E92: Adam Neumann's second act, a16z's $350M bet, housing policy, Inflation Reduction Act & more

0:00 Bestie intro plus a new moderator! 7:19 Adam Neumann raises $350M from a16z for his new residential real estate startup Flow 25:32 Housing policy: Bay Area, Houston, Miami differences 45:41 China, Saudi Arabia, Russia increase relations: should the US be worried? 1:01:09 Inflation Reduction Act signed into law: climate change impact, CBO scorecard, IRS beefed up, carbon tax, big pharma pricing, and more 1:29:47 Chamath ends his spat with Phil Hellmuth, FBI raid follow-up 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/2022/08/15/business/dealbook/adam-neumann-flow-new-company-wework-real-estate.html https://www.google.com/finance/quote/PLD:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/WE:NYSE https://www.google.com/finance/quote/BX:NYSE https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-05/vc-marc-andreessen-opposes-plan-for-multi-family-atherton-housing https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/16/xi-jinping-saudi-arabia-trip-middle-east-influence-00052023 https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541 https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-join-russia-military-exercises-as-u-s-rivals-deepen-ties-11660755790 https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/saudi-pif-buys-shares-alphabet-zoom-microsoft-us-shopping-spree-2022-08-16 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/playing-fire-ukraine https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-08/hr5376_IR_Act_8-3-22.pdf https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/what-a-carbon-tax-can-do-and-why-it-cannot-do-it-all https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/08/18/fbi_unit_leading_mar-a-lago_probe_previously_led_russiagate_hoax_848582.html

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

• 0:00David Friedberg?

  Jake, how what's it feel like to be a guest on your own podcast today?

• 0:03Jason Calacanis?

  I'm excited. Oh, God. So delightful. You did a great job, by the way. Really like the punch up to the formatting where you actually put the questions in.

• 0:10David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I think it's because I want us to all agree on the stuff we want to grok on, you know?

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  In a professional TV show, they would have pre-interviews with everybody, get all their positions. Then they put the positions into the document and they, you know, they basically do what was called a pre-interview.

• 0:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or here's another idea. You could do your job.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean.

• 0:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How about that? How about you try that?

• 0:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, or, you know, or how about I turned you three miserable [BLEEP] into actual likable people in 91 episodes, which nobody thought was possible.

• 0:37David Friedberg?

  I actually think I'm becoming less likable the longer I'm on this [BLEEP] show.

• 0:42Jason Calacanis?

  I think that correlates with all of us. All of our likabilities just.

• 1:05David Friedberg?

  Hello and welcome to the All In Pod. I am your moderator for today, out of the hot seat, doing the easy beat, David Friedberg. I'm joined today by our esteemed panel, back from his European shopping spree, our national treasure, America's favorite dictator, Chamath, Polly Habatia. Chamath, how are you feeling?

• 1:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm feeling great.

• 1:26David Friedberg?

  Get lagged? You're okay? You're recovered?

• 1:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. I'm a little, I've got, I got a little head cold, though.

• 1:31David Friedberg?

  Oh, well, sorry to hear that.

• 1:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hope it's not COVID 2.0. No, I tested. I'm COVID negative. Thank God.

• 1:37David Friedberg?

  Okay. Also with us as usual, from his emergency bunker ahead of the US Civil War, the Rain Man, David Sacks. How are you, David?

• 1:45David Sacks?

  Good.

• 1:46David Friedberg?

  Happy with the late start this morning, I'm sure. And of course, everyone's favorite ski bum, producer of the Woodstock of tech conferences, the one and done All In Summit in Miami, Jason Calacanis. Jason, what's it like to be a guesty today?

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's so delightful. When you said you wanted to moderate, that to me was chef's kiss. I get to, I get to comment and not be the moderator. I love it.

• 2:08David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so we're mixing it up a little bit today. I'm gonna take the lead. J Cal is gonna sit back. I'll say a couple of words before we start because I think last week we got a little nasty. Definitely heard that from listeners, you know, and so I want to kind of just address it real quick and then we can kick off the show. I think it's important to say that none of us really started out doing this pod as a job or thinking that it would become a real, regular thing, right? We started doing it for fun, ad hoc from time to time. And then it became this thing that people listened to and it became this thing that we started doing every week and people actually cared about it and suddenly it became this real obligation. It's almost like we got pregnant and had a baby and now it's like four men and a baby.

• 2:48David Friedberg?

  And so, you know, I think we all feel this like, you know, challenging obligation that we never expected to take on of like taking care of the show, taking care of the pod. And we all have like different points of view on what we want the pod to be and what we want it to become. J Cal cares about, you know, getting up in the rankings and listening to the audience and ultimately has shared that he wants to monetize, you know, at points. We've not always agreed on different points about that. You know, Chamath has the things he wants to bring to the table. Sacks has things he wants to talk about. And so, you know, it's really difficult kind of running the pod, managing the pod with four very different points of view, very different perspectives on what it is we all want to kind of get out of this over time. And I think it causes us to get really frustrated with each other. We end up having real fights.

• 3:34David Friedberg?

  You know, you have the biggest fights with your best friends, you know, you really let loose and lash out. I think last week I listened back, I was pretty contemptuous in my kind of retort to J Cal about hitting up on the inflation topic and I want to apologize to J Cal for doing that. I think it was, you know, I think, yeah, I think it was a little rough. But at the same time, I just want to point out like, you know, we're gonna keep doing the show. Because I think, you know, as much as we all disagree, as much as we fight and as much as we may even start to dislike each other and not get along, I think it's really important that we keep doing this and I think. Restating that commitment and trying to do better is really important. So, you know, we're going to try different stuff out, try and find ways to find common ground and keep doing the show productively with each other.

• 4:19David Friedberg?

  As one experiment this week, I'm going to moderate and we're going to, you know, try and take it that way. But, you know, I just wanted to say those few words before we kick this off, guys, because I thought it was important, especially after the last couple of weeks. I think it's been a bit of a struggle. We've been having a tough time and I just want to be open about it and, you know, highlight that, you know, as an example, you can fight with people, you can disagree with them and you can still keep trying. And I want to set that example. I want us to keep doing that. So, anyway, just thought that'd be good.

• 4:45Jason Calacanis?

  I would just like to say apology accepted. And I thought it was a lovely opening. One thing I would just punch up there is, the real reason we did this was because we missed each other. We missed hanging out with each other. And then, this is, you know, something that's become more successful than any of us ever imagined. It's got an audience size that is just, you know, hard to imagine how many people are listening to this, which then does put a little bit of pressure on it. We want it to be great for the audience. And I just want to say, like, I don't take it personally when we battle on stuff, even with politics and Sacks and stuff like that. I respect each of you. You are each brothers to me. I love each of you deeply.

• 5:29Jason Calacanis?

  And when we fight and things don't work out, I look at it as like personal growth or progress towards some other goals that we each have. The amount of support I've gotten in my career from David Sacks and Chamath has been unparalleled. David Sacks was my first LP. He encouraged me to create my first venture fund. Chamath supported me relentlessly in my career, showed up for me every event I ever did, and I tried to do those same things for them. You and I haven't done much business together, Friedberg, but I'm enjoying the business that we've started to be doing.

• 6:04David Friedberg?

  Starting to.

• 6:05Jason Calacanis?

  And I showed up for both of your events when you needed me.

• 6:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Jason Calacanis?

  Doing some syndicates with you. And I love doing this each week. I love doing this each week.

• 6:14David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's like, I think my point was, it's a lot easier to be friends and have wine together and play poker together than it is to do a job together. And this has become really a job. And so, you know, you can have really good friends and then you try and start a company together or do a job together and you can hate each other. I think it doesn't mean that you guys stop being friends or that we should stop doing the work. I think we should still keep trying to do the work, figure out a way to make it work. So anyway, that was the point I wanted to make.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  And that's the end of my statements. Those weren't prepared. Those are just a reaction to yours. I don't know if Sack wants to say anything, but I doubt it.

• 6:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's get this off. Sack, you have any emotions right now? Sack, what are you feeling?

• 6:50David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, Samoth, do you think grass fed is better or the regular, uh, built up?

• 6:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sacks and I were texting while you guys were, we're hugging it out, talking about different kinds of jerky.

• 7:06Jason Calacanis?

  While we were jerking each other off, you guys were researching jerky? Great.

• 7:10David Sacks?

  I was recommending, uh, Bill Tong to him.

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, great. Awesome.

• 7:13David Friedberg?

  Speaking of jerky, let's get into Adam Neumann. Ayo. Okay. So now, hey, ayo. Okay. So, uh, first, uh, thing to talk about today. And I kind of wanted to take it in a little bit of a different direction than I think all the other tech media have kind of addressed this. You know, Adam Neumann is back. He raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz. There was an announcement this week for his new company called Flow, which as we understand it is trying to develop residential apartments. You know, in the same sort of vibe, quality and attention to experience as maybe was intended with WeWork. Uh, and Flow, you know, seems to have, um, started, originated with Adam, doing a bunch of acquisitions of real estate with his own capital.

• 7:57David Friedberg?

  And now he seems to have turned this into a real business and raised money from Andreessen. So there's all the commentary and joking about Andreessen putting this money in. Are they crazy? As well as all the, you know, commentary about Adam Neumann? How could anyone back him? The guy was so awful the first time around. Let me just do a quick round the horn with you guys, you know, initial reactions to the, to the Adam Neumann deal. And then I'd love to talk about founders having a second act. Because, you know, Adam happens to be high-profile. So his failure was high-profile. But a lot of founders have a failed, low-profile first experience and come back and kick ass the second time around. And investors have taken notice of that. And so I'd love to go there, but maybe we just do a quick reaction.

• 8:42David Friedberg?

  J. Cal, I know you've talked about this on your other show. Maybe you can kind of give us your quick commentary on the opportunity, the transaction. And what are people talking about with respect to this deal happening?

• 8:52Jason Calacanis?

  You know, people are wondering why he's able to raise money. And what I always tell founders is when you see these like weird fundings and you can't get your heads around them, it typically has to do with track record and credible audacity trumps prior blunders. So, say what you will about Adam Neumann, he is audacious and he has credibility. People forget his origin story. They only remember the Masayoshi Son, $4 billion and what happened and what he did with that. And that was a complete clusterfuck. It went off the rails. He did all kinds of inside dealing and it was madness. But before that, he did Green Desk. He was a bootstrapped entrepreneur. And then he created the category-defining coworking space, which to this day, when you say, "I need to get an office," the first thing people say is, "Get a WeWork."

• 9:37Jason Calacanis?

  Just like they say, "Take an Uber," just like they say, "Google it," just like, you know, any other verb that we talk about. And so it's very easy to dismiss him and say, "The tech industry has no morals. They just back, they'll back anybody." He has a publicly traded company that's in the market right now. He defined the category. And he also put $300 million, apparently, of his own money at stake to buy these apartments. So I think it's, I would say, the bet makes sense to me. And I think it will make sense if we go into the bet, which I'd love to hear everybody else's thoughts on. It's an audacious bet because housing is one of the hardest industries to tackle. And he already did it for commercial, so why wouldn't he be able to do it for residential?

• 10:20David Friedberg?

  Sax, did you see this opportunity in the market? Did you guys take a look at it or have any point of view on it?

• 10:25David Sacks?

