All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom's Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs

Starting point is 00:00:00 Alright, everybody, welcome back to the all in podcast, the number one, finance, technology, business, and mega podcast in the world. Today is the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, living a modern 1950s aesthetic lifestyle there. This is the house of tomorrow, house of the future. World's Fair. The original 1955 Tomorrowland at Disneyland. Well, and you have a NASA hat on, this is amazing.

Starting point is 00:00:32 He's in full geek out mode. Yeah, I didn't, I told you guys about this haircut last week. Oh, because you couldn't blow yourself. That's right. Properly. I told you this would happen to you. It's exactly what your mom said would happen. Look at the continuity He told you you could never match the blow you got last week. And here we are. I Did my best. I mean it looks ridiculous, but stylish in a way and with us again your chairman dictator Chamath

Starting point is 00:00:59 polyhapetia, he's ready to go to the inauguration and He's ready to go to the inauguration and take his victory lap and take an enormous amount of credit. Chamath, are you looking forward to your victory lap? I was in Florida earlier this week. I came all the way back so that I could play poker with my friends and see my family and children. And I'll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning. Were you at Mar-a-Lago? No, I was with my friend in a undisclosed location. With a friend in an undisclosed location.

Starting point is 00:01:31 Okay, sounds great. And joining us for the first time, one of my oldest friends, Mr. Mark Pincus, or as we like to say, Marcus Pincus. Why do you always take credit for these guests being only your friends? The rest of us are the ones that call them and are like, hey, do you want to come on the show?

Starting point is 00:01:49 And then you're like, who's my old friend? Who's my old Pinkus longer than you? I don't know about that. Is that true? Back to like AOL? Yeah. Well, we met when you were doing Silicon Alley, right?

Starting point is 00:02:00 Reporter, yeah, and then angels. I've been collecting rent from Mark Pinkus for the last year. That's true. My landlord. You should whistle blow on Freeberg to Gavin's gouging police and see if you can get something. We'll get right to that in a minute. The price couch continues. If our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to price couch, it's a hundred percent Freeberg.

Starting point is 00:02:38 A thousand percent. But let's be clear. The real gouging is the Presidio Trust, who's charging an amazingly high rent, like over $100 a foot. And then Freeberg was actually giving me a pretty good deal. He was getting a pretty good deal. I was paying like 130 a foot or something, 120, 130 a foot all in for real estate and the Presidio.

Starting point is 00:02:58 And we just weren't using the space, but it is the most expensive real estate. It is nuts. That is quite an office, man, Lord. The Presidio Trust manages that federal land and they get to keep all the money and reinvest it. It's probably the only profitable operation in the federal government.

Starting point is 00:03:13 I used to be on the board, so I saw it close up and they reinvest in things like, you know, restoring natural habitats, cutting down eucalyptus trees, Right. You know, archeological digs. Right. Right. It was really interesting. I looked at one of those houses to rent when I was first moving up to San Francisco. And the only problem with those houses have these gorgeous houses that were like

Starting point is 00:03:39 the generals houses like three, four or five bedrooms, but they would have one bathroom. Right for four rooms. Can you put another bathroom and cannot change anything. These are historic privileges. So, you know, sorry, landmarks marked it. free loader, tribe, social network back in the day support.com. And if you wasted some portion of your youth playing Farmville, he was one of the original app creators or Zynga poker, which famously he said, Hey, would you like to be an investor in Zynga poker? And I

Starting point is 00:04:12 said, How does it work? He said, Oh, well, you play for virtual coins. And I said, Mark, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You've taken all of the money out of the game, it's never going to work. And of course, he turned it into a multi billion dollar company. And that was another $25 million angel investment miss on my part. But Mark, you were also like early general social networking, you were involved in Facebook as an investor, LinkedIn, weren't you like,

Starting point is 00:04:38 Yeah, I, I think the first social media investment I made was Napster, I sent the first check, first $100,000. I think the first social media investment I made was Napster. I sent the first check, the first $100,000. I think of that as the beginning of all this. But then, yeah, Reid and I put up the first money for Friendster. And then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook, the first round of Twitter. So, yeah, like pick the right body of water, even if your boat doesn't tribe didn't work. But but you place five other bets. So you hit a couple

Starting point is 00:05:13 of them. It works out just fine. You also own you. I believe you own the six degrees patents the original social network in the 90s in web 1.0 was a company called six degrees. And they had a bunch of patents and I believe you bought them and then sold them to Facebook. Yeah. No, we didn't sell them. Reid and I bought them. Because we're worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them or even Friendster that they would have blocked the whole industry. So we bought them. We paid $750k, which was a lot then. And we were accused of being patent trolls.

Starting point is 00:05:52 And we never got that opportunity. We just sat on them to this day. Actually, I own half and Microsoft owns the other half. Are you still close with Reed, Mark? and Microsoft owns the other half. Are you still close with Reid, Mark? Yeah, very close. How did you guys reconcile your differences in political views in this last election? Because he was very vocal, Kamala, you obviously became vocal, Trump, and very kind of diametrically different views on the future. Well, it's interesting because Reid and I really started the

Starting point is 00:06:25 whole kind of journey into bigger national politics together. We both sat down and had lunch with Biden and made wrote big checks a little over a year ago, December of 23. And and then, you know, we won't bother you, but I had my red pill moment and I went a very different direction, which started off just questioning the Democrats. Hold on, hold on. Can you actually just double click into that? What was your red pill moment? Was there one specific thing or was it more of a trickle of things? It was both, right? It's like it starts, the wall starts crumbling and then it comes down all at once. So for me, it really started early in 23, I started reading PirateWires and Mike Solana and I thought he was a little crazy at first because he would write these articles. One he wrote was about how the Ukrainian

Starting point is 00:07:20 soldiers had swastikas on their helmets and the New York Times photographers would ask them to take the swastikas off for photos and I said that can't be right, that can't be true. And then four months later it was in the New York Times buried in the middle of the paper and I kept seeing stories like that that that he would be early on. And so I just started feeling uncomfortable and queasy about what was going on with mainstream media. And then in May of last year of 24, I read some article that talked about Trump's speech in Charlottesville, and this has been well covered, but where he said there was good people on both sides.

Starting point is 00:08:00 And the article said it was completely, you know, propaganda and not what he actually, not accurately reflecting what he said, that he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech. And so then I went and watched that video. And that was my red pill moment. I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn't just the media spinning it or politicians spinning it. That was like one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump was that speech.

Starting point is 00:08:31 And then you see Biden say that's why he had to run a second time and you see Obama go to, you even see Biden bring it up again in the beginning of the DNC. And it's one of their pillars and they clearly know that they're misrepresenting things. So for me, that was just, that was beyond uncomfortable. I was just like, okay, now I got to go back to first principles and look at the

Starting point is 00:08:56 primary data and listen only to original speeches by people. And I just realized I couldn't trust mainstream media. So I was, I became, I started questioning the Democrats. As soon as I started questioning the Democrats, I started getting a lot of shame and anger and hatred. Oh, the other thing that happened, that was part of this journey is that my chief of staff parted ways with me after nine years in April of last year. And he was the main person protecting me from myself on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:09:26 And he was the one who would say, stay in your lane. Nobody wants to hear what you think about politics or San Francisco or anything other than, you know, your area of products and investing. And with him gone, I just started tweeting whatever I felt and thought. And sometimes I got it wrong or it was a little too emotional. But first of all, it was really fun. And then second of all, I found I got connected to this whole new audience of people who are these kinds of techno optimists.

Starting point is 00:09:55 I think you guys probably talked about it. And that just brought me down this path that eventually I came out two days before the election publicly for Trump. It was only because that's when I completely got there. And I was trying to just be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time. And my daughters turned to me that Sunday and they said, you're, you're going to vote for Trump. We know it. And I said, yeah, you're probably right. And they said,

Starting point is 00:10:29 well, then you have to go say it on Twitter. And my daughters were like, really in this with me. Yeah. So anyway, and then it was on the front page of the New York Post on the day of the election that I was, uh, this, not that I'm such news, but maybe it was just their news peg that I was coming out for Trump. And, but I'll get back to your read question, but what I love about my New York Times, about my New York friends is that they did not give a f**k. They were all pro-Kamala and they texted me and they're just like, oh, that's kind of funny. But it's one thing I kind of love about New York.

Starting point is 00:11:08 They didn't care. Back to your question on Reed. What I love about Reed was he was already getting pings from people saying, what's going on with Pinkus? He's going off the rails. He's becoming a Trumper. You know, it's you guys, I'm sure have gone down a little bit of that too. But your mom's in Greenberg.

Starting point is 00:11:27 Yeah. Me. Like, what's wrong with him? We got to bring him back into the fold. You know, he's he's, should we lock him up? Is he crazy? And so Reed was already getting these. I had a lot of anxiety about talking to read about it.

Starting point is 00:11:42 And finally, we got on FaceTime. And he just said, I just want to start by saying, I'm Team Mark. And I said, I'm Team Reid. And it gets out a little, you know, ah, but Americans can get along even if they disagree politically about candidates, probably where we need to get to, especially, you know, now that Trump's going to be in office in a couple of days. What was it like when you had lunch with Biden? Yeah. Okay, well, just to finish the read part, sorry.

Starting point is 00:12:12 But what I love about Reid is that we followed that with a four hour dinner and he said, I never questioned your principles. He said, I know you're a highly principled person and I just want to understand which principles it is and I'd like to convince you to change your mind. But anyway, so we was- Hold on one second. So you said something almost in passing, but I just want to double click. I think part of what Silicon Valley actually gets wrong is that we don't embrace the tism. And what I mean by that is everybody, we're all a little socially uncomfortable,

Starting point is 00:12:54 we're awkward. I wouldn't say that we were the coolest people growing up. And there's this virulent form of blockers. You called a chief of staff. I think that these folks can be very detrimental, which almost represent this filter between your true self and everybody else. And there is this game that's played about being a gatekeeper. I do think that executive assistants are valuable.

