E39: West coast super drought & climate crisis, Nuclear virtue signaling, chaos in SF & more

Show Notes: 0:00 Super drought & climate crisis on the west coast 25:53 Nuclear energy, virtue signaling, cognitive laziness, positive signals of optimism 36:50 Friedberg's "anti-science" theory 44:48 San Francisco chaos, "crime is down" controversy, viral crime videos 59:42 Are Israel's recent COVID vaccine findings problematic? Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: Nuclear energy timeline https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GSIb-vyIvZalcE9LCBFqbQjsvE4uu-c-/view?usp=sharing The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future https://www.amazon.com/Grid-Fraying-Between-Americans-Energy-ebook/dp/B01DM9Q6CQ MarketWatch - Target shortens hours in San Francisco due to 'alarming rise' in shoplifting https://www.marketwatch.com/story/target-shortens-hours-in-san-francisco-due-to-alarming-rise-in-shoplifting-11625688560 Israel Ministry of Health - Decline in Vaccine Effectiveness Against Infection and Symptomatic Illness https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/05072021-03 Tweets: https://twitter.com/friedberg/status/1413044148735672322 https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1411362359734542343 https://twitter.com/michelletandler/status/1411943649231851522 https://twitter.com/cyantist/status/1412478525014085632 https://twitter.com/briansugar/status/1412507632267534340 https://twitter.com/activeasian/status/1412252070829182976 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1412160046046203909 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1412163715676327950 https://twitter.com/ThomasSowell/status/1412858750747217922 https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1412899033933307911 https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1409170317826793474 https://twitter.com/briansugar/status/1412507632267534340

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  What did your doctor give you to make you lose all this weight? What is your celebrity doctor giving you? Tell the truth. Did you get that new shot?

• 0:06David Sacks?

  People, people on Twitter are like, your, your Twitter account's sounding a lot more like Jake account. I'm like, I think we're on the same diet. I think that's what's going on here.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  In three, two.

• 0:34Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Pod. With us today, of course, the queen of quinoa and from his castle in Italy, the cackling dictator, Trumav Poli Hapatia Nice Gardenias and back from his big, big battle, his brawl, unblocked and undefeated, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks.

• 1:03David Sacks?

  And judging by the comments, I'd say dominant.

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you read the comments? Just another sign of your obsession with how you're perceived?

• 1:11David Sacks?

  Like you don't.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  I never read comments. Rule number one, don't read the comments. We're not doing it again.

• 1:17David Sacks?

  It shows because you're not listening to the comments. So it makes sense.

• 1:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Go ahead. And you got your whole troll army. How many people have you hired on your social media team to troll me from anonymous accounts on Twitter now to prove your points?

• 1:29David Sacks?

  Now you're paranoid too.

• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I'm not gonna.

• 1:32David Sacks?

  Don't be paranoid. Don't be paranoid. Anyway, look, we've patched things up.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's patched up.

• 1:36David Sacks?

  Don't break the peace. We have détente.

• 1:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So Friedberg is busy writing tweet storms now about the drought in California, which seems to be just gonna be a really bad year, basically. So Friedberg, walk us through it. How bad is California's drought gonna be this year?

• 1:59David Friedberg?

  So the drought is already very bad. I put out a lot of tweets at two in the morning last night, I think. I drank way too much caffeine yesterday. I'm in the mountains and like, the only way I can avoid having headaches is like drinking caffeine all day and it was a mistake. It kept me up all night.

• 2:12Jason Calacanis?

  You sure it's not there?

• 2:17Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you're so excited about this that you just can't sleep. Nick, you could beat this out.

• 2:26David Friedberg?

  No, no, keep that, keep that. So, you know, the, the, the big tweet storm I put out at two in the morning last night kind of highlighted that there was a paper published in 2018, 2019 that showed how, you know, North America, particularly the western half of North America is in this, you know, mega drought that we haven't seen in, you know, 500 plus years. And since that paper was published, you know, um, in 2019, conditions have only worsened. Uh, we talked about this a few pods ago, but like the snowpack level in California reached zero percent throughout the entire state by June 1st. That has never happened before. Temperatures in British Columbia, as you guys know, reached over 120 degrees for

• 3:08David Friedberg?

  several days in a row last week, which has never been seen in history in British Columbia. Um, you know, there was a paper published today that estimates that over a billion um, animals and life forms were wiped out in the coastal region of British Columbia because of this heat wave. Um, and the temperatures in, in California are obviously excessive as well, not as bad as they were last year. But what matters most is that the moisture conditions in our forest land is lower than we've ever seen at this time of year in history. And so this all sets us up and, and, and the other kind of big consequence, the high temperatures is causing an increased demand for air conditioners. That's the big variable in power demand on all grids. And the low snowpack means that we're not getting hydroelectric power. Hydroelectric power is down by 70% in the state of California over where we were in

• 3:53David Friedberg?

  2019, um, because there's no snow that's melting, causing the rivers to flow. And about 11 to 15% of our state's electricity comes from hydroelectric power. So we're going to have more power demand. We have less power available. We have extremely dry forests. Um, and so this is setting us up for a, a number of possible disasters this year. And so rather than just trying to sound the alarm bells, what I'm pointing out is that there may be some things that we should be thinking about doing to try and get ahead of some of the consequences of these, um, these big risks, like, you know, having enough masks for people to breathe outside so we don't have to shut down schools and shut down outdoor work and all the things that might happen. Having community centers that have power available. The state is scrambling to find excess power on the grid right now. But, um, you know, it, it just highlights that there's a moment here that is almost

• 4:38David Friedberg?

  like where we were going into COVID. It may not happen, but the probability is high enough that something bad may happen that we should probably start to get prepared for it. You know, we should probably be talking about the things we're doing to get prepared for it, and we're talking about, and we should be talking about the things we're going to do to make sure that communities are safe and people are safe and businesses can keep operating. Because if the state of California has 150 AQI, which is the air quality index, workers can't work outside. And all the outdoor work, which employs 3 million Californians, has to shut down. And you know, you kind of start to add these things up. It's like, what are we going to do as this happens, not if this happens? And we should kind of be planning for it. And I don't see much happening in terms of planning and preparation and talking about the opportunity.

• 5:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  History rhymes, because if you remember, and this is all going into a recall election in the fall, this was a different, but kind of equivalent setup where, you guys remember, we were having all these blackouts and brownouts when Gray Davis was recalled? And then Schwarzenegger just swooped up out of nowhere and, you know, people thought, oh, there's no chance. And people were just frustrated because the quality of life took a measurable step backwards in the intervening six or nine months before the recall election. And so it'll be really interesting to see how Gavin Newsom manages all of this, because if he can't get the state's act together and you have all of these issues at hand

• 6:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and a credible candidate emerges, you could have some really interesting political fireworks in September.

• 6:09Jason Calacanis?

  A big part of this, correct me if I'm wrong, Friedberg, is that we live in essentially like a lot of desert area here in California, and we just haven't invested in the desalinization plants. We have one that's come on since 2005, and I think there's another one in SoCal that was mothballed and they, during the last drought, wanted to open it up again. But we now have one in Carlsbad, the Claude Budd, Lewis Carlsbad desalinization plant that is now, I think that cost us a billion bucks. But Israel, correct me if I'm wrong, is now, they charge three times as much for water than we do. So people take water seriously and they actually monitor their water usage. And they have desalinization and they have more water than they need per capita.

• 6:53David Friedberg?

  Well, D-SAL doesn't really solve a number of these problems that I'm highlighting. You know, the probability of the forest land on the west coast, not just in California, but all up and down the west coast catching on fire is very high. No number of D-SAL plants is going to put out those fires. When that happens, the air quality is going to get really bad. You know, like we saw last year, I don't know if you guys remember, I escaped to Lake Michigan last summer when the

• 7:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we remember the threads, yeah.

• 7:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah, and it was insane. You know, it doesn't, D-SAL plants don't solve the air quality problem where people can't work outside, your kids can't go to school, et cetera, et cetera. D-SAL plants don't solve the problem of hydroelectric plants, which requires snowpack to melt to get rivers to run, to turn those turbines to generate electricity for the state.

• 7:35Jason Calacanis?

  Nuclear would solve that, though.

• 7:37David Friedberg?

