LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland

00:00:00.000 | I just got a haircut with a new person. She was like, I'm like, do what you want. This is what

00:00:04.880 | she did. Okay. Well, let me know who she is. Chamath and I will go beat her up and get them,

00:00:09.360 | get your money back. Did she feather your bangs and blow your hair out? She did. She gave you

00:00:13.360 | a blow, didn't she? It's starting already. Okay. No, but that's a blow dryer. Just,

00:00:17.440 | yes. Right. She blow dry your hair? At the end, she gave me a little.

00:00:20.560 | Yeah. That's not sustainable. So you can't tell what the quality of the haircut's like,

00:00:23.600 | because you're never going to do that again. You don't have the skill.

00:00:25.920 | I've never blow dried my hair in my life. No, I understand that. Then this is why,

00:00:28.960 | because if you get the blow and it looks good in the blow.

00:00:31.200 | Just say blow out, please. Just say blow out, the full word.

00:00:34.720 | Why? What are we, six? Just grow up, you f***ing dingo.

00:00:37.200 | The way you're saying it, you're saying it to provoke a reaction. Come on.

00:00:40.880 | No, I'm not. Such a liar. I love it.

00:00:44.560 | Tell us about what your rules for blows are. What I'm saying is if you get a haircut

00:00:48.720 | and you get a blow, it's very hard for you to know. No, but I'm serious. It's very hard for

00:00:54.720 | you to know what it's going to look like the next day when you take a shower and when you don't,

00:01:00.560 | you know, blow it. It's true.

00:01:03.040 | Oh, you're saying the self-blow can't match the stylist blow.

00:01:06.080 | It's just important when you get a haircut with a new stylist or a hairdresser or a barber,

00:01:11.120 | you cannot let them blow you. He's not happy with the ending.

00:01:14.800 | Got it. It was an unhappy ending. Because when you blow yourself, Chamath,

00:01:20.560 | which people have accused you of blowing yourself on this very program, when you blow yourself,

00:01:25.040 | it's not going to come out the way it did. It won't be as fabulous.

00:01:29.040 | Every time I've blown myself, it's been perfect.

00:01:31.360 | All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. I'm your host, J-Pow from

00:01:56.640 | Japan here, cutting turns in Niseko and at Iwanai. And we have an incredible lineup today.

00:02:06.480 | As always, the Chairman Dictator Chamath is here to reign supreme. How are you doing, brother?

00:02:12.560 | Good. How are you? What are you wearing exactly?

00:02:15.040 | I'm just wearing my kimono as I want to do here on the All In podcast.

00:02:20.480 | Why are you speaking in Elizabethan English?

00:02:23.360 | I just decided in 2025, I'm going to live my best life and I'm going to do everything.

00:02:29.440 | Anybody asks me to do something, I'm saying yes.

00:02:31.520 | Oh, I'm going to ask you a bunch of stuff next weekend then. I got so many ideas. I got a list.

00:02:36.240 | I'm going to ask you to do all sorts of things.

00:02:37.200 | If it's epic, I'm doing it.

00:02:38.400 | Yeah. Okay.

00:02:39.120 | So yeah, I'm over the moon right now. And then I'll be going to the inauguration to see all my

00:02:47.360 | friends and celebrate the big Trump victory and tape an episode there. With us, of course,

00:02:53.680 | David Freeberg, your resident sultan of science. And not a moment too soon. We have so much to

00:02:58.480 | talk about. What's the background here? Those are some dead trees with Mount Fuji in the background.

00:03:05.040 | Yeah, that's basically Jason Kurosawa landscape.

00:03:08.960 | While you've been gallivanting and being a dilettante,

00:03:12.960 | your original adopted home state is burning to the ground.

00:03:16.800 | Yes, I know about this. I got off the ski lift and I saw this after I had posted like,

00:03:22.400 | "Oh, my life is amazing." And I was like, "Oh my God." Everybody replied like,

00:03:28.400 | "Are you in the room?" And I'm like, "Oh my Lord."

00:03:31.600 | This is unbelievable. And we'll obviously talk about that a whole bunch.

00:03:35.840 | So then you promoted the tweet?

00:03:37.040 | Yes, I put $500 behind it to boost it to try to get my ratings up. No, I actually

00:03:41.680 | literally deleted it. And I never do that. But I posted a video where I was like, "Oh my God,

00:03:45.760 | it's incredible." And I was like, "You know what? This is the wrong time for it."

00:03:49.440 | So a little grace there, folks. And I am so happy to have here on All In Idol,

00:03:57.920 | the one, the only, my good friend, Cyan Bannister.

00:04:01.360 | No, our good friend.

00:04:02.320 | She's my good friend before you guys met her. So she's ours, but I've been friends with her longer.

00:04:07.920 | So my good friend, Cyan Bannister and our good friend and our bestie. Let's just leave it at

00:04:11.680 | that. It doesn't have to be a competition for who Cyan is best. We'll ask her to rate at the end of

00:04:15.520 | the episode. Cyan, welcome to the program.

00:04:17.680 | Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's nice to see everyone.

00:04:22.000 | Jason, you want to tell people about Cyan's background?

00:04:25.040 | Yeah, do an epic rant on Cyan's epic history.

00:04:27.360 | I mean, Cyan and I fought in the Clone Wars together. It was a long time ago. But

00:04:31.600 | she's a technologist, self-made individual who then decided she would start writing small angel

00:04:38.640 | checks about 14 years ago, literally the same year I did. And myself, Cyan...

00:04:44.960 | She's done profoundly better than you.

00:04:46.800 | She's done incredible, yes, of course. But we'll get into it. And Cyan and I would...

00:04:53.840 | 14 years ago, I guess, we would meet startup companies together and host little events

00:05:01.840 | where we get together and take pitches. And we invested in a couple of companies together,

00:05:06.320 | and it worked out very nicely for everyone involved.

00:05:09.520 | So...

00:05:10.000 | Yeah, we're in a couple of companies together.

00:05:12.000 | Yeah. Density.

00:05:13.280 | Density. We were on the board together for a little bit, so that was fun.

00:05:16.240 | A little bit, yeah. Thumbtack.

00:05:18.400 | Thumbtack. Actually, Thumbtack, Density, and Uber, I all discovered through you.

00:05:26.240 | What's... Which one was Uber? I got to check my...

00:05:28.160 | Yeah, and I don't think you're allowed to say them.

00:05:29.920 | I don't think you're allowed to say them.

00:05:30.480 | Let me check my Google sheet here. I didn't know I invested in Uber. Let me check. I have

00:05:33.520 | to confirm that. Oh, yeah, I did. But at one of these events, I introduced Cyan to Uber. It's

00:05:38.560 | true. It's true. It's true.

00:05:40.080 | Found all three of those deals at your event, so that was really great.

00:05:42.800 | Well, thanks. That's a very nice...

00:05:45.920 | Let me try. Cyan is a prolific angel investor.

00:05:49.680 | Correct. We just said that.

00:05:50.640 | She was a part of Founders Fund.

00:05:53.760 | Oh, right. Yeah.

00:05:55.360 | She runs a seed fund called Long Journey Ventures.

00:05:58.320 | Some of her hits include SpaceX, Anduril, Density, Postmates, Niantic, which is the

00:06:08.080 | makers of Pokemon Go, and Jason's favorite startup, Uber. Yeah, it's been a good run.

00:06:15.520 | It's been a good run. And also, I'll just add, a wonderful human being. And if you ever

00:06:19.600 | had the chance to hang out and talk for a couple of hours, Cyan would be one of those people that

00:06:24.640 | you'd put right at the top of the list.

00:06:26.320 | I will promote Cyan's interview with Tim Ferriss a couple of weeks ago.

00:06:30.320 | Oh, yes.

00:06:30.880 | I randomly turned it on. I was in the car driving home, and then I stopped in my driveway and kept

00:06:36.000 | listening. I was just telling Cyan it was a fantastic... What was it? About two hours,

00:06:40.000 | two and a half hour interview?

00:06:40.960 | Three. Well, it was four hours.

00:06:42.240 | Three hours.

00:06:42.720 | I think he cut it to three and a half. Yeah.

00:06:44.400 | And then I had to drive again. I listened to it, and I was excited to get back to it,

00:06:48.480 | which never happens for me listening to long-form interviews like that. It was

00:06:52.240 | phenomenal, so I recommend it to everyone.

00:06:53.680 | Why did it hit you so deeply?

00:06:56.000 | A couple of things. One, Cyan is an incredible storyteller. The way she describes her

00:07:01.520 | experiences, her history, her life, beautiful. She talks in kind of, I think, a deep persuasive

00:07:08.400 | way about some of the things that have shaped her, her business investing, as well as kind

00:07:14.160 | of spirituality, which she mentioned earlier, which is not something that you'll typically...

00:07:17.120 | And you're like, "Wait, where did this conversation just pivot to?"

00:07:19.440 | And then you go down this whole other path with her, and you go on the journey with her.

00:07:22.480 | I just thought it was great. So all over the place, it was great. Beautiful.

00:07:26.080 | Recommend it to everyone to get to know Cyan.

00:07:28.240 | Oh, thanks. Can I have you all as my professional cheerleading squad from now on?

00:07:32.080 | This is pretty awesome. I don't like talking about myself, and this is great. I love it.

00:07:36.000 | Yeah.

00:07:36.240 | Well, it's true. Cyan was voted most humble in our angel investing group,

00:07:41.440 | and I was a close second, so I almost won most humble.

00:07:44.240 | More work to do being humble.

00:07:47.280 | I'm going to get you a t-shirt called "The Humblest."

00:07:49.120 | No, you have to borrow it from Chamath. He's got his hat on for the last 10 years.

00:07:54.400 | Seven or eight years ago, Jason approached Cyan and I and said, "Hey, guys,

00:07:58.560 | Harvey Weinstein has asked me to make a show."

00:08:01.200 | Yes, a true story.

00:08:02.640 | No, it's a true story.

00:08:03.920 | Here's how he asked me to do it in his room. It was really-

00:08:06.320 | It's a true story.

00:08:07.200 | Oh, dude, take it down a notch.

00:08:09.520 | Cyan, myself, and Jason went to someplace in the city, and we taped a-

00:08:14.720 | We taped an episode. I have it.

00:08:16.000 | What is it called, the first episode?

00:08:17.280 | A pilot.

00:08:17.360 | A pilot.

00:08:17.360 | We taped the NBC pilot for "The Accelerator," or "The Incubator." So I had been approached

00:08:25.680 | and did a pilot for NBC called "The Accelerator," and they spent like a half million dollars on

00:08:31.680 | this. And you guys came on, and it came out great. And it was just going to follow me around-

00:08:35.520 | Well, it was very awkward, because afterwards, they approached Cyan and I to do the show-

00:08:41.040 | Without me.

00:08:41.440 | But when we-

00:08:42.080 | Without Jason. And so we had to decide-

00:08:45.200 | We're friends like this.

00:08:46.080 | We decided Cyan-

00:08:47.120 | Who needs enemies?

00:08:49.520 | We decided our friendship was more important.

00:08:51.920 | Exactly.

00:08:52.640 | I don't know if I ever told you guys the story, but literally, they were figuring out where to

00:08:56.880 | put this and what time slot. They were like, "We're going to do it in the summer, because

00:08:59.600 | we're trying to get some summer programming going. That's where we're going to test stuff."

00:09:02.720 | And then Harvey Weinstein turns out to be an horrible monster, and the whole thing gets

00:09:06.240 | canceled. And anything that was anywhere within 100 miles of Harvey Weinstein got canceled,

00:09:11.200 | including my failed or forgotten reality TV show.

00:09:16.400 | All right, let's get to more important things.

00:09:19.440 | There is an unbelievable tragedy occurring in Los Angeles, as we're speaking. Devastating

00:09:26.080 | wildfires. Basically, I formed a ring around LA, the most destructive of which has been

00:09:31.760 | the Palisades Fire, which had stretched into Malibu, obviously.

00:09:36.960 | And 15,000 acres or so have been burned in that area. Thousands of homes, maybe 2,000 homes.

00:09:45.360 | Here's some images. They're just devastating. And we have a lot of friends in this area.

00:09:51.040 | And the area you're seeing on fire, if you don't know the topography of Los Angeles,

00:09:55.920 | is north of Santa Monica. You have Palisades and then Malibu. And obviously, east of the 405,

00:10:00.960 | you have things that you've heard of, like Bel Air and Brentwood. This area is part of a mountain

00:10:07.600 | area called the Santa Monica Mountains, and they get very dry. And there's a phenomenon,

00:10:14.240 | which we'll get into, called the Santa. And it winds that blow really, really strongly,

00:10:19.520 | and a perfect storm has happened, where thousands of homes and tragically five lives,

00:10:25.040 | and I'm sure there will be more, unfortunately, have burned it down.

00:10:29.520 | This video of driving down PCH, if you've ever driven PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway,

00:10:37.040 | these are 10, 20, $50 million homes that are literally on the Pacific Ocean.

00:10:43.280 | The most coveted homes in Los Angeles are not Bel Air and Brentwood. You might think that because

00:10:48.160 | you hear them on TV. But really, if you were an incredibly successful person, you would aspire

00:10:53.600 | to live in the Pacific Palisades, just west of Brentwood, and just south of Malibu or Malibu.

00:10:58.560 | Many celebrities live there, many executives, etc. And these homes are gone. Thousands and

00:11:06.480 | thousands of homes. This has turned into the ultimate Rorschach test on social media, where

00:11:13.680 | people are projecting into this tragedy, which tragically occurs every year to varying degrees,

00:11:20.400 | and maybe every 20, 30 years, it's an acute situation. We'll get into that in a moment.

00:11:24.640 | But looking at this absolute, just devastating loss of property and lives,

00:11:32.160 | the lives could have been a lot worse. Friberg, from a scientific perspective, maybe we'll start

00:11:37.360 | there. When you look at these wildfires, extreme weather, global warming, and you look at this

00:11:44.320 | situation, is that where your mind goes? Or in this Rorschach test of how you feel about

00:11:49.760 | these kind of tragedies and how you interpret it? Do you go somewhere else? The incompetence

00:11:54.480 | of California's government, DEI, Ukraine, I mean, everybody is superimposing on this

00:12:01.520 | natural disaster, whatever their pet issues are. Where do you come to when you look at this?