Starting point is 00:13:23 Administrative assistants are valuable. The reason I can say this is that my EA went on maternity leave. I had, and I experimented with the chief of staff, et cetera. And now I use Jason's service called Athena. And I have a guy that works with me in the Philippines, and it's about 3,000 a month. And I can honestly tell you this guy is the single

Starting point is 00:13:46 most effective administrative support I've ever had. And what there isn't is all these opinions on what I can say or do. And I think that when you look at a lot of these big companies, if you look at Zuck's current transformation or what you just spoke about, there are all these interlopers transformation or what you just spoke about. There are all these interlopers that seem to get in the middle of you and people's perception of you. I don't know if you have any comments or reactions to that idea. Yeah, it's part of where I know you guys have talked about Zuck coming out as Lisa's based or his seemingly more authentic self or sharing more about himself. I can relate to it because I think we all go through this struggle as you start to be more of a known person inside your company, outside your company, and you have people around you taking the edges off. And I think that we're now in this time, I think we're having, authenticity is having

Starting point is 00:14:48 a moment now, which is great for me because Reid said to me, if you Google me, you'll see that there's lots and lots of bad things written about me. And a lot of it is, my high school quote was, some people have tact and others tell the truth. And I've always been kind of just committed to being honest, even if it's nuanced and it's not an easy sound bite. And Reed said to me early on, you need to pick what the easy narrative is, or the press is going to make it up for you. And he was right. And they did or my competitors did. So I think and he was right and they did or my competitors did. So I think that now with long-form podcasts and there's just more and the fact that we can kind of directly and a lot of ways,

Starting point is 00:15:34 Elon was the first one to directly defend himself. You remember when he fired his whole, do you remember when he fired his whole PR team? He fired all those people. There's just like, there's none of that infrastructure between him and everybody else. But do you remember when he would be on Twitter all the time, post PayPal, trying to correct the story and just write long, long diatribes. And then, then when a New York Times reporter said something negative out of Tesla, he just went off for weeks about them. And, and it seemed a little crazy and deranged, and then you started to see that it worked. Like he actually, and we were told, don't defend yourself.

Starting point is 00:16:11 If something bad is written about you, you're gonna prolong the press cycle. You're going to make the journalists angry. And so we're now unshackled. I teach this class at Stanford, and I taught two back-to-back on Monday and I looked around and I saw half the placards said, you know, she, her, you know, he, him, his, and I got a little pang of like, oh, do I have to watch what I'm saying? Like, no,

Starting point is 00:16:37 I don't. I'm unshackled. I'm just going to, this is just me and I'm going to be Mark unfiltered and it's the better version of ourselves so anyway, I I'm glad that Zuck feels like he can be he can present more of his Complete self out there now and I think We can get into it later But I have a lot of thoughts on how the culture is going to kind of move more towards base back to the other question with Biden that lunch you had. Did he seem like he was all there? Come on. Yeah, come on. Was it in the afternoon? I mean, did you have that was that sharp as a talk? Well, that was me. I mean, I'm not saying I'm like full

Starting point is 00:17:18 mag over here. But here's my dad was like, wait a second. Are you guys lying about this? Like, how long is this? And how deep is this cover up? I've no horse in this race. I didn't have a horse in the race. So I had nothing to lie about. I for sure don't now. I'm really not a Biden fan or protector. I'll tell you, like, the exact my exact observation, we, we had this lunch, there was like maybe five of us with Biden and a few of his finance people and they had it in the tennis house, which is the way they found that they can have

Starting point is 00:17:55 a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House. They found some way, we'll see if Trump does it. Some loophole, right? Yeah, the loophole. And it was, I was impressed, it was a long lunch. It loophole, right? Yeah, the loophole. And and it was I was impressed with a long launch, it must have been an hour and a half, two hours. And I'll tell you the good and the bad. The good, the part I was impressed was

Starting point is 00:18:14 he kept the conversation thread, he was engaged and kept the thread the whole time. When people say sharp as a tack or kept the thread. That's how we talk about like our 90 year old grandparent or something so I'm just saying the reality to me he he was not he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of dementia but we were impressed that he was able to follow the conversation thread and then say, you know, Okay, let me say it differently. Would you have had the same bar if it was Jamie Diamond sitting across from you for two hour lunch?

Starting point is 00:18:57 No, no. So so so yes, it was, it was Wow, your grandfather is holding up really well. Like Your grandfather was able to have a whole lunch and hold the conversation. But it wasn't, I didn't walk away saying, I have to admit, I did not walk away saying I think he's mentally unfit. But I did, and I wasn't shocked, but I was like, okay, this is someone who's being really handled and managed by the people around him. And he's being told to show up here, say this. But I will say he was he was not on an obvious script, which I know I think famously he did some fundraiser at Vinod's house where he was reading a prompter the whole time. So wasn't reading a prompter.

Starting point is 00:19:43 Yeah, that was it. And a person's home, they brought a teleprompter from to speak. Wow. That's weird. Yeah, I didn't actually, that's no information. That's crazy. But I mean, in fairness, like the there's this issue called sundowning, people who are in that age group, they're good in the day, and then the sun goes down and, you know, their brains are exhausted. And that's when you would see it. And that's what they said about the

Starting point is 00:20:11 debate. But for me, that was the the coronation of Kamala and like not actually having a speed run primary that to me was just anti democratic, anti American, and like just what happened to merit and like having a process here, right? That's when I felt like the party just collapsed on itself. I'm glad you're here. Let's jump in. Okay, but let me ask you a question before we get into the document. We got a lot to talk about, obviously, but what do you think the Democratic Party does from here? Like is it everybody's like this? They're lost in a drift. We're not even hearing from them. Maybe a little bit of pushback, I guess, at these Senate hearings right now for confirmations. But what do you think happens? Is there any

Starting point is 00:20:53 hope for this? And who would lead them out of this? Shapiro? Somebody? AOC? I think that what my brain, my kind of intelligent front of brain would tell me, the logical thing, which I think I want to say is one lens that I think we have to be careful not to just apply logic here because it's parties and the Democrats. The logic would say, oh, they're going to find based authentic people to put up against these other ones, the kind of Federman types that they're going to put those people forth who are more centrist and also are more trustworthy that they're actually authentic in their flaws. That's what my brain would tell me.

Starting point is 00:21:40 I think there'll be a little of that that the party, I believe, will move more that way. I think that the corporate candidates aren't going to fly anymore with the electorate. I think that the managed corporate through soundbites can't do a long form, things like this. I think that's over and we can get into that later if we want. But I think they won't go as far as they should. So they won't go as far as like what I think we would intelligently advise them to do. So that's as much as I can figure out. That they should do that, but they won't. Interesting.

Starting point is 00:22:20 Well, we're certainly going to find out in the next year or two what their direction is when they get to the midterms I suppose Oh One more thing though on it is yeah, and a lot of it depends on Really what we see and if if Doge starts to really get popular support this whole I think you guys talked about this last week that the more that FDR style Trump and people get popular support, it's going to become a more and more isolating lonely place in two years to still be like, you know, California, Gavin, everyone

Starting point is 00:22:55 saying, don't worry, we're going to protect you against these people. If they're doing things that are popular to still saying you're protecting against them, I think won't fly. Well, that's a great jump off point because Gavin does seem and Karen Bass seem like their careers are ending and they're in the last stages of trying to maybe get a little bit more pragmatic based is the word people might use for that just being super candid. But let's get let's get into a little bit of an update here about the absolute tragedy occurring in Los Angeles

Starting point is 00:23:25 The death toll is now at 25 12,000 structures have been destroyed. It's mostly people's homes. It's 40,000 acres. That's 60 square miles. I Think San Francisco is seven by seven miles, right? So this is a lot of space It's bigger than all of San Francisco. The palisades and Eden fires are still burning. And as of Wednesday, 80,000 people were under evacuation orders. Couple of our friends lost their homes and but they survived. But the stories of losing everything are just tragic. Every memory, all your

Starting point is 00:24:03 personal documents, photos, art, whatever that you've collected over a lifetime. I just had two conversations with people and they were just in shock. The estimates right now of damage are between $135 billion and $150 billion. This is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. It's 10 times more costly than any other wildfire in history, according to reports, you might remember the Camp Fire near Paradise, California. That's about what three hours north of San Francisco, northeast. That one was 12.5 billion just to level set it. And now people are talking about and we'll talk about here today, what the recovery and rebuild effort

Starting point is 00:24:48 might look like. California leadership disgraced across the board. Gavin, I just got Gavin Newsom. Have you had traffic to disgraced.com with all of this right now? Disgrace.comcom is gonna be redirected to Gavin or Karen Bass. I don't know which one is more disgraceful. I mean, it's an incredible troll that you just redirected every week

Starting point is 00:25:14 to whoever you're madest at. Yeah. Who would be more disgraceful in this situation? Gavin or Karen Bass? I think it's gotta be Karen Bass for just being out of the country. I think it would be quite funny if every week, you actually gave an award and redirected the website to the

Starting point is 00:25:29 person that you're best this week. And before that it was Jake Paul for that Tyson fight. And the disgrace ad.com but it's the mistakes have gone up. Gavin is now doing executive orders. One of them is to make it illegal to global offers to impacted homeowners for the next three months. I don't know what the point of that is. And the other one is to eliminate the coastal acts review of permits for that the houses that are alone pch I suppose and he wants to

Starting point is 00:26:09 extend key price gouging protections quote to help make rebuilding more affordable gouging is defined as raising the rent or price of other goods and services more than 10% from the last market price. But it could be as little as 5% it's just not clear. And then LA Mayor Karen Bass created a snitch hotline to report on any kind of price gouging and rents, which we've started to see people are now naming and shaming Zillow and Redfin listings, where they you

Starting point is 00:26:42 can see the previous history of what they were asking for for a home or for rent. And obviously, the free market is making rental homes double in price. Freeberg, we talked a bunch about this. And I know, Pinkus, you've got we had, I don't know if you're comfortable talking about it, but we had a whole conversation about your getting dragged by the Coastal Commission in Northern California. Freeburg, maybe kick us off here on what your thoughts are on rebuilding this area, how this will happen, especially with we brought up last week. And I think when a bit viral is your sort of talk about putting your

Starting point is 00:27:21 thumb on the scale with insurance, I mean, this is I think, one of the concerning things here is the free market not being allowed to progress previously with insurance and then now with the rebuild. Well, California has got at this point, price controls or a mechanism for controlling the change in price on insurance, on housing services, and now they've got this non-solicitation rule. All three, I think, are very challenging to, I think, an appropriate market recovery. Look, the insurance issue is a longer one. If you guys want, we could talk about that.

