Pod Insights All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Inflated GDP?, Google earnings, How the media lost trust, Rogan/Trump search controversy, Election! About this episode (0:00) Bestie intros!
(5:40) US Real GDP growth comes in at 2.8%, but there are underlying issues
(29:16) Google earnings: YouTube and Cloud post huge quarters, would they have survived outside of Google?
(36:24) Sacks's idea to auction off public spectrum licenses of major broadcast networks
(42:17) How the media became one of the least trusted institutions in the US
(54:26) Why Joe Rogan's interview with Trump was not appearing in YouTube search results
(1:08:54) Final pre-election segment: how it's tracking, election integrity, voter fraud stats
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Referenced in the show:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10
https://x.com/freesites_com/status/1851615700869144908
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/30/dropbox-slashes-20percent-of-global-workforce-eliminating-500-roles.html
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S
https://www.commercebank.com/about-us/prime-rate-update
https://www.fdic.gov/system/files/2024-05/unrealized-gains-losses-on-investment-securities.png
https://abc.xyz/assets/71/a5/78197a7540c987f13d247728a371/2024q3-alphabet-earnings-release.pdf
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/29/google-cfo-says-company-can-push-a-little-further-in-cost-savings.html
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/youtube-q3-2024-advertising-revenue-growth-1236193926
https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1818467743479542130
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-record-low.aspx
https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/24/americans-trust-in-media-plummets-to-historic-low-poll
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust
https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1850277560816681255
https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1850979360037356001/photo/1
https://x.com/davidsacks/status/1844429818554876026
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1851745648313602189
Transcript 16,771 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Jason Calacanis? We had dinner last week and Sax and I got bombed last week. We had dinner and we drank a quadruple Casa.
0:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? I've not seen J Cal drink like that before. I stopped in for a few minutes.
0:13 Jason Calacanis? I was so drunk. I mean Casa Azul.
0:16 Chamath Palihapitiya? He tore my house apart getting back in.
0:19 Jason Calacanis? Oh my God, like a bear, like a bear. I went Brooklyn South.
0:22 Chamath Palihapitiya? He was like a bear. He was like a drunk bear.
0:24 Jason Calacanis? But I, I spoke to the lady of the manor and I will be staying at Sax's house next time. So I will be able to refresh the ranch's soap and towels. Yeah, I'm staying at your place. I need, you know what? I forgot to get towels when I was at Chamath. He's got this amazing embroidered towel. So I'll just hit those up when I hit your place.
0:43 David Sacks? It's really funny to go to J Cal Ranch and there's gonna be a big S on his towels. You're like, wait, why, why is there an S on?
0:49 Jason Calacanis? I got the robe that says DS on it. I've got a robe on the back. It says MAGA.
0:57 Jason Calacanis? I took all the MAGA robes from.
0:58 Chamath Palihapitiya? What is, what does the S stand for? It's grifter.
1:04 Jason Calacanis? Oh, it's so funny.
1:05 David Sacks? Steels.
1:08 Chamath Palihapitiya? He's got a bunch of towels that say C as well. Cheap.
1:30 Jason Calacanis? All right, listen. Happy Halloween to everybody and we've got a great docket for you today. But I just upfront, wanted to let people know that we will be having the All In Holiday Spectacular on December 7th at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It's gonna be amazing. Allin.com/events. And next Tuesday, that's right, November 5th. If you go to our YouTube at 7:00 PM Pacific Time, 10:00 PM Eastern Time, we're going to do an election night livestream for the fans. We're almost at 700,000 subscribers. So subscribe to comment and join us on our livestream on Tuesday night.
2:11 Chamath Palihapitiya? There'll be guests, right?
2:12 Jason Calacanis? There's gonna be some fun guests. I think Hellmuth is still banned by Chamath for life, but I may bring him on and let him give him a second chance, Chamath. Is that okay? I bring him on for a second chance?
2:23 Chamath Palihapitiya? Sure.
2:24 Jason Calacanis? Okay, so we're gonna give Helmuth a second chance, but we'll see, he's gonna be on a very tight leash. If he makes it about himself in seven seconds or less, seven seconds to Phil Helmuth, he's gonna get kicked right off the show.
2:37 David Friedberg? Okay, holiday party. Did we announce that?
2:39 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, so the holiday party, go to allin.com/events if you want to come. It's gonna be great.
2:45 David Friedberg? You guys aren't gonna be happy, but we are setting, uh, we are gonna spend a million dollars on this party.
2:50 Jason Calacanis? How do you spend a million dollars on a party? Dude, did you see the set he built last time?
2:56 Chamath Palihapitiya? That sounds like a lot of founder.
2:58 Jason Calacanis? That's a lot of, yeah, about 300,000 in founder mode.
3:02 David Friedberg? Probably lose money on the party, but it's gonna be, it's not meant to be, call it a profit center, but it's just gonna be super fun.
3:08 Jason Calacanis? You cannot put a price on a good time. And you know, if you're gonna get that premium founder mode.
3:14 Chamath Palihapitiya? Did you always want to be a party promoter when you were like in high school and in college?
3:18 David Friedberg? When I was in college, I had a DJ setup. I had like synthesizer setup, which I plugged in and I did live electronic music with my DJ setup.
3:26 Jason Calacanis? I'm gonna drop the beat, Chamath.
3:31 Jason Calacanis? I'm gonna drop the beat. Here it comes. A couple of my startups now are doing something interesting. Athena bought like a pack of tickets and they're doing like a holiday party there with their top.
3:43 David Friedberg? For our event.
3:44 Jason Calacanis? For our event. They basically bought a bundle of VIP tickets and they're giving them to the top customers and their top employees to come.
3:50 David Friedberg? That's cool.
3:50 Jason Calacanis? And make it like their holiday party in San Francisco with our customers. So that's kind of neat, smart move by them. And so if you have a startup and you want to bring your startup, you can buy a pack of tickets, as it were.
4:01 Chamath Palihapitiya? That's actually a really good idea. A bunch of these small startups should just co-opt our holiday party as your holiday.
4:07 Jason Calacanis? Precisely. Yeah, just buy 10 tickets and come.
4:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? If we were just gonna go blow a million bucks, you might as well co-opt it.
4:14 David Friedberg? I'm hopeful today we're gonna sign this DJ, um, which is everyone, everyone knows the DJ and it is gonna be pretty sick if we can get him.
4:20 Jason Calacanis? Degenerate gambler. We know him. We play poker with him. Whatever we pay him, he's gonna lose twice as much at the poker game. Let's just, let's call it what it is.
4:30 David Friedberg? Sax, can you host poker at your house after the party?
4:33 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
4:35 David Sacks? No.
4:38 Jason Calacanis? What a team player.
4:42 David Friedberg? He built an entire poker building and he's used it like seven times. He's like, David Sacks is just the absolute best.
4:50 Jason Calacanis? All right, let's get to work. You know what's winning as well is the US GDP. Here we go. It grew slightly slower than expected, but the top line numbers are healthy. Looks like the soft landing might be baked in. We'll see. On Wednesday, the Department of Commerce reported that real GDP grew 2.8% in Q3. That means it's adjusted for inflation and you know, you can't look at these things in a vacuum. You have to look at the other Western countries and their GDP. Japan, 0.7, Australia, 0.2, Germany, 0.2, Canada, 0.5. The world is not growing. US is growing briskly and in terms of how to think about it, 2 to 3% is sort of the sweet spot for mature economies.
5:34 Jason Calacanis? Above 3% positive, but can also signal overheating like we experienced during ZIRP in 2021. Under 2%, yeah, stagnation. US GDP was 30 basis points below the Dow Jones consensus forecast of 3.1%. There's your chart if you missed it. And obviously inflation, we talked about this last week, is at 2.4%. Very close to the 2% target. Unemployment, 4.1%, close to historic lows. 10-year Treasury, 4.3% and obviously stock market at its all-time high again. There's your S and P, Dow and NASDAQ. As we've talked about over and over again, Shama, the federal debt is the issue, 35 trillion in debt.
6:18 Jason Calacanis? We have a trillion in annual interest payments on that debt. And Friedberg, New York Pet Peep, 23.5 million directly and millions more indirectly. As we know, federal government employees now at 3 million. It's about 1% of the country. And state government employees, 5.5 million. Local governments, 15 million. Put it all together and we got almost 25 million people working for our government. What do you think the prescription here is, Friedberg, as we come up on Election Day and we look towards next year? Do you believe we can cut this crazy spending? What do you think's going to happen to the economy? Will it overheat?
6:59 Jason Calacanis? Soft landing? You're running a company now, so you have to think about this, obviously.
7:05 David Friedberg? Oh, well, I'll separate running a company because I think that's got to be treated independently from macro. You can't build your business around macro. But 10-year treasuries are sitting at just around 4.3%. I think what the market is telling us, and remember, that's off of a low, right when the rate cuts were happening, if you'll remember in mid-September, we got down to just around 3.5%. The market is telling us that with the sort of economic growth we're seeing, low unemployment, and, you know, call it modest inflation, this is not the time to be cutting rates. And the market is saying, we are expecting higher rates for longer. So I do think that that's one big kind of turnaround that's happened in the last 90 days, which is really, I think, a big surprise to a lot of folks, is just
7:49 David Friedberg? how robust things are relative to where folks thought that they were about 90 days ago, urging, pleading, and supposedly needing a big rate cut to get the economy moving again. But I think at the end of the day, everyone's looking to the election as kind of the next big moment in the economy. Both Trump and Kamala have made fiscal proposals that would be deeply expensive if you assume the, you know, these budgeting groups that go out and take their policy proposals and try and build a model against them, that they're both going to add trillions of dollars to the debt, they're going to increase deficit spending, et cetera. But the reality is that neither of them are actually going to end up theoretically being able to execute all those policies, and there will likely be some degree of difference.
8:34 David Friedberg? So where do we end up on spending?
8:36 Jason Calacanis? A lot of talk about DOGE, the Department of Government, what is the last word? Efficiency. Efficiency, that Elon might be collaborating on. What do you think the chances are? He said there could be 2 trillion in savings that could occur. What are the chances that any meaningful cuts happen and we reverse the trend in if Trump, say, he wins and he creates that position?
9:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think the first question that'll inform how dramatic the cuts are is whether we organize ourselves around an accurate sense of where the actual economy is.
