A Conversation with Marc Benioff and David Sacks | Dreamforce 2025

Our CEO and chair, Mr. Mark Benioff. All right, all right. Here we go. Here we go. Hello, everybody. How are you? How is it going? Did you like the keynote? Yeah. What about Laura Albert? How did she do? I see her right there. Pretty awesome, right? Okay. Anyway, welcome to Dreamforce. We're very excited to have you here. It's obviously our largest, most important Dreamforce ever. It's extremely exciting. We couldn't be more thrilled to have everybody here. We want you to have a fantastic time. We want you to have a safe time. And we're having a series of the most interesting people that we could find to pull in like we do every single year. And this year, longtime friend of mine, very excited that we're going to be introducing you to David Sachs. Please welcome David Sacks. There he is. So, David, welcome to Dreamforce.

Thanks for having me.

We are thrilled to have you here.

Yeah.

And, David, we've known each other for a long time, and we've always been friends. We. We've also been competitors. We've been partners. We've been investors. I mean, we've had every possible thing. You know, we've had late nights, you know, in my kitchen drinking bourbon. You know, it's been a long relationship. It's been awesome. And this year, I'm so excited to have you at Dreamforce because your life has taken a huge right turn. And before we get into that, are.

You sure it's not a left turn?

Let's not even go into that.

Are you sure it's not a left turn? No, it's not.

Pretty sure. It's not a left turn. I'm pretty sure. But before we get into the right turn, the left turn or the U turn, I think we should just talk a little about you, because a lot of people don't know you. They don't know where you're born. Your life story. Would you just give us a little background on yourself? Because I think everybody here and everybody who's watching online, I think we see you now on this podcast, you know, or we see a little snippet of you, but we don't really know you. So just lean back, relax, enjoy, and just tell us. Tell us about yourself.

The bio.

So just start at the beginning.

So I was born in South Africa, and my parents immigrated to the United States when I was five years old. We moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and then I came out to California for college. I went to Stanford and graduated in 94. And that's what led me to the Internet. I met Peter Thiel there And then ended up joining PayPal at a very early stage and have been involved in the tech industry since then for whatever, 26 years. And somewhere along the line, I guess, five years ago, we started doing this crazy podcast. And it turned. I don't know, we started doing it during COVID when everyone was kind of locked in their houses. We were locked down. And the other. I don't know if people here have seen it, but the other. The other guys in the pod are people I play poker with, and we talked about, wouldn't it be fun if we just recorded.

Nobody's seen the podcast. How many people here have seen the podcast? All in podcast. Anybody? Okay, that's pretty good. About a third.

This guy's pretty good. So we just, you know, we.

So more market share for you still in this. Yeah.

So hopefully the rest of you guys can check it out. But we basically said, what if we recorded our conversations at the poker table? And that was the original inspiration for it. And when Covid came along, we were all kind of locked in our houses. We just started recording it by Zoom, and it kind of became a surprise hit. And then that led me to other things, where I am today.

Well, before we get to that, let's just kind of go back to Stanford briefly. And you're in Stanford, and obviously it's a great school. You're now kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley. You've come a long way. Did you know you were going to end up moving into a tech company? And at the same time, you're also writing, if I remember, too, weren't you working on books and you were starting to philosophize a little bit as well?

So I thought I missed the whole Internet thing because I graduated in 94, and then I went to law school from 1995 to 1998. And then the whole Internet revolution started happening, and I thought I'd, like, missed it. I thought I had kind of blown it, and I thought it would be really exciting to be back in Silicon Valley for that. But I didn't really have a way to get back until again, I got a phone call from Peter Thiel, who I knew from Stanford, and he was creating a new startup that would become PayPal. And he recruited me to come back. So I was very fortunate to kind of be in the right place at the right time in terms of who I met. And then that led me into the industry. But, no, I mean, if you go back to the 90s, it was very different than it is now. No one knew how to be an entrepreneur. There was no yc, there was no blogs out there explaining how to be an entrepreneur. Like, no one. It just wasn't as obvious how you got into startups. And it was just much less of a thing. It was much less track, there was way less information about it. And, you know, back in the 90s, you had to be like a little bit weird and different to kind of get pulled into the whole Silicon Valley thing. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't like the default thing that everyone graduating from a good school just went on to do.

