E151: WW3 risk, War with Iran?, 4.9% GDP, startup failures growing, new Speaker & more

(0:00) Bestie intros! (1:16) WW3 risk, is WSJ trying to escalate US vs Iran? (22:02) Nuclear risks (33:28) Best case scenarios for de-escalation (40:34) Murky macro picture: Main Street disconnects from Wall Street, startup shutdowns, challenged returns (1:09:14) Cruise robotaxi accident update (1:12:59) Hurricane Otis's rapid progression and the second-order effects on US coastal communities (1:24:47) Jason reflects on his time in the Middle East (1:31:09) New House Speaker and Trump case update 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: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/28/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-map-front-line.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/politics/us-israel-gaza-ground-invasion.html https://unherd.com/2023/10/republican-hawks-now-want-a-war-with-iran/ https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-oe-heilbrunn-iran-framework-republican-neocon-response-20150403-story.html https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-hamas-strike-planning-bbe07b25 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/09/no-evidence-yet-of-iran-link-to-hamas-attack-says-israeli-military https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/blinken-says-no-direct-evidence-iran-was-involved-hamas-attack-israel-rcna120110 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/hamas-fighters-trained-in-iran-before-oct-7-attacks-e2a8dbb9 https://www.reuters.com/article/israel-palestinians-usa-senator-idAFS8N3BG0A6 https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-red-line-moment-with-iran-9e1bbf5a https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-israel-hamas-strike-planning-bbe07b25 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iranian-backed-militias-mount-new-wave-of-attacks-as-u-s-supports-israel-d51364d4 https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-counteroffensive-pierces-main-russian-defensive-line-in-southeast-9441e204 https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/07/politics/joe-biden-cluster-munitions-ukraine/index.html https://nypost.com/2023/10/15/biden-insists-us-can-tend-to-both-ukraine-and-israel-at-the-same-time https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1717049864180379761 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/world/middleeast/erdogan-turkey-hamas-israel.html https://jordantimes.com/opinion/daoud-kuttab/king-abdullah-calls-peace-immediate-stoppage-war-gaza https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2023-10/gdp3q23_adv.pdf https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1716608344264470868 https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fddce62ff-33dd-4a38-a659-25e192825c29_1250x630.png https://www.google.com/finance/quote/CART:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/KVYO:NYSE https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bank-americas-unrealized-losses-securities-rose-1316-bln-2023-10-17 https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/dmv-immediately-suspends-cruises-robotaxi-permit-in-california https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/a-detailed-review-of-the-recent-sf-hit-and-run-incident https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2023/10/25/mike-johnson-is-a-social-conservatives-social-conservative-00123619 https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/25/democrats-opposition-mike-johnson-house-speaker-00123624 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/us/politics/mike-johnson-house-speaker.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9017431/Farting-sound-heard-twice-Rudy-Giulianis-voter-fraud-hearing-Michigan.html https://thosenerdygirls.org/can-farts-spread-covid

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  What are the next steps in your interview process for your cabinet position? Secretary of Treasury, Chamath? Secretary of State, Sacks? J. Kell?

• 0:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Press Secretary, obviously.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  Press Secretary. Oh, my God, Press Secretary.

• 0:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can you imagine me in the press briefing room? Whoever wins the presidency, I just want you guys to know, I would be a great Secretary of Sweaters. I will source incredible-

• 0:24David Sacks?

  Only cashmere.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  Vakunia.

• 0:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I will redesign the outfits of the entire military industrial complex.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  And Laura Piana, yes. The Navy SEALs will be in Laura Piana from head to toe. It's their new outfit. They're gonna go whack Osama the nun next time with Laura Piana $4,500 French shoes.

• 0:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Could you imagine SEAL Team Six wearing Vakunia?

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, it's gonna be great. It gets showing those Apaches and the Blackhawks. You're gonna want like a Pashmina wrap or something.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  Have you been to Afghanistan at night? It's freezing.

• 1:16Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome to episode 151 of the All In Podcast. With me again today, the Sultan of Science, the Queen of Kinwa, the Prince of Panic Attacks, David Friedberg, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, and your crazy, angry history uncle, David Sacks, is here. Welcome to the program, everybody. Uh, we got a very full docket. I guess we'll start it off with how the war and the conflict in the Middle East is going here. Sacks, you hosted a Twitter space with Vivek and Elon on preventing World War III. What was the premise and the reason for setting up this trio to talk about World War III?

• 2:04David Sacks?

  Well, I think Vivek actually had the idea to do it. We had a couple other folks on the panel as well. We had Colonel Daniel Davis, who has a podcast called Deep Dive. He's a military expert. We had Alexander Mercurus from the Duran, which is a top geopolitics podcast. And so we were talking about the risk of a series of chain reactions that could happen in the next few weeks here over what's happening in the Middle East. Elon wanted to do it because of what he said, which is that he's talking to a lot of world leaders. He's talking to a lot of different people, and they tell him that the risk of some major war happening or some greater catastrophe is higher than they've ever seen. So he was quite concerned

• 2:46David Sacks?

  about that. And, you know, I think a few things came out of it. The first is, and I think Elon took this position most strongly, we really need to end the war in Ukraine. The combination of having a war in Ukraine that involves the United States, and then a war in the Middle East that could also involve the United States, and Russia has troops in Syria, there's a lot of ways for this to spiral out of control. There's a lot of room for unintended consequences. His view was, look, we've just had five months of counteroffensive here. It didn't go anywhere. On net, the Ukrainians didn't take back any territory. In fact, the Russians slightly gained territory. So this war is going nowhere.

• 3:28David Sacks?

  It has failed. It is time for the administration to work towards a ceasefire and a resolution.

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  Failed for who?

• 3:34David Sacks?

  Well, the Ukrainians have not taken back...

• 3:37Jason Calacanis?

  What did you say, failed?

• 3:38David Sacks?

  They had a completely failed counteroffensive.

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but you said the war has failed. So I'm just curious, which side?

• 3:43David Sacks?

  Sorry, the counteroffensive has failed.

• 3:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, got it.

• 3:46David Sacks?

  We're now, the counteroffensive started on June 4th or 5th. It's now October 26th. And if you look at the map that the New York Times provided, Ukraine has not taken back any meaningful amount of territory. In fact, Russia on net has gained territory, even when it was supposed to be Ukraine on offense. So there is no prospect of Ukraine achieving its objective of evicting Russia from their territory. So what is the point of continuing this war?

• 4:14Jason Calacanis?

  They have defended themselves from an invasion from Putin, yeah? You would say that?

• 4:18David Sacks?

  They've ended up killing hundreds...

• 4:20Jason Calacanis?

  Successfully?

• 4:21David Sacks?

  What's successful about it? Several hundred thousand Ukrainians have died.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they successfully didn't get taken over as a country when they were invaded by Russia.

• 4:27David Sacks?

  That was Russia's goal.

• 4:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So when they sent the troops in there, their goal wasn't to invade?

• 4:35Jason Calacanis?

  What was their goal then?

• 4:36David Sacks?

  Honestly, you don't really understand the history of the conflict.

• 4:39Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I mean, we've talked about history of the conflict, I'm just saying the way you're framing it is that Ukraine failed. It seems to me they've also, the argument could be that they defended themselves successfully.

• 4:47David Sacks?

  If you look at what's happened this year, so let's just put a pin in what happened last year, because I think there's different ways of interpreting it. But if you look at what's happened this year, and certainly over the last five months, Ukraine has made no progress in evicting the Russians, nor is there any prospect of them evicting the Russians. So the continuation of that war doesn't achieve anything except kill the flower of Ukrainian youth and continue to...

• 5:12Jason Calacanis?

  And Russian youth.

• 5:14David Sacks?

  The Ukrainians are dying in much higher numbers. And Russia's a much bigger country, they've got something like five times the population. So moreover, with this new conflict in the Middle East, you create all these unintended consequences and all this risk of escalation, being in a proxy war with Russia. So that was the first thing to come out of the Twitter space was a consensus among the people who were there that it's time to resolve this conflict with Russia. The United States does not need to be in a proxy war with Russia. We need to normalize relations. It's way too dangerous to be continuing this with what's going on in the Middle East.

• 5:48David Sacks?

  The second half of the Twitter space, I think, was about the scenarios here for what could come in the Middle East. And just briefly, I think that there's three scenarios here for what could happen, assuming Israel goes into Gaza. This is what everyone's waiting for, is will there be a ground invasion of Gaza? Netanyahu says they're going to do it. The theory on why they haven't right now is the US is actually moving a bunch of assets, military assets, into place. They're putting air defense batteries around military bases in the Middle East. So there's been a lot of reporting that the US has told Israel to wait until the US military is ready for any blowback that could happen. But Netanyahu's been very clear that they are going in no matter what anybody else says.

• 6:30David Sacks?

  Three scenarios could arise from that. Number one is what Israel and I think the administration want, which is that they have a successful military operation and the US's threats deter Hezbollah or Iran from getting in. So that would be like scenario number one. Scenario number two would be that the Israelis go in, it's guerrilla fighting, it's much tougher than anybody expects, they start to take casualties. At the same time, you get massive public uproar, you get a lot of protests, the Arab street erupts, more and more leaders across the world denounce Israel, and so you kind of muddle your way eventually towards a ceasefire in a couple of months. So that would be scenario number two. Scenario number three is that this thing spirals out

• 7:13David Sacks?

  of control very quickly, where you get Hezbollah in the north invade, so you have a second front, the West Bank could erupt in protests, that could potentially create a third front. Iran could get involved, either because they feel the need to defend Hezbollah, or because you have people like Lindsey Graham who are basically already calling for war with Iran. So either side could basically escalate into that. So I think there's-

• 7:37Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what happened with Lindsey Graham, because he was telling them if Iran, if they got involved, that we would strike back, yeah?

• 7:44David Sacks?

  Yeah, but I think-

• 7:45Jason Calacanis?

  He wasn't saying invade Iran, that was not his-

• 7:47David Sacks?

  But I think he's saying pretty clearly, I think he's saying pretty clearly that if Hezbollah gets involved, we're blaming Iran for that.

• 7:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it, okay.

• 7:52David Sacks?

  So he's chomping at the bit to basically invade Iran. Now, how could that happen? Well-

• 7:58Jason Calacanis?

  You're saying you think he's chomping at the bit to invade Iran?

• 8:01David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 8:01Jason Calacanis?

  Or he just, so he gave them the warning to not-

• 8:03David Sacks?

  This has been on the neocon agenda-

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm curious about that point. Yeah, explain that piece.

• 8:08David Sacks?

  This has been on the neocon agenda for a long time. They've wanted to have a war with Iran, they basically see the Iranian regime as an enemy, and they want to knock it off. Even if you go back to 2003, the beginning of the Iraq War, there was serious conversation about whether Iraq was the right country to invade. A lot of people thought that we should go after Iran, not Iraq. And the Bush administration's view on that was, don't worry, we're gonna get them all. The question is just which one to do first, we're gonna knock off Saddam first. In fact, what's gonna happen is, we're gonna be greeted as liberators. Asians can be so successful that the rest of these tyrannical Middle Eastern regimes are just gonna throw up their arms and they're gonna basically, you know, surrender and become

• 8:49David Sacks?

  democracies. That this was the Bush administration's claim back in 2003. Obviously, it didn't work out like that. But there has been a desire to go into a lot of these countries for a long time. And I think there are a lot of these neocons who see Iran as unfinished business. And if they get the chance to do that, they will.

• 9:09Jason Calacanis?

  So yeah, see, that's a piece of your analysis there that I thought was most interesting. You think Lindsey Graham wants to invade Iran. So when he gave that warning in his speech, which I think came out today, or did it come out yesterday? You think when he gave him the warning, hey, don't get involved, or that's going to be the third front, you'd actually think it's he wants to invade. The United States has that agenda.

