Hurricane fallout, AlphaFold, Google breakup, Trump surge, VC giveback, TikTok survey

(0:00) Bestie intros! (3:18) The science behind Hurricanes Helene and Milton (14:59) The economics of intensifying natural disasters (29:03) AlphaFold creators win Nobel Prize in Chemistry (35:17) The Jayter's Ball (38:53) Google antitrust update: DOJ is going for a breakup (53:32) VC giveback: CRV will return ~$275M of a $500M fund to LPs (1:03:44) New TikTok survey shows increased usage as a news source (1:15:26) Election update: Are polling problems causing a strategy shift for Kamala Harris? Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://allin.com/meetups https://youtube.com/@allin https://allin.com/tequila https://allin.com https://x.com/Ry_Bass/status/1844367980249178396 https://www.newsweek.com/hurricane-helene-update-economic-losses-damage-could-total-160-billion-1961240 https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/september-2024-enso-update-binge-watch https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3 https://x.com/vkhosla/status/1844166857655533811 https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/sfury.html https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03214-7 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/us-says-it-s-weighing-google-breakup-as-remedy-in-monopoly-case https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rtKjE02hAh_k/v0 https://x.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/crv-vc-fund-returning-money.html https://www.axios.com/2023/03/03/founders-fund-slashes-vc-peter-thiel https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-americans-regularly-get-news-on-tiktok-especially-young-adults https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/10/08/who-u-s-adults-follow-on-tiktok https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-pays-criminals-to-sow-mayhem-in-europe-warns-u-k-spy-chief-21ab960c https://x.com/iapolls2022/status/1844418916107341948 https://x.com/2waytvapp/status/1844803367740096811 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1829383729284067659

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one science, politics, technology and business podcast in the world for five years running. We're about to hit our fourth anniversary here. Episode 200 is coming up. And a bunch of lunatic fans are getting together. You can join them. All in.com slash meetups. Holy cow, we got the domain name All In. Fantastic. Go to allin.com slash meetups and hey, subscribe to our YouTube channel. We're going to do some sort of crazy event for the million subscriber party. We're like 300,000 away, gentlemen. This is nuts, huh? Can you imagine this thing made it to 200 episodes?

• 0:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow, we have allin.com. How much did we spend on this? This is great.

• 0:42Jason Calacanis?

  I negotiated it. I got it. It took me two years. And I got a sick deal on it. I don't even want to say. Because I, you know, I don't want to change it, but I think I got it. Don't say it. I'll just say you bleep it out. I got it for

• 0:59Jason Calacanis?

  or so. And that's a million dollar domain, just so we all know. Five letters in the dictionary. So good for branding.

• 1:06David Sacks?

  Good job, Jacob.

• 1:06Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you, my friend.

• 1:07David Sacks?

  Yeah, now we have allin.com slash tequila.

• 1:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, I love it.

• 1:10Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, exactly. And you can yum yum. I got you sax.com, didn't I? You have the domain name sax.com. I negotiated that for you.

• 1:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wow, we have all the way back to episode one. This is incredible.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the new website?

• 1:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, can I tell you, if I may?

• 1:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Allin.com.

• 1:29Jason Calacanis?

  Allin.com? That's our website?

• 1:31David Sacks?

  It's like this thing is real.

• 1:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's like a real thing. After four years, we got our together. This is great. Here we go. And I want to give a shout out to Podcast AI, one of our, remember those fake All In episodes? That became a startup Podcast AI and they built our website for us. So shout out to the team over there. All right, ladies, let's move on. And I am, of course, your executive producer for life and the moderator of the All In Podcast. And if I may, just a tiny plug. If you're a founder, we are having our ninth cohort of Founder University. It's a 12 week course I teach on starting companies.

• 2:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are you doing? What is this? Stop, stop.

• 2:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just giving a quick plug for Founder University. I need to get a plug in because I want to be found. Go to Arrow One and buy Super Gut Bars $3.99. You can pick them up this afternoon.

• 2:34Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of that, your people use me in an ad, Friedberg, so don't talk about plugs.

• 2:40David Sacks?

  A few weeks ago, when I shouted out that Glu AI was hiring engineers, we had like 100 applications just from that.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  From Glu AI, looking for engineers?

• 2:47David Sacks?

  One plug on the show, yeah.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  For Glu AI?

• 2:50David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Jason Calacanis?

  Right, that's awesome for Glu AI. And if you haven't tried Supergut, Friedberg's team literally made an advertisement with me talking about Supergut and didn't tell me.

• 3:01David Sacks?

  And we're still hiring, so.

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, there you have it. So go to founder.university to apply for my 12-week program.

• 3:07David Sacks?

  Check out Grok.

• 3:07David Friedberg?

  I'm running a GoFundMe.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  GoFundMe?

• 3:09David Friedberg?

  Yeah, go to GoFundMe/Freeburg.

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  For what, more Xanax to deal with your panic attacks? All right, let's get started, everybody. Enough of the shenanigans. Hurricane season is upon us as Friedberg have predicted Hurricane Milton made land fall on Wednesday evening along the west coast of Florida, as many of you know.

• 3:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's been downgraded. It started as a category five potentially, then a category three, and then it looks like it's a category one now, so I guess these things are quite random. Leading up to Milton, though, 6 million Floridians across 15 counties were ordered to evacuate. That's a lot of people moving out. And it was a pretty powerful storm. It ripped off the roof of the Tropicana Field in Tampa. So far, the death toll is at four, but it's expected to rise sadly. And just two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene swept through six southern states, killing over 220 people tragically, devastating western North Carolina, and entire towns were wiped out.

• 4:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oof, these are also, beyond the tragic human losses, are economically staggering in terms of the losses. AccuWeather estimating the total economic damage could be between 145 and 160 billion from Helen, and Moody estimates the property damage alone could be as high as 26 billion. Tons to get into here, FEMA, Starlink saving the day, tons of stuff. But Friedberg, back on episode 182, you predicted this would happen. What's causing all this? And let's just start with the science angle, I guess, before we get into the other political and insurance issues.

• 4:49David Friedberg?

  Well, I think if you'll remember when we talked about this a couple of months ago, the sea surface temperature was at kind of a record high in the Atlantic. And warm ocean temperatures drive moist air up that evaporates. The warmer the air, the faster the evaporation, and that starts to cause the movement of the air, which drives ultimately the hurricane, and then the hurricane sucks up more warm, moist air from the ocean, and it creates a feedback loop. So the more energy you have in the ocean, the more likely you are to accelerate wind forces in storms. And that's why you get these massive hurricanes that suddenly form seemingly overnight and

• 5:29David Friedberg?

  go, like in the case of Helene, that hurricane went from a Cat 2 to a Cat 4 or a Cat 5 in like 48 hours because of the energy that's sort of. And 90%, here's an interesting stat, 90% of the energy that we get from the sun is absorbed and stored in our oceans. The other kind of fact that's playing into this, if you pull up that Nature article, and this is something that I think you guys may remember we talked about. So this was an article that came out, a paper, a science paper that came out a couple of months ago. And in this paper, the scientists identified that removing sulfur dioxide from cargo ships that travel across the oceans is actually causing accelerated warming in the oceans.

• 6:13David Friedberg?

  And the reason is that the sulfur dioxide forms cloud formations as they travel across the oceans. And those cloud formations reflect sunlight. And in the absence of those cloud formations, that sunlight makes its way into the ocean, and you get more ocean warming. And by their estimation, removing sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and that's the reason it's been pushed to be removed, and they started removing it in 2020, 2021, from cargo vessels, by removing sulfur dioxide, we are now going to see a doubling of the rate of warming of the oceans in the 2020s and going forward.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  Let me pause there for a second, just to make sure people understand what you're saying. Emissions from cargo ships block sunlight, which then, of course, reduces the heat absorbed by the oceans. And so we're now choosing between pollution of the air or overheating of the oceans. Am I correct in summarizing that?

• 7:10David Friedberg?

  That's roughly it. And

• 7:13David Sacks?

  What is the pollution again? Sorry, I just don't understand.

• 7:16David Friedberg?

  It's emissions.

• 7:17David Sacks?

  Sulfur dioxide.

• 7:17David Friedberg?

  Sulfur dioxide. Yeah, that goes into the fuel of cargo vessels. And a couple of years ago, they started to implement these mandates that sulfur dioxide no longer be used in the fuel. As a result, when sulfur dioxide is emitted from these vessels, it goes into the atmosphere. And it actually triggers cloud formation. So now you have these clouds that are forming and Nick's gonna pull up this image right now. Yeah, here you can see that. So all of these tracts are these cargo vessels moving across the ocean. And as they move across the ocean, they create cloud cover. That cloud cover actually reduces the warming in the ocean because it reflects sunlight. So now that sunlight energy gets absorbed into the ocean.

• 7:56David Friedberg?

  So this is another driving force that some people are now speculating may be accelerating the warming of the oceans that we're seeing, which drives these extreme storm and hurricane events. And so this becomes a more frequent event. Now, a lot of people also

• 8:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So sorry, can I ask you a question? Does that mean that we're mean reverting? Meaning, if we improve the quality of the fuel source that are used in shipping, doesn't that then mean that we're reverting back to what would have happened in the absence of these dirty fuel sources?

• 8:27David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so in addition.

• 8:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I'm asking, I'm asking you the question. Is that true or not?

• 8:33David Friedberg?

  Um, so yes, we are no longer reflecting as much sunlight. And so for several decades.

• 8:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We had bad fuel sources.

• 8:41David Friedberg?

  We had artificial cooling.

• 8:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We had, we had an artificial cooling and now we take, but that's counter to the narrative of what we all think is happening.

• 8:50David Friedberg?

  Oh, well, the argument is that we've actually been warming the atmosphere, which we have been. We can see the data that shows that everywhere all over the earth, not just about sunlight coming in on the oceans and not just ocean warming. But the, the atmosphere is warming, the planet is warming. And so this is by, by blocking the sunlight above the oceans, we were artificially dampening that effect. And we were reducing the amount of heat energy that was getting into the oceans. So now by taking that away, we're seeing the heat energy in the oceans accelerate. And now the oceans are getting much, much warmer.

• 9:21David Sacks?