00:12:08.160 | I don't think that those are exclusive. I think that you can have had both incompetent planning

00:12:17.920 | and execution by leadership, as well as have kind of uncontrollable circumstances that

00:12:27.680 | management and planning weren't necessarily going to solve. I'll kind of talk about a couple of

00:12:31.600 | these points real quick. First of all, we talked about when the hurricane hit a couple of months

00:12:38.080 | ago, remember? As you guys know, I have an office or facility out in Asheville, so we were exposed

00:12:42.480 | to the flooding circumstances. We talked about the frequency of that sort of an event having

00:12:48.640 | been such a rare occurrence becoming more common. Similarly, we're seeing more frequent high wind

00:12:55.120 | events in California, flooding events in California, and extremely hot events in California.

00:13:00.560 | If you look at this link I sent out, Nick, in terms of the total precipitation over this current

00:13:05.280 | what's called rain season, the Southern California region is basically at a, you know, call it zero

00:13:12.560 | percent of normal. So this is Southern California. You can see that third column. That's the percent

00:13:17.360 | of normal rainfall that has been experienced. There's been zero rain in these regions. So

00:13:22.640 | everything is primed to be very dry, and then you get these Santa Ana winds, 100-mile-an-hour winds.

00:13:28.720 | No matter how much underbrush you clear out, no matter how many trees you remove, if there's some

00:13:33.600 | embers in the air, there's a 100-mile-an-hour wind. That is going to create a fire hurricane,

00:13:38.160 | and a lot of homes are going to get caught on fire. So it's very hard to kind of just pin the

00:13:42.560 | blame solely on not doing underbrush clearing, not doing removal of trees. Those should have

00:13:48.240 | happened. They didn't happen. That was wrong. That was bad policy. But it doesn't excuse the

00:13:53.440 | fact that there's a natural event that happened here that seems to be occurring with greater

00:13:57.920 | frequency. The thing I'll kind of pivot to, if we want to get there now, maybe we'll talk about that

00:14:01.840 | in a minute, it's kind of the economic and the policy issues with respect to the Department of

00:14:06.160 | Insurance. Okay, let's get to that after we go through maybe a little bit of the quick reactions

00:14:10.960 | here. I think that's where that's where there's going to be real pain and devastation, and that's

00:14:14.480 | the biggest economic consequence is the role that insurance has played in all this stuff,

00:14:18.080 | which we'll get to in a minute. Okay, so Chamath, I think, table stakes, we all agree,

00:14:22.800 | global warming, extreme weather, depending on what degree you believe in it, there's play some

00:14:28.480 | factor here. And this is something that has reoccurred over and over again in this specific

00:14:33.600 | region. But on social media, we're seeing a lot of other interpretations of this event,

00:14:39.680 | maybe your thoughts on some of the other interpretations. And then where, when you

00:14:43.840 | look at it, what do you start to think about preventing this in the future? Or maybe who's

00:14:48.800 | responsible? What's your general take on what we've seen in the last week?

00:14:52.160 | I mean, I'm not very sympathetic to the there were 100 mile an hour winds, not because it's not true.

00:15:00.480 | But there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are

00:15:08.480 | happening in greater and greater frequency. Nick, maybe you can find this and just put it up here.

00:15:14.240 | But remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018,

00:15:23.600 | burning to the ground? Can we just look at that all of us collectively, because that was

00:15:28.640 | six years ago. This is not like it was a distant memory from 100 years ago.

00:15:36.240 | We knew in 2018. That's a poll that a pass. So this, this idea that we were just lollygagging

00:15:43.760 | around and got caught off guard by 100 mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable

00:15:48.960 | answer. We knew in 2018, that these things could happen. We knew across the rest of the United

00:15:55.360 | States that these outlier weather events were happening in greater and greater frequency.

00:15:59.120 | If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California homes

00:16:06.160 | fire coverage three months before this event happened. So all this data was in the realm of

00:16:12.400 | the knowable. And then when you double click, and you get into a little bit more of the details,

00:16:19.040 | there's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to

00:16:24.800 | the bottom of. So I'll just give you a couple of facts. In the 1950s, the average amount of timber,

00:16:32.240 | so wood that was harvested in California, was around 6 billion board feet per year.

00:16:38.000 | Into intervening 70 years that shrank to about 1.5 billion board feet. And so you'd say, okay,

00:16:46.560 | well, that's a 75% reduction. We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation. It turns out

00:16:54.480 | that that's not entirely true, because what it left behind was nearly 163 million dead trees,

00:17:02.400 | dead, like gone. And so you would say, well, those things should have been removed. And

00:17:09.520 | the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act,

00:17:14.240 | CEQA, hopefully I'm pronouncing this right. And a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies

00:17:20.080 | that limited the ability of local governments and fire management to clear these dead trees

00:17:25.040 | and vegetation. And I think that that's a really big deal. And when you double click on that,

00:17:30.880 | here's where you find the real head scratcher. Okay. Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951,

00:17:40.480 | AB 2639, all rejected by the democrat controlled legislator, or worse vetoed by Governor Newsom.

00:17:49.520 | That would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues.

00:17:56.480 | Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground.

00:18:01.840 | SB 103, as an example, went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk. So I'm just a little

00:18:10.160 | bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. One is everybody can see that these events are

00:18:18.080 | happening. Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just six years ago.

00:18:24.320 | All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the

00:18:32.640 | ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence.

00:18:35.920 | Okay, Sian, you've heard Chamath and Freeberg's take here. Some amount of incompetence,

00:18:44.480 | some amount of, hey, this keeps occurring, and there might be some global warming that

00:18:48.320 | is contributing to it. What do you take away from this situation?

00:18:52.160 | I agree with Freedberg and Chamath. It's a lot of everything. But I also think that

00:18:59.280 | to add to the prevention part, other than clearing out underbrush and trees and things like that,

00:19:04.800 | we don't build things in the state of California in a way that houses should be built when you

00:19:12.880 | know that there are fires like this. So for example, we have more wooden roofs than we

00:19:17.120 | really should have. We should really evaluate our materials that we're building things out of.

00:19:22.080 | But we also have, down in El Segundo, this is a company that I invested in, Rainmaker.

00:19:27.920 | We have the ability now to cloud seed and do preventative measures to actually make a region

00:19:33.040 | have more water. And I don't understand why we're not looking into things like this that

00:19:39.440 | could have prevented. We knew that this storm was coming. We knew that these winds were coming.

00:19:44.880 | Southern California shut power down. I have a farm down there. We still don't have power

00:19:50.800 | because they knew that most of these fires were started by PG&E or down power lines.

00:19:55.680 | And so they proactively shut everybody down, and we're still running on generators. And if

00:20:00.320 | you notice, there's no fires down there. But they also have 100-mile-per-hour winds.

00:20:06.320 | And you're not seeing it. And there's plenty of mountain ranges and dryness there. You know,

00:20:09.680 | avocado farms are basically just sitting fuel. So I do think it's a combination of all of those

00:20:17.040 | things. And competence is definitely one of them. Yeah. And I actually lived right next door to this

00:20:25.040 | area for a long time in Brentwood. And to your point about roofs, it seems silly. And a lot of

00:20:29.600 | these fire prevention things can seem silly when you first mention them, which Trump looked,

00:20:35.200 | let's face it, the way he says things sometimes is very colorful. And when he said, listen,

00:20:39.440 | you're not raking like people in wherever he said it, Scandinavia, Finland are raking

00:20:43.280 | the forest. And he was absolutely 100% correct on that maybe sounded bombastic or silly when

00:20:48.960 | the way he said it. But the truth is, in Tahoe, where we just were over the holidays,

00:20:54.480 | people are clearing underbrush. When I lived in Los Angeles, people who lived in the Hollywood

00:20:58.480 | Hills would get a fine if they didn't clear it. But there are mountain ranges that nobody owns.

00:21:04.160 | And when you showed that Sepulveda pass, that's the 405 going past the Getty Center.

00:21:07.920 | That area has got to be cleaned by the city and the government. And maybe they weren't doing it

00:21:13.120 | as much. Look at this. This is apocalyptic. Yeah. So I know this past very well, because I would

00:21:18.480 | drive Jason, what, what did California learn from this? What did Gavin Newsom implement?

00:21:24.160 | Based on what happened here? What did the city of Los Angeles implement? Based on what

00:21:29.840 | happened here? I want to just specifically know the answer to those two questions.

00:21:33.440 | Yeah, and I think that's going to be a big part of this breakdown after this happens. Because

00:21:38.000 | in a lot of these cases, you might lose a home or two, but you haven't had this kind of wholesale

00:21:43.280 | destruction in a while. And when I lived in Brentwood, I had a shake roof. That's a fancy

00:21:48.240 | way of saying shingles, wood shingles, and they would bake in the sun. And I love this roof. But

00:21:53.760 | my neighbors who in Brentwood were all 70, 80 years old, and I was right on Sunset Boulevard,

00:21:57.680 | and I could look up from my house and see the place you just showed, which is the Getty Center

00:22:02.080 | and the and the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 and the Sunset Boulevard. I was only allowed cyan to

00:22:08.720 | replace 30% of my roof at a time, you couldn't replace it and put shake roofs on, you could only

00:22:13.200 | like maintain it. Because in 1961, there was the Bel Air and Brentwood fires. And these fires,

00:22:20.320 | you want to talk about like, in memory, Chamath, this one, Zsa Zsa Gabor and tons of celebrities

00:22:25.680 | lost their homes as well. This one was started because of the Santa Ana winds. And somebody was

00:22:31.200 | just burning a rubbish pile. I think it was some construction workers were burning that.

00:22:34.160 | They said to me, the neighbors, do you know about the Bel Air fire? You know what the Brentwood

00:22:38.640 | fire, you got to get rid of that shake roof, you got to get rid of that shake roof. When my daughter

00:22:41.760 | was born, the the roofer said to me, let's put composites on I put composites on and he said,

00:22:47.360 | what do you want to do with the sprinkler system? And I said, there's a sprinkler system in my

00:22:50.320 | little one story ranch house. He said, Yeah, I said, I've never seen it. And he showed it to me

00:22:54.560 | was on the roof. People were so scared after that 62 fire, they were putting these on the roof. And

00:22:59.920 | now you cannot have wood roofs have been banned. You were grandfathered in, I was part of that.

00:23:04.400 | But there was a lot of PTSD from that. And now, I do think there's gonna have to be some lessons

00:23:10.400 | learned. And let's get to where some folks online are pointing to maybe not having great priorities,

00:23:18.320 | and maybe focusing on things that are not as important as the taxpaying citizens. A lot of

00:23:25.360 | tweets, I don't know how people feel about them about de i about who's running the fire department,

00:23:30.800 | etc. Did you have any thoughts on that? Friedberg? I'll I mean, look, we one of the things I wanted

00:23:36.400 | to talk about was the do is role of the Department of Insurance role in what I think will ultimately

00:23:42.480 | be creating a pretty significant economic consequence here from this sort of an event.

00:23:49.440 | I don't but I'll answer your question. Okay. I don't think that the mission of any public

00:23:57.440 | service organization should be to meet de i metrics. I think the mission of that public

00:24:04.960 | service organization should be to serve the public. And I think that those de i metrics

00:24:10.720 | should not be a priority when serving the public is the objective. The best ability to serve the

00:24:18.400 | public should be the objective. And that's it. And I'll state that really clearly. So obviously,

00:24:25.200 | the fire chief in LA is getting a lot of attention, whether or not that prioritization of de i metrics

00:24:33.520 | took away from the interest and the focus in preparing for major disasters. I don't know,

00:24:38.640 | there have been some interviews over the last day or two just to be fair, where she has claimed that

00:24:43.200 | they asked for more money to that would not be able to be prepared for major disasters. If the

00:24:48.240 | budget cut took place that was proposed by bass, that budget cut did take place. And so the fire

00:24:54.480 | chief has said that she asked for budget to make this the preparation for this sort of an event,

00:24:58.560 | and she lost it. And so I don't want to just say, hey, she's to blame. She's to blame because she

00:25:02.880 | was focused on de i. But I will separately say that I think that creating de i as a mission

00:25:07.200 | for an organization that's supposed to serve the public interest makes no sense.

00:25:10.480 | This is an important one. James Woods, obviously the famous actor who lost his home in Pacific

00:25:16.800 | Palisades has been going on a bit of a rant about Christine Crowley. She is LA's fire chief. She

00:25:23.520 | also happens to be a lesbian and has made a priority and done a number of talks on trying

00:25:30.320 | to increase diversity inside of the fire department. She also just with a bit of research

00:25:36.400 | is one of the top performing firefighters, a paramedic, an engineer, a fire inspector, a captain,

00:25:43.360 | a battalion chief, an assistant chief fire marshal, deputy chief. And when she took the firefighter

00:25:48.000 | exam in the late 90s, she was scored in the top 50 out of 16,000. She seems eminently qualified.

00:25:52.400 | There has been a massive pile on attack on her. And you know how it is on x and other social

00:25:59.040 | networks where people are really tweaked about de i that they're kind of putting the blame on her.

00:26:05.280 | What are your thoughts of this de i angle trauma? I don't think this is to blame. Okay. If all of a

00:26:11.040 | sudden, because of de i 70% were physically incapable of carrying out the task, and that's

00:26:18.720 | why these fires grew, maybe you could make the claim that it is a de i problem. I do agree with

00:26:26.000 | free bird, but the thing that these public institutions need to do a better job of is

00:26:33.920 | being very clear about what their North Star is. I think the North Star for the fire department

00:26:39.360 | is to save people's lives and put out fires. I think the North Star for the police service

00:26:45.120 | should be to save people's lives and to hold criminals responsible and get them off the

00:26:49.360 | streets. And you should hire the people that allow you to do that job the best. The thing

00:26:55.200 | to keep in mind is that there were probably 20 or 30 people interviewed to be fire chief.

