E36: New FTC Chair, breaking up big tech, government silent spying, Jon Stewart, wildfires & more

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 Show Notes: 00:00 Besties intro 03:37 Lina Khan appointed to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission 07:02 Will Lina break up big tech? Which one will be first? 18:02 Potential repercussions to consumers 27:48 Sacks' antitrust experience at PayPal vs. Ebay, Visa & MasterCard 29:50 Google's multi-trillion dollar data trove 35:40 The U. S. government's capability to silently take data while "gagging" Big Tech 53:32 COVID's psychic shadow, Friedberg's office landlord is still requiring masks 1:00:17 Jon Stewart's lab leak bit on Stephen Colbert's show 1:10:04 California's wildfire risk increasing with climate change 1:20:57 Besties summer plans Referenced in the show: Chamath's 2019 Annual Letter re: Big Tech breakup https://www.socialcapital.com/annual-letters/2019 Big Tech Gag Order (mentioned by Sacks) https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/13/microsoft-brad-smith-trump-justice-department-gag-orders/ https://rss.libsyn.com/shows/254861/destinations/Big%20Tech%20Gag%20Order%20(mentioned%20by%20Sacks)%20https:/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/06/13/microsoft-brad-smith-trump-justice-department-gag-orders/ Obama Administration Record Seizure (mentioned by Sacks) https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/us/phone-records-of-journalists-of-the-associated-press-seized-by-us.html?referringSource=articleShare California Forest fire maps (mentioned by Friedberg) https://twitter.com/NWSBayArea/status/1398474379214802951/photo/1 Jon Stewart On Vaccine Science And The Wuhan Lab Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8 #allin #tech #news

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  What's going on Sax LP meeting? Is it an LP meeting or are you going to lunch Peter Thiel? A little layer proof? What's going on? It's 9 a.m. You must be, there must be a call going on here. Tutti bene Saxi Poo, tutti bene. It's a day, Sax.

• 0:15David Friedberg?

  Every week at Chamathas in Italy, another button gets undone.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  This is definitely.

• 0:38Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast, episode 36. Back with us today on the program, the Queen of Quinoa, science, spectacular Friedberg is with us again with leading off last episode Friedberg with a great Friedberg science monologue. The crowd went crazy for it. How does it feel coming off that epic performance in episode 35? Tell us, what were you thinking going into the game? And yeah.

• 1:08David Friedberg?

  Well, I was thinking I would talk about the Alzheimer's drug approval at Biogen and then I felt like I did it when we were done.

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Yeah, it's just, it's like literally interviewing Kawhi Leonard after like a 50 point game. Okay. And with us Rain Man David Sax with layers for players. He's been styled and groomed and he's in some random hotel room. How are you doing, Rain Man?

• 1:30David Sacks?

  Good, good. But I'm not, I'm not in a hotel room. I'm.

• 1:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, your, your home just happens to look like a five star resort. Got it. Forgot that.

• 1:38Jason Calacanis?

  And to give us an idea, coming into today's game with the layers, you obviously are here to dominate and get your monologues up. Got to be hard for you to look at the stat line and see yourself trailing in monologues behind the dictator. I'm of course referring to All In Statistics.

• 1:55David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Jason Calacanis?

  Where some maniac is breaking down how many minutes we each talk per episode.

• 2:00David Sacks?

  Jason, I'm really happy with my performance. For me, it's about quality and not quantity. I like to stick and, stick and jab.

• 2:07Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, got it. What are we talking about right now? What, what, what? And of course, the dictator leaving all monologues. What the hell are you talking about right now? There is a Twitter account, Dun, you know how the All In Stans have a ton of skills? Like, there is an audience for this podcast that has more skills than, you know, it's like the 5% of the most skilled people in the world listen to this podcast. So in addition to doing the merge, in addition to doing, who's the guy? Henry, who does all those incredible videos with animations? In addition to those.

• 2:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Henry Belkaster.

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Henry Belkaster. Henry Belkaster crushing it.

• 2:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those things are great.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  Those are amazing. And then, of course, you have Young Spielberg, who led the charge, dropping incredible tracks. And now we have this new crew that is analyzing, somebody put, you know, we'll put in the show notes a link to it, but they do some type of AI analysis of the audio files and they tell us who had the most monologues and then the running time and then historic running time. So they're actually looking at it, trying to figure out, you know, who is speaking the most and they thought Friedberg was going to run away with the episode, but it kind of disappeared in the second half of the game. And Chamath obviously came around the corner and took his 27%. But they live a pie chart of how much we each talk.

• 3:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a, I always have a very strong first and third quarter.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, absolutely. And then he gets frustrated when he passes the ball and somebody misses a shot. It's kind of like LeBron in the early days. So kicking off today, Lena Kahn has been confirmed to the FTC with bipartisan support. Interesting. And this is obviously going to be a challenge for big tech. On Tuesday, the Senate voted 69 to 28 to confirm Lena Kahn, who is a very well-established critic of big tech. And this is obviously really unique because she's 32 years old and she's leading the FTC, which is unbelievable. I did a little research on her and watched some videos. She's basically written two amazing papers.

• 4:10Jason Calacanis?

  And the first paper came out in 2017, Amazon's antitrust paper. The second one came out in June and was about the separation of platforms and commerce. And when you hear her speak, she is incredibly credible and knowledgeable. It is as if one of the four of us were discussing this. She could come into this podcast and speak credibly about Amazon's businesses as opposed to the charades we saw at different hearings where the senators and congresspeople just absolutely had no idea what they're talking about. Some of the items I picked up from a talk she gave in Aspen is that she formed a lot of these opinions by talking to venture capitalists who were concerned about Amazon's

• 4:53Jason Calacanis?

  dominance and other companies and the competitive space. And she is looking at consumer welfare, one of the lenses of antitrust, which I'm sure David Sacks will have some thoughts on as our resident attorney here, and the framing of those in terms of harm of the consumer. She believes there's other harm that happens. And she thinks one remedy is to kill Amazon basics because the marketplace shouldn't own the goods as well. She's concerned about cloud computing consolidation because that creates fragility. And that is another type of consumer harm. While she freely admits that prices have gone down, services are free, and this is a consumer benefit. So she wants to rethink the entire concept. And she is savvy.

• 5:35Jason Calacanis?

  She brought up Facebook buying Enovo, the reportedly spyware VPN, to give them a little advantage as to what was being used on phones and maybe give them a little product roadmap information. She also brought up Amazon studying the sales of other products to inform Amazon basics, a claim that Amazon says they don't do, but everybody knows they do do because all that information is publicly available. She talked about Amazon's VC arm, using data to invest in buying companies. Why wouldn't they? That makes total sense. That's a great signal for them. She seems to want Amazon Web Services spun out, which I think would just double the value of it, or maybe add 50% to the value of it.

• 6:16Jason Calacanis?

  And she gave very pragmatic examples, like maybe separating Google Maps from Android. And when you turn on your Android phone, you would have to install Maps, or maybe you would pick from the different Maps that are out there, different programs, and that there would be integration in them and people could swap out. You know, MapQuest or Apple Maps in their Google searches. So a lot of actually very interesting pragmatic approaches. And she doesn't think these need to be decade long lawsuits. She thinks this is going to be a negotiation and that people will kind of work together on it. But this is all with the backdrop of partisan politics. And, you know, one group of people looking at this through the lens of wealth and inequality, and another group looking at it through censorship. Sax, since you are our counsel here, what are your thoughts on this appointment?

• 7:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing is that, you know, Lina Khan is the Bernie approved candidate. She is liked by the progressive left, but at the same time, she got 21 Republicans to support her. And so this nomination sailed through confirmation. I think what she's saying, what she's saying, I think there's, there's a very good, good argument to it. That, and I've said similar things in the past, which is, you know, what she's basically saying, especially in the case of Amazon, is look, you've got this company, Amazon, that controls essential infrastructure, AWS, the whole distribution and supply chain, going all the way from the port to warehouses, to, to logistics and distribution.

• 7:47David Sacks?

  That is going to be owned by a scaled monopoly player. You have a massive economies of scale. It's pretty clear they're going to dominate that. And what they're doing is systematically going category by category and using the monopoly, monopoly profits they make by owning the sort of core infrastructure and subsidizing their entry into each of these new categories that Amazon Basics and others. And she calls that, you know, predatory pricing. And she's afraid that Amazon's just going to end up dominating every category, every category that you could build on top of this core infrastructure. I think it's actually a pretty valid concern. I think you see something analogous happening with Apple and Google and the app stores. We had a congressional hearing pretty recently in which you had Spotify on other apps complaining

• 8:32David Sacks?

  about what Apple was doing to them, saying, they are making our service non-viable with the 30% rate that they're charging. You remember Bill Gurley had a great post about this, saying- Just because you can charge a 30% rate doesn't mean you should.

• 8:46Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 8:46David Sacks?

  And now we're seeing this blowback from this massive 30% rate. And you had Spotify saying, look, Apple is doing this to basically make us infeasible relative to Apple Music. So I think there is a legit point here, which is that if you own the monopoly platform, the sort of essential infrastructure, you cannot use it to basically take over every application on top that can be built on top of that platform. That I think is a very appropriate use of of antitrust law. And I think so. I think that's the good here. Now, I think that there there are some some concerns or some potential downsides. And, you know, and the downside that I see is that we used to think we used to judge

• 9:31David Sacks?

  antitrust law in terms of consumer welfare. And so so there was a limiting principle to the actions of government, which is you would just look at prices and the effect on prices. Here, you know, the the sort of movement that Lina Khan represents, the so called hipster antitrust movement. They're concerned about power and they want to restructure markets to avoid sort of concentrations of power. I don't see the limiting principle there. And so I think what the the

• 9:58Jason Calacanis?

  Would market share be a limiting principle?

• 10:00David Sacks?

