E45: Theranos & VC fraud risks, China bans video games, Texas SB8, Apple app store, CA fires, Rogan

Show Notes: 00:00 Besties recap, it's Chamath's Birthday, Callin app 08:58 What should protocol be for conferences & live events? 12:58 Fake it before you make it, the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos trial & implications for fraud in VC 31:28 China's video game ban, is it a good move? 39:34 Texas Senate Bill 8, allowing suing for aiding an abetting abortion 55:09 Apple alters their payment policies 1:03:06 Fires continue in CA, $1T of homes can't be insured & the impacts on real estate values 1:12:48 Joe Rogan & the narratives woven by the media & consumers Download Callin: https://www.callin.com Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: Elizabeth Holmes Trial https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/technology/elizabeth-holmes-trial-jury.html China Bans Video Games https://www.reuters.com/world/china/oh-thats-an-idea-us-parents-respond-china-screen-time-ban-2021-08-31/ Texas SB8 https://fortune.com/2021/09/02/texas-abortion-law-business-backlash-match-group-bumble-sb8/ Apple Modifies App Store Developer Payment Policy https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-allow-spotify-other-media-apps-to-link-to-websites-for-payment-options-11630544101 Joe Rogan Covid https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/business/joe-rogan-covid-19.html #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?

  Hold on, let's see if we get Sax on line.

• 0:04Jason Calacanis?

  Alright guys, I guess Sax isn't, I guess Sax is blowing it off because he's too busy with his app.

• 0:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay Sax, no, fuck Sax.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  We'll start without Sax. Okay. Three, two.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome to the All In Podcast. With us today, the queen of Kinwa on fire in California, which is also happens to be on fire sadly. Uh, and the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. Uh, David Sax will not be joining us today. He's too busy with his All In app. Oh, I'm sorry. It's actually Callin. He put a C in front of it.

• 0:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, no. It's Callin, Callin.

• 0:56Jason Calacanis?

  Callin, his Callin app, which has debuted this week. Um, but Sax will be, uh, if you're a Sax stan, I think Sax is, uh...

• 1:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we've done one show without Friedberg, now we're doing one without Sax.

• 1:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this will be the Sax-free episode.

• 1:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It is what it is.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  Sax-free episode, alright. So, we got a lot on the...

• 1:13David Sacks?

  I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look who joined!

• 1:19David Sacks?

  All too eager to take credit for Callin on Twitter, so don't pretend like you're not part of it now.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  The All-In app? Oh, I'm sorry, I meant Callin app.

• 1:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh no.

• 1:27Jason Calacanis?

  The All-In app? This guy creates some...

• 1:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I hope Callin is worth a trillion dollars.

• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I can't believe it. This guy is complaining that I'm leveraging the pod.

• 1:35David Friedberg?

  You should have done an Adam Human-style licensing of the term "All-In" to Sax and gotten paid like $7 million in equity for him using our name.

• 1:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my god.

• 1:43David Sacks?

  I gave you guys so many shout-outs, you know, during the whole promotion.

• 1:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, he did, because I listened to his, uh, interview with, uh, Emily Chang, and I listened to his thing with, um, Axios with Dan Primack.

• 1:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, did he?

• 1:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's very, David had a very good, uh...

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  He was magnanimous?

• 2:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Presentation, and then he was really magnanimous and kind, so thanks SaxiPoop.

• 2:05David Sacks?

  And I, and I gave so much credit to J Cal. I said that if it wasn't for J Cal, I never would have done this whole podcasting thing, because it was too hard. I never would have figured it out.

• 2:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then you gave me a shout out because like of organizing it so that we could all be friends on uh I like that. I appreciate that.

• 2:19Jason Calacanis?

  Very nice. I have, I actually haven't listened to it, but give us a, for those who don't know, David Sacks has created a podcasting slash casual audio app. It's called Call In. It's available for download for iOS. Uh, just coming out of private beta. I, my understanding is, uh, you're at somewhere around 10,000, uh, folks?

• 2:37David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of signups yesterday. I haven't got all the latest numbers yet, but um, but yeah, no, it's, it's, you know, it's taking off. The, all the reviews of it have been sort of rave reviews. People are really excited about it.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 2:50David Sacks?

  But yeah, look, the concept is we're combining social audio with podcasting. We call it social podcasting. You've seen these apps where people create a room and they have these many, too many conversations. They tend to be ephemeral. No one really records or saves them and the quality of the conversation is, it's a little bit chaotic, but we've taken that concept and put it in the service of creators who can now essentially like record their pod in front of a live studio audience. They can bring up the, uh, we call them callers. They can bring up people from the audience one by one to ask their questions. It's much more organized and structured. It's not a free for all to try and grab the mic. And then once you record the episode, you can then go into post-production in the app, can edit the transcript in order to

• 3:34David Sacks?

  edit the episode and then you publish it and you can share it. So.

• 3:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it like, so it's basically like OnlyFans but audio?

• 3:41Jason Calacanis?

  It's OnlyFans, but for people who don't look good on camera.

• 3:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At the end or no?

• 3:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh!

• 3:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Family show, come on!

• 3:50David Sacks?

  I do. I, I do when this becomes a unicorn.

• 3:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh no!

• 3:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Play it is all getting cut, cut, cut, cut. No, not delete. It's my birthday today, god damn it.

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Happy birthday Chamath. We're going around the horn here. Everybody's patting themselves on the back. Uh, let's all take a moment to say what we like about Chamath. Okay, great. Let's get back to the episode. That was quick.

• 4:12David Sacks?

  What do you, you know, I was thinking about, uh, you know, what birthday present do I get for Chamath? And then I was like, gee, what do you get for the dictator who has everything? I don't, I don't know.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  What does Kim Jong Un need?

• 4:26David Friedberg?

  Hey guys, wait a second, just.

• 4:27Jason Calacanis?

  What did they get MBS for his birthday?

• 4:30David Friedberg?

  Hey, we don't.

• 4:31David Sacks?

  Well, actually, I'll tell you.

• 4:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wine, very rare wine, very rare wine.

• 4:35David Sacks?

  No, actually, there's actually an answer to that question. Apparently Madeline Albright once got Kim Jong Un a basketball signed by Michael Jordan for his birthday. So apparently that is, yeah, apparently that's what you get a dictator.

• 4:48Jason Calacanis?

  Access, you get them access to people they wouldn't normally have, or a bone saw.

• 4:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A very, very, very old, uh, French burgundy. Ideally white, but the white doesn't hold up as well. But, you know, if you go back, I mean, I wonder if you could drink like, yesterday I had the two, the two fills, Deutsch and Muth at my house and we had, uh, we drank 1996 Salon Claude de Meznil, no, sorry, 1997 Salon Claude de Meznil, and then we drank a bottle of 1996 Paul Roger Sir Winston Churchill champagne. Fabulous. Only champagne last night, it's fabulous.

• 5:24Jason Calacanis?

  We could also get you some Planonium, uh, Planonium if you want to, uh.

• 5:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, guys, guys, I don't need anything.

• 5:29Jason Calacanis?

  You want to take out some enemies?

• 5:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would like you to come and play poker next Thursday, you fuckers. And then, too, let's just bring a bottle of, uh, bring a really nice bottle of wine or champagne. We'll drink it together.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  That's fine.

• 5:39David Friedberg?

  Oh my God, I got cases of terrible wine. I'm gonna bring them.

• 5:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you asshole, this, did you hear what this fucker did?

• 5:44Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 5:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This fucking asshole shows up, this piece of shit showed up last week and he's like, Chamath, here are these fantastic bottles. And I looked at this, like, 1985 Camus. And I'm like, that's not a good year. I've never.

• 5:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right in the, right in the garbage. Right in the garbage.

• 6:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It gets better, it gets better. He has two bottles and so he gives them to Joshua and Joshua looks at them and Joshua doesn't know what to think and he looks at me and I'm like, just like, you know, ah, and so Joshua's like, wow, David, thanks Friedberg, this is incredible, I appreciate it. And then Friedberg does the fucking most brutal thing. Open it, open it, let's just.

• 6:18Jason Calacanis?

  And Josh was so appalled, he opened it and poured it on Chamath's car keys.

• 6:22David Friedberg?

  I threw it out.

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  He took it right to the herb garden.

• 6:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, he said, where did you find this? He goes, oh, it was in my basement in the hot, temperate, humid, fucking San Francisco weather for 10 years.

• 6:33David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I had no idea. So I moved, you know, I moved like two weeks ago and I went to the basement to like get all my boxes. And I'm like, I've got like hundreds of bottles of wine that I have not seen in years. And I started going through these.

• 6:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Not temperature controlled.

• 6:45Jason Calacanis?

  Right next to the furnace.

• 6:46David Friedberg?

  They weren't lying flat. I'm like, these things are all like, they're all coral.

• 6:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're all, they're all coral.

• 6:50David Friedberg?

  And there's like stuff from the eighties, from the nineties. Yeah.

• 6:53Jason Calacanis?

  Somiye Josh took them and poured them over the arugula salad.

• 6:56David Friedberg?

  He didn't want to ruin the arugula.

• 6:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, he didn't ruin the arugula. It would ruin the fucking vegetables and herbs in the garden.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  He, he basically cleaned.

• 7:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pour them in the drain.

• 7:04Jason Calacanis?

  He poured them on Chamath's windshield.

• 7:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do not bring any more wine to my house.

• 7:08Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 7:09David Friedberg?

  I'm bringing wine for your dog. If your dog's coming back with Nat, we've got wine.

• 7:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My dogs are coming back today. Yeah, they're flying back from.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  All I have to say about that game is thank God Mr. Beast has 100 million followers on YouTube. Ooh, rest, R I P Mr. Beast.

• 7:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 7:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, by the way, I want to say.

• 7:25David Friedberg?

  I gotta give a shout out.

• 7:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mr. Beast is fucking incredible. I mean.

• 7:27David Friedberg?

  He's a great.

• 7:28Jason Calacanis?

  What a great human.

• 7:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What an incredible entrepreneur. What a great human being.

• 7:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Um, I have, I mean, for 23 years old to be that sophisticated.

• 7:35Jason Calacanis?

  He's 23?

• 7:37David Friedberg?

  23.

• 7:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This guy.

• 7:38Jason Calacanis?

  I thought he was 30.

• 7:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This guy's clearly on track to being an enormous figure in culture. Oh, he's going to be a fucking multi, multi billionaire.