• 9:30David Sacks?

  I think there's a lot of neocons who have that agenda. And you see this in the Wall Street Journal, which is sort of the lead leading neocon publication.

• 9:38Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay, so let's explain what the Wall Street Journal obviously has been talking about Hamas militants being trained in Iran a few weeks before the 10/7 attacks. And it says about 500 militants from Hamas.

• 9:52David Sacks?

  Even when 10/7 happened, remember there was that Wall Street Journal story claiming that Iran had directed the whole thing?

• 9:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 9:59David Sacks?

  And then that was knocked down by Israeli officials who said, we haven't seen evidence of that, as well as Washington officials, you know, kind of the usual unnamed knock that down. So the Wall Street Journal has been kind of pushing the the edge here, trying to, I'd say, rattle the saber and gin up, some sort of action against Iran. The latest thing was a story claiming that 500 militants had just been trained by Iran. So they keep trying to put this idea in play that we need a war against Iran, is my point.

• 10:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so just let me reflect that back to you. You're saying Lindsey Graham wants to invade Iran, and he's part of the neocon agenda, and the Wall Street Journal

• 10:41Jason Calacanis?

  Is not just straight reporting this. The Wall Street Journal is in trying to incite an incident here and start a war with Iran.

• 10:48David Sacks?

  Well, the Wall Street Journal reflects the agenda of the people who own it and then the people who are their sources. And clearly, somebody is leaking these stories to the Journal. Somebody leaked the idea on day one of this crisis that Iran was secretly directing the whole thing, even though Israel itself said that was not true. So yeah, look, they have an agenda. They have an agenda.

• 11:11Jason Calacanis?

  So the Wall Street Journal's agenda is to saber-rattle and incite a global war with Iran? Or are you saying that they're just useful idiots and that they're being manipulated by the military global complex and the neocons?

• 11:26David Sacks?

  I'm just saying that the Wall Street Journal-

• 11:27Jason Calacanis?

  You said the Wall Street Journal's saber rattling. So that's as if the Wall Street Journal wants to start a conflict.

• 11:33David Sacks?

  The Wall Street Journal is beating the drums of war. That's what's going on.

• 11:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So you believe the journalists at the Wall Street Journal are trying to start a war with Iran?

• 11:41David Sacks?

  They are beating the drums of war.

• 11:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's what beating the drums of war means to you. Okay. Chamath Freiberg, you think that the Wall Street Journal here is trying to start a war with Iran?

• 11:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll give you a little bit of history here. I'm going to presume you know it, so it'll be repetitive. But it used to be that Iran was a bastion of economic growth and cultural vitality, right? But if you go even further back, there was a duly-elected prime minister that was overthrown, Mohamed Mossadeghi, because he tried to nationalize the oil industry in the 50s in Iran. And that coup d'etat, which was run by the army, was sponsored by the UK and US government. So we've had a long, kind of sordid, history with Iran for a very long time, post-World War II. A lot of it has been intertwined with petrodollars and oil.

• 12:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So, you know, we had the Shah, then there was this duly-elected prime minister. He tried to nationalize the oil industry. He was overthrown in a coup d'etat, supported by America and Britain. They brought back the foreign oil companies, including American oil companies. Then the Shah ran for 30 years, but then he was overthrown for a whole bunch of cultural issues. And so it's gone back and forth and back and forth. So I think it's important to keep in mind that a lot of that generation, it's not clear to me where their views come from. And what I mean by that generation is folks of Lindsey Graham's generation and older have this multi-layered view of Iran because they've seen two or three of these regime changes

• 13:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and they've seen the changing incentives that America has had towards dealing with them. So instead of just kind of putting it out there like, "We just want to go to war", I think it's important to remember that these guys have a historical context that younger folks may not, okay? That's number one. Number two, I think it's, David is right, that there are certain publications that are beating the drums of war. The first time that The Wall Street Journal did it, it was that Iran was the one that essentially was the trigger puller on the October 7th attacks. And that was immediately refuted, interestingly, not by Iran, which did it later, but actually by the United States and Israel.

• 14:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I do think that there is some questionable incentives that drove the publication of that article at a very critical point, at the beginning of this Israel-Hamas-Gaza war. Yeah, an idea of what that incentive would be? No, I don't know, except to say that the facts are that there was an article that pointed the finger. It was written as an exclusive. It was written in a moment where things were very heightened and little was known. And that these governments had to come out and explicitly disavow and deescalate it. And so I think that's just an important thing to observe. Now, we're in this second wave where there's a second attempt to now point the finger directly

• 14:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  back to Iran as having trained these Hamas terrorists as now engaging in, and it's not to say that they're not, but it's just that this escalation is definitely happening on a continuous basis. And so it's important to frankly, understand the historical context and deescalate so that we don't, I think Elon is right. This is how you sleepwalk into war, is you read a headline, you believe it, and then you run with it. And the opposite of sleepwalking is underwriting from first principles. I think it's important to go and read the historical context of how we've been engaged in Iran since World War II particularly, the back and forth, the complicated issue of all the petrodollars.

• 15:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then you can view Lindsey Graham's comments in two veins, I think. Vein number one is he was there with a bipartisan delegation of, I think it was 10 US senators.

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  There's 10, five of each.

• 15:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Five Republicans, five Democrats. So I think it's fair to say that he is not just speaking off the top of his head. I think that there's some understanding of what he intended to say. And so I do think that this is sort of a back channel way of getting on the record that they really need to deescalate. If they're given an opportunity to engage, they should not. I think that's the deescalated message.

• 16:04Jason Calacanis?

  Iran.

• 16:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Jason Calacanis?

  Iran should deescalate.

• 16:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And frankly, hopefully they listen and they do, and they do it.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Lindsey Graham's quote, just to put it out there, when he was visiting Tel Aviv, "We're here today to tell Iran, we're watching you. If this war grows, it's coming to your backyard. The idea that this happened without Iranian involvement is laughable." Friedberg, what are your thoughts? Do you think the journalists at the Wall Street Journal are complicit in trying to incite something here? Do you think they're just reporting the facts straight? What's your take on this?

• 16:39David Sacks?

  Can I answer that because I actually have a data point?

• 16:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, I mean, and the reason I'm pushing you on it sacks.

• 16:44David Sacks?

  You're using the language of conspiracy, like complicit, to make it sound like I'm leveling an accusation at them when what I'm saying is this is their editorial policy and you can see that by actually reading their editorials. So therefore, look at an op ed that came from their editorial board two days ago called Biden's Red Line Moment with Iran. And what it says is here that Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Tuesday that the US would respond swiftly and decisively to any attack on American forces from Iran or its proxies. And then it says, that's a welcome message aimed at deterring the mullahs in Tehran and their agents. But will the president enforce the red line? He appears to be drawing. He hasn't so far. So in other words, the Journal editorial board is saying that Biden

• 17:28David Sacks?

  has not been tough enough on Iran. Okay, now go to the last paragraph. It also says here, Iran is using his proxies to test US resolve. The more they attack without Iran paying a price, the more likely that Iran will raise the stakes. The paradox, Mr. Biden, has to appreciate, the most stabilizing move for the region would be restoring America as a deterrent power. So what does that mean? You take these things together. They're saying that in order to stabilize the region, we need to deter Iran, but they say that just making threats of deterrence is not enough. You actually have to do something. So in other words, like attacking Iran is the stabilizing move, which is war is peace. It's right out of George Orwell. So this is what I mean beating the drums of war.

• 18:11Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, the reason, I'm not saying you're conspiracy theorists, you're, there are, there is editorials, then there's news, and then there's your imprecise language that I'm just challenging you on because I want you to be precise here. If you're saying the journalists are trying to provoke a war here, or, you know, and the banging the drum and saber rattling.

• 18:29David Sacks?

  I'm not being imprecise. I think you're.

• 18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, saber rattling and banging the drums are a bit imprecise.

• 18:34David Sacks?

  You're going down a weird rabbit hole of what, what the Wall Street Journal believes. I think it's pretty clear that their editorial policy is they are super hawkish on Iran. They don't think Biden's been tough enough on Iran. They also have published two stories that have been either knocked down or questioned since October 7th, that clearly want to lay all the blame for this on Iran. And so they are ginning up both in their news and their editorial pages. They're beating the drums of war. They're trying to basically prime the administration to go to war.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. They're trying to goat the administration.

• 19:09David Sacks?

  But I don't think, I don't, I don't understand why, honestly, I feel like we're going down a rabbit hole. Look.

• 19:14Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm just trying to understand your position. And if you're talking about the editorial page, you're talking about the reporting. That's all. I'm just trying to get you to be more precise. That's all.

• 19:22David Sacks?

  I think both in this case. Remember, if you go back to the reporting on the Ukraine war, and I followed a lot of it by all the major publications. In my opinion, the Wall Street Journal's news coverage of Ukraine was some of the most biased and inaccurate of any publication, any major Western publication. And I'll just give you one example here, which is on August 31st, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Ukraine had a major success in its counteroffensive, claiming that it had pierced the main Russian defensive line. Okay, we are now, what is it? Basically, two months since then, and it's very clear that that did not happen. Okay, that was all nonsense.

• 20:07David Sacks?

  And again, read the first paragraphs here. Not only do they claim to penetrate the main Russian defensive line, it said it raised hopes of a breakthrough that would reinvigorate the slow-moving counteroffensive. Was there a subsequent breakthrough? Did hopes get raised? No, this was total nonsense.

• 20:22Jason Calacanis?

  So your position here is the journalists who wrote this story are in some way trying to benefit the neocons in the military industrial complex.

• 20:33David Sacks?

  I'm just saying that they're inaccurate.

• 20:36Jason Calacanis?

  Using the Wall Street Journal as a, you know, an active participant in this as a reporter, it's just kind of an explosive, it's not kind of, it is, it's an explosive claim. And so I'm just trying to be clear.

• 20:45David Sacks?

  Not really. I'm just saying that their reporting on Ukraine was highly inaccurate, and it was all inaccurate in the same way, which is it always overstated the Ukrainian successes in this war. So I call that bias. I think it's easy to prove. I think they have a similar bias, which is stated explicitly by their editorial board, which is they don't think that Biden and DC has been hawkish enough on Iran. And they would like to see, they think the stabilizing move is for Biden to basically take action against Iran, whatever that means.

• 21:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:25Jason Calacanis?

  Freebie, any thoughts on this before we move on to the next topic?

• 21:30Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing on the war, on the situation?

• 21:32David Friedberg?

  No, I'm good. We can pivot off of that.

• 21:35David Sacks?

  I want to hear a few words to say.

• 21:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's why I'm bringing him in.

• 21:38David Sacks?

  I mean, I feel like we're debating the wrong thing, which is you're you're actually questioning whether there are war drums beating for Iran, when I think it's like abundantly clear what we should be discussing is whether that's a wise move for the US.

• 21:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's clear that these drums are being beaten. I think the question is, why? Why would we allow that to be the default plan of action?

• 22:02David Friedberg?

  My concern, it's everyone's going to think it's crazy, but it's that there's a very, very low probability, but now probably much higher than it was, that the world marches towards using a nuclear weapon for the first time in a long time. And the reason is, as Sacks has pointed out so many times, there's significant material and industrial production shortages, not just in the US, but around the world to support rising conventional wars that seem to be scaling all over and there's going to be multiple fronts. And to feed those wars with conventional weaponry, there's, there's a breaking point. Our cost

• 22:45David Friedberg?

  of weaponry is 10x Russia's cost of weaponry supposedly. I mean, I'm just quoting Sacks on this point. But if all that is true, at some point, these conflicts become really difficult to maintain. And if we're in the midst of a conflict, you may not be able to simply retreat or recede. At some point, the question is, well, how do we gain superiority again? And whether that's us or Russia backed into a corner, or Israel backed into a corner, who also has a nuclear arsenal. There's a couple of scenarios. There's like a million scenarios from here. There's a million realities we could live in from here, from today. But there's some number of them that end up with someone saying, I gotta press the button.