9:17 Chamath Palihapitiya? If you look at the print today, it would actually tell you that things are pretty okay. And that we are not sort of near an unsustainable turning point. However, and Nick, if you want to just throw up this chart. If you back out the percentage of government consumption that is included in GDP, you start to see a very different picture, which is that over the last two and a half years, all of the economic gains under the Biden administration have largely been through government consumption. What that means is that private industry
10:02 Chamath Palihapitiya? has been standing on the sidelines somewhat. And that actually maps to a lot of this intuition that I've had over the last few months when I've said, I think we're in a low key recession. Because what I could never figure out is why I would look at the earnings transcripts of a bunch of companies who would constantly talk about softening demand. And by the way, this is across the board. It wasn't just CPG companies, but Dropbox as an example. Same sort of thing. They just laid off 20% of their staff and the memo was about weakening demand. So this is a broad based softening as far as companies experience the economy. But the high level number is positive, which would make you think that everything is fine.
10:47 Chamath Palihapitiya? But when you look at that chart and you back out the percentage of the positive news that the government is responsible for, what it means is the economy is flat. And the economy isn't growing, which means that roughly there are a bunch of folks that are seeing contraction. So
11:05 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think that if you normalize on that view of the world, I think the cuts that Elon will affect will be meaningful and necessary.
11:18 Jason Calacanis? If you pull up this chart, Nick, of the federal net outlays as a percentage of GDP.
11:24 Chamath Palihapitiya? I mean, you're basically at a, you're at a flat, stalling economy.
11:29 Jason Calacanis? Well, if you look at this, you know, we, we basically have had high teens during our lifetime Clinton era, seventies and eighties, and then it's gone up into the twenties now. So that is definitely something, the amount of spending we're doing.
11:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? Sorry, just to, again, this is where you can get a little confused by data. Jason, this is net outlays.
11:50 Jason Calacanis? Yep.
11:50 Chamath Palihapitiya? And that's different from total gross government spending, which also includes QE. So if you go back to the other chart, why is this one going down and the other one represents 85% of GDP? It's because that one is a more accurate sense of what the government is doing across all of its tentacles in the United States economy. It includes the money printer going brrr, which the net outlays chart doesn't include. So just to be clear about what's happening, 85% of this quarter's GDP was induced by the government. If you sub, if you sub it out, so take 2.8% and multiply it by 0.15, that is the true growth x the United States government that exists in the United States economy today.
12:33 Jason Calacanis? Sax, your thoughts here on the GDP, obviously, looks pretty good for Biden Harris to have all these stats going in their favor, but there is the caveat, obviously, about the government spending in there.
12:47 David Sacks? Yeah. No, I think that's right. I mean, I, I think that for Harris in this election, it's probably a little too late for this GDP report to be helpful. If you go back all the way to 1992, where the whole election hinged on the economy, remember that was Bill Clinton running against George H. W. Bush and Clinton's message was, it's the economy's stupid.
13:10 Jason Calacanis? Yep.
13:11 David Sacks? And.
13:11 Jason Calacanis? Carville, right, came up with that.
13:13 David Sacks? Carville came up with it and, and Clinton beat Bush because we had a recession in, I think, 91. But by 92, it was over already. And in the final week of the campaign. Bush tried to tout a similarly positive GDP report that showed 2.7% growth. That report would later be revised up to 3.9% growth. So the recession was definitely over and the economy is growing again. And nonetheless, Bush lost because voters' impressions of the economy had already formed and solidified by the final week of the campaign. So I think it's probably too late here for the GDP numbers to have a big impact on the election.
13:57 David Sacks? I think the other thing is that voters' impression of this economy isn't based so much on the GDP numbers. It's really based on their perception of inflation over the last four years. And there's no question that the cost of living has increased a lot over the last four years and voters are really feeling that. And that, I think, is playing into their perceptions of the economy. And I don't think that Harris has a great answer for that. So I think the bottom line here is I don't think this report's going to have a big impact on the election. In terms of where the economy is going, the thing that I would come back to is interest rates. And this is the thing that Friedberg was talking about, which is even though the Fed has cut
14:42 David Sacks? rates by 50 basis points, the long-term rates, the 10-year Treasury, has not gone down. In fact, it's gone up slightly. You know, it's gone up to, call it 4.3%. And so we have this real issue where as the Fed is cutting short rates, long rates are not going down. And I think that is because of the government deficit and the government debt and the fact that there's so much debt that needs to be serviced by the bond market.
15:09 David Friedberg? And the market for Treasuries.
15:10 David Sacks? Right.
15:11 David Friedberg? The buyers are all leaving the market for Treasuries. The Chinese, we talked about this last week, have been selling down their Treasury position. There just aren't buyers anymore, which is...
15:20 David Sacks? Right. And I think this could ultimately have a very detrimental effect on the economy. You already saw that. I think this hasn't been widely reported, but I think it should be a major piece of news, which is the prime rate hit 8% today. So now it had a seven handle on it before and now it has an eight handle on it. Well, this matters a lot if you want to buy a house and get a mortgage. It's much more expensive. Then you got to think about all the people who already have debt.
15:50 Chamath Palihapitiya? Doesn't this look recessionary?
15:53 David Sacks? Totally, because a few years ago, you could get a home loan at a three to 4% interest rate, you know, and amortize that. Now, your debt service cost can be twice as high. So you just can't buy as much house.
16:08 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's a very bad place if the economy's in the toilet, but we can't even talk about it because there is no structural way to get an accurate read because the government just perverts the effect it has in the economy. Like, you can't have, yeah, distortion, fine. You cannot have a nonprofit entity representing the plurality of the economic activity of a country and expect the capital markets to function properly. At some point, the capital markets will basically throw their hands up in the air and puke it all out and say no. And I think that you're starting to see a little bit of these fissures. So I think we're going to have to clean up our balance sheet pretty aggressively here.
16:51 David Friedberg? Yeah, and if you look at the importance of that rate, that rate drives the value of bonds. As the current market rate for treasuries or for the prime rate climbs, the value of an existing bond that pays interest at a lower rate goes down because you have to pay a lower basis in order to get back to the new high rate that the market is telling you. So there are several trillion dollars, and we can pull up the graph here, Nick, of loans and bonds that are sitting on the balance sheets of many commercial banks in the United States that are now so significantly underwater, where the value is now below the book that they paid for those loans
17:33 David Friedberg? or that they issued them at, that those banks now have unrealized losses. And I think that this number is one of the other kind of facts. You see a few articles come out here and there about this. But the number, as the rates go up, the number of unrealized losses, the dollar value of unrealized losses at banks' balance sheets in the United States has climbed so considerably that it represents a real crisis. In fact, the unrealized losses on banks' balance sheets today is higher than it was in 2008.
17:59 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's trillions. It's trillions. Buffett warned B of A.
18:03 David Friedberg? And he's been selling off, he sold off, right?
18:05 Chamath Palihapitiya? Well, he warned B of A publicly, although a bit obliquely last year during his annual conference. And it was very clear, it's like, listen, this is an opportunity for folks to just mark to market these securities properly and or sell them and get them off the books. I don't think B of A acted quickly enough. And so what did Buffett do? He just basically started dumping. And he's almost completely out of B of A, B of A, if not completely out altogether. So there's a lot of talk.
18:37 David Friedberg? A crisis is brewing.
18:38 Chamath Palihapitiya? There's a lot of talk in FinFit, if you go into sort of like the, the deep, far reaching bowels of of the, of the fintech community on X, that there is a huge credit crisis looming amongst some of these large
18:52 Chamath Palihapitiya? charter holding banks because of this exact issue.
18:54 Jason Calacanis? And the relation between the Fed and the prime is typically 3%. So the Fed cuts rates and then the banks put 3% on top of it when they give people creditworthy people mortgages and credit cards. So as the Fed cuts, this should come down. But if it went up, what explains that? I'm curious if anybody knows.
19:15 David Sacks? Well, the Fed sets short rates. It sets the, the Fed funds rate, which is the, the rate of overnight lending between banks. But it does not set the 10 year treasury, for example, the long term.
19:27 David Friedberg? The market sets that.
19:28 Jason Calacanis? The market sets that.
19:29 David Sacks? And the market now requires a higher rate of interest in order to accept, you know, the risk of investing in those bonds, or it's not really, since it's a US Treasury, it's not really risk. It's more about the time value of money. And their expectations of inflation, how much that money is going to be worth in the future. So I think what we're seeing is that the Fed can cut short term rates, but it hasn't had the impact on long term rates that everyone was expecting. I think everyone was expecting that we had this sort of burst in inflation, the famous 9% inflation rate. I think people were expecting that that would work its way through the system and that we'd get long term rates back to where they were, but that's not happening.
20:11 David Sacks? And it's not happening for the reason we're saying, which is there's just too much debt out there. So now think about the impact on the real economy. Let's say that you're a home buyer and you got like a five year interest only ARM type.
20:26 David Sacks? Mortgage for your house.
20:27 David Friedberg? Tik Tok.
20:28 David Sacks? Yeah. So now, you know, you probably got that in the three to 4% range. If you have to refinance it this year at 8%, your monthly payment's gonna double. That has a real impact on people's wealth and on their spending power. Maybe they can't even support a payment like that. Now, go over to the commercial side and it's, it's very similar. There's a lot of commercial real estate out there, you know, buildings and so on, where they've got debt on it. You can't get 30-year mortgages in commercial. The typical commercial loan is five to seven years. Okay. We're now coming up, I think in the next few years, on a lot of that, that debt will need to roll. It'll need to be refinanced.
21:11 David Sacks? If it gets refinanced at twice the interest cost roughly, a lot of those buildings may be underwater. I mean, they may not be, you know,
21:20 David Friedberg? There's no equity value.
21:22 David Sacks? There may be no equity value. And a lot of people know this now, but they don't really have to mark those positions to market. If they did, their equity was zero, but they're kind of all on borrowed time right now, hoping that rates will go back down. And what we're seeing is that the long rates are not going back down. It's a pretty scary proposition. And then, of course, you know, a lot of the, the debt on those buildings, it's all owned by the commercial banks that you're talking about, the regional banks. So they're sitting on a lot of bad debt that they haven't had to mark to market, and they're just kind of hoping that this problem will get sorted out before, you know, before there's a default.
21:59 David Friedberg? And by the way, as these numbers climb, the cost to borrow for the federal government climbs. So the new bonds, we have to reissue a good percent, I think nearly $10 trillion, I think of our debt, has to be reissued in the next year. That's gonna get reissued now at this higher rate. And that higher rate means that the annual expense just to pay the interest on the existing debt is now climbing at a faster rate. And that means you've got to issue more debt to pay for your interest on your current debt. It's quite paradoxical that the Fed sets that rate, right? Well, this this becomes the compounding problem when your debt to GDP reaches a certain level and you don't reduce federal spending fast enough, it becomes a compounding problem you cannot get away from.