• 7:46David Friedberg?

  He is, he is determined, hardworking, smart, kind, good to people.

• 7:51Jason Calacanis?

  Ambitious, clever.

• 7:52David Friedberg?

  Ambitious.

• 7:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing.

• 7:53David Friedberg?

  Great. And his ideas, he's creative and he's just a good human. I really enjoy the time with him.

• 7:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mr. Beast was one of the most impressive people I have met in a really, really, really long time.

• 8:01David Friedberg?

  Totally agree.

• 8:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, he and I had been texting for a long time on Twitter and then, and then just on text. But then to finally meet him and we had talked on the phone and we had zoomed before. I'd never met him in prison, but what an incredible human being.

• 8:13Jason Calacanis?

  Why don't we have him as the bestie guestie on the pod?

• 8:15David Friedberg?

  He totally like, he totally fit in with the group too. He was great, just funny.

• 8:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know what we should do is we should all round every bit up. We should fly to, uh, to Greenville and we should surprise him. Yeah.

• 8:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Do a little game at his warehouse. Now, here's an idea. No, we could do is we could tweak Phil Hellmuth and just have a game and replace Phil in the game with him as our new bestie.

• 8:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God, that's great. Let's replace, let's replace the mute.

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  Who replaced the mute with Mr. Beast.

• 8:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  With Mr. Beast.

• 8:41Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of like a better bestie in many ways. Okay, listen.

• 8:44David Friedberg?

  By the way, are we skipping next week to record at the symposium on Monday? Or are we going to do next week and then also do Monday?

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  No, double down.

• 8:52David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 8:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Double down.

• 8:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's keep it double down. All right, listen. We have a lot of shit to cover.

• 8:56David Friedberg?

  Good, good notification. We're doing our first all together recording of the all in pod a week from Monday. At the, at the TPB symposium, no reason to.

• 9:06Jason Calacanis?

  The production board.

• 9:07David Friedberg?

  The production board, no reason to publicize it, but I'm excited because it.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's a closed event. What is the purpose of the event?

• 9:14David Friedberg?

  I just get together a bunch of scientists, investors, entrepreneurs and CEOs and um, it's, it's a day of science talks mostly, and then some business talks on the next day. But we're having a really fun event the night before with poker. Our friends are all coming to play poker and we're gonna record.

• 9:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm coming for the science day. I'm there for the full.

• 9:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah, you're gonna love it.

• 9:30Jason Calacanis?

  I'm staying for the science day too. I want to learn. Uh, so.

• 9:33David Friedberg?

  But the poker, the poker night's gonna have poker and, and we're gonna record the all in pod live or, or together in person for the first time.

• 9:39Jason Calacanis?

  First time. Yeah, that should be really cool. Um, and for those of you wondering, you know, we're going to do our own all in summit, which will be probably like a hundred or 200 iconoclastic people. Uh, and we're gonna probably do that in the first quarter or second quarter of next year, uh, post pandemic.

• 9:56David Sacks?

  We gotta choose a date. You know, my people are going crazy because you won't give them a date.

• 10:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you guys were.

• 10:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should do it in, uh.

• 10:02Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 10:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In Rome. Okay, so.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

  The dictator wants Italy, Rome. Sax wants Miami.

• 10:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm telling you guys, they're hotel Lucy, maybe the sickest hotel in the world, and I'll tell you why. The people you have never seen. These people.

• 10:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. It's are amazing.

• 10:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Amazing.

• 10:22Jason Calacanis?

  Tremendous people in Rome.

• 10:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They are. But it attracts the hottest people. I mean, it's fucking crazy.

• 10:28Jason Calacanis?

  We're not doing it based on aesthetics. We're doing it on ideas, Chamath. It's not just aesthetics. Wherever you want.

• 10:33David Sacks?

  People aren't gonna go to Rome, you know, Miami, the good thing about Miami is we know it'll be open no matter what, right? You know, we can't count on.

• 10:40Jason Calacanis?

  We can host our own super spreader event. Fantastic. No, I mean, we're host the the code conference, Kara Swisher's conference is at the end of the month and Sky and Brooke and I are hosting our poker again. And I was like, is there any way this conference is going to occur? And if it does occur, what happens if they're, I mean, obviously, everybody's going to be vaxxed, everybody's going to be masked, I don't know if they're going to do testing.

• 11:03David Sacks?

  Right. You think everyone should be masked at the conference?

• 11:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They're going to be unless it's outside.

• 11:08Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're going to be because it's indoors and there's a breakout event amongst the vaccinated, which can happen.

• 11:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Between Delta and Zeta 2, you're you're going to be forced.

• 11:18Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think, Sax?

• 11:19David Sacks?

  Well, I just think, how do you effectively have a meeting with people whenever indoors, when everyone's wearing a mask? I just think that's, and I mean, there's so much.

• 11:27David Friedberg?

  We're doing that at the TPB Symposium.

• 11:29David Sacks?

  Really?

• 11:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, you have to wear a mask?

• 11:31David Friedberg?

  Indoors, not during the dinner and stuff. Look, I mean, I think for poker, but we are testing everyone on entry all three days.

• 11:38David Sacks?

  Okay, that that makes sense to me, right? We do a rapid test at the door. And so, but then, once you've done the test and someone's negative, why would you need a mask once you go in?

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I don't know about doing test at code every day.

• 11:48David Sacks?

  The stupidest thing is, they do stuff like make you wear the mask, but then take it off for dinner. Like, what? You can't get COVID when your mouth is full? I mean, how does that work?

• 11:58David Friedberg?

  It makes no sense. That's the whole.

• 11:59David Sacks?

  It makes no sense.

• 12:00David Friedberg?

  Put your mask on.

• 12:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's do risk assessment here.

• 12:02David Friedberg?

  And then take it off when you sit down three feet away.

• 12:03David Sacks?

  It's it's it's security theater.

• 12:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's do it. Let's do risk assessment. None of us would go to an indoor event if it wasn't fully vaxxed, correct? Would anybody attend an indoor event of this nature, hundreds of people, if they didn't have a vax requirement? I wouldn't.

• 12:18David Friedberg?

  Yes. I don't.

• 12:19Jason Calacanis?

  You would.

• 12:20David Friedberg?

  I well, I mean, what I would care about is, I wouldn't attend it if people weren't all being tested on entrance.

• 12:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, I'm trying to do just on vaxing first.

• 12:28David Friedberg?

  The vax doesn't seem to eliminate transmission right now.

• 12:33Jason Calacanis?

  So for you to go to an event, you would have to be vaxxed and tested that day, morning of rapid test.

• 12:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, look, I mean, I think in general, everyone's kind of standard is like make sure vax because it reduces the likelihood of transmission, but still like it's not stopping transmission clearly. I'd rather, what I care more about is, is point of entry testing, which is what we're doing at our symposium. I just want everyone to get tested upon entry.

• 12:53Jason Calacanis?

  Shama, what would you do?

• 12:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let's talk about something important.

• 12:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. All right, listen, I think the most interesting thing going on in our industry this week is Elizabeth Holmes' trial has begun. Jury selection started this week and it's going to cover 12 counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud over false claims she made about the blood test results from Theranos. They have now selected a jury of 12 Northern California residents consisting of seven men and five women. It took two days to question around 100 potential jurors about their answers to a 28-page questionnaire that included news outlets they read, what news outlets they read, if they knew any witnesses and if they had any negative medical experiencing, experiences.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  And it was complicated to get these because it is impossible to not know about it. And now it seems the interesting thing is Elizabeth Holmes, who worked on this company for two decades, close to two decades and was involved in this fraud from start to finish, is now taking the position that she was under the control of her business partner, Sonny Bawani, and that he had been abusing her and controlling her. What are your thoughts on, and so he's being tried separately, by the way, they're going to be tried in sequential order, so whenever this trial ends, then he gets to get tried.

• 14:23Jason Calacanis?

  What are your thoughts on if she will be convicted and her defense strategy?

• 14:29David Friedberg?

  I think this is more, this is like less about the specific

• 14:35David Friedberg?

  evidence against her as much as it's, and it's much more right now about the

• 14:43David Friedberg?

  whole Silicon Valley fake it before you make it approach to entrepreneurship. And, you know, we all hear this from, you know, all the entrepreneurial kind of advisors and, you know, experience, stories of experience and stories of success that in order to kind of achieve success as an entrepreneur, you really have to oversell and promise and create an incredible narrative about where your business is headed. And in many cases that gets ahead of you. Now, the public, the general public that doesn't operate within Silicon Valley with as much breadth as we do, I think they hear the stories of the Adam Newmans and WeWork and the collapse and Elizabeth Holmes and this Trevor Milton guy and Nicola. But there's thousands of these other sorts of smaller stories where a VC rolls his eyes,

• 15:26David Friedberg?

  where the first board meeting after raising money is like, wait a second, we're actually going to be half our forecast when we raise money. Or the numbers are going to be way below, or the product doesn't actually work as we presented it to you.

• 15:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, I don't think I've ever funded a company where that hasn't been the case.

• 15:39David Friedberg?

  Exactly. And so I think that's the, that's the, the, the big question, right, Chamath? It's like, does this trail, does this trial kind of indict the way Silicon Valley operates and the storytelling models and the narrative models? There are examples of these people getting a little too far ahead of their skis. And maybe you can argue they could perceive something to be non fraudulent while other people can, you know, kind of perceive it to be fraudulent. But don't we see this kind of broadly in Silicon Valley? And doesn't this kind of bring up a question on like, are all startups now? Or is the industry going to have a shift as a result of this trial in terms of behavior as investors and as entrepreneurs? And how you tell stories, how you diligence, et cetera, et cetera?

• 16:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is, this is only going to get meaningfully worse. I don't know if Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud or not. I think that, you know, these folks will be able to

• 16:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  figure that out in detail. But here's something that I do know pretty precisely, which is the amount of money that's trying to get into Silicon Valley is going exponentially up.

• 16:36David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 16:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And as that happens, you guys now see it every Day where there are firms whose entire business now is just to literally write a check every day. They're closing deals every single day. They're doing zero diligence. And so what that's going to create is an incentive for founders, particularly those whose backs are against the wall, or who's doing something that's highly speculative and hard to diligence, to stretch the truth to get the capital. And it's impossible for guys like us to actually step in and do diligence on a lot of these companies, even if you actually have time. But then if the competitive dynamic is such that you don't even have the time, because somebody else beside you is going to write, rip in a check with, by just meeting somebody.