  Nuclear would solve that, certainly. And so, you know, the point is, we're kind of reaching this apex of, are we going to do climate change adaptation? Are we going to have, you know, kind of long-term systemic solutions that we're going to start to put in place for these risks that we face? And more importantly, from an acute perspective, in the near term, what are the actions we should be taking to protect communities and get ahead of this problem? So it's not a scramble after the crisis, which is what we typically do with these sorts of crises.

• 8:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're not investing in infrastructure. If we put in some nuclear power plants, if we did more D-SAL, and we did more forest management, or put more fire breaks into, you know, all this.

• 8:14David Friedberg?

  I'm talking about the simple solutions like have a

• 8:17Jason Calacanis?

  But those three things would be massive, wouldn't they?

• 8:19David Friedberg?

  Well, those are long-term solutions. I'm talking about like for this summer.

• 8:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, this summer? Is it even solvable?

• 8:24David Friedberg?

  We need, we need communities, no, but we need to prepare for what is going to happen this summer. So when communities get run out, what are we going to do? You know, do we have community centers set up where people can get water and power? Do we have masks available so that outdoor workers can keep working in the state? You know, all of these things that we could be doing to get in front of the inevitable consequences of these risks, I think are things that we should be actively pursuing.

• 8:46Jason Calacanis?

  If you're in California, you should order your air purifiers now. We ordered six more of these Conway ones that we used last year that were amazing.

• 8:55David Friedberg?

  Get N95 masks.

• 8:56Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm doing, we have the N95 masks, we ordered them already. And we're going to put in a power generator, which I know not everybody is able To do, but you can buy a portable one for as little as three or 400 bucks, I think now. So portable generator in case you lose power, stock up on everything else.

• 9:11David Friedberg?

  We need those solutions. Like I think there's going to be a big kind of power generator push, right? Like distributed power has always been something. That's the whole point of solar. You get the solar on your roof. You get your own power. Um, but how are you going to keep your AC running when it's 120 degrees outside if you have no power? You know, that that's kind of a very scary um circumstance of heat waves. Uh, and it's um, it's something that we should have a real plan around. And if I were the governor or if I were kind of California leadership or leadership up and down the West Coast, you know, the Western governors. Um, I'd probably be running a daily press conference, starting now, saying, let's just get in front of this problem and talk about what are the risks we're seeing? What are the problems we're seeing and what we're doing about it, just so people feel reassured because, you know, scrambling after a crisis doesn't make anyone feel better.

• 9:53David Friedberg?

  You know, showing that we're prepared and we're taking action to get in front of this crisis, which is not 100% certain, but it's a greater than 0% probability. Is something that could helpfully kind of reassure and start to put the pieces in place um for for the near term.

• 10:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, just just for those that don't really appreciate how interconnected everything is, the basics, the science basics on drought, as I learned about them. Were really, really incredible. So you think, okay, well, how how is all this stuff connected? It turns out that, you know, as we have warmer and warmer temperatures. Yeah, I didn't know this, Friedberg, you probably do this, but it accelerates soil evaporation. And then there's this really terrible feedback loop that starts, which is you have drier soil. Which means you have less vegetation. And then as a result, you have less what's called evapotranspiration. Which means there's less regional precipitation. And then this whole thing just starts to spin and spin and spin. You have warmer temperatures that results in less snowpack. The snowpack, the snowpack melts earlier.

• 10:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And we have a situation now in the United States, which is just incredible. I saw a graph, which is uh one of soil moisture. And it shows basically the Western half of the United States is in the first percentile of soil moisture, looking back over many, many decades. So.

• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then all of that vegetation dries up and then becomes fodder for more fires.

• 11:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Jason, we're well, even worse than this, we're in a position where, you know, we are threatening our own food supply. And just to put a finer point on this, it's not just the western half of the United States that's now suffering from this. It's Brazil, it's the Mediterranean and Southern Europe, and it's large parts of Africa. You add up all those number of people, there are many countries there that are actually self-sufficient, which will then no longer be, will have to import food, that food quality is questionable at best in some cases. So we're in a really tough position here.

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't this all solvable with technology? I mean, if we just tax people a little more for their water usage, if we really invested in the diesel plants, if we really invested in nuclear, we could actually flip this whole thing. The same way it's spiraling in the wrong direction, it could spiral in the right direction.

• 12:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Two things on the water side. I've been looking at water investing for a while. There's a real problem, which is, when I looked at this, my team found some incredibly interesting opportunities. Largely, it evolves around owning water rights, right? And then basically selling them back to the state. And when states get in difficult situations, the problem is, I think it's politically intolerable for, let's just say, somebody like me, to own those kinds of water rights.

• 12:30Jason Calacanis?

  To be a water baron, yeah.

• 12:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's no bueno. The idea then that I had was like, well, maybe what we should be doing is buying these things and sticking them in a foundation so that we can guarantee water for people in certain states. Maybe that flies, I'm not so sure. That's the government's job. That's the government's job. But then they're not doing their job.

• 12:49Jason Calacanis?

  But they're incompetent.

• 12:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're unfortunately not as skilled as you'd want them to be on this stuff.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, how would you spin this out of this death spiral and into abundance? Is there a way?

• 13:00David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, the first thing to realize here is that this is not a black swan event. I mean, this is entirely foreseeable. Drought conditions have existed in California for a long time. In fact-

• 13:13Jason Calacanis?

  Two hundred years, yeah.

• 13:15David Sacks?

  Well, and even maybe going back millions of years. I mean, geologists have found evidence that, you know, millions of years ago, you would have millions of acres of California burning every year. And so drought conditions have existed for a long time. Has climate change amplified that and made it worse? Yes. But this is entirely foreseeable. We know we're dealing with these conditions. And in fact, back on his first day in office in 2019-

• 13:44David Sacks?

  Newsom held his very first press conference about this issue on emergency preparedness for fires, but the problem is there's been no follow through. And so, to go back to Chamath' point about the political ramifications here, you could have a Gray Davis like situation with the recall where all of a sudden Newsom goes from being the favorite to potentially losing because of fire season. But by the way, I mean, the whole reason why the recall election is happening is September now and it's of October, November is because Newsom is precisely worried about the Gray Davis scenario and this recall is supposed to happen in the October, November timeframe. They've moved it up to September because Newsom thinks there's a higher chance of fading the worst of fire season by doing the election sooner.

• 14:29David Sacks?

  The problem for him is that fire season now starts in August. And so we could be in the middle of fire season when this recall election happens and this thing could boomerang on him. But back to the point about, you know, Newsom held this press conference back in January of 2019. And the problem is there hasn't been any real follow through on forest management. So, you know, Newsom was recently caught in a lie saying that, you know, they had basically treated 90,000 acres. This is what this article I'll put in the chat said. In reality, they'd only really treated about 11,000 acres. Even 90,000 would be inadequate, right? They're not doing enough. And the way, you know, I talked to a very prominent person who knows California politics well and knows all the players.

• 15:14David Sacks?

  And what he said is, look, the fundamental problem is that Gavin is not operational, right? He's fantastic at fundraising. He says all the right things at press conferences. But, but not everything is about running for reelection. And the problem is he has not managed to this outcome. And, and so now we're in this situation where to Friedberg's point, we're going to be scrambling after the fact. Now, what is Newsom's excuse going to be? It's going to be, you know, climate change, it's going to be global warming. It's kind of the all-purpose dog-eat-my-homework excuse for anything that goes wrong is Akin is blaming on climate change. But the reality is, we knew about climate change. Climate change is something we're going to have to live with. Even if we stop it in its tracks from this point forward,

• 15:58David Sacks?

  we're not going to be able to reverse the effects it's already had. And so we need leaders who will step up and get much more aggressive about preventing this problem.

• 16:08David Friedberg?

  I think my, and by the way, my tweet, I didn't mention climate change at all. I got, you know, I don't think that that's even the point. The point is, we are facing acute conditions on the, in the western half of the United States right now, that lead to a number of significant and severe consequences. Those acute conditions, you know, you could blame them on climate change. They say that they're a part of climate change. It doesn't change the reality. They are here today, and we have to deal with them. And I think, yeah.