22:41 David Friedberg? And this has been the beginning of the cataclysmic economic collapse of every great empire in the last 500 years. I know I've said this, you guys can joke about it all day long, but this is how it starts, is it starts at a point where you're arithmetically not able to get out of your debt spiral. And the markets are telling us that if the US doesn't take drastic action in reducing its spending and reducing the deficit levels so that we can actually address the payment obligations on the outstanding debt that we've already issued, the US dollar is going to have a real problem and the creditworthiness of the United States is challenged. That's what the market says, but I know that there's other issues with the fact that there's no other better place to put money today and there's not a lot of other, you know, great economies out there and so on and so forth, but the stability of the United States,
23:23 David Friedberg? the hegemony of the United States and the dollar is challenged in part by the fact that you've got this BRICS organization out there now that has greater GDP in aggregate than the US. And so there may be an alternative that emerges in the next couple of years and maybe everyone's kind of putting their assets away in gold and Bitcoin and other stuff while they're waiting for the transition to find another place to buy. We'll see. All right.
23:45 David Sacks? But what it implies if if rates have roughly doubled, let's say, in the last few years and they're going to stay at that level, they're not going back down, it implies there's going to be a big deleveraging, right? Because, you know, you can't support those interest payments. I mean, let's say that you own a building, right? And now all of a sudden...
24:05 David Friedberg? Well, in fact, it's actually deleveraging or inflation, because the alternative is the Fed monetizes the debt, they start buying all the bonds, which means you're pumping more US dollars into the market, and that means that the cost of everything goes through the roof. So you have this effect of economic inflation, which is the way that you inflate away the debt problem. Assuming people still want to use your currency.
24:26 David Sacks? Yeah, well, I mean, that's at the government level. I mean, I was talking about the private sector. I mean, just think about it at the level of like an individual building. Got a loan on it. Now you need to refinance the loan. Interest rates are twice as high. That, let's say that that doesn't, the building no longer produces operating income at that level of debt. So you have to pay down some of your debt. It's called an equity in refinancing where you're not pulling money out, you're putting money in. You have to deleverage in order to make your sort of income statement work, right? It's just too much debt at that new level of interest rates. So if rates stay high, there's no choice but for many people to delever. Whether it's on the commercial side or the, or on the consumer side. You just can't afford as much debt, right, at that higher interest rate.
25:11 David Sacks? So think about the impact that has on the economy when everyone has to delever. That's a very negative effect. And then, of course, you, like you're saying, at the government level, you have to figure out what to do about that because our interest payments on the debt are already what? Twenty to twenty-five percent of federal revenue?
25:29 David Friedberg? Yeah, it's about trillion fives.
25:30 Jason Calacanis? Trillion, yeah.
25:31 David Friedberg? It's about twenty-five percent.
25:33 David Sacks? So you already see it there where there's less money to spend on current programs because you're paying for interest on the debt. So what do you do about that? So I, I think that the next president's going to face a pretty wicked set of problems and trade-offs here, even though the GDP numbers are fine, they're good. I still think there's like a wicked set of problems related to government debt and interest rates.
25:55 David Friedberg? Yeah.
25:56 David Sacks? And there's no way to really skin this cat without some, some pain.
25:59 David Friedberg? There, yeah, there, there, I, I think the only path is you have to cut spending, which is recessionary, government spending, which is recessionary. So you're going to trigger an economic recession. You're going to have to have some amount of inflation and you're going to have to have a spike in unemployment. And if you don't do the first two things, you're going to have a lot more inflation, which is really hard to get out of. So.
26:19 David Sacks? Well, I, I agree, I agree that we have to cut.
26:21 David Friedberg? There doesn't seem to be a win, a win-win scenario here. There's no, there's no, yeah.
26:24 David Sacks? I agree, we have to cut government spending. I don't, I personally don't think it's recessionary. I think it helps the private sector when government gets cut.
26:30 David Friedberg? Right.
26:30 David Sacks? Uh, however.
26:32 Jason Calacanis? Because, Sacks, that means the private sector gets to service that function.
26:37 David Sacks? The government won't be consuming all these resources that the private sector could use better. It also won't have as many government bureaucrats. Acting as brake pedals on the private sector. So I tend to think that the government, the, the real economy will perform better with a smaller government. However, I, I think the reason why it won't happen is because it's politically difficult. It's extremely difficult to cut spending politically, right?
27:01 Jason Calacanis? Right. Well, I mean, as we saw this cycle, every single proposal seemed to be a payoff to different constituencies. It was like
27:10 David Sacks? Right. Those line items got in the budget somehow, right? Somebody, somebody fought for every single line item in the budget, some special interest, and they're going to fight like hell to keep their appropriation.
27:21 David Friedberg? It's not even special interest. It's the representatives in Congress doing their job, which is to fight for their constituents, getting their fair share or their fair shake at the money that's being spent. And that's just the way that the legislative branch has evolved over time. If someone's getting something in order for me to vote for it, I want to get something too. And so the whole thing over time becomes functionally inflationary.
27:44 David Sacks? Right. I think that whole shell game might just be over now because there's no more money left. I mean, it's all been spent. In fact, you know what I mean? So like all the federal government probably will end up doing in the near future is entitlements and defense. That's it. Because those are the core, core functions of the federal government. I think everything else that's, that's sort of quote unquote discretionary is probably going to get cut because there's no more money left.
28:11 Jason Calacanis? Tragedy of the commons, folks. Everybody acting in their self-interest and yeah, not a lot of coordination or ability to win office if you actually do what's in everybody's collective best interest and take the medicine. Moving on through the docket, tech earnings this week, Google had a great quarter. Let's go over that a bit here, your alma mater, Friedberg. They beat top line and bottom line, stock popped 5%. Looks like cloud and YouTube are the story here. Total revenue, let this sink in, 88.3 billion, up 15% year over year. Search was 49 billion of that. And their operating income is now up 34% year over
28:55 Jason Calacanis? year. I think the CFO is getting some work done there, 28.5 billion. And net income was 26.3 billion. Interestingly, people are expecting even larger profits. They got a new CFO over there who said they could push a little further on cost cutting. And she said the company will use AI to cut costs by streamlining workflows and managing headcount, physical footprint. I think that means more layoffs are coming to big tech. YouTube had a tremendous quarter. Ad revenue, 8.9 billion, Chamath, that's up 12%. But Sundar said something interesting. He said YouTube surpassed 50 billion in total revenue over the past year.
29:35 Jason Calacanis? And so if you do a little Bote math, that's the back of the envelope math for those of you at home. We haven't heard that acronym. Google doesn't report YouTube's non-ad revenue, but we know YouTube had 35 billion in ad revenue over the last year. That means they're doing about 15 billion in premium paid products. YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket, YouTube Premium, which is the greatest product ever. It takes ads out of YouTube and makes it usable. So 70 30 split. Cloud had a blowout quarter. Google Cloud, I see that all the time now. 11.4 billion in revenue on 35% annual growth with 1.9 billion in operating profit. I mean, it's printing money.
30:20 Chamath Palihapitiya? There are seven quasi-monopolies in the world. They're all American and if we allow them to flourish, we'll be good. If we hamper them a little bit and allow other companies to pick up the white space, we'll be great. Over to you.
30:39 Jason Calacanis? Okay, there's your, that's called analysis.
30:42 Chamath Palihapitiya? And what if we break them up?
30:44 Jason Calacanis? And if we break them up?
30:46 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think that you'll have a lot more, the sum is greater than the parts.
30:50 Jason Calacanis? I mean, clearly YouTube would be one of the great companies right now.
30:54 Chamath Palihapitiya? If you take the perspective of, if you own stock in any of these companies.
31:02 Chamath Palihapitiya? The, some of the parts analysis would tell you that the breakup value is greater than the way that these companies get discounted. You can look at the multiples that they trade at and you can see that. So if you're a shareholder of the company, you actually silently probably want them broken up because you'll get individual shares that are each will be worth more. Separately, if you are a shareholder of the United States economy, you also probably want them broken up because then you'll just have many more companies creating economic value, which then drives the tax rolls, which benefit the United States balance sheet. It's hard to see unless you're an employee of the company or you derive a lot of ego
31:45 Chamath Palihapitiya? from the existence of a company, the way it is, that you would need it to stay where, how it is.
31:50 David Friedberg? Well, let me challenge your point on two fronts. In Google's case, both YouTube and GCP required many, many, many, many billions of dollars of investment over many years. Same with Waymo, by the way, at this point, that took a long time and a lot of capital to get the payback on. If those were standalone businesses and they didn't have the profits being derived from search and ads over many years, they would not have been able to build those incredible businesses. So if you do break these businesses up, what you do lose is the ability for an American juggernaut to be able, just like Amazon did with AWS and Apple did, and we can go through the list, to build these new businesses that require
32:32 David Friedberg? the cash flows from the old businesses. As separate companies, it becomes much harder to make that degree of an investment.
32:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? That, that angle, that angle of belly aching is not going to pass muster because it's all about litigating the past. And you got to play the ball where it lies. Where it lies is this business is in a position where you can probably demarcate four or five logical business units. Again, I'm not saying that it should happen, but it will happen. And, and the, the argument of, but the past is not going to work.
33:00 David Friedberg? No, no, I'm not, yeah, I'm not disagreeing with your point about like, hey, if these things broke up, people would make money. I'm just, I'm just trying to understand this point about American dynamism, or whatever you want to call it, that these companies... They're all in America. They've all been successful because they've been led by amazing founders. They've reinvested so much of the profit they've generated back into building insane new businesses. That took a lot of capital and a lot of time, and eventually they paid off. And they became the next generation of ginormous new businesses that would have not have possibly existed. If not for the will and the cash flows coming from those old businesses.
33:33 Chamath Palihapitiya? But you also have a companion economy in the capital markets where there's hundreds of billions of dollars that go and fill in the gaps. And I think the reality is the people in the capital markets are not stupid. And if these big companies hadn't spent hundreds of billions of dollars, the capital markets would have. So I don't think that that.
33:50 David Friedberg? If Google, let's just play a scenario and I'm not trying to relitigate the past, but if Google did not own YouTube. What do you think would have happened with YouTube?
33:57 Chamath Palihapitiya? It would have gotten funded and it would have been fine.
33:59 David Friedberg? It would have raised billions and built the infrastructure. Because you, do you remember YouTube had a real infrastructure problem?
34:05 Chamath Palihapitiya? Serious lawsuit. I think they would have shut down. The reason is because. People are smart enough to understand when then there's the potential to make money. Okay. And the free markets do a really good job of highlighting where that's possible.