• 17:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And, you know, quote unquote, having done the work on their own, which is impossible because they're not, you don't have access to somebody's, you know, financial books. This problem is only going to get worse. And so I think we as an industry just have to realize that there's going to be an incentive to lie. There's going to be an incentive to stretch the truth. And it's because of the amount of money that's available and the lack of diligence that's happening.

• 17:48Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, is this an example in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, of somebody being delusional as a strength, or somebody committing fraud as a crime?

• 17:59David Sacks?

  It's probably both. Now, look, I think you guys are giving a little bit too much credence to the media narrative that Theranos is a quote unquote Silicon Valley failure. The truth of the matter is there was no major Silicon Valley VC firm, in fact, not even a minor one, that invested in Theranos, as far as I know. There was no VC on the board of Theranos. We've talked about this before. It was a bunch of kind of grand poobah types. And there was no one who actually had the technical competence to do diligence. And so Elizabeth Holmes isn't so much an example of Silicon Valley as somebody who was selling Silicon Valley. She was selling the promise of Silicon Valley. She was selling the idea that this was going to be a

• 18:41David Sacks?

  Decacor or a Centacor to people who are too unwilling to know. And I see, you know, Tim Draper, a lot of people are really hanging their hat on the fact that Tim Draper wrote a seed investment to Elizabeth Holmes. You know, that that really is very different. You know, when you write a seed investment, apparently Elizabeth Holmes was like a neighbor of his.

• 19:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, their daughters were friends, is my understanding.

• 19:02David Sacks?

  And she clearly was an impressive person, you know, she came across impressively in person. She obviously cast a pretty big reality distortion field to a lot of, you know, smart people. So, you know, she's the type of person who you would write potentially a C check to just based on, you know, a talent bet. The fact that she later chose to engage in fraud, I don't think that's like Tim Draper's fault. And it doesn't make this like a Silicon Valley fraud. Again, um, you know, show us the VC firm that was hoodwinked by this.

• 19:34Jason Calacanis?

  But you are seeing, David, this trend of the the firms coming in and not doing diligence, not having audit rights, not having information rights, not doing proper diligence, and basically relying on the previous investors.

• 19:46David Sacks?

  Right.

• 19:47Jason Calacanis?

  How troubling is that? And what are you doing to protect Kraft's LPs?

• 19:50David Sacks?

  Yeah. So, so look, I think there's a big difference between going into a board meeting and finding out the projections were inflated because like frankly, we all take projections with a grain of salt. Right. But versus the founder lying about the past, right? So people are always going to put the rosiest picture or they're going to puff up what the future is going to look like. And it's up to you as the investor to determine if that's true or not. But they cannot lie about the past. They cannot lie about what their revenue was last year, what contracts they signed before you invested. That is fraud, right? And that is what, that's where Elizabeth Holmes crossed the line. She wasn't just painting a rosy picture. Of, you know, what the technology would look like, you know, years from now, she was lying

• 20:35David Sacks?

  about their capabilities at the time people were investing. That is the line you cannot cross. Um, look, we conduct diligence. We, you know, try to look at financials. We try to make sure that the numbers are all true. Um, you know, frankly, we're not investing in things that involve a tremendous amount of technical risk, a lot of technology risk. So we always use the product before we invest. The idea that the product would be faked, I think it would be hard to perpetrate that kind of fraud with a SaaS company. But, um, so look, I mean,

• 21:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's interesting you bring that up. I just dropped a link into the Zoom chat. Co-founder and former CEO of Palo Alto-based startup technology company Headspin, charged with securities fraud and wire fraud. And, uh, this guy, Lakwani, 45, from Santa Clara County, basically was lying about their ARR in a SaaS company. And they raised a bunch of money. So this is an example of somebody- It can happen in every company. Yeah, it can happen at any- Yeah.

• 21:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  SaaS, I think, I don't think you're inoculated just because you invest in SaaS. My point is, if you have a person that's willing to rip in a check a hundred million dollars three hours after meeting you, asking for no diligence, at some point, David, your back is going to be against the wall because you're going to have to justify to your LPs why you aren't in some of these theoretically good deals, right? And some of them will become fraudulent. They'll just turn out to be. It's just the laws of distribution.

• 21:58Jason Calacanis?

  So it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma, you're saying, Shama?

• 22:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean,

• 22:02Jason Calacanis?

  You don't do, how do you, you have to get deals done, and you're up against people who won't do diligence.

• 22:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, it actually comes down to something different, which is then you have to differentiate with real brand. Meaning, if somebody really wants you on the cap table, they will absolutely slow everything down to get you. Correct? So for example, like, let's, let's assume like it's Mike Moritz, I'll use that. There is nobody in the world, I think, who's not a complete buffoon moron who wouldn't slow his process or her process down to get Mike to be on their board. And so if you're willing to basically just scuttle an entire process and just take the fastest money, I think it actually says something that there is more risk in backing somebody like you than somebody that wouldn't slow down. So, right?

• 22:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So then, you know, the problem is there's fewer, there's fewer and fewer Mike Moritzes in the world, you know? I think Saks is one of those people. I think Peter Thiel is another kind of person. You know, Bill Gurley is another kind of person. So there are these people in our industry where I think that you will slow things down and I do think allow these folks to do diligence and I think there will be less fraud in general for that cohort. But if your platform becomes one that's just about ripping money in, and I think the late stages are roughly this, they're all, it's all brand independent because the money is the same, the values are the same.

• 23:23Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, Friedberg.

• 23:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah, doesn't it introduce the risk of the retail investor? You know, we're seeing more retail participation via syndicates, you know, via, you know, one-off investments, online kind of marketplaces and also Sacks where the retail investor relies on, you know, to have some of these kind of bigger institutional or perhaps some name that gets some carried interest in an investment doing the diligence. And if the activity level is going up and the dollars are flowing in and the margin of error is increasing, you know, is there not some inevitable kind of SEC backlash and consideration around how are private companies ultimately raising money and how much they are disclosing?

• 24:08David Friedberg?

  And we kind of face this, you know, regulatory threat.

• 24:11Jason Calacanis?

  I can address this as a syndicate lead. You know, we only take accredited investor money at this time. And so anything that happens is with obviously sophisticated people, the top 4% of Americans investing in companies. And in our diligence now, we have seen a spike in what I'll call

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, massaging uh, or painting the picture in a way that I'm not comfortable with. And we have maybe tripled the amount of time we're putting into diligence now. Because I really care about my reputation and maybe 20, 30% of the companies we wind up. After initially wanting to invest, maybe giving them an offer, getting an allocation. Uh, in recent history, 20, 30% were winding up backing out during the diligence process because. Uh, their revenue was not software based. There was a hundred thousand in consulting revenue. For me, it's like, if you're gonna, you know, make these kind of decisions early on in the company. I think it's indicative of future fraud or future um, moral ethical issues. So we're, we're sitting out in a lot of cases. There are.

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, public platforms now, Republic and Seed Invest, which I know are also increasing their. Um, diligence process because there's so many newcomers to the space. And I think there's a level, I'll be quite frank here, of entitlement amongst founders that is being. Um, let's say, uh, encouraged unintentionally by the lack of diligence that's going on. People are not taking the process as seriously as they did 10 years ago or even five years ago.

• 25:40David Sacks?

  Well, let me, yeah, look, I, I, I agree. I think that the diligence you're doing is really good. And um, here's where I agree with, with Chamath. Um, so we have seen this trend in our industry of the private equity money coming in in greater volumes, in greater, you know, earlier and earlier and faster and faster, right? And it started with, you know, you have these, um, like frankly, like public company investors were looking at the uh, the value at IPO relative to the last private round. And they saw, wow, there's like two, three X market here for one year. Those are phenomenal returns. Let's arb that by getting into the last private round. Then they look at the second to last private round. They're like, well, wait, there's a big return there. So they keep moving earlier and earlier to arb out that return.

• 26:23David Sacks?

  But to Chamath's point, it's just they're applying a financial model where they're not in the diligence business. They're just, um, and, and I think they just see like fraud as a cost of doing business, right? Something they can model out with a portfolio, but, but the only reason they can model it out. That way and have the fraud be an acceptable and predictable sort of cost of doing business is because you had these firms in our industry who actually did diligence at the seed at the series A. Right?

• 26:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 26:51David Sacks?

  And now, and now the private equity guys, they're moving so early, they're actually even now doing the, they're moving all the way to series A. So no one's doing the diligence and so, so, so that is, that is a risk, I think, because it might actually change things. And this is where bringing it back to Elizabeth Holmes, um, I think it's important here that there's a conviction. I think she should do time. This was clearly a major fraud, big time fraud. And even if she didn't directly perpetrate it on Silicon Valley VCs, I think the message to the industry would be absolutely horrible if she gets away with it. And frankly, I'm a little concerned she's going to get away with it. Um, you know, because

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  She is incredibly charismatic. John Kerry was saying on a CNBC hit that don't underestimate her charisma and ability to snow people. And the Svengali defense, and she just had a baby, which, you know, people don't want to discuss because it seems like it's sexist, but she is a Svengali herself who will manipulate people in the

• 27:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I like the way you say that.

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  She's a Svengali, like a

• 27:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you mean Svengali, but

• 27:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm talking about me in Brooklyn right now.

• 27:58David Friedberg?

  Sex, what do you handicap her likelihood of conviction at?

• 28:01David Sacks?

  I, I think it's probably like a 50 50. And I think, so, so here's, here's the thing, when she was running this company, she wanted everyone to believe she was Steve Jobs. She even did the media tour with the turtleneck. She wanted everyone to know that she was a Jobsian micromanager who made every decision was responsible for the success. Now that she's on trial, she wants us to believe that she wasn't calling the shots. She wasn't

• 28:21Jason Calacanis?

  She had 99% voting power in the company.

• 28:24David Sacks?

  Yeah, look, yes, you know, this is sort of the, the Romeo and Michelle's high school reunion defense where she wants us to suddenly believe that she was sort of like, you know, the, the sort of ingenue who didn't know anything and, um, you know, but she might get off because she kind of looks like Lisa Kudrow, you know, um,

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Wow, this is a lot of deep pulls here. You're like, wow, that's going deep. Media pot here.