• 23:31David Friedberg?

  And there's, remember, not all nuclear weapons are these things that wipe out a million people instantly. Some of them are small, low tactical weapons. That is still very low probability, but much higher than it was a few weeks ago, that we find ourselves walking because of the fact that we're going to have multiple conflicts and burn through all this conventional weaponry, not have industrial production systems to support all these conflicts. But every, there's a bunch of countries that have a trump card. And once you start talking about it, it'll seem scary at first, then it'll get normalized, and then it'll become a question of when and where and how. And then all of a sudden, it's like, holy shit, this is a different world we're living in. That's a scary place I don't want to be in. Anything we can do to eliminate those paths from being walked,

• 24:15David Friedberg?

  I'm in favor of, even if that means ceding strategic advantages today. I just don't think that that's a place we want to go.

• 24:22Jason Calacanis?

  There's like, nine nuclear powers. Who do you think is going to be the one who would actually use a nuclear bomb for a burn? Do you have some speculation there? Or you just think everybody runs out of bullets and tanks and missiles and then they go to nuclear because they have nothing left?

• 24:38David Friedberg?

  I don't, look, I tend to think in terms of, like, there are multiple parallel scenarios that can play out. So I don't have a point of view. I'm not going to say deterministically, I think this thing is going to happen. Again, I think this is very low probability. But I could see a bunch of scenarios emerging. Like, let's say that Russia's got their back against the wall and Putin's feeling lost and desperate and he needs to use a tactical weapon to, you know, get some regional victory. Again, these tactical nuclear weapons, they're not necessarily the kinds of things that you would use to level Manhattan. Those exist. But there are other weapons in the arsenal that I get worried that someone says, we're backed in a corner, we have nowhere else to go, we can't win this thing conventionally,

• 25:23David Friedberg?

  and we cannot lose. And that's the moment when someone says, this is the, let's start talking about this. And that conversation happens before it gets used, then that conversation becomes normalized, and then suddenly it's not this thing. We all grew up in a world where this was never a real threat or risk or conversation. There was the Cold War and the... dismantling and we were kind of headed in a good direction for the last forty some odd years but now it's like I don't see it going in that good direction anymore so I'm just really nervous about that

• 25:49David Sacks?

  yeah I think you should be nervous about that let me give you a couple of examples so so first of all I agree with Friedberg's point that humans who are convinced of the righteousness their cause have a tremendous ability to wave away or justify any sort of tactical implications so for example we did use two atomic bombs to end World War II that wasn't the only time it was advocated if you go back to I think it was around 1950 MacArthur wanted to win the Korean War by using twenty to thirty atomic bombs and his plan was to so thoroughly irradiate the border between China and North Korea that China would never be able to invade through a invading army

• 26:31David Sacks?

  for something like fifty years Truman had to fire him because Truman didn't agree with the strategy and by the way MacArthur was not some crazy you know he was not some like wacko he was the most respected man in America in 1950 and Truman paid a huge political price for having to fire him it was one of the reasons why Truman couldn't run for reelection again so this idea that like rational people would never use these things not true the generals in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis were all ready to take the nukes off the chain if the Soviets were willing to break the naval blockade so you know it's not just foreign powers who have rattled the saber on nukes we've done it at various points through our history too let me give you a more mundane

• 27:16David Sacks?

  example just earlier this year Biden said that we were out of 155 millimeter artillery ammunition and so we had to give Ukraine cluster bombs remember this just a year before that same administration had said the use of cluster bombs was a war crime so in other words they were able to change their morality on the use of cluster bombs because tactically they were out of the type of ammunition they want to use they had nothing left So, you know, I think this kind of reinforces Friedberg's point. Now, look at our inventory replacement times for key systems. This was a report by CSIS, that is a military think

• 27:58David Sacks?

  tank in Washington. What they show is that our industrial capacity is so hollowed out that it's going to take us five plus years to replace our stockpiles of artillery ammunition, of Javelins, of Stingers, of Gimblers, as another type of rocket system. And so, we are like dangerously low on key types of ammunition. And yet, remember when 60 Minutes did that interview with Biden, they said to him, well, gee, if we're in a war, both on behalf of Ukraine and behalf of Israel, doesn't that pose any trade-offs? And Biden's response was, no, we're the most powerful nation in the world. For good measure, he said, we're the most powerful nation in the history of the world. So, he doesn't see

• 28:42David Sacks?

  any trade-offs. He doesn't see any limits on American power. Quite frankly, I think this is why he's dangerous, is because he still thinks that the US is living in 1991. He's been in Washington for 50 years, and he only remembers the unipolar moment. All of his instincts and experience have been shaped by that period of time when the US was the only superpower, that we were the global hegemon. We're no longer in that position anymore. You know, first of all, Russia and China are strong. They are great powers too. And Iran is much stronger than Iraq. Iran is four times the size of California and has roughly 90 million people. And they got a lot of engineers. And even if we did want to attack them, it's not exactly clear how you would stage that attack. Just getting

• 29:26David Sacks?

  to Iran would require flying over some very dangerous territory. It's not clear we have the, we have the bases or the air clearance rights from allies to be able to even get to Iran. Moreover, Iran apparently has a very strong missile program. So, they may even have the ability to fire missiles or hypersonic missiles at our aircraft carriers that are sitting in the Mediterranean Sea. So, if we get in a war with Iran, it's no joke. This is not going to be shock and awe. This could be a very, very dangerous situation for the United States, which is why when people are just kind of making these idle threats, they should be very careful about that, because Iran is hearing that too, and they're getting ready.

• 30:10David Sacks?

  And one last point on that. Thanks to our destabilizing the Middle East with the Iraq war and the Syria regime change operation, Iran now has proxies in both Iraq and Syria. They've got Iraqi Hezbollah. They also have proxies in Yemen with the Houthis. And all of those groups could stage attacks on American military bases there.

• 30:33Jason Calacanis?

  We've gone down the worst case scenario here, use of a nuclear bomb. The United States invading Iran. Here's just a list of the nine countries that are nuclear powered and that have nuclear bombs rather than nuclear powered. And as you can see, Russia, US, China, France, UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea. Israel denies they actually have them. And Pakistan has been the one who has been proliferating them, getting bombs to North Korea and helping Iran with their program. Iran obviously does not yet have a nuclear bomb, but we don't know how far they are because intelligence is sparse on that topic, based on my cursory research. What's the best case scenario here?

• 31:18David Sacks?

  Sorry, Jake, I just want to be clear that I don't see nuclear use as likely.

• 31:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that was Friedberg's point, yeah.

• 31:24David Friedberg?

  Sorry, I did not say it was likely at all either. Not at all.

• 31:28Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, you said it's a small possibility and we just spent 10 minutes talking about that small possibility.

• 31:32David Friedberg?

  I just want everyone, like, let's say something goes from 2% chance to 8% chance. It's now 4X in the next 20 years. That's a significant shift in risk. And I think there have been others like Ray Dalio, I think, or Warren Buffett. Some people have said that the chance of us using a nuclear weapon over a long enough period of time approximates 50 to 100%. It starts to get very high because, you know, at some point, these things proliferate, the intelligence, the capabilities proliferate, they get into the wrong hands. There's all these different scenarios that emerge. So the probability might be low on any given period of time, but over a long enough period of time, these things become a real kind of concern.

• 32:14David Friedberg?

  The nukes that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are like 20 kiloton yields. I mean, we have massive, massive, massive warhead, multi-warhead missiles that have many, many, many megatons of yield, but there are sub 20, sub 10 kiloton yield nukes. That can be deployed in a conventional, in what people would call a tactical setting. So you're not trying to...

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  The suitcase nuke, they're not literally suitcases, they're on trucks. But tactical nukes are, have been produced by Russia, China, and the United States are the known tactical nuclear powers.

• 32:48David Friedberg?

  Well, they're also, they're in different forms of delivery, but they're not, you know, you don't take a bomber up and put it over a city and blast the whole city.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  No, you can drive them into a city in a van, is the idea, yeah.

• 32:58David Friedberg?

  No, not necessarily about being on a van. It's like they can be on short-range tactical systems. So the point is, like, you're caught in a corner, you have nowhere to go, and you can't lose. And if you have one of these things, I mean, just take all human history aside, and all convention aside, if you've got this thing, you're trapped in a corner, you've got nowhere to go, and you can press this button and win, you might press the button.

• 33:26Jason Calacanis?

  So let's do the other side. What's the best-case scenario here? Obviously, we haven't had the ground invasion. We've had Qatar and Saudi and a number, and the United States, obviously, doing some pretty hardcore diplomacy, and we've had some hostages released. So, you know, and I've been spending some time here in the Middle East, there is a theory that people have brought up multiple times here, that there's a deal going on right now to get the hostages, a larger number of them, and that the ground invasion may not occur. This is just a theory that a number of people have been talking about here, and maybe they're just optimists, but is there an optimistic scenario here, Chamath? Is there a golden bridge out of here?

• 34:09Jason Calacanis?

  Is there a possible path to, you know, the peace process getting back on track? Or does it all just seem hopeless? And if there is, and if there is a possible path, what would that look like? Let's just see if we can come up with any optimistic framing or theory here.

• 34:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why? It's just as bad as the other side.

• 34:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you don't see one, yeah.

• 34:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How about we just look at the facts on the ground? The facts are that we have this long simmering war between Russia and Ukraine that doesn't seem to have an end. And there doesn't seem to be a loss of life at which

• 34:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  they're willing to stop, or whether the international community is willing to force a ceasefire. And then now you have this one, which is in thousands and will escalate into the ends of thousands, but it seems like it's on a path to be slow and simmering. So I don't know what to say, except that it does not seem to be escalating.

• 35:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the reason it isn't escalating is that there is enough emotional impact

• 35:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  that's causing people to understand that the stakes are high. And so when the actual actions are relatively de-escalatory, I find that the rhetoric ratchets up, right? It's almost inversely proportional, you know? It's kind of like, what was the phrase in World War II about Churchill, iron fist strapped in a velvet glove? Is that, is that the phrase, something like that? But the idea is that when you act decisively, you say little. And when you have no plan of really escalating, you say a lot. So I think that right now we're saying a lot, which actually counterintuitively to me says, we're not planning to do much of anything. And I think that that's good.

• 35:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I'm all for Lindsey Graham braying, as long as we don't take it too seriously and sleepwalk into some escalation.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  Sacks, any chance that this gets de-escalated? And what might that look like?

• 36:12David Sacks?

  Sure, I think there's a chance. I think like

• 36:17David Sacks?

  Well, what it looks like, I think, is that the ground invasion keeps getting paused, either because the US needs more time to get its military in place, or because the Israeli military realizes this is going to be a very difficult operation and they need more time to plan. And while that's happening, there's a serious diplomatic effort going on. And while that's happening, there's also more pressure being brought to bear against Israel to not go in. So for example, you saw Erdogan this week. Make some statements. I actually thought they were pretty outrageous where he described Hamas as basically being freedom fighters, but warning Israel not to go in. There were much more reasonable remarks by King Abdullah of Jordan,

• 37:00David Sacks?

  basically at least recognizing the atrocity that had taken place against Israel, but also trying to advocate for the lives of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and telling them that it would be a mistake to go in. So you're seeing like a wide range of opinions across, I'd say, major players in the Middle East, but all of it, the gist of it is basically telling Israelis not to go in. So you've got all these delays and pressures going on and so maybe there's some chance it could de-escalate. I personally think that that's still unlikely. And the main reason for that is I think Israel is determined to go in. I think Netanyahu has made that clear. I think from the Israeli

• 37:43David Sacks?

  point of view, they don't feel like they have a choice. They've suffered the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and they can't be perceived as simply standing by and doing nothing. That would make them look extremely weak in a region of the world where you don't want to look weak.

