Inflated GDP?, Google earnings, How the media lost trust, Rogan/Trump search controversy, Election!

00:00:00.000 | We had dinner last week and Saks and I got bombed last week.

00:00:03.960 | We had dinner and we drank a quadruple.

00:00:07.640 | Casa, I've not seen Jekyll drink like that before.

00:00:12.100 | I stopped in for a few minutes drinking.

00:00:14.440 | I mean, Casa Azul.

00:00:16.320 | He tore my house apart getting back in.

00:00:19.020 | Oh, my God, like a bear, like a bear.

00:00:21.480 | I went Brooklyn, so he was like a bear.

00:00:23.120 | He was like a drunk bear.

00:00:24.380 | But I spoke to the lady of the manor and I will be staying at Saks's house next time.

00:00:29.160 | So I will be able to refresh the ranch's soap and towels.

00:00:34.300 | Yeah, I'm staying at your place.

00:00:35.560 | I mean, you know what?

00:00:36.560 | I forgot to get towels when I was at Chamonte.

00:00:38.660 | It's got this amazing embroidered towel.

00:00:40.400 | So I'll just hit those up when I hit your place.

00:00:43.080 | It's really funny to go to Jekyll Ranch and there's going to be a big S on his towels.

00:00:46.840 | Why is there an S on it?

00:00:49.880 | I got the robe that says yes on it.

00:00:53.120 | I've got a robe on the back.

00:00:54.380 | It says MAGA.

00:00:56.220 | I took all the MAGA robes.

00:00:59.500 | What does the S stand for?

00:01:00.960 | It's grifter.

00:01:01.960 | Oh, it's so funny.

00:01:02.960 | Steals.

00:01:03.960 | He's got a bunch of towels that say C as well, cheap.

00:01:14.960 | All right, listen, happy Halloween to everybody, and we've got a great docket for you today,

00:01:36.640 | but I just up front wanted to let people know that we will be having the all in holiday

00:01:42.360 | spectacular on December 7th at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

00:01:47.980 | It's going to be amazing.

00:01:48.980 | All in dot com slash events and next Tuesday.

00:01:53.560 | That's right.

00:01:54.560 | November 5th.

00:01:55.600 | If you go to our YouTube at 7 p.m. Pacific Time, 10 p.m. Eastern Time, we're going to

00:02:01.800 | do an election night live stream for the fans.

00:02:04.880 | We're almost at 700000 subscribers.

00:02:06.820 | So subscribe to comment and join us on our live stream on Tuesday night.

00:02:11.920 | There'll be guests.

00:02:12.920 | Right.

00:02:13.920 | There's going to be some fun guests.

00:02:14.920 | I think Helmuth is still banned by Chamath for life, but I may bring him on and let him

00:02:18.920 | give him a second chance.

00:02:19.920 | Chamath, is that OK?

00:02:20.920 | I bring him on for a second chance.

00:02:23.440 | Sure.

00:02:24.440 | OK, so we're going to give Helmuth a second chance, but we'll see.

00:02:29.040 | He's going to be on a very tight leash if he makes it about himself in seven seconds

00:02:33.920 | or less.

00:02:34.920 | Seven seconds to fill Helmuth.

00:02:35.920 | He's going to get kicked right off the show.

00:02:37.480 | OK.

00:02:38.480 | Holiday party.

00:02:39.480 | Do we know that?

00:02:40.480 | Yeah.

00:02:41.480 | Go to all in dot com slash events if you want to come.

00:02:43.760 | It's going to be great.

00:02:45.480 | You guys aren't going to be happy, but we are setting we are going to spend a million

00:02:49.400 | dollars on this party.

00:02:50.400 | How did you spend a million dollars on a party?

00:02:51.400 | Dude, did you see the set he built last time?

00:02:56.840 | That sounds like a lot of founders.

00:02:58.320 | That's a lot of it's going to be about 300,000.

00:03:01.360 | We'll probably lose money on the party, but it's going to be it's not meant to be call

00:03:06.140 | it a profit center, but it's just going to be super fun.

00:03:08.200 | You cannot put a price on a good time.

00:03:11.840 | And, you know, if you're going to get that premium founder mode, did you always want

00:03:15.320 | to be a party promoter when you were like in high school and in college?

00:03:18.180 | When I was in college, I had a DJ set up.

00:03:20.920 | I had like synthesizer set up, which I plugged in and I did live electronic music with my

00:03:26.320 | DJ set.

00:03:27.320 | I'm going to drop the beat.

00:03:28.320 | Chamath.

00:03:29.320 | I'm going to drop the beat.

00:03:30.320 | A couple of my startups now are doing something interesting.

00:03:38.000 | Athena is bought like a pack of tickets and they're doing like a holiday party there with

00:03:42.200 | their top for our event, for our event.

00:03:44.800 | They basically bought a bundle of VIP tickets and they're giving them to the top customers

00:03:48.220 | and their top employees to come.

00:03:50.200 | That's cool.

00:03:51.200 | And make it like their holiday party in San Francisco with our customers.

00:03:53.760 | So that's kind of neat, smart move by them.

00:03:55.920 | And so if you have a startup and you want to bring your startup, you can buy a pack

00:04:00.280 | of tickets as it were.

00:04:01.840 | That's actually a really good idea.

00:04:02.840 | A bunch of these small startups should just co-opt our holiday party as your holiday.

00:04:07.600 | Precisely.

00:04:08.600 | Yeah.

00:04:09.600 | Just buy 10 tickets and come.

00:04:10.600 | If Freebird's going to go blow a million bucks, you might as well co-opt it.

00:04:14.840 | I'm hopeful today we're going to sign this DJ, which is everyone.

00:04:18.740 | Everyone knows the DJ and it is going to be pretty sick if we can get it.

00:04:21.320 | It's a degenerate gambler.

00:04:22.320 | We know him.

00:04:23.320 | We play poker with him.

00:04:25.120 | Whenever we pay him, he's going to lose twice as much at the poker game.

00:04:28.000 | Let's just, let's call it what it is.

00:04:30.200 | Sax, can you host poker at your house after the party?

00:04:33.760 | Yeah.

00:04:34.760 | No.

00:04:35.760 | What a team player.

00:04:38.760 | He built an entire poker building and he's used it like seven times.

00:04:47.880 | David Sax is just the absolute best.

00:04:49.840 | All right.

00:04:50.840 | Let's get to work.

00:04:51.840 | You know what's winning as well is the US GDP.

00:04:54.080 | Here we go.

00:04:55.080 | It grew slightly slower than expected, but the top line numbers are healthy.

00:04:59.360 | Looks like the soft landing might be baked in.

00:05:01.520 | We'll see.

00:05:02.520 | On Wednesday, the Department of Commerce reported that real GDP grew 2.8% in Q3.

00:05:09.120 | That means it's adjusted for inflation.

00:05:11.560 | And you can't look at these things in a vacuum.

00:05:15.260 | You have to look at the other Western countries and their GDP, Japan 0.7, Australia 0.2,

00:05:21.520 | Germany 0.2, Canada 0.5.

00:05:24.000 | The world is not growing.

00:05:25.120 | US is growing briskly.

00:05:27.200 | And in terms of how to think about it, 2% to 3% is sort of the sweet spot for mature

00:05:33.560 | economies.

00:05:34.560 | Above 3%, positive, but can also signal overheating like we experienced during Zerp and in 2021.

00:05:42.240 | Under 2%, yeah, stagnation.

00:05:44.400 | US GDP was 30 basis points below the Dow Jones consensus forecast of 3.1%.

00:05:50.680 | There's your chart if you missed it.

00:05:53.680 | And obviously inflation, we talked about this last week, is at 2.4%, very close to the 2%

00:06:00.600 | target.

00:06:01.600 | Unemployment, 4.1%, close to historic lows, 10-year treasury, 4.3%, and obviously stock

00:06:07.400 | market at its all-time high again.

00:06:11.040 | There's your S&P, Dow, and NASDAQ.

00:06:13.880 | As we've talked about over and over again, Shamath, the federal debt is the issue, $35

00:06:17.960 | trillion in debt.

00:06:18.960 | We have a trillion in annual interest payments on that debt.

00:06:23.000 | And Freiburg, your pet peeve, $23.5 million directly and millions more indirectly.

00:06:28.760 | As we know, federal government employees now at $3 million, it's about 1% of the country.

00:06:33.720 | And state government employees, $5.5 million, local governments, $15 million.

00:06:38.880 | Put it all together and we got almost 25 million people working for our government.

00:06:46.520 | What do you think the prescription here is, Freiburg, as we come up on election day and

00:06:52.000 | we look towards next year, do you believe we can cut this crazy spending?

00:06:56.240 | What do you think's going to happen to the economy?

00:06:58.320 | Will it overheat, soft landing?

00:07:01.360 | You're running a company now, so you have to think about this, obviously.

00:07:05.280 | Well, I'll separate running a company because I think that's got to be treated independently

00:07:09.800 | from macro.

00:07:10.800 | You can't build your business around macro.

00:07:12.120 | But 10-year treasuries are sitting at just around 4.3%.

00:07:15.440 | I think what the market is telling us, and remember, that's off of a low right when the

00:07:20.840 | rate cuts were happening, if you'll remember, in mid-September, we got down to just around

00:07:25.080 | 3.5%.

00:07:26.440 | The market is telling us that with the sort of economic growth we're seeing, low unemployment,

00:07:33.400 | and call it modest inflation, this is not the time to be cutting rates.

00:07:37.880 | And the market is saying we are expecting higher rates for longer.

00:07:42.400 | So I do think that that's one big kind of turnaround that's happened in the last 90

00:07:46.200 | days, which is really, I think, a big surprise to a lot of folks, is just how robust things

00:07:50.320 | are relative to where folks thought that they were about 90 days ago, urging, pleading,

00:07:55.640 | and supposedly needing a big rate cut to get the economy moving again.

00:07:59.920 | But I think at the end of the day, everyone's looking to the election as kind of the next

00:08:02.760 | big moment in the economy.

00:08:05.800 | Both Trump and Kamala have made fiscal proposals that would be deeply expensive.

00:08:13.320 | If you assume these budgeting groups that go out and take their policy proposals and

00:08:18.800 | try and build a model against them, that they're both going to add trillions of dollars

00:08:21.560 | to the debt, they're going to increase deficit spending, etc.

00:08:24.280 | But the reality is that neither of them are actually going to end up theoretically being

00:08:29.900 | able to execute all of those policies.

00:08:32.360 | And there will likely be some degree of difference to where we end up on spending.

00:08:36.440 | >>Corey: That's a great point.

00:08:37.440 | Chamath, a lot of talk about DOGE, the Department of Government, what is the last word?

00:08:44.400 | >>Chamath: Efficiency.

00:08:45.400 | >>Corey: Efficiency.

00:08:46.400 | I think Elon might be collaborating on, what do you think the chances are?

00:08:50.240 | He said there could be $2 trillion in savings that could occur.

00:08:53.680 | What are the chances that any meaningful cuts happen and we reverse the trend if Trump,

00:09:00.440 | say he wins and he creates that position?

00:09:02.960 | >>Kamala: I think the first question that'll inform how dramatic the cuts are is whether

00:09:10.360 | we organize ourselves around an accurate sense of where the actual economy is.

00:09:18.020 | If you look at the print today, it would actually tell you that things are pretty okay and that

00:09:24.800 | we are not sort of near an unsustainable turning point.

00:09:29.560 | However, and Nick, if you want to just throw up this chart, if you back out the percentage

00:09:37.000 | of government consumption that is included in GDP, you start to see a very different

00:09:43.240 | picture, which is that over the last two and a half years, all of the economic gains under

00:09:52.200 | the Biden administration have largely been through government consumption.

00:09:57.520 | What that means is that private industry has been standing on the sidelines somewhat.

00:10:06.040 | That actually maps to a lot of this intuition that I've had over the last few months when

00:10:12.280 | I've said, "I think we're in a low key recession," because what I could never figure out is why

00:10:16.860 | I would look at the earnings transcripts of a bunch of companies who would constantly

00:10:21.760 | talk about softening demand.

00:10:25.040 | By the way, this is across the board.

00:10:27.540 | It wasn't just CPG companies, but Dropbox as an example, same sort of thing.

00:10:32.440 | They just laid off 20% of their staff and the memo was about weakening demand.

00:10:36.820 | This is a broad-based softening as far as companies experience the economy, but the

00:10:43.360 | high-level number is positive, which would make you think that everything is fine.

00:10:47.360 | When you look at that chart and you back out the percentage of the positive news that the

00:10:52.760 | government is responsible for, what it means is the economy is flat and the economy isn't

00:10:58.960 | growing, which means that roughly there are a bunch of folks that are seeing contraction.

00:11:05.120 | I think that if you normalize on that view of the world, I think the cuts that Elon will

00:11:13.140 | affect will be meaningful and necessary.

00:11:18.840 | If you pull up this chart, Nick, of the federal net outlays as a percentage of GDP, you get

00:11:24.600 | a good idea of the spending.

00:11:26.840 | You're at a flat, stalling economy.

00:11:29.000 | >>Corey: Well, if you look at this, we basically have had high teens during our lifetime, Clinton

00:11:34.720 | era, '70s and '80s, and then it's gone up into the '20s now, so that is definitely something

00:11:43.040 | the amount of spending we're doing.

00:11:44.720 | >>Corey: Again, this is where you can get a little confused by data.

00:11:48.160 | Jason, this is net outlays, and that's different from total gross government spending, which

00:11:53.760 | also includes QE.