So now you've been recruited by Peter Thiel. You're in PayPal. How many employees are there at the time?

About 20.

About 20 people. And it starts to grow. It becomes very exciting. And of course, we all know the mystery that all of a sudden there becomes a PayPal mafia as well. Like, he's really a great recruiter, right? He's hiring some of these incredible people. Did you realize it at that time that it was going to be, you know, those credible goop group of people that would go on for decades?

I guess I knew that the people I met and was working with, people like Peter and Max Levchin, who was the cto, and then obviously Elon. At some point we merged with Elon's company and other folks I knew they were the smartest people I had met, but I didn't know that they were the smartest people that anyone had met. And. And it sort of became clear that actually, no, somehow, like this group of people were like the smartest people. And what happened is that the whole PayPal mafia experience was less than four years. It was 1999 through about 2002, and we were the first company to IPO after the dot com crash. People thought the whole dot com thing was over. And then somehow we managed to survive. The Internet crashed. There's a lot of stories about that. But then we IPO'd and then we got acquired by eBay, and then eBay. Never really made an effort to keep the talent. I don't think they really saw the talent as part of the asset they were buying. They were primarily interested in the payment system. And I think they kind of saw the talent as these renegades who'd be hard to manage or control, and they were perfectly fine.

You're saying that Elon Musk might be.

Hard to control and they didn't really try. They just kind of let us all go off and do it. So you had this group of people who had this success, but were now kind of free to do other things. And they all kind of left to start companies, I call it. I say that it was less of a mafia, more of a diaspora. Ebay kind of took over our homeland and burned our temple and kicked us all out. And we became a diaspora and had to go find other things to do, other places to live.

Well, then your journey really starts and you start to not only be kind of in a company, but you're starting to do new things as well. And you're even starting to create companies and invest in companies. How did you decide that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

I guess I just always had that desire. My grandfather had started a candy factory in southern Africa and that was always just a very inspiring story to me, but I didn't really know how to do it again. Just back when I graduated from college. No one taught you how to be an entrepreneur. It just wasn't really a thing. And like I said, somehow I just kind of ended up with a group of people who are like minded and.

Help pave the way at usc. And I'm sorry to bring up that school and your presence, but we used to ask the question, are great entrepreneurs born or are they made? Which one do you think you are?

I think that the entrepreneurial desire is probably something people have to be born with, but I do think that you can learn a lot to facilitate that. I learned a lot from the people I worked with. The two CEOs that I got to work for before I started my own company were Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. And that was obviously tremendously beneficial to see how they operated in very different ways, by the way, can you contrast them? Sure. So at a very high level, Elon is incredibly hands on at each of his companies. He's got 20 reports and he's very involved in every important decision and certainly every product decision. And Peter is kind of the opposite of that. Peter is more of a delegator. He's more high level. He just wants to make sure that we have the strategy right and then tries to hire good people and kind of just lets them do their thing. So it was really a pretty big contrast in styles.

Do you see yourself as more of a leader like that kind of higher level, or do you see yourself more as a manager?

Well, at this point I'm kind of an investor, which is. It's almost like being semi retired, I guess. But when I was actually a founder and running a company, I tried to take the best parts of each one of those styles or at Least. And the way I kind of divided it up is that when it came to the product, I sort of micromanaged the way that Elon does. I wanted to be very involved in every product decision. But when I came to other parts of the company, I just tried to find the best people I could and give them the authority necessary to. To do their jobs. And unless there was a problem. I mean, if there was a problem of some kind, then I would get very involved and people could kind of feel me breathing down their necks. But as long as things were tracking well, then I would kind of just give people the room to run things the way they wanted.

I recently had the opportunity to go down and have dinner with Elon Musk and go down to Xai. And one thing that I noticed is that on Tuesday he is down at Tesla, and Wednesday he's down at Xai, then he goes to SpaceX on Thursday. On Friday, he's at Neuralink. Every day he's concentrated on one company and whatever problem that they're trying to solve then and very singularly focused right there and very present. Is that how he was and is that a fair characterization of kind of how he's working in this kind of, you know, kind of unusual cadence?