• 28:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That is deep, the number of pulls there. Based on the number of pulls, I know exactly how old you are too. Romeo and Michelle's wedding Lisa Kudrow.

• 28:52David Sacks?

  No, she's, she's, she's. She's gonna go up there and pretend to be Lisa Kudrow or something, you know, like somebody who's a diva.

• 28:59Jason Calacanis?

  It, it's super offensive that she wants to get up there and say that she was this abused woman. I mean, for women who actually are abused, for her to get up there and say she's an abused woman and she perpetrated this 20 year.

• 29:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

• 29:12Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sorry.

• 29:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We don't know whether, we don't know whether she was abused or not. And if she was, it may or may not have implicated in what she did, which we don't know whether she did because again, thank God for the laws in America. She is presumed innocent. So let's, let's all just like, I think, I think what David, where I agree with you is the following, which is we do need to know that, uh, you know, investors, we all sign up for expressing the fiduciary responsibilities on behalf of our LPs or on behalf of our stakeholders. Okay. There needs to be some equivalent standard that founders are held to. And there needs to be consequences for lying, particularly about the past, because in the future you say, I'm just projecting.

• 29:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But in the past, you're right, you have to be able to rely on what's given to you. Like, look, when we do diligence in a company, we are given everything that they have, right? We talk to their lawyers, we talk to their lawyers' lawyers in some cases. In the public markets, all of this has to be transparently published so that we can come to our own conclusion. Sometimes those conclusions are right, sometimes they're wrong, but we can at least know that they're not lying to us. The minute that it turns out that they were fudging the numbers that they gave us, you, you're making, you know, the best decisions you can. You're assuming that it's great data, but if the data is fudged, you're fucked. And so to the extent that she did that, then she should be punished because we need that standard.

• 30:36Jason Calacanis?

  She, this isn't, and this goes beyond money. She was switching people's results. She was saying that she was giving them a blood result on her incredible Veronose machine. And she was running it to the back and, and running it on an Apple machine.

• 30:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is that right?

• 30:49Jason Calacanis?

  And she, so she was taking. Investors putting their blood into her machine, the Theranos machine, then taking them for coffee, running it to an Abbott machine and giving their results. I mean, this was the definition of a premeditated, deliberate and multi-year fraud. I put her at 80% likelihood of guilty and I put the over/under at 32.5 months served.

• 31:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Talking.

• 31:14Jason Calacanis?

  Served. I don't know what the.

• 31:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Take the under.

• 31:16Jason Calacanis?

  Taking the under of 32.5 months?

• 31:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll take the under.

• 31:18Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks of served, of served.

• 31:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll take the under.

• 31:21Jason Calacanis?

  What do you got?

• 31:21David Sacks?

  Well, I, I hope you're right because, uh, yeah, I mean, I'm a little worried that, uh, she's going to figure out a way to pull the rug over people's eyes here.

• 31:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What, what are our kids going to get in jail if we were Chinese right now and they played video games? How many months are they going to get?

• 31:34Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, I think you would, you would do harder time. Uh, so moving on to our next story.

• 31:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The consequences is to the Chinese internet companies.

• 31:43David Friedberg?

  No, what's the consequence to the kids if they're caught on video games?

• 31:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, you're not, you're, oh, I don't know.

• 31:47David Friedberg?

  Companies have to turn it off. Right, right, right.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  All right, here we go. China bans young people from playing video games. This is for kids who are under the age of 18. They are now restricted from playing games on weekdays, can only play for three hours most weekends. And these were set as a response to China's physical and mental health being affected by gaming, according to Reuters. Uh, it limits, um.

• 32:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think they're doing what all American parents would want, uh, our government to do for our kids.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  I, I don't disagree with that. Uh, gamers are now penalized if they don't obey and the gaming companies will be as well. Gaming companies will have to prove they have an identification system in place, like requiring monitors to use, their real names.

• 32:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Fucking hard it is. I have, I have, I have three kids in that age, age range. I am sweating who they're texting, who they're talking to, what game they're playing, the new game they want to download. Fuck that. This is the only thing I've ever said that would make me want to move to China. This one rule.

• 32:46David Sacks?

  This is.

• 32:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is the most incredible thing I've ever heard and I, and, and they're so smart. By the way, what's so beautiful is they, they send fentanyl and TikTok to us so that we get addicted to that shit.

• 32:57David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 32:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know what I'm saying? And they're like, no, you guys are going to learn STEM so that you can, you know, take over the world. It's beautiful. It's brilliant.

• 33:03David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I, I would say like everything about China is, is a measured decision, right? The, the, the politburo, the decision makers are not sitting there. randomly shooting from the hip based on intuition and saying hey I think we should stop video games they seem bad for kids there is clearly evidence and data and statistical models that are driving this decision and their objective function is improve the health the longevity and the economic prosperity of our society as a whole

• 33:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm sorry did you get this statement from China what are you doing continue comrade

• 33:35David Friedberg?

  but I'm pointing out these guys are these guys generally don't make decisions based on someone's kind of like flippant intuition they make decisions based on what they believe to be in the better interest and I'm not saying it's right or wrong but in the better interest of economic prosperity longevity

• 33:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  let's be honest

• 33:52David Friedberg?

  and so there's data that certainly underlies this and I think we all know it intuitively we can certainly read reports but in the United States we value individual liberties above all else and so we don't find ourselves in this circumstance it seems foreign and scary and crazy but again it's another in my opinion it's another tool that China will use to outcompete this century

• 34:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  yes that's true but let's let's be clear we don't we don't value individual liberties that's not true that's just what we tell people but that's not totally true and you know that

• 34:20David Friedberg?

  I'm not gonna go there but yeah

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  well I mean we are literally sitting here fighting there is a group of individuals who are fighting to wear masks or not have to wear masks rather not have to take the vaccine and at the same time and I don't know if we want to go there we are denying a woman's

• 34:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  we have to

• 34:37Jason Calacanis?

  let's go to David Sacks David Sacks are you in support of Texas's abortion ban

• 34:46David Friedberg?

  no no we're let's just hear him on China

• 34:47David Sacks?

  no I know I think it's a stupid law and I'll explain why in a second but just on the China thing for a second this is I'll be a dissenting voice here this is like if we had given Tipper Gore dictatorial powers I mean this is insane they're gonna they're gonna determine how many hours a kid can play video games I mean look I get the potential benefit but this is incredibly intrusive into the lives of citizens and I'm not sure that video game playing is altogether a negative thing you know I think it's mostly our kids go through a phase Where they play a lot of games and they grow out of it. And you know, you talk to developers, like computer programmers, they all went through some phase where they were like hyper addicted to

• 35:32David Sacks?

  video games. It, you know, builds hand eye coordination, it builds um sort of uh you know, computer uh literacy. So I'm not sure it's like that. Look, obviously if someone does nothing but computer games their whole life, that's a problem. But as a phase that a kid goes through,

• 35:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with you. I agree with you because I used to play three hours of fucking Zelda a day when I came home because I was a no because I was a latchkey kid. No, because I was a latchkey kid and I didn't have anybody to take care of me. Uh, I don't think David, though, that that's what kids are getting when they're playing four hours of fucking Call of Duty every night.

• 36:05Jason Calacanis?

  Four hours. These kids are playing 10 hours a day.

• 36:09David Sacks?

  By the way, I think I think China has another motivation for for this ban, which is they've got a lot of because of the one child policy, right? They've got a radical uh misbalance of, you know, male to female ratio. They've got a lot of young males without romantic prospects in that country. Basically, they have an incel problem.

• 36:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Incel. They have a ton of incels.

• 36:31David Sacks?

  It's a giant incel problem. I don't think we hear much about it um because they control the media, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of just random violence out there. And the last thing they want to do is have these incels playing Fortnite and Call of Duty, shooting people five hours a night and then getting their brains wired that way. That might be playing into this decision. I don't know.

• 36:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, again, you're just validating the mental health aspect. They've studied the mental health implications of these video games and they say enough's enough.

• 36:59David Friedberg?

  I'm not arguing for the ban. I'm arguing for the fact that China has certainly done something to indicate they have some data that indicates why they should make this decision. It may be, you're right, it may be about kind of, you know, growing, getting people to be more romantic and get out of the house and go get married and have kids and whatnot. But there's certainly a and remember, their objective function is always about longevity and economic prosperity. So, you know, there's something that's making them say that we can increase economic prosperity, increase longevity by doing this, and that outweighs that whatever the. detrimental, social and other effects might be. And, you know, I think there's something to read into it, but no matter what, every big decision they make has some degree of competitive advantage for them. And, you know, those kids, if they're not playing video games, they're going to be doing

• 37:43David Friedberg?

  something else, like, I don't know, programming computers, doing biotechnology in a lab, figuring stuff out on the internet, writing the next cryptocurrency, I don't know, but there's going to be some advantage that's going to arise out of the time and the productivity that's going to be generated by this. And I think that's the calculus that they're undertaking here. I'm not saying it's right or wrong.

• 38:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, we all agree they're thoughtful. The question is, what is this going to do for this generation if they don't play video games? Are they going to be more productive? Are they going to be, you know?

• 38:12David Sacks?

  They'll be, they'll be good drones for the collective, you know?

• 38:16David Friedberg?

  That's right. No, you're right. You're right. Exactly right.

• 38:20David Sacks?

  And that's, that's the downside here is even if they get it right in this particular case, how much freedom do you have to give up? How much state surveillance is there in the enforcement? And how many other insane policies will they foist on people with this mentality of you don't get to live your life individually, you got to serve as collective?

• 38:38Jason Calacanis?

  This is actually, I think your best point, Sacks, is that I think what could happen here is you can overplay a hand and by squeezing people too tightly, you can't play video games, you can't run your own companies, you're going to get replaced, you can't practice your own religion, you can't say what you want, be a journalist. These things could add up and, and they could, you know, piss off a young group of people who do what happened in Tiananmen Square or in Hong Kong, and they could be dealing with, you know, their own revolution. And what if it's video games? Revolutions have started over similarly seemingly simple acts by an authoritarian government, taking away people's right to sell fruit on the street, you know, famously started

• 39:23Jason Calacanis?

  the Spring Awakening in the Middle East. So you, you, you could see this, actually, I think, you know, maybe it's a small chance, 5% or 10%, you know, creating a lot of social unrest.

• 39:33David Sacks?

  Do you want to, all right, should we go to Texas? You guys want to talk about that?