  Well, it would be a limiting principle in terms of who you could take action on, but it wouldn't be a limiting principle in terms of how you would restructure the market. And I think what we're in for over the next few years is potentially a hyper politicization of big tech markets. I think these 21 Republicans might soon feel like the dog who caught the bumper in the sense that, yes, they're finally going to have the regulation of big tech they've been calling for. But they might not like all of the results because we because what could happen is a very intrusive meddling by government in the markets of technology. And it could go well beyond sort of this this this gatekeeper principle that we've been talking about that I think would be a valid reason to regulate.

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  Chima?

• 10:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think she has to be careful in focusing on Amazon. So if you break down antitrust law, there are really three big buckets where the attack vectors are. And I'm not going to claim to be an expert, but I think they're relatively easy to understand. So you have the first principal body, which is called the Sherman Act. That's the thing that everybody's looked at. And that's, you know, sort of where most current

• 11:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Antitrust enforcement action has failed on tech companies because it largely looks at the predatory nature of pricing power that certain companies have. And you have to remember, this thing was written in the 1800s. And so, you know, what did people do when they controlled things? They just, they drove prices up. Tech does the exact opposite, right? They constantly drive prices down. And what's counterintuitive is, it turns out that in the olden days, driving prices up drove out competition. Today, driving prices down drives out competition.

• 11:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 11:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? So, you know, you make Gmail infinite storage. Nobody else can compete with Gmail.

• 11:51Jason Calacanis?

  Why switch? Why switch?

• 11:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You make, you know, photos completely subsidized. You make certain music products effectively free. And you subsidize that, you know, you create enormous amounts of content, blah, blah, blah. So you have the Sherman Act. Then somewhere along the way, we realized, okay, we need to add something. We created this thing called the Clayton Act. That was around M and A, right? We added to that. A lot of folks that are listening probably have heard of Hartz Scott Rudino, HSR. We've all gone through it, right? On M and A events, we have to file these HSR clearances. When you make big investments, for example, you know, I just made a climate change thing, we had to file HSR. And then there's this FTC, which is the Federal Trade Commission Act. That is where she can get, you know,

• 12:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  if, to use a poker term, you know, a little frisky. Why? Because the FTC has these two specific things, which says you can have an unfair method of competition, or an unfair or deceptive act or practice. Now, it falls on her and her team to basically build the strongest case around those two dimensions. And my only advice to her, I wrote this in 2019 in my investor letter as well, just thinking about the breakdown of big tech. If you're going to go after these guys, that's the body of law that probably is the most defensible. But you probably have to start, you know, whether you like it or not, with

• 13:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Facebook or Google. And the reason is, there are more examples how you can use that language under the FTC to give those folks a hard time. I think it's much harder.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  The example would be, Chamath, that we are giving away this product, losing money on it, to keep you in our store and moat you into our advertising network, etc.

• 13:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's an example, yeah.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  That's yeah.

• 13:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or, or you know, we then, we then, and that, because then, when you have control, then you can show that then the first part, the Sherman Act part kicks in. Why? So you've seen 15 or 20 years of Google, Facebook, less Apple, by the way, using their edge to decrease price. And for the first time in the last quarter, both of these two companies, and they were the only two of big tech, that announced an increase in pricing, right? They saw a diminishing of CPM inventory, and so they had to figure out ways to grow inventory as users started to stagnate. And what they really said is we're ramping up CPMs. And CPMs, I think, were up 28, 30% in a quarter.

• 14:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of competition right now for ad space.

• 14:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you put these two ideas together, which is step one is you surreptitiously, basically, take all the costs out of the system, and then step two, raise price over time. There's probably something there.

• 14:34Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, when we look at her age and her obvious, deep, deep knowledge, do you see that as an overall plus? I mean, obviously, if, you know, David framed her as the Bernie-approved candidate, but then conceded that 20 Republicans are backing her. What do you, what do you think about the massive credibility she has, Friedberg, in terms of she's actually understands this deeply, clearly?

• 15:01David Friedberg?

  I mean, I'm sure she's not dumb, if that, if that's what you're asking. I'm not sure.

• 15:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, it's a 32-year-old. I mean, have we seen an appointment like that before? I mean, I don't think so.

• 15:12David Friedberg?

  Yeah, that's, that's good for her.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 15:15David Friedberg?

  So I just feel like there's a bit of a cycle underway where we have this kind of anti-wealth, anti-wealth accumulation sentiment as an undercurrent right now. You know, obviously Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others are key vocal

• 15:38David Friedberg?

  proponents of change that's needed to keep this kind of wealth disparity from continuing to grow. And one of the solutions is to reduce the monopolistic capacity of certain business models, specifically in technology.

• 15:53David Friedberg?

  The downside that I don't think is realized and that inevitably comes with this action under this new kind of business model of the technology age or the digital age is the damage to consumers. And so, you know, as Chamath and David pointed out, like historically, antitrust has been about protecting the consumer. And the irony is the more monopoly or the more monopolistic or the more market share Amazon gains, the cheaper things get for consumers. And it's unfair to small businesses and to business owners and to competitors, but consumers do fundamentally benefit. And so, the logical argument she made in her

• 16:37David Friedberg?

  paper that was widely distributed a few years ago was around this notion that in this new world, it's not about consumer harm, and we need to look past the impact to consumers and look more at kind of the, you know, the fact that this company maybe prevents innovation and prevents competition. But ultimately, if the consumer is harmed in the resolution of that concern, we're not going to wake up to it for a while. And then consumers one day are going to wake up and they're going to be like, wait a second, why am I paying five bucks for Gmail? And, you know, why am I paying an extra $10 for shipping to get my Amazon products brought to me every day? And, you know, all the things that I think

• 17:16David Friedberg?

  we've taken for granted in the digital age with the advent of these, you know, call it monopolistic kind of business models where they accumulate market share and they can squeeze pricing and keep people out. And the bigger they get, the cheaper they get, and therefore, it's harder to compete. Consumers have benefited tremendously. I think all of us would be hard pressed to say, I would love to pay 10 bucks a month for Gmail. I'd love to pay for Facebook. And at the end of the day, these models, I'd love to pay more for shipping with Amazon. And so, you know, it becomes a value question, right? What do you value more? Do you value the opportunity for competition and innovation in the business world? Or do you value, as a consumer, better pricing? And I don't think that we're really having that debate. And I think that that debate will inevitably kind of arise over the next couple of years if and as Friedberg, how much of this

• 18:01David Friedberg?

  this agenda has kind of played out.

• 18:03Jason Calacanis?

  I think, to be clear, Friedberg, what you're saying is this is driven by the extraordinary wealth of Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.

• 18:09David Friedberg?

  It's easy to pinpoint that problem and then not involve the repercussions to consumers if you try and change how business operates in a free market system. And these businesses are successful because they have customers that like what they're offering. And they drive in a competitive way of pricing down and they prevent people from coming in and competing, not by entering into contracts and antitrust enforcement, all this sort of stuff. They're doing it because they're scaling and offering lower prices. I mean, this like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have separately argued for this in really intelligent ways, probably in a far more articulated way than I can. But and they did this early on, which is, you know, we want to find businesses that can become monopolies.

• 18:50David Friedberg?

  Because if you can reduce your pricing and improve your pricing power with scale, it's going to be harder and harder for someone to compete. And therefore, the capital theory is rush a bunch of capital into these businesses, help them scale very quickly. I mean, this is obviously the basis of Uber and others, and then get really big, really fast.

• 19:06Jason Calacanis?

  Create the moat.

• 19:07David Friedberg?

  Create the moat, drop the pricing, and then no one can compete with you on pricing. Consumers benefit and you've created the big business and you've locked everyone.

• 19:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let me go around the horn here and frame this for everybody. Let's assume that big tech does get broken up. This broken up. This is an exercise. We assume it gets broken up and YouTube and Android are spun out, Instagram, WhatsApp are spun out, AWS is spun out, and you know, app stores are allowed on Apple's platform iOS for the first time. I want to know if this is good, bad, or neutral for the following two people. So these breakups occur. Is it good, bad, or neutral for consumers? And then two, is it good, bad, or neutral for startups, Sacks?

• 19:49David Sacks?

  I generally would lean towards saying yes. I mean, a lot depends on how.

• 19:54Jason Calacanis?

  Good, bad, or neutral for each party, startups and for consumers?

• 19:59David Sacks?

  I, I think it could ultimately be good for, for both, uh, but it really depends on how it's done. And I think there is a big risk here that this just generates into sort of hyper politicization. You get intensive amounts of lobbying by big tech in Washington that what happens is, you know, you have a good cop, bad cop, where Lina Khan just becomes the bad cop. She's there to kind of keep big tech in line, threatens to break them up. And then the good cop is, you know, Biden and the administration, and then they, they become the protection and the extortion racket. They raise on, you know, ungodly amounts of money. And really it'll be a bonanza for, for all elected officials, because now big tech's gonna have to increase its donations even more.

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Super cynical. Wow.

• 20:45David Sacks?

  That's the, that's the cynical take. So we could end up with something much worse than what we have now. But, but I think the legit, I think the words you're gonna hear a lot. Okay? Our common carrier. Because what she seems to be saying is, look, if you're a tech monopoly that controls core infrastructure, we need to regulate you like a common carrier. You cannot summarily deny service to your competitors who are downstream applications built on top of your platform. Conservatives can get behind that because that is the argument they've been making about Facebook cutting off free speech is you are a speech utility. You should be regulated as a common carrier. You cannot cut off people summarily. You cannot discriminate against people who should be allowed to have free speech on your platform. And so I think

• 21:28David Sacks?

  there is, I think the left and the right here can cut a deal where they regulate these guys, these big tech companies as common carriers. I think that is what we're headed towards.

• 21:37Jason Calacanis?

  So a bakery can deny service, as we talked about previous issue, to a gay couple who wants a cake because it's a tiny little company and there's other choices. But when we're talking about Facebook and Twitter, there are not other choices. And once you're removed like Trump has been from the public square, there is no recourse. You are essentially zeroed out. Chamath, is it good for startups, bad for startups, neutral, same thing for consumers? If, you know, one chunk of every company got cleavered off?