• 38:02Jason Calacanis?

  They have to annihilate Hamas, I guess, is the thinking.

• 38:06David Sacks?

  Well, they say that their objective is to destroy Hamas, but I think that probably from their standpoint, they'd consider it a success if they could significantly degrade Hamas, set them back 10 years.

• 38:17Jason Calacanis?

  And get the hostages back.

• 38:18David Sacks?

  Destroy their capability to wage war against Israel, to undermine their tunnel networks and so forth. So I think Israel still feels like this is something they have to do. And so I kind of think that the most realistic good case scenario is that if they do go in, that the military operation for various reasons is not a long one and eventually a ceasefire can be agreed to before this can escalate out of control. And so there's a bunch of like very delicate red lines there for a lot of different players. And so in order for that scenario to work out, I think it's going to take some very deft behind the scenes diplomacy from the Biden administration, really, and I'm not sure they're capable. I'm not sure they're up to that task.

• 39:02David Sacks?

  So this is why I think it's such a dangerous situation.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  But can I ask you a question, by the way?

• 39:06David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Jason Calacanis?

  Is Lindsey Graham speaking on behalf of the United States officially with the president's approval? He can't possibly be freelancing that. I didn't have any.

• 39:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I tried to research it online. I couldn't find any

• 39:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well, why don't you fill in the blanks, Jason?

• 39:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sanctioned or not.

• 39:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, Jason, think about this. David texted this into the group chat and then tweeted it as well. Do you think Mohammed bin Salman is meeting with a group of 10 senators that's just off on an adventure?

• 39:39Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 39:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay. Well, there's your answer.

• 39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, no, I'm just.

• 39:43David Sacks?

  Look at this photo. I think this, the picture says a thousand words. So you have a delegation of senators. I count about 10 senators there.

• 39:52Jason Calacanis?

  There's 10 of them on the trip.

• 39:53David Sacks?

  Yeah. Yeah. They're meeting with Mohammed bin Salman.

• 39:55Jason Calacanis?

  Five Republicans and five Democrats.

• 39:57David Sacks?

  And who has the seat of honor right next to MBS in the front of the room? So I personally would like to believe that Lindsey Graham is just an outlier and he doesn't speak for anybody. But unfortunately, this delegation saw fit to put him in the front of the room. I consider that very scary.

• 40:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think it's also fair to say that the Office of MBS would have coordinated that decision with the White House before receiving them. That's, that's typical political protocol.

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It just was never explicitly said. He didn't say on behalf of the president or the president has sent us here. It just seemed like a disjoint. I hadn't never seen that before.

• 40:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I guess we'll move on to some business issues here. The macro picture is quite confounding. GDP, as we were talking about in our group chat, grew 4.9% year over year in Q3. Higher than the 4.3% expectations and much higher than the 2.1% growth in Q2. Highest year-over-year GDP since Q4 2021. And we thought we were going into a recession. We'd have a couple of quarters of contraction. That hasn't happened. CPI in September was 3.7, slightly above the 3.6 estimates. And Chamath, what do you take from all of this, this crazy high-growth GDP? Is this because of stimulus, government spending? What, what is this confounding?

• 41:19Jason Calacanis?

  You know, inflation coming down and getting somewhat under control and then crazy GDP growth?

• 41:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know. I don't think anybody knows.

• 41:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's really confounding for the markets. I think it's really bad for markets in general. It's probably the worst for private companies because you have this effect now where everybody's been wanting to price in a recession, right? Everybody wants to see that shoe drop where they say, oh, okay, here it is. Something's softening. Demand is softening. And then when you see a print like this where the economy is expanding, you're kind of confused and you're like, well, where is the softening going to come from? And so what happens is people become very overreactive to small amounts of data. And that actually started to come

• 42:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  out, I think, basically since August. And what's been happening since August is that every time a company reports, the sector that's gotten the most attention has been fintechs. And the reason is that fintechs tend to be on the bleeding edge of capturing consumer demand. And if consumer demand shrinks, that's probably the first sign that there's going to be a recession, right? Because consumption is about almost 70% of the US economy. And so since August, what you've seen are the large leading edge public fintech companies just get absolutely murdered. And yesterday was an even worse day because what happened yesterday was a company was basically world line, started to report softness

• 42:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in spending. Now, that spending was not even in America. That spending actually happened to be within a segment of their customer base in Germany. And that was enough to just literally sink the stock, I think, 60% in a day. So we have on the surface a healthy growing economy, but underneath the surface, what we are betting on

• 43:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Increasingly is that consumer demand has basically stopped. So you can see here, Adyen is down 50% since the beginning of the year. But again, most of this was since August. Block is down another 35%. PayPal is down 30%. So that's one thing, which is this is a big bet. That consumption is slowing and shrinking. The economy will be in a recession over these next two or three quarters, which will give the Fed the motivation and the justification to lower rates starting in the middle of next year. That's the big bet in the market. But separately, if you take a different lens and look at this data, we all have a bigger problem in Silicon Valley land,

• 44:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  which is how do the capital markets take companies public when this is happening? And the reason why this data is so important is, we've said this 1,000 times, there are only two companies that can structurally open the capital markets for all startups. One is SpaceX Starlink, but that's on its own path and not going public soon. And the other is Stripe.

• 44:28Jason Calacanis?

  You could probably add TikTok to that as well.

• 44:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, because that's a Chinese company with all kinds of overhang. So no, I would disagree with that.

• 44:34Jason Calacanis?

  But with 30 or 40% US ownership.

• 44:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would disagree with that, but no. So I think it's Starlink and Stripe. And the problem now for Stripe is that the public comps dollar for dollar are off 50%, which from the beginning of the year, which then says that if you apply that ratably to its valuation, they did around at 55 billion, then the market clearing trade may be 25 to 30 billion now. Now, 25 to 30 billion for Stripe, you're incinerating $70 billion of equity value, right? And about $5 to $10 billion of actually paid in capital. So what does that do for Silicon Valley and for VCs? I think it's going to put a lot of pressure on companies and valuations. So.

• 45:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, we're in for a real slog. So on the surface for the real economy, I think it's generally decent news. For startup land, I think it's not good. And then specifically within startup land, sectors like fintech are in pretty bad trouble, I think.

• 45:38Jason Calacanis?

  And the late stage, obviously, still very much in trouble. Friedberg, any thoughts on the startup economy? You had some thoughts on this, I think, too.

• 45:45David Friedberg?

  I'd like to hear your guys' experiences, but there's definitely been a big holdup in Series B, C, D later rounds because so much of the market questioning is, you know, when, when is the next round going to get done? Which is based on when can the companies potentially go public? And ultimately, if you don't see a path to a window opening up, you don't fund the pre-IPO round, you don't fund the late-stage round, the growth-stage round, everything gets held up. And a lot of rounds that are getting done lately have been these kind of convert or bridge rounds, where existing investors are funding the company to give it another year or two of runway. That was definitely the case for most of this year, coming out of '22. I think post the summer,

• 46:29David Friedberg?

  it seems like a lot of folks I'm talking to are starting to wake up. There's even more Series B at lower prices and everyone's kind of capitulating and accepting that there are still great businesses out there, it's just that they got overpriced in their A or their B. And let's price them at a lower valuation and rounds are sort of starting to get done in the fall here.

• 46:47Jason Calacanis?

  I'll have you react to this data, Sax. Karta manages cap tables for folks, but they have produced this chart. And this is Karta companies only. So this is a subsection. Who knows, Karta may power the cap tables of 10%, 20% of Silicon Valley. The rest are done on other pieces of software or even in Google Sheets or literally in an Excel sheet by an attorney. Who is working with the company. If you look at this chart in 2020 and 2021, you had about 70 startups shutting down per quarter. In 2022, you see that number double. And we start seeing 129, 141 a quarter.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  And then in 2023, this last quarter, Q3, rocketing up to 2020. So roughly three times what we see in the boom markets. Sax, and any thoughts on this data? I have a couple of observations, but I wanted to go to you first.

• 47:43David Sacks?

  Well, this is not surprising to me at all. This is the bubble of 2021 working its way through the system. We know that there were these gigantic rounds that were funded in 2021, especially in the second half, where you had this asset super bubble. It wasn't just in tech. It was like all growth stocks, crypto, everything. And so there were a lot of startups that raised huge funding rounds at the peak of the market, and they haven't had to raise for a couple of years. Well, now they're starting to run out of cash and they do have to raise. They're finally being forced to go back into market. And a lot of them are either burning too much money or they don't have the numbers to justify another round. Or if they do, it's a structured round, a down round.

• 48:26David Sacks?

  Or again, they just are unable to raise. They have a broken process and they eventually start winding down. So I think you're going to see this dynamic for the next 18 months or so. But this is not a new dynamic. This is the lagging indicator of what we've been talking about since the regime change of the first half of 2022, is that the markets started looking for different things. Instead of growth at all costs, it's been about growth with unit economics and efficiency. And the valuations went way down. And there's a lot of companies that no longer qualify and they're getting weeded out. So this is just a delayed reaction to things we already knew.

• 49:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key part, the delayed reaction as well. I'll just note when a company does shut down, that process typically takes two or three quarters. And for a founder to accept the shutdown, that might take one, two, three quarters as well. So anything you're seeing in 2023, that might be a shutdown where the employees were all laid off in late 2022. But I mean, I have a question for you guys. What, what turns this around? I'll tell you what I'm seeing in the early stage. We are seeing many companies come to Found University and two or three people who want to build a company who can't get jobs at Google or Stripe, they're not hiring. So we'll see two or three developer teams working on a project and then raising 250, 500K at a 5 to 12 million

• 49:44Jason Calacanis?

  dollar valuation and then very quickly getting to 10 to 50K in monthly revenue.

• 49:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right. But what about all this money that we need to return so that we can recycle and keep doing this job? What, what needs to happen? Sacks, Friedberg, what do you guys think needs to happen to get to crack? Cause like the three IPOs we've had have not fared particularly well and the market just seems to get harder and harder for tech companies, even profitable ones, right?

• 50:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, I think profitability is key. I think that's the great evolutionary forcing function here. It's like a tale of two worlds, of two startups. The one startup needs cash for a long period of time and the other one's found a path to profitability. The one that's found a path to profitability, they have an infinite number of options available to them. It might take longer to get public or whatever, but they can wait it out because they don't need money. The one that needs cash continuously and will for a long period of time is really screwed.

• 50:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What about the multiple of these profitable companies? That seems to have changed materially as well.

• 50:45Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you something that's starting to happen as well, Chamov, is that the public markets are looking at their stocks if they're undervalued and then Dara Uber is reportedly planning like buying back upwards of 20% of the Uber shares in the next five years. And then you look at a company like Snap, which is majority controlled with super voting shares, they're still losing 300 or 400 million a quarter. So I think Friedberg's exactly right. Tale of two cities. Some people refuse. And then if the stock is so cheap, people start buying it back and the freezing of employees and the expenses going down while revenue goes up and earnings increase, I think that's the setup. If you're looking for the setup, I think it's the public market companies showing the path to profitability, buying back stock and then these small companies not getting big.

• 51:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't understand. How does, how does that help private companies go public?

• 51:32Jason Calacanis?

  If the private companies follow suit and they're profitable and they control costs and they, people get greedy looking at how profitable they are as opposed to their 50% growth rate, they start looking at their increasing earnings and how much cash they're throwing off. And I think that's starting to trickle down through the startup ecosystem. People are trying to get to profitability quickly.

• 51:52David Sacks?