• 39:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my mind here.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right, here we go. SB eight creates a private cause of action that enables Texans to sue those who perform or aid and abet the performance of abortions after a fetal heartbeat has been detected. The ban comes two years after abortion restrictions were proposed in Georgia, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Louisiana. The previous propositions were spoken out publicly against by progressive tech companies, companies with a female customer base, women-led businesses. That proposed bill never became law.

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, Sax, you want to just frame for us the, the legal sort of case here? Uh, yeah, let's go to.

• 40:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you want to, do you want to go back and actually frame, uh, Roe v. Wade and, and Planned Parenthood versus Casey? I think those are important to understand what the hell is going on here.

• 40:23David Sacks?

  Sure. Okay. Well, so, you know, Roe obviously gave women the, the right to choose, um, you know, uh, the reproductive freedom over, you know, invalidated abortion laws, very, very, in a very, very sweeping way. Casey sort of modified Roe. It upheld it, but modified it, saying that the state could impose some restrictions as long as it didn't place an undue burden, that was a key term, undue burden on a woman's right to, to choose. And I think what was at issue in that case was, um, I think it was Pennsylvania, the state of Pennsylvania imposed a waiting period and some consultation with an advisor. And so it delayed the abortion, but it didn't restrict, it didn't otherwise eliminate.

• 41:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me add.

• 41:07David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, so, so, so Casey, Casey, Roe as modified by Casey is really the undue, i- is really the law of the land right now, which is the undue burden. Then Texas comes along and do you want to explain this law?

• 41:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 41:19David Sacks?

  So th- this law is, um, regardless of what you think about abortion, it's a really, um, bizarre law. Because what it does is, it doesn't just, um, ban, it, it doesn't ban abortion outright. What it does is create a private right of action, basically a right to sue, uh, in civil court, anyone who aids and abets an abortion after about five or six weeks. So six weeks, basically after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. So which is about six weeks into the pregnancy. And the way the, the law works is that. Um, okay. So point one abortion providers are prohibited from performing abortion if they can detect fetal heart tones.

• 42:01David Sacks?

  Um, again, that's six weeks. There's no exception for rape and incest. I think that's really explosive politically.

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  And horrible. Do you think it's horrible as a human?

• 42:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  I'm curious your personal position.

• 42:13David Sacks?

  Yeah, well, let's get that. Let me just explain the law. So the, the law puts the onus of enforcement on private citizens, not government officials. Okay, they do that to avoid, to make it harder to legally challenge this under Roe and Casey. Okay, so what the, what the government has done here, what Texas has done is it gives private citizens the ability to sue abortion providers. Or anyone who aids and abets someone to, to get an abortion. So it could be. An Uber driver. It could be a friend who simply drives someone to the abortion clinic. It could be. A person who provides financial assistance. It could be. A secretary who works at the abortion clinic. They can all be sued now. Under aiding and abetting. And here's, here's really the, the, the, the person who had the abortion cannot be sued, but.

• 42:55David Sacks?

  But anyone who aided and abetted can be. That's how they're getting around the, the right to choose. And here's the craziest part is. The citizens who choose to sue don't need to show any connection to the person they're suing. And, uh, they don't even have to live in the state, right? So there's no connection. To them. There's no personal injury to them, but they're basically suing under a personal injury, under a civil right of action. And if they succeed. The law states that they're entitled to at least $10,000 in damages in addition to their legal costs. So if they win. Their legal has got, legal costs get paid, but if they lose, they don't have to.

• 43:32David Sacks?

  Cover the defendant's legal fees. So they just get a free shot here, which is also, I've never seen a loser pay rule like this. I mean, there are loser pay rules, but. They're symmetric. So we have an asymmetric loser pays rule, but I don't think we've ever had a civil law like this. Where, um. Where somebody can sue where there's no injury to them. There's no standing here. This is the thing that's fundamentally, I think, at odds with our entire legal tradition. And I think regardless of what you think about abortion, this. Law will eventually be invalidated by the Supreme Court or a lower court on that ground that they're allowing people to sue without standing.

• 44:12David Sacks?

  And it's a horrible precedent because can you imagine if what Texas is basically doing is deputizing private citizens to enforce in civil courts a prohibition that they cannot or will not pass directly.

• 44:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is this the best they could come up in your? Well, hold on, let's just state a couple more facts like this was an extremely well thought out law.

• 44:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that they, the pro-life faction in Texas clearly had some very smart constitutional thinkers that were able to navigate around Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood versus Casey to get something written that could be passed in a way where, you know, Sam Alito is basically punted and said, we're not going to give a stay. And so this is going to have to meander through the courts. There is still a risk that it could just get kicked down to Texas and it could remain a state issue, which there is a big risk. And if that's true, then, you know, other states could basically take a run at copying this law. What I wanted to talk about was if you bring it all together, you know, Friedberg said something about like, you know, we really value personal freedom. And this is where I was like cynically like, actually, that's not true.

• 45:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is an example in my, in my opinion of where this is just like, we are very hypocritical. Where, you know, if we talk about a vaccine mandate, you know, there's just an entire fiery, you know, up in arms of people, usually typically in the same states that are very anti-abortion that are like, you know, tread on me lightly, you can't touch my body, you know, I have the right to decide. But when it comes to this topic, they abandon all of that and they go to the extreme opposite side, which is the government mandates. And to be able to say that to 50% of the population, that just because you were born with reproductive organs that you're treated differently, specifically, you know, a uterus, ovaries and a vagina, you're treated differently than a man, to me just seems absolutely insane

• 46:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and just like fundamentally just erodes this idea of equality, like at just a very principled level. And the even worse thing. Is that then, you know, the corporations that actually used to be on the front lines of helping to drive social justice so far have been completely absent, right? You have to remember in 2019, when we had these very repressive abortion laws, I think it was in Mississippi or Alabama, you had all of these companies come out and say, hey, no, not here, not under our watch. Then when you had all these voter suppression laws in Georgia, right? You had all these companies come out and say, hey, absolutely not, not on our watch. We will leave the state if you implement these things. But so far, what you've seen in this law is complete radio silence in Texas.

• 46:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this is, you know, you have to remember, Texas is the ninth largest economy in the world, right? In the world. So you have every single kind of company from technology to otherwise, who have chosen to either start or relocate their businesses in this state. And I gotta think that, you know, these employees and these leaders of these businesses should be saying something and they haven't said a damn thing.

• 47:14Jason Calacanis?

  Free Bird, you have thoughts? And then we'll go to you, Six.

• 47:21David Friedberg?

  Um, look, I feel like, um, everyone has a limit to what they believe, um, defines individual liberty. Um, you know, should everyone have complete freedom to the point that they can take a gun and go shoot anyone that they want? The answer is no. I think even the most diehard libertarians would argue that there's some degree of, what is it, John Stuart Mill sex? Um, you know, you should have the ability to do whatever you want within your sphere of influence, as long as it doesn't intersect with the sphere of influence of others. And so the philosophical argument that I believe the pro-life movement made, which is really a different point of view on values, is that the sphere of influence of a fetus

• 48:05David Friedberg?

  exists at some point in time and therefore shouldn't be invaded by the, by the, by the mother. Now, I'm not speaking, obviously, my point of view. My point of view is extremely pro-choice, um, just to be very clear. But the argument is, um,

• 48:22David Friedberg?

  It's, I think, one that we all kind of blush over and assume that it's about taking away a woman's right without recognizing the voice on the other side, which says that there is a right to life by a fetus at a certain point in time. And so to me, there's almost like this principled debate that arises, and it probably certainly falls more along religious lines than it does along, on a religious spectrum than it does on a kind of a libertarian spectrum, or a spectrum of liberties, that kind of defines that crossover point for people. But clearly, Texas is a really interestingly confused state, right? There's this argument about individual freedom, but now what comes across is a highly kind of conservative point of view with respect to the freedom of a pregnant woman. And so, you

• 49:07David Friedberg?

  know, I don't know if there really is an easy answer. It certainly seems to me nowadays that the pro-choice movement is the majority, the pro-life movement is the minority, and maybe I'm off on that, you probably know better. But, you know, I'm not sure this truly does set a precedent that becomes kind of a widespread recognition of a new way of addressing kind of the pro-life movement, or giving the pro-life movement some additional movement. I still think that the pro-life movement remains a minority. And I know over time, that will, you know, there'll be perturbations, but there'll certainly be some resolution over time in favor of what I think the majority is.

• 49:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where are all the politically correct people? Where are they? Where are they right now? Where are all the politically, I mean, like, I guess they were happy to get Mike Richards, or whatever the guy's name was, fired from Jeopardy last week, but where are they now? When we really need them?

• 49:53David Sacks?

  But Chamath, are you really saying there's not enough outrage about this? I mean, I'm seeing a ton of outrage on social media about this.

• 49:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I see everything. I see nothing.

• 49:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I see, I see a lot of useless virtue signaling. I don't see anything that's actually organized and effective.

• 50:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think what we're talking about here is the leadership of companies and leaders in big companies.

• 50:07David Friedberg?

  My prediction, my prediction is going to be a million-person march within 45 days.

• 50:11David Sacks?

  Okay, well, let me go back to Chama's point about whether, you know, he called this this this bill smart in the sense that it was really thought through. I agree that it's a deliberate attempt to circumvent Roe v. Wade and make it harder to sustain a legal challenge against it. But I don't think this is smart. I think it's stupid philosophically, politically, and legally for the even for the pro-life movement. So philosophically, I think the problem here is they're creating unlimited standing to sue across state boundaries by somebody who hasn't even experienced harm. I mean, this is so far from what conservative jurists and legal scholars have always professed to believe. I mean, I remember 20 years ago,

• 50:56David Sacks?

  tort reform and ending frivolous lawsuits was the absolute bedrock plank on the, you know, of the Republican Party. So they're they're just throwing that out the window here with unknown consequences. Hold on a second. For example, why wouldn't this be used to circumvent people's second amendment rights? Why wouldn't you just create a private right of action to sue anyone who couldn't, you know, aided and abetted a gun crime? You know, so I, I, I think this is going to boomerang on conservatives. Second,

• 51:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what I wait, okay.

• 51:25David Sacks?

  But let me get to the political stupidity of it and then

• 51:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Henry Belkaster wanted this as one piece, so we didn't have to do so much editing, Chama.

• 51:32David Sacks?