• 16:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We have a, we have a couple of things that are, that are gonna happen here in short order that I think can make this thing accelerated a little. So there's a, an organization, a department in the United States government that's not very well-known called the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, USBR. And they are the ones that will make formal assessments of water levels. And there's a really important assessment that's going to happen in Lake Mead at the end of this year. And the reason why it's critical is that if the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation measures Lake Mead under a certain threshold, they can declare a tier-one shortage. And what that means, just

• 17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  practically speaking, cutting through all the, you know, jargon, is that initially, the state of Arizona will be denied around 600,000 acre-feet of water next year. What does that mean? That's about 15% of the demand for that state. And so you're going to start, you know, to deal with these sort of like rolling, I don't know what we're even going to call these, water-out scenarios where it's not just about watering your lawn. That's not going to be possible. It's going to be a whole bunch of other things. Now, there is a solution, and this is where California can come to the rescue for most of the western United States if they really want to, or at least for the rest of California, which is, there is an enormous untapped groundwater aquifer

• 17:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in Southern California, which is the size of Lake Mead. It's an incredibly unique thing. It's actually owned by a public company.

• 18:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the whole goal was, okay, well, let's just build a pipeline, right? From the aquifier to deliver drinking water to folks that, you know, are lacking water. And this has been a multi-year, you know, bordering on multi-decade slog because of California politicians. Because water has become highly politicized. No one wants to pay the full cost for a commodity that they frankly view as a right. But then they don't want to step in to do the work to actually make it reasonable and viable. So this whole thing is just, again, as David, as you said, the dog ate my homework. And now we're really playing with some very complicated things that are really out of the control and intellectual capacity of the,

• 18:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  of frankly, state governments, which is the interconnectedness of weather, temperature, water, our soil, our food supply. It's a, I think.

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  What's so frustrating with this is this is so easily solvable. And we are not doing the blocking and tackling, the free throws, the basic things. If you look at just monitoring our water usage, I invested in two companies. One of them didn't work out, but both of them were to monitor water usage. And what we learned was at a campus like Stanford, they have like four water meters. Like they're not going down to the building level in some cases. There'll be like four buildings on one water meter. And you can very easily at each sink, at each, you know, showerhead, you can put a device that costs 25 bucks installed. It just wraps around the, the, the, the water, the, the, the pipe.

• 19:47Jason Calacanis?

  And it could tell you how it's flowing and we lose 20, 30% of our water to leaks. Nobody is monitoring their usage because there is no cost to it, to Chamath's point. And then you look at these crazy, insane almond and other agriculture in the, the middle of California. They are using flood irrigation, which I'm sure Friedberg can give us an education at versus what, you know, the trip irrigation that they use and other reclaiming methods in Israel and other places. So we. Look at water as like to Trumath's point, some crazy God given right that we can just splash it everywhere. We can take 20 minute showers and then we allow, how crazy is this? We allow

• 20:28Jason Calacanis?

  the bottling of water in California. We allow these companies to bottle water and then sell it and we don't even monitor our usage. We have, we are so entitled, it is gross.

• 20:39David Sacks?

  Newsom's biggest donors, uh, who, who, who's that family that grows all the almonds or whatever?

• 20:45Jason Calacanis?

  Whoever they are.

• 20:45David Friedberg?

  The, the Resnick's.

• 20:46David Sacks?

  The Resnick's, single biggest, them and the teachers' unions, singles.

• 20:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Linda Resnick and those Palm people with the Palm stuff. I, I know them.

• 20:53David Sacks?

  It's, it's total political corruption, right? I mean, they get.

• 20:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's Chinatown. It's literally the movie Chinatown.

• 20:58David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, I think so to this point about why aren't politicians solving the problems? I mean, to make a meta point, there's a great tweet from Thomas Sowell, or the person who manages the Thomas Sowell account, uh, where he said, no one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They're trying to solve their own problems, uh, which are getting elected and reelected. That's number one, number two.

• 21:21Jason Calacanis?

  Stay in office. That is their only goal.

• 21:23David Sacks?

  Three is far behind and, and that, that's basically the situation we have is, I think Newsom actually is a little bit like Trump, not in his personal style, but in that he thinks he can talk his way out of problems and he's not going to focus on solving a problem when he can just spin his way out of it.

• 21:40David Friedberg?

  By the way, I, I just think you guys should know the, you know, cause a lot of people talk about residential water use. That is also kind of an acute and local problem where depending on your water supply, how much water you have available to your community. Um, but in terms of aggregate water use, the vast majority of water in California is used in agriculture. It's about, uh, 10x, uh, what is used for residential, um, applications. So, uh, California agriculture, by the way, it's not a bad thing. It's a huge, uh, part of our economy. Uh, that water has generally been fully available in aquifers. People bought that land with rights. They paid a premium for those rights to those aquifers. This is a very complicated problem, uh, in California and that, uh, you know, supports a large part of the California economy. So,

• 22:25David Friedberg?

  you know, you can't just kind of blow them away, but. 90% of water use in California is associated with ag. And it's not just a generally, we need to save water problem. It's very specific to a region and a community and their particular water source on whether and how much you need to save versus do you have abundant supplies and so on. And so it's a little bit more complicated, but Sax.

• 22:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but we should be focused on abundance, Friedberg. If you look at the new nuclear power plants that, you know, Bill Gates has invested in, and then you look at desalinization, which is an energy issue. We can desalinize for roughly two or three times the cost that we're getting our water for now. So just put a nuclear power plant next to a desalinization plant and you're done.

• 23:04David Friedberg?

  Great. That's a 20-year project and you gotta build.

• 23:07Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Why is it a 20-year project? China does it in two. You need to be more bold in this country. It is completely ridiculous that we accept that everything has to take 20 years. We need this now. Where's the leadership that says, fuck it, let's do it immediately. Let's set a goal of two years to build 10 of these. And let's spend the fucking money.

• 23:26David Friedberg?

  I'm not sure it solves our acute problems. It solves long-term problems associated with climate change and energy and security.

• 23:31Jason Calacanis?

  We can't do both. We can't do both. Let's do both.

• 23:34David Friedberg?

  Sure, we should do everything, but right now, the, you know, the, the conditions indicate that there are some specific things that we can and should be doing to kind of support the state in terms of what's going to happen in the next year or two. And yes, we should also be funding long-term projects that create water security and energy security for everyone in the United States. But Sax, to your point, and by the way, if you guys ever want to read an interesting book about how the grid operates, um, there's a book called The Grid. Uh, and it talks about how the electrical, uh, power grid system was built in the United States and how inefficient it is and all the problems. There, there are a lot of structural problems that need to be solved, not just, you know, dropping in cheap power. Sax, who is the good operational candidate that you've seen that's running for governor of California in this recall? Is there someone that stands out in your mind?

• 24:15David Friedberg?

  Cause I, I don't seem to hear anyone talking about, hey, there's a good alternative to Gavin Newsom at this point.

• 24:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, we don't, a clear alternative has not emerged yet. Um, you know, I guess the, and part of the problem is that because there was no Republican primary, you haven't sort of consolidated the opposition to a leading candidate. There are a couple of, I guess, interesting candidates on the Republican side. I need to spend more time getting to, you know, know them. I mean, I have never met them or talked to them. But the, the two who are, I think, mentioned quite a bit are, uh, this is Guy Faulkner, who's the mayor of San Diego, who is sort of a socially liberal.

• 24:56David Sacks?

  Republican and then there's a state assemblyman named Kevin Kylie, who who I think says a lot of interesting things and he just announced he's running. There's another guy as well, John Cox, but he got trounced by Newsom in the last election. I think it's time to let somebody else take a shot against him. And then, of course, you've got Caitlyn Jenner, but I think people are still trying to figure out if her campaign is real or how real it is. So, yeah, look, we the the opposition has not consolidated against Newsom the way it did with Schwarzenegger, you know, back in 2001.

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  I'm voting I'm voting Republican just to create a counterbalance. I don't care who it is and I'm not a Republican, I'm an independent, but I'm voting across the board. I'm just going to go to Republican for every position in California and I'm going to just run my finger down the Republican line and check every single one.

• 25:48David Sacks?

  Jake, how does it feel to be a radical Trump supporter?

• 25:50Jason Calacanis?

  I listen, I have not for Trump, but Chamap, talk to us about nuclear and what we can do to get to reverse what these hippie dippy, well intentioned, no nukes concert set us back 50 years. And let's be honest, a lot of the climate change problems we have today, we would not have if we had invested in nuclear.