00:11:54.760 | If you go back to the other chart, why is this one going down and the other one represents

00:12:00.120 | 85% of GDP?

00:12:02.280 | It's because that one is a more accurate sense of what the government is doing across all

00:12:06.280 | of its tentacles in the United States economy.

00:12:09.480 | It includes the money printer going brr, which the net outlays chart doesn't include.

00:12:15.820 | Just to be clear about what's happening, 85% of this quarter's GDP was induced by the government.

00:12:21.220 | If you sub it out, so take 2.8% and multiply it by 0.15, that is the true growth X the

00:12:29.280 | United States government that exists in the United States economy today.

00:12:33.160 | >>Corey: Sax, your thoughts here on the GDP, obviously looks pretty good for Biden-Harris

00:12:40.400 | to have all these stats going in their favor, but there is the caveat, obviously, about

00:12:46.040 | the government spending in there.

00:12:47.720 | >>Saxe: Yeah.

00:12:48.720 | No, I think that's right.

00:12:49.720 | I mean, I think that for Harris in this election, it's probably a little too late for this GDP

00:12:56.240 | report to be helpful.

00:12:58.800 | If you go back all the way to 1992 where the whole election hinged on the economy, remember

00:13:04.880 | that was Bill Clinton running against George H.W. Bush and Clinton's message was, "It's

00:13:09.480 | the economy, stupid."

00:13:10.480 | >>Corey: Yep.

00:13:11.480 | >>Saxe: And-

00:13:12.480 | >>Corey: Carville, right?

00:13:13.480 | Came up with that.

00:13:14.480 | >>Saxe: Yeah, Carville said, and Clinton beat Bush because we had a recession in, I think,

00:13:19.680 | '91.

00:13:20.840 | But by '92, it was over already, and in the final week of the campaign, Bush tried to

00:13:27.200 | tout a similarly positive GDP report that showed 2.7% growth.

00:13:33.240 | That report would later be revised up to 3.9% growth.

00:13:37.920 | So the recession was definitely over and the economy was growing again, and nonetheless,

00:13:41.960 | Bush lost because voters' impressions of the economy had already formed and solidified

00:13:49.080 | by the final week of the campaign.

00:13:50.600 | So I think it's probably too late here for the GDP numbers to have a big impact on the

00:13:57.080 | election.

00:13:58.080 | I think the other thing is that voters' impression of this economy isn't based so much on the

00:14:04.880 | GDP numbers.

00:14:05.880 | It's really based on their perception of inflation over the last four years, and there's no question

00:14:10.800 | the cost of living has increased a lot over the last four years, and voters are really

00:14:15.320 | feeling that.

00:14:16.640 | And that, I think, is playing into their perceptions of the economy, and I don't think that Harris

00:14:23.160 | has a great answer for that.

00:14:25.480 | So I think the bottom line here is I don't think this report's going to have a big impact

00:14:29.800 | on the election.

00:14:31.300 | In terms of where the economy is going, the thing that I would come back to is interest

00:14:37.800 | rates, and this is the thing that Freeberg was talking about, which is even though the

00:14:41.520 | Fed has cut rates by 50 basis points, the long-term rates, the 10-year treasury, has

00:14:47.720 | not gone down.

00:14:48.720 | In fact, it's gone up slightly.

00:14:50.600 | It's gone up to, call it, 4.3%.

00:14:53.820 | And so we have this real issue where, as the Fed is cutting short rates, long rates are

00:14:59.240 | not going down.

00:15:00.240 | And I think that is because of the government deficit and the government debt and the fact

00:15:04.920 | that there's so much debt that needs to be serviced by the bond market.

00:15:09.840 | And the market for treasuries.

00:15:12.400 | The buyers are all leaving the market for treasuries.

00:15:14.200 | The Chinese, we talked about this last week, have been selling down their treasury position.

00:15:18.280 | There just aren't buyers anymore, which is-- Right, and I think this could ultimately have

00:15:22.740 | a very detrimental effect on the economy.

00:15:24.600 | You already saw that.

00:15:25.920 | I think this hasn't been widely reported, but I think it should be a major piece of

00:15:30.680 | news, which is the prime rate hit 8% today.

00:15:36.320 | So now it had a seven-handle on it before, and now it has an eight-handle on it.

00:15:39.880 | Well, this matters a lot if you want to buy a house and get a mortgage.

00:15:45.640 | It's much more expensive.

00:15:47.480 | Then you got to think about all the people who already have debt.

00:15:51.160 | Doesn't this look recessionary?

00:15:52.920 | Totally, because a few years ago, you could get a home loan at a 3% to 4% interest rate.

00:16:00.480 | You know, and amortize that.

00:16:02.760 | Now your debt service cost can be twice as high.

00:16:06.000 | So you just can't buy as much house.

00:16:08.280 | It's a very bad place if the economy is in the toilet, but we can't even talk about it

00:16:12.480 | because there is no structural way to get an accurate read because the government just

00:16:19.440 | perverts the effect it has in the economy.

00:16:23.440 | Like you can't have-- Distortions, yeah.

00:16:25.480 | Yeah, distortion.

00:16:26.480 | Fine.

00:16:27.480 | You can't have a nonprofit entity representing the plurality of the economic activity of

00:16:33.480 | a country and expect the capital markets to function properly.

00:16:38.680 | At some point, the capital markets will basically throw their hands up in the air and puke it

00:16:42.840 | all out and say, "No."

00:16:44.760 | I think that you're starting to see a little bit of these fissures.

00:16:47.960 | So I think we're going to have to clean up our balance sheet pretty aggressively here.

00:16:51.800 | Yeah, and if you look at the importance of that rate, that rate drives the value of bonds.

00:16:58.560 | As the current market rate for treasuries or for the prime rate climbs, the value of

00:17:03.800 | an existing bond that pays interest at a lower rate goes down because you have to pay a lower

00:17:10.760 | basis in order to get back to the new high rate that the market is telling you.

00:17:15.040 | So there are several trillion dollars, and we can pull up the graph here, Nick, of loans

00:17:20.760 | and bonds that are sitting on the balance sheets of many commercial banks in the United

00:17:24.600 | States that are now so significantly underwater, where the value is now below the book that

00:17:31.580 | they paid for those loans or that they issued them at, that those banks now have unrealized

00:17:37.040 | losses.

00:17:38.600 | I think that this number is one of the other kind of facts.

00:17:41.160 | You see a few articles come out here and there about this, but the number as the rates go

00:17:44.960 | up, the number of unrealized losses, the dollar value of the unrealized losses of banks' balance

00:17:49.840 | sheets in the United States has climbed so considerably that it represents a real crisis.

00:17:54.280 | In fact, the unrealized losses on banks' balance sheets today is higher than it was in 2008.

00:17:59.000 | Trillions.

00:18:00.000 | It's trillions.

00:18:01.000 | It's trillions.

00:18:02.000 | Buffett warned B of A publicly.

00:18:03.000 | But he's been selling off.

00:18:04.680 | He sold off, right?

00:18:05.680 | B of A.

00:18:06.680 | He warned B of A publicly, although a bit obliquely, last year during his annual conference.

00:18:16.240 | It was very clear.

00:18:17.240 | It's like, "Listen, this is an opportunity for folks to just mark to market these securities

00:18:20.680 | properly and/or sell them and get them off the books."

00:18:24.400 | I don't think B of A acted quickly enough.

00:18:26.960 | What did Buffett do?

00:18:27.960 | He just basically started dumping.

00:18:30.460 | He's almost completely out of B of A, if not completely out altogether.

00:18:36.120 | There's a lot of talk-

00:18:37.120 | A crisis is brewing.

00:18:38.760 | There's a lot of talk in FinTWIT, if you go into the deep, far-reaching bowels of the

00:18:45.160 | FinTWIT community on X, that there is a huge credit crisis looming amongst some of these

00:18:50.000 | large charter-holding banks because of this exact issue.

00:18:55.400 | The relation between the Fed and the prime is typically 3%.

00:19:00.280 | The Fed cuts rates, and then the banks put 3% on top of it when they give people credit

00:19:06.040 | worthy people, mortgages and credit cards.

00:19:09.260 | As the Fed cuts, this should come down, but if it went up, what explains that?

00:19:14.480 | I'm curious if anybody knows.

00:19:16.200 | The Fed sets short rates.

00:19:17.560 | It sets the Fed funds rate, which is the rate of overnight lending between banks, but it

00:19:23.360 | does not set the 10-year treasury, for example, the long-term-

00:19:27.560 | The market sets that.

00:19:28.560 | The market sets that.

00:19:29.560 | The market sets it.

00:19:30.560 | It now requires a higher rate of interest in order to accept the risk of investing in

00:19:36.120 | those bonds.

00:19:38.440 | Since it's a U.S. treasury, it's not really risk, it's more about the time value of money

00:19:44.760 | and their expectations of inflation, how much that money is going to be worth in the future.

00:19:49.800 | I think what we're seeing is that the Fed can cut short-term rates, but it hasn't had

00:19:54.240 | the impact on long-term rates that everyone was expecting.

00:19:57.600 | I think everyone was expecting that we had this sort of burst in inflation, the famous

00:20:02.720 | 9% inflation rate.

00:20:04.640 | I think people were expecting that that would work its way through the system and that we'd

00:20:08.720 | get long-term rates back to where they were, but that's not happening.

00:20:12.440 | It's not happening for the reason we're saying, which is there's just too much debt out there.

00:20:16.120 | Think about the impact on the real economy.

00:20:19.000 | Let's say that you're a homebuyer and you got a five-year interest-only ARM-type mortgage

00:20:26.760 | for your house.

00:20:27.760 | Tick-tock.

00:20:28.760 | Yeah.

00:20:29.760 | Now, you probably got that in the 3% to 4% range.

00:20:33.520 | If you have to refinance it this year at 8%, your monthly payment is going to double.

00:20:39.240 | That has a real impact on people's wealth and on their spending power.

00:20:44.080 | Maybe they can't even support a payment like that.

00:20:47.680 | Now, go over to the commercial side and it's very similar.

00:20:51.400 | There's a lot of commercial real estate out there, buildings and so on, where they've

00:20:55.680 | got debt on it.

00:20:57.400 | You can't get 30-year mortgages in commercial.

00:21:00.120 | The typical commercial loan is five to seven years.

00:21:04.560 | We're now coming up, I think, in the next few years on a lot of that debt will need

00:21:09.200 | to roll.

00:21:10.200 | It'll need to be refinanced.

00:21:11.460 | If it gets refinanced at twice the interest cost, roughly, a lot of those buildings may

00:21:18.320 | be underwater.

00:21:19.320 | I mean, they may not be in composite.

00:21:20.320 | There's no equity value.

00:21:21.320 | There may be no equity value.

00:21:23.480 | A lot of people know this now, but they don't really have to mark those positions to market.

00:21:27.680 | If they did, their equity was zero, but they're all on borrowed time right now, hoping that

00:21:34.300 | rates will go back down.

00:21:36.600 | What we're seeing is that the long rates are not going back down.

00:21:39.340 | It's a pretty scary proposition.

00:21:40.340 | Then, of course, a lot of the debt on those buildings, it's all owned by the commercial

00:21:44.900 | banks that you're talking about, the regional banks.

00:21:47.600 | They're sending out a lot of bad debt that they haven't had to mark to market.

00:21:51.960 | They're just kind of hoping that this problem will get sorted out before there's a default.

00:21:59.420 | By the way, as these numbers climb, the cost to borrow for the federal government climbs.

00:22:04.740 | The new bonds, we have to reissue a good percent, I think nearly $10 trillion, I think, of our

00:22:08.640 | debt has to be reissued in the next year.

00:22:12.160 | That's going to get reissued now at this higher rate.

00:22:15.120 | That higher rate means that the annual expense just to pay the interest on the existing debt

00:22:19.600 | is now climbing at a faster rate.

00:22:22.120 | That means you've got to issue more debt to pay for your interest on your current debt.

00:22:25.800 | It's quite paradoxical that the Fed sets that rate.

00:22:30.360 | This becomes the compounding problem when your debt to GDP reaches a certain level and

00:22:36.360 | you don't reduce federal spending fast enough.

00:22:39.080 | It becomes a compounding problem you cannot get away from.

00:22:42.000 | This has been the beginning of the cataclysmic economic collapse of every great empire in

00:22:46.760 | the last 500 years.

00:22:47.760 | I know I've said this.

00:22:48.760 | I could talk about it all day long, but this is how it starts, is it starts at a point

00:22:51.840 | where you're arithmetically not able to get out of your debt spiral.

00:22:56.160 | The markets are telling us that if the U.S. doesn't take drastic action in reducing its

00:23:00.000 | spending and reducing the deficit levels so that we can actually address the payment obligations

00:23:05.440 | on the outstanding debt that we've already issued, the U.S. dollar is going to have a

00:23:09.040 | real problem and the creditworthiness of the United States is challenged.

00:23:12.720 | That's what the market says, but I know that there's other issues with the fact that there's

00:23:15.840 | no other better place to put money today and there's not a lot of other great economies

00:23:20.480 | out there and so on and so forth, but the stability of the United States, the hegemony

00:23:24.200 | of the United States and the dollar is challenged in part by the fact that you've got this BRICS

00:23:28.200 | organization out there now that has greater GDP in aggregate than the U.S., and so there

00:23:33.000 | may be an alternative that emerges in the next couple of years and maybe everyone's

00:23:35.920 | kind of putting their assets away in gold and Bitcoin and other stuff while they're

00:23:41.120 | waiting for the transition to find another place to buy.