  No, look, no, look, the Wall Street Journal has a great editorial today. Okay, this is the Wall Street Journal editorial page is a great piece. This is from, they basically say, look, they said, sometimes we wonder if Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is a progressive plant. That's the guy behind this. His ill-conceived legal attack against Obamacare backfired Republicans in last year's election and lost at the Supreme Court. Now he is leading with his chin on abortion. How about thinking first? So they're pretty clear this is going to get overturned. And frankly, then politically, this is just handed. This is, you know, Democrats are already having a field day with this. So Biden said, this law is so extreme, it does not even allow for exceptions in the case of rape and incest.

• 52:15David Sacks?

  I mean, look, he's right about that. And Gavin Newsom, the polling for him is now going through the roof because all he has to do for the next 10 days is talk about right to choose in this Texas bill. And he's going to cruise towards defeating the recall because it's basically

• 52:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're talking about something differently than I was. What I'm saying is something very specific. If you go back to Roe v. Wade. It was written by a man, first of all, which, you know, we can debate whether that makes any fucking sense. But Harry Blackman went to the Mayo Clinic and lived there for like six or eight weeks, reading medical textbooks and came up with this trimester framework. And again, I'm just gonna go out on a limb and say, I don't have a fucking clue what's going on in a woman's body. And I don't think Harry Blackman did, even though he was much smarter than I and was on the Supreme Court, okay? And then Casey tried to clean this up by going to this fetal viability thing. So we have this law that was really kind of ill conceived, but was kind of going in the right direction, but it was really a very first form of judicial activism. We tried to clean

• 53:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  it up in the early 90s, but it's always been an issue where eventually what's really been happening is we've been pushing this to the states' right issue. And I think that the cleverness of this bill, and it's dangerous, but it was very well thought out. This was not a random thing where two haphazard dipshits got together and wrote this bill, David. I think that this was methodically planned out for years.

• 53:38David Sacks?

  They are dipshits, though. It's totally gonna backfire on them. It's not gonna...

• 53:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David, for example, we now have an activist Supreme Court who may actually not opine on this, on the validity of the issue, but say this is a states' right issue. If this stays in Texas and doesn't get outside of Texas, you will have this specific thing hold and stand. And I think that that's a very bad precedent to have set. I think that these folks planned this out, and I don't think they thought that it was an easy way to overturn it. And I think that's why, when everybody was waiting with bated breath for Alito to basically stay this, he didn't.

• 54:17David Sacks?

  Listen, I think there's a lot of hysteria and hyperbole on social media right now saying that Roe v. Wade's been overturned, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade.

• 54:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm not saying that. Those are morons who don't know anything.

• 54:27David Sacks?

  Yes. But they're saying that because the Supreme Court ruled on very narrow procedural grounds that it wasn't ready to hear about the Texas law because a harm hasn't been committed yet. But they haven't said they won't look at it in the future. I believe they will. I believe that this law will be found unconstitutional. Not necessarily

• 54:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think these companies?

• 54:48David Sacks?

  Not necessarily because of abortion, but just because

• 54:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I know. I don't think this is an abortion issue.

• 54:52David Sacks?

  The legal definition of standing in a way that flies against everything we know about how the court system works. I just I, I, I think ultimately this is too clever by half by the by the state attorney general. I think it was

• 55:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think, I think he's a, he's a, he's a tool.

• 55:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Do we want to move on and talk about uh, Apple allowing people to uh, link to their own websites?

• 55:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The, the Apple thing is really big news because it, it kind of goes to show you that you had, you had a pretty progressive legislative framework in South Korea. I don't think it's particularly a huge market for Apple because the, most of the, most of the um, um, app activity, I think is Android more than it is Apple. Um, but they basically just seeded the market and by deciding to basically conform to this law, then then they started with these reader apps and allowing uh, payments, um, allowing you to link to it. It's the beginning of the beginning for, you know, the app stores to be deconstructed and opened.

• 55:49Jason Calacanis?

  This, uh, just so people understand, um, Apple said it would, uh, allow media apps to create in-app links to sign up pages on those companies websites, allowing the likes of Spotify and Netflix to bypass the iPhone maker's cut of subscriptions. Now, of course, you can use Spotify and Netflix on your phone, but you may have, probably people haven't experienced this because they've already become members of it and did it on their site, but you can't actually pay through your phone and you can't sign up through the app. They're not, they were technically not allowed to link to it. So this is a small, small concession only to media folks. So what do you think, Sax?

• 56:26David Sacks?

  Um, well, I think, Tomath has kind of said this at the beginning of the end. Um, I think there's some truth to that. Um, look, I think the, the, the, the root of this is the fact that Apple has this 30% rate uh, on any in-app purchases. And like Bill Gurley said, it's a rake too far, right? Just because you can't charge 30% doesn't mean you should charge 30%. Ultimately, this is why the whole ecosystem has been up in arms. They formed an industry coalition to challenge Apple. That resulted in a lot of Leo challenges, lawsuits, and you know, a lot of these companies like Spotify and Tile, they testified against Apple in hearings.

• 57:07David Sacks?

  So I think this 30% rake has ultimately backfired on Apple. It's created a huge backlash and now they're paying the price. They've already had to roll it back for these so-called reader apps. So, you know, if what you're doing is buying a subscription to say Netflix, Netflix will now be able to redirect you to their website. You can buy it there and then consume the content, you know, on your iOS app without Apple getting a part of the split. But this now opens the door for this type of thing to apply to to games as well. Where there's a lot more in-app purchases like Fortnite, right? So I just think this is a case where, you know, what's the old line that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered?

• 57:50David Sacks?

  Apple has been a hog and now it's getting slaughtered.

• 57:54David Friedberg?

  Yeah. By the way, I want to point out like this is a really interesting experience of the free market. You know, clearly consumers and the developers on the app in the App Store ecosystem were vocal and angry enough that that that this behavioral change from Apple, the structural change kind of came to bear, it didn't require regulatory intervention. I just want to point out how important and relevant that is that.

• 58:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, the market is functional.

• 58:23David Friedberg?

  The market is functional and having the government and regulators come in and, you know, people complaining to the Senate about Google and Apple monopolizing them out of their businesses ultimately gets resolved when enough there's enough kind of collective mass from the consumer slash partner that says to the the big incumbent player, we're not going to play by these games anymore, by these rules anymore.

• 58:44Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta think Lina Khan being appointed did make Apple think maybe.

• 58:49David Friedberg?

  It may have instigated enough fear here, right? To kind of to kind of.

• 58:53Jason Calacanis?

  Start giving concessions, right? Some modest concession that, yeah, if you're a Spotify or a Netflix or Audible, we're going to let you buy through the app.

• 59:03David Friedberg?

  I mean, Zach, you're all about regulatory regulation and.

• 59:09David Friedberg?

  Don't you think this is a nice win for the free market?

• 59:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, I do. Well, look, I don't think monopolies are, I don't think letting monopolies do whatever they want is free market. Okay. I mean, monopolies and competition, they will squash innovation. They will, you know, they will basically get in the way of permissionless innovation. So I, you know, I'm in favor of renting in these monopolies. And the two big issues I think with Apple and Google, well, Apple especially is number one, side loading of apps. So the idea that they have total control over what app, what apps get loaded onto your iOS device. People want the ability to create alternative app stores that already exists for Android, right? So I think that is coming for Apple. Apple claims it's a security issue, but.

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  It is. I mean, what they should do is if you click on side load apps, it should just give you a warning. You are no longer protected by us. You know, you're, you're subjecting yourself to phishing scams, your information. And buyer beware. And then people can make their own decision. I've always thought that would be the best decision for what I like about this is I think this gives Apple the ability to now just compete against everybody in the App Store without having to have this, um, you know, well, we're partners with you. They are not partners with people in the App Store. They watch the App Store and when something great comes and emerges, they will copy it. They just do it slower than Facebook. So Apple Music studied Spotify and they created their own Apple product.

• 1:00:41Jason Calacanis?

  Apple TV plus now with Ted Lasso is competing against Netflix. They watch Netflix. And I signed up for Apple Arcade for my, my daughters because I didn't want them to be paying for, um, like your in-app purchases. I'd rather just have the games be, stop upselling them. And that's been wonderful for five or 10 bucks a month to have that. And I pay for the news product. So now they can just compete against everybody directly. I think all of these media companies are going to be video games, podcasts, TV shows and music. So I don't know if you saw Netflix is going to be doing podcasts about their shows and video games. I think Amazon will be video games content. It's all going to be one thing. And Disney Plus will have games built into Disney Plus, I bet, and that subscription price. So the consumer is going to win ultimately.

• 1:01:26David Friedberg?

  You know, I think monopolies are good because monopolies are just like lazy and it's easier to innovate and compete against a monopoly, to be honest, than it is to compete against cronyism. When there's kind of embedded government regulation that prevents emerging competitors from competing effectively, it's a lot harder to win than against some slow, big, un-innovative monopoly. Well, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:01:57David Sacks?

  Well, here's the counter argument. So I agree with you that big, slow, lumbering monopolies can be great to compete against, but here's the problem. When they control access to an ecosystem when they're gatekeepers, that's the problem because now you have to go to them and they're going to be slow, lumbering and stupid in terms of allowing you to innovate. And when they see you becoming a threat, they'll squawk at you. That's the problem. If these guys didn't control platforms, that would be one thing, but they control the most important platform there is, which is the operating system. So I just think that, you know, this is Microsoft and Windows all over again, except there's two of them, right? There's iOS and Android.

• 1:02:33Jason Calacanis?

  Well, in a Microsoft's example, you could load whatever software you wanted. They were just bundling. They weren't saying you couldn't load Netscape. They're just saying, we're going to give you Internet Explorer with the operating system. So this is even worse. I mean, Apple's saying you can't even install your app.

• 1:02:49David Sacks?

  Yeah, Microsoft was actually pretty open by comparison, but there is like a version of bundling here. What Spotify said is, look, when we have to pay 30% and Apple Music doesn't have to pay anything, we can't compete with that, you know? And they have a point there.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a completely valid point. California's on fire. This is what, the third or fourth year in a row this has gotten acute for the Bay Area. People are now making plans, as Friedberg mentioned on the last pod, I think, that there's, or two pods ago, there was like two or three weeks of the year, maybe even a month, where you just can't really be outside in Northern California. You can't be outside. Have you guys seen the cell?