Yeah. And I think. I mean, although I'd say back in those days, he was just focused on one company. So now he's got like, five major companies, but he just still works incredibly hard. I visited him recently as well, and I think, you know, I think I left around midnight and he was still going. I think he must have gone till 2am or something like that. So I don't know anybody who works as hard as him.

Yeah. And I don't think there's anybody who not only works as hard as he does, but works how he does. Yeah, it just is such an unusual cadence.

Tremendous focus, and he's really in the technical details of it. When he bought Twitter and did that transition, I got to see him work in a different way because it had been like, 20 years. And I think what I saw him do was really get to the bottom of the technology. I think he spent about a month, like, really drilling into every system in the company. And I could see him kind of putting together his mental model of how the whole thing worked and. And eventually had the whole thing in his head, and then he felt like he could manage it in the way that he wanted.

And if you go back to when you were with him at PayPal with Peter, could you see the. The beginning of that philosophy even Back then, or has that evolved? You know, as he's had more experience?

You could definitely see it back then. I mean, I think he was very focused on all the product decisions, technology decisions, and tremendously charismatic leader.

So here you've worked for Peter, now you're working for Elon, but now you're really ready to go out on your own.

That's the way I saw it. Yes.

And tell us that story.

Yeah. So I ended up creating. Well, social networking was like the big wave that started in the. You know, I guess around 2003, 2004, I created a family social networking company. The idea wasn't quite right. We effectively pivoted into corporate social networking, enterprise social networking. And I think that's when we started to get to know each other.

That's when we started to spend more time together.

Yeah. And so I think it was back in 2008, we launched at the TechCrunch 40 conference. We won that conference. You were a judge. Right.

Maybe I may have voted for you. I cannot disclose.

It may have been that one or something different. But in any event, you know, it.

Was a great company and a great product. Right. So we may have. We may have looked at buying the company a couple times. Is that right?

Yeah. We ended up.

I would also say we were probably a lot closer than most people realized at that time.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think what. I think you saw. Well, actually, you did a Dreamforce, probably. I want to say. I don't remember the exact 2010ish that you called the social enterprise. It was like the theme of Dreamforce. So you saw that this social networking thing was going to be a huge wave and it was going to change the way that we work, and that enterprises would want some version of that as well. It wasn't just going to be a consumer technology. So you saw that. And that was basically our thesis when we started Yammer is. And ultimately Microsoft acquired it back in.

2012, and Yammer just took off. It was just incredible what happened. Right. It was viral, it was enterprise. It took the best of Facebook. But then all of a sudden, it was this incredibly compelling capability. It was very inspiring to me, you know, that we started to build things like that at Salesforce, called Chatter and other things. And then you and I had all these kind of amazing conversations, and I was kind of like, well, you know, is this part of Salesforce? What should happen? And then, boom, Microsoft bought you. What happens?

Well, Microsoft just got very interested because they needed a way to sort of reposition the Office Suite into being cloud, social, and mobile. And obviously Office is one of the most successful piece of software ever created. But they were in a little bit of an existential crisis because everything was moving to the cloud and it was moving mobile and software was becoming social, and they were trying to figure that out. And then they. They basically bought Yammer as part of that strategy, and then it eventually became part of the, you know, the whole online Office suite.

Did you enjoy working at Microsoft?

You know, it was really interesting to see how a company that big works. And, you know, I thought it was a very.

It wasn't just Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. You were also now working for Steve Bomber.

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.

You were.

I was pretty sure, if I remember. Yeah. So it was about a year where I was still kind of running it, and then eventually the whole thing.

I'm sure he'll be glad to hear that response.

No, I thought it was. I mean, what. What I remember Steve Ballmer would give these amazing speeches where, you know, he would talk to auditoriums full, like, 90,000 people. And I didn't know exactly how he was doing it because he could speak for an hour. I never saw the notes. I never saw the teleprompter.

Tremendous.

And I mean, full of energy.

He's probably one of the most actually tremendous and most kind of underrated CEOs of all time.

Totally. I thought it was, you know, you could feel the way that he would project the energy through the organization. I mean, when you're running a company that big, you have to have that kind of presence.