  Right. So the pollution was good?

• 9:23Jason Calacanis?

  That's the paradox here is that it was creating a blocker for sunlight. And to your point, Chamath, exactly like, shouldn't we just be going back to what was normal, but at the same time, in the same system, we had heated things up. So this is a multi-factor system that we're dealing with, Friedberg. And I guess the takeaway from all of this is that we got to be really careful with what we do with the environment, right?

• 9:47David Friedberg?

  Well, I mean, let's talk about economics, right? So what, how much real estate do you guys think is on the Florida coastline? What's the real estate value?

• 9:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sorry, Friedberg, can you just anchor this? Like, was it that it was supposed to be a category five and now it's a category three when it hit land?

• 10:03David Friedberg?

  Right. So what happens typically when storms hit land is they no longer have that hot ocean pumping energy back into the storm that keeps the feedback loop going. So the storm cycle starts to break down. All hurricanes, when they hit land, they start to break apart. And so the category which measures the wind speed actually reduces. This is just a natural thing that happens. But this was a category five hurricane when it made landfall. I believe it was category four. So, you know, it was a massive hurricane as an approach.

• 10:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should not dismiss it because my understanding was Helen was cat four when it like hit North Carolina. But I read yesterday that-

• 10:42David Friedberg?

  What happened, yeah, what happened with Helen was it was-

• 10:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That Milton is cat three when it hit Tampa or something. Is that not right?

• 10:48David Friedberg?

  Yeah, so that's right. But what happened when Helen hit North Carolina, it was not a cat four. What happened is as that storm moved inland, it hit the mountains and the first mountains it hit are on western North Carolina. That area is elevated. There's mountains there. So when a heavy, hot storm runs into cold mountains, all the moisture dumps out. It's like it runs into it and suddenly everything precipitates out of that storm. And that's why some parts of western North Carolina got like 18, some people measured as high as 30 inches of rainfall in a couple of hours. So this insane dumping happens when that hot air hits cold, hits a cold region and suddenly everything, all that warm moisture precipitates out and dumps to the ground. So it ran into a mountain. It's effectively why everything fell out in North Carolina.

• 11:33David Sacks?

  Wait, so you're saying that it wasn't Democrats who basically-

• 11:37David Friedberg?

  Right. I blame Putin. Who did it, Sax?

• 11:42David Sacks?

  I thought Nancy Pelosi cast a spell or something and.

• 11:45David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Well, isn't there a lot of geoengineering conspiracy theories going on in your cohort? I mean, what's your?

• 11:51David Sacks?

  I don't think so, but Vinod wants us to be very clear that we need to, we need to stop all this disinformation that somehow Democrats were behind that storm.

• 12:01David Friedberg?

  Well, there are a lot of.

• 12:01David Sacks?

  We can assure everyone that it was just precipitation.

• 12:03David Friedberg?

  There's a lot of theory online that there's a ton of, um, laser engineering being run by government agencies to drive these storms.

• 12:10David Sacks?

  People aren't taking that seriously.

• 12:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, the, the origin of this though, Free Bird, is people have done experiments for decades on trying to control the weather or, you know, alter the weather and, and they're doing that in the Middle East by seeding clouds and creating more rain. We saw that with the Dubai floods. They said that that might've been caused by over seeding of clouds, uh, which they're doing there. And then there have been experiments just to, you know, for the crazy laser people conspiracy there, it's, there is Sun X. There actually have been experiments with lasers, you know, being shot into hurricanes and storms, correct?

• 12:47David Friedberg?

  Are you Alex Jones? Is that what we're doing?

• 12:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, I'm not saying.

• 12:50David Friedberg?

  We're doing the Alex Jones episode.

• 12:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just saying that's the origin of where people are kind of building on this. There have been many geo.

• 12:55David Friedberg?

  Okay. So, so let's just talk about the hurricane, the amount of.

• 12:58Jason Calacanis?

  I'm teeing it up for you to debunk is what I'm doing here. Yeah.

• 13:01David Friedberg?

  Putting particulates in clouds to accelerate precipitation is, I mean, we've done that for a hundred years. You know, you can do, you can increase the precipitation rate when there's already clouds that have formed. But that has nothing to do with creating 200 mile an hour wind speed. That requires an extraordinary amount of energy. All of this energy, the, the oceans are like giant batteries. And when a hurricane gets going, that battery is accelerating the hurricane and the hurricane sucks up more power from the battery. And it creates this incredibly dynamical system. There is no human created energy system that can force, form a hurricane. A hurricane is an extraordinarily powerful natural phenomenon that arises from the amount of energy that can come out of

• 13:41David Friedberg?

  very, very, very hot oceans, relatively speaking. So, you know, that's really where these hurricanes are coming from. Now they're going to be more frequent if the ocean temperatures remain elevated as they seem to be and continue to be elevated. And this can be a function of generally the temperatures warming on earth. Generally the removal of sulfur dioxide, generally these El Niño, La Niña cycles. There's a lot of factors, but it seems to be the case that we are having a very significant trend of continuously warmer oceans. And those continuously warmer oceans means that we're going to have what used to be called a 1 in 500 year storm, which is what Asheville is being termed at, 1 in 500 year. These sorts of storm events can happen every couple of years. And we're now looking at 1 in 100 year events happening every 2 to 3 years

• 14:25David Friedberg?

  in the United States with the hurricane activity that we've been seeing.

• 14:28Jason Calacanis?

  I think a lot of the conspiracy theories are built on actual experiments that happen. This one, Project Storm Fury, I'm sure you know about, was to try to modify hurricanes by putting in some chemicals that would freeze them and dull them. So they're kind of building on this.

• 14:44David Friedberg?

  Break it apart.

• 14:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, break it apart. So, you know, there have been experiments here with altering weather, altering hurricanes, but that doesn't mean it's Putin, Pelosi, or, you know, the Illuminati.

• 14:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Okay, so let's get back to brass tacks. So...

• 14:58David Friedberg?

  Well, let's talk about the economics. So there's 500 billion to a trillion dollars of real estate value on the Florida coastline. And what used to be a 1 in 100 year event, the average Florida homeowner historically has been paying about 1% of the real estate value in insurance. So now, if your real estate is likely to be wiped out 1 out of every 20 years, instead of 1 out of every 500 years, the cost of insurance gets to the point that it is untenable for most people to pay for their insurance. Florida has a state-backed reinsurance provider called the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund. And this fund issues debt to meet its coverage demands because it reinsures insurance companies in order to incentivize them to come into the state and underwrite homeowners' insurance.

• 15:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You should explain the loop here, which is, you go and get a mortgage, the bank says, "You need to get insurance if I'm going to lend you the money to buy the home." So then, a bunch of insurers need to decide that they're willing to underwrite that area. And then when they give you that insurance, they then want to lay that risk off and go to reinsure. Is that the cycle?

• 16:01David Friedberg?

  That's right. And what's happening is they would normally underwrite that risk. They would say, "This is going to cost, you're going to lose the value of your home every 100 years or every 200 years." But now, the models are showing, because of the frequency of these sorts of hurricane events and the severity of the hurricane events, that maybe you'll lose the value of your home once every 20 years or once every 30 years. And no consumer is going to be willing or able to pay that much for the insurance on their home. So the state, over the last several years, has had to step in and effectively subsidize the insurance. And now, the state reinsurance vehicle only has statutory liability maximum of $17 billion in a single hurricane season.

• 16:43David Friedberg?

  Now, I think they got lucky with Milton today, but some were estimating that the Milton losses were going to be in excess of $100 billion, bigger than Katrina. It's likely, as of this morning, the reinsurance websites are all saying it's probably a $40 to $50 billion loss event, which still exceeds the state's reinsurance capacity. So you can kind of think about Florida state's reinsurance thing being effectively bankrupt. It doesn't really have the capacity to underwrite the insurance anymore. So the real question for everyone is, is the federal government going to have to step in and start to support the price of homes? Because if they don't-

• 17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, it's a terrible precedent to set, because if you do it for Florida, then you'll have to do it in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi-

• 17:23David Friedberg?

  And California with wild fires-

• 17:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And Arizona, and Texas. There's going to be no way to create a clear demarcation of who gets a bailout and who doesn't, which will mean that everybody will get a bailout or nobody gets a bailout.

• 17:36David Friedberg?

  That's right.

• 17:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And if everybody gets a bailout, and if you think about how systematically unpredictable, at least in the southern states, the weather is, you're going to be talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, probably.

• 17:48David Friedberg?

  The total value of all mortgages and homeowner mortgages in Florida is $454 billion. And those people typically have, you know, a debt to equity ratio probably on the 50 to 80% range. So if the value of your home dips by 25% because everyone starts selling their homes, leaving Florida, or they can't get insurance, then the people that live in Florida, most of them have their net worth tied up in their home, are going to see their personal net worth wiped out or cut in half. So it's not just an economic problem, it's a social problem, that now there are so many people that have put their entire net worth into their home, the value of their home is written to a point that it no longer makes sense, given the frequency at which homes are going to get destroyed in-

• 18:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's probably the reason why they'll have to do it, because they'll-

• 18:30David Friedberg?

  Exactly.

• 18:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then that calculation will have to happen for every single homeowner in every single state at- Where this is a, this is an issue.

• 18:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 18:38David Sacks?

  Wait, Friedberg, are you saying the entire Florida coastline is no longer economically viable?

• 18:43David Friedberg?

  No, it's totally viable. It's just the question is, what are you willing to?

• 18:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  At what price?

• 18:47David Friedberg?

  At what price? Will you pay 5% of your home value for insurance every year? You know, will you pay 2%, 3%?

• 18:54David Sacks?

  If the expected life of a house is 20 years, then no, that's not, that's not viable.

• 19:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It becomes very, very untenable.

• 19:02David Friedberg?

  Well, it used to be one in 500 year. Now it's probably one in 15, right?

• 19:05David Sacks?

  Does this apply to the entire coastline or just parts of it?

• 19:08David Friedberg?

  Well, I mean, you saw that the range at which these events can happen is all over the place. And the, and the challenge is the events are getting more significant

• 19:17David Friedberg?

  because of this warm ocean weather that we see, this warm ocean temperature.