• 22:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unanimously good for startups in any scenario in which they get involved. And I think in most cases in which the government gets involved, it's good for consumers as well. Why in both cases? So for startups, it's just because I think right now we have a massive human capital sucking sound that big tech creates in the ecosystem, which is that there is an entire generation of people that are basically unfortunately frittering away their most productive years, getting paid what seems to them like a lot of money, but is what is effectively just,

• 22:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you know, payola to not go to a competitor or go to a startup by big tech. So to explain that clearly. For example, like if you're a machine learning person, right? Those machine learning people, you know, can get paid 750 to a million dollars a year to stay at Google. And instead, they won't go to a startup because they take sort of the bird in the hand. Right? You multiply that by 100 or 150,000 very talented, you know, technical people, and that's actually what you're seeing every day. Now, those numbers are actually much higher. You know, if you're, if you're a specific AI person, you can get paid five, 10 million dollars a year. My point is.

• 23:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They could have started a startup and made 500 million. They, they, look, let's be honest, they go to Google, Facebook and whatever. And I don't think anybody sees the real value of what they're doing in those places except getting paid. Now, they're making a rational economic decision for themselves, and so nobody should blame them for that. But if startups had more access to those people, or if, you know, those engineers finally said, you know what, enough's enough, I'm actually going to go and try something new, that's net additive to the ecosystem, it's net additive to startups, right? Right. That's, that's for them. And then for consumers, I think the reason why it's positive is that it'll start to show you. In which cases you had been giving away something that you didn't realize was either valuable

• 24:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  or you didn't realize you were giving away in return for all of these product subsidies that you were getting. And I think that's the next big thing that's happening. You can see it in the enormous amount of investment Apple, for example, is making in both advertising, the push to privacy, as well as implementing the push to privacy. You know, this last WWDC, you know, they really threw the gauntlet down. You know, they were really trying to blow up the advertising business models of Google and Facebook. And as consumers become more aware of that, they're probably willing to pay more. So a simple example is, you know, there are a lot of people now who will pay higher prices for food if they know it to be

• 24:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  organic, right? There are people who will pay higher prices for electricity or for an electric car because of its impact or the lack thereof in the climate. So it's not to say that people always want cheaper, faster, better.

• 25:05Jason Calacanis?

  Right. I mean, sometimes people will buy an iPhone because it's obviously protecting their privacy and they know it's not an ad-based model. And in fact, Apple is now making that part of their process. So Friedberg, I asked the other gentleman if they thought some large unit being chopped off of every company, YouTube, AWS, Instagram, you pick it, would be a net positive for startups or negative or neutral and the same thing for consumers? What do you think?

• 25:32David Friedberg?

  Which gentleman did you ask? You mean Zach?

• 25:35Jason Calacanis?

  I was specifically referring to the ones who are wearing higher.

• 25:38David Friedberg?

  Hello, sir.

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm using the term lightly.

• 25:43David Friedberg?

  So if you guys go back a few years ago, you'll remember there were these, I think there were congressional hearings and Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp was pretty vocal about how Google was redirecting search engine traffic to their own kind of reviews and they were pulling Yelp content off the site. But then they said to Yelp, if you don't want us to pull your content, you can turn the web crawler toggle off and we won't crawl your site. But your site is publicly available. We can crawl it and we show snippets on our homepage. But then their argument was, well, you're using our content. To drive your own reviews and they made this whole kind of case that Google's kind of monopoly in search was harming their ability to do business. You know, the counter argument was, well, if you guys have a great service, consumers will go to

• 26:28David Friedberg?

  your app directly or your website directly to get reviews. They won't go to Google. And so it created a little bit of this kind of noise for a while. I think there was some follow up and this is all very much related because ultimately, if he was able to get Google to stop providing a review service, his business would do better. Because Google would effectively redirect search traffic to his site as opposed to their own internal site. So it is inevitably the case that in-house apps or in-house services that compete with third-party services when you're a platform business are, you know, if they're removed, it's certainly going to benefit the competitive landscape, which is typically startups. You know, imagine if Apple didn't have Apple Maps pre-installed on the iPhone.

• 27:13David Friedberg?

  Everyone would download and use Google Maps, right? Or yeah, MapQuest, whatever. Or MapQuest or whatever. And so, you know, or whatever startup came along like Waze and said, hey, we've got a better map. But because they have this ability to kind of put that Apple Maps in front of you as a consumer and it's a default on your phone, you're more likely to just click on it and start using it and you're done. It certainly opens up this window, but I think the question is what's ultimately best for the consumer? If you believe that consumers will choose what's best for themselves, you're starting to kind of manipulate with the market a bit. And so I don't know, I think you've got a different point of view on this, but.

• 27:48David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, I'm a free markets type of guy, but my experience at PayPal really changed my thinking on this because PayPal was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the eBay market. At that time eBay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead market for online payments. So we launched on top of eBay. They were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from their platform. And really, the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was was an antitrust thread. We actually spun up, you could call it a lobbying operation where we would send information to the FTC and the DOJ and say, listen, you've got this auction monopoly here that's taking anti-competitive

• 28:33David Sacks?

  actions. Against us, this little startup. And, you know, and so we were able to rattle the saber and sort of brush them back from the plate from taking a, you know, a much more dramatic action against us. And frankly, we did something kind of similar with Visa Mastercard because PayPal was essentially an application on top of Visa Mastercard as well. We offered merchants the ability to accept Visa Mastercard, but also PayPal payments, which were gradually eating into and supplanting the credit card payments. And so, you know, Visa Mastercard had a very dim view of PayPal and they were constantly, you know, they were constantly making noise about switching us off.

• 29:14David Sacks?

  And I do think that without the threat of antitrust hanging over these big monopolies or duopolies, it would have been very hard for us as a startup to get the access to these networks that we needed. And so it really kind of changed my thinking about it because, you know, if you let these giant monopolies run wild, run amok, they will absolutely stifle innovation.

• 29:40Jason Calacanis?

  100%.

• 29:41David Sacks?

  They will become gatekeepers. And so you have to have the threat of antitrust action hanging over their heads or you will stifle innovation.

• 29:50Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. I mean, if you just look at the interest in Google Flights over time, I'm looking at a chart right now, we'll put it into the notes. Google Flights, you know, I know some of us don't fly commercial anymore, but you know, for somebody who's looking for flights on a regular basis, watching Google intercept flight information, put up Google Flights, and it's an awesome product. And just Expedia and bookings.com have collapsed.

• 30:15David Friedberg?

  So Jason, that was a company called ITA Software based out of Boston and ITA was acquired by Google. ITA was the search engine behind Flight Search for most companies. It was like 70 PhDs, they were all statistics guys, and they basically built this logistical model that identified, you know, flights and pricing and all this sort of stuff.

• 30:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. So that should never have been allowed.

• 30:36David Friedberg?

  Well, they created a white label search capability that they then provided and they were making plenty of money providing this as a white label search capability to Expedia. Media and kayak and all the online travel agencies. And Google wanted to be in that business because travel search was obviously such a big vertical. And rather than just buy a travel search site, they bought the engine that powers travel search for most of the other sites.

• 30:59Jason Calacanis?

  So gangster.

• 31:00David Friedberg?

  And then they also revealed the results in their own search result homepage. Uh, which effectively cut off the OTAs and the OTAs are big spenders on Google ads. So.

• 31:10Jason Calacanis?

  So basically, Google, this is how nefarious it is. If I'm hearing what you're saying, Friedberg correctly. They watched all this money being made by those OTAs. They watched where they got their data from, then they bought their data source and then they decided, you know what? We won't take your cost per click money. We'll just take your entire business.

• 31:28David Friedberg?

  Well, I don't know. So, so let me just, let me just say it another way. What's best for consumers? So does a consumer, because what happens a lot in.

• 31:35Jason Calacanis?

  Benevolent dictatorships, I guess, that don't want to make money.

• 31:38David Friedberg?

  In online advertising, there are a lot of these ad arbitrage businesses is one way to think about it. Where, um, you know, a service provider will pay for ads on Google to get traffic. The ads will come to their site and then they will either make money on ads or, you know, kind of sell that consumer off in another way. Right. And so that's effectively what the OTAs were is they were, they became.

• 31:59Jason Calacanis?

  Intermediaries.

• 32:00David Friedberg?

  Online search engine intermediaries that were arbitraging Google's ad costs versus what they could get paid for the consumer. And so Google looked at this and they're like, wait a second, we're only capturing half the pie. And consumers don't want to have to click through three websites to buy a flight or buy a hotel. And by the way, if they did, they would keep doing it. So why don't we just give them the end result right up front? And then consumers will be happier, the less time they have to spend clicking through sites and looking at other shitty ads, the happier they'll be. And the product just works incredibly well. Consumers love it.

• 32:27Jason Calacanis?

  So make consumers' lives less arduous while building a power base that then could make their lives miserable.

• 32:34David Sacks?

  I'll say. What I think Lina Khan is saying though, is you can't just look at the short-term interests of consumers. You gotta look at their long-term interests. What's in the long-term interest of consumers is to have competition. In the short-term, these giant monopolies can engage in predatory pricing to lower the cost for consumers. And so just looking at the price on a short-term basis isn't enough.

• 32:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And they can trick people to giving them something else that they don't know to be valuable. So in the case of these. You know, a lot of these companies, what are they doing? They're tricking them to get enormous amounts of user information.

• 33:07David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 33:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Personal information, user-generated content, and they get nothing for it.

• 33:13David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 33:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then on the back of that, if you're able to build a trillion, look at, look at the value that YouTube has generated. Economic value, and then try to figure out how much of that value is really shared with the creator community inside of YouTube. I'm guessing it's less than 50 basis points.

• 33:29David Friedberg?

  Well, 55, they get 55% of revenue.

• 33:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 33:32David Friedberg?

  But you're saying downstream with all that data, Google's making a massive amount of money.

• 33:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just wanted to. If you, if you impute the value of all of the PII that Google basically gets.

• 33:42David Friedberg?

  Explain PII.