  No, I mean, we don't write $350 million-sized checks. So it's just not something that we're going to take a look at. For that matter, we don't really do non-software investments. We don't do, you know, in the physical world-type investments. And I've kind of learnt that doing anything in the physical world with atoms is 10x harder than doing anything with bits. So, you know, one of my takeaways over the last few years is, you know, we tend to like pure software models, not even hybrid or tech-enabled models, because it really does take a 10x entrepreneur to do anything in the physical world. So, we, you know, we, software is kind of our knitting and we, we like to stick to that.

• 11:08David Sacks?

  Uh, in terms of, you know, Andreessen Horowitz making this investment, here's what I, or your larger topic of, of repeat founders. Look, most startups fail and most founders or good founders have an entrepreneurial streak in them. And so you combine those two things and there's going to be a lot of repeat second time founders, people who are fundamentally entrepreneurial and their first thing doesn't work out. I think that, that can be a positive thing to invest in because they've gotten some of their mistakes out of the way and they've learned from that experience. So I think the question we would just ask is what were the learnings and did they conduct their failed startup honorably? You know, like if they lied to investors or misled investors, then obviously we don't want any part of that. But I don't think most failures are like

• 11:50David Sacks?

  that. And, um, and so as long as the founder, I think, conducted themselves honorably, had some good learnings, it's certainly not a disqualifier for their next startup.

• 12:00David Friedberg?

  I mean, Chamath, you've been open in the past about startups that waste money and do the kind bars and red brick, you know, offices and, you know, easy living at the office. There's no better example of over the top exuberance as there was at WeWork, right? I mean, does that indicate to you that this guy doesn't have a clue in terms of how to be prudent with investors' capital and it's not backable? Or how do you think about it?

• 12:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a couple of thoughts. The first is that WeWork is a really interesting business. But that business had been built many times before and it's called REIT. And I think what Adam was able to arbitrage was a period of time where he pitched a non-real estate investor, a technology company, that was really just a real estate investment trust. And that's why he was able to get these incredibly heady valuations. I think the peak valuation of WeWork was like forty-five or fifty billion dollars. But what happened, which is that when WeWork ultimately went public, the collective intelligence of the public markets imposed

• 13:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a REIT-based valuation model on WeWork and it is now a three-point-six-billion-dollar public company. And I don't think you can dunk on Adam for that. It's hard to build any kind of company, let alone a three-point-six-billion-dollar company, and he was instrumental in that, so he should get some amount of credit. But the reality was that he was pitching people that didn't want to hear about a business that was a real estate investment trust. They wanted to hear about some technology and all of these other things, but ultimately when you stripped it away, it was a REIT. Now you started again and from the outside in, not knowing anything, because we don't know anything, what it looks like is the beginnings of another REIT, except focused on residential.

• 13:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right? So when you buy hundreds or thousands of apartments. But again, Same pig, different lipstick. The issue at hand, though, is that, again, he has found a technology investor to buy a technology story. And again, time will tell whether there is a technology business here, but if it ultimately is an amalgamation of a bunch of apartments with some sort of, you know, interconnected technology that helps enable a better community or what have you, those kinds of REITs have also been built before and REITs are valued in a very structured way on this thing called FFO, Funds from Operations.

• 14:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you know what the upper bound of valuation is, which is if you go and you know, look in the stock market, the most valuable REIT in the world is a company called Prologis. They have about a billion square feet under management. They're about a hundred billion dollar company. WeWork has about 45 million square feet under management. They're a 3.6 billion dollar company. So if you just interpolate from those two data points, on the residential side, Adam's gonna have to buy, you know, if you think an average apartment is 1,500 square feet, he has to buy, you know, 665,000 more apartments in order for that to be Prologis scale. You know, I don't know, to invest at a billion dollar valuation, or 1.5 or 2, or whatever that number turns out to be, makes sense if you think the upper bound

• 15:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  is unlimited, but if you think the upper bound is 3 or 4 billion, the only reason to do it, by the way, it still makes sense for a reason to do it. And this is why I think people get tilted. Because now this comes to my second point, which is that what Adam Neumann is able to take advantage of is a very obvious, powerful understanding of the venture capital business model that other founders don't, especially the ones that dunk on him. And let me just explain this. We talked about this last week. The only mistake I think that SoftBank really made was a velocity of money mistake, which is not setting the investment cycle of their vision fund to be 10 years instead of five.

• 15:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  While every other fund has a five-year investment cycle too, including AHs. And so when you have tens of billions of dollars under management, guys, guess what? They have the same problem SoftBank did, except with just a different quantum of capital. They want velocity of money. And so if a founder comes and asks for 350 million dollars, it actually in a perverse way makes your life easier. Because now that's saying yes once versus saying five or six times to people asking for 50 million dollars. Or heaven forbid, 350 times for people asking for a million dollars.

• 16:29David Friedberg?

  And so if you're in that seat, Chamath, if you're in the investor seat, are you... Putting all that capital once with the one guy who's managed that money before? Or do you want to find the guy who hasn't or the gal who hasn't?

• 16:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have to understand the Andreessen business model, Andreessen Horowitz's business model is to become Blackstone, but for technology.

• 16:50David Friedberg?

  They have like 30 billion AUM now, right?

• 16:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right, which is still, you know, a drop in the bucket.

• 16:54David Friedberg?

  35 billion, something like that.

• 16:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if you look at Blackstone, right?

• 16:57David Friedberg?

  A trillion.

• 16:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Blackstone is a hundred plus billion dollar market cap company, right? Built on three pillars: credit, private equity and real estate. You can make the argument that technology is near, is as important as those three categories. And so, you know, if, I think it's pretty obvious that Andreessen is trying to build a publicly ownable security that represents all things in technology. So again, I don't think that they're necessarily out to generate massive returns for LPs. They want to become a credible, reliable institution for, to absorb hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 17:37David Friedberg?

  And so ultimately, the objective, you think, is to index technology?

• 17:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Their, their ultimate goal is to mo, is for Andreessen and Horowitz to monetize the equity of Andreessen Horowitz.

• 17:47David Friedberg?

  Of the management company.

• 17:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, that's the goal. And that's a, that's a, by the way, that's a laudable goal. It's really hard to build a business. They've built an incredible business and then they should get credit for that.

• 17:57David Friedberg?

  Sacks, do you agree?

• 17:58David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, they are, they, I think Sharmar's right that their stated goal is to build like a larger institutional VC type investor. I mean, doesn't Andreessen have a portrait of JP Morgan hanging on his wall or something? I mean, they want to turn VC from being like a little craft business to something larger and more institutional. So yeah, I'm sure they jump at the chance to write a 350 million dollar check if they believe in the company. But can I shift this conversation just for a second? So I've done a lot of commercial real estate investing. I think there are reasons to think that Flow, this new company could actually be better than WeWork. And let me just explain. So with WeWork, You know, if you talk to commercial office space owners, landlords about WeWork like 10

• 18:42David Sacks?

  years ago, what they would have told you is, yeah, look, that model is great, but we want tenants who are high credit and sign long-term leases. Why? Because they're not worried about what happens in a bull market. They're worried about what happens in a recession, and they want to make sure they can cover their bank debt. So landlords have always cared not just about rents, but also about having high credit, long-term leases. What WeWork basically did is arbitrage that. Of course, it was a much better deal for startups, because if you're a startup, you don't have to go through a complicated process signing a lease. You could just go month to month at a WeWork, and you'd be willing to pay a premium for that. So WeWork's business worked great during an upmarket, because they would rent

• 19:24David Sacks?

  space for, say, 50 bucks a foot, lease it for 100, and they would capture the spread. The problem is, the business was highly levered to a boom cycle. And at the first recession or bust cycle, all of a sudden, they're going to have massive vacancy, because everyone can leave. And all of a sudden, their rents go below their, the rents they're collecting go below the rent they're paying, and the arbitrage goes away. They magnified that problem by making two mistakes. Number one, they signed a lot of top-of-market leases, right? They were signing leases at $100 plus per foot in hot markets. And the other thing is, they didn't seem to have a lot of financial discipline. You know, I guess that show kind of makes fun of these sort of bacchanalian parties they had and so forth like that. You can get away with a lack of spending discipline if you're a 90% gross margin

• 20:09David Sacks?

  business, like a Google. But when you're a real estate business who's got real cogs, not having spending discipline is actually a problem. So for all those reasons, I think WeWork kind of contained the seeds of its own implosion inside of their model, and they needed to manage or mitigate those risks a lot better. That's not to say, though, that it wasn't a great product. I mean, for every start, it was an amazing product.

• 20:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, in the early days, in fact, so to your point, they were Taking undermarket, like really low cost per square foot space, like in the Tenderloin, and then selling it for, you know, Bryant and Third Street rents, right? I mean, that was the arbitrage and it worked. It's only they lost that discipline, it sounds like, in the second half of the company's history.

• 20:54David Sacks?

  Right. What I think is interesting about Flo is that it's sort of multifamily, these apartment-type buildings, those tend to be, you know, let's call it one-year leases anyway, and they're owning them. They're not leasing from a landlord, they're basically, so, Chamath's right, it's basically a standard apartment replay where Neumann is going to create a consistent experience and brand across the country. I'm not sure that's really been done before, where there's like a brand for apartment living.

• 21:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's never been done.

• 21:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, and so actually, it's pretty simple in terms of measuring if it's going to work or not, which is simply, can Adam Neumann deliver lower vacancy rates and higher rents? And then, you know, buy apartment buildings at market prices. So in other words, that's the arbitrage, is can he extract more rent and less vacancy from apartment units by creating this national brand and this experience?

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  But this is, this is-

• 21:43David Sacks?

  And hopefully do a financial discipline.

• 21:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 21:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But this is my point, everything you talked about is how we would actually do a teardown of any other REIT that was looking for money, David. You know, we would look at what is the FFO? Ultimately, it's like, you know, what's the implied cap rate and what's the FFO? Can you get paid for owning this thing?

• 21:59David Friedberg?

  How much do you have to spend and can you get paid?

• 22:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And this is where I, this is where I think, like, you know, trying to then, you know, so if, if, if on the, if on the inside of it, what, what instead, it was not that, but it was pitched as some, you know, convoluted technology play, it's a little bit harder to believe, again, we don't know the details, so maybe-

• 22:17David Friedberg?

  Or conscious play. Right, sure.

• 22:19Jason Calacanis?

  Actually, what I would say, building on Sacks and Chamath's, if they are going to do 700,000 apartments, you can actually put some numbers on this, you know, 700,000 apartments, you think they can get extra 100, maybe 150 bucks out of a renter? I think they could, for like that experience, right? People pay a little premium, they're not going to pay 300 more, 400 more, because then they would just get a larger apartment and, you know, they could spend that money because it would be better spent. If they have 700,000 of those, you're talking about a billion dollars in revenue a year. That's with 700,000 apartments. Okay, 10x profits, you know, whatever, $10 billion valuation. If Andreessen Horowitz is buying in at 1.5 or 2, like Chamath saying is probably correct. Somewhere in that range, they bought 20%. Okay, yeah, maybe they get a 6 or 7 bagger out of this, but it's a 6 or 7 bagger on a big number, 350. It's not like a 20x or a 50x.

• 23:04Jason Calacanis?

  And you also get the branding, which I would not under value here of being the firm that backs bad boy entrepreneurs and is like willing to go there and support founders.

