Trump Takes On the Fed, US-Intel Deal, Why Bankruptcies Are Up, OpenAI's Longevity Breakthrough

Jason Calacanis is turning Founder University into an international deal-flow funnel, starting in Riyadh and expanding to Asia next year. He said roughly 5,000 applicants can be narrowed to 50 participants and about 10 investments after 12 weeks, explicitly calling the program a filtering mechanism.

Trump’s attempted removal of Fed governor Lisa Cook created a direct legal test of Federal Reserve independence. The episode said Cook sued after Trump cited mortgage-fraud allegations as cause; she had not been charged, and the hosts described it as the first presidential firing of a Fed governor.

Chamath Palihapitiya argued that rate-setting should move from the Fed toward Treasury auctions and market pricing, while David Friedberg defended long Fed terms as protection from election politics. Friedberg warned that politically driven short-rate cuts could lift long-term rates by reigniting inflation and worsening debt-service costs.

The U.S. government’s 10% Intel stake was presented as a new bargain: convert unpaid CHIPS Act support into passive equity rather than give grants away. The shares were described as non-voting, with no board or governance rights, and the panel broadly agreed taxpayers should capture upside when national-security intervention is unavoidable.

Friedberg proposed using government-acquired corporate equity to strengthen Social Security instead of letting it disappear into the general federal balance sheet. He suggested housing such assets inside the OASI trust fund and eventually allowing public-equity investment, which would require Congress to change current rules limiting the fund largely to Treasuries.

Large U.S. corporate bankruptcies reached 446 through July 2025, putting the year on pace for the highest total since 2010. Chamath argued this is less a tariff shock than delayed cleanup from years of near-zero rates, cheap capital and debt-heavy businesses that survived longer than their economics justified.

Commercial real estate may be the more concentrated financial stress: the episode cited $2.2 trillion of CRE debt maturing before 2028. Sacks said refinancing now collides with higher interest costs and lower property values, creating equity gaps that can force owners to surrender buildings even when they once generated cash.

Friedberg highlighted an OpenAI–Retro Biosciences experiment in which AI-designed reprogramming proteins reportedly performed about 50 times better than the original Yamanaka factors. He said 85% of cells expressed key stem-cell markers by day 12, but estimated approved therapies remain seven to twelve years away because over-reprogramming can produce cancer-like growth.