• 33:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Personally identifiable information, all the cookies that they drop, all that information, and you equate it to an economic enterprise value, not necessarily even yearly revenue. Like a discounted cash flow over 20 years, you would be in the trillions and trillions of dollars. And then if you discounted the same 20 years of revenue share that they give to their content producers, it will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars at best. And so you're talking about an enormous trade-off where Google basically has built, you know, a multi-trillion dollar asset and has leaked away less than 10 or 15% of the value. But that's an example where they are giving people something that they think is valuable.

• 34:25David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 34:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But in return, they're able to build something much, much more valuable.

• 34:28David Friedberg?

  All right. Well, hold on, I just want to address like Sax's point, which is the regulators are now going to start to think about the long-term interest of consumer over the short-term interest of the consumer. As effectively giving the regulatory throttle to elected officials. And this means that you're now giving another throttle, right? Another controlled joystick to, to folks that may not necessarily come from business, that may not necessarily have the, the appropriate background, and that may have their own kind of political incentives and motivations to make decisions about what is right and what is wrong for consumers over the long term. And ultimately, those are going to be value judgments, right? There's no determinism here. There's.

• 35:11David Friedberg?

  No right or wrong. They're going to be decisions based on the kind of opinion and nuance of some elected people. And so it is a very dangerous and kind of slippery slope to end up in this world where the judgment of some regulator about what's best for consumers long term versus the cold, hard facts, oh, prices went up, prices didn't, you know, but really saying, well, this could affect you in the future in this way, starts to become kind of a really, you know, scary and slippery slope if we kind of embrace this new regulatory order.

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right, moving on, big news this week. Apple had a gag order, it has been revealed.

• 35:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is unbelievable.

• 35:47Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty crazy. And we only have partial information here, but the Justice Department subpoenaed Apple in February of 2018 about an account that belonged to Donald McGahn, who obviously was the Trump's White House Counsel at the time, and obviously was part of the campaign. He is very famously known for being interviewed by Mueller and at that this is the time period, by the way, we're talking about here in February of 2018, when Mueller was investigating Manafort, who of course was super corrupt and went to jail and then was subsequently pardoned. Because he was also involved in the campaign in 2016, it's possible that this related to Mueller, it's unknown at this time.

• 36:29Jason Calacanis?

  Many other folks were also caught up in this dragnet. Rod Rosenstein was his second. And it's unclear if the FBI agents were investigating whether McGahn was the leaker or not. Trump had previously ordered McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mueller, which McGahn refused and threatened to resign. And McGahn later revealed that he had in fact leaked his resignation threat to the Washington Post. According to the Times disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting White House Counsel, which they kept secret for years, is extraordinary. Go ahead, Sax.

• 37:05David Sacks?

  Well, I just think you just got all the facts out here. I think you're missing some of the key facts. So the Justice Department under Trump starts this investigation into leaks of classified information. They're on a mole hunt effectively. And they start making, they subpoena the

• 37:21David Sacks?

  DOJ subpoenas records from Apple and it goes very broad and they end up subpoenaing the records, not just of McGahn, who's the White House counsel, which is very bizarre and curious that they'd be investigating their own White House counsel. But they also, uh,

• 37:35Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it was a leaky ship, Sax.

• 37:37David Sacks?

  Yes, but they're all, they also subpoena records of Adam Schiff and Swalwell and members of the House Intelligence Committee. And so you have now, um, an accusation which is being breathlessly reported on CNN and MSNBC that here you had the Trump administration investigating its political enemies and using the subpoena power of the DOJ with Apple's compliance to now spy on their political enemies. That, that,

• 38:05Jason Calacanis?

  Those are some big jumps. Those are some big jumps.

• 38:07David Sacks?

  Setup.

• 38:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, and that, those are some big jumps because, um, according to Preet Bharara and some other folks who are in the industry, um, who, who have done these actual subpoenas, they could have been subpoenaing, you know, one of Manafort's, you know, corrupt, you know, uh, partners in crime. And then those people, he could have been talking to many people in the Trump administration and then subsequently family members and others. So he might've not been the target. He could have been caught up in the metadata of other people.

• 38:34David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 38:34Jason Calacanis?

  So this might not be Trump saying, get me his iPhone records. It could be there's some dirty person. They know they're dirty and that person had reached out to other people and they might've even done one more hop from it. Schmott, thoughts?

• 38:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, to, okay, that's one version.

• 38:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 38:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, you know, the other, the other version, which is important is you subpoena your own lawyer by going to Apple, getting basically God knows what data associated with this man's account. And then, you know, institute a gag order on that company so that they can neither tell the person until now, when the gag order expired, nor tell anybody else, nor have any recourse to the extent that they think that this is illegitimate. That to me smells really fishy. And so, you know, like, there are other mechanisms that that we know of, like FISA request and other things that these big companies have to deal with all the time. This, at least the way that it's written and how it's been reported, is something outside of the pale.

• 39:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I think you have to deal with it with this question of like, what the hell was going on over there? Yeah. It does seem like they were going, uh, I mean, you know, kindly maybe mole hunting, more nefariously witch hunting. Um, but they were trying to pin it on people and they may have used this blanket sort of deniable plausibility of the Russia, you know, imbroglio. But really what these guys were doing was they were investigating anybody that they thought was a threat. And that is a really scary thing to have in a democracy. And then the fact that these big tech companies basically just turned it over and didn't have any recourse to protect the user or to inform the public. Forget Trump for a second.

• 40:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we don't necessarily want that to be the precedent that holds going forward.

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And the interesting thing here is that Sacks, Jeff Sessions, Rosenstein and Barr all say they're unaware of this. So what would be the charitable reason they were unaware of it? Or what would be the nefarious reason? Or is that important at all? Because that's really strange. Well, they would go after the White House counsel and Adam Schiff and those top three people would have no idea? Are they lying?

• 40:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, what's next is the, you know, are we going to basically go to a point where like, you know, every single, every, no, but I mean, like, every single post that one makes on Facebook is basically surveilled. Um, if you make an anonymous post on Twitter, will you be tracked down? I remember like, as much as everybody thinks there's anonymity on the internet, there really isn't. And you should just completely assume.

• 41:10Jason Calacanis?

  That you are trackable, are being tracked, have been tracked, everything is in the wide open. It's just a matter of whether it's disclosed to you or not, or whether it's brought back to you or not.

• 41:19David Sacks?

  So yeah, so look, I mean, I agree with Jamal that this stinks and it's it's an invasion of people's civil liberties, but I would not make it too partisan because the Obama administration was engaging in similar activity back in 2013. And I don't think people realize this. There's an old saying in Washington that the real scandal is what's legal. And the fact of the matter is that what the Trump administration did was certainly suspicious, and it might have been politically motivated. We don't know. But it was legal. The DOJ convened a federal grand jury, got these got these subpoenas, presented them to Apple and got this information. And in a similar way, back in 2013, the Obama administration

• 42:01David Sacks?

  did something similar. It's quite extraordinary. They subpoenaed the records of the AP. They for they for two months, they got the records of reporters and five branches of the AP and all their mobile records, and they were on a mole hunt to try and find leakers of classified information. So the Trump administration basically did exactly what the Obama administration did. The only new wrinkle is that they not only went after reporters, they actually subpoenaed records of members.

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  You're missing one huge, you're missing, you're missing one huge difference. Trump was under investigation for espionage and treason at the time. So it is slightly different.

• 42:42David Sacks?

  I don't think it's that different in the sense that Trump used powers that were pioneered by the Obama administration. They just took them. They just took them.

• 42:51Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and in addition to that, Sacks, in addition to that, when Obama did it, all the top brass at the Department of Justice were aware of this. And in this case, you have three people who are running the Department of Justice, all claiming they don't know.

• 43:04David Sacks?

  No, in 2013, there's a New York Times article on this. I'm going to post on the in the show notes. But it said that when, first of all, the AP was not informed about the subpoenas until a number of months later. So it was a secret seizure of records. Same thing here with the gag order. And so you have people being investigated that don't even know they're being investigated, investigated, they can't even get a lawyer spun up to oppose the invasion of their rights.

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  I agree with you, but the Attorney General knew about that.

• 43:36David Sacks?

  Maybe the Attorney General did, but the White House claims that it didn't know. So in any event, I mean, look, what we, I, my view on this is that we shouldn't try to make this too partisan. What we have here is an opportunity to hopefully get some bipartisan legislation to fix the issue. And I think the fix should be this, that when you investigate somebody, when you subpoena records from a big tech company, you have to notify them. You should not be able to do that secretly because the fact of the matter is that Apple and these other big tech companies don't have an incentive to oppose the subpoena. They're not your lawyer. And actually Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, had a great op ed in the Washington Post that we should post, that we should put in the show notes, where he said these

• 44:19David Sacks?

  secret gag orders must stop. He said that in the old way of the government subpoenaing records is that you would have essentially offline records. You'd have a file cabinet and the government would come with a search warrant that present the search warrant to you and then you could get a lawyer to oppose it. Well, they don't do that anymore because your records aren't in a file cabinet somewhere. They're in the cloud. And so now they don't even go to the person who's being investigated. They just go to a big tech company, seize the records and then put a gag order on top of it. So you don't even know you're being investigated. That's the part of it that stinks.

• 44:50Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, it's even more pernicious than that, Sacks, because to combine this with the previous story, what incentive does Apple have to say to an administration that could break them up, we're not going to cooperate?

• 45:04David Sacks?

  Of course.

• 45:05Jason Calacanis?

  Zero.

• 45:06David Sacks?

  Zero incentive. They are not your agent in this. And here's the thing, those are your records. They're in the cloud, but they're your records. And every other private context, we say those records belong to you, not to big tech. So why?

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is why Apple's moving everything to your phone.

• 45:21David Sacks?

  Right. But just to finish this point, why should the government be able to do an end run around you, the target of the investigation, go to big tech, get your records from?