00:23:43.600 | We'll see.

00:23:44.600 | All right.

00:23:45.600 | Well, it's scary.

00:23:46.600 | But what it implies is if rates have roughly doubled, let's say, in the last few years

00:23:51.600 | and they're going to stay at that level, they're not going back down, it implies there's going

00:23:56.120 | to be a big deleveraging, right, because, you know, you can't support those interest

00:24:01.600 | payments.

00:24:02.600 | I mean, let's say that you own a building, right, and now all of a sudden…

00:24:05.440 | Well, it's actually deleveraging or inflation because the alternative is the Fed monetizes

00:24:12.040 | the debt, they start buying all the bonds, which means you're pumping more U.S. dollars

00:24:15.200 | into the market, and that means that the cost of everything goes through the roof, so you

00:24:18.920 | have this effect of economic inflation, which is the way that you inflate away the debt

00:24:22.920 | problem, assuming people still want to use your currency.

00:24:25.680 | Yeah.

00:24:26.680 | Well, I mean, that's at the government level.

00:24:27.680 | I mean, I was talking about the private sector.

00:24:29.920 | I mean, just think about it at the level of, like, an individual building, you've got

00:24:33.520 | a loan on it, now you need to refinance the loan, interest rates are twice as high, let's

00:24:38.480 | just say that that doesn't… the building no longer produces operating income at that

00:24:42.080 | level of debt, so you have to pay down some of your debt.

00:24:45.920 | It's called an equity in refinancing, where you're not pulling money out, you're putting

00:24:49.640 | money in.

00:24:50.640 | You have to deleverage in order to make your sort of income statement work, right?

00:24:53.920 | It's just too much debt at that new level of interest rates.

00:24:57.800 | So if rates stay high, there's no choice but for many people to delever, whether it's on

00:25:03.760 | the commercial side or on the consumer side.

00:25:07.640 | You just can't afford as much debt, right, at that higher interest rate.

00:25:12.000 | So think about the impact that has on the economy when everyone has to delever.

00:25:16.880 | That's a very negative effect.

00:25:18.680 | And then, of course, like you're saying, at the government level, you have to figure out

00:25:23.320 | what to do about that, because our interest payments on the debt are already, what, 20

00:25:27.120 | to 25% of federal revenue?

00:25:29.120 | Yeah, it's about $1.5 trillion.

00:25:30.120 | $1.5 trillion, yeah.

00:25:31.120 | It's about $2,500.

00:25:32.120 | So you already see it there, where there's less money to spend on current programs because

00:25:37.640 | you're paying for interest on the debt.

00:25:40.200 | So what do you do about that?

00:25:42.060 | So I think that the next president is going to face a pretty wicked set of problems and

00:25:46.560 | trade-offs here.

00:25:47.560 | Even though the GDP numbers are fine, they're good, I still think there's like a wicked

00:25:52.360 | set of problems related to government debt and interest rates.

00:25:56.720 | And there's no way to really skin this cat without some pain.

00:26:00.960 | I think the only path is you have to cut spending, which is recessionary, government spending,

00:26:07.040 | which is recessionary, so you're going to trigger an economic recession.

00:26:10.400 | You're going to have to have some amount of inflation, and you're going to have to have

00:26:13.240 | a spike in unemployment.

00:26:14.240 | And if you don't do the first two things, you're going to have a lot more inflation,

00:26:17.880 | which is really hard to get out of.

00:26:19.160 | Well, I agree.

00:26:20.160 | I agree that we have to cut.

00:26:21.160 | There doesn't seem to be a win-win scenario here.

00:26:23.680 | There's no, yeah.

00:26:24.680 | I agree we have to cut government spending.

00:26:26.840 | I personally don't think it's recessionary.

00:26:28.240 | I think it helps the private sector when government gets cut.

00:26:31.160 | However...

00:26:32.160 | Because, Saxe, that means the private sector gets to service that function.

00:26:38.040 | The government won't be consuming all these resources that the private sector could use

00:26:41.360 | better.

00:26:42.360 | It also won't have as many government bureaucrats acting as brake pedals on the private sector.

00:26:47.520 | So I tend to think that the government, the real economy will perform better with a smaller

00:26:52.880 | government.

00:26:54.080 | I think the reason why it won't happen is because it's politically difficult.

00:26:58.800 | It's extremely difficult to cut spending politically, right?

00:27:01.600 | Right.

00:27:02.600 | Well, I mean, as we saw this cycle, every single proposal seemed to be a payoff to different

00:27:08.600 | constituencies.

00:27:09.600 | It was like Christmas for everybody.

00:27:10.600 | Right.

00:27:11.600 | Those line items got in the budget somehow, right?

00:27:14.640 | Somebody fought for every single line item in the budget, some special interest, and

00:27:19.000 | they're going to fight like hell to keep their appropriation.

00:27:21.840 | It's not even special interest.

00:27:23.400 | It's the representatives in Congress doing their job, which is to fight for their constituents

00:27:28.520 | getting their fair share or their fair shake at the money that's being spent.

00:27:32.680 | And that's just the way that the legislative branch has evolved over time.

00:27:37.080 | If someone's getting something in order for me to vote for it, I want to get something

00:27:39.960 | too.

00:27:40.960 | And so the whole thing over time becomes functionally inflationary.

00:27:43.800 | Right.

00:27:44.800 | I've seen it.

00:27:45.800 | I think that whole shell game might just be over now because there's no more money left.

00:27:49.400 | I mean, it's all been spent.

00:27:51.640 | In fact, you know what I mean?

00:27:53.140 | So like all the federal government probably will end up doing in the near future is entitlements

00:27:59.920 | and defense.

00:28:00.920 | That's it.

00:28:01.920 | Because those are the core functions of the federal government.

00:28:04.360 | I think everything else that's sort of "discretionary" is probably going to get cut because there's

00:28:09.680 | no more money left.

00:28:11.200 | Tragedy of the commons, folks.

00:28:14.280 | Everybody acting in their self-interest and yeah, not a lot of coordination or ability

00:28:18.800 | to win office if you actually do what's in everybody's collective best interest and take

00:28:23.680 | the medicine.

00:28:25.240 | Moving on through the docket, tech earnings this week, Google has a great quarter.

00:28:30.800 | Let's go over that a bit here, your alma mater, Freiburg.

00:28:34.520 | They beat top line and bottom line.

00:28:36.400 | Stock popped 5%.

00:28:38.440 | Looks like cloud and YouTube are the story here.

00:28:41.280 | Total revenue, let this sink in, 88.3 billion, up 15% year over year.

00:28:47.520 | Freiburg was 49 billion of that.

00:28:50.960 | And their operating income is now up 34% year over year.

00:28:55.360 | I think the CFO is getting some work done there, 28.5 billion, and net income was 26.3

00:29:02.480 | billion.

00:29:03.640 | Interestingly, people are expecting even larger profits.

00:29:07.440 | They got a new CFO over there who said they could push a little further on cost cutting.

00:29:13.160 | And she said the company will use AI to cut costs by streamlining workflows and managing

00:29:17.760 | headcount physical footprint.

00:29:20.120 | I think that means more layoffs are coming to big tech.

00:29:23.440 | YouTube had a tremendous quarter, ad revenue 8.9 billion, Chamath, that's up 12%.

00:29:29.200 | But Sundar said something interesting.

00:29:30.840 | He said YouTube surpassed 50 billion in total revenue over the past year.

00:29:36.020 | And so if you do a little botte math, that's the back of the envelope math for those of

00:29:41.400 | you at home who haven't heard that acronym.

00:29:45.900 | Google doesn't report YouTube's non ad revenue, but we know YouTube had 35 billion in ad revenue

00:29:50.480 | over the last year.

00:29:52.080 | That means they're doing about 15 billion in premium paid products.

00:29:57.160 | YouTube TV, NFL Sunday Ticket, YouTube Premium, which is the greatest product ever, it takes

00:30:01.360 | ads out of YouTube, and makes it usable.

00:30:04.140 | So 70/30 split, cloud had a blowout quarter, Google Cloud, I see that all the time now.

00:30:11.240 | 11.4 billion in revenue on 35% annual growth with 1.9 billion in operating profit.

00:30:17.840 | I mean, it's printing money.

00:30:20.280 | There are seven quasi monopolies in the world.

00:30:24.720 | They're all American, and if we allow them to flourish, we'll be good.

00:30:30.600 | If we hamper them a little bit, and allow other companies to pick up the white space,

00:30:37.160 | we'll be great.

00:30:38.280 | Over to you.

00:30:39.280 | Okay.

00:30:40.280 | There's your, that's called analysis.

00:30:41.280 | And what if we break them up, Chamath?

00:30:44.300 | And if we break them up?

00:30:46.460 | I think that you'll have a lot more, the sum is greater than the parts.

00:30:51.000 | I mean, clearly YouTube would be one of the great companies right now.

00:30:54.880 | If you take the perspective of, if you own stock in any of these companies, the sum of

00:31:02.920 | the parts analysis would tell you that the breakup value is greater than the way that

00:31:07.200 | these companies get discounted.

00:31:08.700 | You can look at the multiples that they trade at, and you can see that.

00:31:13.480 | So if you're a shareholder of the company, you actually silently probably want them broken

00:31:17.640 | up because you'll get individual shares that are each will be worth more.

00:31:21.400 | Separately, if you are a shareholder of the United States economy, you also probably want

00:31:27.080 | them broken up because then you'll just have many more companies creating economic value,

00:31:31.760 | which then drives the tax rolls, which benefit the United States balance sheet.

00:31:38.400 | It's hard to see unless you're an employee of the company, or you derive a lot of ego

00:31:45.440 | from the existence of a company the way it is, that you would need it to stay where how

00:31:49.960 | it is.

00:31:50.960 | Well, let me challenge your point on two fronts.

00:31:53.440 | In Google's case, both YouTube and GCP required many, many, many, many billions of dollars

00:31:59.400 | of investment over many years.

00:32:01.880 | Same with Waymo, by the way, at this point, that took a long time and a lot of capital

00:32:06.800 | to get the payback on.

00:32:08.600 | If those were standalone businesses, and they didn't have the profits being derived from

00:32:12.920 | search and ads over many years, they would not have been able to build those incredible

00:32:17.920 | businesses.

00:32:18.920 | So if you do break these businesses up, what you do lose is the ability for an American

00:32:23.040 | juggernaut to be able just like Amazon did with AWS, and Apple did, and we can go through

00:32:27.840 | the list to build these new businesses that require the cash flows from the old businesses.

00:32:34.360 | With separate companies, it becomes much harder to make that degree of an investment.

00:32:38.160 | That your set angle, that angle of belly aching is not going to pass muster because it's all

00:32:43.160 | about litigating the past.

00:32:45.840 | And you got to play the ball where it lies, where it lies is this business is in a position

00:32:50.520 | where you can probably demarcate four or five logical business units.

00:32:54.520 | Again, I'm not saying that it should have for sure, but it will happen and the argument

00:32:58.920 | of but the past is not going to work.

00:33:01.040 | No, no, I'm not.

00:33:02.040 | I'm not disagreeing with your point about like, hey, if these things broke up, people

00:33:04.640 | would make money.

00:33:05.640 | I'm just I'm just trying to understand this point about American dynamism or whatever

00:33:09.680 | you want to call it, that these companies are all in America, they've all been successful

00:33:13.360 | because they've been led by amazing founders.

00:33:15.800 | They've reinvested so much of the profit they've generated back into building insane new businesses

00:33:21.280 | that took a lot of capital and a lot of time.

00:33:23.320 | And eventually they paid off.

00:33:24.760 | And they became the next generation of ginormous new businesses that would have not have possibly

00:33:28.880 | existed if not for the will and the cash flows coming from those old businesses.

00:33:33.760 | But you also have a companion economy in the capital markets where there's hundreds of

00:33:37.440 | billions of dollars that go and fill in the gaps.

00:33:39.940 | And I think the reality is the people in the capital markets are not stupid.

00:33:43.640 | And if these big companies hadn't spent hundreds of billions of dollars, the capital markets

00:33:48.400 | would have.

00:33:49.400 | So I don't think that if Google, let's just play a scenario and I'm not trying to relitigate

00:33:53.480 | the past.

00:33:54.480 | But if Google did not own YouTube, what do you think would have been fine would have

00:33:58.040 | gotten funded and it would have been fine.

00:33:59.680 | It would have raised the billions and the reason for it because you do you remember

00:34:03.320 | YouTube had a real infrastructure under a serious lawsuit.

00:34:05.880 | I think they would have shut down.

00:34:07.320 | The reason is because people are smart enough to understand when then there's the potential

00:34:14.040 | to make money.

00:34:15.320 | Okay.

00:34:16.320 | And the free markets do a really good job of highlighting where that's possible.

00:34:20.720 | Again, there is no point relitigating this, but I think it would have gotten funded.

00:34:25.960 | Yeah.

00:34:26.960 | Why didn't AWS get funded with $10 million?

00:34:29.200 | Yeah.

00:34:30.200 | Because that's what open is, right?

00:34:31.200 | Why does why does core weave get funded today?

00:34:33.800 | How is core weave allowed to even exist?

00:34:35.720 | Why doesn't it all go?

00:34:36.920 | Because investors are smart.

00:34:39.120 | They see that there's an economic rationale for there being multiple players.

00:34:43.240 | And then there's a smart founding team that creates a justification that gets it going.

00:34:49.080 | So the era of the monopolies monopoly on building new monopolies is over.