  I don't know.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  You asked, the question was, can people turn it around?

• 51:55David Sacks?

  I think.

• 51:55Jason Calacanis?

  If they do, that's what it's going to be, is profitability.

• 51:58David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you guys are kind of talking about two different things. Sure, any particular company can still get its house in order and create a great business and they'll eventually get, you know, liquidity, they'll go public. The question is, I think what Chamath is getting at is that the exit comps have changed. If you were a tech investor, or let's say a real estate investor, before the regime change, you were underwriting to completely different exit comp. And now those exit comps have totally changed. And so it's going to be very hard for those investors to make a good return.

• 52:29Jason Calacanis?

  So they're going to lose their money like Instacart.

• 52:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I'll give you a mathematical example, just to illustrate what David just said. If you have a company with 300 million of ARR, you are in a rare group of, say, 30 or 40 companies, period. Okay, so very, very, very few companies get to that level of scale. But if you are at 100% net dollar retention, okay, which means that you're kind of treading water essentially.

• 52:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Your customers may grow, but the value of each customer isn't particularly growing. So you know, you have, you have pretty nominal growth.

• 53:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That company now comps to roughly three to five times ARR.

• 53:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, the problem is, if you go and look back through Crunchbase or any of these other, serve a pitch book, the number of companies that traded above 1.5 billion dollar valuation as a SaaS business, there's like 70 of them, but there's only seven of them that have 300 million of ARR. So what do you, what happens, guys? Like, the jig is up. Okay, uh, what's going on here?

• 53:40Jason Calacanis?

  Consolidation, I guess, and some of them will flame out. I mean, look at Instacart, the people who were the last four rounds, they either lost money or broke even. So, and that means time adjusted versus what they could have made in the markets. They lost money, so.

• 53:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What happens if Stripe is only worth 30?

• 53:57Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, how much has been invested into that company? What's the total paid in capital?

• 54:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Again, I, I, I think we all want Stripe to be worth 100. We want it to be worth 200 billion because it would help. Frankly, it is the rising tide that lifts all boats. But if, if unit level profitability is scrutinized and then comped appropriately to the public markets, as Sacks said.

• 54:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're going to have to take that signal and apply it to our entire portfolio.

• 54:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so it goes all the way back to eventually the seed in the series A as well, which is really good. Jason, as you've said many times, just getting the inflation under control and in check, but it will mean not just changing valuations, but it will mean changing salaries, right? It will mean totally different equity packages.

• 54:45Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of hard work.

• 54:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I almost think that maybe none of the hard work has actually yet started. So I don't know. I'm just putting that out there, guys. Do you think that we've all just kind of been hoping maybe that all of this would pass? And now we're getting more and more signals that we actually have to do a pretty hard valuation reset?

• 55:05David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at the altimeter charts that Jamon Ball has put out, I mean, the valuation levels are returning to, let's call it the pre-COVID mean. In fact, they're slightly below the pre-COVID mean because the 10-year treasury has a higher rate. So yeah, we're going back to something that was more like, I don't know, 2015 levels of valuation and maybe even slightly worse again because long-term rates are higher. So cost of capital and hurdle rate are higher.

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I'm saying. I'm seeing 2012 valuations, valuation of Uber when I invested was five million.

• 55:40David Sacks?

  Yeah, let me just tell you, it's a lot harder for people to make money when the money supply is shrinking than when the money supply is growing. For obvious reasons, when the money supply is shrinking, it's like you're playing a game of musical chairs and you're just hoping that you still have a seat. Whereas when the pie is increasing, it's a lot easier to get like a piece of it. But when the pie is shrinking, it's a lot harder to get a piece.

• 56:03Jason Calacanis?

  Musical chairs, as you're describing is what you're, is literally the description of the venture capital industry and GPs right now. A lot of people are losing their seats.

• 56:12David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Jason Calacanis?

  And I think there's going to be a lot of shutdowns of venture firms. I think a lot of venture firms are going to shut down. This is going to be zombie funds.

• 56:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we got to believe the

• 56:23David Friedberg?

  Extraordinary outcomes make up the bulk of returns in venture from, you know, the singular companies and there's a few of them, right? There's 15 billion dollar exits created every year. I don't know if it's unicorns as valued in private markets or actual exits, but as we know, every couple of years, there's a company that comes along that's worth 10 billion and every once a decade, there's a company that comes along that ends up being worth 100 billion. And the bulk of the returns in the entire venture landscape comes from those handful of companies. I think we end up focusing a lot on market metrics as the performance driver for venture

• 57:03David Friedberg?

  returns, but the truth is it's the performance driver for the mid-tier of venture returns. And that mid-tier of venture returns is skating along at 2X multiple after 10 years or 3X after 10, 2 to 2 and a half X after 10 years.

• 57:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's the top quartile.

• 57:19David Friedberg?

  Right. And so whatever it is, 1.8X and now those guys are all underwater. So instead of being 1.8X, they're all going to return 0.7X or 0.5X and they're going to lose money.

• 57:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I think the, I think the 50th percentile returns money.

• 57:30David Friedberg?

  Okay. But the truth is, so then now they're going to lose money, but the truth is whichever funds get the tiger by the tail, whoever gets the Uber at 5 million, whoever gets the Slack at whatever you got in at, whoever got to the SpaceX or whatever Saks got in at, you're going to be fine because like the multiples in markets don't matter as much if you're generating 4,000X.

• 57:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true because if it happens in a fund and that all of those deals, except SpaceX, happened in a different valuation framework where rates were zero. So I think the question, the more intellectually honest question is what would Slack and Uber have gone public at today with a 5% tenure? And I think the answer, if you're going to be intellectually honest, is a very different valuation than when it went out when the tenure was zero.

• 58:21David Sacks?

  It's going to be hard to make outsized returns unless and until the entry price is completely correct. And I think they've partially corrected, but they may not have fully corrected because people, I think, always want to believe that there's going to be a bounce back.

• 58:35David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 58:36David Sacks?

  And it takes time to kill that hope.

• 58:38David Friedberg?

  I think, I think that might be the capitulation. The capitulation is. I think that capitulation is starting to happen, to be honest. I mean, that was my observation. I feel like everything was so shut down last year, the start of this year through the summer, and then in the fall, like just the last couple of months, it feels like there's this capitulation where it's like, okay, we're worth 80% less, but we need money. Let's do the deal. Okay, we'll put money in.

• 59:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't think the reset can happen until Stripe goes public. I'll be very specific. I think that is the company that sets the cascading valuation framework for every other company. So I think all of this is a bunch of people, us blathering on and making stuff up. I think the true numerical forcing function, the clearing event, happens when they go public, because it will, it will be, you won't be able to hide. Like, I think we all would say, it's the best run company that's private. It's the most technical, it's gotten the most people, it's gotten the most pristine cap table, it's raised the most money at the, like, it's done everything right.

• 59:44David Friedberg?

  It's the gold standard, yes.

• 59:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what their valuation is, is then what you can expect if you are of that caliber, or you can expect a lower valuation if you are not of their caliber. And I think that until we know what that is, we're all going to be hoping, and but we know that hope isn't a strategy. So my takeaway from all of this is just more that people have to really right-size the portfolio, sell what you can, find liquidity where there are people that want to buy at different entry prices. They may not be the price that you thought originally, but, you know, makes sense for them and their risk profile in this moment in time. All of this stuff has to happen to actively manage to exits, I think.

• 1:00:27David Friedberg?

  Well, and there's a new phenomenon that's going on that I've been seeing a lot of, I've been approached by a number of people who are doing, buying strips of GP interest and strips of LP interest in venture funds. From the last 10 years, I got offered for a 5X on paper fund, like 3 point whatever X.

• 1:00:46Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and you could clear out, like you're saying, some of your shares. I got offered, you know, half price, basically, by some people who I think, I don't want to say they're bottom feeders, but I think they're maybe optimistic about certain names and yeah.

• 1:00:58David Sacks?

  I've noticed that the amount of activity from secondary brokers seems to have increased. And yeah, and, and specifically that the emails that I get that are interesting are the ones where they're asking me to sell shares. So when someone's offering you, that doesn't mean anything because there may not be any transactions clearing. But when they have definite buyer interest at a certain price, that tells you that the market now has found, or is in the process of finding, the market clearing price.

• 1:01:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27David Sacks?

  So I think, I think we do actually know from the secondary market, kind of where a lot of these unicorns are at. My guess is-

• 1:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  And what would you say on average, half?

• 1:01:39David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  Half price?

• 1:01:40David Sacks?

  There's, yeah, a lot of half price.

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I see. I see a lot of half price action.

• 1:01:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But that doesn't, I'm not, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, guys, but the average SaaS company that's public is down 75%. If you look at the fintech space, these companies are down 80 to 90%. So how can half be reasonable?

• 1:01:55Jason Calacanis?

  Well, just for certain names, yeah.

• 1:01:57David Sacks?

  Because I think the, the really bad names don't get any liquidity. Like, there's just no buyers. So you're talking about names where there's already a buyer, so that's going to bias it towards the better companies.

• 1:02:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I'm saying when Square and Adyen, these are great companies, right, that are down 80, 90%, how can a private liquid company be only down 50%?

• 1:02:17David Sacks?

  Maybe it's not priced correctly, but maybe also there's been two or three years of growth since that last private valuation. So maybe there's some selection bias, maybe it's, there's 20, 30% growth.

• 1:02:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but, but Adyen and Stripe have all, I mean, Square have also grown by 50%.

• 1:02:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you also, let me, we, we have a comp on this, which is Instacart, 39 billion, peak profit market valuation. It's trading at like six and a half billion, which I think is exactly what you said, Jamal, when we were pricing it, we, we looked at that 800 million, remember?

• 1:02:48David Sacks?

  Mine?

• 1:02:49Jason Calacanis?

  I think when I, no, but I, I had said 800 million and I just put it at like, there was 800 million in advertising revenue. And I said, okay, you know, seven, eight, nine times that, that top line. Or if I said, if it was, if it was 50% margin, you could give it 20x. So I think that's how I came up with my number. And I think we came up with eight. Based on that, and sure enough, that's basically where it's trading, 6.8 billion.

• 1:03:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, that's amazing. It's down 26% since IPO. Now, I will say that Instacart is an example of a company that has historically had very high burn, and it's a very capital-intensive business relatively, whereas a good software business, like take a Klaviyo, for example, is much more capital-efficient and should be doing better. Klaviyo is down 16% since the IPO. Yeah, market cap about 7 billion. So yeah, it's an ugly story. I mean, even for the names that just IPOed, it's not looking too good.

• 1:03:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, revenue, profits, that clears it out. I do think there's going to be a lot of GPs who are...

• 1:03:50David Sacks?

  ARM, down 21% since the IPO.

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's a lot of money, yeah.

• 1:03:55David Sacks?

  Look, I think the market has just turned very negative very recently. It comes back to this GDP report. You know, when I saw the 4.9% number, I mean, the thing that occurred to me, the larger theme, is that there's such a divergence right now between Main Street and Wall Street.

• 1:04:11Jason Calacanis?

  Explain why the GDP is so strong right now, and that would indicate that the economy is strong, therefore, stocks should go up, right? Why is that not happening? I think this is maybe confusing for people.

• 1:04:24David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, I'm not sure I can fully explain it, because I think there's a lot of contradictory data. But if you look at Main Street, you're seeing whatever, 4.9% GDP growth, you're seeing pretty robust employment numbers, the consumer seems to be holding up. But if you look at Wall Street and the investment side of things, it's pretty miserable. The whole stock market this year is being held up by seven stocks. The so-called magnificent seven is the top seven tech names in the S&P 500. If you look at the overall S&P 500 excluding those names, it's flat for the year. And it's basically giving back all the gains, and now those seven names are starting to crack. So just in the last week or so...