Starting point is 00:28:02 I've got a couple of notes I can bring up on the history of how we got to this point. But I think it's going to be the one of the biggest burdens going forward. And it could actually lead to a pretty significant effect in long term housing prices in California, because of the way that the insurance market is structured and regulated in California. But if you want, we can talk about that up or down. What do you think ultimately, you know, TLDR, like, do you think prices are going to go way up here? Do you think this is

Starting point is 00:28:31 going to take five or 10 years to rebuild these homes? I mean, we've never seen this many structures go down at this price point in a constrained area where just construction is so expensive and hard. So I think the governor did a good job suspending the permitting requirements for the Coastal Act for affected homes and the CEQA review. Those are very important, I think, suspensions. But he also put in place this executive order for price gouging.

Starting point is 00:28:58 And if you pull up the note, Nick, so he basically said California Penal Code Section 396, which prohibits price gouging during a declared state of emergency, will now extend indefinitely in this region. And in the language in that penal code, it says that businesses cannot raise the price of essential goods and services by more than 10% above their pre-emergency price for a specified period. And in this case, his executive order is indefinitely. So on an indefinite basis, you cannot raise the price of goods and services,

Starting point is 00:29:34 which generally applies to consumer goods like food and emergency supplies, but it also applies to building materials and services related to housing work. So if you want to attract builders, if you want to attract contractors, if you want to attract electricians and plumbers to go to the LA area, you have to allow the market to do its job. If I'm a plumber operating in Sacramento or in Phoenix and I'm like, man, I could make some money if I go to LA, you will see an influx of service providers and an influx of goods to support the rebuilding effort in Southern California.

Starting point is 00:30:09 That's the way the free market should work is there's an opportunity in the market, folks show up, they say, great, I can make money, I'm going to come here and do this work. And as more folks show up, they begin to compete on price and eventually the cost kind of normalizes and you end up finding What is now the new fair market value between the bid and the ask the people that are saying? Hey, I'll do the work there they ask and hey, I need people to do work That's the bid and you find a price but the benefit of that is you increase the supply you increase the supply of goods You increase the supply of service providers of contractors. There is a home building dearth right now in the United States. So this is an amazing opportunity because

Starting point is 00:30:48 they can now move to LA, build homes, we can get a rapid reconstruction effort underway. Except the governor just said we can't pay people 10% higher than what they were getting paid right before this happened on an indefinite basis. And then Karen Bass created a hotline, you can go to LA 311 and report people if they're trying to charge too much. And then the Stasi will come and investigate you and determine that you're charging too much. I understand that there's a strong moral imperative and incentive to say, we got to stop price gouging. We don't want people to get hurt. But the second order effect is you're actually

Starting point is 00:31:21 hurting the market and you're hurting the rebuild effort because you're reducing the incentive for folks to come in and fill the void in the market that is necessary for us to accelerate the development of 15,000 homes in a very short period of time. The alternative now is people are going to be sitting around and I already spoke to a couple of friends, I'm sure you guys have, that are like, I tried calling architects, I tried calling contractors, people that live in this area that have been affected. I cannot get anyone to return my call. There is not enough service providers down there. You're going to end up waiting six, seven years to get your home rebuilt.

Starting point is 00:31:50 Now what do you do? You own a lot. You don't have a home to live in. And then there's this other thing where we can't take unsolicited offers on the home. That was the other executive order. So if you want to pull that one up, the governor said, it is illegal to make an unsolicited offer on a piece of real estate in one of these affected zip codes.

Starting point is 00:32:09 I don't know what happened in Hawaii that makes the governor keep referencing the Hawaii story as if there were people that were taken advantage of and we need to protect the citizens of LA. But I'm pretty sure that having an increase in the number of offers coming in for real estate in one of these affected areas increases liquidity in the market, it increases the buying behavior, and that will ultimately drive prices up and that will ultimately make it easier by having more liquidity for some of these folks who

Starting point is 00:32:40 owned burned down lots to be able to sell their lot, take their insurance check, move to another neighborhood and go somewhere else because they're gonna have to otherwise wait six or seven years to build a home. So I think that the music- Hold on, hold on. Yeah. I think you're a little bit off the deep end with some of this stuff

Starting point is 00:32:54 because I think you're not being totally fair in representing what this EO says. And that's coming from me. I mean, I am not a Newsom fan, okay? And I think he is completely and totally incompetent. But I'll just take the other side of this, which is that I read the EO and I actually think it's somewhat reasonable.

Starting point is 00:33:19 And I didn't connect the dots with the EO and the real estate market. And the reason is that if you read all of what he said, the EO is hyper specific to unsolicited offers to a very specific handful of zip codes. And it was time boxed for three months. So he said, making any unsolicited offer to an owner of real estate property located in the areas encompassed by any names, a bunch of zip codes. I think there was like one, two, there's like 12 or 13 of them. Okay. So unsolicited,

Starting point is 00:33:52 okay? To acquire any interest in real property for an amount less than the fair market value of the property on January 6th, so before the fire started. And he said, that's prohibited for three months. That's it, for three months. And the reason I think he said that is that if you just scope out a little bit, just from this moment in Los Angeles, the problem is that after natural disasters,

Starting point is 00:34:24 there is a spike in fraudulent activities. And there are people that try to take advantage of that situation to make money. So for example, after hurricanes, we saw this in Florida, people pose as contractors, they come in and they offer inflated prices, they offer poor quality of work. And especially when you sort of deregulate for that moment, where there's less checks, there's less folks involved, because you're trying to speed up the process, you can have a bunch of pressure tactics that work against the best interests of the person trying to rebuild. On the wildfire side, there is this crazy thing, Nick, I'll send you the link from KTLA that talked about these folks

Starting point is 00:35:05 called fire chasers, which are essentially like, you know, wildfire scammers or ambulance chasers, but during fire. So my point is, I don't disagree with his incompetence, okay? And I think he is totally out of touch. I think there's a broken cartel that runs this state that's going to drive this state into just complete disrepair. He was going to negligent. Well, they're already in. You can't say a state that has $322 billion budget is already bankrupt. It's teetering on a path where we won't be able to return and we can debate that. But my point is, I just think, despite all of this, he's grossly negligent. Karen Bass is grossly negligent. The California cartel is breaking this state.

Starting point is 00:35:51 But on this specific narrow thing, I kind of will give him his flowers. I think it was like a decent, smart, good thing. It's narrowly focused. There's a specific window here that's time boxed, so that the worst behaviors of other people are roughly managed and mitigated until we can figure out a better answer. You're saying that unsolicited offers on real estate can drive fraud? What you talked about, if there was a person that is, this does not prevent somebody from selling- By the way, let's talk about services separately because he has a separate EO on services.

Starting point is 00:36:25 This does not prevent anybody whose house burned down from listing his lot. You could sell it for a dollar. That's right. So it's not, it's, I think it's, it's not right and it's inaccurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market. The idea that you cannot sell isn't what is in this EO. The idea is some person shows up out of the blue and applies a pressure tactic to you when you're in a very stressful situation,

Starting point is 00:36:51 trying to deal with your insurance brokers, trying to figure out where your kids are going to go to school. But they're just making an offer. What's the pressure tactic? Why can't someone make an offer on your home? You want people to bid up homes. David, here's what's gonna happen. There are people that in the middle of all of this

Starting point is 00:37:06 stress are trying to figure out how much money they can get. Somebody shows up and underbids what the true price discovery could be in a few months from now. You don't know whether you have to still pay back your mortgage. There will be people, it will be non-zero, that will make a mistake. And I think that it's good to try to stop that. It doesn't absolve him from his incompetence, but this, I think, was reasonably good. What about the services piece, Chamath? The fact that you can't increase pricing on goods and services

Starting point is 00:37:35 by more than 10% for an indefinite period. Don't you think that that creates a disincentive for service providers to come into the state to come and address the rebuild effort? Well, obviously it does, yeah. This grand ideal of the free market will solve everything isn't necessarily always true. It's great in theory, it reads well in a textbook,

Starting point is 00:37:55 but real life is messy. Right now we are in the messy part. And we are in the most critical part where the abuses will be the highest. I suspect that in six months and nine months and 12 months, the free market will sort all of these things out. So if there's a governor who can implement some checks and balances to protect these folks who are probably totally dazed, like for example, we know some of our friends, I've spoken to them over the last few days. I've spoken to their wives. Honestly- They're in shock. I'll say it in a horrible way.