• 26:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I I sent around, well, I sent around an image, Nick, maybe you can stick it in the show notes or something so that people can see. But if you if you look at, if you graph the construction of nuclear reactors from like the 1960s, 1960s to today, essentially what and you color code them by country, what essentially you see is a transition from the able, from the frankly, from countries that basically were just right at the at leading the pack and it was really the United States, building, building, building. And then two things really happened. There was Three Mile Island and then there was Chernobyl.

• 26:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And there was an incredible overreaction to not really understanding either the cause and or the remediation to two events. Now, could you imagine if there were two airlines that crashed and we stopped flying? How basically we would have, you know, retarded the progress of the world? And now you impose it on something like nuclear energy, which is consistently proven to provide an enormously abundant, cheap and clean form of sustainable energy. And it actually solves a bunch of the problems we talked about before. So for example, if you look at the power consumption for desalination, it's off the charts, quite honestly.

• 27:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, that's why people say that it can't be done credibly. If you look at even just like the amount of energy that's required to clean water and to, you know, sanitize water and make it drinkable, the, the, the standards that are defined by the government are incredibly stringent. But the, the implication of it operationally is an enormous amount of power that goes into it. But Jason, you are right, which is that if we have small forms of sustainable abundant energy that can be basically hyper localized and located where we can do these jobs, the jobs to be done, it's transformational. Now, why doesn't it happen? It doesn't happen because the same folks who really want to sound the alarm bells on climate change, which is the progressive left, are not really willing.

• 28:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They are intellectually lazy when it comes to nuclear. They don't do the work. They make a bland sort of broad based prognostication about how we need to do something about climate. Then they will point to solar and wind without really understanding the contamination of the earth that we do in order to mine the rare earths and the actual metal and mineral inputs that are required for solar.

• 28:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's nuts. But it sounds better, right? It sounds better.

• 28:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's better optics.

• 28:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we're using air and the sun.

• 28:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The sun and it's abundant. And it's like, if I could show you what, what tailings are and like the dirty after effects of mining copper and nickel out of the ground, which is what we need for batteries, and how countries like Indonesia are literally dumping it into the ocean. Dumping it faster that they can get their hands on it so that they can sell copper and nickel and cobalt to us so that we can make batteries. You would actually say to yourself, if you knew all these facts, you'd actually say to yourself, you know what, maybe nuclear isn't so bad and maybe I overreacted to two incidents.

• 29:20Jason Calacanis?

  If you want to understand this, you just have to look at the laziest group of individuals in society, the French. They want to take the laziest route and do the least amount of work and have the most amount of leisure. Sorry to our French listeners. Seventy percent of the energy in France is from nuclear. They figured this out. They said, how do we take more time off and not work and have unlimited electricity? Seventy percent nuclear. They're so smart.

• 29:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the French are actually smart because after Fukushima, because after Fukushima, what happened is if you had, you know, sort of like woke politicians.

• 29:57Jason Calacanis?

  Germany.

• 29:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A bunch of Germany, they completely unwound their entire nuclear agenda.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

  They shut it down.

• 30:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which, which was insanity, insanity. And so now here they are, they're writing laws faster than they can make them up. They're basically pivoting entire industries to try to now adopt batteries and storage without any real understanding about the downstream implications to the earth that they are going to create.

• 30:22David Friedberg?

  The net consequences.

• 30:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If they had just stayed the course on nuclear, they would be in a much better place. And, and to France's credit, they were like, what the fuck are you people overreacting about? Again, just think about this, guys.

• 30:35Jason Calacanis?

  The pragmatism is delightful.

• 30:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If we stopped flying after two airline crashes, where would the world be? Where would the world be?

• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, be pragmatist here. Do we want to deal with high energy prices and brownouts and all kinds of problems and rolling blackouts? Or do we want to put this issue behind us? If we just go on a Manhattan Project, literally, to make new nuclear, we would be, this issue would be behind us and we could focus on something else like education. It's so dumb.

• 31:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The very scary thing about nuclear is despite all of the progress, it will get bogged down in litigation and bureaucracy. These are the last two things that should be in front of science and physics, especially when it comes to energy independence. I just think it's crazy.

• 31:27Jason Calacanis?

  Free break, any way out?

• 31:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Any way we can get people to, what's the best way to convince the American public to embrace nuclear? And force our politicians to do it? Open your mind and think for yourself.

• 31:40Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 31:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Please.

• 31:41David Sacks?

  Well, uh, Mark Andreessen had a good term. Uh, he said, we're living in a vitocracy, as in the word veto. I think it was an interesting interview with, um, Antonio Garcia Martinez on his blog. Anyway, um, yeah, they were talking about the inability of the US to build anything anymore, especially when you compare us to some, you know, a place like China. And whether you want to call it nimbyism or vitocracy, there are just too many people and groups who have the right to say no to anything and block anything important from happening. Um, but we got us, we got to stop letting our politicians off the hook, um, by making excuses, you know, just because there's climate change, doesn't mean that the politicians can't do anything about it.

• 32:24David Friedberg?

  I mean, welcome to the downstream consequences of a successful democracy. Right? Like a democracy over time doesn't reduce the number of laws it has. Every year politicians need to do their job and they create new laws. As new laws accumulate, like the things get clogged up, right? Like, when, when have you seen a law that gets passed by a local government, a state government, or federal government that makes it easier to do something?

• 32:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I get that, but where, where does it say in the constitution of the United States that being part of a democracy also means shutting your brain off and becoming a dumb cynic?

• 32:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's, that's not part of what being part of a democracy is. I, by the way, I want to, I want to talk about that for one second. There was this thing that I sent you guys in the chat and Nick, hopefully you post, post that in the show notes as well. But there was a study that was done about cynicism. And it went back and it did like a qualitative assessment of more than 200,000 people and their attitudes and their measured IQ, their measured literacy, their measured numeracy, and their measured earnings. And here's what they found. Cynicism is associated with lower IQ, lower literacy, lower numeracy, and lower earnings.

• 33:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The idea of cynical individuals being more competent appears to be a widespread, yet largely illusory lie.

• 33:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I think we have to teach people.

• 33:49Jason Calacanis?

  I think this makes sense. I mean.

• 33:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was shocked by that study because I actually generally think cynical people must be smarter because they're thinking more rationally and maybe I'm being emotional. It turns out they're fucking stupid.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, here's the thing. There's cynicism and then there's people who are cantankerous and not content. And I think people sometimes conflate those two things. If you look at the people.

• 34:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But constant pervasive cynicism is not a feature of democracy. It means that you just stop thinking for yourself as a protective mechanism.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  Right. But the people we know who have changed the world and who they seem to be.

• 34:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're not cynical.

• 34:25Jason Calacanis?

  They're not cynical. They're actually delusional and optimistic. Or say, wouldn't have started a company to make electric cars, you know, or, you know, whatever piece of software or climate.com or synthetic biology. You have to be a radical optimist. I mean, and we're literally trying to attack our incredible capitalists who are actually solving these problems while our politicians can't get their shit together and make desal plants and nuclear plants. The private market seems like the only solution, Sax.

• 34:56David Sacks?

  Well, there's an old saying that pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. And yeah. I mean, if you think about it, if you think about it, you know, pessimists don't create companies, right?

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  No, they throw rocks. They become journalists. They become shit posters on Twitter.

• 35:17David Sacks?

  They become critics, yeah.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Anton Ego.

• 35:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sax, what do you think about this idea that, you know, if we get into the throes of it for water? The folks that own water rights, I think that this is going to be like an eminent domain issue where the government is at some point just going to say, sorry, need it back. It's mine.

• 35:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, during an emergency, for sure.

• 35:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  For sure.

• 35:39David Sacks?

  But I mean, I hate to, I hate to use the words, I agree with J Cal, but.

• 35:48David Sacks?

  But you know, look, there's not a shortage of water in the world, right? I mean, the world is mostly water, so it is a function of building desalination plants, if that's what we need.

• 35:59David Sacks?

  There has to be a solution for that problem. And Friedberg's right that maybe it does take a decade or two to to put in place all that infrastructure, but then why didn't we start 10 years ago?