• 23:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it's a real positive for Andreessen. It's like, look, you know, you just raised a ton of money. Well, guess what? You got to put that money out because it's not as if they're going to think to themselves, "Oh, I really only want to run this fund over three years instead of two." They're not thinking that. They're like, "I want to keep going out because I think their business model works by taking as much oxygen in the room as possible, which means to be actively fundraising always." That's, it's tied, it's true of Blackstone, it's true of Apollo, it's true of Carlyle, it's true of KKR. Any of these publicly traded investment managers, they live and die by their ability to constantly be raising funds,

• 24:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  which implicitly means you have to constantly be writing funds. The returns decay, but that's okay because now you're feeding, you're taking money from pension funds and other institutional limited partners who are fine because their hurdle is like 6 or 7%. So if you deliver 11%, you still look like a genius because you can absorb so much money. So Andreessen wins by showing that Adam Neumann goes and picks him. Andreessen wins because they have the ability to write a $350 million check. Andreessen wins because they have $350 million less that they have to actually put into the hands of other entrepreneurs. Now they can do it with just one check. So it's a multifaceted win for them and it's a multifaceted win for Neumann.

• 24:43David Friedberg?

  I think there's also brand value for the entrepreneurs that have had failed startups or issues with their first startup imploding and knowing that there's still a second bite at the apple. I remember a survey, and I just tried to pull it up and I couldn't find it. So I may be wrong on this, but First Round Capital years ago surveyed Or did an analysis of all the investments they had made. And I think one of the biggest predictors of success in a startup was that it was the founder's second startup. And so if you've had failings the first time around, you're more likely to have learned from those failings to improve your performance the second time around. And so as an entrepreneur, I looked at Andreessen Horowitz after this investment and think, you know, these guys will still back, you know, great entrepreneurs, even if things

• 25:27David Friedberg?

  went sideways or there was an issue the first time. And you've got, you know, the ultimate kind of case for that. Okay, speaking of Andreessen, I'm going to move us along. You guys wanted to cover this topic, not my favorite topic, just because I want to be careful about, I mean, you guys decide what you want to say, but I'm going to bring up the Andreessen nimbyism thing in Atherton. You guys wanted to cover this, right? Yeah, thumbs up? Sure. I mean, I mean, it's like, okay. Well, I mean, everybody's talking about, why wouldn't we? Everyone's talking about it. Okay, so during COVID, Mark Andreessen wrote an essay called Build. And I'm going to read an excerpt. He says, "You don't just see the smug complacency, the satisfaction with the status quo and

• 26:11David Friedberg?

  the unwillingness to build in the pandemic or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life and specifically throughout American life. You see it in housing and the physical footprint of our cities. We can't build nearly enough housing in our cities with surging economic potential, which results in crazily skyrocketing housing prices in places like San Francisco, making it nearly impossible for regular people to move in and take the jobs of the future." And then last week, Mark and his wife Laura submitted a letter to the town of Atherton to fight against multifamily housing, saying, "I'm writing this letter to communicate our immense objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton. Please immediately remove all multifamily overlay zoning projects from the housing

• 26:55David Friedberg?

  element, which will be submitted to the state in July. They will massively decrease our home values, the quality of life ourselves and our neighbors, and immensely increase the noise pollution and traffic." Sax.

• 27:08David Friedberg?

  I'm just gonna hand the mic over.

• 27:10David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, I'm happy to defend the residents of Atherton on this. I'm gonna take the contrarian standpoint, but does anyone...

• 27:17David Friedberg?

  I was gonna do the same. I thought you guys were all gonna bash him, so go ahead.

• 27:21David Sacks?

  Well, look, I mean, do we have a problem where housing is too hard to construct in the state of California? Yes, and there's a bunch of reasons for that. The permitting process is Byzantine. It takes years. All those delays cost money. The tenant rights movement has gone so far that landlords basically can't, you know, it's almost impossible to evict anybody, and that makes it so no one wants to be a landlord. No one wants to build these multifamily buildings or buy them. And then, you know, you've got like all these taxes. So you're just in Calif- in San Francisco, for example, they just passed a 6% transfer tax where, we talked about this on the show, they basically just took 6% of my home, and there's like nothing you can do about it. So there's a lot of reasons

• 28:05David Sacks?

  why people don't want to invest in more housing in California, and I think that this Atherton example is sort of cherry picked, because what this is, is really zoning, you know? There are these suburbs, and it's not just Atherton, I mean, you've got the East Bay as well, where people live in these areas that are zoned for single-family residences as opposed to multifamily. And that determines the character of the neighborhood. Now, if you go buy a house in one of those neighborhoods with that zoning, then that's what you expect to be the case. I mean, you have to spend more money buying a house in that neighborhood because you are investing in the character of that neighborhood. So it is unfair to the residents of that neighborhood for a developer to come along and say, "Hey, I'm

• 28:48David Sacks?

  gonna change the character of this place so I can make money. I'm gonna take a bunch of single-family lots, turn them into multifamily apartment complexes," or something like that.

• 28:58David Sacks?

  So I can understand why the residents would be against that. So I would differentiate between legitimate reasons for zoning and then things that the state or cities have done to undermine the market for housing, basically creating frictions or impediments to the market for housing. Now, it is the case that as cities get bigger and need to free up land, that you might need to rezone. But the areas that you should look at for that should make sense, right? I mean, I don't think you go off to Atherton and change the character of that neighborhood so that you can buy five more units.

• 29:31David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 29:31David Sacks?

  You should, you should look at, like, why not look at the areas around, say, public transit, like the Barts and so forth, where you could basically go up around there and it would make sense for the neighborhood.

• 29:43David Friedberg?

  I mean, the example I would give to kind of paint an extreme picture is, let's say you own a farm in the countryside. Someone buys the farm next to you and then decides they want to build a 50-story tall skyscraper next to your farm. You would have a serious objection because I think that the, I mean, look, look at the town of Venice in Italy. I mean, Chamath, you've, you've, you've been there recently, but, you know, communities, local communities can define the character of their community by, by, by making zoning laws that, you know, allow a small city to remain like a small city. I've also always been against this notion that we should allow any developer to build any size building anywhere they want in San Francisco, which has been an ardent cry from Silicon Valley progressives for years,

• 30:28David Friedberg?

  that we need to let them build, let them build. But at the end of the day, I moved to San Francisco 22 years ago and it was a small quaint city. It felt like a small city. And building skyscrapers made it more congested, made it less inviting, made it feel more industrial, and it wasn't appealing to me as a resident. And I think that residents need to have the right to define what they want their community to be. The question it brings up then is, where do you build? Because all residents everywhere would want to block family housing, multifamily housing, skyscrapers. So, I mean, Chamath, I don't know if you have a point of view to counter what we're saying, but, you know, how, how do we think about solving this problem at scale if everyone wants their, their local communities to remain quaint and interesting and not be built out?

• 31:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I, I think, I think that's true for people who can afford really nice homes in the suburbs.

• 31:14David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 31:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But there are a lot of people that live in highly dense housing in urban environments. And I think that's where we need to focus first. If you look at the data, California needs to build three and a half million extra homes by 2025.

• 31:29David Friedberg?

  That's a rule, right? That's like a

• 31:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So David's right, like focusing on a town with a population of 7,000 people is not going to solve the three and a half million homes we need to build. And it brings up a bigger question, which is then who is going to pay for all the physical infrastructure that's going to be required? Let's just say you're able to actually double the population of Atherton to 14,000. Well, you know, I live near that area, so what I'll tell you is Atherton has bad flooding. David, you know, Sacks actually used to live near there too, so Sacks can confirm this. You know, depending on when it rains, huge pockets of water just collect everywhere. That infrastructure is bad. There are no sidewalks, right? So you kind of walk just on the road.

• 32:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So cars whipping by, you know, could pick you off at any moment. Now, those were decisions that, as David said, the residents of that town made decades ago because of the lifestyle that it created. And they traded away a highly dense urban environment. Whereas if you just moved a mile, you know, south, there are parts of Menlo Park and parts of Palo Alto that are already in a situation to absorb very dense housing where you could put that extra seven or eight thousand people pretty easily.

• 32:46David Friedberg?

  But what do you, what do you do when those people in that neighborhood in Menlo Park say, I don't want another apartment building here. I want it to be down the road in Atherton, right? How do you resolve this conflict? And I just want to remind everyone in September, Governor Newsom signed these bills, right? He signed 31 affordable housing bills, which mandate by zip code and by city and by town, the building of affordable housing to create equity in this problem. Or which basically means all these cities and all these towns are now scrambling to figure out, how do we meet our state mandated objectives of new affordable housing in our zip code or in our town?

• 33:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, look, I mean, look, and I think exactly as you said, what will happen now is it goes to some state commission. And I think that state commission can issue some sort of penalty or something. So, you know, it's, I think the residents will pay for that. Freedom, if you will, to not have that building happen. But again, I just go back to it doesn't solve the crux of the problem. The crux of the problem is we need to solve this housing crisis in the order of magnitude of millions of homes. Okay. And so millions of homes can only be absorbed mostly in cities. So the real conversation and you know, is I have more sympathy

• 34:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  for the residents of Atherton than I do for residents of the city of San Francisco. Okay, because there is dense housing in San Francisco. There already is an infrastructure, social services that were designed and built. There are sidewalks. Again, simple example. There are stoplights, you know, in San Francisco that a lot of these towns don't actually have. Now, again, that was a decision they made 50 years ago and they would have to change that decision, but my point is like there are, there are places that are already shovel ready. And the real question is why can't we build hundreds of thousands of units? And so this is a good article to write because it's a Tony neighborhood and you know, there's a few thousand folks. But I think the real issue won't get solved until we figure out how to

• 34:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  green light hundreds of thousands and millions because we are three and a half million homes short.

• 34:53David Friedberg?

  Jay Cal, what do you think? I mean, are you?

• 34:55Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, the, the truth here is that this is not about Atherton. This is every town, every city in California is fighting all development because if you fight the development, well, yeah, you would obviously have less traffic and supply and demand, your homes become more valuable. The place that's fought it most of all is San Francisco in the city. Where you cannot convert homes, you cannot take your Victorian and make it into a a town home. And then if you look at what's actually happening here, what they're fighting against and you know, this is the hypocrisy of it is, you know, these are town homes. This isn't like a 20 story.

• 35:28Jason Calacanis?

  You know, giant apartment building, they're townhomes and they're going to be $3 million each and they're not going to be for scary people and criminals and ruining people's quality of life. It's going to be the venture partner or the receptionist, not even the receptionist, it's going to be a venture partner. It's going to be a CTO at a tech company who's going to be able to buy this and then be that much closer to work. And so it does reek of hypocrisy and there's a really simple solution here, which is, you know, there are Caltrain stations up and down the peninsula, there are, you know, in some places, you have other municipal transportation. Along those corridors, they should build up and they should build 10-story apartments, etc. Redwood City did this recently. We've all been there and seen the apartments, they're gorgeous, they're 60.

• 36:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But Jay Cal, you're talking about, you're talking about the exact kind of solution we need because instead of trying to solve 100 units here or there, Redwood City did an incredible job. They solved it in the scale of 10s of thousands of units. And it completely changed the downtown of Redwood City. It is awesome.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  And it's awesome. Incredible. What is Athens afraid of? So what is Athens afraid of? This is NIMBYism at its worst in my mind. I'm not going to specifically make it about Mark and Teresa. I think everybody, you know, has the right to live in the neighborhood they want. They, they get to state their feelings. I think what we need to do is convince people and I think there's two really good arguments here. Number one, do you want your chef, your kids?

• 36:48David Friedberg?

  You're saying convince people to let their neighborhoods change is what you're saying.

• 36:51Jason Calacanis?