You can really see it now in the basketball court, right?

Totally.

I mean, it's amazing. But you didn't last at Microsoft very long. You kind of. Now you've had the Peter Thiel experience, the Elon experience. You're kind of. You're on your way out. You're on your way again.

Yeah, I think that. I mean, at some point I transitioned to being an investor, and I think there's a. When it comes to operating companies, there is a certain sameness to it. And I felt like I had done it enough times and I was just kind of happy just to write checks, basically.

All right, well, I wanted to take this first 15 minutes, just kind of lay out kind of your background, because I don't think a lot of people understand the depth of your background and kind of the diversity of your background and everything that you've gone through. But a huge amount has happened this year. And I still remember the phone call you called me at home. And he said, listen, I'm considering this big opportunity, and how would you look at it? And I thought it was a great opportunity for you, but just tell us about that, because, you know, as I remember it, I'm not going to go through all the details, but you were becoming increasingly interested in politics. As I watched you evolve, as you'd gone through this entrepreneurial pursuit, you'd gone through all these different experiences. Now you're doing the investor. But you were very interested in the political kind of flow of the country. And we were having conversations. We were ending up with a lot of political leaders as well, even at your house and other places. And you were also becoming very interested in DeSantis. I remember at the time, kind of in the early days of the presidential election, and then all of a sudden, you know, it became clear, and, you know, I'm not going to go through all the nuances, but it became clear that you were much more aligned with the Trump administration. And so give us your perspective of how that evolved and where you are today with that.

So I think it really started with the all in pod. Like I said, we started doing it right at the beginning of COVID about five years ago. And when you do a weekly podcast, you just have to say what you think, otherwise, what are you doing there? And so many of the topics were many of the major topics in the news. I should just say, for people who haven't seen the pod, we try to cover whatever the biggest issues are in the news that week. We cover business, tech, markets, you know, and the best issues are ones where they're at sort of the intersection of all of those things. And there was a lot of those types of issues during that whole Covid period. And so I got more political because I was just saying what I thought on the pod, and that kind of.

It was just starting to come through very naturally.

Yes. And there was a period there where actually, because California was locked down, I actually moved to Florida for a little bit. I thought DeSantis did a great job managing Florida as governor through that transition. So I did support him. But then eventually I just decided that I came to see Trump as the indispensable figure in effecting the political change that we needed in this country. So I ended up supporting him. And after he won the election, then I kind of got this unique opportunity to. To potentially serve in the administration.

Well, it's been a very exciting year. And I've noticed since the beginning, I think originally you kind of were kind of saying, well, I think I'm gonna be doing the PCAST job, the President's Committee on Science Technology, which is a very exciting job, by the way, where you're chairing this group of people. It's the top 25 scientists in the country. You're really trying to move every scientific discipline forward, but it's really evolved. And now, you know, you're called a czar. You're called crypto czar, an AI czar, a tech czar. You've also taken on kind of this role of almost like the ambassador of Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C. you're trying to translate these things between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. can you just walk us through that evolution? I mean, I think it was right in November or December that you called me for the first time and said, yeah, I'm thinking about the PCast job, but it's gone so fast. So tell us the story.

Well, what basically happened is I started just helping out during the transition, and this is really at Mar a Lago in November, and it really did feel like the center of the universe, and just a lot of exciting things were happening. And then they eventually offered me this job of being the AI and cryptos are, as well as being the chair of the President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology. I just decided it was just such a unique opportunity to work for a president who really wanted to get things done. And so, not knowing that much, I'd say never having expected to go into government, I didn't plan on this. I just thought it was kind of a unique opportunity. So, you know, what I've been doing now for the last nine months is, I'd say is basically being an advisor on those two critical issues with AI and crypto in the administration. And I do try to bring, let's say, the Silicon Valley perspective to Washington. And those two things can certainly are very different cultures, very different ways of looking at the world.

Yeah, because it is. You're kind of like this reluctant administration official. Right. I mean, you. It wasn't really. A lot of people are pining to be in the government. I want this job. I want to be the mayor. I want to be the supervisor. I want to be the governor. I want to be this job. I want to do that job. I want to be the secretary of this, the secretary of that. You see that, right?