• 19:20Jason Calacanis?

  And the only good news, Friedberg, is that now people are building the first couple of floors in high rises in Miami and homes on stilts with concrete and with resistant, you know, saltwater resistant materials. So there is a counter to this. So we might be looking at-

• 19:36David Friedberg?

  An investment in climate resilience. That's right.

• 19:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So it might actually be an opportunity to upgrade all these homes to resistant ones using another set of technologies. But the bailout is really interesting too, Sax, because Florence got a lot of electoral college votes, doesn't it? Like, I hate to bring this back to politics, but you know, promising people bailouts is how these politicians seem to be getting votes these days.

• 20:02David Sacks?

  Yeah, but is anyone talking about a federal bailout? I mean, is that, this is something you're predicting.

• 20:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think what Friedberg is saying is that there's a, there's a pretty obvious parade of parables here where the question will have to be answered one way or the other. Because if you only have a $17 billion reinsurance fund and there's 50 billion of damage, somebody's going to have to come in and cover the gap. And if it's the insurance companies, expect your insurance premiums to double or triple.

• 20:27David Friedberg?

  That's right. And that's what happened in California. And by the way, State Farm left a lot of California.

• 20:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is what I was gonna say. Most of these big insurance companies have already done the calculus to realize that these regions are no longer profitable enough to justify the downside risk.

• 20:41David Friedberg?

  Hundred percent.

• 20:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bigger problem. So then the ones that are left are insolvent reinsurers or insurers that are just funding short-term ARBs because they know that the odds are they're going to get wiped out. So they'll price gouge effectively. So, you know, a different example is that here where I live in Menlo Park, we're not in a floodplain. We're not in a fire region, none of that stuff. But in order for us to get home insurance, you have to now go through a risk assessment. And in our specific case, we were like, hey, what should we do with our roof? And they were like, you gotta take the roof off if you want home insurance. We're like, well, home insurance is probably a good thing to have. Was it a wood shake roof on your house? It was a beaut- you saw our house. It's a beautiful wood shake roof and we had to remove it. And the two choices were a

• 21:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  three hundred and fifty thousand dollar like Composite materials, yeah. Or, or like seventy K for composite. And it's like, this is insane. And the cost of insurance was just egregious in the absence of going in one. Anyways, we ended up getting the

• 21:42David Friedberg?

  For most homeowners, when the cost of insurance gets to a certain threshold, you don't have budget for it. You can't afford it. And so that's a lot of why the insurers leave. They'll underwrite anything at any price, but they just know that most consumers can't afford it. Here's some other interesting statistics, related but unrelated. In the early nineteen hundreds, the city of Phoenix, Arizona averaged five days a year of temperatures of a hundred and ten degrees or warmer. By the twenty teens, Phoenix averaged during the twenty teens, twenty seven days a year where the temperature was one ten or higher. Since twenty twenty one, Phoenix averaged

• 22:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hundred plus days.

• 22:15David Friedberg?

  Forty-two days. And in twenty twenty four, it's been seventy days so far this year that the temperature is over a hundred and ten. So this is affecting. And so there's, there's increased risks in California with wildfires, increased risk with hurricanes. There are a lot of these factors and I have friends that work in reinsurance and in the insurance markets.

• 22:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Even, even if you don't get affected by a wildfire or disaster, when that, that article was in the Wall Street Journal, it, I think it said that the, the number of average days above a hundred was like a hundred something.

• 22:43David Friedberg?

  Yes, that's right.

• 22:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the profile, they profiled this retired woman who was an insurance adjuster or something. And the whole point of the article was not that her her house was destroyed or at risk, but the cost of electricity has gone just absolutely sky high.

• 22:57David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Even with solar panels, even with storage, you need to basically lean on the grid. And the grid now just charges you an exorbitant amount of money. And so these these folks were paying thousands of dollars a year. So if you imagine the the trifecta, you have all of this climate risk that could destroy your home. You're paying an enormous premium for home insurance, and then you're paying an enormous premium for electricity from the mainline power utilities. It's it's not sustainable.

• 23:26David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  And and just for the background, FEMA manages something called the NFIP, National Flood Insurance Plan. And it's historically about 50% cheaper than private flood insurance. They have 4.7 million active policies, providing 1.3 trillion in coverage. But they instituted a new risk assessment system, and that caused rates to increase. And yeah, it's because of all this, the policies have decreased over the last couple of years, meaning less people have flood insurance at the same time that these things are getting worse. And so, yeah, this is a really tough issue. I wonder if this is an opportunity, Chama.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about historically how insurance worked, it worked in communities where people would help each other out to barn-raising kind of events when somebody had a problem. So if we just put on our entrepreneurial hats here, if you look at the cost of insurance, if a hundred different people bundled the cost of their homes together, put money into some sort of platform like an Uber Airbnb marketplace, and there was some management structure here of self-insurance, because I know some people are doing self-insurance for healthcare at their companies for this kind of thing. Do you think there's going to be a new business opportunity here?

• 24:45David Friedberg?

  That's called, that exists, Jason. It's called a mutual. And those are like a good chunk of the industry are mutuals, where it's the shareholders are the members and they all share the risk and the ownership.

• 24:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Those things, those things work because you have broad geographic coverage. If you had to go just into Malibu and Self-insure, the rates would literally be greater than the value of the home.

• 25:07David Friedberg?

  Right, no one would pay into it. So actually, if you do proper underwriting, what's happened in the last couple of years is all the reinsurance companies and all the insurance companies have had to re-underwrite the rates that they charge for insurance. Because the frequency of a disaster has gone up. And the new price that they should be charging is so high, it doesn't matter how the capital structure is set up. It's simply, there's, there's one big event that's going to cause a big wipeout for a large number.

• 25:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My personal belief is I think that the, the real estate markets in some of these places are meaningfully mispriced. And specifically what I mean is that they're massively overpriced.

• 25:43David Friedberg?

  That's right.

• 25:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because I think when you actually account for the climate damage and the long-term financial stability of the insurers and the reinsurers. I don't think that many of the markets that have seen these crazy sky-high prices, I'll name two to be specific, West Palm Beach and Malibu. So both ends of the coasts. These things just don't make sense. And I think people view these things as investments, but on the West Coast, when you deal with things like soil erosion and other things, I think it's a, there's, it's a calamity waiting to happen. And I think on the East Coast, when you factor in the extreme weather conditions, even Jason, your comment about rebuilding these homes

• 26:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  in a more foolproof way doesn't solve it because you won't be able to rebuild the entire state. There's a lot of people that just can't afford it. There's a lot of folks that will not have adequate coverage. So I just think these are disasters waiting to happen, unfortunately.

• 26:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's, and Sax, there's a movement right now. A lot of people, even of means, are renting their homes. And so in the real estate market, what are your thoughts on that? Just.

• 26:57Jason Calacanis?

  Renting versus buying now becoming like a something that, you know, people in the, in the top half of homeowners or potential homeowners are now electing to not own their home and rent. Have you been monitoring that?

• 27:10David Sacks?

  Honestly, I hadn't heard that. I mean, the, the trend that I thought was happening was say you had these big funds, like BlackRock or whatever, buying up huge numbers of homes and then running them to

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  Low end homes, yeah.

• 27:22David Sacks?

  Low end or medium, you know, to families. I thought that's what was going on. I hadn't heard that at the high end of the range that people were running.

• 27:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you think about it, like there's, there seems to be a cap when you have a $10 million home of what you can possibly rent it for. And it's, it's the, the, the prices are now making more sense to keep, more sense to keep your money in the market or in other places and then rent. I'm just hearing that over and over again.

• 27:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Friedberg, are you, are you long real estate in Florida or coastal California if you could? Or do you treat them differently?

• 27:52David Friedberg?

  I think they're different, but Florida is like, I, I mean, I don't know how you do the math on, I, I just don't know what you do on a trillion dollars of real estate value with half a trillion of mortgages. When you have real exposure on loss more frequently than one in a hundred years, they're, to your point, they need to be repriced. And how do you reprice those homes in the significant level that they need to be repriced without causing massive economic and social consequence? That's what's, that's what's kind of, I think, challenging me in thinking about what's the path here.

• 28:26David Sacks?

  So it was a, it was a good thing that I sold my Miami place.

• 28:29Jason Calacanis?

  Once again, Sax makes a great trade. Pretty awesome. Well done Sax. You top ticked it again. Well done Sax. Just like beep.

• 28:40David Sacks?

  I really love, I love that house. It's on the

• 28:43Jason Calacanis?

  You love that house. Where do you think I stayed when I was in town? You're so selfish. I lost the, I lost the place to stay. I mean, the yacht access alone, being able to get out on the bay and get on a boat, the ski doos, all this great stuff. All right. Let's, uh, let's keep the Friedberg train going here. Huge news. Alpha Foil creators just won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Two members of Google's DeepMind AI research team, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, received this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

• 29:17Jason Calacanis?

  They both work for Google's DeepMind, as you know. And Friedberg, again, all in, getting there first, explained what AlphaFold was back on episode 14 in December of 2020. That was almost four years ago. Friedberg, maybe you could explain.

• 29:34David Friedberg?

  Did we predict that they would win the Nobel Prize at the time?

• 29:37Jason Calacanis?

  I believe you did. We'll go check the receipts using the podcast AI search engine.

• 29:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was, it became, it became much more likely that they would win the Nobel after they won the breakthrough prize. I mean, just to, just to point this out, but.

• 29:50David Friedberg?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:50Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out Yuri Milman.

• 29:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Shout out Yuri and Julia.

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

  And Julia.

• 29:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because when those guys won that award for 2023, and you, you heard the extent of what they've done, it was almost like obvious that they were going to win Nobel after the fact. So I think the really interesting thing is actually, in this community, I think the breakthrough prize is actually meaningfully more relevant and a positive directional indicator to breakthrough science.

• 30:18Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's kind of like winning Sundance or Cannes. You win the Palme d'Or, you become a favorite to win at the Oscars, right, in the Academy Award. So that's actually interesting. The regional or more industry centric award could lead to the next one. So Friedberg, just explain to us why this is so important.

• 30:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think it's much more rigorous than the Nobel. I think the Nobel can be a little bit game, I think.