  To let them evolve modestly, to have homes that their own children or their own chefs and housekeepers and associates, we all know people in the, in the area who have bought apartment buildings for their nannies because you couldn't get a nanny or you couldn't get a chef. So you, you bought some unit in Redwood City and you rented it for your nannies or whatever.

• 37:11David Friedberg?

  We don't know a lot of people that have, not everyone.

• 37:13Jason Calacanis?

  I do. I know multiple or who have considered it. And so that's the way you would convince NIMBY people to, to evolve here. And then there's a second one. This has to do with work from home. When you commute. You know, the issues of domestic violence, depression, drug abuse, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, all of that goes way up. And it's somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes of a commute, you start to see people's quality of life seriously deteriorates. And so if we want people to come back to offices, which Apple just mandated last week, everybody's coming back three days a week, like it or not, Tuesday, Thursdays, and you pick the other Wednesday you want to come to work, I guess. If we want people to come back to work, well, yeah, we're gonna have to build some taller homes. The CEOs, the founders

• 37:57Jason Calacanis?

  of the companies, the founders of the venture firms, it's not about Mark Andreessen, it's about everybody. They don't have to commute. The office is within walking distance or a bike ride of their office. People need to start thinking about their nanny, their chef, their firefighter, and their employees.

• 38:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jason, I may have misread it, but it wouldn't have solved the problem for the nanny, the chef, the teacher, the firefighter.

• 38:17Jason Calacanis?

  No, these would be $3 million units.

• 38:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, they wouldn't even be that, because the way that it read, because I read it, said that you would have qualified it by building what's called an ADU on your property.

• 38:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 38:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So people would have built it for their grandmother, their in-law.

• 38:32Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of people are doing that, by the way.

• 38:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My point is, the law as proposed was already hacked, and so it would never have accomplished what you were saying. I think the answer to what you're saying is what Redwood City did. It's what towns all around the country should be doing, which is like in and around particularly like transportation hubs, you should be greenlighting a lot of dense housing. But Jason, those are not ADUs that sit on a property.

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no.

• 38:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those are 500 and a thousand. And by the way, those also require not just the infrastructure, but it also requires the financing and all of the, you know, the banks and construction companies.

• 39:06Jason Calacanis?

  The market's there to construct it. That's not a problem in California. The opposition is the problem, which is why the federal, I'm sorry, the state government's getting involved and superseding or trying to supersede what happens on a local level. That's why Gavin Newsom is passing these things, is because each town is refusing to do it. But another possible solution is if Atherton is so good at blocking this stuff, and they have so much money, let them pay a penalty and have Redwood City, or San Carlos, or another neighborhood, Millbrae, that wants money, and they want to build up. Millbrae is built. Building because that's where the Bart station ends is in Millbrae. Just to keep this not. Building up there.

• 39:39David Sacks?

  What you're describing are like are all these contortions and what should be a more free market for housing construction. I mean, the reality is we've done so many things to distort the market.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  Agreed.

• 39:50David Sacks?

  With these labyrinthine permit process processes that delay projects for years and years to um, you know, to all the taxes and and other rules. Yeah, well.

• 40:00Jason Calacanis?

  Because that's how they fight it. They fight it with all these environmental stuff.

• 40:04David Sacks?

  Zoning is a little different. Yeah. So the NIMBYism factors into the permitting process, but but I would, again, I would differentiate zoning. Um, but my point is just we've like so broken the free market for housing that we then come along and say, see, the free market is not working. We need more government mandates. Look, is this happening in Miami? No, go to Miami. There are cranes everywhere. They're building.

• 40:26Jason Calacanis?

  Houston.

• 40:27David Sacks?

  They're building multifamily or exactly. So in these frankly, red cities, red states, which are much more lightly regulated, they're building a lot more, but at the same time, it's not like.

• 40:38Jason Calacanis?

  And in New York, which is constrained, so you have to build up. Yeah. But Houston has no zoning.

• 40:43David Sacks?

  Yeah, New York City has always had a very non sentimental view towards construction. The city has always said, okay, if you want to build something bigger and better, you can tear it down and start over. I mean, they have like air rights and so on that you have to respect, but but New York City has never they by and large, they don't constantly um label buildings as historic and say you can't touch them and things like that. It's New York City has always wanted to keep being dynamic and growing. Um, so there are other places that just don't have this problem and they're able to achieve this growth without building an apartment complex like in the lot next to you if you live in the suburbs and have a single family residence. I mean,

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 41:24David Sacks?

  So I I just think like the, you know, the the politicians in California have so thoroughly broken the market for housing and now what happens is you get an article like this that's basically scapegoating the residents of a suburb as being the source of the problem when they didn't create this problem.

• 41:43Jason Calacanis?

  They're just fighting to keep the status quo. So they're perpetuating it, I would say.

• 41:46David Sacks?

  But you know, like, so first of all, I have no special love for Athens and Toronto. I I lived there for a couple of years and it's kind of like a Stepford community. I mean, I had to move back to the city. Yeah, well, I'm like, you know, somehow I'm just more comfortable stepping over dirty needles and excrement.

• 42:01Jason Calacanis?

  You're voting with your dollar?

• 42:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, I moved back to San Francisco, but

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  masochist.

• 42:06David Sacks?

  Yeah, but look, Alvin's like a really weird place because

• 42:09David Friedberg?

  Sax is like Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate. Go ahead, Sax.

• 42:14David Sacks?

  In addition to there being no sidewalks, there's literally no offices, there's no grocery store, there's no commercial real estate of any kind. There is no downtown. There is, there, you know, so I don't know like where the hook is that you would all of a sudden put an apartment complex. I mean, you're literally going to be building it in someone's backyard. So the character of that neighborhood just doesn't support it. And I think, you know, people coming together to form their own cities, you know, under the principle of subsidiarity, should be allowed a reasonable freedom to basically construct a city as they want, in the way that they want to live.

• 42:47Jason Calacanis?

  And there are other cities that competition, Friedberg, there's other cities that competition. Houston has no zoning, essentially. So you could, if you have a lot and you want to make it into a school, or a hotel, or a restaurant, you can do it. And then outside of Austin, you, you kind of have that same thing. People build all kinds of weird compounds and stuff out there.

• 43:03David Friedberg?

  Are you guys following?

• 43:04Jason Calacanis?

  So it's a competition between those cities. And I think San Francisco's losing.

• 43:08David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Are you guys following any of the startup cities that are being built where there's like a new city being built from the ground up? And any of those seem like?

• 43:14Jason Calacanis?

  Cul-de-sac, you mean?

• 43:16David Friedberg?

  I don't know the names of any of them, but

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  Cul-de-sac is one, yeah.

• 43:19David Friedberg?

  I mean, are these real? Are these real projects? Are we going to see these emerging like next gen cities that, you know, could be viable places to move to and live? Or is it really just about, you know, transforming some of these cities that are less regulatory and that's ultimately what will win in the market?

• 43:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, part of why the, the regulation has gotten so perverted in a lot of these towns is because you've been able to gerrymander how, you know, these public school districts get funded. And so, you know, why folks are so protective of, of it is, is again, and, and, you know, to, to underscore one of Sax's points, this is much more prevalent in democratic states and democratic cities where, you know,

• 43:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Coastal elites have really gerrymandered these school districts and that's a large reason why they, uh, they don't want a lot of building. They want to protect the tax base and they want to be able to funnel those specific tax dollars into a few schools for their kids and that's it.

• 44:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so it's, it's-

• 44:16Jason Calacanis?

  That is actually a really good point, Chamath. People don't know this undercurrent, which is up and down the peninsula.

• 44:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, this is the dirtiest little secret in these democratic states, again, mostly democratic, but if you look inside of California and a couple of other states, how horrendously gerrymandered it is. So that you can basically redistrict in a way to cordon off tax dollars to only then send to one or two public schools that sit inside of your area, your zip code, because that's what the law says. It's a zip code oriented scheme. It's perverse. It's created incredibly horrible incentives for people. So I think David is right, which is that there's a, there's a contortion of laws that come together that underlie some of these decisions that then manifest in a petition like this and et cetera. They all need to get cleaned up.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  And Chamath, it's, it's even worse than that because the same people who have rigged it so that all their tax dollars stay in their non-development community, then they're overfunding their public schools they could easily afford private, but they're using all that money for just their private school and the one in the town next to it, East Palo Alto, whatever, they have no money. And then these people have the audacity to fight against school choice so that those poor people can take tax dollars and then pick a better school. So it's hypocrisy all the way up and down. And, and you know, I think this is why people are largely moving to different places around the country and it's a competition between states and cities.

• 45:40David Friedberg?

  Okay. We're going to go from super local to global. Um, you know, this is a topic I wanted to talk about today because I want to bring together a couple of, of breads and get your guys' take on, you know, all of these things kind of coming together and what it means for foreign policy and how things might play out on the global stage in the next, um, you know, call it years to decades. Xi Jinping, it's been reported this week, is taking a trip to Saudi Arabia.

• 46:12David Friedberg?

  You know, this is just a few weeks after Joe Biden made his trip to Saudi Arabia. I'll read just an excerpt. He's going to end his more than two years of self-imposed in-person diplomatic isolation, and his first trip is going to be to Saudi Arabia. You know, this is from unnamed Saudi sources, so it's unclear. This isn't an official statement. This is just reporting. You know, The Wall Street Journal reported in March that after six years of negotiations, China and Saudi Arabia are getting close for China to start paying Yuan for oil that they would be buying from the Saudis. So there's an important kind of economic tie-up that may be emerging that could affect the

• 46:54David Friedberg?

  US dollar and the importance of the US dollar on the global economic stage. And meanwhile, this week as well, it's been reported that China is doing military exercises with Russia, inside Russia. So there is an extension of China and their influence and their economic tie-ups and their military activity with both China, sorry, with both Russia and Saudi. I also want to highlight another important point that came out this week. Saudi Aramco reported their earnings, the largest earnings ever for a company, $48 billion of net profit in a quarter. That is more profit than Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Tesla combined in a single quarter.

• 47:38David Friedberg?

  It is the most profitable business, and Saudis have been very public about their intention of divesting their interest in Saudi Aramco, which is their state-owned and state-run oil company, and moving into other businesses. Over the past couple of months, it's been reported that they've accumulated a nearly $100 billion equity portfolio, owning stocks like Alphabet, Zoom, Microsoft, and others. It's also been reported that they own over $160 billion of US Treasuries. So the US is very dependent in the private equity community, in the VC community, and in the public markets on Saudi dollars. Saudis have been large holders of US dollars. And now, through China, it looks like the Saudis may be having a tie-up that brings

• 48:20David Friedberg?

  them closer to China through this trade relationship with the Yuan and the visit from Xi Jinping, while China is actively exercising, you know, their military inside of Russia. Is the future a China, Russia, Saudi axis? And should we be concerned and should we be changing any of our tactics on foreign policy, David Sacks, as this, you know, set of threads plays out over the next couple of months and, you know, going ahead?

• 48:48David Sacks?

  Yes, I think we do need to make some changes. Biden's backing away from this now, but in his first year, he declared the Saudis to be pariahs, and he did push them into China's arms. What was the point of that? Biden recently had to go to the Middle East to basically beg Saudi Arabia to increase their production of oil. So he's already acknowledged that policy didn't work. And one of the reasons it didn't work is because simultaneously with declaring these allies to be enemies, he basically restricted US energy production, which is, you know, strategically undermined.

• 49:19David Friedberg?

