
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Hurricane fallout, AlphaFold, Google breakup, Trump surge, VC giveback, TikTok survey
Fri, 11 Oct 2024
(0:00) Bestie intros! (3:18) The science behind Hurricanes Helene and Milton (14:59) The economics of intensifying natural disasters (29:03) AlphaFold creators win Nobel Prize in Chemistry (35:17) The Jayter's Ball (38:53) Google antitrust update: DOJ is going for a breakup (53:32) VC giveback: CRV will return ~$275M of a $500M fund to LPs (1:03:44) New TikTok survey shows increased usage as a news source (1:15:26) Election update: Are polling problems causing a strategy shift for Kamala Harris? Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://allin.com/meetups https://youtube.com/@allin https://allin.com/tequila https://allin.com https://x.com/Ry_Bass/status/1844367980249178396 https://www.newsweek.com/hurricane-helene-update-economic-losses-damage-could-total-160-billion-1961240 https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/september-2024-enso-update-binge-watch https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01442-3 https://x.com/vkhosla/status/1844166857655533811 https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/sfury.html https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03214-7 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-10-09/us-says-it-s-weighing-google-breakup-as-remedy-in-monopoly-case https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rtKjE02hAh_k/v0 https://x.com/AOC/status/1844034727935988155 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/technology/crv-vc-fund-returning-money.html https://www.axios.com/2023/03/03/founders-fund-slashes-vc-peter-thiel https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/17/more-americans-regularly-get-news-on-tiktok-especially-young-adults https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/10/08/who-u-s-adults-follow-on-tiktok https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/russia-pays-criminals-to-sow-mayhem-in-europe-warns-u-k-spy-chief-21ab960c https://x.com/iapolls2022/status/1844418916107341948 https://x.com/2waytvapp/status/1844803367740096811 https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/1829383729284067659
All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one science, politics, technology and business podcast in the world for five years running. We're about to hit our fourth anniversary here, episode 200 is coming up. And a bunch of lunatic fans are getting together, you can join them all in.com slash meetups. Holy cow, we got the domain name All In? Fantastic. Go to allin.com slash meetups.
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Wow. We have all in.com. How much did we spend on this? This is great.
I negotiated it. I got it. It took me two years and I got a sick deal on it. I don't even want to say because I, you know, I don't want to change it, but I think I got it. Don't say, I'll just say you bleep it out. I got it for, And that's a million dollar domain, just so we all know. Five letters in the dictionary. So good for branding.
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Ooh, I love it. Exactly, exactly. And you can yum yum. I got you sax.com, didn't I? You have the domain name sax.com. I negotiated that for you.
Wow, we have all the way back to episode one. This is incredible.
Oh, the new website?
Yeah, this is great.
Oh, can I tell you, if I may-
Allin.com. Allin.com. That's our website. It's like this thing is real.
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And I am of course, your executive producer for life and some moderate podcast. And if I may just a tiny plug. If you're a founder, we are having our ninth cohort of founder University. It's a 12 week course I teach on starting companies. What are you doing?
What is this?
I'm just giving a quick plug for Found University.
I need to get a plug in because I want to be found. Go to Arrow One and buy Supergut Bars, $3.99.
You can pick them up this afternoon. Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sasson.
Speaking of that, your people used me in an ad, Breedberg, so don't talk about plugs.
A few weeks ago when I shouted out that Glue.ai was hiring engineers, we had like 100 applications just from that. From Glue.ai looking for engineers? From one plug on the show, yeah.
For Glue.ai.
Yeah.
Right. That's awesome for glue AI. And if you haven't tried SuperGut, Freedberg's team literally made an advertisement with me talking about SuperGut and didn't tell me.
And we're still hiring, so.
Okay, well, there you have it. So go to founder.university to apply for my 12-week program.
And check out Gronk. I'm running a GoFundMe. A GoFundMe? Yeah, go to GoFundMe slash Freedberg. For what?