Starting point is 00:38:32 One person said this to me, and I'll just quote him. The amount of people that have reached out to me, if you had asked me two weeks ago, why would so many people reach out with condolences? I would have thought that one of my children had died. That's what he said to me. And it completely struck me with it's not on that same level, but the amount of emotional turmoil that these families are going through probably approaches that. I don't think many of those people are in a condition to make good decisions right now. So I almost think a

Starting point is 00:38:59 cooling off period actually benefits everybody. It can allow the free market to work in a few months from now. We're only talking 90 days. No, no, the the services thing is indefinite. That's what I think is a little bit frustrating. Let me bring Mark in here. Mark, you heard both sides of this debate. If you had a lot in the Pacific Palisades that burned down, and people started making unsolicited offer listed. I've known you for 20 plus years. Uh, very sophisticated, obviously. But do you think that's a reasonable thing to do to put a moratorium on people making these low bid offers and then we'll get to the construction piece second, but you know, what do you think of unsolicited offers. Yeah. What do you think of that? I think what bothers me about it, there's a presumption, and maybe Chamath's right in it, you're getting me to think about it a little more than I was, but I'm pretty much where Freeberg is that we're kind of treating these people like children, because what we're

Starting point is 00:40:01 saying is that they're not capable of making good decisions, so we need to protect them from themselves. And we're saying, so we don't want you to know that somebody is willing to pay X dollars for your property because you might take it and you might regret later that you took that is kind of what Chamath is saying. No, in a very narrow window where you may not have the best and clearest ability to make the best decision for you because you're dealing with so many other crazy issues in your life. Sure. And that's-

Starting point is 00:40:38 You can still say no. You could say no, but you're presuming there's one side that bothers me that feels like what we've had from the Democratic Party forever, which is this big, wise overlord that's going to protect us from ourselves, from our worst natures. And then on the other hand, you're bringing up something, Chamath, that I hadn't thought about that I'm just thinking more about now, which is, well, maybe people could be taken advantage of at the margin because they feel like they're in a dire position. But if they think they're in a dire position, they might really be in a dire position. So they might really need that money.

Starting point is 00:41:18 Well, for example, let's just say that you haven't heard back from the banks that own your mortgage about whether there's going to be a moratorium on mortgage payments. And so now you're trying to juggle paying for an extra rental and this house while you're trying to figure out where to put your kids. And somebody shows up and says, Hey, I will buy this from you. I think that there are a lot of people who would otherwise be able to make a much more rational decision who may make a panic decision in that moment. And I think that if you give people a 90-day cooling off period, I think it at least shines a light on whether all of this governmental and other infrastructure can actually do something for these people. I do think that there is a moment at which you can't govern these things.

Starting point is 00:42:01 And all I'm suggesting is a very narrow window of time where people's feelings of just like desperation are at their highest. I think that this is a decent thing to do. You know, there is some precedent for the state doing stuff like this. You know, in most states, there is a cooling off period with marriages and divorces. You have to wait three days to file either way to get married or to get divorced. Let's talk about the construction process here. Free brokers, I think that's the most important one, because we're going to rebuild. If you don't pay a premium to get somebody to leave another market

Starting point is 00:42:38 to come to this one, which is what's going to be required, there are simply not enough construction people in any state. That's right. So now you're people in any state. That's right. So now you're competing with another state. That's right. This immediately triggered the debate and dare I say courage that Travis had around this issue with surge pricing for Uber, Lyft, and sidecar and a bunch of other folks who were kind of virtue signaling were like, we don't ever want to do

Starting point is 00:43:02 surge pricing. Therefore, there were never cars on the road on Friday and Saturday nights when people needed them, or during, you know, inclement weather, snowstorms, or on New Year's Eve. And he said, if you want to increase supply, we believe Uber should have availability lift took a different decision, we're gonna have no search pricing, and they just simply weren't available. So maybe, what do you think about that piece pink is you think that the free market and people should be able to say, you know what, I'll pay you time and a half to come here, I'll pay you double time to work Saturday and Sundays, I'll get a couple of RVs, put them in the back if you want to have some folks live on the construction site. And if you hit these dates, I'll pay you a bonus for hitting it. Doesn't seem like any of that would be wrong to me for somebody who had the ability to pay an incentive for somebody to move from another state would be out of line here.

Starting point is 00:44:00 What are your thoughts on that? I agree. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty much just a free market believer. And so I think other than guardrails like Chamath saying, and maybe I like the idea of cooling off periods, it kind of makes sense. But outside of that, when it comes to service providers, yeah, you have the opposite problem right now, which is like you're saying saying you need to incentivize a huge construction force to come to LA and the cost for them to get there to find housing themselves is going to be even higher or the amount of distance they're

Starting point is 00:44:40 going to have to travel every day. So I think this could have real unintended consequences and just stop the just stop the wheels from turning on rebuilding all these homes, which make it way more complex. So I agree. Chmoth, any final thoughts on the rebuild and the free market in that regard? Yeah, I think this is where the government ineptitude is at its worst.

Starting point is 00:45:10 I think that we need to dismantle this regulatory state that makes doing the right thing impossible. So specifically, the thing that Newsom did was essentially create a time expectation on when things will get permitted. And I think he said it was like six months. The problem is like this is what just goes to show you how insane the state has become. Even if you get a permit within six months, and this is where I do agree with Freeberg, like

Starting point is 00:45:44 getting service people in and being able to build something to spec safely is going to take three, four, five, six years and it's going to be insane. And the example of the complete incompetence of the California state government is if you contrast and compare this with how the state was able to respond in the Northridge earthquake. And the crazy thing which I thought was incredible was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, they rebuilt I-10, right? Which is like that is like a crazy artery. In 66 days, guys, they rebuilt it. Not they permitted it. Not that they were trying to get the California coastal commission to opine on it. Not a Sierra club lawsuit about the upper land

Starting point is 00:46:30 grouse. They rebuilt it. So you actually know what's possible in California if tradesmen are allowed to go to work. They can build incredibly complicated things with safety, with speed. This is where Newsom, I don't think, understands how the real market works. Because if you looked at that example, the real question you should be asking is, well, what has changed? Well, technology has gotten way better since then. The people are more skilled. There are more people to be able to do more of these jobs. And so why does it only take six months to just get the permit when in 120 days, you could just rebuild an entire highway? Similarly, why aren't we saying that we expect these homes built in the next three years, get these kids back in their homes and back in

Starting point is 00:47:13 school? You know what they did on that? They offered a $200,000 per day early build bonus on that program back then. So they basically the state declared we need this freeway reopened. And here's the date. It was like 144 days and they're like, you'll get a $200,000 bonus for every day under 144 that you deliver it. So now, show me an incentive. I'll show you an outcome. Exactly. The really interesting thing here is there are regulations that this is a unique opportunity to put in place. Nick, if you can pull it up, there was a home that wasn't burned in the Pacific Palisades,

Starting point is 00:47:50 and the architect talked about some of the design decisions there. You know, having stone scaping around your home, gravel, etc. And using these new materials, and not having overhangs, which and then having vents into your attic, which is what a lot of homes have and the embers get into the addict, there's an overhang and they're not using, and they're all wood built, you know,

Starting point is 00:48:14 none of this is concrete, none of it's brick. California is all wood. And so they probably should add some regulations about building things that are fireproof. Because if you had a 100 homes that were all fireproof and built to withstand this, that would act as a natural break. And if you didn't have as much vegetation, so there's probably a series of things that should be added here

Starting point is 00:48:37 in terms of regulations while you're getting rid of some of the ones that are slowing you down. But let's pivot over to, oh, and then finally, like allowing people to park their mobile homes in these places to have housing for construction, to your point, Mark, would be super critical. And they block that kind of stuff. So when you need temporary housing in California, you can't do it. By the way, I want to hear what Friedberg has to say about insurance, but let me connect the dots between what you said and what he's about to say. There are three images I just want to show you guys and to bubble this up for everybody that

Starting point is 00:49:09 isn't necessarily living in California and is consumed with what all of this means, there's a bigger trend across the country that I think is just worth putting out there. So Nick, do you want to just show the first chart from FEMA? This is basically a graph per locality all over the United States where FEMA tries to assess the disaster risk for living in a given area. What you see here is that there's some risk in living on the eastern seaboard and there's a lot of risk and it's growing for living on the western seaboard. And the two most complicated states that have to deal with this are clearly

Starting point is 00:49:50 Florida and California. So that's one, which is this is a problem that isn't just focused on this one little area. So then if you double click a little bit further, there's a company called CoreLogic, they publish a lot of real estate data. Here's a chart about the Western United States that just double clicks into wildfire risk. And I was shocked when I saw this. This is, first of all, most of California. This is like Nevada. This is Arizona. This is parts of Texas. This is Washington. I didn't even

Starting point is 00:50:22 know the fire risk went up that high, but this is essentially a lot of the Western United States. And then the last chart goes through and it actually does, CoreLogic does an assessment of the value at risk. So in California, it's three quarters of a trillion dollars that are at about 1.26 million homes that are at moderate or great risk of fires.

Starting point is 00:50:50 In Colorado, it's about 141 billion. In Texas, it's 88 billion. In Oregon, it's 45 billion. In Arizona, it's 36 billion. The point is that everything you said, Jason, now needs to get scaled out. Meaning there needs to be a national level conversation. This can't be a bunch of city planners making code and making laws in a little municipality. Because that problem, what that shows you is we have a multi-trillion dollar risk to a lot of people in the Western United States

Starting point is 00:51:27 specifically around this issue that has to get dealt with by code. All right. Really interesting in New York. Finally, New York has put into place congestion pricing. I've been waiting for this my entire life. Here's a map. This went into effect January 5th. this my entire life here's a map this one into a fact january fifth this congestion pricing concept exists in london as everybody probably knows basically if you're below central

Starting point is 00:51:53 park which is sixty street in manhattan and you enter between five and nine pm you can get you know on your easy pass a charge of but nine dollars cheaper than a bacon egg and cheese in manhattan these days you're going clubbing in manhattan between nine pm and five am it's just like two bucks. It's gonna increase to twelve dollars in twenty twenty eight and fifteen dollars in twenty thirty one trucks pay more taxes pay less. The results have been awesome wait times to get on the island are down 50% across the board Lincoln Tunnel down 46% Holland Tunnel down 63% Williamsburg Bridge down 35%. It's just an awesome effort. When I live there, man, as a resident, the traffic was nuts. You can have emergency services move a lot faster, you get rid of noise. pollution, you obviously get rid of air quality pollution for ice engines it's great for cabs great for pedestrians and great for bike riders the only people really complaining are selfish and entitled people who drive their cars into Manhattan that's at least my position on it opponents are saying it's

Starting point is 00:52:59 a money grab for the Transit Authority because the money from this goes to make public transportation better what do you think mark you're in favor of the it. Opponents are saying it's a money grab for the Transit Authority because the money from this goes to make public transportation better. What do you think Mark, you're in favor of this? Yeah, I think more generally, I feel like since the pandemic, what's been on my mind a lot living still in San Francisco, I wanted to start a social network called Still Here. It's like, oh, you still live here? Me too.

