voter. I have a big announcement, Sachs. I have a big announcement about my undecided vote. You want to hear it?
Yeah, let's hear it.
This is breaking news. I am not voting for Biden. I've eliminated Biden as possible. I was waiting to see what happened last night.
We already knew that.
No, I never was clear about that.
You've also eliminated Trump. You've also eliminated Bobby Kennedy.
I have not eliminated Trump or Biden, Kevin. Can I introduce you to Jill Stein?
Maybe Cornel West? Let's move forward.
What's your point? Who's left? Bring anybody out. It can't be Weekend at Bernie's Part 2.
I mean, the Weekend at Bernie's joke is real. I mean, it's cruel and it's real. And my Lord, get it together. All right. There's a really interesting... trend going on that I wanted to get everybody's thoughts on AI and corporate efficiency killing tech jobs. Let's pull up this chart. This somebody shared in our group chat from Fred. These are software developer job postings on Indeed.
From early 2020, that's pre-COVID obviously, to this year. Look at this. The number of job postings for developers has absolutely come crashing down by 80%. This is below pre-COVID numbers. In addition to this, we talked about getting back to work. Penske and Dell saying you have to be back in the office starting this fall four days a week or resignation accepted.
What are you seeing in your portfolios? Any thoughts on this trend of the major jobs, the high-paying elite jobs, Chamath, maybe going away? This is a trend we haven't seen in our lifetime. So there's always room for elites at elite companies. And now it seems maybe the demand's gone. What's going on here?
I just think that company formation has changed after the end of Zerp. And so I think that that chart speaks more to a couple of things. One is that where typically people were hiring for software engineering roles, which was a lot of SaaS businesses, contracted a lot, and the net new amount of SaaS startups also, I don't think, materially increased. And so that was one big switch.
Second is you went through a whole bunch of layoffs at the big cap tech companies as they reestablished profitability. I think when you layered those two things, that explains that chart more than the emergence of AI tools. Just practically what I see is all of these AI tools can add a 10% or 15% lift to an individual person if you are in a traditional organization.
I don't think these things are the panacea that they're marketed as being. These are not creating 10x engineers. At some point, these tools will be good enough, and at some point, companies will get started from scratch that use those tools and create a level of productivity at one-tenth of the workforce, but that hasn't happened yet.
So I think that that chart is more about layoffs and contraction in tech more than anything else.
Yeah. And just to explain this chart a little bit more in depth, the 100% number back in 2020, then boosts up to two and a half times that amount and then comes back down to 60% of that amount. So it's an index. We don't actually have the raw numbers here of the number of developer jobs open or closed. Sax, your thoughts, what are you seeing in company formation to Chamath's point?
And overall, what do you think this means for the American elite workforce?
people with you know really high-end degrees and really high-end salary expectations well i agree with jamatha it's just too soon for ai to be responsible for this i mean the ai productivity gains are just starting and we're not really seeing job elimination yet or job replacement i think this is just a symptom of economic weakness and the main reason for the economic
weakness is the rate hike cycle. Remember, we went from practically 0% interest rates to 5.5% in one year. And a lot of people were expecting that to cause a recession. That's normally what happens when you get a very, very rapid rate hike cycle, is it sucks liquidity out of the economy and it contracts economic activity and you get a recession.
I was one of the people who thought that, and that didn't happen. I think one of the reasons it didn't happen is there was a huge backlog of jobs, of sort of open job postings. I think originally it started at 12 million open jobs. Well, what's happened is the rise in interest rates has created some economic weakness. It's caused a reduction in liquidity and investment.
It's created more pressure on companies to be profitable. And so all those things have cascaded through. And what it's doing is it's burning off this job backlog. So we haven't necessarily seen unemployment yet, but we're seeing a reduction in the job postings. And I think that's what's going on. And I would just say that the economy may not be in recession yet, but I just think it's weak.
And this is just one metric showing that.
Freeberg, you're, you know, running a company now you're doing hiring qualitatively, what you're seeing in terms of hiring from when you were running production board, you had many companies, people were fighting it out in the peak Zerp era, you know, and giving people incredible, incredible, you know, compensation packets and packages.
And then you also had like sort of people trying to take talent and maybe talent hoarding was going on. It seems to have dramatically switched. We've been putting job postings out and seeing hundreds of people apply for jobs that we would get dozens previously. What are you seeing? What's the game on the field in terms of hiring?
I'm not really, I don't really have a great perspective on this where we hire very specialized people at Ohalo and in the specialty field we're in, we're the best in the world. So everyone wants to work here. Got it.
I'll answer your question, Jake. I mean, what I see from our portfolio companies is hiring has got easier. It is way higher, much easier to hire devs right now, software developers than two years ago. No question about it.
Yeah. And I think globalization also having a big impact here. I honestly, my theory on this is that because there's not three competing offer sacks from big tech, when you're a startup, you know, trying to land somebody and you're like, we have to beat Uber or Airbnb or Coinbase, you know, like a mid-market company or the Google offer, the Apple offer, the Amazon offer.