00:34:55.480 | I don't think it's I don't think it's ever existed, but I think the point is that big

00:34:59.640 | businesses are there to eventually grow a GDP so that they can be disrupted by small

00:35:05.240 | companies.

00:35:06.240 | That's what you want, because if you had the same seven or eight companies, then you could

00:35:09.960 | make the argument that we should have stopped at the East West India Company and everything

00:35:13.640 | would have been great.

00:35:14.640 | It's not true.

00:35:15.640 | It is what we did with the railroads.

00:35:17.920 | It's what we did with the AT&T.

00:35:20.200 | It's what we did with Standard Oil.

00:35:22.680 | Like when these when these monopolies were built in the US, they were all broken up.

00:35:25.640 | But hold on.

00:35:26.640 | It's not necessarily what we did.

00:35:27.640 | It's the boundary conditions that enabled other people to then go and fill the gaps.

00:35:31.280 | And I think that that's the economic boundary conditions.

00:35:34.600 | You know, Sachs had this great tweet this past week, and I almost quote tweeted it,

00:35:40.080 | but I thought I don't want to create a lot more noise where there doesn't need to be

00:35:43.320 | paying attention now.

00:35:45.680 | But he had this tweet about taking back the licenses for the main broadcast channels.

00:35:51.840 | And I thought that was an excellent thing.

00:35:53.280 | And I quote tweeted something where I was like, yeah, we should buy that for all in.

00:35:59.320 | And I said it half jokingly, but I didn't.

00:36:02.960 | Because I think that if those licenses were up for grabs, what would happen is a bunch

00:36:07.480 | of private equity people would get behind Rogan, a bunch of private equity people would

00:36:11.320 | get behind us and we would all bid and the outcome would be better.

00:36:16.360 | So the point is that these small structural changes, and I know that it may seem large

00:36:22.880 | to break up Google.

00:36:23.920 | It's not.

00:36:24.920 | It's a small thing in the grand course of American business history.

00:36:27.960 | It's not going to really matter that much.

00:36:31.480 | Would be good generally through the lens of the individual shareholder and through the

00:36:35.560 | lens of the shareholder of the United States.

00:36:37.840 | That's Sachs.

00:36:38.840 | Can you tell us about the broadcast licensing comment that you made?

00:36:42.520 | I thought it was actually pretty good, too.

00:36:44.040 | Yeah, there's a history to this.

00:36:45.400 | I mean, originally in the US, we had three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and

00:36:52.760 | they were given licenses of public spectrum from the FCC.

00:36:57.800 | And those licenses were free.

00:36:59.400 | But in exchange for them, the major broadcast networks had these various requirements to

00:37:03.240 | serve the public interest to be fair, pre pre cable.

00:37:07.360 | And this was right.

00:37:08.360 | This goes back like 100 years, just to be I think it's important to be clear, because

00:37:13.920 | I don't think everyone understands that back in the day, all the TV networks only broadcast

00:37:19.120 | over the air.

00:37:20.120 | So they needed radio spectrum allocated to them to do that.

00:37:24.220 | Which was a you know, 100 year old kind of that's 100 year old situation doesn't exist

00:37:28.120 | anymore.

00:37:29.120 | Sorry.

00:37:30.120 | It was the only way to get information broadcast on TV was through this, this public spectrum.

00:37:37.720 | And so it kind of made sense in a world in which there are only three networks.

00:37:42.960 | Because that was the only way to get information to have these fairness requirements and public

00:37:48.440 | interest requirements.

00:37:50.040 | And so it was heavily regulated.

00:37:51.640 | Well, now it's a century later, and there's so many ways to get information.

00:37:56.080 | You've got cable, obviously, meant that we went from three or four networks to hundreds.

00:38:03.520 | And then of course, you've got the internet, and you've got streaming.

00:38:06.920 | So there's now an infinite number of ways to get information in real time, including

00:38:14.160 | video and that sort of thing.

00:38:16.160 | You've also got social networks, you've got x, and all the rest.

00:38:19.600 | So there's no shelf space limit anymore.

00:38:23.760 | There's no scarcity.

00:38:24.760 | And so therefore, tying up this very valuable spectrum, by giving it for free to the to

00:38:31.480 | the broadcast networks, this doesn't really make sense in the same way.

00:38:35.660 | And what we should do is just auction off the spectrum, use the money to pay down the

00:38:41.040 | national debt.

00:38:43.120 | And then in that way, it'll go to its most highly valued use, the market will figure

00:38:48.440 | out what that use is.

00:38:50.080 | If the broadcast networks are the most highly valued way to use this spectrum, then they'll

00:38:55.160 | win the auction.

00:38:56.160 | But I suspect they won't.

00:38:57.160 | It doesn't make sense.

00:38:58.160 | Isn't that exactly what they did?

00:38:59.160 | They did this auction in 2016, right, for 15 years?

00:39:01.440 | They've been gradually auctioning off more spectrum.

00:39:04.600 | But we're talking about here, this is like the most choice valuable part of public spectrum.

00:39:10.840 | So for example, one of the reasons why the spectrum is valuable is because it can easily

00:39:17.760 | go through walls, right?

00:39:18.840 | Like, you can watch your TV inside your house, and this broadcast spectrum is good at getting

00:39:23.800 | through those walls.

00:39:25.600 | Imagine the types of GPS apps you could enable with that kind of precision, right?

00:39:31.880 | So there's many other ways, in theory, that the spectrum could be used.

00:39:36.880 | And you would be able to unleash, I think, a lot of innovation in next generation wireless

00:39:42.000 | apps if the spectrum were available.

00:39:44.120 | I don't think the public would lose anything because ABC, CBS, NBC, first of all, I mean,

00:39:49.960 | these networks are basically a commodity now.

00:39:52.160 | There's so many other ways to get news, and they'll still be available through the internet

00:39:56.280 | and through cable.

00:39:57.280 | So you're saying to speed up these auctions, because they do occur every 15 years or something

00:40:03.400 | to that.

00:40:04.400 | I think what happens is that the licenses are actually granted to local stations, like

00:40:10.760 | your local ABC or whatever.

00:40:12.680 | WNBC.

00:40:13.680 | WNBC.

00:40:14.680 | Right?

00:40:15.680 | Yeah.

00:40:16.680 | And then collectively, they have a lobby called the NAB, or National Association of Broadcasters.

00:40:22.280 | And this is why they have so much power, is you've got all these local networks, let's

00:40:26.000 | call three or four of them in every geography, and they all come together as part of this

00:40:29.720 | lobby.

00:40:31.040 | And so this is why nothing ever changes.

00:40:33.080 | But does this model still make sense?

00:40:34.680 | No.

00:40:35.680 | I mean, it's completely obsolete.

00:40:37.520 | But those local networks will all go crazy if they lose their free spectrum.

00:40:42.640 | Well, they pay for it.

00:40:45.240 | They don't get it for free.

00:40:46.240 | They don't pay for it now.

00:40:47.240 | They get a free license from the FCC in exchange for the fairness requirement and these other

00:40:51.320 | requirements.

00:40:52.320 | I think that they pay billions of dollars for these and hundreds of millions on a local

00:40:58.240 | level.

00:40:59.240 | Not these licenses.

00:41:00.240 | No.

00:41:01.240 | Every six years or so, they come back up and they get renewed by the FCC.

00:41:03.640 | I was just talking about the spectrum auctions.

00:41:05.520 | I'm looking at it right now.

00:41:06.520 | That's different.

00:41:07.520 | Yeah.

00:41:08.520 | Okay.

00:41:09.520 | All right.

00:41:10.520 | Interesting.

00:41:11.520 | No.

00:41:12.520 | Look, the FCC has auctioned spectrum before, but not the spectrum that the broadcast networks

00:41:16.600 | are sitting on, which is some of the most valuable spectrum.

00:41:19.200 | Got it.

00:41:20.200 | And the only reason why it's being used this way is because of legacy, because this is

00:41:25.760 | how it worked a hundred years ago.

00:41:27.320 | Well, and then this parallels into, I think, some of the research that's going on right

00:41:31.280 | now around legacy media and trust in media.

00:41:35.520 | A bunch of reports have been coming out about this.

00:41:38.600 | It's not shocking to anybody who listens to this podcast, but confidence in institutions

00:41:43.720 | is tracked by a number of different organizations, Gallup being one of them.

00:41:48.320 | And if we look at how Americans feel and trust has generally been going down in everything,

00:41:56.760 | the military.

00:41:57.760 | It's also being tracked in the WAPO op-ed section.

00:42:01.360 | Yeah, exactly.

00:42:02.360 | Are you going to pull that up, Jake, do you have that or no?

00:42:06.040 | Yeah, we'll talk about it.

00:42:08.400 | But here, if you take a look at from 2021, 2022, and into 2023, television news went

00:42:16.000 | from 16 down to 11, and back up to 14, but is amongst the lowest in terms of trust.

00:42:26.840 | And 40% of Americans have no trust in media at all, according to this Gallup poll.

00:42:32.840 | Here's how it breaks down by party, Republican, Independent, and Democrats.

00:42:40.120 | Democrats by the Democrats, 58%, Independents 29%, Republicans 11%.

00:42:48.500 | In mass media, your thoughts, Friedberg, as we look at just trust in general, in institutions,

00:42:55.900 | this transitionary period we're in and specifically the media.

00:42:59.720 | I do think we've talked about this a number of times in the past.

00:43:03.140 | So without rehashing too much, I think that many of the institutions that have offered

00:43:09.560 | media have had to move away from providing data and information because data and information

00:43:14.320 | has commoditized.

00:43:15.320 | It's available broadly through the internet and other places.

00:43:18.040 | So the actual gathering of information is now democratized.

00:43:22.340 | You know, agencies put their data on their websites, stock markets are published on the

00:43:26.600 | internet.

00:43:27.600 | So the internet has democratized access to information.

00:43:29.880 | So the media companies that have historically been arbiters of information have had to become

00:43:34.400 | effectively content businesses.

00:43:37.360 | They've had to provide more than just information.

00:43:40.420 | And what has happened is a iterative feedback system whereby the more kind of angry they

00:43:48.440 | can make someone, the more upset they can make someone, the more emotive they can make

00:43:53.100 | a reader or a viewer or a listener, the more clicks they get, the more the kind of limbic

00:43:59.140 | system triggers that consumer to come back and consume some more of their media.

00:44:03.680 | And so the iterative development cycle is that things look like they're one side versus

00:44:07.440 | another side in nearly every context, in every piece of media.

00:44:11.320 | Everyone is opinionated and making a position point from a side, from a perceived side that

00:44:16.800 | they are representing because it is emotive to the readers and the readers come back and

00:44:20.660 | they align with that side and they want to have more of that because it incites their

00:44:24.060 | limbic system.

00:44:25.060 | So that's what's happened.

00:44:26.060 | And as a result, when people look at it and assume that it's what it used to be, which

00:44:30.360 | is objective truth, fact finding information gathering, and it is not that they're like,

00:44:35.080 | well, this isn't even news anymore.

00:44:36.920 | And the truth is, it's not because information is democratized.

00:44:40.480 | It's available to you anywhere and everywhere you want it.

00:44:42.840 | You can get it through citizen journalism, via blogs, via podcasts, via Twitter, via

00:44:47.840 | many other places.

00:44:49.060 | And so the legacy media companies have effectively become emotive content companies in order

00:44:54.920 | to drive clicks, drive views, sell ads.

00:44:57.480 | That's really all this whole story is.

00:44:58.840 | And I don't think that that's going to shift.

00:45:00.480 | I don't think that Jeff Bezos has attempt to try and return WAPO back to being a fact

00:45:05.200 | finding organization is going to be successful.

00:45:07.440 | I think all the consumers that read WAPO today, they love the one sided nature.

00:45:11.880 | They love the bias that they read.

00:45:13.720 | It makes them feel good.

00:45:15.200 | I think that the people that work there love the bias.

00:45:17.400 | They love writing those opinion pieces.

00:45:19.040 | It makes them feel good.

00:45:20.520 | I don't think anyone actually wants boring news anymore.

00:45:22.960 | Because you know what, they can go to a website from the government itself or from a company

00:45:27.280 | itself and just read the information.

00:45:29.520 | And frankly, if they want to get unbiased, honest, factual information, there's 100 other

00:45:33.720 | sources.

00:45:34.720 | Well, and then here, the commentary, the comment, yeah, the commentary about off the cuff, etc.

00:45:39.080 | You know what that is?

00:45:40.400 | That's called authentic conversation.

00:45:42.680 | That is how people speak.

00:45:44.400 | When we all get together, we are not journalists, we are not necessarily well versed.

00:45:48.480 | Let's be honest, we mess things up a lot.

00:45:50.920 | We say off the cuff comments that are wrong very often.

00:45:53.960 | But that's just how people speak.

00:45:55.360 | And it feels authentic.

00:45:56.360 | And when we do have signal, I think that listeners and viewers are smart enough to separate that

00:46:00.720 | signal from noise.

00:46:02.400 | And they are going to make their own decisions about what they find to be truth and factual

00:46:07.080 | and what they're going to use to make decisions in their life.

00:46:09.560 | And that's, I think, how people want to consume information now.

00:46:12.500 | It's not being told what the truth is by some fake authority.

00:46:16.400 | And here is a clip from the podcast last year.

00:46:20.600 | Podcasts could play a huge role, just like in 2016, social media broke through and played

00:46:24.120 | a huge role.

00:46:25.120 | I think in 2024, I think that podcast could break through and be the way that unorthodox

00:46:31.440 | candidates get their message out.

00:46:32.840 | It could be the way all candidates get their message out.