Starting point is 00:53:28 Some way for us to like come out of our houses and notice that you're here and I'm here, but we'd never leave our homes. I walk around the city at my own risk and I feel like cities have lost the point. Like they've lost the plot. Like why we've kind of, we still live in cities or value them, but I feel like we have to go back to first principles and think why did we move to cities in the first place and what was the value supposed

Starting point is 00:53:55 to be and is that still the deal we're getting or does it have to be a new deal? Because we used to live in a city because it was economic. We were closer to our job. Then we lived in a city because there was a high density of things that we wanted, cultural, people, restaurants. The best cities really were the ones that are fun to walk around. Then we got to a point where it's not safe or clean to walk around. You don't work in the city anymore. And San Francisco started to feel like this gigantic like retirement community. It's just all these people who still live here

Starting point is 00:54:32 because their kids are in school maybe, or they grew up here. A lot of our friends left, went to Austin and other places. And we started, I don't know about Chamath, but I think Dave, but I think our family has a conversation probably twice a year of, should we move? Why haven't we moved? What's wrong with us? And so there's this questioning going on around cities, and I think it's a good question. And I think cities need to innovate aggressively to be better. They have to compete with the other options again. They have to make it fun to be there, fun to be better. They have to compete with the other options again. They have to make

Starting point is 00:55:05 it fun to be there, fun to work there. I think it's great that Daniel Lurie is mayor of San Francisco and he's putting smart people around him and they're trying to rethink first some of attacking these core problems, but also how do we make San Francisco fun again? So I love things like congestion pricing. I think now is the time to try every new innovation that you ever thought of and see what sticks and figure out like how do you take this tax, not literally, I mean, New York has a big tax, but this tax on all of us,

Starting point is 00:55:44 whether it is that you can't walk across this city, that you don't feel safe, or that the good side of it being fun to be in, you know, is that the deal is off. And so I think, you know, and I also, what I'm hoping Daniel Lurie does and other smart mayors is that they benchmark and they say, who's doing it really well around the world, whether it's dealing with homelessness, or things like congestion pricing, who's, who's innovating and doing it well? And why aren't we doing it here? I mean, I think you got to run these, you got to reinvent these cities. And, you know, sorry to sound cliche, I think you've got to kind of take a startup mentality and say, you're not

Starting point is 00:56:28 going to live on your incumbency anymore. You've got to reinvent this and we can't make companies come back to work, you know, come back to the office. I mean, the companies can make their employees, but it'd be really nice if the employees wanted to be there. You know, and you can't make people live in California. So I'm in favor. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:50 Chamath, any thoughts on Mark's point about making cities fun again and joyful again? Sounds like a pretty good platform. I mean, I think he's right. San Francisco sucks. It's trash. You never go there. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:04 It's terrible. And the reason that you don't like to go there is it's dirty. It's disgusting. There's crime. There's grime. Everything just sucks there. Yeah. Freeburg your thoughts on the Gotham City that city. Dave did Sch Chamath ever come to the Presidio? I have come to your office. I've come to Dave's office. I've come to, I've gone to Peter's office there. But what I do is I, I don't even go through the city.

Starting point is 00:57:34 I go all the way around. I drive all through the East Bay, up through Berkeley. Wow. And when I come home. Really? No, no, no. I just think that the city is very poorly managed and just the quality of many cities

Starting point is 00:57:46 are poorly managed. And I think that there's a common through line in these poorly managed cities. All the things that you say, there's no will to do. There's no will to keep crime at bay. There's no will to make usable spaces for people. There's no will to invest in the arts. So what do you expect, right? There's more money collected invest in the arts. So what do you expect? Right? There's more money collected by these cities, but there's just more total grift, corruption and waste. I really like that you got to this will point because whether we come back to the Coastal Commission or not, or talk about California or San Francisco, I don't think it's really about the red tape. I think it's about the willpower

Starting point is 00:58:26 of the people who are running the tape and reading the tape. You're 100% right. Did you see this thing? I have to read this to you because this is really stunning. Sorry, Mark, keep going. But you're so 1000% right. You know, because, sure, okay, maybe in one, Gavin can override the Coastal Commission, but it doesn't matter if you cut their red tape by 90%. As long as there's any tape that they can use, the people running both the staff there and the people on the board have stated on their website

Starting point is 00:59:00 that their policy is managed retreat. They drew a new map of the California coastline. If that's their intention, they're going to look for anything they can to stop and obstruct you. So it's, it's really not like their hands are tied because there's so much permitting. And you're right, they've made a decision. And the decision in California and San Francisco specifically, was that we're going to cater to fentanyl dealers and junkies. And that those people were going

Starting point is 00:59:26 to get a stipend a hotel room and be allowed to take a super drug on the streets. 1000s of people with no recourse. Listen, I'm pro drug. Okay, here's I sent you guys a I sent you guys Asian but not fentanyl and meth. These things are super drugs. Yeah, let's make it less about San Francisco. Let's talk about middle Ohio and let's talk about Anderil. Palmer Lucky did this really awesome. Shout out. Really awesome interview. Nick, I just sent you the link to it. He's building a new Ohio plan, but the question and answer from the interviewer is exactly what Pinkus talked about,

Starting point is 01:00:07 which is will. The interview says, was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline that you needed? And here's Palmer's answer. Was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline? I think that they were the state that gave us the best shot of hitting that timeline. Look, we've really engaged well with Jobs Ohio, with a lot of the politicians here, not just at the state level, but the local level. You know, like you said, we're hiring 4,000 people here in direct jobs, a lot more jobs than that in a direct, or sorry, in indirect capacity. It's the largest single job creation event in Ohio history. It was a state that told us, we have the workforce, we have a million people who are

Starting point is 01:00:45 capable of working in this facility within a 45-minute drive. We're willing to work with you on higher education to help train people so they can come in and they can work with you. Our customer in the form of the United States Air Force obviously has a huge presence here in the form of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. So really all the stars aligned to make Ohio a great place for us to do it and to do it fast. And speaking candidly, as someone who is from California, there's some states that are really good at pushing you out and slowing you down. And there's others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up. And that's what Ohio was. Fantastic. Yeah. States are competing for elite companies. And there's a willpower that's that there's an intention.

Starting point is 01:01:29 And you know that if they want to make it happen, they'll make it happen. Just like Gavin just did, right? Gavin could have theoretically, I don't know, signed an executive order to override the Coastal Commission on even his desal plant. Like, I don't know why he didn't just force that through. But if we had de-sail, maybe there'd be more water to fight the fire now. I think the important thing is to note

Starting point is 01:01:53 that cities have a right to be what they want to be. You guys might find this surprising, but I'm not necessarily of the belief that every city should necessarily cater to progress and acceleration and enterprise Asian and industrialization. Look, when you go to Portofino every summer to month, you would probably, you know, stop going and would be disappointed if you found out that they were building a giant glass tower apartment complex at a giant office

Starting point is 01:02:24 building right by the Portofino port. That's just not the character of what that city wants to be. And I do remember when I first moved to San Francisco 25 years ago, it felt like a smaller European-like city. It wasn't overrun with technology companies at the time. And it was the charm and the quaint nature and the smaller buildings of San Francisco that made it a beautiful, fantastic town.

Starting point is 01:02:49 I think that part of the challenge of San Francisco has been this diametrically kind of opposed viewpoint of progress from the technology sector and a desire to keep San Francisco a small city by the bay. And that that frustration has manifested with a lot of kind of ugliness over the last couple of decades. In addition to obviously by the bay, and that that frustration has manifested with a lot of kind of ugliness over the last couple decades. In addition to obviously all the silly, stupid policies that just make no sense whatsoever. They're rooted in people thinking that this

Starting point is 01:03:14 is a good solution in the short term, but it creates extraordinary damage and harm in the long term, separate. But I do think that cities have a right to be what they want to be. And I think that Dave, I think's just... I just want to interject as a fellow San Franciscan for a long time, just as long, is that that's the normal tension that's been here all along. And that kind of makes the city culture great. And there's, you want to have this creative melting pot here. But there's this other side that I think has come in to play in the last 15, 20 years or 10, 15 years, which is this progressivism side, which we saw Chesa, you know, and I think it's, it's a different virus.

Starting point is 01:03:58 That's the ugly silliness I meant, I was saying, but like, let's put that aside. Let's put San Francisco aside. I do think that a city can and should be what it wants to be. Does it want to attract and build industry? Does it want to attract and build enterprising companies? Or does it want to be a small quaint town? Does it want to stay, you know, with no high-rise? That's a false trade-off. The problem is that people in government,

Starting point is 01:04:22 at every level, sells the former, doesn't actually even give them that nor the latter. What they give them is a dysfunctional hellscape instead. So it doesn't do that, right? Because it doesn't make those promises. It's not asking to elect people that are trying to do it. Yeah, not every city is making that though. Why are we lying to everybody?

Starting point is 01:04:42 And why are people falling for these lies over and over and over again? There's a moral clarity in telling the truth. Portofino doesn't try to do that, but I don't think the point is- You're saying that the cities that promise that and don't deliver, is that where you're- San Francisco promises it.