  And the US has military bases in Saudi Arabia. Very strategic assets for the US military.

• 49:25David Sacks?

  Yeah, listen.

• 49:27David Friedberg?

  And we sell them weapons.

• 49:28David Sacks?

  The US relationship with Saudi Arabia is always going to be complex. They're a complicated friend to have, but it's much better to have them as a friend than basically drive them into China's arms. And the reality is, whatever you think about the regime there and how oppressive it is, first of all, we don't get to choose the people running these countries. That's the lesson we should have learned over and over again from all these failed regime change operations. Second, do we have any reason to believe that if that regime got toppled, it would get replaced with something better? I think we all know that if the regime there fell, it would probably be replaced with something fundamentalist that we would like even less. And certainly if another nation were to basically dominate the region, like Iran, that would be worse for us as well.

• 50:11David Sacks?

  So our relationship with them is complicated, but ultimately they should be, I think, allies of the United States, and we should not be working overtime to push them into China's arms. And I think similarly with Russia, we basically declared ourselves to be engaged in this proxy war with Russia, which...

• 50:28David Sacks?

  Strategically, there's just nothing in it for us. You can sympathize with the people of Ukraine all you want, but it's dangerous.

• 50:35David Friedberg?

  You've said that in the past, and I think the question is, does this China military exercise in Russia indicate an escalation of our conflict with China to you? Or is this something that is just kind of par for the course in terms of neighbors conducting...

• 50:53David Sacks?

  Mearsheimer just had an article in Foreign Affairs talking about the Ukraine war, reminding us that it's still going on. I think people somehow think that this war is just stable and it'll settle into forever war status, kind of like Afghanistan, these conflicts in the Middle East that went on forever. It's actually very dangerous. It could always escalate out of control. And as long as it's going on, I think we just have to remember that it's going on. It poses a huge global risk. And I would say that one of the things that, again, we should be aware of is this idea that even though we have problems and conflicts with multiple nations, we still don't necessarily want to push them into each other's arms. Again, the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War being the key example.

• 51:35David Sacks?

  I mean, this principle of geopolitics goes back thousands of years to the Romans, right? Dividet et impera, divide and rule. You do not want to unite your enemies. And what we've done here is we keep pushing them together. You know, China and Russia historically have not been friends. They share long borders together, neighbors generally have problems with each other. These are nations with serious conflicts or differences of interests, and we've made it really easy for China to turn Russia into the junior partner in that relationship.

• 52:07David Friedberg?

  Chamath, do you think US foreign policy needs to change and that we're setting up this axis of conflict, this axis of allies, that we don't want to have the allies? And would you kind of advise? And also, do you get concerned about this oil yuan trade, where there may be some economic tie-ups that really could affect the dollar as a reserve currency?

• 52:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look, a couple of things. I think it's really dramatic to kind of paint it in these stark bipolar terms. I think we are post all of that. So I understand how in the Cold War, it was easy to fall into binary definitions of good and evil, one and zero, us versus them, Team A versus Team B.

• 52:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But in 2022, I don't think that's how things work anymore. We're in a highly interconnected, highly global world. It's very complicated. Dollar flows are real time. They're massive. Cooperation is real time. It's all over the world. It's with every country. So it allows every country, actually, the first chance that they've ever really had, to maximize their own potential for their own citizens. And that's really what every country's goal is. Right? And so in that lens, look what just happened today. Gazprom said they're going to shut off Nord Stream 1 just for, you know, a few days. Right? But as a result of that, EU nat gas has just gone absolutely nuclear and just closed at all time highs.

• 53:35David Friedberg?

  14x, 14x where it was pandemic.

• 53:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 53:39David Friedberg?

  You know, price per unit for a year ahead.

• 53:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if you, so if you take a step back, we are at max energy production with all of the capacity all around the world, 100 plus odd million barrels a day. Okay? Global productivity absorbs that. There is very little room right now to expand that without pushing the date in which that capacity is available out until, you know, 2028 to 2030. So effectively a decade from now. So if you're in this situation and you're a country with vast natural resources, of which I'll just remind us, America is one. I think the most important thing you can do for your own citizens is to monetize these petrochemicals now. Get it out of the ground in a reasonable way.

• 54:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sell them in the marketplace because there's demand for it. Take that money and reinvest it in your people. And I think if you look at it that way, the best run countries are responding to this moment in time like any company would. How do you maximize demand and sell the product you have to the most number of customers globally? And so I think the Middle East is doing an incredible job. The US, by the way, by passing the IRA. Finally, I think, is on the right footing, because we can talk about this in a moment, but the path to permitting and the path to clean up, and by the way, it puts fossil fuels on a level playing field with clean energy alternatives.

• 55:07David Friedberg?

  Emerging alternatives, yeah.

• 55:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The best thing that could have happened, okay? So, I think we're all behaving in a very rational, market-focused way. And so I would focus less on trying to dramatically kind of resolve these things as a few countries versus everybody else. I don't think that's what's happening.

• 55:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah, much more complex.

• 55:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Much more complicated than that. But I think the simple explanation is, people with resources in the ground of the country in which they rule have a responsibility, if they believe that there's market demand to absorb that, so that they can take the revenue that comes from it and reinvest it in their people. That is true for the United States, it's true for Saudi Arabia, it's true for every country in the world.

• 55:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean Saudi Arabia is clearly making these investments, right? Not just on

• 55:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, and by the way, I mean like

• 55:54David Friedberg?

  But also housing, and new industry, and education.

• 55:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then what do you do with that much money?

• 56:00David Friedberg?

  And Saudi Arabia is becoming much more liberal as a result, too, right? The education standards, yeah.

• 56:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if you look at the investment, like, you know, you didn't, you didn't need to go to Dave Swensen and understand portfolio allocation, although I think the guys in Saudi are smart enough to have probably done it. But if you're, if you have a lot of money coming from one kind of business, and you need to make sure that you can diversify so that you can reinvest over a long period of time, if you look at countries that had huge petrochemical-related revenue flows, the Nordics, what did they do? They stood up these huge sovereign wealth funds, and those sovereign wealth funds went abroad, and they bought all kinds of non-correlated assets to those petrochemicals. That is the same thing that Saudi is doing now.

• 56:44David Friedberg?

  Financial security for their people.

• 56:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But it's like, it's like, what is the furthest uncorrelated asset from oil? It turns out it's Apple, Facebook, Meta, and Google.

• 56:52David Friedberg?

  Tech, and US Treasuries, yeah.

• 56:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, Uber.

• 56:55David Friedberg?

  Hey, J K, so J K, let me, let me ask this contrarian question for you, because you often talk about the authoritarianism of these states, Saudi, China, Russia.

• 57:07David Friedberg?

  You know, it seems to me, as we observe what's going on in Saudi, and maybe the case could be made in China to some degree, although there are steps taken back, but also in Russia, that the US influence, the economic and the political influence associated with these foreign policy conversions, could they maybe be driving these countries to be more liberal? You know, we're seeing in Saudi now that women can drive, that there's new industry, that there's education, that there's a technology industry booming, that you don't need to have a turnover of government and a turnover of what is often classified as authoritarian regime for the operating model to be influenced by the West in such a way that change happens more slowly,

• 57:52David Friedberg?

  and you do see liberalism emerge in these countries with better educational standards, more equality, more human rights. And so, do you think we're kind of... Because you often kind of paint a picture that it's bad guys versus us. You know, do you not think that we're making an influence on these places locally and that we're seeing...

• 58:10Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I would take exception to like, it's bad guys versus us. I don't think we want to create a legion of dictators, and nor do I think that's what this is. I would actually agree with Sacks. We should be embracing these folks and having strong relationships with them, even though we are fundamentally different operating systems for our countries, democracy versus authoritarian.

• 58:29David Friedberg?

  So, you think we should be embracing... Sorry, you think we should have a relationship with Putin?

• 58:31Jason Calacanis?

  A hundred percent. I mean, and we did, right? I mean, Obama was making some progress on that, and we did some great work when... And obviously, Trump has a very, very longstanding, very deep, we don't know exactly how deep, relationship with Putin. And we did great work with... We did, I mean, they did the... He did his pageant over there. I'm making some jokes, they bought a lot of apartments.

• 58:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, that was a joke, okay, go on.

• 58:57Jason Calacanis?

  Just a little joke there, but who knows? We'll find out over time, I suppose.

• 59:00David Friedberg?

  Okay.

• 59:01Jason Calacanis?

  But we did great work with China in terms of containing North Korea's nuclear ambitions, right? And so, there are things we can collaborate on. I think the most important thing, though, is that while we are embracing them, building fabric between them, communication, trade, whatever it is, we are not relying on them. And that's really what we have to look at when it comes to the Kingdom, because if not for the fact that the Kingdom won the, you know, born on top of, you know, oil fields lottery, we would not be in a deep relationship with this country. They're living under a 10th-century...

• 59:35Jason Calacanis?

  You know, rule in terms of how they treat women, gay people, etc. And the human rights is an important issue. And we wouldn't have a deep relationship with them if we didn't have to deal with the oil, but we do. And so what I think we really need to be focusing on here is maintaining great relationships with them. Yeah, we don't want to drive them to each other's arms. But to Chamath's point, I don't think they're creating the Legion of Doom to take on the US. I think they're just doing what's in their economic interest. And we need to do what's in our economic interest, which really is investing in nuclear, investing in solar batteries, wind.

• 1:00:05David Friedberg?

  And in the interest of the.

• 1:00:06Jason Calacanis?

  And bridgles. And that gets what's in the interest of the free world and Europe. Exactly. And if we are independent of them, then we don't have to go over there and kiss the ring like Biden had to do. We don't have to, you know, deal with excuses when they do horrible things like murder Khashoggi or, you know, just this past week, they put Osama al Sha'ab in jail. She's a PhD student from the University of Leeds. She's now going to go to jail for decades because when she went back to Saudi Arabia on vacation, this happened last week, gentlemen, because she retweeted people. And so these human rights violations, the murder of Khashoggi, all these things add up, the Uighurs, etc. And we'll have a better ability to negotiate and lead them as the shining city on the

• 1:00:50Jason Calacanis?

  hill when we work on being that shining city on the hill and we're not dependent on them. And that's really what I think we have to focus on is reducing the dependency on these countries. I think we all agree, whether it's medical devices, PPE, drugs, making our iPhones or oil to keep us. And then so does Europe. And that's where nuclear comes in.

• 1:01:09David Friedberg?

  Speaking of reducing dependency, you know, Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act. Some people have said this is the most important bill signed in years, if not decades, by, you know, passed by a US Congress, signed by a president, because it touches on so many points that folks believe will really move the needle with respect to climate change. Chamath, I think you made an interesting point in our group chat, and I think maybe we should start there, which is, you know, at the end of the day, the systems of industrial production on planet Earth.

• 1:01:49David Friedberg?

  Were made in such a way that we never accounted for the costs of the external output of these systems, meaning we can burn fuel, put CO2 into the atmosphere, or put methane into the atmosphere in the case of animal agriculture, and we get a low-cost product that we consume, and ultimately, no one specifically pays for the cost of the carbon going into the atmosphere, which I, and you know, many scientists would argue, is having an anthropogenic effect on the warming of the planet, and more catastrophic weather, and all these other risks that we're now facing. And so the idea was, you know, first principles, you should tax people, for tax industry, tax

• 1:02:32David Friedberg?

  businesses, for the production of atmospheric carbon that causes an effect that we're all going to have to pay to repair over time. So, you know, is that a point of view that you hold, Chamath? Because, you know, you kind of brought this up in our group text, but that's the, that would be the ideal scenario to resolve climate change, is if you just tax carbon, we kind of, you know, have a, have a real solution here, and that this whole bill is ultimately, you know, meant to kind of resolve the fact that we simply cannot find a way to a carbon tax.