00:46:35.400 | We're moving from traditional media defining these candidates to direct to consumer, direct

00:46:42.800 | through Twitter/X, direct through podcasts, this podcast included.

00:46:47.280 | What we're witnessing right now is the transition from traditional media and the establishment

00:46:52.680 | defining who the great candidates are to the public and the people on podcasts and social

00:46:57.440 | media who are the tip of the spear on the vanguard.

00:47:00.320 | They're going to pick the winners.

00:47:01.600 | I love you both.

00:47:02.600 | You guys totally nailed it.

00:47:05.040 | Look at that.

00:47:06.040 | Sax, your thoughts on this sort of transition?

00:47:08.560 | Interestingly, as we know, Rogan had Trump on, over 40 million views now.

00:47:13.440 | I think they're up to 100 million views now for that Rogan/Trump interview.

00:47:16.560 | Despite the fact that you literally could not find it if you search for it in Google

00:47:21.040 | or YouTube.

00:47:22.040 | Quite amazing.

00:47:23.040 | Well, we'll get to that in a second.

00:47:24.040 | Yeah, that's an interesting one.

00:47:25.040 | I got to take on that, but what do you take from Rogan getting, let's say, many more views

00:47:31.560 | than the last two presidential debates?

00:47:35.240 | Trump/Harris, 67 million viewers, Trump/Biden, 51 million viewers.

00:47:39.960 | I think maybe Rogan combined with his two episodes will get more than the first two

00:47:46.720 | debates.

00:47:47.720 | Yeah, look, I think this is the first podcast election where you can make the argument that

00:47:52.920 | podcasts will decide the election.

00:47:55.920 | There's a couple of reasons for that.

00:47:57.120 | One is podcasts have gotten big enough that there's enough audience that they just have

00:48:00.600 | the reach now to play a big role.

00:48:03.600 | Second, the format is highly informative to viewers.

00:48:08.320 | You get to see a candidate expound in long form, being asked questions and having to

00:48:14.840 | go for potentially hours at a time.

00:48:17.640 | Trump went for three hours with Rogan, and it's very hard to hide who you are when you're

00:48:23.200 | going for that period of time in an unscripted environment.

00:48:26.200 | I would argue even the hour that Trump spent with us demonstrated that he knew a lot more

00:48:32.640 | about policy issues than people were giving him credit for, and it also showed his personality

00:48:38.200 | was a lot different than the media had portrayed him.

00:48:40.680 | So I think that podcasts have been a great advantage for Trump.

00:48:45.600 | He's been willing to do them, and I think he does them quite well.

00:48:49.160 | I think it's particularly helpful to him in a context where the legacy media has been

00:48:55.520 | trying to portray him as a very extreme figure, as literally a Nazi or literally the reincarnation

00:49:01.980 | of Adolf Hitler.

00:49:03.260 | When the media is telling the audience that you're that, and then you can go on Rogan

00:49:08.000 | for three hours and show that you're a normal, funny guy who actually knows a lot about policy,

00:49:13.480 | this is such a different impression than what the media is trying to portray that it's been

00:49:18.080 | incredibly, I think, useful and advantageous for Trump.

00:49:21.960 | By the same token, Kamala Harris has not been willing to do Rogan, at least not on Rogan's

00:49:27.480 | terms.

00:49:28.480 | Apparently, she was willing to sit down for one hour with him, but-

00:49:32.280 | But not in Austin, according to-

00:49:33.720 | But not in Austin.

00:49:34.720 | What Rogan said is, "No, we have to sit down in our studio for three hours."

00:49:39.420 | So far, she hasn't been willing to do that.

00:49:41.260 | I think that speaks volumes in and of itself, is that she hasn't been willing to subject

00:49:45.920 | herself to the same sort of, you could call it interrogation or really just long-form

00:49:50.880 | conversation that Trump has been willing to.

00:49:54.080 | But in any event, just I think my bottom line on this is that I think Trump's biggest challenge

00:49:58.960 | in this election is just to get people comfortable with the idea of a second Trump term, to get

00:50:06.600 | people comfortable with him.

00:50:09.000 | And I think that him going on all these podcasts, including ours, including I thought the Andrew

00:50:14.200 | Schultz one was really good too, has helped him, I think, just get people comfortable

00:50:17.720 | with the idea of Trump, which I think was just his biggest obstacle in this election.

00:50:22.220 | Because people definitely want to change, and they're not happy with Biden and Harris.

00:50:26.040 | The one thing I'll say is, before you go on Rogan, there's a sense of anxiety that I had,

00:50:34.840 | which was, "Do I have enough interesting things to say for three hours?"

00:50:39.840 | That was really at the top of my mind.

00:50:41.540 | I think, Jason, I talked to you right before I went on, and that was a big thing for me.

00:50:49.000 | And then you go and you get in the seat, and he's incredible in the way that he moves the

00:50:54.240 | conversation along.

00:50:56.080 | And then you end up, you're like, "Oh, it's already been three hours."

00:50:59.520 | That's his superpower.

00:51:02.380 | The reason that she should find a way to go to Austin and do it is because he has the

00:51:08.800 | ability to allow you to be your true self over a long period of time.

00:51:15.120 | And I think, again, just going back to the basics, she deserves for herself, for the

00:51:21.120 | American people to vote up or down who she really is.

00:51:25.720 | And all the campaign strategists aside, and all of the other nonsense aside, I would want

00:51:31.240 | if I was running for president, one shot at people being able to see me for who I really

00:51:37.760 | am.

00:51:38.760 | And that's why she should go on Rogan.

00:51:40.760 | I think she's afraid of that.

00:51:42.320 | I mean, she has mostly ducked media interviews and ducked any podcasts that would be perceived

00:51:49.560 | as adversarial or not super friendly.

00:51:52.800 | But she stopped ducking them, I think, in fairness to her, maybe after she was in the

00:51:57.720 | third or fourth week, she started doing them.

00:51:59.120 | Yeah, she's done Call Me Daddy.

00:52:00.200 | She's done Howard Stern.

00:52:01.200 | She's done the ones that she knew would be super friendly.

00:52:03.440 | Yeah, of course.

00:52:04.440 | Yeah.

00:52:05.440 | Doing adversarial is probably...

00:52:06.440 | But don't you think that Trump did our show because he thought it would be friendly?

00:52:10.120 | Yeah, he started with friendlies, yeah.

00:52:12.000 | Yeah, why would he do oppositional?

00:52:13.760 | When Trump did...

00:52:14.760 | I mean, we were on the first podcast he went on.

00:52:16.440 | Were we the first...

00:52:17.440 | Kamala went on that Fox...

00:52:18.440 | She went on that Fox News thing.

00:52:19.520 | She did Fox News for 26 minutes, Friedberg, and her staff was waving.

00:52:22.840 | They were on the sidelines waving frantically to get her off of there.

00:52:27.600 | But in any event, were we the first podcast to interview Trump?

00:52:32.080 | Second.

00:52:33.080 | The Nelk boys were first.

00:52:34.600 | I guess we were second.

00:52:37.720 | I think that it was really unclear what would happen when you put a major candidate for

00:52:43.600 | president on a podcast for an hour at the time he did it.

00:52:46.240 | I think he took a little bit of a risk, and I think it worked out for him, and then he's

00:52:50.200 | done a lot more since then.

00:52:51.320 | I mean, other than Rogan, Rogan and us have consistently tried to get everybody on all

00:52:57.840 | sides to be on the podcast.

00:52:59.280 | I think we did a really good job looking back on...

00:53:01.560 | We've gotten everybody except one person, Kamala Harris.

00:53:05.000 | Yeah.

00:53:06.000 | I mean, I wish I had time to have asked him about...

00:53:07.960 | We had all the Dems.

00:53:08.960 | ...January 6th.

00:53:09.960 | We had all the senior Dems.

00:53:10.960 | That was the only thing I didn't get to on my questions.

00:53:11.960 | We had all the independents, and we had all the credible Republicans.

00:53:16.120 | And to his credit.

00:53:17.120 | By the elections.

00:53:18.120 | We were the first for RFK, right?

00:53:19.120 | We were the first for RFK.

00:53:20.120 | Yeah, he credits us.

00:53:21.120 | First for Dean Phillips.

00:53:22.120 | Dean Phillips.

00:53:23.120 | And Vivek.

00:53:24.120 | First for Vivek.

00:53:25.120 | I think we were the first for Vivek, and so, yeah, I give us some credit there.

00:53:29.880 | On the search issue, I looked into that, there, Vivek, sorry, I always get that wrong.

00:53:35.860 | The search issue, there was some complaints that YouTube might have been, like, I don't

00:53:40.880 | know, hiding the video, which didn't make much sense to people, so I did an investigation

00:53:44.960 | of that, Sax.

00:53:46.600 | You're laughing.

00:53:47.600 | Go ahead.

00:53:48.600 | Well, finish what you're saying.

00:53:50.880 | No, no, no, go ahead.

00:53:51.880 | I have a different point of view than you on this, but.

00:53:53.320 | I didn't even get my point of view.

00:53:54.320 | I know, I've seen it on Twitter, but keep going.

00:53:56.720 | Oh, well, no, I did a search on Bing.

00:54:00.200 | You're gonna defend Google, I know.

00:54:01.200 | No, no, I'm not defending Google.

00:54:02.560 | I'm just explaining to people how search works, independent of it.

00:54:05.480 | I went to Bing, DuckDuckGo, search.brave.com, Google, YouTube, Google Video, and what people

00:54:13.760 | don't understand about how the search algorithms work is they are designed to increase advertising

00:54:19.800 | dollars, and Freeberg will back me up this, he worked at Google, and session length.

00:54:25.740 | That's the goal.

00:54:26.740 | Am I correct, Freeberg, with algorithms, whether it's TikTok, YouTubes, et cetera?

00:54:31.640 | Yeah, I'm not gonna-- Increase session time and increase revenue.

00:54:35.200 | I know more about search results, I don't know as much about the video stuff, so.

00:54:38.280 | So when you look at that, it's a very nuanced thing, but Joe Rogan doesn't monetize his

00:54:43.560 | search.

00:54:44.560 | It does not make any money for them, and then clips do make money for YouTube, and the clips

00:54:51.440 | have flooded the zone.

00:54:53.000 | So if you do a search on any search engine, whether it's Bing, or Brave, or DuckDuckGo,

00:54:58.800 | Google, or YouTube, any of them, what you'll find is the clips beat out the main episodes

00:55:05.580 | all the time.

00:55:06.580 | This happens to our podcast.

00:55:07.880 | When people clip our podcast, they will do keyword stuffing, and they'll beat us, and

00:55:13.360 | we'll beat the algorithm, because the algorithm wants to get ads, and we don't have ads turned

00:55:16.960 | on either.

00:55:17.960 | So people have this frequent frustration with This Week in Startups, my other podcast, All

00:55:22.400 | In Here, and Joe Rogan, that anything that's not monetized on YouTube doesn't rank high.

00:55:28.360 | And if you look, all of the clips, and this makes sense, if you just think logically,

00:55:34.240 | the clips will generate more engagement, because you get to watch the highlights.

00:55:40.260 | So it's kind of like sports highlights.

00:55:41.680 | Sacks, would you like to conspiracy theory this and tell us that Sergey is sandbagging

00:55:46.760 | for the Democrats or something by hiding the YouTube video?

00:55:49.360 | Well, I don't think it's a conspiracy theory.

00:55:50.360 | I mean, if you go to Google every single day and just type in a Trump-related search term

00:55:56.520 | versus a Kamala-related search term, you'll see the difference in coverage.

00:56:00.200 | But back to the Rogan thing, look, Google is a search engine.

00:56:04.160 | This is what they're supposed to be good at.

00:56:06.180 | You have an interview between the biggest podcaster in the world and a former president

00:56:10.800 | who's probably the most famous person in the world.

00:56:13.040 | It's massively trending.

00:56:14.440 | It's got something like 100 million views.

00:56:16.360 | At the time that people noticed that you couldn't find it on YouTube, it already had something

00:56:20.240 | like 34 million views.

00:56:22.380 | What I'm saying is, you have to work pretty hard as a search engine for your algorithm

00:56:27.320 | to be so bad that you can't find that interview.

00:56:30.840 | When I went to YouTube and tried to find it, first I typed in Trump-Rogan interview, couldn't

00:56:35.680 | find it.

00:56:36.680 | Second, I typed Trump-Rogan interview podcast, couldn't find it, it was just collapsed.

00:56:41.440 | It was Trump-Rogan full interview, full podcast, still couldn't find it.

00:56:46.920 | There's no question that this is a factual matter.

00:56:49.720 | This episode was suppressed in YouTube search.

00:56:53.400 | If you went to the main Google search engine and did a similar search, what you would have

00:56:57.080 | found as the number one search result was an article from the Arizona Republic, which

00:57:03.640 | is a publication I've never even heard of, that would have told you that the Rogan interview

00:57:07.960 | with Trump was a brain-rotted waste of three hours.

00:57:11.280 | That's the number one result.

00:57:12.520 | Somehow Google decides that its number one result for the Rogan interview was this Arizona

00:57:18.520 | Republic story.

00:57:21.680 | That is not a search engine doing its job.

00:57:24.360 | It's pretty obvious to me that they're using other factors in deciding what to surface

00:57:31.320 | here, and somehow the results end up being almost universally negative towards Trump

00:57:38.080 | and almost universally positive towards Kamala.

00:57:40.760 | I think you've got to, at this point, have your head buried really deep in the sand not

00:57:45.440 | to think that Google is incredibly biased in this election against Trump.