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  You see, we should be starting a program where we convince the American public that abundance would lead to them having more freedom and our country being stronger. Electrical abundance with nuclear, water abundance with desalinization, and agricultural abundance with those previous two. Because if you had unlimited nuclear and energy and you had unlimited clean water, the price of agriculture would go down and we'd have more free food for everybody, or lower cost food.

• 36:39David Friedberg?

  I'll tell you, I'll tell you a theory I have on this. And it's basically an anti-science theory, which is that, you know, culturally, we've kind of developed this anti-innovation, anti-science mentality, broadly speaking, across kind of modern culture in the United States. If you remember coming out of World War II, and I think it has its roots in the Cold War, you know, out of, when World War II ended, you know, we were all in it together. You know, this country, everyone bought the same stuff. We all had Rice Krispies every day. We all kind of, you know, were excited about our, our homes that looked like everyone else's home on the block. And technology was empowering all of this, right? There was a space race on. There were plastics that were suddenly allowing us to make all sorts of amazing things.

• 37:22David Friedberg?

  There were chemicals that were creating new drugs for humans and new applications for agriculture that was making an abundance of food and increasing lifespans and so on. But then what happened in the late 60s and 70s is we realized we got ahead of ourselves. And, you know, there was cancer from DDT. There was, you know, Three Mile Island. There was a number of pollutants that got into the environment that permanently damaged the environment from chemical companies. And we started to wake up and say like, wait a second, all of this technology that we thought was so great and was giving us this extraordinary Abundance, it turns out is really risky and can cause massive unknown consequences. And if you watch, I think I talked about this in our podcast once, but one of my favorite videos to watch, there's a

• 38:07David Friedberg?

  video on YouTube from the Disney Channel History Institute. And they show the history of Tomorrowland at Disneyland. When Tomorrowland opened in 1955, every ride was all about adventuring into space and like traveling into the human body. And they even had a ride from Monsanto where you would go into the micro world and look at plastics and stuff. And it was all about this amazing abundance in technology. And the guy, the narrator on the video says, beginning in the late 60s, early 70s, we changed all the rides. And the rides all became about the fear of technology. It was all about aliens attacking Earth. It was all about Captain EO was like, you know, the world became robotic and got taken over by unnatural things. Even Star Tours was about a robot that went awry. And the robot doesn't know what it's doing, so it drove us off course and we had to survive the robot.

• 38:50David Friedberg?

  And so everything became, you know, subconscious or subliminally a little bit, this negative technology sentiment. And I think that that still persists, you know, there is an asymmetry. People take for granted the abundance over time because you get used to it. But you feel the acute pain of the loss when technology goes awry. And then that becomes the social conscience. And I think we're still grappling with that. And I don't know how you reverse it.

• 39:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know what, are we not experiencing this right now, everybody with COVID? Where there's one group of people who are like, oh my God. The science we were able to deploy in COVID and get through this so quickly is so promising. That the world's going to be better. Net, net, after the pandemic, even with all the suffering. You could make an argument that that suffering is going to lead to more prosperity. And there's another group of people who are like the Delta variant, let's get our masks back on. And people want to take the cynical route on.

• 39:44David Friedberg?

  As an individual, I don't want harm done to me or my kids or my environment. That's, that's the, I think the general kind of conscience, right? And I don't care about the abundance because I've basically taken it for granted. And so now I find myself as an individual saying, you know what? We shouldn't do nuclear because look at what happened at Fukushima. Forgetting the fact that you've been living off of free electricity practically for decades, or whatever the, you know, the case might be.

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  And free water.

• 40:10David Friedberg?

  And free water and all these things. And I think the, that the abundance that technology delivers to humans, because humans are only programmed to recognize change. They're not programmed to recognize absolutes. Uh, there's a lot of good socio-psychological and evolutionary psychologists in this.

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  Give us an example of that. Give us an example of that.

• 40:24David Friedberg?

  Like if, you know, if you go to the store every day and you're used to just getting a $1 can of Coke, you don't say, oh my God, I feel, it's an amazing world I live in. I get a $1 can of Coke. You never praise that $1 can of Coke. Now, if you went to the store and the can of Coke went up to $2, you'd be like, what the heck? Why does Coke cost so much? And so, um, you know, it, now.

• 40:45Jason Calacanis?

  So we habituate, we habituate to the great things in our life.

• 40:48David Friedberg?

  If the price of Coke dropped to 50 cents, you're like, okay, that feels good. And then you get used to the price of Coke being 50 cents. And a few weeks later, if it goes up, you're upset, but you're not as happy on the other way. So human emotion is kind of asymmetrically, you know, defined by these negative consequences. And I think over time, you accumulate these negative consequences as your core psyche and you have an aversion to doing, you know, innovative things. As a whole, not all people, but as a whole, that's how we operate. Um, and it's why technology kind of gets land-baseded over, over time.

• 41:17Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, this is the most frustrating thing to me, Chamath, is that we have so many amazing things happening in technology and nobody will 10x or 100x on them from the, uh, government perspective or the public. I had a company called Zero Mass on my podcast, which I think is now called Source, and you're aware of this company. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the impact hydro panels would make if we just embrace this technology.

• 41:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I mean, Source is an incredible, incredible company. Um, basically, there's a, there's a guy who runs a Cody Friesen, who, when he was at MIT, basically, um, developed a, uh, essentially a material, a membrane, that can absorb the ambient, um, water that's in the atmosphere. Um, and basically allow you to collect it and to separate it into its components and to basically create. Potable salinized or potable drinkable water in a panel that looks like a solar panel. So you put these solar arrays everywhere and out of the back, you put a little pipe and it collects the humidity in the ambient air and, uh, and it spits out water.

• 42:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's, it's an incredible thing and he's able to go and rewire schools and, and the thing is he can go anywhere because again, he doesn't need anything, right?

• 42:32Jason Calacanis?

  You literally put it on your roof.

• 42:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's incredible.

• 42:34Jason Calacanis?

  And it makes you, if you, I think he told me at, at the time when I interviewed him two or three years ago, he said, you could put two of these on your roof and get like four cases of bottled water a day, no matter where you were on the planet.

• 42:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, he's moving to a place, which is really cool. He told me this, I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say it, but I'll say it anyways.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  Are you saying this might be beeped?

• 42:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, where he's.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  Is it a beep candidate?

• 42:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, he'll have eventual app where you can kind of direct the hydro panel to make the kind of water that you like. So if you love.

• 43:05Jason Calacanis?

  Alkaline.

• 43:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or if you love, um.

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Dial it in.

• 43:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fiji water, or if you love smart water, or.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  You're on the voice, right? Specifically because it's the most expensive.

• 43:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I, I love, I love smart water. I, I, I have a very gratuitous reason why. I remember when I met Jobs, he drank smart water and I thought, buh, it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me.

• 43:26Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you when I knew Chamath made it. I just gotta copy people. Like you gotta copy the good ones. And I was just like. This is a personal anecdote. This is when I knew Chamath made it. We used to play poker in his garage in his little 3,000 square foot tile loft of house.

• 43:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Little.

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  No, Berlin game, Berlin game. In Berlin, whatever. He had this little tiny house and we're in the garage and he's like, look, I'm putting up a flat panel. I'm gonna like paint the walls.

• 43:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we had a little, uh, you had a little, uh, easel and you'd write on chalk how much you owed, you know?

• 43:53Jason Calacanis?

  Then Chamath's like, I got a new house.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  He's got his new house. We come over, he's like, Jay, Kyle, you want some water? I'm like, yeah, I'd love a glass. He's like, oh, Jay, Kyle, you want a beverage? I'm like, yeah, I'd take a glass of water. And, uh, he goes, oh, and he walks over to a rack. And in the rack, like you know, those things you push wine on, there's a rack for water. And there is Voss in the glass bottles, there is Evian in glass bottles, all and you're not like the Evian that you get at the regular supermarket, like somebody sourced the Evian bottles that restaurants have. And then he had the smart, I mean, there's six, and I'm like, it's one on a glass of water, but okay, I'll take the Evian in the glass bottle. It was delightful. Sax, I got three different bounce passes. I can give you just where you want it. Do you want cancel culture? Do you want Chesa Boudin or? Covid.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  What do you want? Or Covid? I can give you any of these.

• 44:43David Sacks?

  I can.

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  I'm ready to pass.

• 44:44David Sacks?

  I'm talking about any of those sound good to me. I mean, the, the, it might be time for a Chesa update because we haven't done that in a while.