• 1:03:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think that what this bill did was kill the idea of a carbon tax. I think it makes it completely unimportant, and it'll never see the light of day. Why? I think it's because, in the absence of what we did in the IRA, there wasn't a clear way of doing exactly what you said, which is letting people figure out what the equivalent trading price would be for burning a pound of coal versus, you know, generating the energy needed to run something off of nuclear. There was no market-clearing function for that. And the reason is because you couldn't get an equivalent amount of capacity effectively

• 1:03:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  available online so that they could compete one for one. What we did through this IRA was essentially use money to create so many subsidies and then to also green light the way that incremental fossil fuel projects would come to market. So that now they actually going to be put on a level playing field in the broad open market so that they can compete. When that happens, I think you will make those trade offs better yourself. And as a result, I don't think that there will be a necessary offset mechanism that will be required. Because this plan will still get us to about 40% of the way there where we want it to be by 2030, which is still a pretty decent leap forward.

• 1:04:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There is no plan that gets us to where we all need to be anyways. And I think that the appetite to go from this plan to where we need to be doesn't really exist. So I think that we're just going to have to kind of grit our teeth, get through the implementation of the IRA and realize that this is the beginning of a probably 100-plus year project. Nothing's going to get solved by 2050. Maybe you'll see something done by 2100, probably not. It'll probably be a 2150, 2200 kind of an objective. And in that lens, I think like a whole bunch of business models got turned upside down. So I think carbon markets and carbon trading are not going to be the thing that we thought it was going to be.

• 1:05:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think stuff like direct air capture again are going to be toy projects off to the side. Totally agree. I don't think that those are not, those are not going to be credible businesses like we thought they were going to be. Instead, the raw tonnage of dollars will do what America was able to do for solar and PV over 2000 to 2022, which is just crush the cost per watt into the pennies so that it can be equivalent to hydro, coal and nuclear. And put everything on a level playing field and then allow the market to figure it out.

• 1:05:47David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other stuff in this bill. I want to highlight for you guys. I don't know if any of you looked at the CBO. So the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. Anytime the bill is being voted on, they do an accounting analysis on how much spending and how much revenue there will be as a result of this bill for a 10-year period.

• 1:06:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is actually awesome. Yeah, I checked it out and you sent it.

• 1:06:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah, if you look at every year for the next 10 years, the CBO score for this bill is that we're going to spend an incremental, we're going to increase the deficit by $330 billion for the next five years. And then we're going to decrease the deficit by $320 billion in the five years after that. So the net effect over 10 years is we're only spending $17 billion on the bill. And then on the revenue basis, the expectation is we're going to generate $67 billion in revenue in the first five years and then another $20 billion in the back five years. So this is actually being accounted for and presented as deficit reduction. And that's because there's 87,000 new IRS agents being hired to go out and audit people and find new revenue.

• 1:06:52David Friedberg?

  And there's a 15% corporate minimum tax being imposed on all companies. And what this means is that companies, public companies, private companies doing over a billion in revenue, historically pay taxes on a book basis. Now they're paying taxes on a financial statement basis, meaning the actual accounting that they present to their shareholders.

• 1:07:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I ask you guys a question? How much was given to the IRS?

• 1:07:14David Friedberg?

  Eighty billion. Yeah, tens of billions.

• 1:07:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Eighty billion. How much do you think it would cost? I don't know. Pick your, pick the most excruciatingly expensive third-party outsourcing firm you could. Okay? To build an entire system to basically automatically review every single tax return and throw exceptions. And machine learn. And machine learn. What fraud looked like or what misrepresentation. Let's say $5 billion. It'd be the most expensive. It'd be the most expensive piece of software ever written. And this is what was so kind of like, that was the only part of the bill that made less sense to me. I think like, if you put really smart computers on the case,

• 1:08:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  or gave it to DeepMind at Google and said, can you guys build this system? Or we could have. Machine learning and AI.

• 1:08:07Jason Calacanis?

  You'd be done. Tax and a simpler tax, which I guess this is trying to do. But you know, Friedberg, when I looked at this and you sent it, my initial reaction was, you know, this old adage.

• 1:08:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It'll be impossible for these guys to find 87,000 humans that want to work at the IRS, number one.

• 1:08:21David Friedberg?

  By the way, there's a funny video on the recruiting that's been going on for that, but yeah, go ahead.

• 1:08:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's pretty good.

• 1:08:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I mean, you know, because like they were asking for people who were ready to like have guns and like be put their body in harm. And it's like at the IRS.

• 1:08:32Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, that can't be real. Anyway, the greatest, this is what I got from this Excel spreadsheet. The greatest tool for writing fiction is not Microsoft Word. It's Excel. Like, there is no way this thing is netting out to zero. Like, this thing's going to cost us a fortune. Government is in shambles. We don't know what we're doing. I thought that the links you sent for the podcast with the pros and cons of the carbon tax was really interesting. Because it is so complicated. When I heard these tax experts explaining how you would implement a carbon tax, and the import and export, and then how often it would have to be tweaked, and then who decides what your carbon footprint of your watch is, and where did the minerals come from to make the watch, and who gets paid on carbon? It just seemed to me, this is a fool's errand. It would be much better to just.

• 1:09:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What if your watch is made from diamond and not carbon?

• 1:09:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, in that case, you should just pay a million dollars. Because you are the latest coastal elite. And we should just start with yachts and watches. What I realized was, what we really need to focus on, and you tell me what you think, Friedberg. Instead of doing this carbon tax, which seems incredibly elegant, but we all know is impossible to get consensus across hundreds of governments and locales to negotiate this. It will never happen, at least not effectively and in real time. Wouldn't it be a much better technique to do what we do in venture, which is here are the biggest problems in the world, here are the, which in this case would be the biggest emitters, here are the best solutions, here are the teams working on the best solutions, let's give the teams working on the best solutions.

• 1:10:03Jason Calacanis?

  Money to work down that list, and if it happens to be, you know, ships coming from China, you know, with a bunch of containers on them, container ships, we, we measure that. And, you know, the, the thing I've learned after the first six months of investing in carbon, because we have a syndicate now at Molly Wood, who's working with me on this climate syndicate, we couldn't find a lot of great investments, you know, that made sense, that weren't, you know, asset heavy, but then we started to find, we found two great monitoring companies, and they're monitoring air pollution and they're monitoring ship pollution, and we made investments in both of those, and that seems to be where we're at, is we should be monitoring and figuring out where the carbon is, and then trying to solve it based on which ones are the easiest to solve.

• 1:10:46David Friedberg?

  Let me just say two things on that. Bill Gates has done a great job of this. You can read his latest book or go to Gates Notes, and he's done exactly what you described, which is break it all down, show what we should do, and that's actually how he's investing his own money. He's putting his money where his mouth is. So there's a really good blueprint for this. He's done the best job of anyone I've seen. The issue with the carbon tax is you have to come up with a consistent, reliable way of measuring the carbon, and then you have to do it consistently and broadly. How do you miss, you know, if you miss one factory or another, then you have to ratchet up the price over time. So first thing is the challenge of how do you agree on measuring? Second is how do you agree on broad accountability? Third thing is how do you ratchet the pricing over time? Fourth thing is how do you deal with the offshoring problem? As soon as you start taxing companies in the US for carbon emissions, all the production's going to go offshore where they're not taxing for carbon emissions, and there's no way

• 1:11:30David Friedberg?

  to account for what they're doing offshore, and this has been the challenge with China and media and so on.

• 1:11:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There is because it's part of your first problem.

• 1:11:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah, sorry, let me just hit the final one, we'll come back to it. But the final big one is just the equity and carbon tax. People have said that the ultimate increment in cost of production is going to adversely affect lower income people because they cannot afford the price of some stuff going up by 25 to 50%. And it's really, you know, a luxury good, a luxury kind of privilege to be able to pay for the incremental cost of stuff to account for the carbon offset needed. So that's the set of issues that have been pushed back against the carbon tax. And it's why it's been impossible to get implemented and to really get into market. Sorry, Chamath, go ahead.

• 1:12:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I was just going to say, part of the problem in all of those issues, if you offshore, is still that there's people pushing for what's called the scope three accounting, which is like, you know, you got to go back to your supplier and your supplier supplier and your supplier supplier supplier.

• 1:12:25David Friedberg?

  Where does it end?

• 1:12:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's impossible. Where does it end? It's not credible. So, you know, I think that the bill has actually cleaned up a lot of future question marks about what we have to do as a country to go about doing our part for climate change. And I think it probably creates a reasonable blueprint for everybody else. And now they're going to have to do some version of the same thing. And what's amazing is that if we actually pass this framework, which is still yet to be written, around how to make permitting more seamless and efficient for these hydrocarbon projects, it will really unleash a massive torrent of both revenues back to the United States. It'll increase our national security and it'll allow us to really kind of put a dent

• 1:13:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in this thing because it'll pull forward the amount of competition that it creates to actually get off those hydrocarbons, which is a...

• 1:13:18David Friedberg?

  I'll tell you, I got a notice from someone who's an investor. So there's a lot of climate tech funds now, a lot of funds. J Cal, you said you got a syndicate in carbon, but there's a lot of funds and a lot of investors that are putting a lot of capital just into early stage climate technologies, which travels everything from energy to materials to food, to industrial and manufacturing and so on. And I got a note from one of these companies, a startup, that highlighted that the dollar 25 per gallon credit, a tax credit for, you know, clean production of fuel.

• 1:13:54David Friedberg?

  Which has to demonstrate a 50% emissions reduction in the manufacturing process will now make this startup profitable. And by the way, you get an extra penny per gallon for every 1% reduction in emissions below that 50% threshold. And so there's a lot of startups that I'm hearing about that their unit economic models were questionable before, now because of this bill, they are flipping profitable. And so I personally think we are going to see a significant influx of venture capital and support for a lot of these climate tech and, you know, new energy, material and manufacturing projects that otherwise may have been held back because the subsidy will kickstart. The question for me that I still don't have a good answer to is are they sustainable?

• 1:14:36David Friedberg?

  Over the long run, if this bill gets shut down or repealed and the funding sources stop and the subsidies stop, do these businesses survive? Or are we simply creating regulatory capture models like we did with other energy products in the past and with food?

• 1:14:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you're not contribution margin positive today, free this bill in climate change, and the bill is the only way that you get there, you're DOA. You just don't know.

• 1:14:59David Friedberg?

  Great point, yep. Sax, the biggest line in this bill is the corporate minimum tax. I don't know if you saw this, but 15% minimum tax applied to the accounting profit reported by any company over a billion dollars. And they're estimating it'll generate 313 billion of incremental tax revenue over the next 10 years. Do you have a point of view on whether this corporate minimum tax is going to cause an issue with startups and companies going public or the valuation in the public markets? Or is this just, you know, hey, this should happen and it doesn't matter? I mean, I don't know if you spent much time on this.

• 1:15:31David Sacks?

  Well, no, I mean, I think the issue here is that why is it that these companies are able to pay so little taxes? Well, the reason is because there's a zillion loopholes and incentives and tax breaks in the existing code that they're taking advantage of. I mean, these large companies have lots of accountants and lawyers. They're not deliberately violating the law. They're scrupulously adhering to it and taking advantage of it. So it's all these tax breaks that they're able to use to pay no taxes. Well, what does this bill do? You talk about the spending. On climate, you know, the 386 billion, most of it is tax incentives and some block grants.