Typically, a developer would have those three sets of offers. Here's a startup that's willing to give you 1% of the equity. Here's a mid-market company, an Uber, an Airbnb, a Coinbase, that's offering you $300K. And then here's the incredible $500,000 offer from Amazon or Google. Those offers just aren't there. So then it makes for... The ability for startups to hire great talent.
This is the best time possible to be a startup. The talent on the field is incredible. OpenAI is considering a for-profit profit conversion, and that means possibly an IPO soon. According to reports, Sam Altman recently discussed this with major shareholders like maybe Microsoft. And it's possible OpenAI will become a for-profit benefit corporation similar to Anthropic or XAI.
If you don't know what a for-profit benefit corporation is, a benefit corporation or B Corp in the industry means you have a stated mission that the board is responsible for going after, you know, save the whales, provide AI software for all of humanity, whatever it is, in addition to the standard acting in the interest of all shareholders. And so...
This, of course, means OpenAI, which was valued at $86 billion, could IPO at some point. What are your thoughts on this? We saw the revenue numbers are crushing it. Any thoughts, Chamath, on OpenAI IPOing? Is that a possibility in your mind?
I mean, it makes so much sense for them. So I think they should do it as quickly as possible. We are in the first inning of what should probably be an enormous tectonic shift in technology. And I think if anything... whoever wins in the first inning usually isn't the one that's winning by the ninth inning.
And so I would encourage anybody that's winning right now to monetize, get secondaries, take money off the table as fast as possible because the future is unknown. And the more disruptive the technology is, the more entropy there is, which means that there's going to be more changes, not less. And again, I would just look at search as an example. I would look at social networking as an example.
When you look 20 years later, the people who captured all the value were not the ones at the beginning who everybody thought was going to win. And so I think if it plays out similarly, it's important for the people that are in the lead today to recognize it's too early and they should monetize their perceived success as quickly as they can to the largest magnitude possible.
In other words, you might be opening up, you might be MySpace.
Yeah, grab the bag if you can. Grab the bag. But what is it called? Secure the bag, sorry. Secure the bag.
Secure the bag, yes.
What are your thoughts here? Secure the bag.
Sacks on a potential IPO by Sam and the team at OpenAI and the impact that might have on the wider space.
Well, for a long time on this show, I've been saying that you need to clean up that. convoluted Byzantine corporate structure with all the line charts everywhere. That structure is what created all the problems with this nonprofit board that they had. You've got a for-profit entity reporting to a nonprofit board. It created a culture clash.
And as we've said before on the show, it's not a good idea for startups to innovate on structure. Using a tried and true C-corp is the way to go. You're ready for IPO if you ever get that far. You don't need to restructure the company. It was always funky and weird that OpenAI had this nonprofit structure. And really, they should have fixed it years ago.
And like I said, given Elon his equity, given Sam his CEO package, and they didn't do either one of those things. And so now they're left with this...
crazy org chart that's a mess and I'm not even sure I mean I think it's I think you would want to clean it up as soon as you can because I think my sense is that the longer you wait on these things the harder it actually gets but yeah more calcified these things get I'm not sure how easy it is to actually fix this thing but yes they should fix it They should make it a standard C Corp.
They should make things right with Elon because he provided the first $40 million of seed capital. They should make it right with Sam. He should get his CEO comp. And then they should IPO so that the public actually has the ability to invest in this AI wave and ride this wave the same way they did with the whole dot-com boom. in the late 90s.
I mean, a lot of those dot-com companies didn't work out, but some of them did. Amazon, Google, and so on. And the public had the opportunity to participate in that huge wave of innovation. And I think we could have something like that happen here.
We still need more public companies, right? Freiberg, you got a thought here before we go into superintelligence and Ilya's new company?
I don't care if OpenAI is for-profit or non-profit. It affects a few people that put money in, and the employees. It doesn't affect anyone else, so...
Well, no, it will affect the public if they can buy shares and they get to participate.
You could say that about any business, right?
Yeah, but OpenAI is one of the leading companies of the AI wave. It is the leading company. It's the leading company.
They apparently raise money at an $80 billion valuation. So one could also argue that a company doing $3 billion in revenue getting an IPO done at $120 billion market cap. maybe the public already missed the big wave.
Well, no, I don't think so. I mean, we saw a lot of these companies that you could have said that about NVIDIA and it basically went up 30x.
It could go up, it could go down. But anyway, there's a bunch of people who put money in who are going to make a lot of money if this thing gets to be for profit.
The trend line is it's doubling revenue, right? Year over year.
My argument is that it'd be good for OpenAI to clean up its Byzantine cap table and structure. And it would be good for the public to be able to have the opportunity to invest. So it's a win-win. I'm not saying they have to do it this minute. I mean, I think that it does take time. to get your reporting to the level of maturity necessary to be a public company.
And you don't want your earnings or your revenue, you don't want your numbers to be volatile.
If you were an employee, Freeberg, and it went out at 120 billion, would you clear your position if you could? Would you sell half your position?
I don't know enough.
I don't know enough. I'm assuming most of those. Tramath, anybody want to play along here?