• 45:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because they're not your records. Well, first of all, they're not your records. These companies tricked all of us by giving it to us for free so that we gave them all of our content. They are not just the, they are not just the custodian, they are the trustee of our content. And it's a huge distinction in what they're allowed to do. And Jason brings up an incredible point, which is, which is that of course they're now incentivized to have a backdoor and live under a gag order because their, their defense in a back room is you guys, you know, when, when in the light, Somebody says we should break you up. In the dark, they can say, guys, come on. We got a backdoor. You just come in, gag order us, give us, we'll give you what you want. You want a honeypot?

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't want this thing all over the internet? And can you imagine how credible, David, that is to your point? Because that is a body of concentrating power that I think is very scary.

• 46:25Jason Calacanis?

  In fairness to Apple, Friedberg, they have locked down the phone and they've moved all of this information from the cloud, or they're starting this process and saying, we're going to keep some amounts of data encrypted on your phone. And of course, with the San Bernardino shooting, they refused, in a terrorist shooting, a known terrorist shooting, to not give a backdoor.

• 46:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, that's a crazy standard. It's like, you know what? Okay, there was a San Bernardino shooter and they were like, nope, sorry, that's a bridge too far. But, you know, Don McGahn and basically like, you know, political espionage, they're like, here you go. I don't know. I don't know. How do you make these decisions?

• 47:00David Friedberg?

  Let me ask you guys a question.

• 47:03Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead, Friedberg.

• 47:03David Friedberg?

  Would you be, could you see yourself thriving in a world where all of your information was completely publicly available? But also all of everyone else's information was completely publicly available?

• 47:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 47:21Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, everybody has all their nudes on the web, is what you're saying?

• 47:24David Friedberg?

  Everyone has. There's a, there's a, there's a book by Stephen Baxter called The Light of Other Days. It's one of my favorite sci-fi books. I sent it out to all of my investors this last, we do like a book thing every year. And I reread it recently, but the whole point of the book is that there's like a wormhole technology that they discover and they can figure out how to like look in, you can boot up your computer and look in anywhere and see anything and hear anything you want. And so all of a sudden, society has to transform under this kind of new regime of hyper transparency, where all information about everything is completely available. But I think the fear and the concern that we innately have with respect to loss of privacy is that there's a centralized or controlled power that has that information.

• 48:09David Friedberg?

  But what if there was a world that you evolved to where all of that information is generally available? Quite broadly, and I'm not advocating for this, by the way, I'm just pointing out that like, the sensitivity we have is about our information being concentrated in the hands of either a government or a business. And I think you have to kind of accept the fact that more information is being generated about each of us every day than was being generated by us a few weeks ago, or months ago, or years ago.

• 48:35Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, everybody, everybody's the Truman, and everybody's the Truman Show is what you're saying.

• 48:40David Friedberg?

  Well, in a geometrically growing way, information which we're calling PII or whatever is being generated about us. And I think the genie's out of the bottle. Meaning like the, the, the cost of sensors, the access to digital, the digital age and what it brings to us from a benefit perspective, is creating information about us and a footprint about us that I don't think we ever kind of contemplated, but as that happens, the question is where does that information go? Can you put that genie back in the bottle? And I think there's a, there's a big philosophical point, which is like, if you try and put the genie back in the bottle, you're really just trying to fight, information wants to be free, information wants to grow.

• 49:15Jason Calacanis?

  What's the name of the book you were talking about there?

• 49:17David Friedberg?

  The Light of Other Days by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke helped write it, but the, the book is most interesting about the philosophical implications of a world where all information is completely freely available. And any, anyone, yeah, completely transparent. And so like, do we see ourselves, because I think there's two paths. One is you fight this and you fight it and you fight it every which way, which is I want my PII locked up. I don't want anyone having access to it. Yada, yada, yada. You'll either see a diminishment of services or you'll see.

• 49:43Jason Calacanis?

  And the other one is you do a selfie on Twitter where you take your shirt off?

• 49:46David Friedberg?

  Or, or you'll see this concentration of power where we all kind of freak out where the government or, or some business has all of our information. The other path is a path that society starts to recognize that this information's out there. There's, you know, whatever.

• 49:59David Sacks?

  It's, it's not just about PII here. This is about due process. This is about our Fifth Amendment right to due process. You have the government secretly investigating people. They could never do this if they had to present you with a search warrant. They are doing an, an run around that process by going to Big Tech. Just to put some numbers on this, Big Tech is getting something like 400 subpoenas a week for people's records. They only oppose 4% of them. Why? They have no incentive to oppose them.

• 50:26Jason Calacanis?

  How many of those are, do you know how many of those are secret or not?

• 50:31David Sacks?

  We don't know how many of them have a gag order. They are required to tell the target what happened, but not if there's a gag order attached to it. We don't know how many have a gag order. You should have the right to send your own lawyer to oppose the request, not to depend on big tech for it.

• 50:46Jason Calacanis?

  If you want to see an amazing movie, The Lives of Others, which is about the State Security Service in East Berlin, Germany, also known as the Stasi, and the impact of literally in your apartment building, there are three people spying on the other 10 people. And they're the postman and, you know, the housewife and the teacher, and they're all tapped and secretly recording to each other. It leads to chaos and bad feelings. And obviously, when East Berlin, when the wall came down, all of this came out and it was really dark and crazy.

• 51:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, let me connect this to the censorship issue, actually, because in my view, they're both very similar civil liberties issues, which is, in the case of the censorship issue, you have the government doing an end run around the First Amendment by demanding that big tech companies engage in censorship that the government itself could not do. You have something very similar taking place here with these records. The government is demanding secrecy about its seizure of records. They're imposing that on big tech. They're making big tech do its dirty work for them. They could never do that directly if they had to go to the target of the investigation and ask for their and subpoena the records that way. So what you have here is a case where we not only need to be protected against

• 52:00David Sacks?

  the power of big tech, we need to be protected against the power of government usurping the powers of big tech to engage in, you know, behavior they couldn't otherwise engage in.

• 52:11Jason Calacanis?

  And let's be honest, big tech and the government are overlapping and in cahoots. Or they're in some, yeah, they're in some really crazy dance. The money is flowing freely from lobbyists and

• 52:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a very, very complicated relationship.

• 52:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's a very complicated

• 52:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's a very complicated relationship.

• 52:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Seven day average for COVID deaths is now at 332. Finding cases of people who have had COVID is now becoming like almost shocking. I don't know if you guys saw, but the point guard, Chris Paul, who is having an incredibly winning season in the NBA, he basically got COVID. They said he was vaccinated, so it could be a mild case, but he's been pulled out indefinitely, and he's about to play in the Western Conference Finals, so it's pretty crazy. And Friedberg, obviously California's opened up after 15 months, and we were the first to shut down, the last to open up, and we were hit the least, I think, of any state, or amongst the least of any, certainly the least of any large state.

• 53:16Jason Calacanis?

  And you're being asked to still wear a mask at your office.

• 53:22David Friedberg?

  I'm also being asked to take off my shoes when I get on an airplane.

• 53:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 53:26David Friedberg?

  20 years later, and I don't think Al Qaeda exists anymore.

• 53:31Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, yeah, maybe some, yeah, parts of it. Explain what's happening to you in the Presidio, which is a lovely state park here in California.

• 53:40David Friedberg?

  My office in the Presidio in California, San Francisco County, and the federal government have all removed mask mandates, but our landlord has determined in their judgment that everyone should still wear a mask to go to work. And so to go into my rented office and work, I have to wear a mask. And I think it's, it's an issue for a lot of people who, like, those are people that, I've been probably at a couple of restaurants this week, and you know, you go to some restaurants and everyone's just chilling, the employees are not wearing masks. There's other restaurants where they're being told they have to keep wearing masks by their manager or their boss. And so this brings up this big question, which is like, we've now got the kind of psychic shadow of COVID

• 54:25David Friedberg?

  that's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna cast a very long shadow.

• 54:27Jason Calacanis?

  You predicted it, you predicted it.

• 54:29David Friedberg?

  And, and so people that are in power want to continue to kind of impress upon, you know, whatever, you know, employees or tenants or what have you they might have in whatever they deem their judgment to be, which is obviously, in many cases, an under-informed, uninformed, non-scientific, and, and non-mandated judgment about effectively what people should have to wear. So if the threat or the risk has been removed, and all of the health officials and all of the government agencies are saying the threat has been removed, you no longer need to kind of wear masks, but your boss or your manager or your Landlord tells you, you have to wear a mask to conduct your business or to go to work. You know, it's going to bring up this whole series of challenges and questions I foresee

• 55:13David Friedberg?

  for the next couple of months at least, and maybe for several years about what's fair and what's right. And there will always be the safety argument to be made on the other side. So it's very hard to argue against that. And, oh, well, the inconvenience is just a mask. It's not a big deal. But for, you know, a number of people to now kind of be told, you know, what to do and what to wear.

• 55:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It'll take a year to sort all these things out because they'll all get prosecuted, not prosecuted, but litigated. And they're going to go to court.

• 55:37David Friedberg?

  They will get litigated for sure. There will, there will be lawsuits on this.

• 55:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, and what's going to happen is that you're going to basically have, again, Jason, back to that example of the bakery in Colorado. Private institutions will be allowed some level of independence in establishing, you know, certain.

• 55:54David Friedberg?

  Employee guidelines and so on.

• 55:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly. And you, you'll have to conform to those. And it is what it is. I mean, I.

• 56:02Jason Calacanis?

  It was very strange in Austin in terms of these COVID dead enders who just will not let it go. I'm in Austin where nobody is wearing a mask. And then there were like, I went into Lululemon and they, like two people charged me with masks in hands. And they were like, you have to wear a mask. And I was like, do I? And they're like, yes, it's our policy. I was like, fine, I'll put it on. I don't care. You know, no big deal.

• 56:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This thing, this thing has really fried a bunch of people's brains. I mean.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy.

• 56:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's, it's basically like you've taken an entire group of folks.

• 56:37David Friedberg?

  And kidnapped them.

• 56:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And kidnapped them essentially.

• 56:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's Stockholm syndrome.