00:27:01.520 | It's not her fault that she was selected. The real question is, what was she mandated to focus

00:27:08.640 | on once she got the job? And I think what you see in all of these interviews is I don't think

00:27:13.760 | that she all of a sudden after growing up through the fire service had this de i bent, I think

00:27:18.400 | typically what happens is it becomes an institutional directive. It guides your compensation,

00:27:24.960 | it guides your recognition. And so you do it. It's sort of what Charlie Munger says,

00:27:29.520 | show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. The entire public service is riddled

00:27:34.560 | with this. The entire private service is riddled with this, which is that we've lost the script

00:27:40.320 | about what is important. So it's yet another example. She's probably quite a capable person

00:27:46.320 | who if was just allowed to focus on fighting fires and saving people's lives would probably

00:27:51.760 | do a good job. But if you had to add all these other things that are not germane to that task,

00:27:58.160 | then people will get frustrated and projected onto her.

00:28:00.960 | It seems like a lot of projecting going on here to mafia. I agree.

00:28:04.160 | All of that said, though, I think you got to go back to how did these fires start?

00:28:08.240 | Yeah.

00:28:08.720 | How did they grow out of control? And again, I think that these wins didn't come out of nowhere

00:28:14.960 | in the sense that they caught everybody off guard. This has happened before. That area has gone

00:28:20.400 | through this exact moment. Yes, there were laws that were proposed, they were vetoed. Okay. So

00:28:28.000 | that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick Caruso who

00:28:34.160 | were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took proactive and

00:28:40.320 | protective measures. Could those proactive and protective measures not be taken more broadly

00:28:45.360 | through L.A. County? Of course they could have. Why were they not?

00:28:50.000 | And here what we're seeing on the screen is Rick Caruso's village.

00:28:52.640 | Let me ask a very specific question.

00:28:55.200 | Pacific Palisades.

00:28:55.760 | How much money, and we know the answer to this, how much money did the government of California

00:29:01.440 | spend poorly, as it turns out, on homelessness? It was about $21 billion and illegal immigrants.

00:29:09.440 | I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions.

00:29:12.320 | If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas,

00:29:18.640 | what would the outcome have been? Maybe there still would have been a fire. Maybe there would

00:29:22.080 | have been damage. But it's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now.

00:29:26.400 | Yeah, I think what you're getting to here is we can confirm lesbians didn't cause the Santa

00:29:32.960 | winds to cause these fires, obviously. But there is an issue that I think many people in the public,

00:29:39.440 | especially in California, who voted for this very leftist liberal ideology are now starting to

00:29:45.360 | realize is, "Hey, wait a second. What are the priorities here, Cyan? What are we focused on,

00:29:51.040 | and what should we be focused on?" And it's very easy to be focused on DEI and maybe things that

00:29:57.680 | aren't as important, homelessness, and move budget there. But at the same time, they wouldn't give

00:30:02.880 | her $17 million. They cut the fire budget. She tried to fight it. Well, that's not clear. Now,

00:30:08.000 | the counter narrative is that she actually got an extra 50, Jason.

00:30:12.400 | Okay, so we're in a breaking news environment, so we'll see what the truth winds up being here.

00:30:18.880 | But Cyan, I think the point remains the same here, which is,

00:30:21.200 | is prioritization and what we focus on out of whack in California?

00:30:27.040 | Oh, without a doubt. I think diversity is good unless that's all you have. And I'll just simplify

00:30:33.200 | it like that. And I think it's very sad that somebody could be very qualified and be in a

00:30:38.320 | position, and we now have to question whether or not they were hired because of DEI. And then it

00:30:44.080 | comes down to prioritization. When you're dealing with an organization like a fire department whose

00:30:49.840 | main job is to protect the public and put out fires and save people, any amount of time, as we

00:30:54.880 | know, is a valuable, precious resource that's being spent trying to roll out these programs.

00:31:00.160 | It goes beyond just who you hire. It's even the thought police of how you think.

00:31:08.640 | It's so pervasive within an organization that you die from the bureaucracy of it.

00:31:14.000 | And if anything went wrong with DEI, it was that they didn't have their eye on the prize of fighting

00:31:21.280 | fires. And instead, they're focusing on something that truly doesn't matter. So you can be as

00:31:25.840 | diverse as you want to be and not be able to put out a fire, and then it just really doesn't matter,

00:31:29.680 | right? Because you're not training people. You're not spending money on things that matter. You're

00:31:33.760 | not having the discussions that matter. And that's where I think that does fall apart, and it

00:31:40.960 | has a place there. But I go back to what Chamath said, though. It really comes down to prevention

00:31:46.320 | and learning from our past. We seem to have a very short-term memory, and we forget very quickly

00:31:51.120 | because we rebuild and it looks pretty again, and everybody forgets. And we just don't have the

00:31:56.720 | ability as a society really to think long anymore. And that's a real problem. And I think we should

00:32:03.440 | learn from this fire. I really hope that what comes out of this is a shift in political leanings

00:32:09.840 | in this state. I think more moderates are going to come to their senses, as we've seen with the

00:32:16.640 | election and the outcome. And I think the state might shift some, and we might actually get some

00:32:20.960 | policies that work. >> You're so right. You're so right. I mean, when are we going to get tired

00:32:25.680 | of all this late-stage progressivism? It's like these litany of excuses. The people that are in

00:32:31.760 | charge have failed us yet again. >> Exactly. >> We have wasted so much money on so many things

00:32:38.640 | that don't move the needle. And then the things that they needed to do, they didn't do. And then

00:32:45.440 | they point the finger at climate change. It's a joke. >> At a certain point, you have to wonder,

00:32:50.160 | are we using politics and the purpose of it to make people's lives better and to have a

00:32:57.280 | high-functioning society? Or is it a way to furture signal or to share your opinions on things?

00:33:02.480 | >> Oh, it's absolutely a virtue signal. >> Yeah. And I think what people are starting

00:33:04.720 | to realize is, you know, in an acute situation, whether it's our budget deficit, whether it's

00:33:09.360 | schools, whether it's safety from climate, you know, or non-climate-induced disasters,

00:33:14.880 | you do need to have competence. And this is the Rick Caruso is such a competent executive

00:33:19.840 | that when he ran for office there, the fact that he didn't get that job is just absolutely crazy.

00:33:25.520 | And you saw the mayor come in, and she wouldn't even address, she wouldn't answer any questions

00:33:31.680 | from the press, not even thoughts and prayers or, you know, "We're thinking of this," or "We're

00:33:35.760 | going to get it done." It just seems like we're hiring non-executives to work in

00:33:39.840 | functions that should be high-performing executives. This is an operational role.

00:33:45.200 | >> Let me maybe bring something that ties these three things together, but it builds on

00:33:50.080 | critically what Sian said. There are so many people here that are good, hardworking people

00:33:56.400 | that lost their homes. For many of these folks, it could be the most single and only

00:34:03.760 | financially securing asset that they have. For other people, those that are family age,

00:34:12.480 | they have kids now beyond the financial damage that are totally displaced. Where will these folks

00:34:17.760 | go? There was a comment by Adam Carolla, a commentary, where he said, "The real test,"

00:34:25.040 | to Sian's point, "will be how they internalize and metabolize this because it now affects them

00:34:32.480 | personally, and they have to go and wait three years to build building permits to rebuild."

00:34:36.640 | Now, that's assuming that they can even get a reasonable amount of insurance coverage,

00:34:42.000 | which touches Freeberg's point. This is the real tragedy. That is the actual tragedy multiplied

00:34:47.920 | by 120,000 or 200,000 families. The real question is how much of that was completely avoidable.

00:34:56.000 | I think there is a reasonable amount of it that could have been. That's what really sucks,

00:35:00.960 | and that's where you cannot take your finger off the scale and forget.

00:35:04.960 | >> Yeah. When it lands on your doorstep, quite literally here, they are not going to be able,

00:35:10.880 | having been in this exact area, I can tell you, when you try to pull a permit to do anything,

00:35:16.080 | as I was explaining with my roof, the regulations are deep and expensive and time consuming.

00:35:23.840 | I don't believe... We talked about the California Coastal Commission on a recent episode,

00:35:28.160 | Freeberg. What are the chances that the California Coastal Commission even allows

00:35:32.320 | these people to build those homes in those locations on PCH, Freeberg?

00:35:37.280 | >> I was talking to Chamath about this earlier today because the California Coastal Commission

00:35:41.280 | was created by the voters directly in 1976, and that commission has authority that exceeds

00:35:49.760 | legislative action. So you would have to basically go back... My understanding is you'd have to go

00:35:55.840 | back to a state vote to rescind the powers of the California Coastal Commission. So they have

00:36:00.160 | effective, complete authority over deciding what does or doesn't get built on the coast because

00:36:06.160 | their objective is to preserve the coast for the use of the community and restore it to its natural

00:36:10.320 | habitat. So anytime there's a request or a permit request, it can take two decades, three decades

00:36:15.120 | sometimes to get anything approved if they ever approve it at all. And so the California Coastal

00:36:20.320 | Commission, any property that touches the beachfront in California, they have this kind of

00:36:26.720 | God-level authority over, and they're basically all political appointees that sit on the commission.

00:36:31.600 | >> To my question, Freeberg, what are the chances they allow the millionaires on Pacific Coast

00:36:38.000 | Highway in Malibu to rebuild those homes, or do you think they slow roll it and those people are

00:36:42.880 | all 50, 60, 70 years old? They'll never be able to rebuild their homes. The California Coastal

00:36:47.120 | Commission could just slow roll this and say, "You know what? Nature returned it to its natural

00:36:51.120 | state." >> I think we should talk about insurance. This is a great segue.

00:36:53.760 | >> Yeah, yeah, the perfect segue. This is the key point I wanted to say about insurance. So

00:36:57.840 | going forward, yeah. >> All of this property that sits in climate-sensitive zones or weather-sensitive

00:37:04.560 | zones, whatever you want to call it, like we've talked about on the coast of California, of

00:37:08.400 | Florida, in hurricane centers, in tornado centers, where the frequency of loss is going up, they're

00:37:15.280 | priced as if the frequency of loss is what it used to be, which is like, let's say you buy a home

00:37:21.440 | for a million dollars, and the probability of your home getting wiped out by a natural disaster

00:37:26.320 | is a one-in-a-thousand-year kind of situation. So you have a one-in-a-thousand chance of your

00:37:31.440 | home getting wiped out each year. So your price for insurance on that million-dollar home should

00:37:34.800 | be about $10,000 a year, one-tenth of 1%. So $10,000 a year for a million-dollar home sounds

00:37:40.480 | expensive, but it is what you have to pay for homeowners insurance. But now let's say that the

00:37:44.720 | probability shifts to one-in-20 years. So now you've got a one-in-20-year probability of your

00:37:49.520 | home getting wiped out. Are you going to pay 5% of your home value? No. And if you have a $10

00:37:57.840 | million home, are you going to pay $500,000 a year for property insurance? No. Now what's happened

00:38:04.320 | is the insurance companies have these models. They're called CAT models, or catastrophe models.

00:38:09.120 | It used to be two companies. One was called RMS. The other one was called Equicat. And I used to

00:38:12.880 | work in this business, so I know it pretty well. And then all the companies started building in-house

00:38:16.640 | models, and now there's startups that make models. And these models have shown that there are

00:38:20.160 | increased probability of complete loss in a region because of the increased probability of these

00:38:24.560 | crazy weather events happening. And so the price of insurance should go up. Here's the problem.

00:38:29.040 | There are 50 state insurance commissioners in the U.S. In order to sell insurance in a state,

00:38:34.160 | you have to have the insurance carrier and the policy approved in that state. And the states

00:38:39.280 | determine what rate or what price you can charge for insurance. So the state insurance commissions

00:38:45.120 | have a couple of goals. Number one is to keep all the insurance companies solvent. So they want to

00:38:49.840 | check the financials of all the insurance companies, make sure they're not writing too

00:38:52.400 | many policies that they won't be able to pay out. The second thing is they want to make sure that

00:38:56.640 | the insurance companies aren't ripping consumers off. So they have control over the rates,

00:39:01.840 | and they don't want the rates to go up too much in any given year. So they're controlling rates

00:39:06.720 | and keeping them down. And then the third is they're supposed to make sure that consumers

00:39:10.240 | have access to insurance. And the third is a very hard thing to do if you're trying to keep

00:39:14.880 | companies solvent, so you can't write too many policies, and you're saying, "Hey, you can't raise

00:39:18.800 | prices." And meanwhile, the probability of loss has gone up. So the insurance carriers are like,

00:39:22.960 | "What choice do I have?" So earlier this year, a state farm pulled out of Palisades. They stopped

00:39:27.760 | writing fire insurance at Palisades. They canceled 1,600 policies in the exact neighborhood that just

00:39:33.360 | burnt down. - What about the timing of that freeburn? That was three months before? Six months

00:39:36.880 | before this happened? - By the way, it's not just that. - I think it was like six months before.

00:39:39.360 | - Yeah, but it seems crazy. But as you know, in Tahoe, a lot of the policies have been canceled.

00:39:45.120 | - Yes, so it's just crazy timing. It's a crazy coincidence. - And remember, in wine country,

00:39:50.400 | we had a lot of wipeouts. All of Santa Rosa was burnt out a few years ago. You guys remember that?

00:39:54.960 | And so they started pulling out of there. So a lot of the carriers are generally pulling

00:39:58.880 | out of California because when they go up to the DOI and they're like, "Hey, we need to raise rates

00:40:02.320 | by... We need to double the price of insurance. We need to triple the price of insurance." This

00:40:05.760 | is now a one-in-20-year event. The Department of Insurance says, "No, no, no. We're not going

00:40:09.760 | to let you charge that much to consumers." And then the carrier's like, "Okay, we got no choice,"

00:40:13.840 | and they exit the market. Here you can see right here, 1,600 policies canceled. This has been a

00:40:18.720 | big driver is the Department of Insurance has made it very difficult to find this free market outcome.

00:40:23.680 | But at the end of the day, one of three parties are going to end up eating the cost of the change

00:40:30.320 | in probability of loss that has occurred. It's either the homeowner because they're going to end

00:40:34.160 | up losing the value of their home in a loss, or they're going to end up needing to write down

00:40:37.200 | the value of their home when they sell it to someone who will take on that risk, which means

00:40:40.480 | the price has to come down. Or number two is the insurers, and there's not enough insurance capital

00:40:45.280 | out there to cover all these losses, so all these insurers would go bankrupt. Or the third is the

00:40:49.280 | taxpayer. One of those three is going to end up eating the loss that's about to happen.

00:40:52.720 | No, you know the answer. You know the answer.