• 30:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. What do you think, Friedberg? Explain to the audience why this is important and what's transpired since we talked about it four years ago.

• 30:49David Friedberg?

  There's been a long challenge in biochemistry on understanding or predicting or visualizing the three dimensional structure of, of proteins. Because remember, proteins are produced by long chains of amino acids, and those amino acids are kind of create like a bead, beaded necklace, and then the, the whole necklace collapses on itself in a very specific way. And that three dimensional molecule, that big chunky protein, does something structurally, physically. And so trying to understand the shape of a protein is really hard. I mean, we've used kind of X-ray imaging systems to try and identify it and try to build models to identify how does that quote protein folding work? How

• 31:32David Friedberg?

  do those amino acids collapse on each other to create that three dimensional construct? And if, I don't know if you guys remember, in the early 2000s, there was a Stanford Folding at Home Distributed Computing Project. Do you guys remember this?

• 31:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It would use people's machines and extra CPU like the study at home project to

• 31:49David Friedberg?

  Precisely, yeah, exactly right, yeah. So it's like it ran on the background of your computer, it used your CPU cycles when you weren't using your computer. And it tried to model protein folding. And so this has been a problem that folks have tried to tackle with compute for decades. To figure out the 3D structure, this is so important because if we can identify the 3D structure of proteins. And we can predict them from the amino acid sequence. We can print out a sequence of amino acids to make a protein that does a specific thing for us. And that unlocks this ability for humans to create biomolecules that can do everything from. Binding cancer to breaking apart pollutants and plastics. To, you know, creating entirely new molecules.

• 32:30David Friedberg?

  To running in some cases like what David Baker did at University of Washington, he shared the Nobel Prize. Creating micro motors, mini motors from proteins that he designed on a computer. And so this becomes, I think, this great like big holy grail in biochemistry. And the Alpha Fold project at DeepMind inside of Google solved this problem. And by the way, since then, they've come out with Alpha Fold 3.

• 32:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 32:53David Friedberg?

  They've launched a drug discovery company called Isomorphic Labs where they're. Basically predicting molecules that will do specific things for a target indication. And then they use the Alpha Fold models to actually design and develop those molecules. And there have been literally dozens of companies that have been started since DeepMind was published. And probably several billion dollars of capital that's gone into companies. That are creating new drugs, creating new industrial biotech applications. Using this protein modeling capability that was unleashed with DeepMind. A number of years ago, so it really has transformed the industry. It'll be a couple of years before we see it transform the world, but it's, it's, it's an exciting kind of thing, yeah.

• 33:32Jason Calacanis?

  Not to virtue signal here, but those are plus size proteins now, Free Bird. They don't like being called chunky, you know, plus size proteins.

• 33:39David Friedberg?

  Plus size proteins.

• 33:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. One, one really difficult technical question for your free bird. Is there any way for you to take this amazing breakthrough and make Sacks interested in it? Is there any possible vector here for it to relate to Sacks and get him off his BlackBerry right now? BlackBerry. I think he's playing chess with T O and J D Vance is watching them play chess. I think that's what's going on right now. It's really hard. I mean, the poor audience here is watching Saks looking down. All right, let's keep this train moving here. Enough of the shenanigans.

• 34:13David Friedberg?

  Anyway, congrats to the teams, the very teams that won.

• 34:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Congrats to Demis and Jumper.

• 34:16David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's just great.

• 34:18David Friedberg?

  And David Baker, the Baker Lab and University of Washington.

• 34:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And David Baker, also a breakthrough prize winner.

• 34:23David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What's interesting to me is like these two Nobels, these guys, but also Geoffrey Hinton's. You know, you're really seeing now the convergence of the hard sciences and computer science.

• 34:36David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 34:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  In a really meaningful way. And I think that that's so interesting and cool.

• 34:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think in the group chat, Chamath, you had an interesting, hey, maybe there should be a computer science award for, you know, a Nobel computer science award. And

• 34:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I actually think it's the opposite now, which is that it's amazing to see folks using computers

• 34:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  to improve our understanding of the natural sciences. And I think that that's a really great place to be. So what Demis and John and David are doing in the life science is amazing. What Geoffrey Hinton, you know, did, you know, 30 and 40 years ago and 20 years ago in terms of training deep neural, that's also really amazing.

• 35:16Jason Calacanis?

  In related news.

• 35:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All computer based.

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, all computer based. And in related news, Benioff just nominated himself for excellence in CRM management. So congratulations to Benioff on nominating himself for a Nobel.

• 35:28David Friedberg?

  What is that comment?

• 35:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's just a stray.

• 35:29David Sacks?

  Why are you attacking Benioff?

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's just a stray. The audience loves.

• 35:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What did he do wrong?

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's just a joke. It's a joke. They're just jokes.

• 35:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you not learned anything to apologize?

• 35:41David Friedberg?

  To people that attack you.

• 35:42Jason Calacanis?

  It's not an attack. It's a joke.

• 35:44David Friedberg?

  Benioff has done so much for philanthropy. Just ask him if you.

• 35:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dude, he's doing the best he can. He's doing a great job.

• 35:52Jason Calacanis?

  This is how I got in trouble with Paul.

• 35:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are you doing?

• 35:54Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Can you people have a sense of humor about yourselves?

• 35:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but it's not even, it's not even funny if you had said something else.

• 36:01Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, okay, give me a, give me a funnier Nobel. Go ahead.

• 36:04David Friedberg?

  Benioff runs a 300 billion market cap.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 36:08David Sacks?

  He's chomping at the bits to come back on the pod and explain why AI is not going to disrupt SaaS.

• 36:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Really?

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, we see he wants to be back on the pod.

• 36:15David Sacks?

  He's texting me. He wants to come on.

• 36:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We'll check in. We'll check in in $100 billion.

• 36:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He had his chance. That chance is closed.

• 36:24Jason Calacanis?

  He shot his shot and it did not land.

• 36:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That door was closed when he insulted our guests about not being able to afford the Disney.

• 36:30Jason Calacanis?

  When he called you all in people wars.

• 36:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God. Now you're piling on.

• 36:36Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody coming to Dreamforce 2025? Okay, let's move on.

• 36:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anyways, leave Benny off alone.

• 36:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, uh, leave Brittany alone. That famous meme, leave Benny off alone.

• 36:49David Sacks?

  Say, how many new enemies do you want to create?

• 36:52Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just, they're just jokes, people. They're just jokes.

• 36:56David Sacks?

  This one, you thought he was running out of feuds, you know?

• 36:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not in a feud with anybody. I'm making stupid jokes. The reason people tune in is because you laugh and learn.

• 37:06David Sacks?

  Did you guys see that, that tweet? That, uh, somebody suggested throwing a conference with all of J Cal's haters?

• 37:13Jason Calacanis?

  Jason Con.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  J Con?

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  Jaders, Jaders convention.

• 37:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What is it called? Jaders?

• 37:22Jason Calacanis?

  Jaders, yeah.

• 37:22David Sacks?

  J haters.

• 37:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Jason haters, Jaders, yeah. I'd like to shout out my Jaders. They're just jokes, folks. I love you, Mark. I'm Penny off. Uh, come on the pod, Zach.

• 37:35David Sacks?

  I think somebody could launch a successful summit just doing that. It's like, it's like a ready-made audience. And they're clearly passionate. They're clearly passionate.

• 37:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All the Y C founders will be there.

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  Keynote, day one, Palmer Lucky. Keynote, day two, David Sacks.

• 37:54David Sacks?

  I think it would rival the All In Summit in terms of the passion of the fans.

• 37:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  All three of us would show up. J Cal would be so devastated if keynote was.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  Are you kidding me? I think it's hilarious.

• 38:05David Sacks?

  I have to keynote.

• 38:07Jason Calacanis?

  Benny off. I like Benny off. I don't, I'm trying to make enemies for Benny off. He's just gotta have a sense of humor.

• 38:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My gosh.

• 38:15Jason Calacanis?

  Megan Kelly.

• 38:18Jason Calacanis?

  Megan Kelly and Palmer Lucky.

• 38:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, does Zuck hate you too? Why does Zuck hate you?

• 38:22David Sacks?

  Oh my God, J Cal was just so.

• 38:24Jason Calacanis?

  I was brutal to Zuck in the early days.

• 38:26David Sacks?

  Brutal, yeah.

• 38:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why?

• 38:27Jason Calacanis?

  Well, he just, anyway, we'll get to it later.

• 38:29David Sacks?

  But you're right. Like, you know, throwing a conference for J haters would just be, that's like a ready-made.

• 38:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Jaders.

• 38:35David Sacks?

  That is an underserved and passionate demographic.

• 38:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It would be bigger than Ted's.

• 38:39Jason Calacanis?

  Passionate demographic. Just, just look at Sacks's replies.

• 38:43David Friedberg?

  Community with shared values.

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, man, if I can get 25% of those ticket sales, I'm in. Let's go. All right, let's keep the train moving here. We have an update on the DOJ's antitrust suit with Google. Looks like they're going for the breakup as Chamath predicted. You remember the Bloomberg report back in August, we covered it in episode 192. Google is found liable for maintaining a monopoly in search and digital ads. Now the DOJ is working on the remedy, right? Okay, they're guilty, so now comes time for the remedy. And the DOJ is, quote, this is from Bloomberg, "considering asking a federal judge to force Google to sell off parts of its business."

• 39:27Jason Calacanis?

  And according to this filing, the DOJ is specifically considering "structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Google Play, that's the app store on Android, and Android itself to advantage Google." Search. Thirty-two page document released by the DOJ lays out several options, and we'll go through them and talk about them here. The obvious one, terminating Google's exclusive agreements with hardware companies like Apple, they're the default search engine there for 30 or 40 billion a year, Samsung, that's a layup. Separating Chrome and Android, my God, that would be drastic ripping that out of the Google ecosystem, prohibiting certain kinds of data tracking, that's a layup as well.

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  Or other behavioral and structural changes for the company. I'm going to pause there, Friedberg, and get your thoughts on this as a former Googler, and you interviewed Sergey at the summit, but I don't think we talked to Sergey about this, because obviously he would not be able to talk about it. So what are your thoughts here on a potential remedy?

• 40:27David Friedberg?