Yes.

You saw that firsthand in Mar a Lago, right, where people are coming for an agenda. But you did not. And that wasn't on your mind. You know that. That was just an amazing moment where all of a sudden you're like, wait, I can add value to what's going on right now. So how did that unfold for you?

Well, I think it was just a function of getting to know a lot of the key people in the administration. Then, obviously, the President remembered when we did an event for him here in Silicon Valley. I remember the date. It was June 6th of 2024. I remember that date because it's D Day. And it felt like D Day when President Trump came to San Francisco. And this was right after they had.

Felt that at your house.

Yeah, exactly. So he came to San Francisco, and I mean, this is the first time he'd been in the city for a long time, and he had spent the previous month in New York being tortured in this very political trial that Alvin Bragg, the DA had put him through. And he was forced to sit through that whole thing. And then he came out to Silicon Valley, and the media had spent the previous week trying to gin up protesters, but as it turns out, there were hundreds and hundreds of people along the roads waiting for him. But they were all pro Trump protesters, or demonstrators, I should say. And there was no protest element. And I remember the first thing he said to me when he got to my house was, am I in the right city? Cause he was surprised that the reception for him was so positive in a liberal bastion like San Francisco. In any event, it was a very successful event, and I think the President remembered that fondly. And then I spent more time at Mar A Lago, and then, like we talked about, he offered me this job.

So now you're at Mar a Lago. It is chaos at that point, right? The President had been elected. Everybody's starting to come in. It becomes kind of the seat of kind of power. It's like that song, you know, in Hamilton, right, where the room where it happens, you want to be there. There's, like. You're in these rooms. There's, like, slide shows going. People right of. They're choosing candidates. It's. There's. I don't know. Is it. What is it like? Is it a. Like a. It's a cross between, you know, a scene in Animal House and, you know, and the candidate. Tell, tell. Give us. Give. Give us a playback.

You know, it was like being in King's Landing. Have you guys ever watched Game of Thrones? It felt. It felt a bit like King's Landing. And I remember, you know, the election was. Was on a Tuesday, and actually I came out that night for the party hoping that it would be a positive result. And it was. But then the, you know, then that weekend I got like a text to, hey, come back to, you know, Mar A Lago to help with the transition. And then I was there Monday morning when it started. And so I walked into the living room of, of Mar A Lago and the President was there, and he was wearing a suit but no tie yet. And he was walking around and heads of state were calling him, and he had him on speakerphone, and he's just kind of walking around and people and they're all calling to congratulate him. And anyway, it was just, it was like really, it was surreal. It was really surreal. And then you had all these people who were there, like job seekers and supplicants were all there waiting in the living room to meet with him. And it felt like King's Landing or something like that.

That's where there is a line of people who definitely have an intention of why they're there. Maybe they've done fundraising or whatever, but that's not the category you're in. Here you are, you're kind of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, right? And you're there and then all of a sudden they say, yeah, David, we need you. So how did that unfold?

Well, I think the president, somewhere along the line, they came up with the idea that they wanted to have an AI czar and they wanted to have a crypto czar. And, you know, I think that, I mean, I think it was the President's idea. I think he likes the idea of having these cross functional roles and he likes having people from business in the administration. You saw the result of that over the last few days with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff helping to negotiate the release of the hostages in Gaza. I mean, they were two very non traditional hires, and again, they come from a business background, real estate. But the President likes hiring people who have different backgrounds and have had business success. And in their case, I think they were able to get something done that no one thought was possible, that no one thought they'd be able to negotiate that deal. And I remember, you know, Jared very well. I mean, Jared and Steve are probably the most disparaged members of the administration. Jared from last time and Steve from this time, because everyone's like, what do these guys know about diplomacy? Why should they be negotiating anything? And as it turns out, maybe negotiating huge deals in the private sector is relevant for getting things done diplomatically. But in any event, I think it just shows that the President's willing to take a chance on people who he thinks can be helpful, who have a different kind of experience. And I think he decided and other people on the team, they like the idea of having an AI czar and they like the idea of having a crypto czar. And I think first they were just going to have me do aizar, but then they weren't really happy with their choices for crypto either. And they're like, hey, can you do both of these? And I was like, sure, why not? So I ended up doing both.