00:40:54.240 | Taxpayer.

00:40:54.800 | Taxpayer. Yeah, somebody's going to lobby somebody. But hey, we're sitting here,

00:40:58.880 | Chamath, in the age of Doge and saying, "Hey, let's make the government smaller."

00:41:03.840 | In fact, Dave, you and I were talking about, at some point, gangs of New York and the fire

00:41:08.080 | departments being, you know, crazy timing that we were talking about that two or three weeks

00:41:13.280 | before this happened. But, you know, when we look at making government smaller, well, that means

00:41:18.160 | that these kind of situations would put citizens more on their own. So let's counterbalance what

00:41:23.600 | you think, Chamath, about who should be responsible. We all espouse, I think, free market ideology on

00:41:29.520 | this program and as executives and in what we do every day. Should the people who own these homes,

00:41:35.600 | going forward, who decide to rebuild them here, have to pay, you know, 5-10% of their value of

00:41:41.520 | home every year? Should their home prices collapse because it's too hard to build there? And should

00:41:45.600 | the free market take over this risk? Or should it constantly be put on the other 329 million

00:41:50.720 | Americans who are going to have to bear the brunt of what happens to the million people affected in

00:41:54.400 | this area?

00:41:54.960 | Well, I mean, 'should' is a very strong word. The cap on the insurance reimbursement is about

00:42:01.680 | 3 million, is my understanding. David, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that's right.

00:42:05.680 | The houses in the Palisades are anywhere from, call it, 1 million on the low end to maybe 40

00:42:11.680 | or 50 million on the high end.

00:42:12.960 | The average is four and a half.

00:42:14.240 | Yeah, that's what I was about to say. There's nothing for a million these days. Yeah,

00:42:17.200 | it's got to be three or four minimum.

00:42:18.400 | Right. But the median is probably more instructive, which is probably seven or eight million. So

00:42:22.880 | my point is that folks will get less than half their home value back. They're going to have to

00:42:28.240 | come up with some amount of money to then rebuild. But the cost of rebuilding a 7,000-square-foot

00:42:33.840 | house in the Pacific Palisades is probably at least 1,000-square-foot. So that's 7 million of

00:42:38.080 | cash.

00:42:38.400 | It is. Exactly.

00:42:39.680 | So now all of a sudden, these people have to come up with a lot of money.

00:42:44.240 | Exactly.

00:42:44.960 | And that's post-tax money. So you might as well double it because California is just so

00:42:49.920 | egregiously burdensome in terms of taxes. So the individual homeowner is not going to be in a

00:42:55.600 | position to rebuild. I think that the liabilities of the insurance claims are going to be so massive

00:43:05.120 | that the state's going to look to the federal government to bail them out.

00:43:08.480 | My parents just got evacuated. I got to call them and just there's a new fire.

00:43:13.760 | Where are they in Ballpark County?

00:43:14.960 | Literally, right. There's a new fire called Kenneth Fire. It just took off.

00:43:18.880 | And it's at their house. So just give me, I'll be back.

00:43:22.000 | Okay. Don't do your thing.

00:43:23.360 | Oh, wow.

00:43:24.160 | Gosh almighty.

00:43:24.880 | We're talking about, hey, maybe less government. Hey, maybe spending less.

00:43:30.080 | Now the same group of people, maybe who were saying, hey, we need to spend less and

00:43:33.840 | reduce the size of government are saying, hey, well, why isn't California more prepared? Well,

00:43:37.760 | being prepared obviously means more money and more taxes. So you have now these two competing

00:43:44.400 | ideologies here. But to the question of who's responsible, it is economically going to make

00:43:49.600 | no sense to rebuild unless you can get that insurance. It is a coveted place to live.

00:43:54.640 | But because of the construction costs have gone absolutely parabolic in California,

00:43:59.760 | because of regulations, you're talking about $14 million in income to build a $7 million house.

00:44:04.880 | And maybe you're just better off selling the lot for $1 million and letting it be somebody else's

00:44:10.080 | problem going forward and just taking the two or three or $4 million loss. Who should pay for

00:44:15.840 | on a go forward basis, underwriting these homes?

00:44:20.000 | Yeah, I mean, a lot of these people paid for I was reading stories of 30 some odd years

00:44:24.720 | into insurance thinking that, you know, their house wouldn't burn down. And then of course,

00:44:28.560 | it gets canceled two weeks before their house burns down. And then the one time they need it,

00:44:32.000 | they don't have it. And part of this is, I mean, a huge part of it is what Friedberg was talking

00:44:38.160 | about are the regulators. And so the free market solution is the only solution. If you look at,

00:44:42.800 | I have an investment in a company called Ken Insurance, and they specialize in direct to

00:44:47.200 | consumer insurance for areas that are plagued with natural disasters. So their number one

00:44:53.600 | state out of the 11 that they serve is Florida, followed by Texas, which, you know, has tornadoes

00:44:59.040 | and things like that. And how they're able to get into these places and do insurance is the pricing

00:45:04.480 | is according to, you know, the construction of your home and all of these various things. And

00:45:08.560 | also weather models and using data science, things that are not allowed in California,

00:45:13.040 | if you can believe it or not. So you're not allowed to use a weather model to price in,

00:45:18.000 | you know, your decision making for insurance in the state. And that just doesn't make a lot of

00:45:22.480 | sense. You know, you should be rewarded if you put the resources and time into your home to make it

00:45:29.200 | a weatherproof, fireproof, fireproof, I mean, you know, even earthquake resistant, right?

00:45:34.880 | This is more regulations that were layered on here to try to create equality, you know,

00:45:40.800 | in the fact is, it's now working against the system in Tahoe, to your point, they gave us

00:45:48.640 | explicit instructions around homes, put stone and pebbles around your home, cut the trees and bushes

00:45:54.320 | down around your homes, do this over here, you know, your premium, when you do that, and if you

00:45:59.760 | do that, if you do that, it might cost $10,000 a home, you should, it would keep these from jumping

00:46:05.600 | from one to the other in most fire situations. Freeburg, you're back, is everything okay?

00:46:09.840 | It's not okay listening to your, you know, 70 something year old parents evacuate their

00:46:16.800 | home and try and pack their cars with all their stuff in a matter of minutes while a fire creeps

00:46:22.240 | on their home is a pretty devastating thing to listen to. Yeah, what are they saying?

00:46:26.800 | They're trying to get out of the house, they're throwing everything in the car,

00:46:29.200 | there's a vacuum, it's like, if I'm looking at the video right now, the fire is like right by

00:46:33.120 | their house, it's insane, it's literally like blocks away from their house. God.

00:46:37.920 | This is nuts, this is the house I grew up in, in LA. I'm so sorry, man. Gosh. It's blocks away,

00:46:44.240 | and I'm like, you know, what do you say to them? Like, throw all the photo albums in the car is

00:46:48.240 | what I said, throw the photos, like just grab the framed photos, my mom's trying to grab all her

00:46:51.760 | life. That's the number one thing that everybody misses. And it's mentioned in every interview

00:46:57.280 | that I've seen is photographs. I'm like, grab all the photos, grab all the albums. And she's like,

00:47:02.800 | you know, she's grabbing her jewelry and stuff. And I'm like, grab the photos, like,

00:47:05.920 | we're the last generation that will be thinking about this issue of grabbing the photos. Yeah,

00:47:10.560 | it's fascinating. I just want to say like, you know, as we wrap up this segment, you know,

00:47:14.160 | obviously, we're thinking about everybody there. This is complex. This is not the fault of a

00:47:19.120 | lesbian firefighter or the Ukraine or any of these other issues. This is leadership, and nature and

00:47:25.280 | preparedness. So there are big issues around climate change, you want to believe you don't

00:47:29.680 | want to believe in fine, put that aside. But I can tell you that when I saw Karen Bass,

00:47:33.840 | get off that flight. Play the clip neck of Karen Bass here, because it's a short enough

00:47:39.520 | clip that we can play it here for the audience. I'm assuming you all three of you saw this clip

00:47:44.480 | of her being absolutely unwilling to answer a single goddamn question about what's going on.

00:47:51.520 | This is the opposite of leadership. Just 10 seconds of this being absent while their homes

00:47:59.120 | were burning. Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars? Madam

00:48:04.640 | Mayor? Have you nothing to say today? Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?

00:48:14.160 | Disgraceful shock. I mean, I have zero sympathy. You took the leadership job. I don't

00:48:21.040 | give a if you're in shock. You're a leader, you just you sold yourself as the leader that you

00:48:26.480 | were going to service these people and you don't have the dignity that the honor to just answer

00:48:31.920 | the questions. It is the that is absolutely the worst leadership I've ever seen. Under fire.

00:48:39.760 | Let me ask you guys a question. Disgraceful. What do we do? You fire them all and you vote

00:48:45.360 | for Rick Crusoe. You vote for executives who know what they're doing and know what to do in a crisis

00:48:51.040 | because they've been under fire before because they've run a business before because they've

00:48:54.880 | seen hit the fan. This person, I don't know her. I don't know her history, but I'll be totally

00:49:00.320 | honest, like I wouldn't trust her literally to pick up my lunch if she can't answer one or two

00:49:06.240 | goddamn questions and give a placating answer to a reporter. Hey, it's an intense situation.

00:49:11.040 | We're working as hard as we can. She can't even say two goddamn words to the people who voted her

00:49:16.960 | in. And for anybody who voted for this level of a competence reminds me of exactly what we went

00:49:21.040 | through in San Francisco. And I was living there in the Bay Area when you put someone like Chesa

00:49:24.720 | Boudin in or London Breed or this entire clown car, Aaron Petzger, all these disgraceful,

00:49:31.680 | disgraceful Marxist lunatics who would rather virtue signal dopey Dean Preston, the whole lot

00:49:39.120 | of them, you vote them out and you vote in executives. And it doesn't mean a Republican

00:49:43.200 | executive. It doesn't mean a Democrat executive. It means an executive who's run something in their

00:49:47.600 | life before, whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's Trump, whether it's Rick Crusoe, it doesn't matter

00:49:52.240 | their ideology. It matters their effectiveness. And if you vote for ineffective people, you're

00:49:56.560 | going to get situations like this over and over and over again. So use your brains and vote for

00:50:01.520 | executives who've done something in the world. This is why I've changed my position on rooting

00:50:06.240 | for Trump. Now, I was a never Trump or everybody knows that, but he put executives around him this

00:50:11.200 | time round. And I am rooting for those executives to do what's right for the American people and

00:50:15.760 | solve big problems, not make them worse. It's infuriating. Timothy, what do you think?

00:50:21.680 | I think we need to have a wholesale replacement of the people that govern the state of California.

00:50:28.640 | It's just not worrying. And I think that the citizens that live in California need to do

00:50:35.680 | some real soul searching. It is beyond party politics. So I think what has happened in

00:50:43.280 | California is people vote for whatever vessel has the name Democrat beside their name or Republican

00:50:50.320 | beside their name. And I think that you have to go back to first principles and do a better job

00:50:56.880 | of picking the people to represent us because the people that are in positions of power

00:51:01.040 | just don't fundamentally know what they're doing. They're not capable.

00:51:05.520 | And the fact that then what we have to deal with are sort of lies and distractions

00:51:13.120 | to excuse incompetence, I think is unacceptable. I think we pay way too high of a price.

00:51:20.560 | And like I said, you are now dealing with hundreds of thousands of families whose

00:51:26.000 | entire lives have been totally disrupted and ripped away. And I hope that we learn something

00:51:33.200 | from this because we didn't learn from it eight years ago. And we clearly didn't learn from it

00:51:39.360 | when a different natural disaster in North Carolina. Will we find out that folks said,

00:51:44.160 | hey, guys, is there an outlier natural disaster event? Obviously, it's not going to be the same

00:51:48.960 | thing in North Carolina, but could a different form of something happen here? What could it be?

00:51:53.520 | Are we prepared? I'm sure we'll find out that they didn't do that. Maybe they had different

00:51:58.320 | meetings and they were all about other total distractions or things that just didn't matter.

00:52:05.440 | So this is what we need to do. We as a populace in this state need a reset. Otherwise, we deserve

00:52:12.400 | what we get. Bingo. Sian, you agree? Yeah, I think I think Democrats need to reclaim their party.

00:52:19.440 | I think there's a lot more strength in the middle. And, you know, they've let this woke ideology,

00:52:26.960 | I call it woke imperialism, like a religion take over in place of actually doing things that matter

00:52:36.960 | to the people that elected them, that pay taxes, that pay their, you know, their paychecks and

00:52:42.080 | everything in between. And it's time that people really look in the mirror. I've got so many

00:52:45.680 | moderates coming to me saying, you know, people call me a Republican and I'm far right and I'm

00:52:50.880 | a Nazi. And I'm like, yeah, welcome to the club. You know, it's at some point you've got to stop

00:52:55.520 | letting them run the board and stand up and say, you know, enough's enough. You know, we're not

00:53:01.040 | building some railway that's never being built. We're not solving homelessness with billions and

00:53:05.680 | billions of dollars. We're not doing this stuff anymore. You know, we do need real executives,

00:53:10.960 | to your point, Jason, you know, to run things that understand how things are,

00:53:16.320 | how it works and, you know, the best use of funds. Because right now it's misappropriated.

00:53:22.480 | - It's a crisis of competence. I mean, I think we all see it. These are incompetent people.

00:53:27.200 | - By the way, it's not just the leadership, it's also legislative action that's gonna be needed

00:53:33.680 | to fix a lot of the policies, the regulations, the way infrastructure operates in the state.

00:53:39.760 | And that requires three things to change. Number one is the California State Assembly. Number two

00:53:46.000 | is the California State Senate. And number three is to put things in front of the voters that they

00:53:51.360 | can vote on to make the wholesale change needed to rescind some of the bad decisions that were

00:53:56.000 | made over the last three decades in the state that has led us to this point. And I think that

00:54:00.160 | it's gonna require, just like what happened recently in the national politics, a state

00:54:05.680 | politics organizational effort to say, let's take a look at the composition of the state assembly,

00:54:11.280 | the state senate, and what are some of the votes that need to be done by the citizens to make the

00:54:16.640 | necessary changes in the state to try and get the world's fifth largest economy to start acting and

00:54:22.320 | looking like it. Because right now it's sort of like a weirdly disabled third world country type

00:54:27.840 | operation with the wealthiest resources on planet earth. And it seems pretty f***ed up. It's almost

00:54:34.000 | like once people have it all, that's when they want to give it all up. That seems to be the

00:54:38.000 | moment that this state has just passed. Now maybe it's time to go reclaim it and build it back.