• 1:05:05Jason Calacanis?

  Google and Tesla went down a bit, yeah.

• 1:05:07David Sacks?

  Yeah, we're seeing them go down.

• 1:05:08Jason Calacanis?

  And Facebook, yeah.

• 1:05:10David Sacks?

  And Facebook. So we're seeing... And then, you know, Microsoft had a great quarter, but it's now down. It's giving back that pop. So you're seeing that on the investment side of things, it's still pretty grim out there, because people are now pricing in higher rates for longer. That's basically what's happening. And the thing I wonder about, I mean, here's the disconnect, is that...

• 1:05:37David Sacks?

  Ultimately, what happens on Wall Street affects the consumer. Their 401ks go down in value. The value of their houses go down because now you can't, if you, if you sell your house, you lose your 3% mortgage. Now you have to get a new one at 8%. So everyone stopped trying to sell their house. The number of real estate transactions gone down a lot. That's gradually working its way through the system. So at some point, the consumer realizes that they're just not as wealthy as they thought they were. That's the wealth effect and they just stopped spending as freely. And we already know that credit card debt and especially credit card servicing costs are at all time highs because of these high interest rates. So at some point, you just wonder if the consumer is like Wile E. Coyote and has gone

• 1:06:21David Sacks?

  off a cliff, but just hasn't looked down yet.

• 1:06:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, just like the country, just like our government. It's like we're just, everybody's just spending and, and nobody's actually paying attention to the balance sheet, whether it's the government or individuals apparently because credit card debt's now at its highest and people are still yellow. I don't, I mean, is because the only possible explanation with the consumer is that consumers' wages and the unemployment, the low unemployment, persistent low unemployment, the number of jobs available is just making everybody super confident, but that's gotta end at some point, right? Doesn't it?

• 1:06:54David Sacks?

  I think so.

• 1:06:55Jason Calacanis?

  If companies keep cutting their belts.

• 1:06:56David Sacks?

  I don't think Wall Street and Main Street can be disconnected forever. I think it's got to reconcile one way or another.

• 1:07:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:07:03David Sacks?

  So I would describe our economic situation as, as fragile. I mean, I think most commentators like Bill Ackman still thinks that things are going to turn south, that this, this GDP number is sort of a peak number. I don't know. It's just things still seem kind of shaky to me. And not exactly the, not exactly the recipe that you want when you have this massive geopolitical instability.

• 1:07:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. That, that, that double M and then plus the election coming up and, and the chaos that that could cause in the country. It's kind of like that quote about going bankrupt. How did it happen? Slowly and then all at once. I think that's kind of what we're heading towards. This is, this has been happening slowly and then everybody's going to wake up with a heck of a credit card bill at 15 or 20% and they're not going to be able to pay it.

• 1:07:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, the government will have to intervene. They're, they're, they can't be in a situation where. I agree with you, Mark. A large percentage of the US consumers just can't.

• 1:08:01Jason Calacanis?

  This is my point of view on, yeah, on consumer and all this commercial real estate and the bank loans. Eventually, the Fed monetizes all this stuff. It's the only path, which, by the way, will inflate a lot of financial assets. And if that happens-

• 1:08:15David Sacks?

  And actually, you bring up another data point we haven't discussed, which is there's a major storm cloud out there, which is major US banks are facing large unrealized losses. So Bank of America had unrealized losses of 131 billion on securities in Q3. JP Morgan Chase had unrealized loss of 40 billion in its held to maturity portfolio in Q3. And Citigroup did not disclose its losses for Q3, but it had 24 billion of losses at the end of Q2. So remember this dynamic that we had with SVB and all these banks back in, was it like March?

• 1:08:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:51David Sacks?

  Where all these regional banks were basically had these large unrealized losses, and then it created a run on a few of them. Well, now, the biggest banks are starting to face that unrealized losses problem. Now, I don't think like Bank of America, JP Morgan, or Citigroup are gonna have a run on the bank, but they're clearly not doing that great. And at some point, there's gonna have to be a reconciliation of that.

• 1:09:12Jason Calacanis?

  Unless they hold it to maturity, I guess. We should do just a quick hit here on this cruise follow-up story. We had talked earlier about the cruise accident and self-driving. Well, a lot of news has come out about this gentleman that is potentially explosive. As we all know, just to catch everybody up, on October 2nd, there was a hit-and-run accident, and this tangentially included that cruise vehicle. The cruise vehicle, a woman tragically got hit by a car, driven by a human. That car ran off. The woman got knocked into in front of a cruise self-driving car, which then ran her over. Okay. California's DMV

• 1:09:56Jason Calacanis?

  has suspended crews and their permit. Because allegedly, the company withheld footage of the incident. If you remember, we had a little discussion here about the taxi had rolled over the person. And then we talked about, hey, you know, you're not supposed to move off of the person when we did our whole joke about EMT J Cal. Uh, well, it turns out after the AV collision, the cruise vehicle apparently pulled the woman for 20 feet. And this has been confirmed now by Cruz, but when Cruz gave that information to the regulatory agency, the California DMV, they didn't show that footage. In other words, they showed just the first half of the footage. And that has gotten their license suspended.

• 1:10:41Jason Calacanis?

  So we have, or we're left to interpret, why did Cruz not tell the full truth to the DMV? And now, Friedberg, to your point about society taking risk, now we have allegedly Cruz,

• 1:10:58Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what the most generous way to say this is, but they either omitted or they straight up lied to the California DMV.

• 1:11:08David Sacks?

  I mean, J Cal, if it's true that they lied and were deceptive about the video, then yeah, that's like do not pass go, go directly to jail time. I mean, that's really bad.

• 1:11:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18David Sacks?

  One point I made last time was I didn't think Cruz was sophisticated enough tech, or really GM, who's their backer, was sophisticated enough technologically to get this right. And I still maintain that. And so if on top of that, they were deceptive about what happened, then that's like the kill shot. One question I have, J Cal, is there was an NBC reporter who was on the scene, just happened to be on the scene. And I remember her reporting that Cruz was not responsible. So I'm just wondering, like where the disconnect here is between all these various reports.

• 1:11:53Jason Calacanis?

  I have a theory. Yeah, I have a theory, which is not responsible for the accident, but then responsible potentially for the subsequent, the dragging of the, the body. So I think that's the, the issue here is that they may be able to claim, hey, we had nothing to do with the accident. But then in what happened after the accident, yes, the, the technology failed apparently. Or maybe the technology never took into account, what happens if you run somebody over that was rocketed under your car? And maybe that's just a freak accident that we have to get used to, that possibility happening. And that could happen with obviously a human driver. So it's just a possibility that that could happen.

• 1:12:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You don't think that that edge case is hardcoded?

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the edge case of how would the car know there's a person underneath it? I don't know.

• 1:12:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, but I'm saying you're you're bringing up something so obvious as to be comical, which is like, of course, there has to be some emergency cutoff when there's like some obstruction. Anyway, sure, let's let all the facts come out.

• 1:12:54Jason Calacanis?

  I think we'll wait for the rest of the facts to come out. We've got, I think, 80% of them here, 90% of them. But Friedberg, you had told us in the group chat that Hurricane Otis would potentially be disastrous for Mexico. And turns out you are correct. 27 people are dead in Mexico. And maybe you could explain to us why this storm is unique and why, if you think this, that we're seeing more of these, or are we seeing more of these, or is the coverage in the media, you know, and the reaction to it getting distorted?

• 1:13:29David Friedberg?

  I don't know about the media coverage. The big story with Hurricane Otis is that it went from being kind of a tropical storm to being a category five hurricane in about six hours. And then it made landfall in Acapulco at a category five hurricane. And no hurricane forecasting models had predicted this. And hurricane forecasting models are what are, you know, typically run off of ensemble models, meaning that there are multiple things that may happen. And that those simulations are run on very compute intensive systems. And there are many, many simulations being run all the time, every six hours, the simulation runs are done. And then you look at these and you create a probability of things that

• 1:14:11David Friedberg?

  may happen. And none of the forecasts had any probability associated with this event happening. It was so out of the bounds of anything we have seen historically, that none of the models had any chance ascribed to this tropical storm suddenly evolving into a category five hurricane in six hours, and then making landfall on a city with a million people. We can look at pictures if you guys want and what happened in Acapulco. It's obviously pretty devastating. There's apparently no power lines standing in the entire region. Here's some photos. I mean, look at this like 165 mile an hour sustained winds. The I wall went through the town. It's a million people, by the way, many of whom live in. Not concrete reinforced buildings up against the mountain there.

• 1:14:54David Friedberg?

  And so the devastation is really extraordinary, but the shocking thing is that there was no prep. There was no warnings, there was no alerts. There were a ton of tourists sitting in these hotels. Look at the, I don't know if you have any of the hotel photos, Nick. But it's insane, there are zero windows left in any of the hotels, any of the condos, any of the resorts. They are gone. So imagine you're like in Acapulco, you're drinking beer and tequila. And then you go to sleep and this thing hits at 1 a.m. As a category five hurricane and destroys everything. There's no power, there's nothing. So if you pull up the first chart, most of the energy that is absorbed from the sun ends up in our oceans. So, you know, we talk about atmospheric carbon increasing energy retention.

• 1:15:37David Friedberg?

  And people can debate that all they want, where the carbon comes from, et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, there is energy coming into the earth from the sun. And that energy is being retained. The vast majority of that energy is retained by the oceans. So the first couple of hundred meters of the oceans retain north of 90% of the energy absorbed by earth. If you go to the next slide, so that results in water temperatures going up. So if you look at, this is compared to the 1955 to 2006 average. And you can measure ocean heat content, but ocean heat content has risen fairly linearly since the 90s. And you can kind of see, you know, how much excess is that.

• 1:16:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is that correlated to temperature perfectly or no?

• 1:16:22David Friedberg?

  So this is ocean temperatures over time. So here you can see 2023. And so this shows you the average sea surface temperature. So 2023 has been such an outlier. And this is also because of these El Nino phenomena, but there's obviously over time, if you were to look at the average sea surface temperature trend, it's rising linearly with heat content over time. And in particular in 2023, there's an extraordinary rise in temperature. So off the coast of Acapulco, the sea surface temperature was 88 degrees Fahrenheit. I mean, it was so hot, the water, like imagine in the 80s, that's like a David Sacks swimming pool. It's so warm, you know, going down many meters in the ocean. So when a storm goes over that level of heat, it takes heat out of the ocean.

• 1:17:06David Friedberg?

  And that heat coming out of the ocean increases the wind speed. And then the wind speed pulls more heat out of the ocean. And that's how these things become escalatory until they hit something cold, like a mountain or the land. The land is much cooler. And then these things start to dissipate and break apart. And that's why these things form over the ocean. So the point is, no models predicted this. And that's because we've never seen this level of energy stored in the oceans before. And the model training has never really accounted for this sort of extreme condition. This extreme condition, obviously, is what some folks are arguing is becoming more frequent. So it brings into question, you know, this ability for us to actually forecast. The rise in the temperature over time is driving this.

• 1:17:49David Friedberg?

  And then, oh, from an economic perspective, and this is one of the key points I wanted to make. When an event like this happens, there's a market called the reinsurance market. And the reinsurance market sets the price for covering insurance companies against a big loss, where you can lose a ton of stuff at once. Insurance companies like to write insurance policies, like car insurance is a great business, because there's never one big event that causes everyone to get in an accident on the same day. But with property insurance, a hurricane can cause everyone to lose on the same day. So insurance companies need to buy reinsurance. And then there's these big reinsurance companies, and they have pools of capital. And there's capital markets involved in bonds that are sold to protect reinsurance.

• 1:18:30David Friedberg?