• 56:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's incredible.

• 56:41David Friedberg?

  No, everyone's been held, everyone's been held hostage, you know, in a prison for the last year. And so you've kind of accepted that this is the new reality. I gotta wear a mask. I gotta wear gloves. And, you know, it's the similar sort of shift in reality that I think was needed going into this, where people didn't believe what it was. And now it's hard for them to believe what it's become.

• 57:03David Sacks?

  Well, we we we flagged this.

• 57:04David Friedberg?

  That's just human nature. Yeah.

• 57:05David Sacks?

  Yeah, we we flagged on this pod a few months ago, the threat of zeroism.

• 57:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:10David Sacks?

  Which is that we wouldn't let, you know, all the special rules and restrictions lift until there were zero cases of COVID. And we all know that's never going to happen. COVID will always be around in the background. And just to add a layer to what's happening here in California is, yeah, on June 15th, we lifted the restrictions. But Governor Newsom has not given up his emergency powers and he's, he says he will keep them until COVID has been extinguished. So he's now embraced zeroism on behalf of the sort of authoritarianism.

• 57:41David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:41David Sacks?

  And, you know, so we've got this like Golden State Caesar. And now I, what's interesting is I don't think this is just because he's a tyrant, although he's certainly been heavy handed. I think it's because that the, I think it's more about corruption than ideology because federal funds, emergency funds from the federal government keep flowing to the state as long as we have a state of emergency. And so the longer he keeps this thing going, the more money he gets from the federal government that he can then use in this recall year to pay people off. And so we've already seen he's been buying every vote he can, right? He gave 600 bucks to everyone making under 75,000.

• 58:20David Sacks?

  He's forgiving all the traffic fines and parking tickets. He's doing this, this lottery ticket thing for getting the vaccine. And so he just wants to keep the, the gravy train from Washington. Going to California, even though we have a surplus.

• 58:35David Friedberg?

  It's what government, Governor Chamath would have done.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it reminds me of 9/11 where people were just like, hey, we can keep this gravy train.

• 58:44David Friedberg?

  No, I mean, like 9/11 is the perfect kind of psychic, you know, scenario of, you know, replaying itself with COVID. There are behavioral changes that have lasted forever. There are regulatory changes. This, you know, Department of Homeland Security. I mean, you go through the amount of money that gets spent by the TSA every year. And the qualified risk and the qualified benefit completely unquantified, right? Like the amount of money that flows into these programs because you can make the, the subjective statement, there is a. Threat, there is risk, therefore spend infinite amounts of money, right? Like it's because because you never kind of put pen to paper and say, what is the risk? What is the probability? What is the severity of loss? And therefore, let's make a value judgment about how much we should spend to protect against that downside. And we're now doing the same thing with COVID.

• 59:29David Friedberg?

  We're not having a conversation about how many cases, how many, what's the risk? Should we really still be spending billions of dollars of state funding to continue to protect a state where 70% of people are vaccinated?

• 59:40Jason Calacanis?

  And we and we have a massive surplus and we're still giving people money who may or may not need it, and we're doing it indiscriminately. Speaking of discussions and hard topics and being able to have them, YouTube, which kicked off a ton of people on the platform for talking about things that were not approved by the WHO, has taken Professor Brett Weinstein's podcast down because he had a very reasonable discussion about ivermectin and its efficacy or lack of efficacy. This is a doctor, a PhD, talking to an MD. And the video was removed. Apple did not remove this episode.

• 1:00:17David Sacks?

  These people should not be the gatekeepers of the truth. They have no idea what the truth is. Let's talk about the the Jon Stewart appearance on Stephen Colbert.

• 1:00:24Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I was about to dovetail this with, which is

• 1:00:27David Sacks?

  Yeah, he killed. He killed on Stephen Colbert, but the things he was saying about the lab leak would not have been allowed on YouTube.

• 1:00:33Jason Calacanis?

  If it was three months ago that you would have been removed for it, even as a comedian, the performance was amazing. He basically says, you know, the Wuhan COVID lab is where the Wuhan, you know.

• 1:00:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, the disease is named after the lab. So where do you think it came from? Was like a panel in, you know, mated with a bat? I mean, this is and he goes on this whole diatribe. It's incredibly funny.

• 1:01:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:01:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then at the end of it, well, I had two takeaways. I don't know if you guys felt this. At first I was like. Ah, Jon Stewart's a little unhinged here. Like, I mean, there was a part of it that was funny. And then there was a part of it, which is like, wow, Jon Stewart's been trapped indoors a little

• 1:01:13Jason Calacanis?

  For fifteen months. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I thought that as well, to be honest. But then the second thing, which I saw on Twitter, was all these people reminding anybody who saw the tweet that this exact content would have not been allowed on big tech platforms were it said three or six months ago. And I was like, wow, this is, this is really nuts. Meaning it takes a left-leaning, smart, funny comedian to say something that if the, if the right, if the right would have said, it would have just been instantly banished. And that's like, that's kind of crazy.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, his, the great quote was, I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science.

• 1:01:59David Sacks?

  Yeah, it was, it was a funny line where he said something like, if there was an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

• 1:02:05Jason Calacanis?

  Hershey, Pennsylvania.

• 1:02:06David Sacks?

  It wouldn't be because, you know, whatever, the pangolin kissed a bat. It's because there's a fucking chocolate factory there.

• 1:02:12Jason Calacanis?

  Like, I don't know, maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean.

• 1:02:20David Sacks?

  He was so funny. He's so, he's so funny. So I agree with Thomas' takeaways. I mean, this was a great example of censorship run amok at these big tech companies. But the other thing I saw that was really interesting was Stephen Colbert lose control of his audience. And, you know, Stewart killed on that show, but you could see Stephen Colbert was, I think, visibly nervous.

• 1:02:42Jason Calacanis?

  Very uncomfortable. Yeah.

• 1:02:43David Sacks?

  Very uncomfortable. He did not know what was coming. And he was trying to, and when, when Jon Stewart kept pushing this, he was like, well, uh, he kept trying to qualify. Well, so what you're saying is now that Fauci has said this might be a possibility, you're saying it might be a possibility. And Jon Stewart was having none of it. He ran right over that, said, no, the name is the same. It's obvious. Come on. And

• 1:03:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Colbert kept challenging him. I don't know if you saw this part where he said, hey, listen, is it possible that they have a lab in Wuhan to study the coronavirus disease? Because Wuhan, there are a lot of novel coronavirus diseases because there's a big bat population. And then Stewart is like, no, I'm not standing for that. He goes, I totally understand. It's the local specialty and it's the only place to find bats. You won't find bats anywhere else. Oh, wait, Austin, Texas has thousands of them fly out of a cave every night at dusk. And he wouldn't let it go. So it's just great watching.

• 1:03:31David Sacks?

  It was, it was a reminder frankly, of how funny both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were about 15 years ago. And I frankly, I don't think Stephen Colbert is funny anymore because.

• 1:03:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because he's gotta keep his job.

• 1:03:44David Sacks?

  He's carrying water.

• 1:03:45Jason Calacanis?

  He's also too woke and, and yeah.

• 1:03:47David Sacks?

  Yes, he's become very polemical. And, and what Stuart reminded us is that comedy is funny when it's making fun of the people who are pretentious and basically who aren't telling the truth. And Stephen Colbert has become so polemical that he's lost sight of the comedy. And Jon Stewart brought it back. And I hope he brings Stephen Colbert back.

• 1:04:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Colbert, Colbert had this element of satire, which even Stuart, because Stuart was in your face funny. Whereas Colbert was like subtle and dry and you had to think about it. There was layered. And he's totally lost it. Totally, totally lost it.

• 1:04:23Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if, you know.

• 1:04:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then, and then, and then, and then I thought Stuart came out swinging hard. I do think though, it sucks. You have to agree. Did it seem to you though, like Stuart had not, like he just needed more human to human interaction?

• 1:04:34Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. He was a caged tiger, man. He was a caged tiger. They let him out.

• 1:04:39David Friedberg?

  He was like Jekyll going to off.

• 1:04:40Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. This is what I went on the world tour.

• 1:04:43David Sacks?

  But it was the funniest thing Jon Stewart's done in many years. And, and the reason is because he connected with the fact that here is this obvious thing that we're not allowed to say. And that is what comics should be doing.

• 1:04:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. Put a light on it. I mean, if comedy is tragedy plus time, I think that this is a great moment for us to reflect on. Like, I think we're going to go back to normal pretty quick. If you remember after nine 11, there was this idea that comedy was over forever. You were not going to be able to make fun of things and that this was the end of satire. People were, this is, you know, a bridge too far, et cetera. And I think we're back. We're back and that's it. You know, we can joke about the coronavirus. We can talk about it. We don't need to censor people for having an opinion. We're all adults here. You know, the idea that, you know, we have to take down people's tweets because they have some crazy theory.

• 1:05:38Jason Calacanis?

  Or put a label on them like we went a little crazy during the pandemic. Um, and tried to stifle discussions for what reason? Exactly like when we look back on this, it's going to look really strange that we demanded that we put labels on people questioning or having a debate, including doctors. Doctors were not allowed to debate to the public on YouTube or Twitter about. Uh, what was the drug that Trump kept promoting?

• 1:06:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hydroxychloroquine.

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  Chloroquine. Like, remember that whole chloroquine? I think this, uh, ivermectin or whatever it is, is just triggering people because it feels like that last drug, which is a drug that may or may not work to slow down the progression of COVID. But anyway, this is all over. If you haven't gotten your goddamn vaccine, please get it.

• 1:06:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stop denying science.

• 1:06:28Jason Calacanis?

  Stop denying science.

• 1:06:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And climate change, climate change is not real.

• 1:06:31David Sacks?

  And remember.

• 1:06:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God, the YouTube just canceled our account. Jamal, what are you doing? You can't say that.

• 1:06:39David Sacks?

  Science, we, we talk about science as if science is a definitive answer to a question.

• 1:06:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's a process.

• 1:06:46David Sacks?