00:57:50.520 | So, let me pull up some facts to show how wrong you are.

00:57:55.240 | If you pull up YouTube here, here's an image of the YouTube search results that I just

00:58:00.360 | did for the Trump Rogan, and what you'll see is, as I explained previously, clips perform

00:58:06.240 | better and make money.

00:58:08.140 | They make money, so the algorithm favors those, and what you'll see here is Fox News, et cetera,

00:58:12.840 | and all these clips, and then eventually you get to the Joe Rogan interview.

00:58:15.680 | If you look at Bing search results for Rogan Trump interview, what you'll see is all the

00:58:19.600 | search engines put news up first, then they go to organic, so it's just a fundamental

00:58:24.600 | misunderstanding of how search is designed for users.

00:58:28.920 | They start with news on every search engine today, and then here's Google's same thing,

00:58:34.280 | and then what you'll see here is, on the Google and on the Bing images, you have a collection,

00:58:39.860 | you know, typically five or six news stories, then they go to the first organic, so people

00:58:44.000 | just don't understand how search works.

00:58:45.840 | It's always news first when you type in a politician's name, and then when you look

00:58:50.320 | at the news, it has New York Post right-leaning.

00:58:53.440 | You have people who are dead center like AP in there, and you have Fox News there in the

00:58:57.880 | Google one.

00:58:58.880 | Of the first five, two of them are right-leaning, and AP is obviously in the middle, Forbes,

00:59:04.720 | I don't know, maybe Forbes is right-leaning too, Freeberg, over to you.

00:59:09.040 | Well, I was going to say, I read somewhere, so I have no direct knowledge about this,

00:59:13.600 | I actually pinged several people at Google to ask them what was going on, and I did not

00:59:17.840 | get a clear response, so like I have no insight as to what actually happened, but what I read

00:59:23.960 | online somewhere was that someone reported that someone at Google said that there was

00:59:30.120 | kind of a whole bunch of people that clicked inappropriate content flagging on the video,

00:59:35.720 | so like anti-Trump people went to the video, clicked that it was inappropriate, and when

00:59:41.360 | YouTube gets that many people clicking that this is inappropriate, it automatically flags

00:59:46.560 | it.

00:59:47.560 | Mass flagging, yes.

00:59:48.560 | It is a technique people will use, they've used it on our program here, where they flag

00:59:52.200 | it.

00:59:53.200 | They flag it and then people that say at once like, "Hey, there's inappropriate content

00:59:56.040 | in here."

00:59:57.040 | The default is to hide the video from search results while it's investigated, but clearly

01:00:03.600 | there's something messed up here because they should have been on top of that and responded

01:00:07.240 | immediately with a video that has such a large number of views and such a large audience

01:00:12.240 | to allow that to happen and drag on for so long, but someone said that that may have

01:00:17.120 | been what happened and then they fixed it, so I don't know, but I just want to point

01:00:20.240 | that out, that it may not necessarily have been overt action by Google, but just the

01:00:25.400 | way that the system is set up that anyone can flag and if enough people flag, you get

01:00:28.880 | the sort of trigger.

01:00:29.880 | I can tell you, I know firsthand that Google is aware of the claims of bias and I think

01:00:36.520 | you're starting to see it, just like CNN is aware of the claims of bias and they added

01:00:40.120 | …

01:00:41.120 | Totally.

01:00:42.120 | CNN is aware of the claims of bias.

01:00:43.120 | They're super sensitive.

01:00:44.120 | All these companies are super sensitive to it.

01:00:45.120 | They're so is Facebook.

01:00:46.120 | Mark Zuckerberg's very sensitive to it.

01:00:48.080 | I know Sundar himself is very sensitive to it.

01:00:50.440 | I don't want to kind of hide the fact that these people think that they're going out

01:00:53.120 | and being biased, that they have these kind of information empires because they know that

01:00:57.600 | they're going to lose trust and they're going to lose customers and revenue and etc.

01:01:01.600 | CNN has done, I think, an exceptional job.

01:01:03.720 | I don't know if you watch it at all, Sax, but they have been having Trump supporters

01:01:08.840 | and right-wing commentators in CNN on the desk every …

01:01:12.520 | They have?

01:01:13.520 | Yes.

01:01:14.520 | It's really changed the nature of it from being like MSNBC or Fox …

01:01:17.320 | Did you know that, Sax?

01:01:18.320 | To being something in the middle.

01:01:19.320 | I didn't know that.

01:01:20.320 | I've never … I never watch these shows, but like …

01:01:22.460 | Before we go off on this topic, people throughout this election have been posting Google search

01:01:27.240 | results when you just type in Trump versus Harris, and I've done it.

01:01:32.760 | Every single time it's massively biased.

01:01:34.560 | I mean, let's just go through them.

01:01:36.160 | This was a search result I got months ago where I just typed in Donald Trump and the

01:01:41.080 | first carousel was about Kamala Harris.

01:01:43.720 | I remember joking on the pod that if you want to find the latest news about Kamala Harris,

01:01:49.000 | just search for Donald Trump.

01:01:50.560 | And then you go down and the first carousel that's about Trump is negative stories.

01:01:55.580 | This one was about Project 2025, which has nothing to do with Trump.

01:01:58.760 | Nonetheless, this was a major Democratic talking point at the time is that somehow that Project

01:02:04.440 | 2025 is what Trump would do in a second term.

01:02:06.720 | I just did this and it's different now, obviously.

01:02:09.320 | You said this is a few months old?

01:02:10.400 | I've been doing this on a recurring basis over the last few months.

01:02:14.840 | The point is that whenever you search for the candidates, the news is very positive

01:02:20.080 | towards Harris and it's very negative towards Trump.

01:02:24.500 | And even when you search for Trump, they'll give you positive news about Harris.

01:02:27.320 | Now go to the podcast … And again, Sax, you don't think this is a

01:02:31.080 | function of the fact that so many media outlets are being so negative about Trump and positive

01:02:35.080 | about Harris, and so therefore the ratio is just off the media?

01:02:37.520 | How does the Arizona Republic end up being the first choice when you search for Rogan

01:02:41.960 | Trump?

01:02:42.960 | They're not … PageRank can't explain that.

01:02:45.800 | They're just not a major publication.

01:02:47.120 | They're not being linked to by a lot of people.

01:02:49.480 | Doesn't make any sense.

01:02:50.480 | Here's another example.

01:02:51.480 | Okay.

01:02:52.480 | Stay on this one for a second.

01:02:53.560 | This was after Trump went on the Andrew Schultz podcast.

01:02:57.960 | That podcast was a very positive experience for him, as we just talked about, helped his

01:03:02.480 | campaign a lot.

01:03:04.040 | What's the number one result when you look for that?

01:03:06.640 | New Republic, podcast host laughing Trump face as he struggles to defend rambling.

01:03:11.200 | That's when he had that hilarious story about the weave.

01:03:13.280 | If you actually watch the clip, the podcast hosts, they were definitely laughing with

01:03:18.240 | him.

01:03:19.240 | They were not laughing at him.

01:03:20.240 | That was a ridiculous mischaracterization.

01:03:22.360 | The New Republic is not the objective source for anything.

01:03:26.840 | I don't know how you could say that objectively PageRank should get you to the New Republic

01:03:32.000 | as the number one source for the Andrew Schultz interview of Trump.

01:03:36.680 | That is bias.

01:03:37.680 | I mean, it's just bias.

01:03:39.400 | There's been so many examples of Google giving these ridiculous results and they find obscure

01:03:47.160 | publications and obscure articles that have no basis in the truth to elevate to the top.

01:03:53.480 | It's almost like they're trying to find the most negative article they can find on Trump

01:03:57.560 | and make that the number one result.

01:03:59.440 | Yeah.

01:04:00.440 | It's not the search engine.

01:04:01.600 | It's just the corpus of media that's being indexed.

01:04:04.840 | If you look here at Google-

01:04:06.360 | Why isn't it New York Times then?

01:04:08.000 | That's the number one thing.

01:04:09.160 | Well, I mean, just here, if you look at Donald Trump, if we were to look at these news sources,

01:04:15.720 | there's NBC, NPR, Politico, and New York Times are left-leaning.

01:04:19.960 | If you were to do this on, I think I have Bing as the next one you can open and you

01:04:24.840 | can look at the next one, Nick, which is DuckDuckGo.

01:04:27.600 | In all of these cases, the problem is only three or 4% of journalists at publications

01:04:32.880 | today are right-leaning, and most of the right-leaning publications are opinion publications like

01:04:38.580 | Fox, et cetera, and so you don't have a lot of representation in the index of Republicans.

01:04:45.140 | And that's a big opportunity, I think, for Republicans is to make more publications or

01:04:48.500 | take more publications over, like we're seeing with the LA Times and Washington Post, which

01:04:52.840 | I think are going to move right-

01:04:53.840 | Publications if Google would choose to surface them, but it decides that it doesn't want

01:04:59.120 | to.

01:05:00.120 | It's on a percentage basis, it's very small is the problem.

01:05:02.720 | Here you go.

01:05:03.720 | This is Arizona Republic rocketing to the top of search results for Joe Rogan Trump

01:05:07.880 | interview.

01:05:08.880 | That's a publication that is local to Arizona, that no one's ever heard of, it has no basis

01:05:13.040 | being the number one result in Google.

01:05:15.400 | New York Times is second.

01:05:16.400 | Okay, I can see the logic of that because New York Times is a big publication.

01:05:21.040 | Then you go down one row to the carousel, oh, there's New York Public again.

01:05:25.440 | Why?

01:05:26.440 | Because it's calling Trump appearing on Joe Rogan shady.

01:05:29.600 | And then you've got another one, you've got another one there from the Independent calling

01:05:33.040 | Trump a predator.

01:05:34.040 | I mean, come on.

01:05:35.040 | This is ridiculous.

01:05:36.040 | Okay, so you've shared these examples.

01:05:39.160 | What I would recommend is I think we get someone from Google on the show, we could arrange

01:05:42.200 | that and they can kind of talk about how the algorithm works, because I don't think any

01:05:46.040 | of us are going to be able to provide a reasonable counterpoint or understanding of what's going

01:05:49.440 | on.

01:05:50.440 | But if there is bias, and there's some kind of manual intervention in this, in this process,

01:05:56.320 | maybe it can be kind of discussed and talked about why and how and, you know, what the

01:06:00.080 | automation is that causes this to happen.

01:06:01.960 | And let's just try and let's try and let's try and I'll take that as a to do and I'll

01:06:06.840 | try and find someone that we can talk to listen, the conversation they do I look, I mean, I've

01:06:10.960 | talked with a lot of people over there.

01:06:12.840 | And I have heard from a lot of folks that this is a real issue that folks are trying

01:06:17.260 | to address internally, so that there's this perception of bias that they're trying to

01:06:20.320 | get rid of.

01:06:21.520 | And they really want to address it.

01:06:22.760 | This is what I've heard from people at Google.

01:06:24.080 | So I want to give them a chance to pull up the thing rather than having us all debated

01:06:28.960 | or I don't even have a strong point of view on this, I'd rather just bring someone in

01:06:31.600 | and talk about it.

01:06:32.600 | So just as a counterpoint here, Nick, pull up the thing I just did for Donald Trump.

01:06:35.320 | And we'll just if you do it as an exercise, that's always the way to find the objective

01:06:38.560 | truth here is to try the independent search engines or other search engines, DuckDuckGo

01:06:42.320 | brave, perplexing.

01:06:43.320 | perplexing.

01:06:44.320 | Well, yeah, you can do that as well.

01:06:46.320 | We'll see.

01:06:47.320 | But if you look here, this being one, if you take out MSN, well, no, if you go MSN woke

01:06:53.080 | woke search.com, check out MSN, USA Today, Charlotte Observer, Seattle Times, Washington

01:06:59.520 | Post, I think these are all left leaning.

01:07:01.960 | So that is more to my point that the entire corpus of news reportage is 95% left leaning.

01:07:10.080 | That's what's happening here.

01:07:11.760 | And so they need to they're going to need to manually sacks, say these 5% should get

01:07:18.000 | represented 5050.

01:07:20.240 | In the search results to please the other side, even though that's not what the corpus

01:07:24.720 | is.

01:07:25.720 | And the number of stories written by left leaning just is probably 50 to one to right

01:07:31.240 | leaning.

01:07:32.240 | Moving on

01:07:33.240 | through I have an alternate explanation.

01:07:34.240 | We just got this.

01:07:35.240 | This just got some data.

01:07:36.240 | I'd like to just pull up this data if I could look at employee donations to party.

01:07:41.720 | We've looked at tech companies.

01:07:43.120 | It's all 90 something percent goes to Democrats separate very simple explanation for why the

01:07:49.800 | Google search results are horribly biased in one direction, Uber's 18%.

01:07:56.640 | All right.

01:07:58.640 | Let's go to our final segment here.

01:08:00.320 | We'll talk a little bit about the election.

01:08:02.560 | Why don't you tee us up here?

01:08:03.560 | Freeberg.

01:08:04.560 | All right, guys, I'll quickly introduce our final political election update before our

01:08:12.720 | live stream on Tuesday, obviously, a lot of daily freakouts, daily efforts at having an

01:08:21.120 | October surprise that will take down the other side, all sorts of drama, all sorts of insult,

01:08:26.240 | not a lot of love in America right now.

01:08:28.840 | Super depressing and sad.

01:08:30.320 | All sorts of stuff happened this week.

01:08:31.640 | J. Cal, once you kick us off, what do you think is going to happen on Tuesday?