  So there's, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars, trillion dollar plus in reinsurance. When an event like this happens, those reinsurance markets take a loss. And the loss causes them to raise rates significantly. And when that happens, the reinsurance markets harden, is what they say. And then rates go up next year for reinsurance. And then the insurance companies pass those rates on to consumers and to property developers and to the people that have mortgages. And the more of these events happen, even though it just happened in Acapulco, it impacts insurance rates everywhere. So as we see the events like what happened in Maui, What happened in Acapulco, what happened in Miami? You can start to see more of these things start to happen at the same time. The cost for insuring property goes up.

• 1:19:14David Friedberg?

  And that starts to make this whole system very difficult to maintain because if the cost for insurance doubles or triples and people can't really afford it, but the mortgages require that they have it in all of these high-risk coastal cities and coastal areas. That's where an economic hit either has to be absorbed by the federal government or we end up taking a mass or we take a massive

• 1:19:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Insurance, right?

• 1:19:36David Friedberg?

  Or we take a massive economic loss. And so I just want to say like this seems like an outlier event and oh my gosh, we should be sorry and sad. But the truth is the frequency of these events and the risk factors, which is this ocean heat temperature rising continuously for a long period of time are going to drive that frequency of events. And there's going to be a real economic cost to bear on the order of several trillion dollars over time. Because someone has to underwrite that real estate and someone has to underwrite the insurance to support that real estate. So it may seem like a one-off and oh, you know, this won't be a big deal. But it actually translates economically through the reinsurance and insurance markets into the real estate markets fairly quickly. And so I just wanted to kind of point out one of the second order consequences.

• 1:20:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, Nick, you can probably find it about this exact issue where they profiled the handful of homeowners, I think it was in Palm Beach or West Palm Beach. And they essentially had to sell and leave because they couldn't afford the home insurance or for those that own their home outright, they just stopped insuring it because they realized the land value would be fine. And so they said, if a storm, there it is, if a storm hits, if a storm hits, you know, West Palm and destroys my home, you know, hopefully I'll be fine and then I'll just leave and I'll just sell it for the dirt. But to your point, it's become economically untenable in a lot of places for these folks to be able to insure, insure their home.

• 1:20:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look at this, on this example, $121,000 a year for home insurance. What?

• 1:21:06David Friedberg?

  By the way, so add up the value. Well, that's because there's a 1 in 10 chance that a hurricane's going to hit them on any given year, right? And then they lose their whole value. So do the math on what the total real estate value in that region is, and think about what it gets written, gets written down to as everyone starts to sell. And then you do that across all these regions where there's now high risk and lack of insurance available. And you have a real economic question on who's going to step in to support and buoy those asset values.

• 1:21:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Now, but aren't there state actors now that step in and act as a reinsurer?

• 1:21:37David Friedberg?

  Great question. In Florida, they have a reinsurance pool that is largely assumed to be completely underfunded. And so everyone says like Florida's got this reinsurance pool, they'll write your stuff. But in Florida, if people, if you ask people in the reinsurance industry, they're like, this thing's basically bankrupt. It's completely insolvent. This isn't real. So the federal government's going to be asked to step in and cover that thing at some point. And then someone's got to write a trillion dollar check. I mean, you know, you want to complain about sending 100 billion to Ukraine and Israel, wait until most of the country has to underwrite coastal communities' real estate values.

• 1:22:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So Silicon Valley actually needs to be pro-climate change so that you can reinflate the money supply.

• 1:22:14David Friedberg?

  Wow. I mean, and then the other, the other second order of fact is-

• 1:22:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm being facetious, but I'm kind of not. It's really crazy that so many industries, it, I think Sacks said it really, really quite perfectly. When the money supply is shrinking, there's just a lot less money to go around. When the money supply is growing, it's much easier for all of us to grab a share of it. And now that it's shrinking, you have this weird effect where you actually want government intervention, which unfortunately only happens in acute tragedies and calamities. And so what are we hoping for now as a society? That's a very scary idea.

• 1:22:49David Friedberg?

  The second effect is who's going to buy these homes if they can't be insured, right? Isn't that going to crash home prices, Friedberg? That's my point, is that these assets aren't worth what they're currently marked at. And if you add up all of the real estate assets in all of these different regions that, you know, everyone assumes are worth X, but the only reason they're worth X is because they're insured. And if they're not insured, people are going to have to start to sell them. If they can't afford the insurance, they're going to have to start selling. Then the real value starts to come out. These sorts of events like Acapulco are catalyzing events for forcing the market to rewrite this stuff. That's, this is the beginning of a cascading effect.

• 1:23:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I saw a really interesting study about the the the risk of the rising oceans and just the salinity of the oceans to all the real estate in Malibu. And the reason is that, you know, if you look at the Malibu coastline, there's a small number of homes, but they trade at an extreme amount of economic value. But what underpins all of that stuff are that these homes are viable and that you can live in them and that you don't have to replace them and that if you can sufficiently drill far into the bedrock, you can keep these homes safe. And this study was just talking about how the corrosive effects of the ocean are such now that you can't actually do that to the same rate when you when you actually initially buy these homes. So now you have these 1500 million dollar homes that are really at risk of just corroding and falling into the sea.

• 1:24:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's always been an issue there. And you're right on the PCH highway, and there's a small amount of land between you and the water. So if it starts rising or it's corrosive, you know, I've rented those homes before, friends of ours have as well. And the water just goes right underneath the homes. And every year, it goes a little bit further onto the home.

• 1:24:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 1:24:29Jason Calacanis?

  And you can't, in some of the homes now, when they when they rent them to you for the summer, they say, hey, listen, during high tides, you can't get to the beach safely. You can like jump off your back porch and jump into a wave. But, you know, low tide, you can get down and use the beach. If not, you have to walk down the street and go down, like, you know, another person's alley to get to the water.

• 1:24:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jake, how where are you now?

• 1:24:48Jason Calacanis?

  So I have been in the Middle East. I got to go to Riyadh for the first time. I'm in UAE for the second time. I don't have any business interests here, but I have been taking a bunch of meetings. And the reason I went is I'm actually, and I'll pre announce it here, I'm going to be bringing this weekend startups. I'm going to do a series from the Middle East and feature the capital allocators and the startups that are growing here. The startup scene here is extraordinary. And I'm going to bring my founder university to the region as well. And I'm going to start. Teaching entrepreneurs here in the region, Egypt, Saudi, UAE, Qatar, anybody, Jordan, who wants to learn how to build a company, I'm going to be teaching startups in the region. And so, pretty exciting. And I think startups, you know, at their core is hope

• 1:25:33Jason Calacanis?

  and personal freedom to change the world. And I think if we build deep relationships between these important countries that are playing a bigger and bigger role in the global stage, and we build companies together, that's going to be great for America and American interests. So that's what I'm doing here, since people have been asking, yeah.

• 1:25:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What if anything has changed between what you thought of the Middle East versus what you think of it now? Has anything changed? Did you have a different view of Saudi? Let's take Saudi for example. What did you think of Saudi and MBS before you went? And what do you think now after you've been there?

• 1:26:03Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there was very little change in that society over the last 30 or 40 years. And based on what they've told me, you know, spending a lot of time with a lot of people there, I maybe had, I don't know, 30 individual meetings, or coffees, dinners, literally 30 different people. And they've told me everything's changed. So, personal freedoms have changed radically. Economic freedoms have changed radically. The political system hasn't changed, nor do I think that's going to change radically. But yes, my opinion of it, the reality of it is it's changed massively. And then, on top of that, yeah, I have learned

• 1:26:44Jason Calacanis?

  a lot. I've never been there. The entrepreneurial excitement in the region, Saudi-

• 1:26:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think you were too judgmental before?

• 1:26:52Jason Calacanis?

  Um, I have some core principles that I believe in. And what I will say is from doing this podcast with the three of you, and then being thrust into like geopolitics, which, you know, I really haven't been in my life, I felt I needed to get more educated. I feel I am more educated now, after doing all these meetings. And I think the big education is, the people here are not much different than the folks in our country. And they all want peace, prosperity, personal freedoms. They want to have a great life with their family. So, to that extent- I think, and each of the countries is very different, you know, and so you can't paint with a wide brush. Now, of course, I know that, but there's no substitute for being here and

• 1:27:36Jason Calacanis?

  spending time with people. So.

• 1:27:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So do you think that you just had a misconception? Or do you think you just fell for what the media tried to portray these countries when there were incidents? Like, how do you reconcile that as you change your mind about them?

• 1:27:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think things have actually changed here, more than I've changed my mind. I still feel the same way I feel about human rights and, you know, personal freedoms and everything like that. But what I've learned is that this area is changing so quickly, and that change is hard. And David said something really important, you know, it's like you need strong people to make these changes here. And they're going to make the changes on their time. So the other thing, I think, if there's anything that has influenced me, it's probably what David said, you know, is like, this is going to be hard to make the changes here. And another thing you said, you know, there was one point you said on this pod, like, hey, do you think they care what you think? Right? They actually do care. They listen to the pod. But the truth is, the changes are going to occur here, Chamath,

• 1:28:34Jason Calacanis?

  whether we're involved or not. And so I think as Americans, what we have to decide, and as business leaders, how involved do we want to be in that change? And how deep of those relationships do we want to build? Because if we don't build those relationships, there are other people who would like to forge relationships, right? Russia, China, et cetera. So I think, just in terms of the chessboard that we see playing out right now, the more America can engage with this region, build companies with them, I think it's going to be better for humanity and society. And I think if you look at China, we disengaged. And how's that going for us? Yeah, it's going terrible. So I want to build companies here. And that's the other thing, is people are having big talks about all of these issues, human rights, changes. And so I.

• 1:29:22Jason Calacanis?

  The thing I want to make sure people understand is I want to see positive change in the world, including our country, here, everywhere. And so, you know, it's never coming from a place of trying to be preachy to people. I just want to see positive change in the world. And, you know, now with this podcast being so popular, people have expectations of us. And one of the expectations is we know what we're talking about. And I did not know what I was talking about in this region because I never spent time here. Just like Sacks has never been to Ukraine. What does he know about Ukraine and Russia? He's never been to either of those places. So, you know, just like Sacks is going to go to Russia and Ukraine and get educated, you know, I came here to get educated so that I can represent the pod better.

• 1:29:58David Sacks?

  I've been to the United States, and so I know that the US shouldn't be involved there.

• 1:30:02Jason Calacanis?

  I'm joking with you, my friend. I'm joking. But we, you know, I think we should go, you know, do more travel. And it's really inspiring to see what's going on here. On a very pragmatic basis, I will say, this is going to be the number two region in venture capital. And it's going to be that in 10 years, because I've met with a lot of the family offices. And the family offices here are extraordinary. Like, they built these businesses, like, really hard fought businesses 50 years ago.

• 1:30:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Welcome to being a capitalist, Jason. I love it. The water's warm in this bathtub. Join us.

• 1:30:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, the thing with these, these individuals is they're, they're coming to the United States to invest in companies here. They're not just like the dumb money at the table.

• 1:30:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Of course they are. Of course, because they're smart business people. We're all smart business people. We've always wanted to be in business. Nobody, it's what you said, nobody who's sitting here wanting to be some preachy know it all.

• 1:30:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, anyway, I'm learning a lot. I'm having a great time here. I don't have, currently have any business, business interests here. But I would say, you know, a year from now, there'll be, you know, a 12-episode run of This Week in Startups featuring folks here. And then Founder University will be here building companies with people in the region. So I'll be investing in some companies here and helping founders start companies. All right, Sacks, I-

• 1:31:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, tell us about the speaker, Sacks. What do we know about this guy?

• 1:31:14Jason Calacanis?

  Who is this lunatic?

• 1:31:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, let's not call him a lunatic, because he's third in chart, he's third in line for the presidency. So, Sacks, who is he?

• 1:31:21David Sacks?