  I think we've talked about this. I mean, look, I've shared in the past my belief that companies that are big, that have excess capital, that then invest that excess capital in R and D can be a net benefit for all of us. Look at Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a monopoly on, through their association with. AT&T with developing radar, microwave, the transistor, integrated circuitry, information theory, everything that is the basis of the internet, computing, even nuclear technology and so on. It's because they had this extraordinary capital flow from the scale of the business and they were able to invest in R&D.

• 41:09David Friedberg?

  Similarly, Google acquired and invested for many, many years in DeepMind. And we just talked about how Demis and team won the Nobel Prize for the work that they did. And they, by the way, published the protein structure for 200 million proteins for free out of that service. I just want to zoom out for a minute and talk about the fact that this isn't about, you know, whether Google has a monopoly in search that prohibits competition or in ads that prohibits competition, but are, do, is it really worth penalizing any company that's big? Particularly, do we lose the benefit of those big companies investing in technology that pushes us forward? Google also invested in Waymo for years and

• 41:50David Friedberg?

  years and years, which arguably spurned and drove investment from many other companies in self-driving technology. And if Google hadn't done that, would self-driving have taken off the way it did? I don't know. Same with Kitty Hawk and Larry's investment in eVTOLs and that spawned a lot of eVTOL investing. And similarly, if you think about Amazon and their investment in AWS where they were burning cash for many years, that turned out to spawn arguably a lot of interest and investment in cloud. And so I don't think that these big companies are bad just because they're big. I think we should take apart the monopolistic antitrust actions and behaviors that they take and then identify ways to remedy those behaviors versus just saying anyone or anything that's

• 42:34David Friedberg?

  big should be taken apart because there is a tremendous benefit to be gained from the R&D dollars that they all put into things that, you know, move the whole industry forward. And I think that leadership's important and needed. Otherwise, if you've got a bunch of startups that are trying to get $10 million checks from VCs, I'm not sure they're going to build a Waymo and I'm not sure they're going to build Amazon cloud and I'm not sure they're going to build a DeepMind, you know, protein folding company and publish it for free. So I don't know. That's just my point of view.

• 43:01Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, what's the likely outcome here?

• 43:02David Friedberg?

  How we should think about this stuff.

• 43:03Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, you kind of know this one. Pretty good with these predictions. Tell us, we'll be sitting here five years from now, what will have occurred?

• 43:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unfortunately, not what Friedberg just said. It'll be the opposite. There'll be some form of forced remedy. I'm sympathetic to Friedberg's argument. I don't think that it's really a good thing in the end, because I do think there are some incredible examples of Google specifically reinvesting in a way that's really added value in the world. I think the problem, though, is that

• 43:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the technology innovation cycle has gotten too elongated. So you're not seeing

• 43:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  creative destruction be the natural force that keeps all of these companies in their own swim lanes. And so they are allowed to become too amorphous and too profitable. And I think it becomes an obvious target for politicians.

• 44:03Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's a really good observation there about the timeline of this, because if you look at this, I have started now, and I know many people are starting their search journey on Claude and ChatGPT every day. I'm doing 30, 40, 50 queries and follow-ups per day. I force my entire team to do that as well. And so just as there's an actual viable competitor to Google, this action has reached, I don't know, the halfway mark. This is going to wind up being completely meaningless, Sax, if ChatGPT does build a viable competitor or co-exister that siphons off search. Am I wrong here?

• 44:47David Sacks?

  Well, it is ironic that frequently the government takes actions on these monopolies at precisely the moment they're subject to the greatest disruption.

• 44:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Totally.

• 44:56David Sacks?

  The same thing happened with Microsoft in a way. But it was still a good thing that the government acted when it did, because there was a risk of Microsoft porting over its desktop monopoly into this new era of the internet. I think it's still a good thing to be looking at breaking up Google. I actually think that would be good. At the end of the day, it might be good for shareholders. This thing should be probably three separate companies like we've talked about on our previous show, but it is true that Google is facing the most existential threat to its search monopoly, and it is a monopoly, in the form of OpenAI at this point in time.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  I have one final thought here and piece of advice for Sergey and the team over there. And I told Sergey directly, they have to get good at making apps to go use ChatGPT. You take out the app and it's a wonderful, beautiful experience. When you go try to figure out how to use Gemini, it's like shoehorned into search results and then it's like some subdomain, that's why people aren't using it. Go buy the domain name chat.com and make a dedicated app just for Gemini.

• 45:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're 100% right.

• 45:59Jason Calacanis?

  Kick ass.

• 45:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're 100% right.

• 46:00Jason Calacanis?

  Google, you suck at apps.

• 46:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We said this when, when you asked about the bear case of OpenAI. If the DOJ is going to go after Google, and by the way, the interesting thing, Jason, and I mentioned this to you, is that in the same article that floated the trial balloon about this remedy of a Google breakup, the headline in the Wall Street Journal, which I think was very purposeful, said Google and Meta. So I think that they, if given their druthers, they being the powers that be at Washington, will probably want to take a run at both of these companies. They'll start with the one that they think they can disassemble the quickest and then they'll go to Meta afterwards.

• 46:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My strong advice to Meta and Google is if this is going to happen,

• 46:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you got to go out kicking and punching and fighting and scratching. And I think the most obvious thing is what you just said, Jason, which is you are the front door through to the internet. And there is this completely new emergent technology. And where is the same response to ChatGPT that you had to X or that you had to Snapchat or that you had to TikTok? Because if it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And then you might as well just go for it.

• 47:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Build the apps, make them kick ass, make the ChatGPT alternative and get it to billions of people yesterday. That would be the most logical game theory thing to do to build up a pool of users that you will rely on when.

• 47:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The DOJ tries to come with some consent decree or whatnot. So this is the time to build up the assets now as aggressively as possible.

• 47:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and selling YouTube would be the ultimate. I know that the ad networks you've pointed out for your blog are connected, but if they distributed, if they spun out.

• 48:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'll give you, I'll give you something about the ad thing.

• 48:03Jason Calacanis?

  Can you imagine $500 billion going into Google's coffers in YouTube shares? They would have $500 billion in cash, Chama.

• 48:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I had a, I talked to a company, he, the CEO of a, of a public consumer facing company. And this was in the context of some 80, 90 stuff. And he said that he and, and two other CEOs, the three of them, you guys would all know, these are very big companies, the three of them combined are particularly large. And they said they've had multi-year roadmaps to try to build a reasonable set of tools in advertising and it's been impossible. And partly why is that the, the tools that the big folks offer are so good that they just cannibalize and run over the entire market. And so what they hear from CMOs is we would love to advertise on your company, your site, but A,

• 48:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  your tools are substandard and B, even though your inventory is cheaper, you just don't give us the same scale and breadth that we get in these other big places. I'm not saying that that's either right or wrong, but through the lens of probably what the DOJ sees is when a lot of these folks write letters to them talking about what they're going through, this is what they're saying. And I suspect that if you could actually have a more fragmented market in some of these key markets, it's going to be a little bit easier for these smaller companies to have a business. Now, you could say, well, tough luck. You tried and you couldn't build it. I get that argument. And I think, and I think that that at some point that is legitimate. But the problem is if you're public and you're trying to make your company profitable, what

• 49:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  do your engineers want to work on? They want to work on consumer facing forward features. And so what always falls off the list, it's the stuff at the end.

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  The ad tech, yeah.

• 49:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so anyways, it's this recursive negative loop that a lot of these other companies are in, in the shadow of these big companies that I think is going to cause the DOJ to try to do something.

• 49:59Jason Calacanis?

  You know, this is a great setup for M and A. It's a great setup for IPOs. It's starting to look like, and this is a multi- Administration case that's been going, right? I think this started under Trump, went into Biden, and is now going to continue on to Trump or Harris. So what are your thoughts here, Sax?

• 50:18David Sacks?

  Well, in terms of the political environment for M and A next year?

• 50:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:22David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, so obviously it depends which administration's in power. A lot of Democrats, you know, prominent Democrats in tech like Mark Cuban or Reid Hoffman have been making the case that if Kamala is president, she's going to be much more hospitable and friendly towards M and A. And they've been saying explicitly that they want Lena Kahn fired. Well, in response to that, AOC just came out and said, we're going to have a throwdown if you do that. So I don't.

• 50:49Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go.

• 50:50David Sacks?

  I would not expect a substantial difference or improvement in the regulatory permissiveness towards M and A if we have a Democratic administration. If you have Trump in office next year, I think that there will be an opening up of M and A. I think the Republicans have their own issues with big tech, but those issues tend to revolve around censorship and bias and search results and L L Ms, things like that, as opposed to bigness per se. So I think it will be easier to get M and A done next year if you have a Republican administration.

• 51:27Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. I am going to be printing money in a Trump administration. It is going to be obscene how many M and A deals and IPOs are going to occur. There is such a huge backlog. But I do think the Democrats want to get this moving as well. And I was talking to Reid Hoffman and you and Peter Thiel in the Illuminati meeting, and they voted 190 to 2 to replace Lena Kahn in the Illuminati meeting. Chamath, why didn't you make the Illuminati meeting last week? I'm shocked that you weren't there.

• 51:55David Friedberg?

  I'm not invited to that.

• 51:57David Sacks?

  People don't know that you're being facetious, Jason.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really? They don't understand that I'm joking about the Illuminati?

• 52:03David Sacks?

  They often don't. They often don't.

• 52:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I'm sorry to the low IQ listeners who don't know that the Illuminati is not real.

• 52:12David Friedberg?

  Oh, now you're insulting the audience?

• 52:13Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm insulting the ones who believe there's an Illuminati.

• 52:16David Friedberg?

  He's trying to sell tickets to the Jaders.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to sell tickets to the Jaders Ball with Buck Nasty, Zuck Nasty. Jay Cowan is the biggest hater in the tech industry. You ever see the Haters Ball, Sax? Chappelle Show?

• 52:33David Sacks?

  No.

• 52:33Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, it looks like between the time we mentioned it on the pod, it's it's actually happening. Here it is, the Jaders Ball is happening. There it is. Lena Condon, David Sacks.

• 52:43David Sacks?

  Why am I there?

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, because you're a headliner, you're you're organizing. I think you're the host.