01:08:34.480 | What are the things that you think are going to move people between now and then?

01:08:38.040 | It's a toss up.

01:08:39.040 | I mean, that's what everybody's saying.

01:08:40.040 | It looks like Trump's got a slight lead.

01:08:41.760 | So I think it's going to be a toss up.

01:08:43.960 | Sachs.

01:08:44.960 | Agreed.

01:08:45.960 | Are we 65, 35 as Polly Market predicts or are we 100% Trump or we 90% Kamala Harris?

01:08:53.340 | What are we looking at?

01:08:54.340 | Well, you definitely can't say it's going to be 100% anyone.

01:08:56.440 | I mean, but if again, if you look at all the data, the data is definitely pointing towards

01:09:01.380 | Trump having an advantage.

01:09:02.760 | Obviously, the prediction markets are almost two to one in favor of Trump.

01:09:06.520 | The polling shows that Trump is ahead narrowly in all the swing states.

01:09:11.000 | I think every single one of them, even the sort of blue wall states of Pennsylvania,

01:09:15.640 | Michigan, Wisconsin, that Harris must win, I think, in order to have a path to victory.

01:09:22.720 | Whereas Michigan and Wisconsin are very, very close, like 1% or less in the swing state

01:09:28.200 | polls, Pennsylvania polling shows that Trump is ahead by, I think, two or three.

01:09:33.720 | That's what I've seen today.

01:09:35.060 | So it is looking good for Trump.

01:09:36.840 | And if you look at the numbers that Elon's group, that America PAC put out, it looks

01:09:43.520 | like the early voting in Pennsylvania is trending 500,000 votes better for Republicans in the

01:09:53.080 | early voting than four years ago.

01:09:55.320 | So it sucks.

01:09:56.320 | Is that just pulling votes forward?

01:09:57.320 | It could be.

01:09:58.320 | It could be.

01:09:59.320 | It could be.

01:10:00.320 | Instead of showing up at the ballot box on Tuesday, a lot of folks are doing mail-ins

01:10:03.280 | and making sure they get their vote in in mail instead of going in person.

01:10:07.080 | So then you've got to look at polling of people who say they're going to vote but haven't

01:10:11.880 | voted yet in Pennsylvania, who say they're going to vote on election day.

01:10:16.040 | And I think those numbers are running about 18 points ahead for Trump, which is about

01:10:21.480 | double what he needs to win.

01:10:23.240 | So just to be clear, the early voting favors Harris, but not by the same percentages that

01:10:28.600 | it did four years ago.

01:10:30.360 | So right now, it looks like Trump is tracking to win that state.

01:10:36.440 | But look, I can't guarantee it.

01:10:37.960 | I'm not representing that.

01:10:40.800 | That's exactly what's going to happen.

01:10:42.800 | But right now, the numbers are looking good.

01:10:44.240 | Remember, Biden only won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes.

01:10:48.320 | And again, the swing so far is Republicans are doing 500,000 votes better than they were

01:10:53.760 | doing four years ago.

01:10:55.360 | So there's a lot of stories coming out on Twitter, on independent media, and on mainstream

01:10:59.880 | media, or legacy media, as we might call it now, talking about, "Hey, I live in a house.

01:11:04.320 | I got 15 ballots mailed to me," all with different random names.

01:11:08.280 | And these sort of anecdotal stories are being pushed and then amplified by folks that are

01:11:13.480 | involved in the election.

01:11:15.160 | Chamath, is this kind of dangerous?

01:11:18.120 | Do we think that there really is a lot of this kind of election meddling happening?

01:11:23.560 | And if not, or if there is, is this kind of a dangerous thing to happen, where a lot of

01:11:28.320 | people are talking about this, where no matter what happens on Tuesday, people start to question

01:11:31.960 | the results of the election?

01:11:33.880 | How much should we be kind of worried about this rhetoric?

01:11:36.280 | I think there are two things.

01:11:37.640 | There's the substance, and then there's the strategy.

01:11:39.960 | The substance is that, does it really make sense that the most advanced and important

01:11:46.080 | country in the world doesn't have a uniform system where one ballot is given to every

01:11:53.920 | single American citizen who is eligible to vote?

01:12:00.560 | That probably makes sense, so we should probably just figure out how to do that.

01:12:05.840 | Separately, the strategy of it is for both sides to lay the groundwork to say that this

01:12:10.680 | thing somehow wasn't totally right down the middle.

01:12:16.200 | I am hoping for a very clear, decisive victory.

01:12:21.400 | And frankly, whichever candidate wins, I hope that it's very clear and decisive so that

01:12:27.400 | everybody is forced to de-escalate and move on.

01:12:31.760 | Now, that said, I think what the early voting data shows is something that you haven't seen

01:12:41.280 | in the past, which is that there are a lot of Republican people that are voting early.

01:12:50.160 | I don't know what that means for Election Day, but typically it's the Democrats that

01:12:53.720 | dominate these early voting processes, and they build what's called the firewall.

01:13:00.800 | And in these swing states, these firewalls become very important going into Election

01:13:04.480 | Day.

01:13:05.480 | And as Zach said, a bunch of these states are different than they've historically been

01:13:12.040 | in the favor of the Republicans.

01:13:15.040 | I saw an article today that just said that they've basically considered Nevada now in

01:13:21.440 | the Republican camp, because there's been so much early voting that it's about 60% of

01:13:26.240 | the total votes they think have already been cast, since they have a very clear Republican

01:13:30.520 | lead going into Election Day.

01:13:32.060 | So there's all kinds of stuff here that's new.

01:13:35.720 | I just hope that it's just an absolutely crushing victory in one direction or the other, so

01:13:39.640 | that we de-escalate and get on to the business of running the country.

01:13:45.080 | So I'm going to break with most of my Republican brethren on this and say, I think early voting

01:13:49.360 | is actually a good thing.

01:13:51.080 | It's very convenient.

01:13:52.080 | Right?

01:13:53.080 | You don't have to force people to only vote on just one day, because what if you get sick

01:13:58.520 | or a kid gets sick and you have to pick them up from school?

01:14:01.280 | There's a lot of things that can go wrong.

01:14:02.840 | It is more convenient to have, say, two or three weeks to be able to cast your vote.

01:14:06.720 | I actually think that's not a bad thing.

01:14:08.900 | And in terms of who it helps, I'm not sure.

01:14:11.080 | But I think that as Republicans become more of a populist party and the Democrats become

01:14:15.200 | more of an elitist party, I think higher turnout might actually...might benefit Republicans

01:14:21.120 | regardless.

01:14:22.120 | So I think it's a huge convenience for voters, and I think early voting is something that

01:14:25.800 | we should keep.

01:14:27.440 | The thing we got to change is in the states where you don't have to present any voter

01:14:32.080 | ID to show who you are, that's just crazy.

01:14:34.920 | I mean, you just...you go up to the polling place and you give your name and I guess your

01:14:39.040 | address, and they look you up on a computer and they hand you a ballot, and there's no

01:14:42.360 | verification that you are who you say you are.

01:14:45.320 | That to me is crazy.

01:14:46.520 | The other thing that's crazy is that you can even get registered and added to the voter

01:14:50.520 | rolls in a lot of states without any proof of citizenship.

01:14:54.520 | So there are states where you can go get a driver's license without proof of citizenship,

01:15:00.800 | and there's just a checkbox to be added to the voter rolls, and no one ever checks you're

01:15:04.800 | a citizen, and now you're on the voter roll and you can go pick up your ballot without

01:15:09.480 | any voter ID.

01:15:10.920 | That's just crazy to me.

01:15:11.920 | So I think that after this election, there should be some sort of bill that gets passed

01:15:18.080 | and signed by the president that sets a minimum standard for voter integrity.

01:15:24.280 | And I...

01:15:25.280 | For federal election.

01:15:26.280 | For federal election.

01:15:27.280 | For federal elections, right.

01:15:28.280 | Because states can do what they want, right?

01:15:29.280 | Like each state can vote how they want.

01:15:30.280 | I guess states can do what they want, but I don't think states should be able to do

01:15:31.640 | whatever they want in federal elections because that affects all of us.

01:15:34.320 | I want to point out that each state is effectively voting for the folks that they want to have

01:15:39.960 | go to the electoral college, and that's really where the vote for president is cast.

01:15:44.640 | So should there be...

01:15:45.640 | Yeah, but that affects all of us.

01:15:46.640 | I mean, if there's cheating in several states and in a close election, by the way, I'm not

01:15:52.360 | accusing that of happening, okay?

01:15:54.160 | I'm just saying that if we have several states that don't have basic voter integrity, and

01:16:00.640 | that affects the outcome of a national election, that has a huge impact on all of us.

01:16:05.460 | Let's just talk about this really important point, which I think a lot of folks ignore.

01:16:09.040 | It's not a direct democracy.

01:16:10.360 | It's not like everyone in the United States votes for the president.

01:16:13.400 | What happens is the states send a bunch of electors to go vote for the president.

01:16:18.120 | Each state casts a vote for the president.

01:16:21.400 | How each state ultimately decides who they're going to vote for for president is through

01:16:25.680 | this kind of process that we've kind of standardized across the states, but each state is making

01:16:30.240 | a vote.

01:16:31.240 | So shouldn't the states be able to kind of decide how they want to make their kind of

01:16:34.940 | voting process run internally to determine who the folks are that are going to go to

01:16:38.800 | the electoral college?

01:16:39.800 | Yeah.

01:16:40.800 | I mean, I think the constitution specifies that the states will run their own elections,

01:16:43.600 | and I'm fine with that, but what I'm saying is there needs to be a minimum standard.

01:16:47.760 | To me, the minimum standard is voter ID and proof of citizenship to get registered.

01:16:51.760 | I'm in strong agreement with Sachs on this front, and I've actually done a ton of research

01:16:56.760 | into it that I would like to share, because I think this is an important service we can

01:17:01.440 | do here on the All In podcast, I think.

01:17:05.280 | I had Hans...

01:17:06.280 | So as a diehard moderate, you agree with Sachs?

01:17:09.680 | I mean, as an American, putting political parties aside, I had Hans von Spakovsky of

01:17:17.160 | the Heritage Foundation on This Week in Startups last Tuesday, you can watch it, and they have

01:17:21.440 | spent a ton of money and time on election fraud, and obviously they're a partisan organization.

01:17:29.320 | They found 1,600 cases in 40 years, it's about 40 a year.

01:17:34.320 | They found 23 cases in 2020, none of them were in Georgia.

01:17:38.920 | You can go search those cases, and you'll find cases like this one here that Nick will

01:17:42.960 | pull up, Randy Allen Jumper, who voted twice, and the database is amazing.

01:17:48.400 | They're crowdsourcing this, and so putting all partisan aside, the Heritage Foundation

01:17:53.360 | is doing great work here because sunlight is the best disinfectant, and what's really

01:17:58.320 | important for Americans to understand is it is impossible right now, absolutely statistically

01:18:05.680 | impossible to swing the presidential election with fraud.

01:18:11.760 | The Brennan Center, they're on the other side, they did a report about voter fraud, and they

01:18:16.920 | put it at 0.0003% and 0.0025%, and basically you've got a much greater chance of being

01:18:25.600 | struck by lightning.

01:18:26.920 | And let's just do a little bit of math here, 158 million people voted in 2020, we'll have

01:18:31.840 | about 160 million this year, if the estimates are correct, and if you look at swing states,

01:18:38.400 | right, that's where I think a lot of people are concerned, "Oh, what if they could swing

01:18:42.180 | it in Georgia?"

01:18:43.180 | Right?

01:18:44.180 | And we all know from the famous phone call to Brad Raffensperger, who's a Republican,

01:18:49.200 | Secretary of State, and Trump said, "Hey, you know, we've got to find these 11,780 votes,"

01:18:54.480 | that was the winning margin.

01:18:55.800 | So if we were to talk about that, right, and we compare it to what the Heritage Foundation

01:18:59.560 | found, 1,600 cases documented in 40 years, about 40 a year.

01:19:05.360 | Now there could be a multiple of that, Freiburg, 10 times, 100 times, but to find 11,000 ballots,

01:19:14.520 | this would require, in Georgia, for, which has voter ID, and by the way, voter ID is

01:19:20.280 | in 35 of 50 states already, after this election, it's going to hit 40, because it's just obvious

01:19:26.340 | that we all want that.

01:19:28.320 | Georgia requires you to have ID to vote in person, and you have to water, and they've

01:19:32.520 | watermarked the ballots.

01:19:34.340 | So in order, Shamoff, for somebody to do this, they would have to fake 12,000 watermarked

01:19:42.360 | ballots and have fake IDs, and have those 12,000 people not show up to vote and have

01:19:48.200 | two votes there.

01:19:49.200 | Then, if you were to-

01:19:50.200 | Well, it looks like Georgia's got a great system, but we're talking about the states

01:19:53.180 | that don't.

01:19:54.180 | Yeah, yeah.

01:19:55.180 | Like in California, they just passed a law saying that you're not allowed to look at

01:19:57.320 | voter ID.

01:19:58.320 | Right, and so that obviously should change, but the point is, even in California, which

01:20:03.560 | we know is-

01:20:04.560 | Sorry, California did that?

01:20:05.960 | Why do you guys think such a law is passed?

01:20:08.440 | What's the justification for that?

01:20:10.960 | They want to not have somebody who had a chance to vote vote, and it obviously benefits Democrats,

01:20:18.000 | if you believe that minorities don't have ID in some greater population, which people

01:20:24.440 | have rightly called out is racist, and there is this concept that black people or Hispanic

01:20:30.400 | people might not have IDs to the same extent, and they would lean Democrat.