More Xanax to deal with your panic attacks? All right, let's get started, everybody. Enough of the shenanigans. Hurricane season is... Upon us, as Freeburg had predicted, Hurricane Milton made landfall on Wednesday evening along the west coast of Florida, as many of you know. It's been downgraded.
It started as a Category 5, potentially, then a Category 3, and then it looks like it's a Category 1 now. So I guess these things are quite random. Leading up to Milton, though, 6 million Floridians across 15 counties were ordered to evacuate. That's a lot of people moving out. And it was a pretty powerful storm. It ripped off the roof of the Tropicana Field in Tampa.
So far, the death toll is at four, but it's expected to rise, sadly. And just two weeks ago, Hurricane Helene swept through six southern states, killing over 220 people, tragically, devastating western North Carolina, and entire towns were wiped out. These are also, beyond the tragic human losses, are economically staggering in terms of the losses.
AccuWeather estimating the total economic damage could be between $145 and $160 billion from Helen. And Moody estimates the property damage alone could be as high as $26 billion. Tons to get into here. FEMA, Starlink, saving the day, tons of stuff. But Freeberg, back on episode 182, you predicted this would happen. What's causing all this?
And let's just start with the science angle, I guess, before we get into the other political and insurance issues.
Well, I think if you'll remember when we talked about this a couple months ago, the sea surface temperature was at kind of a record high in the Atlantic. And warm ocean temperatures drive moist air up that evaporates. The warmer the air, the faster the evaporation. And that starts to cause the movement of the air, which drives ultimately the hurricane.
And then the hurricane sucks up more warm, moist air from the ocean and it creates a feedback loop. So the more energy you have in the ocean, the more likely you are to accelerate wind forces in storms.
And that's why you get these massive hurricanes that suddenly form seemingly overnight and go, like in the case of Helene, that hurricane went from a cap two to a cap four or a cap five in like 48 hours. because of the energy that's stored up. And 90%, here's an interesting stat, 90% of the energy that we get from the sun is absorbed and stored in our oceans.
The other kind of fact that's playing into this, if you pull up that nature article, and this is something that I think you guys may remember we talked about. So this was an article that came out, a paper, a science paper that came out a couple of months ago. And in this paper,
the scientists identified that removing sulfur dioxide from cargo ships that travel across the oceans is actually causing accelerated warming in the oceans. And the reason is that the sulfur dioxide forms cloud formations as they travel across the oceans. And those cloud formations reflect sunlight.
And in the absence of those cloud formations, that sunlight makes its way into the ocean and you get more ocean warming. And by their estimation, removing sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, and that's the reason it's been pushed to be removed, and they started removing it in 2020, 2021 from cargo vessels. By removing sulfur dioxide, we are now gonna see a doubling
of the rate of warming of the oceans in the 2020s and going forward.
Let me pause there for a second just to make sure people understand what you're saying. Emissions from cargo ships block sunlight, which then of course reduces the heat absorbed by the oceans. And so we're now choosing between pollution of the air or overheating of the oceans. Am I correct in summarizing that?
That's roughly it. And... What is the pollution again?
Sorry, I just don't understand. It's emissions. Sulfur dioxide.
Yeah, that goes into the fuel of cargo vessels. And a couple of years ago, they started to implement these mandates that sulfur dioxide no longer be used in the fuel. As a result, when sulfur dioxide is emitted from these vessels, it goes into the atmosphere and it actually triggers cloud formation. So now you have these clouds that are forming. And Nick's going to pull up this image right now.
Yeah, here you can see that. So all of these tracks... are these cargo vessels moving across the ocean. And as they move across the ocean, they create cloud cover, that cloud cover actually reduces the warming in the ocean because it reflects sunlight. So now that sunlight energy gets absorbed into the ocean.
So this is another driving force that some people are now speculating, maybe accelerating the warming of the oceans that we're seeing, which drives this extreme storm and hurricane events. And so this becomes a more frequent event. Now, a lot of people- So sorry, can I ask you a question?