• 1:03:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. Three of our friends have been evacuated because, you know, they moved up there in the middle of the pandemic. They had to come down. They said it was raining ash. You know, one of our friends's homes is literally threatened. It's just like, and then the fire season is moving up earlier and earlier in the year. You know, my kids were in camp in Tahoe this July and they had to be evacuated. And fortunately for us, you know, we had a really good friend of ours, a neighbor here, whose kids were also out, they can't be able to drive up in the, but my God, like that was.

• 1:04:04David Friedberg?

  You know, there's, there's about.

• 1:04:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's going on?

• 1:04:06David Friedberg?

  There's about eight trillion dollars of real estate value in California. And, you know, if you assume a tenth of that is exposed in the middle of this kind of dense fire, these dense fire regions, let's say it's a, let's say it's a trillion dollars. There's a trillion dollars of real estate value that you cannot insure anymore.

• 1:04:26Jason Calacanis?

  I had an idea about this, Friedberg. I was looking two or three years ago when these fires started, maybe it was four or five years ago now, for a blanket that could go over a home, could be installed or dropped over a home with helicopters. I know this sounds crazy, but is there a material that's light enough that you could put it on a helicopter and drop it over one of these two, three million?

• 1:04:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, why doesn't the startup exist? I mean, this would be amazing. Imagine if these homes had on the roof some sort of a system that when fire or heat got there, it just deployed the blanket and protected the home.

• 1:04:57David Friedberg?

  I don't know if you guys know this, but right now in Marin County in California, it's nearly impossible to get fire insurance. And this is becoming kind of a predominant factor in California, particularly in all the areas of lots of forest land. There's 100 million acres of forest land in California. So if a trillion dollars of real estate is actually exposed to fires and you can't get fire insurance, ask yourselves the question, what's going to happen when hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate literally goes up in smoke? Or, or gets sold off? Who ultimately bears the cost? Where does that cost have its economic flow? And that's just the tip of the iceberg of the effects that may arise as these things start to take hold. You know, we had this huge upswing in real estate in Tahoe as everyone moved out of California and went to Tahoe during the pandemic.

• 1:05:42David Friedberg?

  Now we're seeing Tahoe real estate sell off like crazy. This happened in wine country in Sonoma and Napa County last year after the big fires they had there. And so there are counties where you start to have these massive fires causing this massive real estate sell off and/or the real estate burns and it's uninsured. And guess what happens? FEMA steps in, right? The federal government steps in and ultimately the federal government's going to have these like Katrina events four or five times a year that we're going to be underwriting losses. For people's real estate that's valued in a way that doesn't account for the effects of climate change.

• 1:06:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, I started-

• 1:06:11David Friedberg?

  This is the massive shift in economic value that we're gonna, someone's gonna have to pay for over the next decade. And this is just the beginning of it all is my, is my strong belief.

• 1:06:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I tweeted this out about maybe six or seven months ago, but with another, with this fabulous entrepreneur named David Soloff, I co-founded an insurance company called OTT Risk. And, you know, we've been trying to build models and price, um, uh, this kind of insurance, climate insurance, you know, social media kinds of like disruptions, um, civil unrest insurance, things that are very typical, atypical, sorry. And to your point, Friedberg, it is really, really hard to try to forecast what's going on in a way where you can actually insure these things with a margin of safety. And so just as the, as a person who would be the provider of this kind of insurance,

• 1:07:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  what I'm telling, you know, what I'm learning is man, these, and we're negotiating multi hundred million dollar policies with these big corporates. Um, and, you know, for example, like, you know, they want pandemic insurance. If there's the next Delta variant or whatever, and I have to shut down my facility and here's my economic loss, I want to, you know, you to insure that. And, okay, uh, it's impossible. And so I can only imagine what it's like then on the ground floor, somebody to just buy some insurance that says if my house burns down.

• 1:07:30David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's very hard.

• 1:07:32David Friedberg?

  So you're gonna-

• 1:07:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this kind of parametric insurance doesn't exist, which means that if you live in any of these areas, like I basically, I think what it means is that climate change is gonna ravage, um, uh, suburbs and it's gonna ravage these sort of like far flung communities because, um, nobody's gonna wanna step in there and insure the parametric risk that allows people to live their safety.

• 1:07:53David Friedberg?

  You know what I just realized? This was my last company, right? Climate Corp, we were, what we started out in 2006, we offered parametric weather insurance online. And so it was all about our, our mission was to manage and adapt to climate change. And so you could buy weather insurance online and you underwrite the risk. And the way you underwrite risk like this and auto insurance and any kind of insurance is you look at past data, you build a statistical model that's represented by the past data and the frequency of certain things happening. And that's how you price the insurance. The problem now is the past data has absolutely no bearing on what's going on. And so you have to basically create more fundamental deterministic models of fires, which is something no one's really good at. No one has any ability to do because we've never seen this kind of environment before. We've never seen hot year after hot year, dry year after dry year. And so there's

• 1:08:38David Friedberg?

  no historical data to draw from to build the model. So all the insurers throw their hands in the air and they say, we can't take on that risk. We don't know how to price it. And when they don't do that, I'm telling you, the government's going to end up having to step in and pay people money for the lost homes.

• 1:08:51Jason Calacanis?

  Or the government's going to have to say, the reality here is that we can't afford to do this and you can't build homes there. And what's, talk about functioning markets. I think what we're realizing is the market now is so convinced that global warming is real and you can't deny it, that we just can't insure for it. Therefore, we're going to have to make serious societal changes. And that's part of this process. Insurance being denied for hurricane zones and insurance being denied for fire zones is part of the process of people accepting the reality that we're not doing enough.

• 1:09:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, Jake, the problem is not that it's going to be denied. It's that you're not going to be able to get it. And if you are, you're not going to be able to afford it. And so, so it's not even that people are really open to writing the kind of cover that allows you to go and safely live in Lake Tahoe 10 or 15 years from now. And that that's the shame of it. So we have these beautiful places that I think are just going to be under duress and under pressure. And it's going to force everybody to live more and more in the major metropolitan areas, which is, you know, I'm not sure that that's what everybody wants.

• 1:09:55Jason Calacanis?

  Or it's going to change building. I mean, we saw now in Florida and other places, you know, Louisiana, other places that are flood zones, nobody builds on the ground floor anymore. Everybody builds, you know, on stilts and they put a car garage underneath it. Because it's gonna flood it. I have friends in New York this week and I'm here and I had to change my flight to come to New York for the wedding that I'm going to. I had to change my flight because last night we were going to be flying into this craziness here. They got three inches of rain in one hour. Fifteen people, my understanding, has died in basement apartments because they couldn't or they didn't get out in time. It's kind of hard to understand, but I guess people stayed in their apartments while they were filling up with water and then

• 1:10:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you see the, did you see the video of like the floodwaters ripping into the New York subway?

• 1:10:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, and New York is not built for this. So now New York's gonna just basically have to say, you know what? All the basement apartments, all the basements that exist, they're not livable. You can't live in a basement anymore. And when we build new structures, the first floor is going to be built like they built them in Miami, which is for water to flow straight through them. And the garages underneath are designed to accept massive floodwaters.

• 1:11:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've been spending a lot of time on water recently and the thing that I learned this week, which I, not the thing that I learned, but a great way to summarize this for folks listening, if they don't understand climate change is the areas that are hotter get hotter, the areas that are drier get drier, and the areas that get wetter get much more wet. And so when you have a period of dryness or heat, it's going to be extreme. And when it rains, it's going to be so extreme. And we're just going to get buffeted back and forth between these two extremes. And this is only going to escalate over the next 20 years or 30 years because we have so much embedded pollution that we have to work our way through. Forget all the new stuff, but all this embedded pollution has a cost and we're just starting to begin processing that pollution.

• 1:11:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, welcome to the all in depressed episode.

• 1:11:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, fucking depressive. Wait, this is my goddamn birthday, guys. What the fuck?

• 1:11:53Jason Calacanis?

  Happy birthday. The, happy birthday. Women's rights are being taken away. The planet is on fire. New York is underwater. Covid is not ending. Nobody can sure ensure anything. And yeah.

• 1:12:06David Friedberg?

  I don't know, man. The market's ripping. There's lots of money coming into climate change. Investors and entrepreneurs are more optimistic than they've ever been. You know, there's a backdrop of challenge, but with challenge comes opportunity, and I think people are pursuing it like nuts right now, and it's pretty exciting.

• 1:12:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I like the way you say entrepreneurs, because I say entrepreneurs, but you say entrepreneurs.

• 1:12:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's got an E and a U to mock, I mean.

• 1:12:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Entrepreneurial. Yeah, but it's a very literal pronunciation of it.

• 1:12:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, look, I think.

• 1:12:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Schren, you're a real schren-galli of the word entrepreneur.

• 1:12:39David Friedberg?

  Schren-galli. Are you going to monetize something now, Sax?

• 1:12:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go ahead, Sax. Monetize your new app.

• 1:12:45David Friedberg?

  Monetize Colin.

• 1:12:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, leverage the all-in audience.

• 1:12:48David Sacks?

  Yeah, that's the good news here. Colin's doing really well. Great long.

• 1:12:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm gonna be rich! Who's on fire, the great, the jewel of California?

• 1:12:56David Friedberg?

  I'm gonna be ash.

• 1:12:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're calling that 10,000 downloads.

• 1:12:59David Sacks?

  I, um, look, I think, I think that, uh, in terms of processing all the, the bad news, I, I do think we have a tendency to underestimate how much political partisans sort of whip things up. In any event, should we, should we end with this Rogan thing? I actually think it's a pretty good issue to talk about.

• 1:13:18Jason Calacanis?

  Joe Rogan got COVID. Um, he was, I think they misframed what he said. I actually saw the original quote where he said, should a young person, uh, take the vaccine? This was in the very early days of the vaccine, or should they wait a little bit and see if it's safe? Uh, I think was his position, um, not one I agree with, but I don't think what he said was absolutely crazy. His quote was, if someone has an ideological physiological reason for not getting vaccinated, I don't want to force him to get vaccinated. So, and then he got it, and he had to cancel some shows.

• 1:13:49David Sacks?