34:21 Chamath Palihapitiya? Again, there is no point re-litigating this, but I think it would have gotten funded.
34:26 David Friedberg? Yeah, could GCP or AWS get funded with $10 million? Yeah, I guess that's what OpenAI is, right?
34:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? Why does, why does CoreWeave get funded today? How is CoreWeave allowed to even exist? Why doesn't it all go? Because investors are smart. They see that there's an economic rationale for there being multiple players. And then there's a smart founding team that creates a justification that gets it going.
34:49 David Friedberg? So the era of the monopolies, monopoly on building new monopolies is over.
34:55 Chamath Palihapitiya? Well, I don't think it's, I don't think it's ever existed, but I think the point is that. Big businesses are there to eventually grow a GDP so that they can be disrupted by small companies. That's what you want. Because if you had the same seven or eight companies, then you could make the argument that we should have stopped at the East-West India Company and everything would have been great. It's not true.
35:16 David Friedberg? It is what we did with the railroads. It's what we did with the AT&T. It's what we did with Standard Oil. Like when, when these, when these monopolies were built in the US, they were all broken up and.
35:25 Chamath Palihapitiya? But hold on, it's not necessarily what we did. It's the boundary conditions that enabled other people to then go and fill the gaps. And I think that that's a reasonable.
35:33 David Friedberg? The economic boundary conditions.
35:34 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know, Sacks had this great tweet this past week and I almost. Quote tweeted it, but I thought I don't want to create a lot more noise where there doesn't need to be.
35:43 David Friedberg? Sax is paying attention now.
35:45 Chamath Palihapitiya? But he had this tweet about taking back the licenses for the main broadcast channels. And I thought that was an excellent thing. And I quote tweeted something where I was like, yeah, we should buy that for all in. And I said it half jokingly, but I didn't. Because I think that if those licenses were up for grabs, what would happen is a bunch of private equity people would get behind Rogan, a bunch of private equity people would get behind us and we would all bid. And the outcome would be better. So the point is that these small structural changes, and I know that it may seem large to break up Google, it's not. It's a small thing in the grand course of American business history. It's not going to really matter that much.
36:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? Would be good generally through the lens of the individual shareholder and through the lens of the shareholder of the United States. That's it.
36:38 David Friedberg? Sax, can you tell us about the broadcast licensing comment that you made? I thought it was actually pretty good, too.
36:44 David Sacks? Yeah, there's a history to this. I mean, originally in the US, we had three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and they were given licenses of public spectrum from the FCC. And those licenses were free, but in exchange for them, the major broadcast networks had these various requirements to serve the public interest, to be fair.
37:05 David Friedberg? This was pre, pre cable and this was broadcast over the air.
37:09 David Sacks? Right. This goes back like a hundred years.
37:11 David Friedberg? Just, just to be, it's, I think it's important to be clear because I, I don't think everyone understands that back in the day, all the TV networks only broadcast over the air. So they needed radio spectrum allocated to them to, to do that. Which was a, you know, a hundred year old kind of, that's a hundred year old situation. It doesn't exist anymore. Sorry.
37:28 David Sacks? Yeah. It was the only way to get information broadcast on TV was through this, this public spectrum. And so it kind of made sense in a world in which there are only three networks. Because that was the only way to get information, to have these fairness requirements and public interest requirements. And so it was heavily regulated. Well, now it's a century later and there's so many ways to get information. You've got cable, obviously, meant that we went from three or four networks to hundreds. And then, of course, you've got the internet and you've got streaming. So there's now an infinite number of ways to get information in real time,
38:13 David Sacks? including video and that sort of thing. You've also got social networks. You've got X and all the rest. So there's no shelf space limit anymore. There's no scarcity. And so therefore tying up this very valuable spectrum by giving it for free to the, to the broadcast networks just doesn't really make sense in the same way. And what we should do is just auction off this spectrum, use the money to pay down the national debt. And in that way, it'll go to its most highly valued use. The market will figure out what that use is. If the broadcast networks are the most highly valued way to use this spectrum, then they'll win the auction. But I suspect they won't.
38:57 Jason Calacanis? Isn't that exactly? They did, they did this auction in 2016, right? For 15 years.
39:01 David Sacks? They've been gradually auctioning off more spectrum. But we're talking about here, this is like the most choice valuable part of, of public spectrum. So for example, one of the reasons why the spectrum is valuable is because it can easily go through walls. Right? Like you can watch your TV inside your house. And this broadcast spectrum is good at getting through those walls. Imagine the types of GPS apps you could enable with that kind of precision. Right? So there's many other ways in theory that this spectrum could be used. And you would be able to unleash, I think, a lot of innovation in next generation wireless apps if the spectrum were available.
39:44 David Sacks? I don't think the public would lose anything because ABC, CBS, NBC. First of all, I mean, these networks are basically a commodity now. There's so many other ways to get news and they'll still be available through the internet and through cable.
39:57 Jason Calacanis? So you're saying to? Speed up these auctions because they do occur every 15 years or something to that.
40:03 David Sacks? I think what happens is that the licenses are actually granted to local stations. Like your, you know, your local ABC or whatever.
40:15 David Sacks? Yeah. And then collectively, they have a lobby called the NAB or National Association of Broadcasters. And this is why they have so much power is you've got all these local networks, let's call three or four of them in every geography. And they all come together as part of this lobby. And so this is why nothing ever changes, but does this model still make sense? No, I mean, it's completely obsolete. But those local networks will all go crazy if they lose their free spectrum.
40:43 Jason Calacanis? Well, they pay for it. They don't get it for free.
40:46 David Sacks? They get a free license from the FCC in exchange for the fairness requirement and these other requirements.
40:52 Jason Calacanis? I think that they pay billions of dollars for these and like hundreds of millions on a local.
40:58 David Sacks? No. Every six years or so, they come back up and they get renewed by the FCC.
41:03 Jason Calacanis? I was just talking about the spectrum auctions. I'm looking at it right now.
41:06 David Sacks? That's different.
41:06 Jason Calacanis? Yeah. Okay.
41:09 Jason Calacanis? All right. Interesting.
41:10 David Sacks? No, look, the FCC has auctioned spectrum before, but not the spectrum that the broadcast networks are sitting on, which is some of the most valuable spectrum.
41:18 Jason Calacanis? Got it.
41:19 David Sacks? And the only reason why it's being used this way is because of legacy. Because this is how it worked 100 years ago.
41:27 Jason Calacanis? Well, and then this parallels into, I think, some of the research that's going on right now around legacy media and trust in media. A bunch of reports have been coming out about this. It's not shocking to anybody who listens to this podcast, but confidence in institutions is tracked by a number of different organizations, Gallup being one of them. And if we look at how Americans feel and trust has generally been going down in everything. The military, police.
41:58 Chamath Palihapitiya? It's also being tracked in the Wapo op-ed section.
42:02 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, exactly.
42:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Are you going to pull that up, Jake? Do you have that or no?
42:06 Jason Calacanis? Uh, yeah, we'll talk about that. Yeah. Uh, but here, if you take a look at from 2021, 2022 and into 2023, television news went from 16 down to 11 and back up to 14, but is amongst the lowest.
42:23 Jason Calacanis? In terms of trust in and 40% of Americans have no trust in media at all, according to this Gallup poll. Here's how it breaks down by party, Republican, independent and Democrats. Confidence by the Democrats, 58%. Independents, 29%. Republicans, 11%. In mass media. Your thoughts, Friedberg? As we look at just trust in general in institutions, this transitionary period we're in, and specifically the media?
42:58 David Friedberg? I do think, we've talked about this a number of times in the past. So without rehashing too much, I think that many of the institutions that have offered media have had to move away from providing data and information because data and information has commoditized. It's available broadly through the internet and other places. So the actual gathering of information is now democratized. You know, agencies put their data on their websites, stock markets are published on the internet. So the internet has democratized access to information. So the media companies that have historically been arbiters of information have had to become effectively content businesses. They've had to provide more than just information.
43:40 David Friedberg? And what has happened is a iterative feedback system whereby the more kind of angry they can make someone, the more upset they can make someone, the more emotive they can make a reader or a viewer or a listener, the more clicks they get, the more the kind of limbic system triggers that consumer to come back and consume some more of their media. And so the iterative development cycle is that things look like they're one side versus another side in nearly every context. In every piece of media, everyone is opinionated and making a position point from a side, from a perceived side that they are representing because it is a motive to the readers and the readers come back and they align with that side and they want to have more of that because it incites their limbic system.
44:24 David Friedberg? So that's what's happened. And as a result, when people look at it and assume that it's what it used to be, which is objective truth, fact finding, information. Gathering and it is not that they're like, well, this isn't even news anymore. And the truth is, it's not because information is democratized. It's available to you anywhere and everywhere you want it. You can get it through citizen journalism via blogs, via podcasts, via Twitter, via many other places. And so the the legacy media companies have effectively become a mode of content companies in order to drive clicks, drive views, sell ads. That's really all this whole story is. And I don't think that that's going to shift. I don't think that Jeff Bezos's attempt to try and return Wapo back to being a fact finding organization is going to be successful.
45:07 David Friedberg? I think all the consumers that read Wapo today, they love the one sided nature. They love the bias that they read. It makes them feel good. I think that the people that work there love the bias. They love writing those opinion pieces. It makes them feel good. I don't think anyone actually wants boring news anymore because you know what? They can go to a website from the government itself or from a company itself and just read the information. And frankly, if they want to get unbiased, honest, factual information, there's a hundred other sources.
45:34 Jason Calacanis? Well, and then here
45:34 David Friedberg? And the commentary, the comment, yeah, the commentary about off the cuff, et cetera. You know what that is? That's called authentic conversation. That is how people speak. When we all get together, we are not journalists. We are not necessarily well versed. Let's be honest, we mess things up a lot. We say off the cuff comments that are wrong very often, but that's just how people speak and it feels authentic. And when we do have signal, I think that listeners and viewers are smart enough to separate that signal from noise and they are going to make their own decisions about what they find to be truth and factual and what they're going to use to make decisions in their life. And that's, I think, how people want to consume information now. It's not being told what the truth is by some fake authority.
46:16 Jason Calacanis? And here is a clip from the podcast last year.
46:20 David Sacks? Podcasts could play a huge role, just like in 2016, social media broke through and played a huge role. I think in 2024, I think that podcasts could break through
46:28 Jason Calacanis? Podcasts will decide the election.
46:30 David Sacks? The way that unorthodox candidates get their message out.