• 44:52Jason Calacanis?

  The killer DA?

• 44:53David Sacks?

  The killer DA, yeah.

• 44:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, by the way, I just want to say I found the journalist. You know, the journalist Sax, don't say her name. And she is setting up her LLC and the $60,000 we raised from the GoFundMe is going to go to her to cover the DA's office for the next six to 12 months in a newsletter website.

• 45:09David Sacks?

  Right. And just to be clear, because I think people kind of misinterpreted what you're trying to do there with the GoFundMe, Jake Al.

• 45:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 45:15David Sacks?

  This is not for opposition research. This is not.

• 45:17Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 45:17David Sacks?

  This is not digging up dirt. This is reporting on, on public policy, on what should be public facts with respect to what the DA's office is doing, how Chesa is performing in his job.

• 45:32Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't it interesting, though, how the left journalists, when I hired investigative journalists to cover criminal justice, accused me of hiring an oppo researcher, and these are investigative journalists? And I told them explicitly, I'm just hiring an investigative journalist to cover crime in San Francisco. There's no oppo research here. And they insisted on saying, I wanted to get into Chesa's personal life. And I explicitly said, that's not what this is for.

• 45:55David Sacks?

  Well, let's face it, there aren't too many journalists anymore who are investigative, who are actually in the business of turning up new facts about elected officials. They're too busy pushing a narrative. They're engaged in agenda journalism. And actually, we saw a really good example, just to tie into. To what's happened, what happened over the past week is you had this story in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is basically pure propaganda from, you could see that the, um, the passing from Chesa to this reporter of this, this farcical, uh, claim that crime is falling in San Francisco.

• 46:33David Sacks?

  Uh, I mean, this claim is so preposterous. We, this is the same week we saw viral videos of 10 robbers bursting out of Neiman Marcus, you know, with

• 46:44Jason Calacanis?

  With every handbag.

• 46:45David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, plus you had the viral

• 46:48Jason Calacanis?

  It was scary. Yeah.

• 46:49David Sacks?

  You had the viral video of the, the guy going into CVS and just, you know, it wasn't even shoplifting. It was

• 46:56Jason Calacanis?

  Did you see Brian Sugar's, uh, video of the person who broke into his house, stole his kids iPads and everything while they were in the house?

• 47:04David Sacks?

  Right. And Cyan Banister, who had another home invasion, just tweeted.

• 47:08Jason Calacanis?

  Home invasions are now, um, not prosecutable crimes in San Francisco.

• 47:15David Sacks?

  Well, no, what they're doing is what Cyan reported about her case is, and by the way, her case is in the public eye. Okay? So it's very brazen for the DA to be doing this, but what they did is they dropped the home invasion charges and they're just treating it as basically a, a theft of, you know, a few hundred dollars, you know? That does not capture the violation of breaking into someone's house and how dangerous that is. But I originally I thought, okay, why is the DA's office doing this? Originally I thought, well, maybe it's just because, you know, Chase doesn't want to incarcerate anybody, but it's more than that. You see, if they drop the charges down to petty larceny, then he can include it in a different stat.

• 47:57David Sacks?

  You see, home burglaries are up by some gargantuan amount, like 50% year over year. They want to be able to claim crime is falling. It's now they're jukeing the stats by reducing the charges from the more serious crime to the less serious crime. And then what they do is

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  They're shaping the stats.

• 48:14David Sacks?

  They're jukeing the stats. You ever watched the, the show The Wire? That's where this expression comes from is, you know, first the, the politicians get held, held accountable to the statistics. Then they realize that, then they start manipulating the facts. And that's what's basically been happening.

• 48:30Jason Calacanis?

  So dirty.

• 48:31David Sacks?

  It's so dirty. But, but the next step in the process is they then feed these juke stats to these compliant reporters.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the fact that they keep repeating these statistics as going down when people are stopping reporting crimes because they won't prosecute them.

• 48:46David Sacks?

  Right.

• 48:47Jason Calacanis?

  Then they mischaracterize them. And then they never say 85% of the commuters coming into San Francisco are no longer coming into San Francisco. And Target announced, like Walgreens, that they are either closing stores or reducing the hours because they can't deal with the crime. And they're saying explicitly, this is the highest crime we've ever seen in any of our stores. And then this crazy communist, are they communists on the left here?

• 49:11David Sacks?

  CVS, Walgreens and Target are all closing stores or reducing store hours because they understand the hit to their bottom line. But you have this mantra. It is, it is communist like where it's like the commandments written on the barn in Animal Farm, where it is propaganda that's so at odds with reality, it's just absurd. Okay?

• 49:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's farcical.

• 49:33David Sacks?

  It's farcical. But then how do they enforce it? What they say is, anybody who questions this narrative is a bad person, is in fact a Klansman.

• 49:42Jason Calacanis?

  Racist.

• 49:42David Sacks?

  A racist and a Klansman. So, so this is the other thing that happened over the past week is that you had.

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  This is crazy.

• 49:49David Sacks?

  Basically, Michelle Tandler, who is a moderate and as nice a person as you could ever find.

• 49:55Jason Calacanis?

  Concerned citizen.

• 49:56David Sacks?

  Concerned citizen. San Francisco born and raised. Yes. Who tweeted that all of her friends are thinking about leaving the city. And then in response to that, you had this, this senior policy advisor to Chesa Boudin, who works for the DA's office named Kate Chatfield, attack her, basically implying her views were, you know, were KKK values for, for, for having the audacity to warn that people are worried about crime in San Francisco. So she gets attacked. By the way, this, this Chatfield person, the top of her profile is the clenched fist of the communist revolution, J. Cal. So this is who's running the DA's office. But, but look, it's not just... trolling and it's not even just slander.

• 50:41David Sacks?

  It's, I think, an abuse of power for someone in the DA's office to go after and attack a concerned citizen like this. Okay. But this is how they enforce.

• 50:51Jason Calacanis?

  Can you read the tweet that she did? Do you have that there? Cause she basically is, the people who have experienced home invasions are concerned for the safety of their families. And what this woman did, Michelle, I believe is her name. She just said, like, people are scared for their families. And then Kate Chatfield referenced Birth of a Nation and compared her to, oh, our wives are not safe because of black people. And that's a KKK. Yeah, the original name of Birth of a Nation, I think, was the Klansmen. Yeah.

• 51:29David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's like a KKK piece of propaganda.

• 51:31Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 51:33David Sacks?

  But it's really outrageous.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  She just blocked me. Kate Chatfield blocked me. Wow.

• 51:38David Sacks?

  This is a public policy advisor who's now hiding her account. Well, why, I mean, a public official should not do that. I mean, they should.

• 51:45Jason Calacanis?

  And so this set you off. Let's be, let's be honest.

• 51:48David Sacks?

  Well, I, I know Michelle Tandler. She worked at Yammer, you know, and I didn't, I thought it was out of bounds for, not just a public official, but someone in the DA's office who has the power.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I just. You went into revenge mode. Let's be honest. You got a little bit, you were a little bit tweaked.

• 52:07David Sacks?

  I donated another $50,000 to the Recall Chase campaign.

• 52:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you dedicated it to Kate.

• 52:14David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Jason Calacanis?

  You said, this is for you.

• 52:17David Sacks?

  Yeah, because, look, this is threatening. Every American should have the right to criticize their government without having its law enforcement arm come down on them. And so here you have a legitimate concern expressed by a private citizen and the DA's office is coming down on them. That's not acceptable.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think I need to break some news here. I didn't want to talk about this publicly, but I'm so outraged now that I think I should let this out. So while I, after the week, in the weeks after I started that campaign to hire an investigative journalist for Chester's office, this is breaking news. I haven't talked about this publicly, but I'm going to break it now. Do you know who contacted me?

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  The DA's office.

• 53:05Jason Calacanis?

  You know what they contacted me about? They were investigating a startup that I had invested in. I won't say which one. And they wanted to interview me. About my involvement with that startup because that startup. Uh, had some complaint from a downstream investor who felt that they were committing. Some type of fraud or problem. Coincidence?

• 53:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are you serious?

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  I'm dead serious.

• 53:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is literally becoming Chinatown.

• 53:32Jason Calacanis?