Now, it's been a very different set of policies from the previous administration in both of these categories, not just in the PCAST area, but in the AI area and also in the crypto area. It's two totally different policies. And just knowing you, it's not like you are coming into this being like you weren't some crypto nut. You were like, right, that wasn't your core competency. You kind of began it with a beginner's mind, trying to listen to these experts in both of these areas, but then have kind of developed this very kind of idealistic policy. Tell us how that formed and how you decided to go forward.

Yeah, so with crypto, I mean, I.

Bought just Mr. Sachs goes to Washington. Is that the vision that we should be looking for?

Well, I think with, with crypto, I actually did discover crypto reasonably early. I mean, I bought Bitcoin for the first time in 2011, so it was on my radar. And I had made some crypto investments over the years, but. And actually back in 2017, I co founded a company called harbor, which was designed to tokenize real estate. So I had been involved in crypto, but it wasn't the only thing I was involved in. It wasn't the only thing I was investing in. It was just one of several things. But I had some background in it and you know, I obviously was new, new to everybody, you know, because, you know, it really didn't start commercially until the end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. So I think we're all kind of learning about that. But, you know, I think in terms of what those two areas need in Washington, they're slightly different. The main thing that the crypto industry needed was regulatory clarity. If you talk to all these crypto founders, they all say the same thing, which is just tell us what the rules are. They had experienced four years of arbitrary prosecution during the Biden years, because I think it was less Biden and more Elizabeth Warren was setting the agenda. They just had an extreme antipathy towards crypto and with, you know, Gary Gensler was at the SEC and he would not say what the rules were. He just prosecuted people and it was kind of a, it was kind of a regulation by enforcement approach. Well, that's really scary to entrepreneurs that, you know you're going to find out what the rules are when you get indicted. You know, that's, that's hard to comply with and pretty scary. So the whole crypto industry was in the process of moving offshore and, and I think our job coming in on that front was just to make the rules clear, to make the rules fair, make them sensible and make them clear so that everyone knew what they were and so that they wouldn't again be subject to arbitrary prosecution and therefore they would feel comfortable creating their startups in the United States as opposed to going somewhere else. So that's been our agenda with respect to crypto and I think we've made a lot of progress there. The President recently signed the Genius act into law which creates the regulatory framework for stablecoins. We have a bill going through Congress right now, it's already passed the House and it's now going through the Senate called the Clarity act, which will provide the framework for all the other crypto tokens besides stablecoins. I think that's likely to become law in the next few months. Separately, I chaired a presidential working group on digital assets which produced pretty thick report on what the crypto rules should be, which was kind of a cross functional interagency report. We worked with the sec, the cftc, the Treasury Department, all of government basically to produce that report. So I think we're very close to achieving the crypto agenda, which again is to provide that clarity so that the US will be the crypto capital of the planet instead of some other country. So that's crypto. I think AI is a little different. I think with AI, the way that we see that is that the US is currently in a AI race and our chief global competition is, is China. Obviously they're the only other country that has the talent, the resources and the technology expertise to basically beat us in AI. And I think whoever wins this AI race, that's going to have tremendous ramifications for both our economy and our national security. Clearly we want the US to be the winner, just like we were with the Internet and many other, every other technology revolution before that. So the question I think from a policy standpoint is how do we win the AI race? And the President gave a very important speech on July 23rd where he addressed this topic and he outlined a few major pillars. One is innovation. We know that to win this AI race, we have to be the most innovative. You can't regulate your way just to beating your competitor. You have to out innovate them. And we know that in the United States, the innovation comes from the private sector, not the government. So we have to do everything we can to help our companies win, to help them be innovative. And that means getting a lot of red tape out of the way. And we can talk a lot more about that if you want. Second is infrastructure. We have to have the most AI infrastructure in the us it has to be the easiest place to build it. All the new data centers that are going in, they require tremendous power. So getting ahead of the curve on energy, making sure we stand up. All of this new infrastructure, we're going.

To need.