46:32 Jason Calacanis? It could be the way all candidates get their message out. We're moving from Traditional media defining these candidates to direct to consumer, direct through Twitter slash X, direct through podcasts, this podcast included. What we're witnessing right now is the transition from traditional media and the establishment defining who the great candidates are to the public and the people on podcasts and social media who are the tip of the spear and the vanguard, they're going to pick the winners.
47:01 Chamath Palihapitiya? I love you both. You guys totally nailed it. Look at that.
47:05 Jason Calacanis? Sax, your thoughts on this sort of transition? Interestingly, as we know, Rogan had Trump on over 40 million views now.
47:13 David Sacks? I think they're up to 100 million views now for that Rogan-Trump interview.
47:17 Jason Calacanis? Oh, including X, I'm sure.
47:18 David Sacks? Despite the fact that you literally could not find it if you search for it in Google or YouTube. It's quite amazing.
47:22 Jason Calacanis? Well, we'll get to that in a second. Yeah, that's an interesting one. I got to take on that. But what do you take from Rogan getting, let's say, many more views than the last two presidential debates? Trump-Harris, 67 million viewers. Trump-Biden, 51 million viewers. I think maybe Rogan, combined with his two episodes, will get more than the first two debates.
47:48 David Sacks? Yeah, look, I think this is the first podcast election where you can make the argument that podcasts will decide the election. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is podcasts have gone big enough that there's enough audience that they just have the reach now to play a big role. Second, the format is highly informative to viewers. You get to see a candidate expound in long form, being asked questions and having to go for potentially hours at a time. I mean, Trump went for three hours with Rogan.
48:20 Jason Calacanis? Impressive.
48:21 David Sacks? And it's very hard to hide who you are when you're going for that period of time in an unscripted environment. I would argue even the hour that Trump spent with us demonstrated that he knew a lot more about policy issues than people were giving him credit for. And it also showed his personality was a lot different than the media had portrayed him. So I think that podcasts have been.
48:44 David Sacks? A great advantage for Trump. He's been willing to do them, and I think he does them quite well. I think it's particularly helpful to him in a context where the legacy media has been trying to portray him as a very extreme figure, as literally a Nazi or literally the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. When the media is telling the audience that you're that, and then you can go on Rogan for three hours and show that you're a normal funny guy who actually knows a lot about policy. It's just such a different impression than what the media is trying to portray that has been incredibly, I think, useful and advantageous for Trump. By the same token, Kamala Harris has not been willing to do Rogan,
49:25 David Sacks? at least not on Rogan's terms. Apparently, she was willing to sit down for one hour with him.
49:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? But not in Austin, according to-
49:33 David Sacks? But not in Austin. What Rogan said is, no, we have to sit down in our studio for three hours. So far, she hasn't been willing to do that. I think that speaks volumes in and of itself, is that she hasn't been willing to subject herself to the same sort of, you could call it interrogation, or really just long-form conversation that Trump has been willing to. But in any event, just I think my bottom line on this is that I think Trump's biggest challenge in this election is just to get people comfortable with the idea of a second Trump term, to get people comfortable with him. And I think that him going on all these podcasts, including ours, including I thought the Andrew Schultz one was really good, too,
50:15 David Sacks? has helped him, I think, to get people comfortable with the idea of Trump, which I think was just his biggest obstacle in this election. Because people definitely want to change, and they're not happy with Biden-Harris.
50:25 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know, the one thing I'll say is, before you go on Rogan, there's a sense of anxiety that I had, which was, do I have enough interesting things to say for three hours? That was really at the top of my mind. I think, Jason, I talked to you right before-
50:43 David Sacks? Yeah.
50:44 Chamath Palihapitiya? I went on, and that was a big thing for me. And then you go and you get in the seat and he's incredible in the way that he kind of like moves the conversation along. And then you end up, you're like, oh, it's already been three hours. That's his superpower.
51:02 Chamath Palihapitiya? The reason that she should find a way to go to Austin and do it is because he has the ability to allow you to be your true self over a long period of time. And I think, again, just going back to the basics, she deserves for herself, for the American people to vote up or down who she really is. And all the campaign strategists aside, and all of the other nonsense aside, I would want, if I was running for president, one shot at people being able to see me for who I really am. And that's why she should go on, Rogan.
51:41 David Sacks? I think she's afraid of that. I mean, she has mostly ducked media interviews and ducked any podcasts that would be perceived as adversarial or not super friendly.
51:52 Chamath Palihapitiya? But she stopped, she stopped ducking them, I think, in fairness to her, like, maybe after she was like in the third or fourth week, she started doing them.
51:59 David Sacks? Yeah, she's done Call Me Daddy, she's done Howard Stern, she's done the ones that she knew would be super friendly.
52:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah, of course. Yeah, doing adversarial is probably.
52:06 Jason Calacanis? But don't you think that Trump did our show because he thought it would be friendly?
52:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah, he started with friendlies, yeah. And why would he do oppositional?
52:13 David Sacks? When Trump did, I mean, we were on the first podcast he went on.
52:16 Jason Calacanis? Kamala went on that Fox, she went on that Fox News thing.
52:19 David Sacks? She did Fox News for 26 Minutes, Free Berg, and her staff was waving. They were on the sidelines waving frantically to get her off of there. But anyway, was, was, were we the first podcast to interview Trump?
52:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? Second.
52:33 David Sacks? The Knuckle Boys were first. I guess we were second.
52:36 Chamath Palihapitiya? Uh huh.
52:37 David Sacks? I think that it was really unclear what would happen when you. You know, put a major candidate for president on a podcast for an hour at the time he did it. I think he took a little bit of a risk. And I think it worked out for him. And then he's done a lot more since then.
52:51 Chamath Palihapitiya? I mean, other than Rogan, Rogan and us have consistently tried to get everybody on all sides to be on the podcast. I think we did a really good job. Looking back on, we've gotten everybody except one person, Kamala Harris.
53:04 Jason Calacanis? I, yeah. I mean, I wish I had time to have asked him about January 6.
53:09 Chamath Palihapitiya? That was the only thing I didn't get to on my questions. We had all the independents and we had all the credible Republicans.
53:16 Jason Calacanis? And to his credit.
53:16 David Friedberg? We were the first for RFK, right? We were the first with.
53:20 Chamath Palihapitiya? Yeah, he credits us. First for Dean Phillips.
53:24 David Friedberg? Dean Phillips.
53:24 Jason Calacanis? And Vivek. I think we were the first for Vivek. And so, yeah, I give us some, some credit there. On the search issue, I looked into that there. Vivek, sorry, I always get that wrong. The search issue, there was some complaints that YouTube might have been like, I don't know, hiding the video, which didn't make much sense to people. So I did an investigation of that, Sax. You're laughing. Go ahead.
53:49 David Sacks? Well, finish what you're saying.
53:50 Jason Calacanis? No, no, no.
53:51 David Sacks? I have a different point of view than you on this, but.
53:53 Jason Calacanis? I didn't even get my point of view.
53:54 David Sacks? I know. I've seen it on Twitter, but keep going.
53:57 Jason Calacanis? Oh, well, no, I did a search on.
54:00 David Sacks? You're gonna defend Google, I know.
54:01 Jason Calacanis? No, I'm not defending Google. I'm just explaining to people how search works, independent of it. I went to Bing, DuckDuckGo, search.brave.com, Google, YouTube, Google Video. And what people don't understand about how the search algorithms work is they are designed to increase advertising dollars, and Friedberg will back me up for this, he worked at Google, and session length. That's the goal. Am I correct, Friedberg, with algorithms, whether it's TikTok, YouTube's, etc.?
54:32 David Friedberg? Yeah, I'm not gonna say it's an authority on this.
54:33 Jason Calacanis? Increase session time and increase revenue.
54:35 David Friedberg? I know more about search results. I don't know as much about the video stuff, so.
54:38 Jason Calacanis? So when you look at that, it's a very nuanced thing, but Joe Rogan doesn't monetize his search. It is not.
54:46 Jason Calacanis? Make any money for them and then clips do make money for YouTube and the clips have flooded the zone. So if you do a search on any search engine, whether it's Bing or Brave or DuckDuckGo, Google or YouTube, any of them, what you'll find is the clips beat out the main episodes all the time. This happens to our podcast. When people clip our podcast, they will do keyword stuffing and they'll beat us and it will beat the algorithm because the algorithm wants to get ads and we don't have ads turned on either. So people have this frequent frustration with This Week in Startups, my other podcast, All In Here and Joe Rogan, that anything that's
55:25 Jason Calacanis? not monetized on YouTube doesn't rank high. And if you look, all of the clips, and this makes sense if you just think logically, the clips will generate more engagement because you get to watch the highlights. So it's kind of like sports highlights. Sax, would you like to conspiracy theory this and tell us that Sergey is sandbagging for the Democrats or something by hiding the YouTube?
55:49 David Sacks? Conspiracy theory. You can just, I mean, if you go to Google every single day and just type in a Trump-related search term versus a Kamala-related search term, you'll see the difference in coverage. But back to the Rogan thing. Look, Google is a search engine. This is what they're supposed to be good at. You have an interview between the biggest podcaster in the world and a former president who's probably the most famous person in the world. It's massively trending. It's got something like 100 million views. At the time that people noticed that you couldn't find it on YouTube, it already had something like 34 million views. What I'm saying is you have to work pretty hard as a search engine for your algorithm to be so bad that you can't find that interview. Okay, when I went to YouTube and tried to find
56:32 David Sacks? it, first I typed in Trump Rogan interview, couldn't find it. Then I typed Trump Rogan interview podcast, couldn't find it. It was just clips. It was Trump Rogan, full interview, full podcast, still couldn't find it. There's no question that just as a factual matter, this episode was suppressed in YouTube search.
56:53 David Sacks? If you went to the main Google search engine and did a similar search, what you would have found as the number one search result was an article from the Arizona Republic, which is a publication I've never even heard of, that would have told you that the Rogan interview with Trump was a brain-rotted waste of three hours. That's the number one result. Somehow, Google decides that its number one result for the Rogan interview was this Arizona Republic story. Okay, I mean, that is not a search engine doing its job. So it's pretty obvious to me that they're using other factors in deciding what to surface here. And somehow, the results end up being
57:35 David Sacks? almost universally negative towards Trump and almost universally positive towards Kamala. I think you've got to, at this point, have your head buried really deep in the sand not to think that Google is incredibly biased in this election against Trump.