  Okay, his name is Mike Johnson. He's from Louisiana's 4th district. He's been in Congress for, since 2016. It's his 4th term. He is, in relative terms, a backbencher. Apparently, he's never met with Mitch McConnell. That may be a good thing. But several members had to Google him to find out who he was.

• 1:31:37Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 1:31:38David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:39Jason Calacanis?

  Here we are.

• 1:31:40David Sacks?

  The good news, in my view, is that he did vote against more funding for Ukraine. However, as much as I like him on that issue, there are other issues where I think his previously stated views could be problematic for the Republican caucus. So he's very socially conservative. He voted to ban abortion at the federal level. He's called gay marriage a dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic. On the issue of entitlements, he has expressed support for cutting Medicare and Social Security. I think Trump has rightly figured out that that would be death to the Republican Party. Where he is aligned with Trump is that he bought into the election denial theories,

• 1:32:25David Sacks?

  and particularly, he bought into the Dominion scam that was pushed by Sidney Powell.

• 1:32:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Shout out Sidney Powell, who is pleading guilty this week.

• 1:32:33David Sacks?

  The Kraken, yeah, the Kraken.

• 1:32:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So was lunatic too muted of a word to describe this guy, Sacks, would you say? Or would you?

• 1:32:42David Sacks?

  I don't think he, I wouldn't say he's-

• 1:32:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, David, David, how did he get elected? Because I thought there was like more moderates that were like Emers and even Scalise is more to the left of this guy. So how, how did, how did it that all of that ended up with the far, far, far right person getting elected?

• 1:32:59David Sacks?

  This is the crazy thing, is that they had better choices. And so, for example, Jim Jordan is the guy who I think should have gotten it. Jim Jordan is always supremely prepared for any hearing. He's one of the only Republicans who knows how to ask tough questions. I think he would have run the House with tremendous discipline. This is a case where you're plucking a guy out of obscurity. He may not even have the experience to run the House with the necessary discipline. Moreover, he's somebody who the Democrats are going to be able to write campaign ads against very easily. Now, you asked a question, how did this happen? I think that the GOP just kind of ran out of gas. I mean, they went through so many candidates that they exhausted all of the options. And there were three weeks of chaos. And the New York Times summed up the feelings of the GOP caucus

• 1:33:44David Sacks?

  by saying, they view Johnson as someone who's sufficiently conservative, who they do not personally despise. So that's really the reason at the end of the day is, they just perceive him as a nice guy. But as you know, nice guys don't always get the job done.

• 1:33:58Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, what is happening?

• 1:34:01David Sacks?

  They kind of ran out of candidates and they they chose this guy because he's a nice guy. Now, Jim Jordan.

• 1:34:06Jason Calacanis?

  This guy's a nice guy?

• 1:34:08David Sacks?

  He's a nice guy.

• 1:34:09Jason Calacanis?

  Nice guy who believes gay people are evil?

• 1:34:13David Sacks?

  Uh, I don't, I certainly don't approve of that message, but it comes from his religious views.

• 1:34:18Jason Calacanis?

  Well done, Republican Party.

• 1:34:20David Sacks?

  But look, Jim Jordan was the right guy here, but Jim Jordan sometimes has sharp elbows. And so he's rubbed people the wrong way. Mike Johnson, on a personal level, has not rubbed people the wrong way. But I agree that the campaign ads are going to write themselves here.

• 1:34:37Jason Calacanis?

  He, uh, he apparently hasn't rubbed anybody.

• 1:34:43David Sacks?

  And then the crazy thing is that the one social issue.

• 1:34:45Jason Calacanis?

  It gets crazier?

• 1:34:46David Sacks?

  It get, well, from my point of view, the one social issue or cultural issue where he's not that conservative, apparently, is on CRT. He said a bunch of things that indicate that he views the US as being systemically racist and doesn't think Republicans should, should be attacking CRT, which I think is the one cultural issue where Republicans should be on offense. They should be opposing the woke mind virus. I would like to see them go after that issue and not be trying to relitigate gay marriage or abortion at the federal level. So in my view, this, this guy is the, the wrong mix of, of cultural issues. And then, of course, his views on entitlements are a surefire loser for the Republicans.

• 1:35:29David Sacks?

  So the Republicans are all like slapping each other's backs and sucking each other's [BLEEP] over getting this done. They're also happy about it.

• 1:35:38David Sacks?

  But I think it's a disaster in the making.

• 1:35:40Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa, yeah. It's a disaster. How long does this last? How many days? Give me, how many moochies? How many sack of moochies does this guy last? Yeah. You give him seven?

• 1:35:51David Sacks?

  Well, again, the Republicans now are so burned by the chaos that just went through that I don't think they want to go back into it too easily.

• 1:35:59Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:35:59David Sacks?

  So it could last. Look, you're right. I don't think, I don't think he's gonna last long term, but, um, but it may be more than a few Scaramouchis.

• 1:36:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:10David Sacks?

  Scaramouchi only lasted 11 days.

• 1:36:13Jason Calacanis?

  So, yeah, that's what I'm saying. 100 days?

• 1:36:15David Sacks?

  The, a Scaramouchi is a, is a unit that equals 11 days.

• 1:36:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So you think like 10 Scaramouchis?

• 1:36:22David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but you have to, you could get to, if you have to get to like January 20th of 2025, which is the inauguration, what are you talking about? 365 days, right? Plus another...

• 1:36:33Jason Calacanis?

  We're talking like 70 Scaramouchis here.

• 1:36:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, we're talking about 41 Scaramouchis to get to Jan 20th.

• 1:36:40Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, 40 Scaramouchis in a wake up.

• 1:36:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Of 2025.

• 1:36:43Jason Calacanis?

  40 in a wake up. Oh, my Lord.

• 1:36:47David Sacks?

  So what you're gonna see is now that the media, this has already started, there's gonna be a drip, drip, drip of all the things that he's ever said when he was kind of a backbencher and no one was paying attention. All these sermons that he's given and so forth, they're gonna be, you know, writing stories about that and they're gonna make the guy seem like a wacko.

• 1:37:05Jason Calacanis?

  Or expose that he is a wacko. I mean...

• 1:37:07David Sacks?

  Well, I, I think that, um, I would say that he's just somebody who's got very socially conservative views based on being evangelical and...

• 1:37:17Jason Calacanis?

  Might be wildly out of touch with Americans, yeah.

• 1:37:20David Sacks?

  I don't wanna like offend people in that group by saying he's a wacko, but I think you are right that it is not in tune with most voters. Let's say that.

• 1:37:31Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, before we go, Sax, I gotta ask you, uh, about the, uh, about the Trump cases. I mean, as a lawyer, what, what do you think's gonna happen here? We have all of the cracking people have...

• 1:37:43David Sacks?

  Explain to the audience what happened.

• 1:37:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, I, I think everybody's following it. Jenna Ellis, uh, Kenneth Chesbro, it's spelled Cheesebro, but it's Chesbro, and Sidney Powell have all now pleaded guilty, some of them for felonies in fact, uh, but the others misdemeanors, and they're all really apologetic about, uh, basically this fake electors, um, scam they were running to try to overturn the election. And they say there are six more of these 19 people in the RICO case who are gonna flip next week. At the same time, Trump was doing his case in New York and was fined 10K for violating the gag order the second time, third time, they think he's gonna actually potentially

• 1:38:25Jason Calacanis?

  be put in jail, which seems to be something he's trying to do. So what's your take here, Sax? Is it all a deep state conspiracy still, the January 6th stuff, or were these lunatics actually trying to overthrow the government?

• 1:38:39David Sacks?

  To be honest, when you mentioned the name Jenna Ellis, all I can really think of is that election hearing in Michigan where she made a face because Rudy Giuliani audibly farted. And then it turned out that she got COVID a few days later and that we think that Giuliani had it at the hearing, so he may have farted the COVID into her.

• 1:39:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's what we've learned after all of this with COVID is that it's not, it actually is airborne. It's just flatulence based.

• 1:39:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You could fart COVID onto somebody.

• 1:39:10Jason Calacanis?

  We gotta go to a second science corner here, Friedberg.

• 1:39:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We need an emergency science corner. Can you fart COVID into somebody's face, please, Friedberg? Don't decide, buddy. This is a serious question. Can it come out your bum as well as your mouth? Come on.

• 1:39:27Jason Calacanis?

  Should we have put masks or diapers when we were on airplanes to block the COVID from, we should have masked and we were masking in the wrong place, yes, Friedberg?

• 1:39:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I got him to smile, he almost laughed.

• 1:39:39David Sacks?

  Hold on, put this on the screen.

• 1:39:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you catch COVID from afar. But, but hold on, she says, she says the TLTR is unlikely, but that's not a no.

• 1:39:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a no.

• 1:39:54David Sacks?

  That's all the same as impossible.

• 1:39:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, can we get Fauci to come back? Shout out Anthony Fauci, he's got the answer for us. In all seriousness, this is, they're gonna flip all these folks, I mean, this is like the end of Goodfellas here. Everybody's getting pinched. You think Giuliani's gonna go to jail here? What do you think? How does it sound, Sax?

• 1:40:18David Sacks?

  I think what's likely happening is that they're flipping these lower level figures in order to flip the next higher level, which would be Giuliani and John Eastman. Because I don't think these people have anything on Trump, so they're gonna try and... You know, use Jenna Ellis to flip Rudy and then they're going to try and see if Rudy will flip on Trump. But this all begs the question of like, was there ever a crime here?

• 1:40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, yeah, I mean, they they admit it. Yeah.

• 1:40:49David Sacks?

  Who who's admitted to it?

• 1:40:51Jason Calacanis?

  The the three people who pleaded guilty. And like, well, the apology.

• 1:40:55David Sacks?

  Because they don't want to have their lives ruined by spending their lives in criminal prosecutions that could send them to jail. So obviously, they're going to cut a deal. But that doesn't necessarily mean that like, they're going to get the big eye here on some on some crime. And in fact, I remember when the TDS crowd was orgasmic over Trump's CFO flipping. Remember when Wesselheim?

• 1:41:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he went, he's going to jail for six months. Yeah.

• 1:41:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, but remember when he supposedly flipped on Trump and it turned out to be a big nothing burger? They couldn't get Trump. You keep trying to get this guy.

• 1:41:25Jason Calacanis?

  Trump knows how to say stuff. He's just like, hey, maybe you guys could do something over here with the election.

• 1:41:30David Friedberg?

  Sex, I read that he walked out of the courthouse yesterday and he got like a $10,000 fine for violating a gag order by threatening a courtroom reporter. It's so incredible, this whole thing.

• 1:41:40David Sacks?

  How does a president of the United States who's running again for president not have the right to say what he wants? That's crazy to me.

• 1:41:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, they said the security of these individuals, he's going after like the like court reporter, like he's going after like the second person down.

• 1:41:53David Friedberg?

  What happens if he gets convicted? Does he miss the election? Is there some rule that says he can't run? What is the the law?

• 1:42:01Jason Calacanis?

  They don't know. That literally is unknown territory. We're in uncharted territory. Uncharted territory, just like the fart. Okay, everybody.

• 1:42:07David Friedberg?

  Just like the hot water in the ocean.

• 1:42:09David Sacks?

  I think I think Jenna Ellis is going to get payback on Rudy for that fart, that COVID fart.

• 1:42:14Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. She flipped it and the fart, yeah. That's it. All right, everybody. God, I mean, at least there's something to laugh about in this horrible, terrible end of 2023. It's so depressing right now. I mean, it's just so depressing everywhere, isn't it? Let's pray for peace and listen, this has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast, episode 151.

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  What your winners want?

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  Besties are back.

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

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

• 1:43:12Chamath 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 they just need to release somehow.

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  What your... Beep. What your... What your beep? Beep. What? We need to get merch. Besties are back.