• 52:48David Sacks?

  I'm gonna be a keynote?

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  You're the emcee.

• 52:50David Sacks?

  I'm the, I'm, okay, wow, I'm the emcee.

• 52:53Jason Calacanis?

  There, look, there's, there's Zuck Nasty and there's Palmer Lucky. You guys don't know this bit from Chappelle? The haters ball from Chappelle? Oh, my God, it's the funniest bit on Chappelle Show. It's literally.

• 53:06David Sacks?

  I mean, I saw a lot of Chappelle Show. I don't remember that one.

• 53:09Jason Calacanis?

  Just show the real picture, Nick. On the Chappelle Show, they have all of these pimps who have a yearly convention, which is their Player Haters Ball. I've seen this, I've seen it. And all they do is sit there with like a toothpick in and they hate on each other and make fun of each other. I've seen this. It is the funniest bit in the history of the Chappelle Show. All right, let's keep the train moving here. CRV is giving back, or maybe not calling down 275 million from their LPs. Charles River Ventures, shout out to my pal George Zachary and Greek Brother from CRV. Historically, they invest in early-stage startups. They did DoorDash, Airtable, Twitter back in the day. They had two funds that they raised back in 2022, billion-dollar early-stage fund and a 500 million growth fund.

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  Sometimes people call that an opportunity fund or a select fund. The New York Times reported CRV is going to give back about half of that 275 million to investors, or technically probably not call it down. The four partners at CRV gave an exclusive to the New York Times, so either getting ahead of this story or maybe, you know, who knows what the motivation here is. But the reason they gave is that the market conditions for late-stage have worsened dramatically and that the valuations are still too high. Yes, the rent is too high and that there aren't any exit options, as we just talked about, with the administration, no IPOs, no M and A. And that VC map doesn't work in the late-stage. So I'll just stop there. There's a bunch of other notes here. Obviously, this isn't the first time this has happened.

• 54:38Jason Calacanis?

  I think Founders Fund cut the size of its eighth fund in half, from 1.8 billion to 900 million. They didn't actually give the capital back to VCs like they're saying CRV did here. Again, I'm not certain if that's what's happened or not. They put the extra 900 million into its ninth fund if they decide to raise that, which I'm assuming Founder's Fund will. Chamath, do you have any thoughts on this?

• 54:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I

• 55:00Jason Calacanis?

  I guess trend, we had two stories here, so I don't know.

• 55:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Peter Thiel did this and he gave back quite a large piece of his fund a couple of years ago and then CRV just did it. I want to make sure I get the citation right. I think it was Thomas Lafont at Co2 who said this, it was really powerful. It made a huge impression on me, which is that the NASDAQ creates about $800 billion of enterprise value a year. And he brought that up in the context of private markets have to exceed that in order for it to be a real viable alternative to just owning public indices. And so if you factor in illiquidity risk and the duration, you have to probably generate, I don't know, a trillion, 1.2 trillion dollars of enterprise value in private tech every year.

• 55:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That just seems like it's really hard to do. Where is all of that value getting created? So I think that venture needs to go through a phase where it rerationalizes. You know, this is sort of what I said at David's LP day, which is I think that LPs have made a couple of very big mistakes. And I think the biggest mistake that they've made is by smearing too much money across too many general partners. And I think if you had to redo it, A, it's probably a lot less money in total. But B, and the example I gave there was instead of giving $50 million to Kraft and $10 million to somebody else, you're better off giving $60 million to Kraft and not even having that other GP.

• 56:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because that GP makes everybody's life complicated. They overpay, they miss pay. They're probably not supposed to be a GP in the first place, and so they force returns down. And then when you contrast that again to a public market that is systematically creating $800 billion of enterprise value a year, this is an incredibly tough game and it's getting much, much harder. So I think that if you just take a step back, these are the right things to do because you're much better off having a smaller pool of capital that you can concentrate into the things that matter. You're probably better off having smaller teams versus bigger teams. And you're probably better off trying to forge LP relationships where they're not

• 57:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  doing 50 fund investments because it just makes the entire industry lag public liquid alternatives. And I think that that's just not good.

• 57:24Jason Calacanis?

  Peanut butter getting spread a little bit then there. Any thoughts, Friedberg, on this trend, if we can call it that? Or is this like maybe they're reacting right as the market is changing and valuations are getting more reasonable and the exit opportunities are getting more reasonable? It seems like this was the right reaction two years ago, but maybe it's the wrong reaction now. What do you think, Friedberg?

• 57:46David Friedberg?

  For a venture firm to return capital, they need to have at least one or two big winners. And so if that winner needs to be a 10x or 20x or 30x of the fund, because most of the investments in the fund are not going to work, you need to be able to enter at a reasonable price and there needs to be enough opportunity relative to the capital trying to invest in that opportunity out there for it to make sense. So in a market where there is excess venture capital, where valuations are at a premium, and where you don't see the exit path, the M&A or the IPO events that make sense, that you can actually realize that model, you should take less capital and make fewer sure investments. And

• 58:31David Friedberg?

  I think that that's what some folks have realized. They don't want to be chasing, you know, highly valued inflated opportunities, and they don't want to be putting capital into tier B or tier C opportunities just for the sake of deploying capital. This is a really interesting moment where you can kind of see who are the right folks in terms of thinking long-term in Silicon Valley, long-term in terms of building an investment practice in private venture, and maybe who are folks that are trying to build their AUM stack, and folks who have done reasonably well, like Founders Fund has probably the most exceptional track record in Silicon Valley as a venture firm. They are very cognizant of the market conditions, and I think that they're being very smart.

• 59:15David Friedberg?

  By the way, the other thing I've heard from LPs is they're similarly trying to find more concentrated capital themselves. So they're trying to put more capital to work in fewer managers. And so there's a real weed from the shaft moment happening in Silicon Valley Venture right now. What I think a couple of years ago was, hey, everyone's going to go do a startup. A few years ago became everyone's going to go do a venture fund. And now I think the froth that has occurred because of that is being cleared out.

• 59:42Jason Calacanis?

  And to just explain this math before I get Sax's thoughts on this, if this was a $500 million fund, let's say they were putting $25 million into each, we'll take management fees out of it, $25 million into each opportunity at a billion dollar valuation, they would own 2.5% obviously of those firms. They need to get probably a $30 billion power law exit, a 30x Sax, in order to just return the fund. There'll be some dilution, obviously, along the way. That's why it's not 20x. And the number of companies that go from a billion to 30 billion per cycle is incredibly low. Uber, Coinbase, Airbnb. It's a really short list, huh Sax, in recent history?

• 1:00:27David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, just go back to the CRV thing. You said at the outset of the conversation that this was either a growth fund or an opportunities fund. That makes a really big difference.

• 1:00:39Jason Calacanis?

  Explain, please.

• 1:00:40David Sacks?

  Because, well, an opportunities fund typically exists to back up your winners. In other words, if the venture fund is producing some big winners, the opportunities fund exists to deploy more capital into those, into those companies. As opposed to a growth fund, which is you'd be underwriting brand new companies from scratch. Typically, an opportunities fund is limited to companies that you're already an investor in through your venture fund. So that makes a big difference. I mean, if CRV has a billion dollar venture fund and only a $500 million opportunities fund, it may just be the case that they don't need all of that capital to back up the winners. They can do their proratas out of the main fund. So I suspect that that might be what's going on. I actually think this is a pretty good time to have a growth fund. A lot of the

• 1:01:25Jason Calacanis?

  Why?

• 1:01:26David Sacks?

  Well, because a lot of the crossover capital has left the ecosystem.

• 1:01:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:30David Sacks?

  A few years ago.

• 1:01:31Jason Calacanis?

  The Tigers and that sort of cohort.

• 1:01:33David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Jason Calacanis?

  Masayoshi Son.

• 1:01:35David Sacks?

  Yeah, well Tiger and SoftMaker are still around, but there are other very large investors, hedge funds and so on, who had come into the ecosystem with billions of dollars a few years ago, and now they've left. And some of those funds that you're talking about, like Tiger, it used to be $10 billion funds, now they're $2 billion funds.

• 1:01:52Jason Calacanis?

  Right, they've been right sized, they're not violently doing, I mean, the Tiger deal is my understanding was they weren't joining the board in a lot of the cases and they were outsourcing the diligence and that was a pretty violent pace. I don't know all the details.

• 1:02:03David Sacks?

  This is the best time in probably five years to have a growth fund.

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 1:02:08David Sacks?

  But to your point about the size of the venture fund, the bigger the venture fund, the bigger the winner that you need to make that pay off, obviously.

• 1:02:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:02:15David Sacks?

  And so because of the power law, so to take an example, I don't know, let's say you've got a billion dollar venture fund. Let's say that at IPO, you own 10% of whatever that winner is. And because of the power law, your fund performance is really determined by your best outcome, right?

• 1:02:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 1:02:34David Sacks?

  So in order to take a $1 billion venture fund and say, deliver a 3X, you know, so 3 billion of returns and your best company you own 10% of, that implies you have a $30 billion winner in that fund. And there are precious few outcomes where you have a $30 billion IPO, right?

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55David Sacks?

  This doesn't happen very often.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  Count them on two hands the last cycle.

• 1:02:58David Sacks?

  Right.

• 1:02:58Jason Calacanis?

  Like I just did, you got Uber, you got Robinhood, you got Coinbase. Stripe will eventually come out, you got SpaceX, well, that was two cycles ago, so I mean.

• 1:03:09David Sacks?

  Yeah, you're going to need to have a meaningful ownership position and a massive company in order to make a fund that big payoff. The data that I think LPs look at shows that smaller venture funds tend to perform better for this reason. 500, 600 million dollar

• 1:03:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23David Sacks?

  Funds. So yeah, I personally wouldn't want the pressure of a billion dollar venture fund, that would be really hard. As a 5 or 600 billion dollar venture fund, you kind of need To have or want to have like a Decacorn outcome to make that a great fund, but to have to have a $30 billion plus outcome, it's it's even more difficult.

• 1:03:44Jason Calacanis?