01:20:35.320 | That is the cynical approach that people have taken.

01:20:38.880 | But if we look at this, it is impossible, impossible to swing the federal election-

01:20:45.320 | Wait, wait, don't skip over this.

01:20:46.320 | Sorry, Jason, you're saying it's a DEI thing?

01:20:48.680 | That's what people claim.

01:20:49.680 | I'm not saying I claim that.

01:20:50.720 | And I think that's condescending and nonsense to act like minorities don't have a driver's

01:20:54.840 | license.

01:20:55.840 | It's ridiculous.

01:20:56.840 | I mean, it's ridiculous.

01:20:57.840 | Or some other form of ID.

01:20:58.840 | I think it's absolutely ridiculous.

01:20:59.840 | To answer your question, Chamath, I don't think there is a good justification for rejecting

01:21:05.480 | voter ID, and the law is even worse than that, because it literally makes it illegal for

01:21:08.680 | someone to ask.

01:21:10.160 | So if you go to a polling place in California, they can't look at your ID.

01:21:15.400 | Even if you say, "Well, I lost my ballot," or something, they just have to take your

01:21:18.000 | word for it when they give you a new ballot.

01:21:20.440 | There's a legal requirement for every employer, when you hire somebody, to make sure that

01:21:24.560 | that person is eligible to work in the United States, if you're going to pay them legally,

01:21:29.240 | right?

01:21:30.240 | You get an I-9, and they need to justify that they have a social security number.

01:21:35.720 | That typically tells you whether you need a supplemental work authorization or not.

01:21:40.920 | So if you do that for normal, functional employment, why wouldn't you do it for voting as well?

01:21:49.680 | Of course.

01:21:50.680 | You need an ID to get on a plane.

01:21:51.680 | You need an ID to buy a beer.

01:21:54.720 | You need an ID to do all sorts of things in our society.

01:21:58.640 | So it's ludicrous.

01:22:01.940 | Voting is something where you should need an ID, because you have to match up that the

01:22:05.720 | person who's standing in front of you at the ballot box is the person on the voter rolls.

01:22:10.520 | But why is it more important to make sure that the person sitting in 23B on the United

01:22:15.760 | Flight is who he says it is, but it's less important for someone to just walk in off

01:22:22.040 | the street and vote for the President of the United States?

01:22:24.000 | Why is that?

01:22:26.140 | Because people believe that certain communities may not have ID, and then they would be not

01:22:32.720 | given the right to vote.

01:22:34.300 | Why don't you allow people to just get on an airplane and just fly wherever they want?

01:22:38.680 | Yeah, or drive without a driver's license.

01:22:41.480 | Yeah.

01:22:42.480 | Yeah.

01:22:43.480 | I mean, I'm not saying I agree with that.

01:22:44.480 | It's just, I'm telling you what people have said is the reason.

01:22:47.800 | I think it's cover.

01:22:49.400 | I think that's total nonsense.

01:22:50.840 | I think it's actually, if you think about it, it's insulting to minority groups to imply

01:22:53.680 | that they're incapable of getting a voter ID.

01:22:56.400 | When you say people, you're saying people in charge?

01:23:00.680 | The people in charge of California, this is what they think?

01:23:03.600 | Yes.

01:23:04.600 | And it turns out...

01:23:05.600 | It's not what they think.

01:23:06.600 | They're trying to enable cheating.

01:23:08.160 | We haven't had a voter ID.

01:23:11.920 | They wanted, not every state has government ID that isn't a driver's license.

01:23:16.280 | Is this Gavin Newsom?

01:23:17.280 | Yeah.

01:23:18.280 | Right.

01:23:19.280 | So this is Gavin Newsom.

01:23:20.280 | It's obvious to see what the effect of this is going to be, which is it makes it easier

01:23:27.040 | to engage in cheating.

01:23:28.560 | Do you guys think if Gavin Newsom was on an airplane, and we said, "Half these people

01:23:33.880 | here have just bought a ticket, but we didn't check their IDs," would he get off the plane

01:23:39.880 | or stay on the plane?

01:23:40.880 | Do you think?

01:23:41.880 | I think TSA requires IDs so that they can do a check on everyone, make sure that they're

01:23:45.640 | not on a do not fly list and all that sort of stuff.

01:23:48.320 | There's consensus that everybody wants voter ID.

01:23:50.400 | I think you can kind of think about a, there's a do not fly list, and there should be a do

01:23:54.520 | not vote list.

01:23:55.520 | Like, if you're not a citizen, you should be on the do not vote list, meaning you have

01:23:59.000 | to be on the I can vote list in order to vote.

01:24:01.160 | It seems pretty reasonable.

01:24:03.840 | The fact that we've got a lot of federal agencies checking IDs to determine whether you can

01:24:07.840 | or can't do something.

01:24:08.840 | I think there is no way to swing the election, even if there is a moderate amount.

01:24:14.120 | That is the most important for people to take out.

01:24:16.080 | So you're not worried about election fraud.

01:24:17.080 | Partisan election fraud.

01:24:18.080 | I don't know how you can draw that conclusion.

01:24:19.080 | If people can cheat, then you can swing an election.

01:24:20.740 | You can draw it statistically based upon what I've just said, which is the smallest race

01:24:26.240 | is 11,779.

01:24:30.160 | Remember when Trump asked them to find those votes?

01:24:32.640 | Do you remember that?

01:24:35.680 | We're talking about the state of Georgia, which I think actually has integrity.

01:24:39.560 | We're talking about the state of California here.

01:24:41.920 | That's the closest race just passed.

01:24:43.720 | Just in your mind, in your mind, logically think about what it would take to get 11,779

01:24:51.200 | people to fraudulently do that, and that they would go to jail and it'd be a felony.

01:24:56.320 | So this is that hard to me.

01:24:58.160 | I'm just saying like, how would you do 11,000 votes or whatever doesn't seem that hard if

01:25:02.320 | there's no voter ID?

01:25:06.320 | It's not possible.

01:25:07.320 | Where would you get 11,000 ballots?

01:25:09.240 | Maybe not in Georgia, because they actually have voter integrity.

01:25:11.240 | Even in California.

01:25:12.240 | Where would you get 11,000 ballots?

01:25:13.240 | Hold on a second.

01:25:14.240 | California is a huge state.

01:25:16.280 | They allow ballot harvesting and they've eliminated voter ID.

01:25:19.520 | So you're telling me that's impossible for someone to cheat?

01:25:22.400 | Nothing's impossible.

01:25:23.400 | No, no.

01:25:24.400 | Cheating, we all agree cheating exists.

01:25:26.280 | Like credit fraud, fraud exists.

01:25:28.280 | What I'm saying is it's so manageable that is farcical for anybody to think that we could

01:25:34.160 | swing the presidential election because Trump tried to swing the presidential election by

01:25:41.120 | asking to find 11,000 and he filed 58 lawsuits and lost all of them.

01:25:46.080 | It's not possible for you.

01:25:47.520 | Do you think so?

01:25:48.520 | Then what is the value then of having voter ID, Jason, if the cheating is so hard?

01:25:53.900 | Because it would add more trust to the system and it's always virtuous to add more trust.

01:25:57.640 | I think they should also give you a receipt when you vote to make sure there's no shenanigans.

01:26:03.080 | And we want to build as much trust in the system as possible.

01:26:06.240 | But the point here-

01:26:07.240 | I would give you a receipt to reduce fraud?

01:26:09.720 | It would reduce people believing that their vote was changed after they left the box.

01:26:15.440 | So if we all had a receipt, and then there was some debate in a small area because of,

01:26:20.720 | you know, hanging chads like in Florida, everybody would have their receipt.

01:26:24.360 | And if you remember the hanging chads case, there were people who said, I voted for Gore,

01:26:28.000 | I voted for Bush, and my vote got counted wrong.

01:26:32.380 | People don't remember this, but you had to push through a card and it popped a chad out

01:26:35.840 | of a little circle.

01:26:37.640 | And there are people who did it wrong because the instructions were, you know, it's a physical

01:26:42.480 | thing.

01:26:43.480 | You have to punch a hole into it.

01:26:44.480 | I don't know who came up with that system as opposed to drawing a circle.

01:26:46.960 | But that was 24 years ago.

01:26:48.640 | I'm sure that's changed by now.

01:26:50.040 | There was a guy named Chad.

01:26:51.280 | Yeah.

01:26:52.280 | But no, now they are giving receipts to people.

01:26:54.160 | So the gold standard is giving a receipt showing ID and having multiple weeks to do it.

01:27:00.040 | And so if anybody's taking anything away from this, there can be cheating, but it cannot

01:27:04.600 | swing the president.

01:27:05.600 | Okay, so Jason's going in, can I make a point?

01:27:08.760 | So you mentioned, I think, fraud rates, credit card fraud rates, didn't you?

01:27:13.000 | I think that's one of the things you mentioned.

01:27:14.440 | Well, the same way, we don't worry about credit card fraud, because there's a certain tiny

01:27:20.320 | amount of it in the system.

01:27:21.560 | But in this case, it would be a magnitude more than voter fraud.

01:27:26.320 | Voter fraud is extremely rare, because there's no incentive to cheat that would be worth

01:27:33.600 | going to jail for.

01:27:35.400 | And that's why people generally don't cheat in these elections, because the cost is so

01:27:39.700 | great.

01:27:40.700 | I was the COO of a payments company.

01:27:42.200 | So let me, oh, actually, sorry, that was Saks, sorry, go ahead, Saks.

01:27:45.320 | Let me explain how this actually works, since I was founding COO of PayPal.

01:27:49.440 | To be clear, one in a million chance of credit card fraud, can I just explain this to the

01:27:53.800 | audience?

01:27:54.800 | Sure.

01:27:55.800 | Okay, you can create all the models you want.

01:27:57.520 | And you can create an expectation of future fraud based on the prior fraud rates.

01:28:03.160 | However, if you change your verification standards, that data is no longer relevant.

01:28:08.620 | If you create a loophole big enough for a fraudster to drive a truck through, then if

01:28:13.960 | a fraudster figures that out, you could have infinite amounts of fraud.

01:28:18.280 | In other words, the historical fraud rate may not be predictive of future fraud if you

01:28:22.920 | change the verification standards.

01:28:25.480 | And I would say that the state of California, signing a bill that prohibits voter ID might

01:28:31.080 | be such a loophole.

01:28:32.680 | So I don't see how you can say with this kind of certainty and confidence that you're saying

01:28:37.040 | that no fraud could ever swing an election.

01:28:39.800 | Of course, fraud could swing an election.

01:28:40.960 | It could swing the presidential election.

01:28:42.580 | It could swing a tiny election in a state or in a local place.

01:28:46.480 | Of course it could because there's a very small number.

01:28:48.480 | Well, I'm not really interested in finding out.

01:28:49.640 | What I believe is that there are some-

01:28:50.640 | Yeah, no, I'm just talking about logic.

01:28:51.640 | There are some verification-

01:28:52.640 | How would you do 11,000 is the question.

01:28:55.720 | It would be incredibly difficult to do 11,000.

01:28:58.720 | Trump tried to swing 11,000.

01:28:59.920 | If you create a big enough loophole, it doesn't sound that hard to me.

01:29:02.320 | It just doesn't matter common sense.

01:29:03.720 | I don't think you can say that something is impossible.

01:29:06.120 | What we should do is simply tighten up these requirements.

01:29:09.080 | There's no excuse-

01:29:10.080 | We're in agreement about that.

01:29:11.080 | I'm just talking about in this election-

01:29:12.080 | There's no excuse for a state banning voter ID.

01:29:13.080 | So-

01:29:14.080 | In this election, you don't have to worry.

01:29:15.080 | 35 out of 50 states-

01:29:16.600 | So, I hope that starting in January, we pass a national voter ID law that's the minimum

01:29:20.360 | standard for states.

01:29:21.360 | 100%.

01:29:22.360 | We all agree on that.

01:29:23.360 | 100%.

01:29:24.360 | We all agree on that.

01:29:25.360 | Yes.

01:29:26.360 | I'm just saying in this election, practically 35 out of 50 states have voter ID and the

01:29:27.720 | ones that don't, the closest margin is 11,700.

01:29:31.640 | This time next week-

01:29:32.640 | It's not going to happen.

01:29:33.640 | We'll see if it-

01:29:34.640 | We'll be able to talk about the results.

01:29:35.640 | No, we'll see you on Tuesday night with Phil Helmuth on a short leash for the dictator

01:29:41.280 | Chamath Palihapitiya, your Sultan of Science and the architect.

01:29:45.720 | I am the world's greatest moderator.

01:29:48.360 | We'll see you next time.

01:29:50.260 | Bye-bye.

01:29:51.260 | We'll let your winners ride.

01:29:52.260 | Brain man David Sachs.

01:29:53.260 | I'm going all in.

01:29:54.260 | And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

01:29:55.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:29:56.260 | I'm going all in.

01:29:57.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:29:58.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:29:59.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:00.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:01.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:02.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:03.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:04.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:05.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:06.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:07.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:08.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:09.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:10.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:11.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:12.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:13.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:14.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:15.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:16.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:17.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:18.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:19.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:20.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:21.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:22.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:23.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:24.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:25.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:26.260 | I'm the queen of Quinoa.

01:30:48.880 | (upbeat music)

Inflated GDP?, Google earnings, How the media lost trust, Rogan/Trump search controversy, Election!

Chapters