Starting point is 01:04:55 London promises it. New York promises it. These things are chaotic messes. And it's not the trade-off of, oh, while Harris has found a way to stay quaint. That was never on the ballot. Some person comes up and says, I'm going to spend X billion dollars a year. Then another person shows up and says, actually, I'm going to spend it a totally different way.

Starting point is 01:05:14 They both claim to have measurements of how it's going to be great. And my point is, none of them are rooted in the real world. Nobody knows how to actually run a business. All the money gets wasted, and nothing happens. It neither stays quaint nor does it advance. If you were living in Los Angeles, you had the opportunity to have Rick Caruso, who built so many amazing experiences and shops for the citizens there. And you picked Karen Bass, I

Starting point is 01:05:43 looked on her Wikipedia page looking for any kind of operational position she ever felt it's you want to read her resume. It's tragic. I mean, it's just as tragic. I would literally like I said last week not send her to get my lunch because you know that order would be totally screwed up. She is so just so unqualified and you had this perfect person, Rick Caruso, who literally you can't script this, he built the Pacific Palisades village. When the days before there was going to be a fire, do you know what he did? He hired water trucks to park on those streets. You can find the picture, Nick, pull it up. And he hired

Starting point is 01:06:25 firefighters and people to protect the village that he built. Karen Bass was in Ghana, partying, taking meetings, I don't know what the connection between Los Angeles and their citizens and what they need to get done. And Ghana after she promised she would not do this global, you know, globe trotting, which she apparently has a track record of doing. She left and stayed there knowing this was all coming. Rick Russo, who you didn't vote for mayor. He did the right thing. Vote these people out. Recall Karen Bass. You can do it. We recall Chesapeake. You remember on the show, David Sachs, he is a Republican entrepreneur, venture capitalist, good friend of mine, I'll introduce you guys if you haven't met him. He started a recall Chesapeake movement. I hired a journalist to cover the victims of crime in San Francisco. Chesapeake was out in 18 months.

Starting point is 01:07:25 the victims of crime in San Francisco, Chesapeake was out in 18 months. You can recall these people. They're unqualified. Take action, start a recall, they'll tell you, oh, it's not a good thing for continuity, whatever. These people are not qualified. They are not thinking in your best interest. You have no choice citizens of Los Angeles, but to get these people out immediately every day they stay in office, they are going to cause more damage to your family, your property in your city. We call them now. Didn't James Woods post a petition on change.org that I saw on Twitter was already I signed it. I don't live there. And I think it was already over like 90,000. You know,

Starting point is 01:08:02 I mean, you you, you have power, the people of California don't understand how much power they have. When Gavin, you said I just told people on Twitter, Chamath, every time Gavin tweets or Karen best tweets, just reply with the word resign. Hundreds of people are doing it now. Shame these people into resigning. It's a very mature way for you to affect you. You know what it worked in Brooklyn, shame worked. I don't know why people think they have no power. You

Starting point is 01:08:26 could literally just go in there and do things. And one of the things you can do is recall them. Okay, do we have anything else except your polemicals left on the dock? All right, tic tocs future is in question right now the ban is about to happen unless the pairing company bite dance divest by January 19, which is this Sunday, tick tock will be banned in America. Google and Apple are going to be forced to remove tick tock from their app stores and Oracle

Starting point is 01:08:51 tick tock's cloud provider has to stop providing hosting services and cut ties assuming bite dance doesn't come up with a last minute deal. tick tock's only hope is the Supreme Court blocking the law. What do you think, Mark? Do you think it's Chinese spyware? Do you think they should be forced to divest? What do you think their repercussions will be? Here's what's so hard for me about this. On the one hand, part of it seems so obvious from a both not just national security point of view, but also just fairness. It's insane if you think about it that there's a Chinese company that's arguing in court for protections under our constitution and freedom of speech when none of our companies

Starting point is 01:09:39 have those kinds of rights in China, much less the right to even operate there if they're not majority controlled or in line like you guys talked about with censorship or whatever else. So on the one hand, it seems like a no brainer to me that on this case. But what you're starting to see come up in the last couple days, I'm even hearing it from one of my daughters who's a major TikToker is from one of my daughters who's a major TikToker is the law of unintended consequences here is that we could see this band, especially if they don't get to a deal with somebody. And then the 170 million Americans, many younger Americans who rely on this, all of a sudden feel like this is censoring them and it's taking away their freedom of expression.

Starting point is 01:10:26 And it could backfire in a lot of ways. And we're already seeing memes where they're going on to these other apps. Like there's this Chinese- Redbook. Redbook, which is even worse, right? I think that one is owned by the Chinese government. And so we're driving them there. And so I I'm the best outcome, I think, would be forced to divest and sell to another American company. But if that doesn't happen, I I'm kind of nervous about a real backlash. I'm delighted, Jamal, that our kids are going to go out and play and have friendships and stop scrolling on TikTok. What you described sounds awesome. I literally get on their iPads and phones

Starting point is 01:11:10 when I sometimes allow them to have phones and just delete the app and then they go get it back. Of course, of course. Kids around it. What do you think Chamath? What do you think is gonna happen here? I mentioned this to President Trump and I really think this is true.

Starting point is 01:11:24 The reason why there was so much bipartisan support for the bill as it worked through Congress is because I think that they were briefed on just how severe the security violations of this app are. Because I don't think we've seen anything in modern history that is this controversial, yet be so almost unanimous. So I think that that's an important data point. There is something happening in the app that they've been briefed on that makes them take this posture. And when I listened to the Supreme Court arguments, I didn't hear a very compelling reason why this ban should be overturned. So I do agree with Mark that we have to find a suitable home.

Starting point is 01:12:10 And I think that we'll probably find one. And I think that it probably happens under the Trump presidency. And whoever gets their hands on it gets their hands on an incredible asset that they will be able to buy extremely cheaply. Because there is no way that there is a fair market value here deal for that asset because whoever is the buyer is in the total catbird seat and in order to get a deal done with the federal government, I think you're just going to get a basically like a buy it now price that's very cheap. The other thing that I'll say though,

Starting point is 01:12:38 on a totally separate tangent, so when I started hunting around, TikTok's real-time recommendation algorithm was open source, the learning method. Nick, do you want to just throw it up here? It's called Monolith. This is an incredible paper. The cleverness of what these guys have built cannot be underestimated. And what's incredible is what they describe in this paper, which I think frankly, a lot of social apps would benefit from understanding, is exactly how they built it to essentially not take this more monolithic training approach for recommendations, but how do you do it in real time? How do you make it collisionless? It's incredible. This paper is a tour de force. And it just makes me realize that despite the political maneuvering of this hot

Starting point is 01:13:28 potato, there are some folks that have been working in that app or in the parent company that are truly technically talented. And it's a bit of a shame that they're going to throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. So people should know that there's some technological innovations inside of ByteDance and TikTok that are just truly amazing feats of computer science. This is an example. It doesn't though change the fact that I think that enough of Congress and the rest of the security apparatus know that this is a mechanism to spy. I think you both nailed it. Isn't China saying though that they're going to, if this does get divested, they're going to keep

Starting point is 01:14:06 me either bite dance or Chinese government saying we're not going to give over the algorithm or you saying it's open source, it doesn't matter. Well, this was an example of just sort of like describing the methodology. It's not functionally open source yet, but I think that open sourcing, it doesn't solve the problem. And the reason is, so let's just say that you're Pegasus. Pegasus was able to reverse engineer or build penetration attacks into WhatsApp that were imperceptible to everybody until it happened to Jeff Bezos, to other people, right? Where you get these state sponsored attacks on your phone and all of a sudden you're dealing with this attack vector that then you call the FBI and they take

Starting point is 01:14:46 your phone and they help you deal with. It's happened to a bunch of people. It's happened to me twice. So the fact that these things can happen and then the attack vectors get incrementally more and more sophisticated, it used to be that there was a PDF payload, then there can just be an image payload. Now, it's any payload, right? And you don't even have to click to open it. And all of a sudden, they just root your phone. So these are extremely sophisticated mechanisms that are enabled by a very few very talented people, talented, I'll put in quotes. But when those talented people work on the wrong side, you have to act. So open sourcing it won't solve this. These exploits are known to a few. And I think that if it's known

Starting point is 01:15:32 to the NSA, this is probably what was disclosed to folks under confidentiality that caused them to get to this conclusion. I think people just need to wake up and realize the Chinese government does not have Americans' best interests at heart. I mean, there there is no concept of reciprocity, as you mentioned, Mark. That's the number one reason to do this. Number two, what you pointed out your mouth with security. And if you think about the two biggest imports from China right now, it's fentanyl and tik tok. They here's what I will want to make us addicted. They want to impact

Starting point is 01:16:04 our society, they want to divide us. This is a massive psyops that's going on. It is a psyops and it is a spyware and it's been proven they spied on journalists. These are bad actors. It has to go. I was super excited when I saw that there was the potential that X would take over TikTok.

Starting point is 01:16:22 And the reason I say that is I do think that if you can take the video content of TikTok and the graph of creators, but have a different app and a different substrate be the delivery mechanism where you know that it's much safer and it's governed by an American, that to me would be the compromise. So I think the app should go away. But if you can somehow give creators a path to sort of like restart their content creating capabilities on X, I think that that's actually a pretty good win. You guys notice in the app, Freeberg, that the left hand

Starting point is 01:16:59 tab, because you have following shop and for you, they added a left hand tab all the way over that stem. And it's just science, technology, engineering and math content. I've not noticed that. Yeah, take a look. I don't know if it's just mine. And they're micro targeting me because they know I'm such a fan of STEM. But I think it's for everybody. Any thoughts? Davis, we wrap on the tick tock Seems like they're going to strike a deal. Chuck Schumer today is calling for a delay in the ban. I'm sure by the time this episode airs, something will have been worked out to create some space for them

Starting point is 01:17:33 to get a deal done. But I think they want to get a deal done and keep TikTok active in the US. Seems like both the Dems and the Republicans are pushing for it. So this kind of also leads to what I think will be the grand deal with China, which I think will happen in the first six months of the Trump administration.