  They literally tried to intimidate me and I didn't want to bring it up and I talked to the person on the phone. The, the, the, the person from the DA's office who was investigating this. And he's, I was like, do I need an attorney for this? Why are you calling me? Cause and he said, well, you know, we just want to talk to you about this. And I was like, yeah.

• 53:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 53:49Jason Calacanis?

  We have a bunch of questions and I just said, you know what? Uh, subpoena me. I'm not, you know, file something and I'll come in with my attorney to talk to you, but I'm not going to talk with you on background. No. So they literally tried to intimidate me. You know what? And I kind of let them because I didn't want to make it public, but I'm making it public now.

• 54:04David Sacks?

  You shouldn't make it public because.

• 54:06Jason Calacanis?

  Public now.

• 54:07David Sacks?

  Well, because.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  This is two weeks after I said, let's hire the journalist. It's intimidation tactic.

• 54:12David Sacks?

  It is intimidation tactics.

• 54:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's intimidation.

• 54:15Jason Calacanis?

  I will not be intimidated, Chesa.

• 54:16David Friedberg?

  All right.

• 54:17David Sacks?

  But what you could see here is, okay, look.

• 54:19Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I was intimidated.

• 54:21David Sacks?

  So.

• 54:23David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, I'm like, I'm not going to have me intimidated again.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  Now that I think about it, like, I didn't do anything wrong here. I put 50K, I put 50 or a hundred K into a company that didn't work out. And now some other investors complaining and they're trying to tie it back to me somehow.

• 54:39David Sacks?

  But Jason, of course you're going to be intimidated. The chief law enforcement officer of San Francisco. Is basically trying to make you the target of an investigation because of what you've said publicly. Of course, that is intimidation.

• 54:52David Friedberg?

  Guys, isn't it possible that they're just interviewing you about a fraud claim? I mean, like what?

• 54:57Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, hold on. But think about the timing, Friedberg. It's two or three weeks.

• 55:03David Sacks?

  No.

• 55:04David Friedberg?

  You know, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta tell you something. A police officer drove past my house last night. Yeah.

• 55:09David Sacks?

  Friedberg, okay.

• 55:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, it's the first and only time I've ever been contacted by a law enforcement officer over an investment.

• 55:16David Sacks?

  I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

• 55:17Jason Calacanis?

  Stop committing fraud. 350 investments.

• 55:20David Sacks?

  Listen, Chesa has not had time, he's almost two years in office now, and he has not had time to successfully prosecute one murder trial. Not one, but his office has time to run down whatever they were trying to run down with JCal. They don't have time to prosecute the home invader who broke into Cyan Banister's home.

• 55:41Jason Calacanis?

  Or Brian's.

• 55:42David Sacks?

  Or Brian's. They don't have time to do that, but they somehow have time to contact JCal.

• 55:46Jason Calacanis?

  He tweeted the video.

• 55:48David Sacks?

  Let me explain what's going on here. There's two things going on. I think one of which is becoming very well understood, but the other one is not. The first one is the Gothamization of San Francisco. We understand that crime is out of control. Cynicism and resignation, people are just kind of given into it. It feels like San Francisco has become Gotham City. These viral videos of the robbers brazenly committing daylight theft.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  Beating up UPS drivers in the street. Beating a UPS driver in the street.

• 56:13David Sacks?

  Because there is no consequence, okay? But there's a second thing happening, which is the Orwellianization of San Francisco government and San Francisco politics. You not only have the crime, you've got the brazen lies about the crime. You've got this insistence on this animal farm commandment that crime is falling, and if you question it, you are a bad person. You're a Klansman. And then they get their, you know, the Kate Chatfield's to push this out, and then they get academics to back this up, okay? There are now, they get their friends in the media and in the academy to give these spurious claims credence, and then the final step is that the rich virtue signalers pay these people off. They pay the protection money.

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  Who's paying off?

• 56:58David Sacks?

  The Dustin Moskowitzes, the Mike Kriegers, the Reed Hastings, and, you know, even actually the biggest contributor to Chesa right now is a guy who's under SEC indictment for the Purple scandal.

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no.

• 57:13David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  Chris?

• 57:14David Sacks?

  Chris, yes, exactly. So, people who need to curry favor either because they've got their own problems, or they just like to virtue signal.

• 57:23Jason Calacanis?

  Chris Larson, Chris Larson is chess's biggest.

• 57:26David Sacks?

  Or William campaign.

• 57:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow, that is dark. Brian Sugar released the video and that person's not going to be prosecuted. I mean, that is the crazy part. You get somebody on camera and they won't prosecute them. And people forget, these are organized gangs that are doing this. This has been proven. This is not a poverty issue. These are not poor people who are stealing bread for their families or trying to make their rent. It's organized gangs.

• 57:49David Sacks?

  Right. Did you see the getaway cars?

• 57:51Jason Calacanis?

  Forty-seven.

• 57:51David Sacks?

  Did you see the getaway cars for the Neiman Marcus heist?

• 57:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they're all like, they're driving great, beautiful cars with their license plates off. This is like mob behavior. And if you give criminals, trust me, I grew up in a criminal environment in Brooklyn. If you give criminals a window, they will figure it out. You give them an opportunity, if you give them something to hack, they will hack it. Period. And you basically have green light of them. Okay, listen, it's enough of us complaining about this. Uh, I am, uh, gonna stop complaining about this and I'm moving either to Texas. I'm moving to Texas or to Florida. I'm making the announcement now.

• 58:27David Sacks?

  Hold on, is that for sure, J. K?

• 58:29Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I, you know, I'm in a partnership and my partner doesn't want to be here anymore. And I'm half and half, so I'm not sure why I'm here anymore. I mean, I think California's, my position right now is California is going to be on a decade-long slide and I'm working for 10 more years. I decided I'm 50. I decided I'm gonna go to 60. I'm gonna try to invest in 100 to 200 companies a year for 10 years and then I'm done. So, why would I spend 10 years in a place that is on a death spiral? Can this be reversed in our, in the next decade?

• 58:56David Sacks?

  Jake, how's it feel, how's it feel to be completely red-pilled?

• 59:00Jason Calacanis?

  I'm purple-pilled. I want to live in a, I want to live in a reasonable place. And it seems to me that Austin and Miami are purple, you know, and they're not communist. I don't want to live in a right-wing place, alt-right, and I don't want to live in a communist place. I want to live in an American place. I want to live in a place where Americans can talk about issues without being villainized. Period.

• 59:21David Sacks?

  That's, that's what I feel about this pod.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  You're not being villainized, Saz. Just give me a break, alright? Just be, you, people really wanna know if you went to dinner with Tucker. Can you just make that statement that you didn't have dinner with Tucker? What do we got next?

• 59:35David Sacks?

  You just made that up.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  It was a joke. Why can't you admit if you did or not?

• 59:39David Sacks?

  Listen, I, I-

• 59:40Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg and I have 15 minutes. We gotta go. Covid, Delta, people are panicking, but the numbers keep going straight down. Pfizer says, Israel says maybe Pfizer is 65% instead of 94%. 65% seems pretty great. Are we at any risk?

• 1:00:00David Sacks?

  Well, okay, let me jump into this because I've been affected personally by it. So yeah, on the last pod, I did, I did give the stat, which was that, at that point, that the best data we had even a week ago was that the Pfizer vaccine was holding it pretty well against the Delta variant. It had reduced the effectiveness from about 95 to 88%. That's sort of the numbers. I think on Monday, Israel released a new study showing that the effectiveness of Pfizer against Delta had been reduced to 64%. Now, that's against, you know, getting symptoms and testing positive. It was still 93% against serious cases requiring hospitalization, but that 93% is down from, you know, 99% plus.

• 1:00:45David Sacks?

  So there has been reduced effectiveness by Delta. It's, it is a little bit concerning. And as if to underscore this point, someone very close to me, who was double vaxxed with Pfizer, just tested positive.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  He did test positive?

• 1:00:59David Sacks?

  Yes.

• 1:01:02David Sacks?

  So he, he woke up yesterday morning with, with cold symptoms. He had sore throat, runny nose-

• 1:01:10Jason Calacanis?

  But he's fine.

• 1:01:11David Sacks?

  And a slight fever, which then graduated into a headache. He went and got tested and he tested positive for Covid. So I think he's fine.

• 1:01:18Jason Calacanis?

  What city was he in when this happened?

• 1:01:19David Sacks?