  I, I think there's something kind of funny here, but also kind of serious here about the way the media covers news like this. First of all, the media is positively gleeful. Whenever they can report that somebody who expressed any vaccine hesitancy or skepticism gets COVID, right? It's almost ghoulish, I think. Um, look, I, I'm vaccinated. I'm really happy I got the vaccine. I think it gave me, it helped me have a much, much milder case of COVID than I would have had. So, I'm pro-vax or whatever, but, but here, here's what the media does. And the, and the craziest headline I saw about Rogan was that Rogan is taking a horse dewormer.

• 1:14:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, that was so dumb.

• 1:14:27David Sacks?

  Referring to ivermectin, right? Now, look, I don't know whether ivermectin is a helpful treatment or not. I think you've got to do a double-blind study to figure that out. But I also think that it's very dishonest to be describing ivermectin as a horse deworm. I mean, the the person who invented ivermectin intended it as a treatment for humans. Humans do take it as a treatment against certain parasites. It also happens to have a benefit in deworming horses, but that's just one of its applications. So to describe this drug as a horse dewormer, as if it was the only thing it does, the purpose of that is to make anyone who thinks that ivermectin is a possible treatment, to make them look ridiculous, right? And, you know, so why is the press doing that? Well,

• 1:15:12David Sacks?

  the agenda is the press decided that vaccines are good. Okay, I agree with them about that. But they, but this is where it goes off the rails. They decide that anybody in pursuing that agenda, they have to make any alternative vaccine, which would be any therapeutic treatment, and anyone who would take that therapeutic treatment look ridiculous. And this is where I think the media just crosses over into total dishonesty. They're doing the same thing with monoclonal antibodies, which actually I think are a treatment that works. But anyone who is expressing support for

• 1:15:43Jason Calacanis?

  This all goes back to the polarization with Trump, right? He was the drug that he was so, which is a big proponent of, that didn't actually work.

• 1:15:50David Friedberg?

  Hydroxychloroquine.

• 1:15:51Jason Calacanis?

  So I think it's back to that. What do you think, Friedberg? Are you have any opinion on Joe Rogan getting dunked on? Another anecdotal story of somebody

• 1:16:02David Friedberg?

  It's interesting to observe how much we've kind of, as with a lot of things, when I say we, I mean, like, society, each of us, reading social media, the internet, media itself, kind of orient things along a spectrum, right and wrong, black and white, left and right. I feel like vaccination and vaccines have similarly become, you're either vaccinated and you're good, or you're not vaccinated, or you're bad, or the opposite is true.

• 1:16:31David Friedberg?

  And it's pretty clear, there's tons of evidence, that vaccination, while it may reduce kind of the severity of COVID, you know, there seems to be a much less protective effect with respect to transmission, particularly with this Delta variant now, and that's just a fact. You know, you can say, oh, my gosh, I'm vaccinated, therefore I'm safe. It's like, no, you're also exposed to Delta. As someone who's unvaccinated in terms of catching it and transmitting it to other people, there may be less severity and there may be less transmission. One interesting fact, by the way, is that there's much, much, much less time when you're vaccinated.

• 1:17:11Jason Calacanis?

  That you're infected.

• 1:17:12David Friedberg?

  With Delta, when you're actually infectious, yeah, incredibly, incredibly reduced amount of time from like 10 days to like one to two days. But still, that is a very infectious kind of variant, and so it's spreading. But it's almost like we're blaming people that aren't vaccinated for Delta spreading. Delta's spreading because it's a really effective virus at spreading. It's like the story. And this orientation around like you're, you're the reason that Delta's spreading is completely false, and everyone tries to then fit the story into that narrative. You know, the Joe.

• 1:17:41David Sacks?

  Yeah, right. Don't, don't, don't you think there's like such a strong agenda?

• 1:17:44David Friedberg?

  The guy got infected. It sucks. Like, it has nothing to do with anything.

• 1:17:47Jason Calacanis?

  Was he vaccinated or not?

• 1:17:48David Friedberg?

  He was vaccinated. I don't know. Who cares? Like, the point is, it's not about.

• 1:17:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean.

• 1:17:53David Friedberg?

  He didn't do anything wrong in the sense, and he's not to blame. This Delta variant is infecting people. Sacks got infected with Delta. He's, he's vaccinated.

• 1:18:01Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think you're, I think the point people are trying to make here, Friedberg, is that he's been kind of, people believe that with his platform, he should be more pro-vax. Because vaccines, there's no downside.

• 1:18:13David Sacks?

  But, but, but Jake, how, look, don't, don't you agree there's such a media agenda here? Like, once they decide what the agenda is gonna be, in this case, it's pro-vax. And I'm not saying that's wrong, okay? I'm just saying that the way the media works is first they decide what the agenda's gonna be, then they distort everything to fit what their agenda is. So, for example, ivermectin's called a horse dewormer, and, and the logic here is completely tortured. They just don't want there to be any therapeutic alternative to vaccination.

• 1:18:39Jason Calacanis?

  They don't want to give credit. They don't want to give credit.

• 1:18:42David Sacks?

  They don't want to give credit to potentially, and the same thing's true. Now, look, I'm not saying ivermectin is an effective treatment. I have no idea, but there's no need to distort and demonize it before we even know what the truth is.

• 1:18:51David Friedberg?

  By the way, I wouldn't, I, I wouldn't. Use the term agenda. I know that that's a commonly used term that the media has an agenda. I would argue that the media has a narrative. And I would secondly argue that that narrative isn't necessarily defined by the media or by some set of people in control, but that that narrative is in effect defined by the consumers that consume the media.

• 1:19:13Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever they click on more.

• 1:19:14David Friedberg?

  They vote with their views. And so the more views, the more clicks, the more dollars you spend on certain media outlets and certain writers, the more those writers get more stories to write and the more the consumption happens. And so my point of view is that the consumer ends up ultimately being the writer of the narrative and the definer of the narrative. And the storyline starts to fit that narrative versus feeling like we maybe felt years ago that, oh, my gosh, there's a few people, this cabal that's in control of the media and they're running everything and they're telling us what to believe. And see, I think we vote, I think consumers vote with their dollars, they vote with their views. And as a result, that that is the narrative that gets written.

• 1:19:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they were not supposed to be tribal. They were supposed to be objective. That was the concept of reporting is to just report the facts and let the.

• 1:19:57David Friedberg?

  Not when it became a consumer product.

• 1:19:59Jason Calacanis?

  Well, now it's been, well, it's always been a consumer product, but now it's just become so hard to run those businesses.

• 1:20:04David Friedberg?

  For profit, right?

• 1:20:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05David Friedberg?

  The more you sell, the more, the more money you make.

• 1:20:07Jason Calacanis?

  And it's got, you know what? It was supposed to be subscriptions were supposed to inoculate the reader, the writers from this that, oh, we're getting paid for subscribers, therefore we don't have to worry about clicks anymore.

• 1:20:16David Friedberg?

  I predict.

• 1:20:16Jason Calacanis?

  Now what's happened, it's worse because you will lose your paid subscribers if you don't give them what they want.

• 1:20:23David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I'm going to predict right now our downvotes on YouTube are going to be in a six to 10% range. We have covered, we have covered.

• 1:20:29Jason Calacanis?

  You're not paying.

• 1:20:30David Friedberg?

  Covid abortion.

• 1:20:31Jason Calacanis?

  Abortion, Joe Rogan, vaccine.

• 1:20:34David Friedberg?

  Like, this is going to be our worst rated episode of all time.

• 1:20:37Jason Calacanis?

  But it was a good discussion between the, the four of us. All right, everybody for the Rain Man David Sacks, please download the All In app. Uh, just put a C in front of All In and you'll find it in the app store. Congratulations to the. Uh, folks who got into the syndicate and thank you to Saks for allowing, uh,

• 1:20:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks Sax.

• 1:20:55Jason Calacanis?

  All-in syndicate to, uh, participate and lead the series B. We're going to be leading the series B. Sax gave us, uh, the ability to lead the series B.

• 1:21:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm 45 bitches. I turned 45. I, I, 45 never felt so good.

• 1:21:08Jason Calacanis?

  Forty-five. You look good, dude. A little tuck of silver.

• 1:21:11David Sacks?

  By the way, we have a show called All-In Afterparty on Call-In where we, you know, we've done a couple of episodes, including we introduced our whack pack. Um, you know, so sort of in between. So like, actually what we should do is all the fans of the show, if you like All-In and you want a little more bestie, go.

• 1:21:26Jason Calacanis?

  Go to the after show.

• 1:21:27David Sacks?

  Go to the, go and sign up for All-In Afterparty. We have 4,400 subscribers already after one day on the app. It's pretty good.

• 1:21:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, it'd be great for those, uh, especially if the whack pack gets in there. I, I talked to our guy who does the, uh, merch, the bestie merch guy. He said he's made like five or six grand on merch in the last quarter. He's paying his way through school on it.

• 1:21:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's so great.

• 1:21:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm happy for him. All right, uh, Friedberg, we'll see you at the, uh, production board closed event. Nobody can get in. Sorry if you want a ticket, it's not available. Chamath, happy birthday.

• 1:21:58David Friedberg?

  Happy birthday, C.

• 1:21:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:22:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we'll see you all.

• 1:22:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, Sax, this is where you say happy birthday, you fucking.

• 1:22:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, happy birthday. Say I love you, bestie.

• 1:22:06David Sacks?

  HBD.

• 1:22:07Jason Calacanis?

  HBD. Slash HBD. HBD.

• 1:22:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you guys. Bye.

• 1:22:13Jason Calacanis?

  Has Sax ever used, uh, an emoji? I don't think Sax has ever used an emoji.

• 1:22:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, I, I have, I have 10 years of text messages with this fuck. He's never used a single emoji once.

• 1:22:22Jason Calacanis?

  No, that's because he has no emotion. We'll put the emoji in there, in the David subtext.

• 1:22:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's written, he's written at one point, smiley emoticon. He wrote those words.

• 1:22:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right, and congratulations to producer Nick, who is getting married.

• 1:22:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, great fucking decision.

• 1:22:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  See you on the other side, you fucking dumbass.

• 1:22:44Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations, Nick. We love you.

• 1:22:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Rachel.

• 1:22:46Jason Calacanis?

  And Rachel. Congratulations, guys.

• 1:22:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Rachel, you're gonna get half of the Call-In stock that Nick has.

• 1:22:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, congratulations. You got half of his advisor shares to, to Call-In. All right, we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Besties are gone. That's my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:23:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

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

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  What? You're the bee. What? You're the bee. What? Where did you get merch? Besties are gone.