  Moving on, Pew just published some really interesting research on TikTok. If you don't know the Pew study, they've been doing it for decades. It's very well respected and bipartisan or nonpartisan. Four in 10 US adults aged 18 to 29 are now regularly getting their news from TikTok. Here's some charts for you to take a look at. As you can see, the younger generation is really spending a lot of time on TikTok and getting a lot of their news there. I know this because, yeah, I've talked to a bunch of kids about this. And people that use TikTok, 52% are regularly getting their news from the platform. And that number has skyrocketed compared to other social platforms. Take a look at this chart. Here's X, 59% of people say they get their news at X.

• 1:04:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's really a news platform, so that makes total sense. You look at Facebook, it's, you know, 48% right now. Reddit, 33%, YouTube, 37% in 2024, Instagram, 40%, but TikTok, 52%, up from 22%. So it's no longer just dancing. And this is the reason I think many people in the government were concerned about the attack vector that the CCP would have in the United States since they still control the company for services like Snapchat, LinkedIn and WhatsApp. And Nextdoor, it's below 20, below 30% get their news from there. There's your Truth Social there, Saks, 57% of people get news there and Rumble, 48%. So what's your takeaway from from this just Saks?

• 1:05:15Jason Calacanis?

  Looking at it and this impact that TikTok has is this concerning on a national security level since the algorithm's a black box and you could tweak it if you really wanted to, to really change sentiment and young people are obviously very impressionable on this platform and they're big users of it.

• 1:05:32David Sacks?

  Well, I thought there was other data in this study that should calm people's fears that TikTok would somehow be used as a political weapon. So in the same survey, you're talking about 95% of adults that use TikTok say they use it because it's entertaining. So that's the main reason people use it. And only 10% of accounts followed by US adults post content related to political or social issues.

• 1:05:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, that's posting and the main reason, right?

• 1:05:59David Sacks?

  Yeah, but so so basically, 90% of the accounts that get followed aren't even posting political or social issues. They're there for entertainment. It's people watching dance videos, it's people

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's definitely.

• 1:06:12David Sacks?

  I mean, the main thing I use it for is to watch wrestling highlights. So.

• 1:06:18Jason Calacanis?

  You're a wrestling guy?

• 1:06:19David Sacks?

  Yeah, I'm a wrestling fan.

• 1:06:20Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 1:06:21David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Jason Calacanis?

  You're into this Kabuki theater of wrestling? This is new information. I'm a K-Fabe for 20.

• 1:06:28David Sacks?

  I get my WWE on TikTok.

• 1:06:31Jason Calacanis?

  You do?

• 1:06:32David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  Who's your favorite? Are you a Hulk Hogan guy? Are you an Undertaker guy? Vince McMahon? I mean, Jimmy, Jimmy Superfly Snuka. Who are you, Andre the Giant?

• 1:06:41David Sacks?

  I know all those names, but.

• 1:06:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I like, I also love the Road Warriors. Ultimate Warrior I loved. I was a huge wrestling fan. That was the one thing that my dad and I bonded over. We would watch wrestling every Saturday. Sax, did you ever watch the the specials on Saturday night? Like the?

• 1:06:59David Sacks?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, those are so great.

• 1:07:00David Sacks?

  That was the era of Hulk Hogan, for sure. Saturday night's main event.

• 1:07:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Randy Macho and Savage. Savage is great. Savage is great.

• 1:07:08David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, my my all time favorite was Stone Cold Steve Austin.

• 1:07:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Stone Cold is great.

• 1:07:12David Sacks?

  I marked out the hardest for Austin.

• 1:07:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He was, he was anti woke before anti woke became a thing.

• 1:07:16David Sacks?

  Totally.

• 1:07:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is crazy. You guys are into wrestling.

• 1:07:21David Sacks?

  And flair. I'd say flair was number two for me.

• 1:07:24Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, hold on. Have you gone to a wrestling event in person, Sax?

• 1:07:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you only like the WWF at the time? Or did you like the NWA as well?

• 1:07:31David Sacks?

  That their moments. When when Hogan turned heel and joined the, the, was it the NWO? That was like a big moment.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm a big Andy Kaufman wrestling fan. That was my only interest is when Andy Kaufman came in there. And uh, trolled them. But have you been?

• 1:07:49David Sacks?

  Andy Kaufman, yeah, that was like in the 1970s, wasn't it?

• 1:07:52Jason Calacanis?

  Or? It was the late 80s. Remember he was on David Letterman? With Jerry Lawler? And he, he comes to a wrestling match, Sacks, in the South.

• 1:08:03David Sacks?

  No, that was where I grew up, in my hometown of Memphis.

• 1:08:05Jason Calacanis?

  Right, so he goes there and he gets in the ring. And he says, "All of you rednecks, I want to show you some new inventions. This is called soap. And this is called a washcloth. And you use it to clean yourself." And he's like just mocking the southern accent and Jerry Lawler. Remember Jerry Lawler smacks him? And on Letterman, oh, it's the greatest.

• 1:08:29David Sacks?

  It was a huge deal, I mean, where I grew up, because that, this was like on the local news.

• 1:08:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:35David Sacks?

  When, when I grew up in Memphis, there was no professional sports teams, okay? All we had was the Memphis State Basketball. And, and uh, wrestling every Monday night, the Mid-South Coliseum. That was it. That was like professional sports in Memphis.

• 1:08:49Jason Calacanis?

  You also had probably like some state fairs or, you know, like best goats, best sheep or something?

• 1:08:55David Sacks?

  Lawler was so popular that he could have been elected mayor. In fact, I think there was talk at one point of him becoming mayor.

• 1:09:02Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, I mean, the intergender champion, Andy Kaufman.

• 1:09:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you, uh, did you guys like Mouth of the South?

• 1:09:08David Sacks?

  Jimmy Hart? Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, he was amazing. He was like the main heel manager for a while.

• 1:09:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14David Sacks?

  This is before the WWE took over, I guess it was called WWF back then. But there were all these little fiefdoms and kingdoms. And Mid-South Wrestling was like one of those kingdoms. And Lawler was like the king of it. And then he had all these guys come in and out and wrestle.

• 1:09:29Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, you ever watch wrestling? And what do you think of this TikTok survey? I don't watch wrestling. Okay, very good. And TikTok survey, anything, where are you, no? Any thoughts? Looks like they gathered some reasonable data. Okay, there you go. There's, there's your hard hitting.

• 1:09:45David Sacks?

  My point was that it's mostly an entertainment app where people go to watch dance videos, wrestling clips, style influencers and so on. And I think that this idea that it's somehow a propaganda tool around, you know, programming our youth, I think that's a moral panic that's been exaggerated.

• 1:10:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think the odds are that TikTok is hacked to allow you to passively listen even when the app is not being used?

• 1:10:09Jason Calacanis?

  Zero.

• 1:10:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You think it's definitively zero?

• 1:10:13David Friedberg?

  No, like 5%.

• 1:10:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  5%?

• 1:10:15David Friedberg?

  Yeah. Because so someone said that that was

• 1:10:21David Friedberg?

  that was a there was some code that enabled that in the early version of the app. And then some other people audited it and they said they did not find evidence that there was any technology. And Apple's got a very good audit system for this.

• 1:10:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did those same people audit WhatsApp? And then it turned out that it was

• 1:10:35David Friedberg?

  Telegram? Did they passively listen?

• 1:10:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37David Friedberg?

  Does WhatsApp passively listen?

• 1:10:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, it's one of the it's one of the most well-known breaches.

• 1:10:41David Friedberg?

  Well, maybe they do. Maybe it's

• 1:10:43Jason Calacanis?

  I'm 100% certain that the CCP is using it because they this people have tracked already journalists using it. So if they've already done it, it's 100%. And I don't know about the passive listening, but any thoughts on 50% plus of young people getting their news here? Chamath, any news on that? I mean, obviously, we don't have evidence that it's being used currently to manipulate people. But it's over 50% of young people are now getting their news there. Or say they're getting their news there.

• 1:11:06David Sacks?

  I bet I bet more than 50% of young people are getting their news from podcasts. And those podcasts get chopped up and clipped and then people watch them on TikTok.

• 1:11:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:11:15David Sacks?

  I bet that's how it's happening.

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

  There are a lot of people who think this show is a TikTok show. And they don't know it's a big show.

• 1:11:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We'll have to prepare for a brave new world in the following way. There was an article, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, that said that Russia and Iran were paying low-level street criminals to create chaos. Okay, and I and I read that article and I thought, okay, well, what does this mean if you actually extrapolate this, which is that the hot wars are very complicated, not worth doing. These disruptive fissures are the better way to sow chaos. And it occurred to me then that tying this back to something that we saw before, it does make sense for a lot of folks to sponsor a lot of long-tail content that say a lot of different things.

• 1:12:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that that just is pretty obvious. And so I think that if you put these two ideas together, it stands to reason that a lot of people will be paying influencers a lot of money to create all kinds of content that is specific to a perspective that they have. And then on top of that, if you can algorithmically amplify one over the other, you know, you're you're going to have issues. Is it the biggest issue in the world? Probably not.

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  It probably wouldn't swing an election, but it would cause chaos. And we just had the Southern District of New York target that Russian, Russia today was giving $10 million to four podcasters. They didn't even know they were getting paid by the Russians. They just picked them because they liked their opinions and they gave them $100,000 an episode to promote pro-Russian positions.

• 1:12:56David Sacks?

  If the Russians were actually doing it, it's the stupidest use of $10 million ever because those podcasters already had their own channels. They're already putting out lots of content and this other content is a drop in the bucket. I think, Jamath, the issue with what you're saying is just there is so much content out there already. People create it for free. People create it, you know, because they're, they have a career in it. There's a whole long tail of influencers. There is so much content out there already through podcasts, through websites. It's all being chopped up that trying to do it as some sort of disinformation strategy, I think is very hard to do because it's just when there's billions and billions of impressions, any effort that you try to engineer ends up just being a drop in the bucket.

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  I agree with that. Yeah, it's definitely a drop in the bucket.

• 1:13:43David Sacks?

  It makes sense in theory, but it makes sense in theory. It's very hard to do in practice.

• 1:13:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the goal is not to win any specific argument. It's to create mistrust in the entire news ecosystem, in the information system, so that people give up trying to figure out what the truth is. And that's what the Russians and the KGB is.