57:50 Jason Calacanis? Let me pull up some facts to show how wrong you are. If you pull up YouTube here, here's an image of the YouTube search results that I just did for the Trump-Rogan. And what you'll see is, as I explained previously, clips perform better and make money. They make money, so the algorithm favors those. And what you'll see here is Fox News, et cetera, and all these clips, and then eventually you get to the Joe Rogan interview. And if you look at Bing's search results for Rogan-Trump interview, what you'll see is all the search engines put news up first, then they go to organic. So it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how search is designed for users. They start with news on every search engine today. And then here's Google's same thing.
58:34 Jason Calacanis? And then what you'll see here is, on the Google and on the Bing images, you have a collection, typically five or six news stories. Then they go to the first organic. So people just don't understand how search works. It's always news first when you type in a politician's name. And then when you look at the news, or it has New York Post, right-leaning. You have people who are dead center like AP in there, and you have Fox News there in the Google one. So of the first five, two of them are right-leaning. And AP is obviously in the middle. Forbes, I don't know, maybe Forbes is right-leaning too. Friedberg, over to you.
59:09 David Friedberg? Well, I was gonna say, I read somewhere, so I have no direct knowledge about this. I actually pinged several people at Google to ask them what was going on. And I did not get a clear response. I didn't, I so like, I have no insight as to what actually happened. But what I read online somewhere was that someone reported that someone at Google said that there were, there was kind of a whole bunch of people that clicked inappropriate content flagging on the video. So like anti-Trump people went to the video, clicked that it was inappropriate. And when, when YouTube gets that many people clicking that this is inappropriate, it automatically flags it.
59:46 Jason Calacanis? Mass flagging, yes. It is a, it is a technique people will use. They've used it on our program here, where they flag.
59:52 David Friedberg? Right, so if you get like a million people that say at once, like, hey, there's inappropriate content in here, the default is to hide, to hide the video, well, to hide the video from search results while it's investigated. But clearly, there's something messed up here because they should have been on top of that and responded immediately with the video that has such a large number of views and such a large audience to allow that to happen and, and drag on for so long. But someone said that that may have been what happened and then they fixed it. I, so I don't know, but I just want to point that out, that it may not necessarily have been a kind of overt action by Google, but just the way that the system is set up, that anyone can flag, and if enough people flag, you get this sort of.
1:00:29 Jason Calacanis? And I can tell you, I know firsthand that Google is aware of the claims of bias. And I think you're starting to see it, just like CNN is aware of the claims of bias.
1:00:39 David Friedberg? Totally.
1:00:40 Jason Calacanis? And they added, CNN is aware of the claims of bias.
1:00:42 David Friedberg? I mean, like, all these companies are super sensitive to it. So is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg's very sensitive to it. I know Sundar himself is very sensitive to it. I don't want to kind of hide the fact that these people think that they're going out and being biased, that they have these kind of information empires, because they know that they're gonna lose trust and they're gonna lose customers and revenue and et cetera.
1:01:01 Jason Calacanis? CNN has done, I think, an exceptional job. I don't know if you watch it at all. Sacks, but they have been having Trump supporters and right wing commentators in CNN on the desk.
1:01:12 David Friedberg? They have?
1:01:12 Jason Calacanis? Every, yes. It's really changed the nature of it from being like MSNBC or Fox.
1:01:17 David Friedberg? Did you know that?
1:01:18 Jason Calacanis? To being something in the middle.
1:01:19 David Friedberg? I've never wa- I never watched, I never watched these shows, but like.
1:01:22 David Sacks? Before we go off on this topic, people throughout this election have been posting Google search results when you just type in Trump versus Harris. And I've done it every single time. It's massively biased. I mean, let's just go through them. This was a search result I got months ago where I just typed in Donald Trump and you, the first carousel was about Kamala Harris. I remember joking on the pod that if you want to find the latest news about Kamala Harris, just search for Donald Trump. And then you go down and the first carousel that's about Trump is negative stories. This one was about Project 2025, which has nothing to do with Trump. Nonetheless, this was a major Democratic talking point at the time is that somehow that Project 2025 is what Trump would do in a second term.
1:02:06 David Friedberg? I just did this and it's different now, obviously. This is, you said this is a few months old?
1:02:10 David Sacks? I've been doing this on a recurring basis over the last few months. And the point is that whenever you search for the candidates, the news is very positive towards Harris and it's very negative towards Trump. And even when you search for Trump, they'll give you positive news about Harris. Now go to the, go to the podcast.
1:02:29 David Friedberg? And again, Sacks, you don't, you don't think this is a function of the fact that so many media outlets are being so negative about Trump and positive about Harris? And so therefore the ratio is just off of media?
1:02:37 David Sacks? How does the Arizona Republic end up being the first choice when you search for Rogan Trump? They're not, you know, like PageRank can't explain that. They're just not a major publication. They're not being linked to by a lot of people. Doesn't make any sense. Here's another example. Okay. Stay on this one for a second. This was after Trump went on the Andrew Schultz podcast. That podcast was a very positive experience for him, as we just talked about. Helped his campaign a lot. What's the number one result when you look for that? New Republic, podcast host laughing Trump face as he struggles to defend rambling. That's when he had that hilarious story about the weave. If you actually watch the clip, the podcast hosts were, they were definitely laughing with him. They were not laughing at him. That was a ridiculous mischaracterization.
1:03:22 David Sacks? The New Republic is not the objective source for anything. I don't know how you could say that objectively page rank should get you to the New Republic as the number one source for the Andrew Schultz interview of Trump. That is biased. I mean, it's just biased. There's been so many examples of Google giving these ridiculous results. And they find obscure publications and obscure articles that have no basis in the truth to elevate to the top. It's almost like they're trying to find the most negative article they can find on Trump and make that the number one result.
1:03:59 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, it's not the search engine. It's just the corpus of media that's being indexed. If you look here at Google.
1:04:06 David Sacks? Why is it New York Times then? That's the number one thing.
1:04:09 Jason Calacanis? Well, I mean, just, you know, here, if you look at Donald Trump, you know, if we were to look at these news sources, there's NBC, NPR, Politico and New York Times are left leaning. If you were to do this on, I think I have Bing as the next one you can open and you can look at the next one, Nick, which is DuckDuckGo. In all of these cases, the problem is only three or 4% of journalists at publications today are right leaning. And most of the right leaning publications are opinion publications like Fox, et cetera. And so you just, you don't have a lot of representation in the index of Republicans. And that's like a big opportunity, I think, for Republicans is to make more publications or take more publications over like we're seeing with the LA Times and Washington Post.
1:04:52 David Sacks? There's plenty of conservative publications if Google would choose to surface them, but it decides that it doesn't want to.
1:04:59 Jason Calacanis? It's on a percentage basis, it's very small is the problem.
1:05:02 David Sacks? Here you go. This is Arizona Republic rocketing to the top of search results for Joe Rogan Trump interview. That's a publication that is local to Arizona that no one's ever heard of. It has no basis being the number one result in Google. New York Times is second. Okay, I can see the logic of that because New York Times is a big publication. Then you go down one row to the carousel. Oh, there's New Republic again. Why? Because it's calling Trump appearing on Joe Rogan shady. And then you've got another one. Listen, I think- Another one there from the Independent-
1:05:32 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
1:05:32 David Sacks? Calling Trump a predator. I mean, come on, this is ridiculous.
1:05:36 David Friedberg? Okay, so you've shared these examples. What I would recommend is I think we get someone from Google on the show. We could arrange that and they can kind of talk about-
1:05:44 Jason Calacanis? Come on the show, Google.
1:05:44 David Friedberg? How the algorithm works. Because I don't think any of us are going to be able to provide a reasonable counterpoint or understanding of what's going on. And if there is bias, and there's some kind of manual intervention in this process, maybe it can be kind of discussed and talked about why and how and, you know, what the automation is that causes this to happen. And let's just try and-
1:06:02 David Sacks? Yeah, I'd love to do that.
1:06:03 David Friedberg? Let's try and govern. So I'll take that as a to do and I'll try and find someone that we can talk with-
1:06:08 Jason Calacanis? I mean, they listen.
1:06:08 David Friedberg? To have a conversation. They do. I look, I mean, I've talked with a lot of people over there and I have heard from a lot of folks that this is a real issue that folks are trying to address internally so that there's this perception of bias that they're trying to get rid of. And they really want to address it. This is what I've heard from people at Google. So I want to give them a chance to come and talk about it.
1:06:25 Jason Calacanis? Pull up the Bing I just sent you.
1:06:27 David Friedberg? Look, rather than having us all debate it, or I don't even have a strong point of view on this. I'd rather just bring someone in and talk about it. So let's just move on.
1:06:32 Jason Calacanis? Counterpoint here, Nick, pull up the Bing I just did for Donald Trump. And we'll just, if you do it as an exercise, that's always the way to find the objective truth here is to try the independent search engines or other search engines. Duck, duck, go brave.
1:06:42 David Sacks? Perplexity.
1:06:43 Jason Calacanis? Bing.
1:06:43 David Sacks? Perplexity.
1:06:44 Jason Calacanis? Well, yeah, you could do that as well. We'll see. But anyway, if you look here, this Bing one, if you take out MSN, what no?
1:06:51 David Friedberg? If you could go to woke, wokesearch.com, J K.
1:06:54 Jason Calacanis? MSN, USA Today, Charlotte Observer, Seattle Times, Washington Post. I think these are all left leaning.
1:07:01 Jason Calacanis? So that is more to my point that the entire corpus of news reportage is 95% left-leaning. That's what's happening here. And so they need to, they're going to need to manually Sacks say these 5% should get represented 50/50 in the search results to please the other side, even though that's not what the corpus is. The number of stories written by left-leaning just is probably 50 to 1 to right-leaning.
1:07:31 David Sacks? I have an alternate explanation. Can we just pull up this, this, it's got some data. I'd like to just pull up this data if I could. If you look at employee donations to party, by tech companies, it's all 90-something percent goes to Democrats. That's a pretty simple explanation for why the Google search results are horribly biased in one direction.
1:07:53 Jason Calacanis? Uber's 18%. All right. Let's go to our final segment here. We'll talk a little bit about the election. Why don't you tee us up here, Friedberg?
1:08:03 David Friedberg? All right, guys, I'll quickly introduce our final political election update before our live stream on Tuesday. Obviously, a lot of daily freakouts, daily efforts at having an October surprise that will take down the other side, all sorts of drama, all sorts of insult, not a lot of love in America right now, super depressing and sad. All sorts of stuff happened this week. J Cal, why don't you kick us off? What do you think's going to happen on Tuesday? What are the things that you think are going to move people between now and then?
1:08:37 Jason Calacanis? It's a toss-up. I mean, that's what everybody's saying. It looks like Trump's got a slight lead, and so I think it's going to be a toss-up.