Starting point is 01:17:48 I'm obviously speculating, but it feels like there's going to be some workout here. China's like in a lot of economic distress. I don't know if you guys have followed much on the stories of the deflationary challenges that China is dealing with. Chinese bonds are trading at a below 2% yield now, which is kind of unprecedented. And there's this real concern that China is in a very significant economic deflationary spiral. So they're in a very weakened position economically at the moment. The United States seems to be in a position of strength. And I would imagine just given the rhetoric

Starting point is 01:18:25 that this administration may try to work out again, some deal that's gonna provide access to the Chinese market in exchange for the US minimizing the tariff effect on Chinese importers to the US. So there could be, I think something, you know, that eases the tension with China and creates, you know, mutual economic value in the first six months of the administration, we'll see.

Starting point is 01:18:49 I mean, it's a great point. Trump is a great negotiator. It's probably his greatest strength and he's great at saber rattling and we're strong. They're weak right now. A grand deal could be an awesome outcome. I think this was my, one of my, this was my contrarian prediction, I think.

Starting point is 01:19:03 Oh no, this was my stock. I'm with you. This was my stock prediction. Yeah, this was. Oh no, this was my stock prediction. Yeah, this was like my, I picked the Chinese tech stocks. Yeah. Same, I've been loading up on Alibaba, a couple of Chinese names. Yeah. The same bet.

Starting point is 01:19:16 Hey guys, here's a chart for you. Companies are not hiring as many MBAs. This is a recent spike in unemployment among MBAs from top business schools like Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. I'm not sure, I think. Pinkus, did you go to Harvard for your MBA? Guilty. Guilty.

Starting point is 01:19:38 And you've also stopped working. So you're represented here on the chart. Yeah, in the moment. You still haven't job-mised in. You still work. What are your thoughts on this? Are MBAs out of vogue? Are they opting out?

Starting point is 01:19:49 What's your theory here? Well, so yes, I went there. I would say that all the learning that's helped me in my career started later after I got out. My first product management job was really when I started learning things that are useful to me today. I think being there, I learned a lot about how to sell to corporate America and some how do they think kind of things. And then I've gone back to HBS for decades trying to recruit from there. And in the beginning,

Starting point is 01:20:24 they would tell me, the kids would, when I had support.com and it was going to go public, they said, I'd have to be a vice president and own 3% of the company to take a job with a startup like you. And this was just before the company went public. There was a little bit of a Renaissance period where some HBS people were excited to join Zynga probably because they thought it was going public, but they were a little more risk on at that point. And now everyone's open to jobs. My take is that there's this fundamental imbalance that people go and get an MBA because they're

Starting point is 01:20:59 de-risking their career. You go to HBS or Stanford and you're guaranteed this high salary and this kind of great job for life. So the reason to go there is to take the risk off. That's in fundamental opposition to where we are in our economy in my opinion today or where the most interesting sectors are. Those kinds of jobs have dried up and the kinds of jobs that I think should be interesting to MBAs are more like go find a Y Combinator company and join a founding team as the business person or whatever. And these people are smart and qualified, but there's this mismatch that they are fundamentally risk averse. And so they're not, so it says they haven't found jobs.

Starting point is 01:21:48 Part of it is, I think they're going to, they're going to have to fall further or this might happen so that a part of it they have maybe debt or they have to pay back this expensive degree. But I think that they've got to get to a point like I was when I started my first company, Freeloader, I happily had very little to no point like I was when I started my first company, Freeloader, I happily had very little to no opportunity costs because I had torched my career by that point, torched my resume. I was fired or asked to leave every job. And so there was kind of no turning back. So can you imagine being Mark Pinkes' boss? I mean, that's almost as hard as being Tramont's.

Starting point is 01:22:24 Yeah, I always say I'm a great team almost as hard as being Tramont's. Oh my Lord. Yeah, I always say I'm a great team player as long as I'm running the team. Right, great quarterback. Yeah. But yeah, so I had no opportunity cost when I started my first company, which looked like it didn't have a chance in hell

Starting point is 01:22:38 of ever making it. So you probably thought so too then about my company. But so now the question is, maybe what's to happen is we're going to get a new equilibrium where the opportunities for these people start to come down, the guaranteed opportunities and a good thing happens. Like consulting firms, right? They all go to McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, whatever. The class I taught on Monday at Stanford, they said everyone wants a job at Meta or

Starting point is 01:23:04 Google, and that's the get rich quick place. And it's, I don't even think that's necessarily true anymore. And they can't get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management. So those jobs have dried up. You know, part of what's in this data probably also is a lot of these people aren't taking jobs. They're not finding jobs that meet this high expectation for pay and opportunity. So I think it's a good thing. It also probably is going to reduce the demand to go into these MBA programs because if you're thinking, well, that's not going to be my risk off trade and I'm not going to be guaranteed.

Starting point is 01:23:43 100%. to be my risk off trade and I'm not going to be guaranteed. So why go in the first place? And I would advise people today, you know, to, depending on what industry I'm biased, but I'd say go get a product management job somewhere and make enough that you can afford to live on it. And that's going to be the beginning of learning. What are these things called when these MBAs graduate? They raise a bunch of money to go buy some real business fun. Yeah, that's that's not happening anymore. Yeah, that was like the moment of money. I don't have made money. Turns out these MBAs don't know what they're doing.

Starting point is 01:24:15 Oh, yeah. So when they take over the business run by a family and some matriarch or patriarch for 50 years to get it to 25. I don't know. There's that there's that one deal out of Stanford GSB, the guy founded a shurian, which is like, you know, 10 bits. It's that guy would have founded that company outside of Stanford, he could have gone to Timbuktu.com University, disgruntled state and he would have been that speaks to more about the cleverness of that one individual, not the 99,000 other s***y deals that have been done. Let me say something that builds on what Pincus was saying, which is I think that this is a interesting window into the future of AI in the sense that

Starting point is 01:24:58 I think what companies are internalizing slowly, that the first place that AI disintermediates is actually middle management. You thought that it was the customer support person. Maybe you thought it was the engineer. Maybe you thought it was the designer. Maybe you thought it was the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it's the middle manager. It's the functionary that basically is acting as essentially cartilage inside of this organization, has less and less to do in a place where AI enabled systems are making a lot of decisions on behalf of businesses. And if you take a step back, how did that evolve? Well, it started because of what I mentioned a

Starting point is 01:25:45 couple weeks ago. What the software industrial complex will really be known for after it is dismantled and gone is that it created all of these really dysfunctional org charts in a company. Meaning, when you are a system of record that sells something, let's make it up, hey, I'm the best general ledger software. Okay, and a CEO says, great, implement that. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, you're going to need a CFO. Okay, but then the CFO comes to you and says, well, you actually need a head of FP&A,

Starting point is 01:26:20 a head of this, a head of that, a head of the other thing. Then the CEO says, okay. Then those people hire. And what happens is the software sprawl is really what created those jobs. Somebody else says, here's a customer relationship management thing. Okay, great. So then you hire a CMO and a CRO,

Starting point is 01:26:39 those people build infrastructure. So my premise about this is, if you look inside of any org chart of any company, you can map those jobs to some clunky old piece of software that was sold to them. Maybe it was 10 years ago, maybe it was 20 years ago. But that's why orgs are this bulky. And now when you have all of these new next gen businesses that are ripping all of that software out, the middle

Starting point is 01:27:05 management layers that used to manage that software are no longer necessary. That's why you're not hiring MBAs. And I think that this trend is only going to grow. So I don't think that this is a commentary on the people. The people are probably quite smart. But I do think that this is a warning sign that people should not go and pursue these degrees because I think, as Pinka said, you're not taking the trade of least volatility. You're actually taking on a lot more volatility than you probably thought you shouldn't be taking on by going to a place like Harvard or Stanford. Freebert, any thoughts as we wrap here about this NBA chart?

Starting point is 01:27:39 The collapse of the NBA program could be the beginning of the unwinding of the higher education market. Why? Say more. I think this is the easiest one to discard first in an age of AI and automation and self-learning. And I think that, I mean, I've been thinking a lot about, I've young kids, right? So my kid, my oldest kid is seven years old. I had to think about that for a second. So many kids now. And.

Starting point is 01:28:13 Isn't it great, by the way? I go through this all, I don't know. I have to go through, I have to like, what's my kid's birthday? Chamath has like a busload of children. When you have five. I just had a fifth. So I have a fifth.

Starting point is 01:28:23 I think I got five, five and you're at four days? I have five. I can't, I just had a fifth. So I have a fifth. I think I got a fifth. Wait, five and you're at four days? No, I have five. I can't, I have to really think about all the way. Four in your birthdays. Fourth on the way. But yeah, I would say, I think a lot about whether or not it makes sense for my kids to go to undergrad.

Starting point is 01:28:37 And I think like about going to classes as an undergrad, certainly there's the social experience. And I learned a lot in, you know, kind of working at a lab when I was there and doing other stuff. But those were like on the job experiences. I do think that the social experience and the practical experience can be gotten outside of the college infrastructure, this educational infrastructure. Oh, I cannot tell you guys how much time I just had a great

Starting point is 01:29:05 idea. I just had the best idea ever. The all in MBA, let's start our own MBA program. I don't think I think that's the whole point is people should get back to kind of an apprenticeship type model or a self learning model. Everyone's got their own personal tutor. Now. That's what I think people aren't realizing is anything you want to learn with AI. And you guys heard about what Johnny Ive is done with his kids. I'm pretty sure they skip college and they just went to work directly with him and his design firm.