• 1:16:10David Sacks?

  So this is now the preferred form of, you know, quote unquote, spending in these bills are tax credits and incentives. This is the way they're going to change people's behavior. So in other words, the bill on the one hand is complaining that corporations don't pay enough taxes because there's too many tax breaks. While on the other hand, creating a whole slew of new tax breaks. So there's a little bit of a contradiction there. Again, why do all, why are companies paying no taxes because of the last 10 bills tax breaks that we're supposed to move the behavior of businesses, the consumers in a certain direction. So just recognize that that's the case. I think you also made a really good point about the phantom deficit reduction here.

• 1:16:51David Sacks?

  So like you mentioned, and we see this in lots of bills, all the excess spending, all the deficit spending occurs in the first five years and all the deficit reduction occurs in the last five years. Something always intervenes to prevent the, the savings from taking place.

• 1:17:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's like startup projections, right, Sax?

• 1:17:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's like we're

• 1:17:10Jason Calacanis?

  I lost my sales guy.

• 1:17:11David Sacks?

  We're cutting the budget next year, you know? And so just to give one example of this, so this ACA subsidy extension. So this is the Obamacare subsidies, about 60 something billion a year. They're extending it for three years, but they're assuming it's just going to die at that point as opposed to keep being extended. And no one's going to want to vote to make that go away in three years, just like they don't want to vote to make it go away now. So if you extend that subsidy three years from now, just that one item alone makes the deficit reduction of this bill go from 305 billion over the 10 year period to negative 155 billion. So just that one item, if you continue it and don't sunset it, just that one thing makes this

• 1:17:52David Sacks?

  a hugely deficit, not reducing bill, but deficit increasing bill. And so you wonder what problem is this bill really solving? And they can't seem to agree on that. I mean, first they're telling us it's a deficit reduction bill, then they're telling us it's a climate bill. Then they're telling us it's an inflation reduction bill. It seems to me that if they're really proud of this and believe in it, they would choose a name for the bill that actually reflected what it was.

• 1:18:15David Friedberg?

  Well, all bills would be named something for everyone, Sax. I mean, like, that's how all these bills get, in order to pass a bill, bipartisan bill, you gotta give something to everyone. I mean,

• 1:18:24David Sacks?

  But this is mostly, you know, this is mostly a climate related bill. You know, this is mostly, this is mostly tax breaks and block grants.

• 1:18:33David Friedberg?

  There's also, I mean, there's a huge tax issue with the IRS agents and the corporate minimum tax, but there's also a huge component on prescription drugs. Chamath, I don't know if you spent any time looking at this, but.

• 1:18:45David Sacks?

  Sorry, just on the IRS agent, can I kind of say, add one detail on that?

• 1:18:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48David Sacks?

  So the claim of the administration and the sponsors of the bill is that this would not increase taxes on anyone sort of middle class. And so the Republicans, I think this is one of the few politically smart things they did. They introduced an amendment basically prohibiting these new 87,000 IRS agents from conducting audits of anyone making less than $400,000 a year, which was what Biden said, you know, he wouldn't increase taxes on anyone below 400,000. That amendment was rejected on straight party lines. So this idea, yes, it's called the Crapo amendment. It was 50 50 and Vice President Harris had to come in and make the tie breaking vote. So obviously they know that there's going to be a lot of net new audits on people

• 1:19:30David Sacks?

  making less than $400,000. Yes, exactly. So the next.

• 1:19:34David Friedberg?

  My understanding of this is it's like small business owners, people who run a small business and a service business. And are they really accounting for their books correctly? Are they really expensing the right things, et cetera? Are they accounting for all their revenue?

• 1:19:45David Sacks?

  They're gonna get whammy. Yeah, they're gonna get whammy by this because look, let's face it billionaires are already getting audited. You know, Elon had a tweet saying, listen, I get audited as a matter of course every year. You know, these people already have.

• 1:19:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dude, I use a big four accounting firm.

• 1:20:01David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, the amount of overhead this creates is crazy. I have a partner, like Anderson, that is literally like, you know, covers, like it covers a Fortune 500 fucking company.

• 1:20:11David Friedberg?

  Might as well be in your office. Put them in your, your, uh, put them in your nanny unit.

• 1:20:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's tens of people. I mean, by the way, Sacks, Sacks is right. Like if you look at them, you know, the ultra wealthy. I think it would be, I would be shocked if any of those folks were actually evading taxes at all because it's impossible the way that this infrastructure runs like, you know, you're getting K1s from Blackstone. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna change that? Like, you know, like, do you guys even know the PIN number of your bank card? I have no idea. So like-

• 1:20:43David Friedberg?

  It's so complicated. Yeah.

• 1:20:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so, so my point is, I don't think that if there is, if there is cheating of taxes, it's happening at that level. What's happening at that level are much more structural issues like carried interest, which they decided not to touch.

• 1:20:57David Friedberg?

  Trust and estate law.

• 1:20:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Trust and estate law. Those are, those, no, I don't think that, that's my point. It's not mistakes. There's nobody with a pencil really filling out a K1 for Bill Gates, dummy. That's my point.

• 1:21:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know, but people can make mistakes. What if a K1 gets left off? That's what I'm saying is when they find something, it's usually easily found.

• 1:21:16David Friedberg?

  Doesn't happen. Doesn't happen.

• 1:21:17David Sacks?

  Jason, when I get my tax return, it's, it's done by an accounting firm and I just sign it. I don't, I don't-

• 1:21:22Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know that. What I'm talking about is what are the IRS people gonna find? Is, you know-

• 1:21:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll tell you what they're gonna find. They're gonna find a lot of, they're gonna find a lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class folks. And they're gonna have to focus on them because individually, it may not represent a lot. But when you multiply it by the number of people inside the United States, and this is what the Wall Street Journal and a bunch of other folks have been saying now. When you apply 87,000 people and task them incrementally with doing a job, it's not going to touch these folks that are already audited. It's going to touch the folks that are not audited. And by and large, a much, much larger majority of middle-income and upper-middle-income people are not audited.

• 1:22:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Which is why I think you could spend a lot less than $80 billion and just build software that guarantees only those that should be audited are.

• 1:22:14Jason Calacanis?

  And uses machines to help figure out these leaks? Or start simplifying the tax code, because when you add this 15% minimum, Friedberg, what is that going to do to the strategy of a public company? Okay, so we should show less earnings, put more to work. Oh, we're not going to be able to depreciate this, or, you know, whatever. I mean, it's going to create all these second and third order impact, impacts that we don't know.

• 1:22:34David Friedberg?

  Well, I think Sacks's point is important, which is one that we don't yet have insight into, which is what is this going to cannibalize? Because ultimately, if there is a minimum tax, it doesn't make sense to pursue incentives that create a tax break today. And therefore, those incentives won't be invested in. Whatever those incentives are, I don't know what they are, you know, low-income manufacturing zone development, or whatever, who knows, you know, what they are, you know, come and build your business here and get tax breaks, et cetera, et cetera. Local, state, and federal tax breaks. If those start to get written over, then there's going to be really adverse effects, and I think that that's something to watch. I don't understand it well enough, certainly I'm not an accountant, but I would be kind

• 1:23:18David Friedberg?

  of worried about and keeping an eye on that front. I do think the bigger question, which is a biotech one, the prescription drug price cap minimizes the profits that a number of pharmaceutical companies will be making. It gives authority to go and negotiate prices. This is the second largest line in the bill. And there was a survey done by healthaffairs.org on an R&D survey, which said, will you guys reduce your, your investment in new drug development? And I think that they, based on this bill, and I think that they came up with some estimate that there would be two, the number two, fewer drugs that would be kind of, you know,

• 1:24:03David Friedberg?

  made available per year because of reduced spending as a result of the price cap, which basically reduces revenue, which will, in essence, reduce R&D investment. You know, guys like Bernie Sanders will say, hey, that's not true. All that money's going to share buybacks and dividends and so on. But it is a fact that those share buybacks and those dividends will still continue, and if they are reduced, so will the R&D expense. And if the R&D expense is reduced, fewer drugs will come to market. And so, you know, there's also a question mark, and people will debate this for the next decade, which is how much will this prescription drug price cap actually have an effect on R and D investment and ultimately on new drugs that come to market?

• 1:24:46David Sacks?

  Can I say something?

• 1:24:47David Friedberg?

  Sorry, let me just say my personal opinion is I don't think that this will have a huge effect. I think this is an excellent part of the bill. I think that the government should have authority to go and negotiate. They're the largest buyer of these drugs. And typically, when the US government, the federal government, steps in to be the largest spender on a particular line, the cost of that line balloons, like we've seen in healthcare, like we've seen in education, and like we've seen in military and defense spending. And so I'm hopeful that this will actually provide a more effective market force in allowing the biggest customer in the market to negotiate prices. And that the VCs, instead of making 48% IRR, they'll ultimately make 28% IRR on the investments that they're making in biotech startups.

• 1:25:31David Sacks?

  Well, hold on. What exactly does it mean for the government to negotiate prices as opposed to the government just to fix prices? I mean, isn't this just price fixing?

• 1:25:41David Friedberg?

  Well, in this example... What do you think's the right answer if they're the largest, single largest customer, Saks, right? I mean, you know, and they are the market. I mean, what's the right thing to do?

• 1:25:52David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, you're saying that these drug companies are going to make a lot less money. Well, obviously, that's going to have a downstream impact in the willingness to fund new drugs and new investment, new R and D.

• 1:26:05David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05David Sacks?

  Now, no one likes pharma companies, so I'm not defending exorbitant profits or whatever. But I don't really know what it means for the government to say they're negotiating. I mean, the government just tells you what it's going to be. That's price fixing. And these companies are going to adjust. Yes, the government will pay less money in the near term. In the long term, there could be reduced investment in R and D.

• 1:26:26David Friedberg?

  I think there'll be a balance of, you know, do you

• 1:26:28Jason Calacanis?

  Don't all governments, Chamath, don't all governments, I know that you're close to some of these drug companies, don't all governments negotiate the purchase of these drugs? And then if they don't like the price, there are alternative drugs and they'll say, hey, listen, your drug is too expensive compared to these other two solutions. So we're going to buy this one primarily for our universal healthcare.

• 1:26:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's this interesting thing that happens, which is that there's a, there's these drugs that are proprietary and under patent. Okay. These could be chemical drugs or they could be biologics. Okay. And eventually what happens is when they go generic, then folks will step in and make lower cost versions of those generics. Like, you know, I mean, I'm on a statin. I think a couple of you guys are on a statin like I don't. It's, it's Lipitor, but it's not Lipitor, right? It's a Torvastatin. It's like some generic drug that I just take. Okay. As an example. And there's a lot of folks that make that and the cost of those pills basically go to zero. But there's a bunch of categories, particularly for biologic drugs where it's very different. It's very difficult to make a what's called a biosimilar.

• 1:27:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a generic drug. So long and short of it is there's all these classes of drugs that kind of like stand alone without enough competition. And I think there are two ways to solve this problem. One is where the government steps in, which I think is, is good. But the better way has already, is already been happening in the United States. So, you know, there's a nonprofit, which is a collective between a bunch of hospitals called Civicup. And I think that's a really interesting example. And what those guys do was they said, we're just going to create our own generic drug manufacturer. And we're going to make the drugs we want. We're just going to make them super cheap. And, you know, they're, they're in the midst right now of completing a massive facility.