00:54:42.480 | Well said. I mean, and as we said, in this segment, there are so many common sense,

00:54:48.320 | tactical, strategic things that these people could be doing that they should be doing that they're

00:54:55.280 | not. And there needs to be a full blown investigation. You kind of alluded to this

00:54:59.520 | earlier Chamath. But if there is, if this is dereliction of duty, then we need to look into

00:55:05.280 | this in a very deep fashion. And to the people of California, you have more power than you know.

00:55:09.280 | My friend who used to be on this podcast once in a while, he and I collaborated on Chesa Boudin

00:55:15.120 | being taken out as this DA in the Bay Area. I know some other people here were involved in it as well.

00:55:21.120 | And you can recall somebody. So recall these incompetent lunatics,

00:55:27.120 | recall them and replace them. It's scary, but you can. You know, they send all their people after

00:55:33.120 | you. They threaten you. It's personal. They went after you. I was signature number one. And I had

00:55:38.240 | to deal with the deluge of that stuff. But to be honest with you, I've never been happier to do

00:55:42.880 | something and get civically engaged. I think it's so important that everybody starts getting

00:55:46.720 | involved in their local government and their state government and the national government,

00:55:51.280 | because you can't just expect people to do the work for you and expect it to turn out well.

00:55:56.560 | And I think that's kind of the mistake we all made. We want to take some responsibility. The

00:56:01.920 | tech industry as a whole did not get as involved as we ought to have in the past. And I think we

00:56:07.200 | should get more involved. Why was it? Why? Why did for 20 years while we were all in the Bay Area or

00:56:12.640 | other people, you know, we just were too busy building companies and it didn't seem companies.

00:56:17.040 | And I remember if I remember correctly, the only person I remember getting involved in local stuff

00:56:23.280 | was Ron Conway. Yes. And he would try to get everybody involved. And we were all just like,

00:56:28.640 | you know, there's people who are smart that do that sort of thing. And they're going to do their

00:56:32.560 | thing and they're running stuff. And we're just not going to get involved. And a lot of people

00:56:36.240 | would say, I'm not political. I don't, I don't do politics. I don't, you know, they didn't get

00:56:41.920 | involved until it affected them. Kind of like the houses burning down, it affects them. And,

00:56:46.160 | you know, like they're saying that first they came for so-and-so and I didn't speak up. You

00:56:52.000 | know, that's what's happening here. And, you know, I just really think that people need to

00:56:57.280 | realize it's now affecting them and it's now time to make a change and elect better leaders.

00:57:01.440 | Here's a framing. If you're paying 50% tax in California, you're a shareholder of an organization

00:57:08.560 | known as California Inc. You're on the board of that company. You're paying the salaries of the

00:57:12.720 | people there. You have a say. Recall these people, start a recall of Newsom, start a recall of Karen

00:57:18.800 | Bass. Just do it. I'm not doing it. I don't have time for this. I'm in Austin. But y'all in Cal,

00:57:23.280 | who is still in California, start a page, recall Newsom, recall Bass, and you have the power to do

00:57:28.880 | it and you will succeed. I guarantee it. Now is the moment to strike. There's other news we should

00:57:33.200 | get to. You know, I hate to say thoughts and prayers. But literally, I've been thinking about

00:57:38.000 | this, you know, all day long. And I have a lot of friends, my friend Mark Sooster lost his home.

00:57:44.160 | I used to play cards with Jimmy Woods. And you know, I just feel terrible for everybody who's

00:57:49.360 | lost their homes. And then their kids and their schools are burned down as well. All those great

00:57:53.120 | schools in Pacific Palisades are gone. I could see developers coming in and being like, dude,

00:57:56.640 | if I could buy all these lots for 80% off, I will. That's what's going to happen.

00:58:00.960 | They're going to sit on them. Yeah, they're gonna just sit on them and wait for people

00:58:03.600 | to forget like they did in 1962. Rick Caruso's of the world will do that. Yeah.

00:58:07.120 | Anyway, yeah. He should be running the place and probably I'll give you another another

00:58:12.320 | California Department of Insurance stats. So after the California Department of Insurance

00:58:16.800 | wouldn't allow the rates to rise like they should from a free market perspective,

00:58:21.280 | they had to set up their own insurance program called the fair plan for homeowners.

00:58:25.120 | It has about $220 million of capital in it. And then they bought about $5 billion of reinsurance.

00:58:31.120 | They have about 6 billion of exposure in Pacific Palisades alone. This is a bankrupt just like I

00:58:36.400 | told you guys about in Florida. The State Insurance Commission tries to step in and

00:58:40.080 | fill the market gap that they create by regulating rates. And then they don't have enough capital to

00:58:44.480 | actually fill the gap because the reason the rates want to go up is because the thing costs more than

00:58:49.680 | the state is willing. So they're distorting it, they're putting their thumbs on the scale,

00:58:53.280 | and they're distorting it even more. They're driving real estate value up,

00:58:58.160 | because they're not allowing the cost of insurance of that real estate

00:59:01.680 | to naturally float. And so by driving real estate values up, the economy looks good,

00:59:06.400 | they make property taxes, income comes in. But at the end of the day, the bill is going to come due.

00:59:11.520 | And in the case of Florida, and in the case of California, either the state government

00:59:15.840 | or the federal government is going to step in and pay the difference. And at some point,

00:59:19.840 | taxpayers are going to look at the fact that they're paying some percentage of their income

00:59:24.400 | to support someone else's home value. And they're going to say enough is enough.

00:59:28.240 | And enough of these sorts of events start to happen. And then the legislative change,

00:59:32.240 | I think will happen that says, this, it doesn't make sense, we have to make a change. And I think

00:59:37.680 | we're getting pretty close after the series of events. All right, this has been an absolutely

00:59:41.840 | fantastic discussion. Let's move on to our next topic here. Zuck just fired matters third party

00:59:47.360 | fact checkers, and he is going to embrace the community notes model from Twitter slash x,

00:59:54.160 | which predates Elon's ownership of the platform, and is an open source project for those folks who

01:00:00.000 | don't know, on Tuesday, maybe he made the announcement on an Instagram video, he published

01:00:05.280 | a blog with a bunch of details. And he made the signal that he was going to move the trust and

01:00:13.680 | safety team out of California, which he feels maybe was too far to the left, as we were just

01:00:20.000 | discussing in the previous story, and move it to the great state of Texas. And here's a quote from

01:00:29.360 | his comments. In recent years, we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content

01:00:33.760 | across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressures to moderate

01:00:38.720 | content. This approach has gone too far. Remember back in August, Zuck sent a letter to the House

01:00:44.560 | Judiciary Committee explaining how the FBI and Biden administration have pressured Facebook into

01:00:49.040 | censoring posts about COVID and Hunter Biden, you'll also remember that Zuckerberg has over 3

01:00:55.680 | billion members to his platform, and had no problem banning Trump from the platform after January 6,

01:01:03.680 | a lot to talk about in this topic, cyan, what's your general take of Zuck going MAGA? How do you

01:01:12.800 | interpret his part? I actually think deep down inside, he always has been, you know, I go back

01:01:19.840 | to the beginning days of Facebook. And when there was social networks that were competing with back

01:01:25.280 | at the time was MySpace, the only political party you could be was Republican or Democrat. And then

01:01:30.800 | along came Facebook, and he added this third option called libertarian. And I would like to

01:01:35.760 | go to the Wayback Machine at some point and find his profile because his profile said he was a

01:01:39.840 | libertarian. So when he started Facebook, you know, that that's where he leaned. So I think

01:01:45.280 | he's always been a free speech person. I think he's always, this has been deep in his heart,

01:01:49.520 | I think what happened was he had enormous success, they grew very large, and he had to become neutral.

01:01:55.120 | Or he thought he did. And so I think what we're seeing with Zuck right now with his change in his,

01:02:00.560 | you know, even how he appears with a gold chain and how he's dressing and everything that he's

01:02:06.320 | doing, is him going back to his roots to be more authentic, because I think he hasn't been authentic

01:02:11.040 | for a long time. And, and that was a big critique that people had of him, you know, they were just

01:02:14.960 | like when he talks, he's like a robot. And I think what we're seeing is him coming out of his shell,

01:02:20.160 | and I don't know if fighting helped it or what helped it. But, you know, I do think it's the

01:02:25.040 | best thing to do. And all the platforms need to do it and should embrace it. And it can be game,

01:02:30.640 | though, community notes can be game that we saw it with, I saw a report that, you know, Kamala's

01:02:36.240 | campaign or I don't know, they directly work for her what happened, but they did take over community

01:02:42.160 | notes on X and started manipulating them. So you have to be really careful, you know, how you run

01:02:47.600 | a community. But in general, I'm all for it. I think it's the right move. It's but one signal,

01:02:52.320 | it's one system for trying to get to the truth. It's not the only one fact checking is another one.

01:02:57.040 | And having no system is another one. Chamath, you're obviously an alumni, you worked

01:03:00.960 | side by side with Zuckerberg in the pivotal years of building the Facebook platform,

01:03:06.160 | what's your take on what cyan said? And what do you attribute Zuckerberg's massive 180 here?

01:03:13.200 | I would start by saying I think he's a phenomenal businessman. I mean, I think the

01:03:17.440 | the results speak for itself. But I also think that that is exactly what explains the shift.

01:03:24.800 | In many ways, he had to make that shift. I think it's fair to say that in the Obama and Biden

01:03:31.200 | administrations, when the winds were blowing towards censorship, they were part of that

01:03:38.160 | machinery. And that was the value maximizing function for Facebook shareholders in that time.

01:03:44.800 | Because if you push back against that, it's not clear what would have happened to Facebook in

01:03:49.200 | other ways. And so I think the decision, whether he morally agreed with it or not, almost didn't

01:03:56.960 | matter. It's the leadership of the country in which I operate is telling me it's going to go

01:04:01.040 | this way, I go that way. Once the Biden and Obama administration sort of went to the wayside,

01:04:06.800 | there's a very interesting picture that Donald Trump put in his book. And I just I sent it to

01:04:12.720 | Nick. And I think it sort of explains the last week's events relatively well. So I'll just read

01:04:18.080 | it. This is a picture of him sitting in the Oval and it says, Mark Zuckerberg would come to the

01:04:23.680 | Oval Office to see me, he would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could

01:04:29.120 | be, while always plotting to install shameful lockboxes in a true plot against the president

01:04:34.880 | in J. Cal all caps. Okay, shout out to the president. He told me that there was nobody

01:04:41.200 | like Trump on Facebook, but at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me.

01:04:45.760 | We are watching him closely. And if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the

01:04:50.400 | rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.

01:04:55.920 | Now that's what I put in the book. And then he was asked about this quote.

01:04:59.520 | At a recent press conference, Nick, do you have the link to that? He's colorful,

01:05:04.800 | very bright. Did you notice Donald Trump a little bit colorful? Essentially, Trump was asked

01:05:09.680 | about Zuckerberg's move to free speech. And he was sent he was asked, you know, do you think

01:05:18.000 | it was because of your threat? And he goes, Yeah, probably. Yeah, I watched their news conference.

01:05:24.640 | And I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they've honestly I think they've come a

01:05:28.880 | long way meta. I think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the

01:05:33.120 | past. Probably, probably. Wow, there it is. But again, the the, the lens that I would put on this

01:05:41.120 | is now the winds are blowing in a different direction. And I do think it's the value

01:05:45.440 | maximizing function. I think Elon didn't make a value maximizing function, he made a moral decision.

01:05:50.960 | He did it when it was unpopular and where the winds were clearly blowing in the opposite direction.

01:05:55.760 | Now that those winds have changed, and it's clear Trump won in early November. The decisions you

01:06:01.200 | make in January are more reflective of the new conditions on the field coming into the inauguration.

01:06:05.920 | But I do think it's the smart value maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders.

01:06:11.520 | And I think it begets a broader point. I think the thing is, when you see Elon operate,

01:06:18.480 | he's a complete outlier in many dimensions. But I think the one dimension where it matters the most

01:06:24.240 | is that he acts morally. And in the best interests of what he believes humanity benefits from,

01:06:31.920 | he's always done it, he was willing to torch $44 billion when he bought Twitter in order to do it.

01:06:36.640 | And so he does these things from his own perspective. I don't think there's any other

01:06:41.520 | CEO that leads this way. And I don't think they should necessarily I do think that, you know,

01:06:47.200 | marks a good person. But his intimate feelings should be known by his wife, his children,

01:06:53.600 | his friends, his family. I don't think we as shareholders have any right to know necessarily,

01:06:58.640 | Elon is different. And I think it creates an expectation that maybe we'll get that from

01:07:03.120 | everybody else. But I wouldn't conflate everybody else with him. So I think that this is a smart

01:07:09.200 | business decision. It makes a ton of sense. And as you can see, he was basically told to do this.

01:07:15.920 | So he complied. Freeburg, your thoughts on Zuckerberg making this decision? If Kamala

01:07:24.480 | Harris had one, would he have released a statement or added Dana White to the board of Facebook?

01:07:30.400 | Probably not. Okay, there you have it, folks. Pretty straightforward here. Kamala wins,

01:07:36.800 | he would not have done this. He is jumping in front of a marching band. And he is the

01:07:42.800 | band leader. Now he's got his baton and he's a front runner. And if you open the dictionary,

01:07:48.240 | you look it up. But I mean, it's a smart business move. I think if you're a meta shareholder,

01:07:52.080 | I think you're happy to see it. Absolutely.

01:07:54.080 | Is there anything wrong with it, Jekyll? Or you're just saying,

01:07:56.800 | Oh, yeah, there's a tremendous amount wrong with it. It's called moral integrity, having

01:08:00.320 | an ethical compass, having chutzpah, having an own sense of what's right and wrong in the world,

01:08:07.440 | which he does not have, in my estimation, based on his behavior.