  A process by which you come to answers, you test them. And look, hydroxychloroquine may have been completely wrong, but let the debate happen. The answers came out anyway.

• 1:06:56David Friedberg?

  I'll tell you a fundamental premise of science is to challenge assumptions. And so when you challenge, um, uh, an existing hypothesis or, uh, kind of an existing thing that we hold to be true, you are engaging in science and the rigorous debate around what works and what doesn't work was notably absent over the past year because everything became about the political truth. You're either true or you're false based on your political orientation. And we reduced everything down to kind of this one dimensional.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  Identity politics.

• 1:07:24David Friedberg?

  This one dimensional framework, which we have a tendency to do.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  Party politics.

• 1:07:26David Friedberg?

  Let me just point this out to you guys. I was going to mention this a few weeks ago, but like, think about every conversation you have, how, um, common it is now to immediately think about what the person on the other side that you're talking to just said, and then trying to put them on a blue or red spectrum. It's how we've all kind of been reprogrammed over the past decade or so, where it used to be about the topic itself and the objective truth finding, or the specifics of what we're talking about. And now it's become about you immediately try and resolve them to being conservative, or not, red or blue, Trump or not.

• 1:08:03Jason Calacanis?

  Purple.

• 1:08:04David Friedberg?

  And so every conversation, you kind of try and orient around that simple, ridiculous, one dimensional framework. And it's a complete loss of the discovery of objective truth in all matters in life, and all matters that affect all of us. And it's really quite stark and sad.

• 1:08:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is why we need a new political party, the Reason Party.

• 1:08:25David Friedberg?

  I think it's less about that. I think it's more about everyone just reorienting themselves. When you have a conversation, just notice yourself doing it. And then recognize that maybe that's not the way to make a decision about the conversation, or about having an opinion or a point of view. But have an opinion or a point of view about the topic itself, not about the orientation of the topic on a single dimensional spectrum.

• 1:08:45Jason Calacanis?

  And then layer identity politics into that. So not only your politics, but your gender, your race, your sexual preference, the color of your skin. And now, how is anybody supposed to have a reasonable argument when I have to process, like, oh, Chamath from Sri Lanka, but he went through Canada and he worked for, I mean,

• 1:09:04David Friedberg?

  Well, it's so reductive that no one gets, it's so reductive that no one gets to have an identity anymore, right? Because we are all complex, and all issues are complex. And they are all nuanced. And when you reduce everything down to kind of this one dimensional framework, you lose any ability to have depth, to have nuance, to have.

• 1:09:21Jason Calacanis?

  Said another way, the issues are complex enough, we don't have to put identity politics or political leanings on top of it. All right, so we had the worst fire season in California ever last year. Obviously, as Chamath said, global warming is a conspiracy by the Chinese, as per your guy Trump, Sacks. And what's happening here with this fire?

• 1:09:44David Friedberg?

  There is climate change in Switzerland. There is a center called the Center for Climate Change. There is a reason that there's climate change in Switzerland. It's coming from that lab.

• 1:09:53Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, the center did it. The center did it. Look at the sign. Look at the sign. It says climate change on the building. They're getting paid to propagate this conspiracy theory. Yeah. Uh, all right. So it's, it's gonna be the worst ever, isn't it?

• 1:10:06David Friedberg?

  We, well, we are at risk more than ever, right? So we're entering June. So as of June 1st, the California snowpack is down to 0% of normal. That's never happened before. So it's the lowest it's ever been. There, there is absolutely like no snowpack in the entire Sierra, in the entire state. 40% of the state is in a state of extreme drought right now. We've had 16,000 acres burn as of a few weeks ago, up from 3,600 during the same time period, the same day of the year last year. Um, and so the, the tinder is there. Now remember, uh, last year was the highest, um, uh, California's ever seen. We, we burnt 4 million acres, uh, last year. California has about 33 million acres of farmland, of forest land, representing about a third of our total land size in the state.

• 1:10:51David Friedberg?

  Um, you know, 60% of that land is federal, 40% is private. Um, and so the, the, the big kind of variable drivers this year are gonna be, um, you know, uh, wind and, and heat, and we're already seeing a few heat waves. But it's the wind that kind of kicks these things off. But the tinder is there, right? So like the state is dry. Um, the, uh, the, the, the, the snowpack is gone. We're on severe water restrictions in a lot of counties throughout the state. Um, it, it's worth, I think, talking about the carbon effect. You know, last year, um, based on the forests that burnt in California, uh, we released about one and a half times as much carbon into the atmosphere from our forest fires as we did from, uh, cars burning fossil fuels in the state. Um, and so.

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:11:37David Friedberg?

  So here's some statistics for you guys, which I think are just worth highlighting. Um, there's about 2 billion metric tons of carbon stored in California forest land, which is about 60 tons per acre. Um, so there's.

• 1:11:50David Friedberg?

  About nine million new tons of carbon sequestered in California by our forest land per year. When there's a fire, we release about 10 tons per acre, so about 1/6 of the carbon in that forest land. The rest of the carbon doesn't burn up. So remember, when there's a forest fire, typically the outside of the tree burns, the whole thing doesn't burn to ash. And so a forest fire can actually, if you look at the longitudinal kind of effect of it, burning forests can actually preserve the carbon sequestration activity versus just removing forests or removing trees. And so there is, to some extent, an effort that has been shut down several times, which is to do these kind

• 1:12:33David Friedberg?

  of controlled burns through the state. But it's met with such resistance, given that it's so controversial, no one wants to have smoke in their neighborhood.

• 1:12:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It shouldn't be controversial. The problem is you can't present simple data and have people have a logical conversation about it.

• 1:12:46David Friedberg?

  And the cost per acre to clear land and forest land in California, it ranges, depending on the complexity of the land, but it's somewhere between $50 and $1,000. So call it a couple hundred dollars per acre. So you can very quickly do the math on a carbon credit basis, Chamath. So it's about 40 bucks per ton for carbon credit today. So you're actually, you can preserve about $400 per ton by not putting carbon into the atmosphere. And if you can actually manage forest land clearance and forest land preservation from fire at a cost of $400 or less, and there was an active carbon credit market, you should be able to cover the cost of managing that forest land back. But we're at incredibly high risk this year. It doesn't mean that we're necessarily going to have

• 1:13:29David Friedberg?

  a fire, because weather is the key driver. The weather is highly variable.

• 1:13:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wind. We need wind.

• 1:13:33David Friedberg?

  We need wind. And we need a heat wave with wind, and then there will be fires.

• 1:13:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then what do they do when the wind kicks up right now? The electric company turns off power.

• 1:13:42Jason Calacanis?

  In California because they don't want to be blamed when a power line goes down and starts a fire. So we have these regular moments where we just lose power.

• 1:13:52David Friedberg?

  Yeah, this is not just a California problem. I know everyone wants to beat up on California, but like the whole Western US, go look at Google Maps, you'll see how much green stuff there is on Google Maps. It's green up and down the western half of the US.

• 1:14:02Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, was Trump right that raking up the forests, to put it in layman's terms or simple terms, is an actual thing that helps?

• 1:14:12David Friedberg?

  60% of forest land in California is federal land. And it was the federal government's responsibility to manage that that cost down, to manage that risk down. What is the incentive? What is the motivation? You know, what are the key drivers?

• 1:14:25Jason Calacanis?

  So obviously, it does work to clear it out.

• 1:14:28David Friedberg?

  It theoretically, when you reduce the amount of tinder, you will reduce the risk of a burn, right? And so the cost, but the cost of doing so, as we mentioned, is probably a couple hundred dollars per acre. And so who's going to, let's say you want to do that on 5 million acres, you know?

• 1:14:41Jason Calacanis?

  Wouldn't this create a bunch of jobs? Oh, wait, we're paying people to stay home. Yeah, like, it would create a ton of jobs. I mean, I hate to be like that guy, but like, could we create a bunch of $35 an hour jobs for people?

• 1:14:53David Sacks?

  I've heard scuttlebutt that Newsom is so worried about fire season that they're going to try and accelerate the recall election so it happens before. There is, you know, the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom.

• 1:15:04David Friedberg?

  Chomsky would do that, too.

• 1:15:05Jason Calacanis?

  He's so smart. No, if Chomsky did it, it would be strategic.

• 1:15:09David Sacks?

  Well, the conventional wisdom, the conventional wisdom was that you'd want to wait as long as possible to do the recall because the longer you wait, the longer you get the rebound of the economy from COVID, right? But now they're talking about accelerating it to beat fire season because it's looking really bad. And Friedberg's right that we needed much more aggressive forest management. It's not just climate change, it's also forest management. We don't do it in California anymore. And so I think we are in for a really hellish fire season. That's my prediction.

• 1:15:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're going to have a terrible, we're going to have a terrible fire season. There's going to be brownouts, probably throughout a lot of the western states. What played out in Texas that affected folks a few months ago, I think will, some version of that will happen in many places in the US. This is, and it's all roughly avoidable. And the critical principal act this year is the progressive left. They need to marry.

• 1:16:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Their disdain for climate change and their disdain for the things that need to happen to prevent it. Because right now, these two things for them are just like it's cataclysmically not possible for us to agree on, for example, as Friedberg says, a controlled burn program as a mechanism of sort of like fighting climate change, or, you know, investing more in the

• 1:16:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the greenification of the economy so that we can actually eliminate the use of a lot of these non-sustainable energy sources. All these things basically just come down to a group of individuals deciding that they can both have an opinion on something as important as climate change, but then are also willing to then go and act. Right now, they won't. Until they do, it's just going to spill over everywhere. It's going to be a very bad fire season. And the only reason I know that it is, is that every year before it has been, every single year has gotten warmer. It's not getting better.

• 1:17:11David Friedberg?