• 1:28:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, I think it's in Virginia where they'll be able to make as much insulin as is needed for the entirety of America for no more than 35 bucks a dose.

• 1:28:22Jason Calacanis?

  That's gangster.

• 1:28:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's gangster. It's super gangster.

• 1:28:25Jason Calacanis?

  We'll make our own.

• 1:28:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And by the way, when California said they're going to make their own, what they really meant was that they're going to go and RFP it out. And my hope is that they end up going with somebody like Civica, who has the experience of actually building it. Otherwise it's just gonna, California is just gonna waste hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:28:43Jason Calacanis?

  Request for proposal, if you don't know what RFP is, request for proposal.

• 1:28:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. But there are these emerging.

• 1:28:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Nonprofits that are basically doing the work of the government. I think that's a better solution to what Saks is actually.

• 1:28:54Jason Calacanis?

  Competition, right?

• 1:28:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's kind of creates competition.

• 1:28:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, competition.

• 1:28:57David Friedberg?

  We gotta move along because I think.

• 1:28:59Jason Calacanis?

  You're doing a great job, Friedberg, right? Just one moderator to another. Exceptional job.

• 1:29:03David Friedberg?

  You know, I appreciate it. I think one of the interesting things sitting in your seat, J Cal, is you see everyone else's face and you see the boredom and the annoyance that people experienced during the pod.

• 1:29:13Jason Calacanis?

  Watch the eye rolls.

• 1:29:14David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:29:15Jason Calacanis?

  Leave for a drink.

• 1:29:16David Friedberg?

  I think Chamath is eating Funyuns. Saks is doing email.

• 1:29:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jerky. Jerky. I've been eating jerky all day. You shouldn't be jerky. Don't Tubin on the podcast, please.

• 1:29:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah, no. And I think that the.

• 1:29:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Don't what?

• 1:29:26David Friedberg?

  The challenge.

• 1:29:27Jason Calacanis?

  Don't do a Jeffrey Tubin on this podcast.

• 1:29:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is that?

• 1:29:31Jason Calacanis?

  Jeffrey Tubin was a CNN anchor who on Zoom accidentally was. No, he masturbated on a Zoom call with his.

• 1:29:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What the fuck does that have to do with beef jerking?

• 1:29:40Jason Calacanis?

  You said jerking and I just.

• 1:29:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I said I was eating jerky, dummy.

• 1:29:43Jason Calacanis?

  You said you were jerking something. That's all I heard. I'm sorry.

• 1:29:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, by the way, so I am no longer fighting with Phil Hellmuth. I, oh my God, guys.

• 1:29:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm still blocked.

• 1:29:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, so I was so mad at him. Okay, so, you know, I finish, I finish this transaction. I finished, I finished the fucking transaction to sell the Warriors. You know, this is a, this is a six month ordeal. Okay, I started in November, right? I'm starting to sell things. I decide I'm going to sell the Warriors. I sell it to a large private equity fund in November, December, and then we had to wait for them to close the second fund and then we sold the rest of it. And it closed in June or July. And then I put out this tweet, right? Like thanking everybody and thanking Hellmuth in the same line in which I, I'm like, I thanked Peter Thiel and I thanked Joe Lacob.

• 1:30:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Everybody is happy except for Hellmuth who calls me and is angry. And he's like, I, I, you know, he had this issue with how it was characterized, that how he had introduced me or something where he wanted credit for having done the deal.

• 1:30:44Jason Calacanis?

  In the first tweet of the tweet storm, he should have been higher up.

• 1:30:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or, you know, and I was like, well, Phil, what if it hadn't made me money? Would you have just made me whole? Like, what would you have done? Like, it's like you were like the architect of this thing. Anyways, I was so mad. I just said, I'm not talking to this dipshit anymore. I'm done with him. I'm done. I'm breaking up with him. And he would call me when I was in Europe and I would ignore and I would get this incredible enjoyment from just pressing.

• 1:31:06Jason Calacanis?

  To, to voicemail?

• 1:31:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He would send me text messages, ignore.

• 1:31:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then I, I mean, this is always happens this way. I did it once and Nat caught me. She's like, why did you ignore his phone call? And I said, I hate Phil. I'm done with hell. I told her the story. She got so fucking mad at me. And then I had to send this text. I'll just read you the text because I think it's just so fucking hilarious. I was going to ignore you for the rest of my life, based on your tantrum with me earlier this year. But Nat has convinced me to see where you are coming from in part. Anyways, we're good. Call me later. He called me one second later. I was waiting. He had your text window open. I can just picture Nat. Mi amor, he's your friend. Why do you gotta be? You're such a jerk. He's your friend. You have no friends. All of your friends are going away.

• 1:31:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Mi amor. Anyways, I'm back in the good with Muse.

• 1:31:59David Friedberg?

  Okay, well, you gotta play poker.

• 1:32:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We do need to get a poker game.

• 1:32:03David Friedberg?

  Before we wrap, Sax is gonna give us, instead of doing Science Corner, we're gonna do Mar-a-Lago Corner.

• 1:32:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tell us what it's like, Sax.

• 1:32:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, what is Mar-a-Lago like? You've had your membership now for 18 months?

• 1:32:14David Sacks?

  Never been there, never been there. But no, I wanted, I wanted to, I want to give a shout out to this article. Last week I took some heat because somehow I guess you're not allowed to question anymore the rectitude of the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, we're not allowed to question anymore. A lot of people feel that way. There was an article that came out in Real Clear Investigations just, I think, yesterday. And what it exposed is pretty amazing. The group, the unit within the FBI that conducted the raid on Mar-a-Lago is the same group that conducted the investigation into Trump back in 2016, that lied to the FISA court, that had its members, its leaders, Peter Struck, were fired for basically wrongdoing.

• 1:33:01David Sacks?

  Whose members are actually under investigation right now by the special counsel John Durham? And you've got people who are on probation right now. So this is the same unit that basically conducted the raid on Mar-a-Lago. So I think there's still more to come out about this, but it's just amazing to me, actually, that Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI, and Merrick Garland, the head of the DOJ, thought that this wouldn't create the appearance of a conflict of interest or impropriety, the fact that you've got the same unit that previously was disciplined for wrongdoing in an investigation of Trump is the one conducting the raid on Mar-a-Lago. So, pretty amazing.

• 1:33:39David Friedberg?

  Chai Cal, retort?

• 1:33:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sorry, what we're talking about?

• 1:33:42David Friedberg?

  Oh.

• 1:33:43Jason Calacanis?

  No, I, I'll tell you.

• 1:33:44David Friedberg?

  Chai Cal, so brutal.

• 1:33:46Jason Calacanis?

  No, I, I just want to make, I have a response.

• 1:33:48David Friedberg?

  I had a couple of child actors.

• 1:33:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look at these props.

• 1:33:51David Friedberg?

  They're on camera right now.

• 1:33:52Jason Calacanis?

  Look at these props, amazing.

• 1:33:53David Friedberg?

  Very cheap props. Good work. Nice props.

• 1:33:56Jason Calacanis?

  Beautiful. Sax, what you're seeing there, hold on Sax, before you get back to Trump, what you're seeing there is a family unit. This is when a family gets together and expresses love towards each other. But continue about Mar-a-Lago.

• 1:34:05David Sacks?

  No, Chai Cal. That's wonderful.

• 1:34:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's wonderful. You could take a picture of this and you could send it to your friends on Christmas.

• 1:34:12David Friedberg?

  All right, Jason, you, you are, you do not accept the Real Clear Investigation Report that maybe there is some long-term...

• 1:34:20Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. I'll, I have actually some feedback. It's nothing to do with Sax. I just think, a lot of times I get positioned as, sometimes when I'm moderating, I like to challenge Sax. Last week I chose to stay out of it. I let him go. And I think one of the reasons people didn't like your comments last week, Sax, was, other than, you know, J.R. Gruber being dead for 50 years, putting that aside and it being irrelevant, I think the reason people didn't like it was because I didn't come back at you and question some of the things you were saying. And so I think they felt it was an unbalanced discussion. They expect me to do that. But I don't want to be pinned as the adversary to Sax's positions in every case because I'm an independent, I'm a moderate, I voted Republican, I voted

• 1:35:01Jason Calacanis?

  Democrat my whole life, I've voted for both of those parties. But I do think that... What's happening here is, you know, Trump is under five different investigations. He's got a career of doing disgraceful, criminal, fraudulent things. And I feel very bad for GOP friends. I feel bad for Republicans because they have to carry water for him. And it's, they, they put themselves in this really difficult position of defending him. And, you know, we've talked on this podcast about January 6th. We talked about voter fraud. My good friend, one of my besties, David Sacks, said he doesn't believe that the election was, there was election fraud and he doesn't, he, he thought January 6th was disgusting. I'm not speaking for you. That's what you said. And so I think, you know, the fact that the Republicans feel the need to defend him

• 1:35:46Jason Calacanis?

  constantly is one of the big problems here. And I think on the other side, the fact that the media is forcing Republicans to defend him and creating this narrative and this hysterics like, oh my God, see espionage, espionage act, he's doing espionage. This might be very simple. Trump lied, cheated, stole his whole career from Trump University to what's happening with, you know, the Trump Corporation now with his CFO and his nonprofit. This is, his life is a history of grifts and crimes and unethical behavior. What the GOP needs to do is stop defending him and just let him go off into the sunset, as Sacks pointed out last week. And that's what this podcast needs to do. Because there's no reason for me to sit here and do the left wing talking points or for,

• 1:36:29Jason Calacanis?

  you know, Sacks to do the right wing talking points. The fact is, first principles, Trump's a grifter. He's a Democrat. That's the GOP. That's it.

• 1:36:39David Sacks?

  My point is not to defend every shady deal that Trump's ever done, or even to defend Trump at all. My interest is having a DOJ and FBI that's not politicized and is not used as a political weapon or to pursue political targeting or vendettas. And the reality is, at some point, we're going to move past Trump as a country. But the precedents that are created now are going to stick with us for a long time. And the reality is, we should not have an FBI and a unit within the FBI that is pursuing these political vendettas. And in this article by Real Clear Politics, the amazing thing, yeah, the amazing thing is Christopher Wray prohibited this unit. From seeking warrants from the FISA court. So he knew there was enough misbehavior last time to basically prohibit them.

• 1:37:24David Sacks?

  But it seems to me that's a very narrow takeaway. It seems to me that the takeaway should be, we don't allow this unit to pursue Trump again because they committed so much wrongdoing.

• 1:37:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it would be cleaner to have a clean unit, right?

• 1:37:35David Sacks?

  Why wouldn't they do that?

• 1:37:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, makes sense. If that's, if it's true, because that is from a biased source, and if it is true, then it would be good.

• 1:37:41David Sacks?

  I mean, Real Clear Politics is kind of like a Politico.

• 1:37:43David Friedberg?

  Look, guys, this has been a lot of fun. Jay Cal, thank you for letting me sit in your seat today.

• 1:37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you did great.

• 1:37:48David Friedberg?

  You know, I appreciate that. It was, it was a lot of fun. Maybe Sacks would like to have a run in the seat at some point here.

• 1:37:53Jason Calacanis?

  He doesn't.

• 1:37:55David Friedberg?

  But for your, as your guest moderator for today, I'm David Friedberg, and this is Your All in Pop. Thank you. Bye bye.