To basically produce these AI factories. Then the third area is around exports. We want the US technology stack to dominate globally. We want to be the partner of choice for the whole world. So that, you know, I think everyone in Silicon Valley understands that the way that you win a technology race is to have the biggest ecosystem, right? You want to have the most developers using your API, you want to have the most apps in your app store. You just want everybody to be building on top of your technology stack. And that's what we want for the United States. We want to help you and all the other entrepreneurs create technology that's going to be successful in the US but also across the world. And we want to be easier to work with than our global competitors. So those were some of the major pillars that the President talked about in his speech. And then we're doing everything we can to help drive that policy forward.

One question I have for you, and I want to go to crypto, and then we'll go to AI. But when you look at crypto, one of the things that's very interesting globally, when we look at the global dynamic, is, you know, you framed as a race with China on AI, but with crypto, it's not that at all. In fact, in many cases they've, they've said they don't want their, their population using cryptography, and not cryptography, but cryptocurrencies, right? So can you. Why do you think that is? And do you view that either as an asset or a strength of the United States or potential weakness, when there is this bifurcation between how the two countries are kind of looking at the future of currency?

I think it's about control. I think that what cryptocurrency represents is financial freedom, that Bitcoin is the store of value or store of wealth that's not dependent on a fiat currency that's never existed before. And then you've got blockchain based smart contracts where you can basically make money more programmable and you can have a financial system that's more decentralized. And if I was to guess, I just think that that idea of financial freedom and decentralization is more anathema to China than to the US and this is why I think that we want the US to win in this area. It's a very important technology and I think the US should win that because I think those are fundamentally American principles or they're more aligned with the American way of looking at things in other.

Countries and then kind of flipping it on the other side. The US seems like they're really far ahead when it comes to chips, but we're now shipping all these chips to China. Does that create a vulnerability for us where they can now kind of race ahead training their own advanced models using our most advanced chips?

Well, it's actually not the case that we're shipping the most advanced chips to China. So starting around 2022, the Biden administration put export controls on advanced semiconductors going to China. And there's a debate about where you draw the line. But the policy basically is the most advanced. We don't ship and then less advanced, we allow. And then there's always a debate about where that line's going to be. But the, and some people want to draw that line very, very restrictively. I think there's, you know, I think there's good reasons to have a nuanced policy there, which is I don't think you want to sell China our latest and greatest chips because it would be too much of an advantage for them. But if you deprive them entirely. There's two issues with that. One is, you know, we still have a trade relationship with China that's important. I mean, these two economies are still interlinked in important ways. And you saw that recently with the rare earths. China basically cut us off or imposed new requirements on that. So as long as there's still things that we need from China, we're going to have to reciprocate in some way. And again, that's all a big negotiation that has to happen at the top. But it's just something for people to keep in mind. The other reason to potentially sell them chips, not necessarily our best, but some, is because if you compete in China, you do take market share away from Huawei. China wants Huawei to scale up and they want Huawei to dominate the Chinese market and then use that to then dominate the whole global market. You do have to ask the question, what would Huawei want? What Huawei wants is for all American chips to be banned in China so they can dominate that huge market for themselves. It's basically, it would be a subsidy for Huawei to give them a monopoly in that country. So, again, for me, the answer is nuance. I wouldn't give them our latest and greatest. But if we can take share away from Huawei with a less current chip, let's say, then that's something we should consider doing. But actually, recently the Chinese government has basically indicated they don't want American chips. I think they. I think their play right now is that they're doing everything they can to boost Huawei up so it can be a national champion and then compete with the Americans on the global stage. And we should be concerned about that.

That's been a core strategy of theirs for a couple of decades now. Right? I mean, that's something that's been articulated by Cisco and others kind of in the last generation of the Internet. Let's go then. Kind of. Go ahead.

Sorry, just one point on this is I think the question of what we ship to China is complicated for the reasons we discussed. But I think that what we ship or export to the rest of the world should not be complicated. And the reality is that every country that we exclude from our technology alliance or ecosystem, every country that we say can't buy American chips or American AI models, where are they going to go? They're going to go to China. And we should just remember that we're not the only game in town. And there were, I think, the export controls put on China, I think they were defensible for all the reasons we talked about. But there's been other countries who are American allies and friends, like uae, the first country to sign an Abraham Accord. They just want to be partners with the United States, and yet we've put all sorts of restrictions on their ability to do business with us. And I can't for the life of me understand what the point of that policy is, because all you're doing is you're going to drive them into China's arms.