• 1:14:03David Sacks?

  I think the mainstream media is doing that on their own. The mainstream media lies so much. That's what's creating the distrust.

• 1:14:07Jason Calacanis?

  As are the Russians paying off podcasters. Okay, let's give.

• 1:14:11David Sacks?

  How is $10 million going to accomplish anything if that story's even true? It makes no sense.

• 1:14:15Jason Calacanis?

  Great question. Great question. May I answer it?

• 1:14:16David Sacks?

  It's a great conspiracy theory.

• 1:14:20Jason Calacanis?

  Not a conspiracy there at all. These were very low level, mid, like, you know, tier B, C, D podcasters. If you give them $100,000 per episode, they can spend more money buying cameras, promoting their shows, hiring people. So you're just finding people and dropping money on their head so they can do more of the same. So it's a very smart strategy, in fact, I think.

• 1:14:40David Sacks?

  I think it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They took podcasters who are already successful and paid them to release content through a less watched channel. That's the

• 1:14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it was. It was just more about getting the money to produce more content and then they in

• 1:14:54David Sacks?

  These guys are already on. These guys are already live streaming like 24/7.

• 1:14:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, there's your puppy. Oh, here he goes. Friedberg trying to win more people over with his puppy love. Unbelievable. This guy is absolutely ridiculous. Unbelievable. All right, listen, let me give Sax some red meat here. He got. He got his little steak Tata with my Russia Today story. You got your little amuse bouge and now I give you your tomahawk. You ready Sax? You want your tomahawk? You want it rare? Here it comes. 2024 election update. The betting markets and polling indicate a really tight race, but maybe Trump is surging this week. Polly Market, which is a betting market, has Trump 55 to 45 versus Kamala. Kalshi, another betting market, 5248 Trump.

• 1:15:43Jason Calacanis?

  Bovada and PointsBet, those are offshore booking and Polly Market is also offshore. 5248 Trump. Nate Silver, friend of the pod, his algorithm has it 5347 Kamala. Real Clear Polling, that's an algorithm, has Kamala with a two-point lead. New York Times, Siena, Kamala with a three-point lead. Reuters, Ipsos, pretty well trusted, three-point lead for Kamala. NPR, PBS, Marist Poll has Kamala with a two-point lead. So, sportbooks and betting markets are favoring Trump slightly, while the polls are slightly favoring Kamala. Sax, I sliced it up. Nice for you. You got nice 10 slices of meat here. Which slice you going for?

• 1:16:28David Sacks?

  Well, I think your recitation of the polls there kind of mixes up a couple of things. There's popular vote polls and then there's Electoral College, which goes state by state. If you look at pretty much now all the main pollsters, you look at Tony Fabrizio, you look at Real Clear Politics, they're now showing that Trump is winning the Electoral College right now. He is up in almost every swing state, including, I think, Michigan, which is pretty surprising. Clearly, there's been a huge swing towards Trump over the last week or two. And look, there's still 25 days to go, so anything can happen. I don't want to overstate this, but yeah, this is a good example right here, showing that Trump now has a lead in every swing.

• 1:17:06Jason Calacanis?

  Electoral College is 296 to 242. What is Fabrizio?

• 1:17:11David Sacks?

  He's just a Republican pollster, but his accuracy is pretty high.

• 1:17:14Jason Calacanis?

  I've never heard of Fabrício.

• 1:17:16David Sacks?

  Well, another guy who I think is more neutral is Mark Halprin, who is a pundit who has been very accurate this election cycle. Remember, he's the one who broke the scoop that Biden would be replaced by Harris. And he even said exactly when it would happen. And he predicted it down to the day. He was exactly right about that. And if you follow his account, he is now saying that both Republican and Democrat insiders that he talks to are both saying the same thing, which is their internals are now showing Trump ahead in every swing state or almost every swing state. And things seem to be breaking Trump's way right now. Again, there's 25 days left, but if you're wondering why is Harris all of a sudden doing interviews?

• 1:18:01David Sacks?

  It's because their internals started showing that she was in trouble, so they decided to get her out more.

• 1:18:06Jason Calacanis?

  Or is it the other way? Is it that the her Howard Stern interviews or whatever are causing her to lose votes?

• 1:18:12David Sacks?

  Well, yeah, exactly. Well, so you know.

• 1:18:14Jason Calacanis?

  Which one is it, do you think? Because I don't know when I don't have the dates of all these polls versus that.

• 1:18:18David Sacks?

  No, I think it's it's what I predicted a couple of months ago. It's the doom loop. So what I said two months ago is that if Harris gets behind, she's gonna have to abandon this sort of basement strategy of not doing interviews. She's gonna have to start doing interviews. The problem is she's not good at interviews. And if she does more interviews, she's gonna fall further behind in the polls. And it could cause a doom loop. So that's where we appear to be right now. I said that on August 30.

• 1:18:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Chamath, your thoughts?

• 1:18:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think that Donald Trump has basically stuck to his strategy, which is he is a generational retail politician. I just heard parts of what he did with Andrew Schultz.

• 1:18:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Another great sort of, you know, podcast. I think David's right that the editing and the massaging of the Kamala Harris talking points are galvanizing the people that have already decided and turning off the people that have already decided to vote for Trump. And she's losing the folks in the middle. And so this is what's causing her to have to be out there. And and she's gonna have to deliver a very crisp.

• 1:19:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Message and I, and I think that right now it's been a little bit lacking, which is why you're seeing the polls. At least the electoral college, which is really what matters at this point, turn Trump. So she's going to have a bit of an uphill fight between here and November. The other thing I'll say is that if you've seen what's happening in the appellate court, it's not clear whether the, the Trump case is going to get overturned before the election. But if that does, that could be very meaningful momentum for him. And then I think the third thing is that we should now buckle in because if the last two elections are any guide, there are going to be a bunch of spanners in the works between now and November.

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, what did you say? Spanners?

• 1:20:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Spanners in the works. Yeah.

• 1:20:14Jason Calacanis?

  What does it mean?

• 1:20:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you call it? Wrench in the system?

• 1:20:17Jason Calacanis?

  You mean like an October surprise? You mean like some crazy turn of events? Okay. Friedberg, any thoughts here? Would you like to Roshak test this and see what you want in the numbers? Or do you have some objective thoughts here? What's your, what's your take?

• 1:20:32David Friedberg?

  On the polling data?

• 1:20:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. Where we're at in the election, you're pretty open ended here. You can look at the, you can make a note on overall what you see between the betting markets and the polls and that disparity. You could just talk generally about where you think we are. You could talk about Kamala on Howard Stern and doing a bunch of interviews with friendlies. Where are you at right now?

• 1:20:55David Friedberg?

  I didn't see her interviews.

• 1:20:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:20:57David Friedberg?

  I saw some excerpts on Twitter.

• 1:20:59David Sacks?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:21:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01David Sacks?

  Let me just follow up on a point Chamath made. Chamath said that she had to be crisp. If you look at any of these interviews, they're the opposite of crisp. She's asked softball questions by, by like Stephen Colbert saying, why are you running for president? How are you different than Joe Biden?

• 1:21:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15David Sacks?

  And she doesn't have good answers. She starts free associating. She gives these very long-winded answers that don't go anywhere. She says you can't think of a single way she's different than Joe Biden when, when pushed on that. It's very strange. These are questions that-

• 1:21:29Jason Calacanis?

  She definitely did the most favorite shows. I wish she would do some challenging shows. I think she's got to do Joe Rogan, All In. And what would be another good podcast for her, Dujma? If she really wanted to like do the adversarial thing or something more-

• 1:21:42David Sacks?

  Why would she do an adversarial interview?

• 1:21:44David Friedberg?

  Why would she do an adversarial? Just come to All In. Come and have a conversation.

• 1:21:47Jason Calacanis?

  Come and have a normal conversation here. Yeah. No, I'm just thinking like, it seems like-

• 1:21:52David Friedberg?

  Sax, if she comes and has a, has a conversation, you'll be respectful?

• 1:21:56David Sacks?

  Yeah. This whole idea that I didn't treat Cuban respectfully is nonsense. Just watch the tape.

• 1:22:01David Friedberg?

  I don't even keep all that.

• 1:22:03David Sacks?

  I know, well, somebody, somebody asserted that.

• 1:22:06Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, I, the, I, all, if you look back on every single presidential related one we did here, they were all respectful. And they were all conversations. I think the Cuban one dipped because of both of you into a bit more of a debate and it was a lot more crossover than the other ones.

• 1:22:21David Friedberg?

  He wanted that. That's what he wanted.

• 1:22:23David Sacks?

  That's his style. I was marrying back to him in style.

• 1:22:25David Friedberg?

  He likes to come out. He likes to do his thing. Yeah. That's exactly what he wanted.

• 1:22:28Jason Calacanis?

  If you look at all the other ones, I'm trying to think of a moment where it, if you look at the other Dean B. Phillips, Chris Christie, Vivek. Boring. Gotta go. Love you guys. We're all interested. All right.

• 1:22:39David Friedberg?

  Bye.

• 1:22:40Jason Calacanis?

  This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast, episode 199. Make sure you go to allin.com/meetups. Make sure if you're starting a company, you go to founder.university. If you're an engineer.

• 1:22:52David Friedberg?

  What are you doing?

• 1:22:52Jason Calacanis?

  Please go to, I'm doing whatever the [__] I please. David Sax, make sure you go to, um. Super God. Glue AI if you're an engineer. And if you like potatoes, go to a hollow.com and order your potatoes. Preorder a subscription.

• 1:23:06David Friedberg?

  I mean, if we're doing ads, sell some, let's sell some super gut.

• 1:23:08Jason Calacanis?

  And Chamap, 80, 90, 80, 90. Go to 80, 90 and 80, 90. We'll see everybody next time on the All In Podcast. Bye bye.

• 1:23:20Speaker 04

  We'll let your winners ride.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  Rain Man David Sax.

• 1:23:27David Sacks?

  And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 1:23:31Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, Wes.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  I'm the queen of Kinoa.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  Besties are back.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

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

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:23:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just, it's like this, like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow.

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  What your, the bee, what your bee? That's gonna be, we need to get merch. Besties are back.