01:08:10.960 | That's not fair. You don't know, because, again, what I'm saying is,

01:08:14.080 | I said, based on my estimation,

01:08:15.920 | no, but Jason, what I'm trying to say is, Elon shares who he is in a 360 degree way with the

01:08:22.720 | world. So we know where he stands. And all I'm saying is, what Mark does or doesn't believe

01:08:27.920 | really isn't known to us. It's probably known to his wife, and his family.

01:08:31.520 | And his board.

01:08:32.400 | I doubt his board even knows, actually.

01:08:34.080 | Some of his close confidants, some of his confidants.

01:08:36.960 | Let me be clear. I'll even, I'm happy you're challenging me on it.

01:08:41.280 | I base people on their actions. His action was to be the greatest censor

01:08:45.840 | in the history of humanity. There's no human being who censored more humans than him.

01:08:49.600 | That was his decision when it was a popular decision, whether it was COVID or...

01:08:53.760 | Not popular. Hold on, but not popular. Not popular, Jason. Necessary for maximizing

01:08:58.240 | his business in that moment.

01:08:59.440 | Well, he doesn't need, no, no, I disagree. His business would have been just as vibrant

01:09:04.560 | if he had a spine and he just said, "This is what I believe." And I think he's over-optimizing

01:09:10.640 | based on what he thinks everybody else around him wants. And I don't know, I've never worked

01:09:15.120 | with him. I don't know him personally. You're right on that front. But he banned Trump for

01:09:20.080 | two years. The President of the United States. I said at the time, "I don't know that you can

01:09:23.360 | give a permanent ban to the President of the United States." When he had the opportunity

01:09:27.200 | to reevaluate that decision, you know what he did? He punted. He created a third party

01:09:31.360 | organization to make the decision for him and deflect it. Zuck created the Oversight

01:09:35.600 | Board. He's so spineless, he decided, "I'll create and give $150 million to this board

01:09:41.200 | to make these hard decisions for me." Instead of me making the decision, he has God-voting

01:09:46.320 | shares of that company, Chamath. He controls it with an iron fist. And not only does he

01:09:50.720 | control it with an iron fist, he has put protection, precisions in that so that his children could

01:09:55.280 | take that $3.3 billion platform and own it forever. And he punted to them and said,

01:10:00.800 | "I don't want to make these decisions." What I saw when he did that was, "I don't want to

01:10:04.240 | be blamed for these decisions." And that is a lack of courage and morality in my estimation.

01:10:10.320 | And then the second he is threatened by Trump, he makes the opposite decision. And if he's

01:10:15.680 | making his decisions strictly on maximizing money, I don't respect that. I think he should

01:10:20.960 | make the decisions based on what he thinks is the moral. What is the point of being a billionaire

01:10:25.440 | or worth $100 billion or $200 billion if you don't get to say, "I have [expletive] you money,

01:10:30.480 | [expletive] you. I'm going to do what I want." And that's what I think is his moral failure.

01:10:34.480 | And anybody giving him his flowers or champing him for this, I think it's just political expediency

01:10:40.960 | and I think it's disgraceful. That's my feeling. Sorry. I have my own opinion.

01:10:45.120 | -What about the fact that he was dragged in front of Congress many times over and people that could

01:10:51.440 | put him behind bars pulled him to his face many times and this has all been kind of been coming

01:10:56.480 | out over the last couple of months that government officials were directing him in a way that feels

01:11:02.000 | like do this or you will be prosecuted to do the following things, to act the following way and to

01:11:06.720 | moderate your platform in a way that we are telling you to moderate it or you will find yourself

01:11:11.360 | behind bars. Do you not think that there's some degree of inherent complicit kind of role that

01:11:16.480 | certain government officials and folks in power had in driving some of those actions that maybe

01:11:21.120 | he had to do it to survive and to keep the company alive? -Not to mention a violation of our

01:11:25.440 | constitution. -No, not at all. He could have just hired lawyers and fought it. He didn't put up any

01:11:30.480 | fight. The second they told him to roll over and ban Trump, he did it. Zero fight from him. He

01:11:36.960 | has no... -Do you know that for sure? Because I just want to make sure I ask you... -I'm just

01:11:40.720 | basing it on his actions. Like I told you at the beginning of this, I'm basing it on his actions.

01:11:45.040 | -Right, but I just want to make sure... -He was not going to jail for banning Trump.

01:11:48.000 | If he didn't ban Trump or he gave him a six-month suspension, he would have been just fine.

01:11:52.400 | -I'm just trying to get you to take a fair point of view, which means like let's make sure you're

01:11:56.080 | thoughtful about the fact that this is not a dumb person or a person... Let's give him the benefit

01:12:00.320 | for a minute. He's not a dumb person... -I do give him the benefit of being a great business

01:12:03.440 | executive. -I'm just saying let's just assume he's not dumb and let's say that as Cyan points out and

01:12:07.360 | as he's kind of highlighted points in his history, he actually does have certain beliefs and certain

01:12:12.080 | systems that he would love to kind of embrace. I've said this many times before. All of the

01:12:16.400 | founders of the big tech companies were all big free speech advocates. That was a big part of

01:12:20.560 | the open internet and the movement of the open internet when a lot of people got involved and

01:12:24.000 | that was a big part for him and I don't know like you know if you really think at some point he

01:12:28.640 | flipped his switch and said I don't care about the open internet. I now want to have a closed

01:12:31.680 | controlled internet or if he recognized or was coerced into controlling moderation on the

01:12:36.400 | platform because of the reach that he had and he said the only way I can have any degree of openness

01:12:40.560 | is to do the following and I will say that my experience is similar in Google. When Google had

01:12:45.120 | to exit China, they initially went to China with a closed internet with a closed censored model of

01:12:50.400 | search because that was the way they had to survive to offer a business in China. They didn't

01:12:55.120 | morally agree with it. They didn't think it was ethically correct. -Did they launch that or did

01:12:58.720 | Sergey kill the deal when Eric Schmidt proposed it? -Well that deal went live. There was a... let

01:13:03.280 | me let me just make sure I get this all correct. -No, they didn't go live. Sergey Brin because of

01:13:08.720 | his upbringing in Russia, he went to the mat and said on a moral basis we're not going into China

01:13:14.720 | and I've talked to Sergey about it. He did not want to go in there and compromise his

01:13:19.200 | own ethics. -That's right. -You're at full stop. So I don't think that is the only outlier here.

01:13:25.200 | -You're not right and I just want to make sure that... -Okay, tell us, when did it... when did...

01:13:28.480 | because the Dragon... it was called Project Dragon. -There was a... there's a long history

01:13:32.800 | to this. -Okay, let's let Cyan come in here. -I want to make sure I get this right but go ahead.

01:13:36.640 | -Obviously he's a brilliant businessman but I do think underneath it all he is a human being

01:13:40.960 | and I think his fighting in the arena and this fighting stuff that he does actually did change

01:13:45.360 | him and this happened long before the first amendment stuff started to appear. You know,

01:13:50.480 | I think, or free speech, I shouldn't call it first amendment, but I do think that the government did

01:13:55.200 | interfere and after January 20th we're going to find out some interesting stuff and we'll get to

01:14:00.320 | the bottom of, you know, how did the government pressure him to censor things and I think he's

01:14:07.920 | getting in front of that because it is going to come out and I think that is a huge part of why

01:14:13.520 | he is getting more involved is because it's going to be revealed just how much the government

01:14:18.640 | coerced him and... -And how much he acquiesced? Is that sort of what you're insinuating? -Yeah,

01:14:22.800 | I mean this is why I think the fighting actually helped. I think he learned to stop acquiescing.

01:14:26.400 | -Wow. -I actually think that... -Interesting. He put up a fight. -That is where I started seeing

01:14:30.000 | the change in him and started noticing and so did the, you know, he's, there are so many more fans

01:14:35.120 | and people who are looking to him as a leader in a different way now because he's actually starting

01:14:39.280 | to express who he is and like what kind of music he likes. Nobody ever knew that. They thought he

01:14:44.720 | was just a robot. He doesn't like music. -He hired a whole PR team to craft this is my understanding,

01:14:49.040 | but anyway. -Yeah, again, I don't know that much detail. I don't, I'm not involved in his personal

01:14:54.320 | life like that, but I just, I always love to give people the benefit of doubt. I guess that's just

01:14:57.920 | me and I do think that people can change and I'm hoping that he is actually going to stay on this

01:15:05.280 | side. We want more leaders like him to believe in free speech. -Of course, of course. I mean,

01:15:10.240 | listen, Reddit had... -By the way, they all do and I've never met, you know, an internet business

01:15:16.800 | executive who didn't come from kind of the open internet philosophical doctrine by background,

01:15:22.320 | that that was a big motivator for all of us because the internet took away the controls,

01:15:27.280 | took away the power, took away the censorship, took away all these things that other kind of

01:15:32.000 | communication systems had vested in them and the internet through an open protocol allowed anyone

01:15:36.880 | to share anything with anyone else and obviously laws and all this other stuff that's happened

01:15:41.760 | since then has made that far more difficult and I will revisit our conversation, Jason. Google's

01:15:46.880 | China with censored search results was live for four years before they cancelled it. So they

01:15:51.440 | launched in 2006, they censored results, they complied with the Chinese government's request

01:15:56.320 | and eventually in 2010, they killed it and you could argue it was because of philosophical reasons

01:16:00.640 | but fundamentally, it never actually got a lot of users in China. There were more users on Baidu

01:16:05.120 | and Google had separately made an investment. -I think it was Gmail was the moment, I think it

01:16:09.680 | became, if I remember correctly, it's 20 years ago but I think... -I think it was YouTube. -Oh,

01:16:14.320 | is it YouTube? Because one of the other services, they started saying, "Hey, we need to know

01:16:18.800 | these people's names who posted this, who sent this email, we want full access into it," and

01:16:23.120 | that's where they drew the line because it wasn't just a passive search engine, right? It was

01:16:26.640 | actually like roundup dissidents like Yahoo famously did. Yahoo... -Yeah, Google claimed

01:16:33.360 | there was a hack that happened because on their servers in China and so they were just no longer

01:16:38.080 | comfortable operating... -How about this, guys? However, we got here, we're here and we should

01:16:44.960 | all be happy that we're here. -Yeah, exactly. -Yeah, I'll take the win. -And we just kind of

01:16:50.240 | move forward. -I mean, taking the win is a good way to do it. -The world is a better place because

01:16:53.920 | of his decision. -Yeah, exactly. -I think we all agree on that. I mean, what's the point of having

01:16:59.040 | an open platform and you can say things... -But why do you call him spineless? Like, why go after

01:17:03.680 | the guy? -Why? Because you can judge a person when they're put under pressure to make the right

01:17:07.920 | decision. -I think what Jason is expressing is sort of what I was trying to say and I probably

01:17:11.760 | said it poorly. I think there are some of us who look at the way that Elon runs himself and his

01:17:20.320 | companies, okay, as a sort of world-beating technology CEO and then that sort of sets the bar

01:17:27.680 | but I think that that bar is impossible to meet and I think part of it is because of Elon's genius,

01:17:35.440 | the other part of it is his success, the other part of it is his influence but there's an element,

01:17:40.080 | Jason, a fundamental moral risk-taking that he takes that has been rewarded over and over again

01:17:46.800 | that no other CEO has had to make and when they have, they've largely failed and so I

01:17:52.160 | understand where you're coming from but I would give a lot of folks the benefit of the doubt here

01:17:57.600 | and say it's not clear what they believe then versus what they believe now but the destination

01:18:03.120 | is very good and we're in a better place for society and hopefully we can maintain these norms

01:18:09.520 | independent of who's in charge after Trump. I am super happy he's making these decisions.

01:18:15.120 | I believe in freedom of speech. I think he's going to have to deal with advertisers next

01:18:18.800 | though. I mean that's one thing that X doesn't have to deal with as much and that's going to be

01:18:22.320 | the second problem he's going to have is not just the government but do advertisers want to be next

01:18:27.680 | to some of the content that's about to appear. And when he loses tens of billions of dollars

01:18:32.320 | in personal net worth, will he make the same decisions? We'll see but I can tell you if

01:18:37.600 | Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position.

01:18:43.200 | I think he is terrified of Trump and having his company broken up and he's doing this

01:18:47.680 | strictly to appease Trump which I think putting Dana White on the board is another signal that's

01:18:52.800 | one of Trump's good friends. He's just trying to get close to the party. He's trying to make up

01:18:56.160 | for lost time for when he supported the censorship of Trump and other folks. I think he would make

01:19:02.720 | the opposite decision but to your point, we're here. I'm glad he's here.

01:19:06.080 | Would you meet Zuck in the octagon? That's the most important question of the day.

01:19:11.280 | No, definitely not. He's 10-15 years younger than me. He'd kill me. Not a chance would I meet him

01:19:18.320 | in the octagon but I wish him well. Would you meet Palmer Luckey in the octagon?

01:19:23.120 | Let's not start that up again. I'm just wondering.

01:19:27.200 | I actually literally challenged him. He wanted to send the mountain. He wanted to

01:19:31.600 | pick somebody to fight for him, Trey, from Founders Fund and I said no unless Trey was

01:19:37.440 | willing to do it. Do you guys ever watch the old TV show American Gladiators?

01:19:41.120 | I would like you and Palmer to have an American Gladiators-style tournament,

01:19:46.240 | like maybe four or five events. That would be incredible.

01:19:50.400 | Put up a million dollars for charity. I'll totally do it.

01:19:52.960 | We'll put up a million dollars each for charity. I'll do it.

01:19:58.160 | Let's get the word out there. I think that this could be the show of the season.

01:20:03.840 | This would be more exciting than the Accelerator, I will tell you.

01:20:06.800 | Absolutely, it might get more ratings than it, yeah.

01:20:09.680 | You could actually call it American Gladiators. It would be a great show.

01:20:12.640 | Well, there you go. American Gladiators, the CEO edition. Business to business edition.

01:20:16.880 | All right, listen. NVIDIA going consumer. Let's talk about it. NVIDIA made a big announcement

01:20:23.360 | at CES this week. They made a lot of them. One of them that was particularly interesting was

01:20:26.880 | this $3,000 personal AI computer for researchers. It's called Project Digits.