Well, I've heard that they've had quite a bit of turnover because there's been pretty good secondary market activity, which means a lot of the employees have cashed out and they've made so much money. Just like what's happening at NVIDIA now, there's very little upside relative to how much money you've already made. So at that point, a lot of the early people start to leave.
Yeah, so they're trying to hire more people, it sounds like.
I heard 70% of employees at NVIDIA are millionaires now. That's a crazy number. Go ahead, Zach.
Well, I was going to say, you know, that question that you asked is really a highly personal question because you could think that OpenAI is a great company that's going to be worth a trillion dollars in the future. Sure. But it still makes sense for you to take chips off the table because 100% of your net worth is in that one company.
Well, let me ask it that way. You got 90% of your net worth in NVIDIA. I'm sorry, 90% of your net worth. You're a person at OpenEye sitting on $10 million in shares. Do you sell half or what would you do personally, Sax?
I would take some chips off the table. Half?
If you were first, if you're like, this is 90% of your net worth, 99% of your net worth.
Well, I mean, you're an insider. So maybe you have a lot of information. If you were really bullish on the future of the company, maybe you take 10 or 20% of your chips off the table. If you're less bullish, maybe it is 50%. So I don't know. I'd be influenced by my perspective on that. But I think that you could think it's the greatest company in the world.
And still, it would make sense for you to take some chips off the table because you don't want all your eggs in one basket. That's a personal diversification decision.
And if it was $120 billion valuation with $3 million in revenue, Chamath, and you're trading at 40x or whatever it is times next year's revenue, let's assume they do $5 billion next year, you're still looking at 30x revenue, you would clear.
I think these multiples are not really what's going to drive their behavior. I think OpenAI is running a very strategic game plan to become part of the tech establishment as quickly as they can so that they are in the inside looking out as opposed to the outside looking in. They were able to add the former head of the NSA to their board of directors.
What was your take on that, by the way, Jim? That was interesting.
People got pretty... It's how you become part of the establishment. Do you think the former head of the NSA no longer has a security clearance or knows people in the NSA? No, of course not. And I think that there is a group of people that want to make sure that these kinds of technologies and capabilities are firmly within the hands of the United States apparatus and not anybody else.
And so I think that that pulls them closer to the kinds of folks that could otherwise give them a hard time, right, or regulate them, or, etc, etc. So now what happens is when you have Senate hearings about this stuff. It's more likely that it's confidential behind closed doors. It's under the purview of national security. All these things are beneficial to OpenAI.
And then secondly, they were able to get Elon to drop his lawsuit. Conveniently, I think it was like on the same day that the head of the NSA was added to the board or the former head of the NSA. So
The next logical step is now to create capital markets distribution, which is really about syndicating ownership of the company to all the big, deep pools of money so that they are also rowing in the same direction in support of open AI. And so that's what a lot of people don't get. It's not about valuations or this and that. This is about creating a high-level game theory of how to create
an international apparatus that supports your corporate objectives. There are a few companies that have done this well, and they are now one of them. The only thing left is to get shares into the hands of the Black Rocks, the T-Rows, all the big mutual fund apparatuses of the world that then syndicate to all the individual investors of the world. And you have everything.
You have government connections. You have no real legal overhang. Then the likelihood that an IRS agent all of a sudden decides to audit OpenAI is basically zero.
Okay, so to summarize, a bit cynical, but you're building an ally base that then makes it harder to investigate the company, criticize the company, or anything like that, right? That's essentially what you're saying.
I don't think it's cynical. It's like a smart business strategy. Strategy.
What's your take on that, Sax?
Well, yeah, they're borrowing their way into the deep state. I mean, the quid pro quo is we will be your vessel. We will be an arm of the intelligence community, of the deep state. We'll give you access to whatever it is you're looking for. And in exchange, you're going to basically protect us and allow us to get rich. And frankly, that's the deal that all the big tech companies have made.
They are all in bed with the intelligence community. And we saw this in the Twitter files. where every week for the year before the 2020 election, there were meetings between the trust and safety people, the censorship division of Twitter, and the intelligence community. So these people are working arm in arm
And basically the big tech companies have given themselves over in a way to this powerful apparatus, this, you know, the deep state in exchange for, you know, they're willing to basically give up power in exchange to be left unfettered to make their money. I think it's a horrible development for the civil liberties of the ordinary American. But I think that is a reality of what has transpired.
Yeah, and the number of CIA, former CIA, former FBI, Justice Department people working at the Googles, Facebooks, Metas, Apples of the world is like a very large number. I have family, as many of you know, in law enforcement and in the deep state, I guess. I should call it sex. And they are constantly asking me about job offers they have from these companies and which one should they go to.
This is after they've done tours in Afghanistan and, you know, speaking many different foreign languages. And then all of a sudden they secure this incredible, you know, 3X job. salary bump by working in big tech. So there is something to all of this. Ilya announced his new startup. Finally, it's called Safe Super Intelligence Inc, or SSI.
He was obviously an OpenAI co-founder, formerly the chief scientist and co-head of Super Alignment. Last month, he announced he was resigning from OpenAI after a decade with the company. And you remember, he was on the board that helped orchestrate Sam Waltman's firing, and then he reversed course a few days after and expressed regret in it.