So what you're saying is you want as much free trade as possible between these countries.

We can put security requirements on some of these chips to make sure they don't get transferred out the back door to China, I think that's reasonable. But there are wealthy countries like Saudi Arabia or UAE that want to do business with us. They want to buy our stock stuff and we're not making it easy for them. We're imposing all these restrictions and I don't get the point of that. You know, again, it's, we're not the only game in town and if we're not careful then you know, again, we're going to create pent up demand for Huawei. And this goes back to the thing we were talking about at the beginning with the, the difference in mindset between Washington and Silicon Valley. Again, everyone in Silicon Valley understands that you want to create ecosystems, you want to have a large ecosystem, you want to have lots of participants in your ecosystem. That's a good thing. But that's a hard concept for Washington to wrap its head around sometimes. Because what Washington wants is control. It's not maybe that different from other countries where I'm talking about the bureaucracies. The bureaucracies want to control these decisions and they want you to have to go there and apply for a license and get their permission to do business. And I can just tell you that if we let the bureaucracy win, we're going to kill, we're going to kill American competitiveness all over the world.

I'd like to take just a, we're kind of at time, but I'd like to just take an extra five minutes if you would, and just project this out now over the next 36 months. It's been an unbelievable 12 months for you. I'm sure you'd agree. I mean, I can't believe it. I know your friends can't believe it. You've done an incredible job. It's hard to believe everything that you've accomplished in just 12 months. Now let's go out 36 months from now, now that you've kind of set this foundation. When you look at these kind of may call it three areas, PCast, AI and crypto. What's your dream? What do you want? 36 months from now when you're leaving your position, you're leaving office, what will you kind of say? This is what I have gotten done, this is my outcome over the next 36 months.

I think on crypto it's easy because we already have the legislation in the hopper. So you know, I'd love to see the Clarity act passed and signed into law by President Trump. And at that point crypto will sort of be normalized as an asset class. It'll have a regulatory framework in the US and it'll just be up to the various agencies to kind of implement our recommendations. So that one's, I think, on a very good track. AI is a little bit more open ended because AI is evolving so rapidly and we have this really amazing AI boom going on and there's so much innovation happening in so many different areas that it's going to keep, it's very dynamic basically. And so I think we're going to learn more over the next couple of years. But I guess what I would like to see is that three years from now we feel that the US is still the leader and hopefully the dominant leader in this area of technology, that there's tremendous innovation happening that is competitive. We like to see competition. We don't want there just to be one or two winners, we want there to be lots of winners. But the US is perceived as still the leader in this dynamic industry.

What about broadly on PCAST and looking out at science and technology, the United States, even the role of universities like Stanford where you went, so many incredible universities that we have here, all part of PCAST as well. What is your North Star?

I think what we want to see there is just a return to gold standard science. Just that these universities are doing scientific research that's just genuinely valuable. That's, you know, that it's, it's, it's unbiased, ideologically unbiased and truly useful. You know, that's, that's what we'd like to see.

I think it's also plays back to what you said before about China because we really see them trying to do this with science in a way that we've never really seen. Yeah, certainly it's been incredible in the last couple years.

Yeah, there, there are crazy what has happened. Yeah, there's crazy statistics on the number of people papers that are now being produced by Chinese universities. Half the world's AI researchers are in China. So they have tremendous talent over there. Obviously they have four times the population that we do. So that means that potentially four times as many AI researchers and they're formidable. And by the way, when I say that we're competitive with them, I don't have any animosity whatsoever towards China. If I was Chinese, I'd want to win the AI race for China, but I'm American so I want to win the AI race for America. But there's no animosity in that. I just want our country to be as successful as possible and to maintain its economic and security leadership.

Well, David, it has been great to have you at Dreamforce. I couldn't be more delighted to have you here today and just want to thank you so much for your service to our country. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Appreciate.