  Yes. By the way, let me just correct a statistic I said, because the statistic I gave was a few weeks ago. But as of today, we were actually at the average, the historical average in terms of number of acres that are burnt in California, as we have seen historically. I will also say that, you know, close to one-sixth of California's forest land burnt last year. So there is a tremendous amount of tinder that has been removed from the risk equation. And we typically burn about a million acres a year. I think we burnt like four million, a little over four million last year. So, you know, as you look at the cumulative kind of reduction of burnable acres, we're actually, the good thing that's going on is we're actually at a lower risk scenario going

• 1:17:54David Friedberg?

  into this year in terms of total amount of tinder. The risk of the tinder catching is higher because it's drier. But when you add this all up, there's certainly a high probability of a bad fire season. But there could be a scenario here where we end up with less than a million acres again.

• 1:18:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Zero scenario that's going to happen. NASA publishes temperature studies. They do measured measurements of how Much warming there is in the earth. Last year, we set yet another record. It was the seventh year in a row where it was warmer than all the previous successive years. It's just going in the same place. I mean, and so if we're all of a sudden supposed to bet that a trend that has effectively been reliable for the last decade is going to turn. I'm not sure that that's a bet you'd want to make. Or that the winds is not going to blow.

• 1:18:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's a stupid bet. There's no reason to make that bet. I mean, this is like betting on a one outer.

• 1:18:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need, we need, we need the left to take control of this issue and solve it.

• 1:18:52David Sacks?

  Get ready for Martian skies over California.

• 1:18:57Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I literally, I'm thinking about an escape plan from California. And I'm putting a generator in this month. I bought six new air filters, you know, like beautiful.

• 1:19:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's not, that's not good enough.

• 1:19:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I have, my house is totally sealed and I have the air purifiers in, I have a built in air purifier for the house and I have six portable ones in each bedroom. Are you coming back in August?

• 1:19:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, in, at the end of August. But by the way, let me, let me tell you where it really, the rubber meets the road. Uh, just again, I'm speaking to the progressive left. They care apparently so much about minorities. I just want to make sure you guys understand that, you know, air quality disproportionately affects minorities. Why? Because we, or not, not me anymore, but you know, minorities are the ones that typically live near industrial output, near transportation throughways and thoroughfares. It is, it is statistically proven that blacks, brown, other minority people are the worst people to suffer from respiratory diseases and airborne illnesses.

• 1:20:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And these are things that are, that are happening today. So again, I want to go back to the same group of individuals who apparently believe in climate change, but don't believe in nuclear. They don't believe in controlled burns. They believe in inequality, but they don't want to do what's necessary to regulate emission. What are we doing, guys?

• 1:20:20Jason Calacanis?

  Just at some point.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Do the job.

• 1:20:22Jason Calacanis?

  Do the job.

• 1:20:22Speaker 04

  I think.

• 1:20:22Jason Calacanis?

  Do your fucking job.

• 1:20:25David Sacks?

  What you're saying is correct, Chamath, but I think it's a sad statement about the progressive left that the only way to reach them through an argument is to argue for that there's disparate impact on a minority. The reality is.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  How many affects all Americans?

• 1:20:35David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. It's it's bad.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  Red pill me. Give me those red pills. Come on. Come on, Sack, you're holding out on me.

• 1:20:42David Sacks?

  No, but but Chamath.

• 1:20:43Speaker 04

  Chop them up.

• 1:20:43David Sacks?

  But Chamath understands that audience. He is making the argument they're going to respond to. But the argument that they and everyone should be responding to is.

• 1:20:51Speaker 04

  Humanity.

• 1:20:52David Sacks?

  Air quality is bad for everybody.

• 1:20:54Speaker 04

  The planet, all humans.

• 1:20:56David Sacks?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:56David Friedberg?

  What are you guys going to do for fire season? Do you actually? I'm thinking about renting a house. Like, I rented a house in Chicago in Lake Michigan last year, and I went there, and it was a great escape for a month to get away from fire season.

• 1:21:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't I don't. I'm very scared to be in California during all of this, to be completely honest with you. I don't just want to be there.

• 1:21:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm out. I'm going to try to figure out some solution.

• 1:21:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Come back in late of August, and hopefully, everything is calmed down by then. Although it won't, because it gets very, very hot at the end of August.

• 1:21:19David Friedberg?

  September was the heart of it. It's typically the heart of it.

• 1:21:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was the heart of it.

• 1:21:24David Friedberg?

  Jake, how do you think you're going to go to Miami or Austin or something?

• 1:21:27Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I I I went back to Austin for a wedding and I met the governor. And.

• 1:21:36David Friedberg?

  Don't care.

• 1:21:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You went sweating and you met Greg Abbott?

• 1:21:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, beep. You gotta beep that out. You went to sweating about the governor, yes. And going to Austin in 2021 is like when I would come to San Francisco and go to the Battery in 2003 and Sack, 2013, and Sack would say, why don't you live here? There's so much going on in San Francisco. Come to San Francisco. And I did. And I got the last five years of the peak. But Austin, very appealing to me. And then I've been looking at beach houses in Miami and.

• 1:22:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm 50% of the way there, folks.

• 1:22:15David Sacks?

  Oh, my God. I mean, the fact that you can now buy a beach house. I mean,

• 1:22:21David Sacks?

  God bless America.

• 1:22:23Jason Calacanis?

  America. 71 three year average. I had a 71 three year average in high school. I had 1150 on my Sacks and I'm going to buy a beach house.

• 1:22:33David Sacks?

  And I forgot that I convinced you to move up to San Francisco. Yet another way in which I have

• 1:22:38Jason Calacanis?

  Contributed to the monster.

• 1:22:39David Sacks?

  Your career towards success.

• 1:22:41Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Okay, I'm going to use call in every day. Call in syndicates underway. Everything's

• 1:22:48David Sacks?

  You wouldn't even be a VC if it wasn't for me. You'd still be a media figure.

• 1:22:51Jason Calacanis?

  That's right. I'd be doing conference producing. You and Naval really pushed me towards it. And then special thank you to you and Chamath, Bill Lee, for anchoring and Dave Goldberg.

• 1:23:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We love you, Jake Al.

• 1:23:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, you know what? I mean, I tweeted the other day, at the end of the day, you know, our lives are a collection, when we look back on them, of memories with our friends. And, you know, I include family and friends. And this podcast, not to get all gushy and whatever, has been a delight over the, you know, really hard pandemic that's now ending. And it's, I just, I'm really happy that we get to spend this time every week together. Every week, I get, you know, a little bit of excitement, like I used to get when we go, you'd host poker, Sacks or Chamath. You know, those days when we'd have a poker game, Sky Dayton would tell me, and you know, I get a little tingly feeling, like, oh, my God, I'm going to see my friends tonight and play poker and laugh. And, you know, we got that amazing note

• 1:23:45Jason Calacanis?

  from the woman who said she was really having a hard time during the pandemic and that the podcast, all them podcasts really helped her. And, you know,

• 1:23:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Shout out to Sam. Thanks for that note.

• 1:23:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Sam, that really made our week. So shout out to Sam.

• 1:23:56David Sacks?

  That was amazing.

• 1:23:58Jason Calacanis?

  Long way of saying, I love you, Sacks.

• 1:24:00David Sacks?

  Well, Jake Al, you are the Stephen Colbert to my Jon Stewart.

• 1:24:06Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's the opposite. I think it's the opposite.

• 1:24:09David Sacks?

  I have to come, I have to come on your show and red pill you and make sure that you're, you're saying the truth and not getting too wrapped up in your Trump derangement syndrome or whatever.

• 1:24:18Jason Calacanis?

  At the end of the day, you know, we, we are, I think, all of us working through complex issues to Freeburger. I really loved your contribution today about how complex these issues are and layering more complexity onto them of our identities, our wealth, you know, our histories, immigrants, not whatever, politics. These issues are so hard and in some ways also so easy with technology and world-class execution that the world needs to have more reasonable conversations. And I think that what we've demonstrated here is that four friends can have reasonable discussions and laugh about life and enjoy life. And that should be for everybody listening.

• 1:24:58David Sacks?

  That's what Sam said in her note to us, which was very heartwarming. So, thank you. Yeah, that was great.

• 1:25:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:25:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you, guys.

• 1:25:04Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, Sax.

• 1:25:05David Sacks?

  Back at you.

• 1:25:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Back at you, guys.

• 1:25:08Jason Calacanis?

  Back at you. Jesus fucking Gasper, guys. It's a brutal.

• 1:25:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Must download new directions to escape forest fires. Love, love program active.

• 1:25:19Jason Calacanis?

  Love, L O V E, querying dictionary, a feeling of affection for another entity or human, like I like, playing video games till 2 a.m. and my dog. Can I say it to another adult?

• 1:25:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Very similar to coding or problem solving using my computer and my HP 17B.

• 1:25:41Jason Calacanis?

  Subroutine overheating, must play chess with Peter Thiel and stop saying I love you to J. C.

• 1:25:47David Sacks?

  They keep saying it. Stop saying it. I never said it.

• 1:25:52Jason Calacanis?

  It's overloading.

• 1:25:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My shirt was so expensive, but yet so thin. I put on yet another shirt.

• 1:25:59Jason Calacanis?

  My stylist said I had to pump it up for the pod. I'm looking, because I've gained 15 pounds, I need to make up for it with a $1,200 silk shirt.

• 1:26:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do I look with four collars? Four, you say? No, it's more two, but also two chins.

• 1:26:12Jason Calacanis?

  Do these two collars make up for my double chin?

• 1:26:15David Sacks?

  Two shirts are better than one.

• 1:26:17Jason Calacanis?

  Two shirts are better than one.

• 1:26:19David Sacks?

  Why? Oh, it's twice as good.

• 1:26:26Speaker 05

  Sax is adding shirts, Tommaso's ruining it. I'll see you all next time on the podcast. Bye bye. Love you guys.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:26:38Speaker 05

  Rain Man David Sax.

• 1:26:42Speaker 05

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I'm the queen of Kinoah.

• 1:26:55Speaker 05

  Besties are gone.

• 1:26:58Speaker 05

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:27:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, man.

• 1:27:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big Hugh Georgie because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  What your the be. What your be. What your feet. Be. What? We need to get merch.