1:08:43 David Friedberg? Sacks, agreed. Are we 65/35 as Polly Market predicts? Or are we 100% Trump? Are we 90% Kamala Harris? What are we looking at?
1:08:54 David Sacks? Well, you definitely can't say it's going to be 100% anyone. I mean, but if, again, if you look at all the data, the data is definitely pointing towards Trump having an advantage. It's, obviously, the prediction markets are almost 2 to 1 in favor of Trump. The polling shows that Trump is ahead narrowly in this, in all the swing states. I think every single one of them, even the sort of blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, that Harris must win, I think, in order to have a path to victory.
1:09:22 David Sacks? Whereas Michigan and Wisconsin are very, very close, like 1% or less in the swing state polls. Pennsylvania polling shows that Trump is ahead by, I think, two or three. That's what I've seen today. So it's, it is looking good for Trump. And if you look at the numbers that Elon's group, that, that America PAC put out, it looks like the early voting in Pennsylvania is trending 500,000 votes better for Republicans in the early voting than four years ago.
1:09:55 David Friedberg? But Sax, is that just pulling votes forward?
1:09:57 David Sacks? It could be.
1:09:58 David Friedberg? Cause some folks have said, yeah.
1:09:59 David Sacks? It could be.
1:09:59 David Friedberg? Like instead of showing up at the ballot box on Tuesday, a lot of folks are doing mail-ins and making sure they get their vote in in mail instead of going in person.
1:10:06 David Sacks? Right. So then you gotta look at polling of people who say they're gonna vote, but haven't voted yet in Pennsylvania, who say they're gonna vote on election day. And I think those numbers are running about 18 points ahead for Trump, which is about double what he needs to win. So he, just to be clear, the early voting favors Harris, but not by the same percentages that it did four years ago. So right now it looks like Trump is cracking to win that state. But look, I can't guarantee it. I'm not representing that, you know, that's exactly what's gonna happen. But right now the numbers are looking good. Remember Biden only won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes.
1:10:48 David Sacks? And again, the swing so far is Republicans are doing 500,000 votes better than they were doing four years ago.
1:10:55 David Friedberg? So there's a lot of stories coming out on Twitter, on independent media and on mainstream media, or legacy media as we might call it now, talking about, hey, I live in a house. I got 15 ballots mailed to me, all with different random names. And these sort of anecdotal stories are being pushed and then amplified by folks that are involved in the election. Chamath, is this kind of dangerous? Do we think that there really is a lot of this kind of election meddling happening? And if not, or if there is, is this kind of a dangerous thing to happen? Where a lot of people are talking about this, where no matter what happens on Tuesday, people start to question the results of the election? How much should we be kind of worried about this rhetoric?
1:11:36 Chamath Palihapitiya? I think there are two things. There's the substance and then there's the strategy. The substance is that.
1:11:43 Chamath Palihapitiya? Does it really make sense that the most advanced and important country in the world doesn't have a uniform system where one ballot is given to every single American citizen who is eligible to vote?
1:12:00 Chamath Palihapitiya? That probably makes sense, so we should probably just figure out how to do that.
1:12:06 Chamath Palihapitiya? Separately, the strategy of it is for both sides to lay the groundwork to say that this thing somehow wasn't totally right down the middle. I am hoping for a very clear decisive victory.
1:12:21 Chamath Palihapitiya? And frankly, whichever candidate wins, I hope that it's very clear and decisive so that everybody is forced to de-escalate and move on.
1:12:31 Chamath Palihapitiya? Now, that said, I think what the early voting data
1:12:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? shows is something that you haven't seen in the past, which is that there are a lot of Republican people that are voting early.
1:12:50 Chamath Palihapitiya? I don't know what that means for Election Day, but typically it's the Democrats that dominate these early voting processes and they build what's called the firewall. And in these swing states, these firewalls become very important going into Election Day. And as Sacks said, a bunch of these states are different than they've historically been in the favor of the Republicans.
1:13:15 Chamath Palihapitiya? I saw an article today that just said that they've basically considered Nevada now in the Republican camp because like there's been so much early voting that it's about 60% of the total votes that they have already been cast since they have a very clear Republican lead going into Election Day. So there's all kinds of stuff here that's new. I just hope that it's just an absolutely crushing victory in one direction or the other, so that we de-escalate and get on to the business of running the country.
1:13:44 David Sacks? So I'm going to break with most of my Republican brethren on this and say, I think early voting is actually a good thing. It's very convenient, right? Like, why force people to only vote on just one day? Because what if you get sick, or a kid gets sick, and you have to pick them up from school? There's a lot of things that can go wrong. It is more convenient to have, say, two or three weeks to be able to cast your vote. I actually think that's not a bad thing. And in terms of who it helps, I'm not sure. But I think that as Republicans become more of a populist party, and the Democrats become more of an elitist party, I think higher turnout might actually, might benefit Republicans. Regardless, I think it's a huge convenience for voters. And I think early voting is something that
1:14:25 David Sacks? we should keep. The thing we got to change is, in the states where you don't have to present any voter ID to show who you are, this is crazy. I mean, you just, you go up to the polling place, and you give your name, and I guess your address, and they look you up in a computer, and they hand you a ballot. And there's no verification that you are who you say you are. That, to me, is crazy. The other thing that's crazy is that you can even get registered and added to the voter rolls in a lot of states without any proof of citizenship. So there are states where you can go get a driver's license without proof of citizenship, and there's just a checkbox to be added to the voter rolls. And no one ever checks you're a citizen. And now you're on the voter roll, and you
1:15:07 David Sacks? can go pick up your ballot without any voter ID. That's just crazy to me. So I think that after this election, there should be some sort of bill that gets passed and signed by the president that sets a minimum standard for voter integrity.
1:15:24 David Friedberg? For federal elections.
1:15:25 David Sacks? For federal elections.
1:15:26 David Friedberg? Because states can do what they want, right? Like, each state can vote how they want.
1:15:29 David Sacks? I guess states can do what they want, but I don't think states should be able to do whatever they want in federal elections, because that affects all of us.
1:15:34 David Friedberg? I just want to, I want to point out that each state is effectively voting for the folks that they want to have go to the Electoral College. And that's really where the vote for president is cast. So should there be...
1:15:45 David Sacks? Yeah, but that affects all of us. If there's, hold on, if there's cheating in several states, and in a close election... By the way, I'm not accusing that of happening, okay? I'm just saying that if we have several states that don't have basic voter integrity-
1:16:00 David Friedberg? I understand, but the way-
1:16:01 David Sacks? And that affects the outcome of a national election. That has a huge impact on all of us.
1:16:05 David Friedberg? Let's just talk about this really important point, which I think a lot of folks ignore. It's not a direct democracy. It's not like everyone in the United States votes for the president. What happens is the states send a bunch of electors to go vote for the president. Each state casts a vote for the president. How each state ultimately decides who they're going to vote for for president is through this kind of process that we've kind of standardized across the states. But each state is making a vote. So shouldn't the states be able to kind of decide how they want to make their kind of voting process run internally? To determine who the votes are that are going to go to the electoral college?
1:16:39 David Sacks? Yeah, I mean, I think the Constitution specifies that the states will run their own elections. And I'm fine with that. But what I'm saying is there needs to be a minimum standard. To me, the minimum standard is voter ID and proof of citizenship to get registered.
1:16:52 Jason Calacanis? I'm in strong agreement with Sacks on this front. And I've actually done a ton of research into it that I would like to share because I think this is an important service we can do here on the All In Podcast, I think. I had Hans-
1:17:06 David Friedberg? So as a diehard moderate, you agree with Sacks?
1:17:09 Jason Calacanis? I mean, as an American, I don't, you know, putting political parties aside, I had Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation on This Week in Startups last Tuesday. You can watch it. And they have spent a ton of money and time on election fraud. And obviously, they're a partisan organization. They found 1,600 cases in 40 years. It's about 40 a year. They found 23 cases in 2020. None of them were in Georgia. You can go search those cases. You'll find cases like this one here that Nick will pull up, Randy Allen jumper who voted twice. And the database is amazing. Anybody, they're like crowdsourcing this. And so putting all partisan aside, the Heritage Foundation is doing great work here
1:17:54 Jason Calacanis? because sunlight is the best disinfectant. And what's really important for Americans to understand is it is impossible right now, absolutely statistically impossible, to swing the presidential election with fraud.
1:18:11 Jason Calacanis? The Brennan Center, they're on the other side. They did a report about voter fraud and they put it at .0003% and .0025%. And basically, you've got a much greater chance of being struck by lightning. And let's just do a little bit of math here. 158 million people voted in 2020. We'll have about 160 million this year, if the estimates are correct. And if you look at swing states, right? That's where I think a lot of people are concerned. Oh, what if they could swing it in Georgia, right? And we all know from the famous phone call to Brad Raffensperger, who was a Republican Secretary of State, and Trump said, hey, you know, we've got to find these 11,780 votes. That was the winning margin.
1:18:55 Jason Calacanis? So if we were to talk about that, right? Can we compare it to what the Heritage Foundation found? 1,600 cases documented in 40 years, about 40 a year. Now, there could be a multiple of that free bird, 10 times, 100 times. But to find 11,000 ballots, this would require, in Georgia, for, which has voter ID. And by the way, voter ID is in 35 of 50 states already. After this election, it's going to hit 40 because it's just obvious that we all want that. Georgia requires you to have ID to vote in person, and you have to water, and they've watermarked the ballots. So in order, Shama, for somebody to do this,
1:19:37 Jason Calacanis? they would have to fake 12,000 watermarked ballots and have fake IDs and have those 12,000 people not show up to vote and have two votes there.
1:19:50 David Sacks? Well, it looks like Georgia's got a great system, but we're talking about the states that don't. Like in California, they just passed a law saying that you're not allowed to look at voter ID.
1:19:58 Jason Calacanis? Right, and so that obviously should change. But the point is, even in California, which we know is-
1:20:03 Chamath Palihapitiya? Sorry, California, California did that? Why do you guys think such a law is passed? What's the justification for that?
1:20:10 Jason Calacanis? They want to not have somebody who had a chance to vote, vote. And it obviously benefits Democrats. If you believe that minorities don't have ID in some greater population, which people have rightly called out is racist. And there is this concept that black people or Hispanic people might not have IDs to the same extent, and they would lean Democrat. That is the cynical approach that people have taken. But if we, if we look at this, it is impossible, impossible to swing the federal election.
1:20:45 Chamath Palihapitiya? Sorry, Jason, you're saying it's a DEI thing?