  LA.

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Let me ask a question to Friedberg. Is it not the best possible situation? I know this sounds like a stupid question, but I am the lowest IQ guy on the pod. Is it not the best situation to have the Pfizer or whatever have this amazing, then to get a mild case of COVID and then be doubly protected? Is that in some way an ideal situation if there is no long haul COVID?

• 1:01:44David Friedberg?

  It's not really clear if that's gonna make a difference. You know, again, like remember, acquired immunity is on a spectrum, right? So a virus can get in your nose, starts replicating. And if you've got a ton of antibodies that immediately get to your nose, it'll shut down that virus before you experience anything. If that virus gets in your nose and starts replicating and you've got a kind of, you know, your antibodies to that specific virus, you know, aren't as concentrated. It's going to take your body a little bit longer to fight off that virus, but you're still well ahead of the game is a way to think about it. And so, you know, to some extent, what we're seeing most likely is this Delta variant having a greater escape velocity from people that have been vaccinated than,

• 1:02:29David Friedberg?

  you know, the Alpha variant or any of the other variants we've seen. And so as a result, you know, people are getting, to date, luckily, knock on wood, mostly mild and moderate symptoms and only a minority of people that are exposed are getting, you know, that condition. But it's being tracked really closely. I mean, like, like Sacks said, in Israel, they have now said that, you know, if you're vaccinated with Pfizer, double vax with Pfizer, you're now 64%, you know, effective. And you're, you know, that, that means that if you're exposed to COVID, there's a chance you can actually get these symptoms. But the hospitalization rate and the fatality rate is still way, way low because you have built up enough immunity, you've built up enough antibodies

• 1:03:13David Friedberg?

  to have a good, strong defense to keep things from getting out of control. And so, knock on wood, right now, we're still looking good in terms of fatality and hospitalizations, but there's certainly.

• 1:03:21Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, what do you think of this situation?

• 1:03:24David Friedberg?

  And Chamath, are markets kind of worrying about this? Because I'm kind of wondering, like, as, as market participants see this stuff, are they trading it in a way that's like fearful? And does this lead to some market conditions in the next couple of days and weeks?

• 1:03:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I think that there's a very good chance that some politicians are going to try to use this for another shutdown in the fall.

• 1:03:45David Sacks?

  Oh, I don't see. I think you're right. And I think the teachers' unions, the NEA and the AFT are already putting all sorts of demands on going back to school. I don't think this dates. So first of all, I think we have to be intellectually honest that this is a bad data point. This is really the first bad data point that we've gotten until now. All the data has been good. The protection from the vaccines lasts longer. It had been completely holding up against the variants. But this data point from Israel is not a great data point. I want to see more of them. More data. But I don't think that this by itself.

• 1:04:18Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second. Didn't Israel only get to like 55, 60% vaccinated?

• 1:04:23David Sacks?

  Oh, no, they're they're way higher than that.

• 1:04:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no, they're way higher than that.

• 1:04:25David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26David Friedberg?

  Half of the infections they're seeing in Israel are children that were not vaccinated. And then the other half are the other half are adults. And so if you look at the adult infection rate, it looks like it's something around 15% of, you know, these cases. I forgot the number, but there's some statistic that shows that it's not the majority being vaccinated. There are unvaccinated people that are.

• 1:04:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look, we're we're gonna probably, we're gonna probably need a booster and we're probably going to be on a cocktail. But beyond that, I think we need to make a moral decision that we are all getting back to life as normal.

• 1:05:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, 100%. I'm done. I'm not.

• 1:05:04David Friedberg?

  There will be boosters. There will be boosters for sure. Like this fall.

• 1:05:09David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. And I think the question about this this data is, does it warrant a change in policy? And I would say not yet.

• 1:05:15Jason Calacanis?

  100% not yet. I mean, we the whole policy idea was ICUs being filled. And if you look at the stats in the United States at the deaths, we are now at a seven day average of under 200. I think it's 150 deaths per day. Some, again, I'll ask you, Friedberg, how many of those are with COVID versus from COVID?

• 1:05:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's unclear, but like Israel hasn't had a single death in two weeks from COVID.

• 1:05:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and what are we talking about here?

• 1:05:39David Friedberg?

  Despite this increase in numbers, it's, it's still a

• 1:05:41David Sacks?

  Right, right. It's not, it's not what the media likes to portray, which is variants punching through, right? I mean, it's not like Delta variant is just sweeping through Israel, okay? There is a slight increase in cases and we're definitely seeing elevated cases here in the US. I mean, Delta variant is going to become the main, the dominant strain if it isn't already. Look, it's mostly sweeping through areas that have not been vaccinated, but there are now cases, I'd say mostly mild cases of people who have been vaccinated. I mean, I think it's all the more reason why if you're an adult, you should get vaccinated. We really do need, all adults barring some sort of, you know, highly specific immune condition

• 1:06:24David Sacks?

  that where you, you need to be on some sort of different treatment, but almost all adults in the US really should get vaccinated. Otherwise, we're going to have, keep having these variants sweep through.

• 1:06:35David Friedberg?

  I'll tell you, I, I had a really good conversation with an infectious disease doctor yesterday, who's a research specialist and well-known in this space. And he pointed out that the evolutionary cycle of this virus is a function of how many people are not vaccinated. Because the more bodies the virus has to hop, the faster the

• 1:06:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the more evolution it can do.

• 1:06:56David Friedberg?

  The more it evolves, right?

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:06:57David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, certain virologists and epidemiologists will model this where they will highlight kind of the evolutionary rate of the virus as a function of unvaccinated people getting infected every day. And so, the more people that we get vaccinated, the longer the timeline it takes for the virus to evolve and get to a breakthrough variant. And so, we need to accelerate and continue to push people to get vaccinated worldwide to reduce the available pool for evolutionary success of the virus.

• 1:07:24David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's, it's, to put it in maybe layman's terms, all these unvaccinated people are basically like a giant Petri dish for the virus to keep, to keep mutating. And we do need, I think, like a Marshall Plan to help all these other countries get vaccinated. vaccinated. I mean, I think we have enough vaccines in the U. S. But what have we done to help all these other countries? It directly benefits us. If we reduce the size of that Petri dish, this Delta variant came from India. Why? There's like a billion plus people there who, you know, for the virus to mutate on. I mean, obviously. With a Petri dish that big, you're gonna get a variant. Now there's a new variant. Coming out of Peru, which looks potentially scary. Now. These are not full breakthrough variants yet, but to Friedberg's point, it's just a matter of time.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  You guys want to guess the bottom two states in the country? I mean, it's just Mississippi, Mississippi and Alabama.

• 1:08:16David Friedberg?

  Alabama.

• 1:08:16Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Can you imagine Mississippi and Alabama, 33%? Come on. Get your act together. What is it? It's gonna whip through those places and you're all gonna die. You're gonna kill your grandparents.

• 1:08:29David Friedberg?

  Is that an evangelical movement issue without?

• 1:08:31David Sacks?

  It's, it's, it's, well, we talked about this in the last pod. There's two groups in America who are most vaccine.

• 1:08:36Jason Calacanis?

  Men.

• 1:08:37David Sacks?

  Hold no, let's be more specific. It's evangelicals and African Americans. Those are the two groups who are most.

• 1:08:43Jason Calacanis?

  You keep saying, you keep saying evangel, what is it? How do you pronounce it?

• 1:08:48David Sacks?

  Evangelical.

• 1:08:49Jason Calacanis?

  Evangelicals. It's actually male Republicans. Why can't you?

• 1:08:53David Sacks?

  No, that's, you're not being specific enough.

• 1:08:56David Friedberg?

  Yeah, guys, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta run. Love you, Friedberg. Love you, guys.

• 1:09:00Jason Calacanis?

  We love you, Friedberg.

• 1:09:01David Friedberg?

  See you later. Love you, Bigfoot.

• 1:09:06Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sacks.

• 1:09:10David Sacks?

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 1:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, West Coast.

• 1:09:23Jason Calacanis?

  Besties are gone.

• 1:09:26David Friedberg?

  That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

• 1:09:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big U. George because they're all just fused. It's like this, like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:09:42David Sacks?

  What your, the B, what your? Where are your feet?

• 1:09:47David Sacks?

  We need to get merge.

• 1:09:57Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going all in.