Starting point is 01:29:35 Exactly. I'm like, I'm taking him out to lunch because I want to interview him. But I think that's such an interesting way. And my daughters want to start a podcast together pinkest You know what they want to name it. Oh No, I don't I don't know if I should say it. Hey, I don't know. I didn't hear the name I think your mom's daughter is in on this as well. I think it was another friend's child who came up with the name They want to call it the nepo pod

Starting point is 01:30:01 when it caught the nepo pod. Jamal's got a couple of pod, I'm here for it. No, I think Freeberg nailed it on this one because I just had Arush Selvin, who is the PM at Google doing deep research on this week in startups yesterday. And this product is nuts. And they designed it to basically be one of these like million dollar or $5 million reports you pay for from these

Starting point is 01:30:27 consulting firms that MBA is right. And it does a better job. It's more accurate. It's done in five to 10 minutes, this thing fires off. Have you used deep research at Mark? No, I keep hearing you talking about it. And I'm such an idiot about this stuff. It's on the desktop only. You can't use the mobile and then I asked Gemini how to use it and it's only on desktop and you have to pay 20 bucks for it and then Grok 2.0 is doing something similar.

Starting point is 01:30:55 When you put your query in, it decides like all the second level queries that would be asked then it checks its work. So it's firing off a spider that goes and crawls 150 pages in real time, then it asks questions about the data, then it says what's missing from this. So all the questions you would get from your manager, if you were working at Boston Consulting Group, where they tell some young MBA, hey, you missed this, you missed this, can you double check this? Can you find double click on this? It goes and does

Starting point is 01:31:22 those follow up questions. So and now you can do a cron job where you can say take my research and every week do a update on it and fill in information and tell me the differences. So instead of just buying a Boston consulting or McKinsey or whatever report, you build it and then have it auto and the deep research is coming out, this thing's going to automatically refresh it in your Google Docs and then update you on what's been changed. And so and grok is doing as well except grok has all the tweets. So when you use grok now, did you see now at the top of the page, it says, and I think

Starting point is 01:31:57 it's only in the grok app, the dedicated app they just launched last week, it shows you all the tweets, and it shows you all the web pages that it indexed for that query. So this is like putting somebody on a week long research project. And like I said, it takes between five and 10 minutes to do this. And it costs a massive amount of server capacity to do these real time, you know, 200 300 queries are occurring behind your one. It's nuts. I don't know if you guys have been using advanced voice on chat GPT much, or do you guys need the voice? And so lately, anytime I kind of have come across an interesting topic,

Starting point is 01:32:34 I end up finding that I just talked to chat GPT for like an hour or two. And I'll be like in my car, like when I'm driving to work or going to a meeting or I go for like a walk down to the coffee shop, I'm driving to work or going to a meeting, or I go for like a walk down to the coffee shop, I'm like, okay, so tell me about like, what happened during the ice age with respect to how quickly sea levels receded. And I start to gather and like,

Starting point is 01:32:55 it's basically like your own personal tutor. I finally have a best friend, Mark. And I think that basically you end up seeing a future where if people are put into almost like the real world becomes the lab environment that is created in a very short window and small amount of space in a college environment where you're like in some like applied scape, that applied scape basically becomes the real world and you've got your college in your ear. You've basically got your tutors, your educational experience,

Starting point is 01:33:29 your capabilities that you're learning, and you learn more in real time. And I think that that's what AI is gonna take us to, which is basically gonna destroy much of the value of higher education. And I think that this MBA piece is probably just the first step of many that's gonna ultimately erode the value of our education.

Starting point is 01:33:45 Did you guys see that fleshlight that can actually be synced to a video you're watching? I've seen that. That's pretty crazy. Can we go to the UFOs instead of sex toys? We get it. Wait, show us the video. Show us the video. It's also AI. Did you get one? Of's also AI, no. Of course, he's about to show us from his hidden folder. I saw it on X.

Starting point is 01:34:08 It was like a summary of the top 10 things from CES. And it was a flesh light that would gyrate based on the actual contortions in the video. Which was using AI. You don't say you want to come up to guest rooms tonight? I'm a little nervous. It's interesting, Pinkus. You get to see two different things here.

Starting point is 01:34:26 When AI comes up as a topic, Freiburg finally has a best friend, and Chamath finally has a lover who will do exactly what he tells it to. This was absolutely perfect. So Mark, lately we've been talking, we've been talking to all the guests about UFOs and UAPs. Welcome to Conspiracy Corner.

Starting point is 01:34:43 You have a point of view on UFO-UAP phenomena? I do. And I guess everyone else has too, so I won't be that weird an outlier. So first of all, I'll just say, I don't believe in UAPs, UFOs, and I don't not believe in them. I'm just curious about it. And I've had this theory that something is going to happen, that we're going to break our current understanding of physics theory and our physics laws.

Starting point is 01:35:14 So I've been looking for that moment and one of those is around the UAPs. So I've been more and more curious and digging more and more. And I started working with a friend who made the movie Icarus on the idea of like a Netflix docu-series. I thought it should be funny and have somebody like a Larry David kind of character narrating it. But he said maybe, maybe. He came back to me. He's making a documentary about the fentanyl crisis and how it, China, documented how China has dumped it here. And he said, you've got to meet with me and this guy.

Starting point is 01:35:50 While he was working on that, he was interviewing a former DOD contractor who had worked for them for decades and said, you know, I've got a lot on fentanyl, but I have this whole other thing to show you about these UAPs. And he'll just tell you his claim, his claim. So they came and met with me and we had to meet outside and put our phones in fairway bags. So, uh, it was a good setup. It's nothing else.

Starting point is 01:36:19 And he said, he claimed that in doing running these war games for the Defense Department, it inadvertently was summoning these UAPs these drones, and he had tons and tons of video of it and classified them. I'm just telling you what he told me. Let me guess the drone all the drone videos look like they were shot on an eight millimeter 1968 camera. Wait, hold on, hold on, Jason. Mark, just explain this. So, the United States is simulating war games. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:36:51 And what is it doing exactly that's causing these drones to show up? He did not tell me what were the... The games. What were the exact triggers that... But he said different things would trigger a different one and he classified them. And he said some of them were aggressive from an electronics and we take out electronics

Starting point is 01:37:14 and communications. Wow. And he, so he was interested and my friend was interested in saying, okay, can you put up a couple of people, a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film this. And I thought about it. I even had him go meet with Reed and, and didn't move quickly. And then he went dark on us and stopped responding.

Starting point is 01:37:41 And then some friends of mine went to a gathering at and what they it was on multiple things related to this. And they said that this guy was there and that he summoned one of these. They kind of said it looked like a large drone. And my friends showed me some pictures that they took, which were really it was at night and they're really great. Stop. Come on. Stop. Come on, stop. I'm not making this up. I'm just telling you. Just one piece of advice with this documentary film stuff. You know how to make a hundred million dollars in documentary films, right, Pinkus?

Starting point is 01:38:14 Yes. Start with a billion. Start with a billion. You're the mark in all of this. You're just a mark. This guy needs a million dollars to finish his house or something in Topanga Canyon. Fair. And you're the way to do it. I didn't fund it. You're the mark. I didn't fund it.

Starting point is 01:38:29 Okay, good. So all I'm saying is that I think that there's a possibility that there is some kind of drone that's getting, that is showing up. And I'm not saying it's even from, you know, from non-human making. I believe it, I believe it. I am looking, I'll be honest because I am looking for a reason to believe in this. I'll be honest, like I know my bias.

Starting point is 01:38:53 I am very sympathetic when I hear these stories. I listen way too long, you know, to the podcasts on this stuff. I watch- Are you donating to Alex Jones? No, but- Are you a subscriber? No, but I, okay the podcasts on this stuff. I'm donating to Alex Jones. No, but I, no, but I, I, okay, how about this? Are we convinced that there has been absolutely zero unidentified object inside some vault buried deep somewhere in either the US or national state government somewhere? Are we guaranteed that the odds of that are zero?

Starting point is 01:39:28 And I say no, it's not. Let's do our first. What is it Fermi paradox? freebird Fermi paradox? Why aren't the if there if there are aliens, why haven't we seen them? quick around? I'm not I'm not I'm not saying there is a UAP that is that has been unidentified that is sitting inside some vault somewhere in a state government in the world. So your position is the aliens have come no stop being covered up. You but you you make the whole thing seem ridiculous when you

Starting point is 01:40:00 say aliens. I'm not saying that I'm saying Okay, visitors from another planet. No, stop with the visitors. Just let's just put it this way, a vehicle that doesn't have anything inside a vehicle could be autonomous and unmanned. Are the odds exactly zero? No. But with billions of planets, it would, you know, logic would make you think that one has come already, right? That's what this billions of inhabitable planets and species out there, there must have somebody must be ahead of us. But the other conclusion of Fermi's paradox is we statistically are the highest a society has ever gotten. And we have yet to send our probes out to the rest of the universe. Although we have sent probes freeburg to your ends. Alright, everybody, thanks for tuning in. This is I need I need a I need a young Spielberg to make us a jingle

Starting point is 01:41:03 for this classy on a.com. Mark Pinkus, you're amazing. Thank you for fitting right in with your besties. And- Also, SoftPro on the baby. Congrats here. Congrats on the baby. Looking forward to seeing you this weekend. All right.

Starting point is 01:41:16 Yeah. And we will see. Oh, and by the way, just programming note, we're all going to be at the inauguration, various parties this weekend. And we will be doing some live episodes of the all in podcast probably on Sunday, Monday timeframe. And we will see you on the live stream, go to youtube.com subscribe to the all in podcast, put on the notifications, the bell, and then

Starting point is 01:41:39 follow us on x.com the all in podcast. And then again, subscribe and then just turn on notifications, you'll get a notification when we go live on those two platforms. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye. Love you boys. Bye bye. And it's said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it I'm the queen of Kenwa I'm going all in What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what Oh man! My avid Asher will meet me at the hotel We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow What? Your? Be? What? Your? Be? What? Your? Be? What?

Starting point is 01:42:37 We need to get merch The keys are back I'm doing all in I'm going all in I'm going all in

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom's Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs

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