01:20:32.080 | It's essentially like, maybe Arduino would be a way to look at this, like a personal device,

01:20:40.720 | but it's powerful enough to run LLMs on. They're also going after physical AI,

01:20:45.120 | like robotics and self-driving. As we said here on the award show, a lot of people on the panel

01:20:50.720 | were predicting this year would be the year of robotics. They announced that they're going to

01:20:54.720 | have driver-assistant chips and maybe build worlds for people to simulate, which, net-net,

01:21:02.160 | at the end of the day, I think Freeberg puts them on second, would put autonomy partners on second

01:21:06.960 | or third base in terms of creating technology by incorporating it into the chips and into their

01:21:12.160 | stack. So, Cyan, what do you think of these announcements and some of the other ones he made?

01:21:16.880 | I know you were excited to talk about this.

01:21:19.360 | Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about it because I think I've been trying to figure out how they

01:21:22.960 | justify their valuation over the long run. I'm not a public market person, but I am fascinated

01:21:30.160 | with NVIDIA and their cloud GPU business is definitely a majority of their revenue. So,

01:21:37.680 | I think a lot of what we're seeing is them trying to grow into that and trying to expand

01:21:42.800 | in case the music stopped. Now, I don't actually think the music's going to stop.

01:21:48.800 | It's insane to me that we haven't even barely touched what AI is going to do and change and

01:21:55.200 | all of the various things that are going to come from it. And the early adopters cannot use Cloud

01:21:59.920 | without getting shut down because of scaling issues. And I don't think those are artificially

01:22:04.560 | created based on the type of investing I'm doing. And so, I'm very bullish on NVIDIA. It is

01:22:11.200 | interesting. It's an interesting thing to go consumer. And the thing that really hit me

01:22:18.000 | was the fact that he declared Tesla one of the most valuable companies in the world in the long

01:22:23.760 | run. It's interesting that he got behind Toyota. But at the same time, there's one single car

01:22:33.200 | company out there that has the kind of data that Full Self Drive has and Tesla has. So,

01:22:38.720 | if they enter the robo-taxi market, I actually think they should buy Uber.

01:22:41.680 | You're saying Tesla should buy Uber?

01:22:44.720 | Oh, yeah. I think they should buy Uber.

01:22:45.840 | Well, that would be about 10% of Tesla's market cap at this point. If they paid a premium,

01:22:49.600 | that might be 15%. So, it would be very similar to the WhatsApp.

01:22:51.200 | It's kind of hard to believe, but it's true.

01:22:53.280 | Yeah, it is true. Yeah.

01:22:55.040 | And then you launch that robo-taxi service and maybe there's some sort of secondary

01:23:00.560 | aftermarket solution, kind of like comma AI or something like that that you can do for people's

01:23:04.960 | cars where you can actually get anybody's car into the fleet and start self-driving.

01:23:10.080 | But it is true. This is going to be the largest breakout in robotics we've ever seen

01:23:15.040 | if Waymo is any indicator. And I read somewhere, I think that Amazon or somebody was looking at,

01:23:22.560 | I don't know what was going on with Waymo, but... Oh, Lyft. Amazon was going to buy Lyft.

01:23:27.760 | Yeah. That makes no sense, right?

01:23:29.360 | It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

01:23:30.720 | Well, it's a dying brand and would the point be...

01:23:34.720 | I do think you're correct.

01:23:35.920 | I think maybe delivery or something like that. I can't figure out what their play is there.

01:23:39.520 | Well, and it's also not global, but looking at the Amazon and Waymo, Tesla, and Uber,

01:23:45.840 | I think Waymo plus Uber, Amazon plus Uber, or Tesla plus Uber defines who number one is, right?

01:23:52.880 | Because you'd have a global footprint and for the five, 10 years, maybe 10 years it takes to roll

01:23:56.720 | out taxis globally, you could have people drive... I mean, it's a really interesting thought process

01:24:01.920 | you have there, Sayen. Imagine if there was an intermarry step where they sold less Teslas this

01:24:07.120 | year slightly than last year, you could just keep producing lots of Model Ys and give them to the

01:24:13.040 | Uber drivers, keep reinforcement learning going while the taxis and regulations get set. And then

01:24:20.480 | you would be able to put another, instead of selling 1.8 million Teslas, you could sell 3

01:24:25.440 | million Teslas, 4 million Teslas to Uber drivers, get all that data and have the safety driver in

01:24:30.720 | while each region decides if they want robo-taxis, where, how, et cetera. Your thoughts, Chamath,

01:24:36.640 | on NVIDIA's dipping their toe into maybe taking the bottom 30% of the stack of self-driving.

01:24:43.360 | I don't have much of an opinion on that, to be honest. I think that sort of along the lines of

01:24:47.520 | what I said on the prediction show, I think that Waymo and Tesla are going to run away with this

01:24:52.160 | market and I think it's going to force a bunch of consolidation in the traditional auto OEMs.

01:24:58.160 | I think the interesting thing is that they really doubled down and created a pretty decent test

01:25:04.720 | bench for robotics. I thought that was pretty interesting. So I think that reinforces what a

01:25:09.760 | lot of smart people, including, you know, what Freeberg and Gavin also spoke about just in terms

01:25:14.480 | of the long-term future for robots. I think that that was cool. I was a little confused by the low

01:25:22.000 | end PC. I don't understand what the point of that is. Maybe it like creates some crazy deep in market

01:25:29.440 | where you can buy GPU and then contribute it to some distributed network and allow some distributed

01:25:35.440 | workload to run on that, I guess. I don't know. I think it's a toy, a hobbyist kind of device

01:25:41.840 | that becomes like a bridge. And we see this often in technology where somebody creates,

01:25:47.200 | like even the original PCs, let's face it, they were kind of like toys and hobbyist devices,

01:25:51.440 | Arduinos and the original drones were kind of hobbyist.

01:25:54.880 | Yeah. I guess the point is a toy to do what, because if you're trying to do inference,

01:25:59.440 | like everything is telling us that we are reaching the limits of training.

01:26:05.520 | And that's an LLS though, right? So the point is, it's not, yeah.

01:26:11.280 | Let me get to it. So, so in this world of AI that we know it today, there's training and there's

01:26:16.480 | inference. And right now we think that there's training that's at a limit. And so now the market

01:26:21.280 | shifts to inference. So if you're going to buy this jacked up personal computer, what are you

01:26:27.760 | going to use it for? My suspicion is some sort of test time compute use case, which is an inference

01:26:34.000 | use case. But it's not clear to me why that's a better solution than all of the AI accelerators

01:26:42.640 | plus tensors that are now just prolifically being exposed to the market, whether it's

01:26:48.080 | Amazon exposing what they've done, whether it's Google exposing what they've done,

01:26:51.840 | a whole litany of startups exposing what they've done. So I was just confused. I don't really know

01:26:58.080 | what the whole point is. What do you think about this?

01:27:03.120 | The robotics thing was interesting if the market develops in the way that they think.

01:27:07.360 | So we're talking about maybe two or three different pieces here, Freebird. Which one

01:27:11.440 | do you think is super interesting than the this $3,000 sort of GPU for your desktop that you

01:27:18.720 | attach to your computer, you get to play with things locally? Do you think that's promising?

01:27:21.840 | Where would that go? If you have to guess? So I think the bet he's making is it's not just

01:27:28.080 | LLMs, which is predicting text. But you know, we've talked a lot about machine vision models,

01:27:34.560 | graph neural nets that that are being used for weather forecasting. There's now these kind of

01:27:40.000 | genome language models that are trying to predict genomic output for biotech applications.

01:27:46.320 | There's also going to be kind of real time machine vision and robotic response.

01:27:52.800 | Like we're working on this at Ohalo. And we're trying to figure out what's the right kind of

01:27:57.840 | runtime environment for these sorts of systems that are going to be using machine vision and

01:28:01.840 | a robotic kind of response type system. And there's a lot of these industrial applications

01:28:05.520 | that are emerging. Let's say you're running a robot in a warehouse, do you really want that

01:28:09.360 | robot in the warehouse to be sending data to the cloud and waiting for a model to run in the cloud

01:28:14.800 | and getting a response? The probability is you want to have that at the edge of the network,

01:28:19.280 | you want to have something local. And I don't think he necessarily has a strong point of view

01:28:24.000 | on what the types of models and industrial applications will be. But the bet he's making

01:28:28.560 | is that the models are good enough. And now the chips are good enough that they can actually

01:28:32.400 | realize real time responses, using machine vision, using real time input, and then respond quickly

01:28:39.680 | with a local model running whatever that model is, to drive some output in the industrial setting.

01:28:45.120 | And that there'll be a lot of these sorts of applications, whether that's making predictions

01:28:48.800 | for biotech research, or whether that's for running robots in warehouses, or building

01:28:54.000 | new research models. Or maybe you could strap this PC on the back of something like a car,

01:28:59.120 | a tractor, a lawnmower, a humanoid robot, or any other set of applications.

01:29:04.320 | Explain to the audience, Freeberg, why having the computer at the edge is beneficial for

01:29:09.520 | those folks who might not know. If you're taking in a lot of data,

01:29:12.560 | and then you have to run a lot of data in a model, it's a lot faster to run that model locally. Like

01:29:18.160 | when Tesla runs self driving, it's not sending the video images from your car to a server 1000

01:29:24.880 | miles away, and then letting the server decide how to drive your car. The car is running its

01:29:28.960 | model on what to do with respect to the video imagery in the car. It's local, because the

01:29:34.640 | ability for all that data to get processed in the car means that you don't have to wait for

01:29:38.000 | the internet to transmit data back and forth. You don't have lag time, you don't have the 60

01:29:42.000 | millisecond or 100 millisecond response time. You don't have it losing your phone connection,

01:29:45.920 | and then not knowing what to do. Exactly. Or the connection drops,

01:29:49.200 | or waiting for a server to come online, or server breaks in the data center, everything is local.

01:29:54.080 | So if you scrap this, like, you know, NVIDIA computer, which is basically plug and play,

01:29:58.960 | you don't have to have like hardware expertise, you could scrap it onto the back of a humanoid

01:30:02.960 | robot or run research applications locally. So I think that there's going to be some really

01:30:07.600 | interesting use cases, whether it becomes a replacement for the Apple, you know, Macintosh

01:30:12.960 | Pro, studio device, whatever, maybe we'll see. Mac Mini 4, yeah.

01:30:17.520 | The Mac Mini 4. But a lot of people have pointed out that actually the compute on this thing for

01:30:21.680 | $3,000 knocks a lot of Macs out of the field. So it is pretty bonkers.

01:30:25.840 | I just can't run an operating system in the traditional sense. Sam, when we look at startups,

01:30:30.000 | I remember when you and I started investing, two of the driving forces was free storage,

01:30:34.160 | free bandwidth, and cloud computing drove a lot of ability to get a product to market very quickly,

01:30:41.280 | effectively, etc. What impact will AI have on all these startups that are being

01:30:47.360 | originating now in 2024, 2025? Look into your crystal ball and how do you think they'll grow

01:30:55.040 | the footprint of them? How is this going to accelerate the startup scene?

01:30:58.800 | I actually think we're going to see a Cambrian explosion of creativity and development of

01:31:04.000 | different things. And some of them are going to be stupid ideas, and some of them are going to

01:31:08.000 | be great. But I think it's going to make our job, especially at the seed stage of investing harder

01:31:12.320 | and harder. There's going to be so many, there's just going to be a lot of people that have similar

01:31:16.960 | ideas at the same time that can execute quickly and do things at breakneck speeds that they've

01:31:22.160 | never been able to do before. Picking the winner is going to be hard to figure out.

01:31:27.840 | It's going to be harder and harder. I've been thinking about this. Do you invest in

01:31:33.520 | competitors, which is something I never used to do? Do you take a bet and index an entire category

01:31:38.960 | that you're interested in? What is the approach at seed and pre-seed? I think of an idea and I'm

01:31:44.960 | like, wow, that's really neat. And then I go and look out there and there's 30 people working on

01:31:48.960 | it. And that didn't used to be the case. And I think part of it is we've really unlocked a tool

01:31:54.800 | that allows people to do things that would have been cost prohibitive or gives them the ability

01:32:02.080 | to think, gosh, I could be an entrepreneur and I can try this and I could do this.

01:32:05.040 | So I'm seeing people experiment and do all sorts of things. As far as the startups,

01:32:11.440 | some of the AI stuff is just a feature. It's just table stakes at this point. It's like a

01:32:17.600 | chat or whatever. And that doesn't really matter. But then you're seeing people re-imagine games and

01:32:22.000 | re-imagine even things down to your kitchen appliance, et cetera. So I do think it's going

01:32:30.640 | to be very, very difficult. And I tend to sit out a lot of hype cycles. So I invested in power

01:32:37.040 | and compute, lithography, kind of all of the things that are going to be underneath all of this.

01:32:43.840 | And so I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to participate in until it starts to get to a steady

01:32:48.880 | state and you kind of can understand what's next. Because the rate of acceleration is just so great

01:32:54.640 | that it's just kind of unclear to me sometimes, especially when it comes to these consumer

01:33:01.520 | applications, consumer facing things. It's just really hard.

01:33:05.040 | Well, when we were picking famously Uber, you had to pick between sidecar lift and Uber. There

01:33:11.040 | were three people doing it and it was pretty clear who was the most qualified amongst those three.

01:33:15.600 | Now, to your point, if you want to be involved in tax plus AI or legal plus AI, you might be

01:33:22.400 | looking at 50 companies, 100. And it was tradition in Silicon Valley to not bet on competitors.

01:33:28.080 | There were some notable exceptions. When you run an accelerator like I do, Techstars or Y Combinator,

01:33:32.560 | you aren't bound by that because 50% of the companies pivot almost by design.

01:33:37.360 | So I think you just have to, I think at pre-seed, because people pivot, you just have to tell people

01:33:43.120 | like, listen, we have a lot of pivoting going on. People are going to run into each other. I can't

01:33:46.800 | just bet on one thing, right? In a space. But I think that's a reasonable compromise. If all

01:33:51.840 | the founders are going to keep pivoting to each other's businesses, how can the investors even

01:33:55.680 | keep track of that? It's like being air traffic control of 10 airports at once. It's just not

01:34:00.480 | feasible. You wouldn't think it, but there's still a lot of spreadsheet companies out there.