1:20:48 Jason Calacanis? That's, that's what people claim. I'm not saying I claim that.
1:20:50 David Sacks? I think that's condescending and nonsense to act like minorities don't have a driver's license.
1:20:55 Jason Calacanis? I agree. I mean, that's ridiculous.
1:20:56 David Sacks? Or some other form of ID.
1:20:58 Jason Calacanis? I, I think it's absolutely ridiculous.
1:20:59 David Sacks? To answer your question, Chamath, I don't think there is a, a good justification.
1:21:03 Jason Calacanis? There's none.
1:21:03 David Sacks? For rejecting voter ID. And the law is even worse than that because it literally makes it illegal for someone to ask. So if you go to a polling place in California, they can't look at your ID. Even if you say, well, I lost my ballot or something, they just have to take your word for it.
1:21:18 Chamath Palihapitiya? You know, there's a.
1:21:19 David Sacks? When they give you a new ballot.
1:21:20 Chamath Palihapitiya? There's a legal requirement for every employer, when you hire somebody, to make sure that that person is eligible to work in the United States. If you're going to pay them legally, right? You get an I-9 and they need to, you know, justify that they have a social security number. That typically tells you whether you need a supplemental work authorization or not. So if you do that for normal, functional employment, why wouldn't you do it for voting as well?
1:21:49 David Sacks? Of course, you need an ID to get on a plane. You need an ID to, to buy a beer.
1:21:53 Chamath Palihapitiya? Right.
1:21:54 David Sacks? You need an ID to do all sorts of things in our society.
1:21:58 Chamath Palihapitiya? Right.
1:21:58 David Sacks? So it's, it's ludicrous. I mean, and, and voting is something where you shouldn't need an ID because you have to say, you have to match up that the person who's standing in front of you at the ballot box is the person on the voter rolls.
1:22:10 Chamath Palihapitiya? Well, why is it more important to make sure that the person sitting in 23B on the United flight is who he says it is? But it's less important for someone to just walk in off the street and vote for the President of the United States. Why is that?
1:22:25 Jason Calacanis? Because people believe that certain communities may not have ID and then they would be not given the right to vote.
1:22:33 Chamath Palihapitiya? Why don't, why don't you allow people to just get on an airplane and just fly wherever they want?
1:22:38 David Friedberg? Like, why don't, yeah, or, or drive without a driver?
1:22:40 Jason Calacanis? A hundred percent.
1:22:41 David Friedberg? Yeah.
1:22:42 Jason Calacanis? Yeah. I mean, it's, I'm not saying I agree with anything. So I'm telling you what people have said is the reason.
1:22:47 David Sacks? I think it's, it's cover. I think that's total nonsense. I think it's actually, if you think about it, it's insulting to minority groups to imply that they're incapable of getting a voter ID.
1:22:56 Chamath Palihapitiya? When you say, when you say people, you're saying people in charge? The people in charge of California, this is what they think?
1:23:03 Jason Calacanis? Yes. And it turns out, the only, you didn't have voter. We, we haven't had voter ID. They wanted, not every state has government ID that isn't a driver's license.
1:23:16 Chamath Palihapitiya? Is this Gavin Newsom?
1:23:17 Jason Calacanis? Yeah.
1:23:17 Chamath Palihapitiya? Right. So this is Gavin Newsom.
1:23:21 David Sacks? It's obvious to see what the effect of this is gonna be, which is, it'll, it makes it easier to engage in cheating.
1:23:28 Chamath Palihapitiya? Do you guys think if Gavin Newsom was on an airplane and we said, half these people here have just bought a ticket?
1:23:37 Chamath Palihapitiya? But we didn't check their IDs. Would he get off the plane or stay on the plane, do you think?
1:23:41 David Friedberg? Right. And TSA requires IDs that they can do a check on everyone, make sure that they're not on a do not fly list and all that sort of stuff.
1:23:48 Jason Calacanis? There's consensus that everybody wants voter ID.
1:23:50 David Friedberg? I think you can kind of think about a, there's a do not fly list and there should be a do not vote list. Like, if you're not a citizen, you should be on the do not vote list, meaning you have to be on the I can vote list in order to vote. Seems pretty reasonable that, you know, the fact that we've got a lot of federal agencies checking IDs to determine whether you can or can't do something.
1:24:08 Jason Calacanis? There is no way to swing the election, even if there is a moderate amount. That's, that is the most important for people to take out of here.
1:24:16 David Friedberg? So you're not worried about election fraud?
1:24:18 David Sacks? If people can cheat, then you can swing an election.
1:24:20 Jason Calacanis? You can draw it statistically based upon what I've just said, which is the smallest race is 11,779. Remember when Trump asked them to find those votes? Do you remember that?
1:24:35 David Sacks? You're talking about the state of Georgia, which I think actually has pretty good voter integrity. We're talking about the state of California here.
1:24:41 Jason Calacanis? No, no, I know, but that's the closest race.
1:24:42 David Sacks? They just passed along.
1:24:43 Jason Calacanis? So just in your mind, in your mind, logically, think about what it would take to get 11,779 people to fraudulently do that and that they would go to jail and it would be a felony. So this is the...
1:24:57 David Sacks? That doesn't sound that hard to me. I'm just saying, like, finding 11,000 votes or whatever doesn't seem that hard if there's no voter ID.
1:25:03 Jason Calacanis? I mean, if Trump couldn't do it, how is it gonna get done? It's not possible. Where would you get 11,000 ballots?
1:25:09 David Sacks? Maybe not in Georgia, because they actually have voter integrity.
1:25:11 Jason Calacanis? Even in California, where would you get 11,000 ballots?
1:25:14 David Sacks? Hold on a second. California is a huge state. They allow ballot harvesting and they've eliminated voter ID. So you're telling me that's impossible for someone to cheat? Nothing's impossible.
1:25:23 Jason Calacanis? No, no. Cheat it. We all agree cheating exists, like credit fraud. Fraud exists. What I'm saying is it's so manageable that it is farcical for anybody to think that we could swing the presidential election. Because Trump tried to swing the presidential election by asking to find 11,000 and he filed 58 lawsuits and lost all of them. It's not possible, folks.
1:25:47 Chamath Palihapitiya? Do you think, so then what is the value then of having voter ID, Jason, if the cheating is so hard?
1:25:53 Jason Calacanis? Because it would add more trust to the system and it's always virtuous to add more trust. I think they should also give you a receipt when you vote to make sure there's no shenanigans. And we want to build as much trust in the system as possible. But the point here...
1:26:07 David Friedberg? How would giving you a receipt reduce fraud?
1:26:09 Jason Calacanis? It would reduce people believing that their vote was changed after they left the box. So if we all had a receipt and then there was some debate in a small area because of, you know, hanging chads, like in Florida, everybody would have their receipt. And if you remember the hanging chads case, there were people who said, I voted for Gore, I voted for Bush, and my vote got counted wrong. People don't remember this, but you had to push through a card and it popped a Chad out of a little circle. And there are people who did it wrong because the instructions were, you know, it's a physical thing. You have to punch a hole into it. I don't know who came up with that system as opposed to drawing a circle.
1:26:46 Chamath Palihapitiya? But that was 24 years ago. I'm sure that's changed by now.
1:26:49 Jason Calacanis? There was a guy named Chad. Yeah, but no, now they are giving receipts to people. So the gold standard is giving a receipt, showing ID, and having multiple weeks to do it. And so if anybody's taking anything away from this, there can be cheating, but it cannot swing the presidential election. Okay, so Jason's going in.
1:27:07 David Sacks? Can I make a, so you mentioned, I think, fraud rates, credit card fraud rates, didn't you? I think that's one of the things you mentioned.
1:27:14 Jason Calacanis? Well, the same way, we don't worry about credit card fraud because there's a certain tiny amount of it in the system. Now, in this case, it would be a magnitude more than voter fraud. Voter fraud is extremely rare because there's no, there's no incentive to cheat that would be worth going to jail for. And that's why people generally don't cheat in these elections because the cost is so great.
1:27:39 Chamath Palihapitiya? I was the COO of a payments company. So let me, actually, sorry, that was Sax, sorry.
1:27:44 David Sacks? Let me explain how this actually works since I was founding COO of PayPal.
1:27:49 Jason Calacanis? To be clear, one in a million chance.
1:27:51 David Sacks? Credit card fraud. Can I just explain this to the audience?
1:27:54 Jason Calacanis? Sure.
1:27:54 David Sacks? Okay. You can create all the models you want, and you can create an expectation of future fraud based on the prior fraud rates. However, if you change your verification standards, that data is no longer relevant. If you create a loophole, big enough for a fraudster to drive a truck through, then if a fraudster figures that out, you could have infinite amounts of fraud. In other words, the historical fraud rate may not be predictive of future fraud if you change the verification standards. And I would say that the state of California Signing a bill that prohibits voter ID might be such a loophole. So I don't see how you can say with this kind of certainty and confidence that you're saying that no fraud could ever swing an election.
1:28:39 David Sacks? Of course fraud could swing an election.
1:28:41 Jason Calacanis? Couldn't swing the presidential election. It could swing a tiny election in a state or in a local place. Of course it could, because there's a very small number.
1:28:48 David Sacks? I'm not really interested in finding out. What I believe is that there are some.
1:28:51 Jason Calacanis? Yeah, no, I'm just talking about logic. How would you do 11,000 is the question. It would be incredibly difficult to do 11,000. Trump tried to swing 11,000.
1:29:00 David Sacks? If you create a big enough loophole, it doesn't sound that hard to me. It just doesn't matter a common sense. I don't think you can say that something is impossible. What we should do is simply tighten up these requirements.
1:29:09 Jason Calacanis? We're in agreement about that. I'm just talking about in this election.
1:29:12 David Sacks? Voter ID.
1:29:13 Jason Calacanis? In this election, you don't have to worry. Thirty-five out of 50 states.
1:29:16 David Sacks? So I hope that starting in January, you pass a national voter ID law.
1:29:19 Jason Calacanis? Hundred percent.
1:29:20 David Sacks? That's a minimum standard for states.
1:29:21 Jason Calacanis? Hundred percent, we all agree on that, yes. I'm just saying in this election, practically 35 out of 50 states have voter ID. And the ones that don't, the closest margin is 11,700.
1:29:31 David Sacks? This time next week.
1:29:33 Jason Calacanis? We'll see you. No, we'll see you on Tuesday night with Phil Hellmuth on a short leash for the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, your soul kind of science and the architect. I am the world's greatest moderator. Moderator. I'll see you next time.
1:29:51 David Sacks? Bye bye.
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