01:34:05.280 | You think you'd run out of them, but they're still out there. You look at,

01:34:09.040 | and I think this is where AI is really going to make a difference, like RFP proposals for

01:34:13.760 | governments. Something that takes like 30 days and it's manual and you have to submit these

01:34:18.560 | horrible documents. You can ingest your entire corpus of all of your previous bids and submit

01:34:24.400 | them at a breakneck speed now and win more contracts. That becomes like a national defense

01:34:29.600 | company at that point. I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting things where

01:34:34.320 | a lot of cruft is going to disappear. That'll be a really interesting wave that I'm looking forward

01:34:42.560 | to. Yeah. In fact, Chamath has made a big bet there with his time, with his software startup

01:34:48.000 | that he's created. All right, let's end on the United States of America growing from 50 to 60

01:34:55.520 | or 70 states. Trump has been rattling off some ideas around this. Chamath, what's your take on

01:35:03.600 | it? I know we got to get wrapped up here. So we'll just do a quick lightning round on it.

01:35:07.440 | I mean, I thought it was really interesting. And I was just caught off guard at how the media tried

01:35:14.320 | to portray it as Trump being Trump. Goofy, whatever, colorful. But I think like what

01:35:20.640 | I've realized, even with the California fire thing, the guy has this prescient way of,

01:35:25.600 | he may not say it in the way that it works for some people, but he's just really on top of this

01:35:31.200 | stuff. So I just had to make a thing. So I started to learn a little bit more about why he wants to

01:35:36.800 | take over Greenland. And it really comes down to one very basic idea here. Because of climate change

01:35:44.240 | and other things, the Arctic ice shelf is melting. And the more and more it melts, it opens up

01:35:50.400 | a shipping lane in the Northern Passage for a lot of critical goods. And so if you had some

01:35:58.080 | sort of strategic agreement with Canada and Greenland, you effectively have this monopoly

01:36:04.720 | control over something that could become as important as the Panama Canal. And so I think

01:36:10.240 | if you look across the world, the control of maritime shipping lanes becomes this really

01:36:17.760 | critical, strategic, military and economic asset. And so the reason why he's trying to find a way

01:36:25.600 | to initiate some sort of a discussion between Greenland and Canada is exactly this reason.

01:36:32.480 | And I think it's sort of like a bargaining gambit the way that he started. But it's really smart

01:36:37.280 | that he's trying to get this done for the United States of America. Because meanwhile, what you

01:36:41.760 | have is China militarizing very aggressively, Russia militarizing very aggressively. And what

01:36:47.600 | you don't want to have happen is those two countries take control of that Northern Passage

01:36:52.000 | as the ice sheet melts. So I just thought that was important. Having a capable business executive

01:36:57.520 | thinking about the future of business and shipping and logistics. Pretty, pretty big win. And I just

01:37:03.200 | love the idea, Cyan. You know what's smart? I mean, let's give Trump credit. What's so smart

01:37:07.040 | is like, somebody was doing this work. Yes. Got it, got it in front of him. Yeah. And he was

01:37:12.640 | smart enough to say, hold on a second, this is really important. Let me tweet it. And then the

01:37:17.280 | way that he initiates it, though, gets even more attention. Because if he basically tweeted,

01:37:23.040 | hey, guys, I have this really interesting idea to gain more leverage in the Northern Maritime

01:37:27.680 | shipping lane, nobody would have paid attention. Absolutely. Nobody would have. And now we're all

01:37:31.840 | talking about it. And now there's an opportunity for millions of people to understand why and be

01:37:36.560 | supportive of it. It's pretty smart. Cyan, any thoughts on expanding the United States to a

01:37:40.880 | couple more territories and states? I love it. I would love to have 60 states in our lifetime.

01:37:45.760 | I mean, let's pick one in the Caribbean. Let's pick one in Europe. I think we should have an

01:37:49.440 | open invitation. Jason, that's not what he's doing. I think he's... I know I'm being a bit

01:37:53.440 | facetious here. This is very strategic, this one. But I'm just thinking the next time, you know,

01:37:58.160 | I would like to get Cuba, maybe Portugal. I don't know who 80% of people, Cyan, what do you think,

01:38:03.200 | in the country want to join? Join. It's very strategic. If you look at the Panama Canal,

01:38:07.600 | I believe either end is operated and controlled by China. We are at war with China, whether we

01:38:13.520 | like to admit it or not, in my opinion. And so this is very strategic. He has a very strange way

01:38:19.840 | of communicating, as you pointed out, but I think it's brilliant. And I actually think

01:38:22.960 | we should add to that. I've always thought that we should open up and add more states

01:38:28.320 | and extend that invitation, you know, to Taiwan. It might be controversial to even say India.

01:38:35.120 | But I do think that there's a lot of countries out there and people who really,

01:38:41.840 | really resonate with what it means to be an American and the freedoms that come with our

01:38:48.000 | subscription fees of this country. And so I do think that it would be great for us to expand.

01:38:54.000 | And, you know, I don't know what he's thinking or who he's got behind the scenes who motivated him

01:38:59.440 | to do it, but I really think it's a great idea. Freeberg, what do you think about opt-in

01:39:04.880 | imperialism and this incredible concept of expanding our territories in the 21st century?

01:39:12.560 | Again, I don't know how to read it. I have no inside information. There's clearly some

01:39:17.920 | posturing, as we've heard many times when Trump makes a declaration, like I'm going to put on

01:39:21.920 | 100% tariff on every car that's imported, or I'm going to charge you 2000 bucks Mexico for every

01:39:27.440 | time you ship something here, or I want to do X or Y or Z. It's not the literal statement that

01:39:34.560 | matters as much as kind of the vector and the magnitude of the vector. He's clearly trying to

01:39:39.520 | begin negotiating for some change. I don't know what the ultimate kind of strategic endpoint is

01:39:45.760 | meant to be here, but clearly there's something. I think Chamath might have a good read on this,

01:39:51.200 | and it seems to make a lot of sense. Well, we have a military base there,

01:39:54.800 | and we also protect it, and we occupy it already, which is interesting.

01:39:58.880 | Right. Yeah, we somewhat abandoned all that in Greenland, but there is a lot of that

01:40:03.920 | infrastructure still sitting around. Can I ask you guys a question? I listened to

01:40:07.440 | Lex Friedman's interview. This is totally off topic, but I listened to Lex Friedman's interview

01:40:11.840 | with Graham Hancock. You guys ever heard of this guy? Yes. Have you read any of his stuff or watched

01:40:17.920 | any of his shows? No, I have not. No. Okay, so he's got this belief that there was this ancient

01:40:23.920 | civilization on Earth, not sci-fi futuristic, but an advanced human civilization, and that's where

01:40:30.640 | the Great Pyramid of Giza was. There was a smaller pyramid that was built there, and a lot of these

01:40:35.440 | other historical places were built, and then they were built on top of later, but that a lot of this

01:40:44.000 | advanced civilization was wiped out during the last Ice Age. There was a very rapid freezing

01:40:51.920 | event that happened over a period of about 1200 years, and that's when this great Ice Age era

01:40:56.640 | civilization was wiped out, but what I didn't realize, and so I went down this really crazy

01:41:00.880 | rabbit hole in the last week on how much of planet Earth, how different planet Earth was just 12,000

01:41:07.600 | years ago during the Ice Age. Have you guys spent any time on this? I just went down a similar

01:41:12.320 | rabbit hole with the Grand Canyon. First of all, how the planet Earth has changed in such a short

01:41:17.840 | period of time blows my mind, but the sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today just 12,000

01:41:26.080 | years ago, and there were humans on Earth at the time, and so all of this area that we look at as

01:41:31.680 | like Malta, the island of Malta, was the southern tip of a continental stretch that went into Italy,

01:41:38.880 | so it was all part of one great landmass, and there's all this area that was actually part

01:41:44.000 | of that landmass that now sits under that ocean there, and there's these ruts in the ground for

01:41:49.360 | moving stuff and buildings and all this other crazy stuff, and we have no idea what's actually

01:41:54.960 | under the ice in Greenland, what's under the ice in Antarctica. There's all these parts of Earth

01:41:59.520 | where humans very likely had some... This is so off topic, we could cut this from the show.

01:42:04.160 | No, I think it's incredible. Chamath and I...

01:42:06.320 | It's so crazy that there's all these parts of Earth, and especially in the oceans,

01:42:11.120 | as we start to explore, there's actually large humans, potentially advanced civilizations that

01:42:15.920 | lived in these areas, not like sci-fi flying around. The Atlanta stuff, that it was actually

01:42:20.160 | an advanced civilization, and then humans lost a lot of this ability when this period of freezing

01:42:26.240 | happened over 1,200 years, and then a lot of it was preserved in legends and myths that showed up

01:42:30.800 | in later archeology and later museums. How do you explain the pyramids?

01:42:35.280 | I think he has a really interesting explanation. We don't want to ask you,

01:42:37.760 | Sayan, I think, because we had Gavin explain it last time. Sayan, welcome to Conspiracy Corner.

01:42:42.160 | So somebody sent me an email, and he said what they did was they flooded the area,

01:42:47.280 | and then they floated the rocks into place. I think I mentioned that last time. They floated

01:42:49.280 | the rocks up, yes. It's brilliant. Yeah, I've heard this, yeah.

01:42:51.760 | But you know what, Chamath and I were talking about this, too, because when you remove all

01:42:54.640 | that crust, because we actually were talking, we just didn't use the guy in Graham's name.

01:42:57.600 | It's just like Uranus. When you break away all that crust,

01:43:00.560 | what did they find in Uranus, Friedberg? Mine was better, mine was better.

01:43:06.480 | You got it. You landed the joke. It's great, it's great.

01:43:08.240 | I got it. Oh, we finally got there, folks.

01:43:11.040 | This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast. It's different, yeah, I can't say

01:43:17.680 | anything other than, Sayan, you were great for a first time out. You got to the conspiracies,

01:43:23.280 | you rocked it. You got to interject more, because it's a vibrant panel, but for a first time out,

01:43:28.560 | very solid debut. By the way, before you go,

01:43:29.920 | do you have an alternative explanation for the pyramids, Sayan?

01:43:32.800 | Yeah, Sayan, what is your end, and what about UFOs?

01:43:34.880 | I've looked into, I mean, UFOs is the only one that I usually come back to, because,

01:43:39.760 | you know, if you look at putting logs underneath and trying to roll them, or you look at

01:43:44.160 | flooding an area, all of this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

01:43:48.000 | And so, and then, you know, the fact that there are other civilizations that also have pyramids

01:43:55.040 | that are stunning and feats of engineering as well, things like Stonehenge, et cetera. I mean,

01:44:01.440 | there's just things that defy explanation. I don't know if you ever tried to make a catapult,

01:44:05.760 | but it's really hard. It's really hard.

01:44:08.240 | It's really hard. And so, like, we just did not have the technology,

01:44:13.840 | or at least we can't find any definitive way that it happened. And so, I do think

01:44:19.520 | there is a possibility that there was a more advanced civilization here, or we were visited,

01:44:24.640 | and I think about that a lot.

01:44:26.880 | I think it's mutants. I'm going with the X-Men theory. I think there were mutant human beings

01:44:30.400 | who had the ability with superpowers to build them.

01:44:32.240 | It could be that. It could be that. It could be we had control of matter and alchemy,

01:44:36.400 | or something like that. Who knows?

01:44:37.520 | This is what we've come to now. We get conspiracy corner at the end of every program. We try to

01:44:42.080 | figure out unsolved mysteries. Welcome to Unsolved Mysteries. And, oh, just a little

01:44:47.680 | housekeeping here as we wrap. Our friends, our partners, dare I say, at Polymarket have

01:44:54.400 | done us a solid, Friedberg. Check this out. We talked a little bit about our long debates here

01:45:02.000 | on the program. So, Chamath, we created a market here. The Magnificent Seven shrinks below 30%

01:45:08.560 | of S&P 500 in 2025, 44% chance is what people in the real world are putting volume on that.

01:45:16.640 | I see $11,000 already in volume. And then, Friedberg, you came up with one, which was Will,

01:45:22.800 | I guess we did this one together, but I think it should be really under your name. Will U.S.

01:45:27.520 | national debt surpass $38 trillion in 2025? And then, third, talking about immigration,

01:45:33.120 | we got a lot of passion around this topic. Trump's team and Trump himself said they're

01:45:37.520 | going to deport 15 million immigrants from America. I said, "Hey, let's create a market for

01:45:45.680 | Will Trump deport 750,000 or more people in 2025, 38% chance." For those of you who don't know,

01:45:52.160 | Obama, I think, did 2 million people in eight years. So, this is not like a partisan thing.

01:45:56.560 | This is just a practical thing. So, anyway, go to Polymarket, look at the creators. You'll see

01:46:00.640 | under that tab, that all in has a bunch of markets. We're doing this in partnership with

01:46:04.560 | our partners who've partnered with us in a partnership at Polymarket, #FTCPartnership.

01:46:11.440 | Well done. Okay. Bye-bye.

01:46:13.280 | Love you guys. Scion, thank you.

01:46:14.480 | Love you, boys.

01:46:14.880 | See you on the mountains.

01:46:15.040 | Thank you, everyone. That was super fun.

01:46:16.560 | You rocked it, Scion.

01:46:18.240 | Thank you.

01:46:18.640 | [music]

01:46:20.640 | Let your winners ride.

01:46:21.520 | Rain Man, David Sachs.

01:46:24.400 | And it said, "We open-sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it."

01:46:31.520 | Love you, Wesley.

01:46:32.240 | Ice Queen of Kinwans.

01:46:33.600 | I'm going all in.

01:46:35.600 | Let your winners ride. Let your winners ride.

01:46:37.600 | Let your winners ride.

01:46:39.600 | Besties are gone.

01:46:41.600 | That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway, Sachs.

01:46:45.600 | [laughter]

01:46:47.600 | Oh, man.

01:46:49.600 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.

01:46:54.560 | It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

01:46:57.600 | What? You're a B.

01:46:59.600 | What? You're a B.

01:47:01.600 | What? You're a B.

01:47:03.600 | Besties are gone.

01:47:05.600 | I'm going all in.

01:47:07.600 | [music]

01:47:09.600 | What?

01:47:11.600 | [music]

01:47:13.600 | I'm going all in.

01:47:15.600 | you

LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland

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