Does that mean that we're mean reverting? Meaning if we improve the quality of the fuel source that are used in shipping, doesn't that then mean that we're reverting back to what would have happened in the absence of these dirty fuel sources?
Yeah, so in addition- No, no, I'm asking you the question.
Is that true or not?
Um, so yes, we are no longer reflecting as much sunlight. And so for several decades, we had bad fuel sources. We had artificial cooling.
We had an artificial cooling and now we take, but that's counter to the narrative of what we all think is happening.
Oh, well, the argument is that we've actually been warming the atmosphere, which we have been. We can see the data that shows that everywhere all over the earth, not just about sunlight coming in on the oceans and not just ocean warming. But the atmosphere is warming. The planet is warming. And so this is by blocking the sunlight above the oceans, we were artificially dampening that effect.
and we were reducing the amount of heat energy that was getting into the oceans. So now by taking that away, we're seeing the heat energy in the oceans accelerate, and now the oceans are getting much, much warmer.
Right, so the pollution was good? Turns out it was good.
That's the paradox here, is that it was creating a blocker for sunlight, and to your point, Chamath, exactly. Like, shouldn't we just be going back to what was normal? But at the same time, in the same system, we had heated things up. So this is a multifactored system that we're dealing with Friedberg.
And I guess the takeaway from all of this is that we got to be really careful with what we do with the environment, right?
Well, I mean, let's talk about economics, right? So what how much real estate do you guys think is on the Florida coastline? What's the real estate?
Sorry, free work, can you just anchor this? Like, was it that it was supposed to be a category five, and now it's a category three when it hit land?
Right, so what happens typically when storms hit land is they no longer have that hot ocean pumping energy back into the storm that keeps the feedback loop going. So the storm cycle starts to break down. All hurricanes, when they hit land, they start to break apart. And so the category which measures the wind speed actually reduce it. This is just a natural thing that happens.
But this was a category five hurricane when it made landfall, I believe it was category four. So, you know, it was a massive hurricane as an approach.
We should not dismiss it because my understanding was Helen was cat four when it like hit North Carolina. But I read yesterday that- What happened with Helen was it was cat four- That Milton is cat three when it hit Tampa or something. Is that not right? Yeah.
Yeah, so that's right. But what happened when Helene hit North Carolina, it was not a cat four. What happened is, as that storm moved inland, it hit the mountains and the first mountains it hit are on Western North Carolina. That area is elevated, there's mountains there. So when a heavy hot storm runs into cold mountains, all the moisture dumps out.
It's like it runs into it and suddenly everything precipitates out of that storm. And that's why some parts of Western North Carolina got like 18, some people measured as high as 30 inches of rainfall in a couple of hours. So this insane dumping happens when that hot air hits a cold region and suddenly everything, all that warm moisture precipitates out and dumps to the ground.
So it ran into a mountain. It's effectively why everything fell out of North Carolina.
Wait, so you're saying that it wasn't Democrats who basically...
I blame Putin. Putin or Kamala.
Who did it, Sachs?
I thought Nancy Pelosi cast a spell or something.
Well, isn't there a lot of geoengineering conspiracy theories going on in your cohort? I don't think so.
But Vinod wants us to be very clear that we need to stop all this disinformation that somehow Democrats are behind that storm. We can assure everyone that it was just precipitation.
There's a lot of theory online that there's a ton of late geoengineering being run by government agencies to drive these storms.
People aren't taking that seriously.
The origin of this, though, Freeberg, is people have done experiments for decades on trying to control the weather or you know, alter the weather. And they're doing that in the Middle East by seeding clouds and creating more rain. We saw that with the Dubai floods, they said that that might have been caused by overseeding of clouds, which they're doing there.
And then there have been experiments, just to, you know, for the crazy laser people conspiracy there, it's there a sun x, there actually have been experiments with lasers, you know, being shot into hurricanes and storms, correct?
Are you Alex Jones? Is that what we're doing? Well, no, I'm not saying Alex Jones.
I'm just saying that's the origin of where people are kind of building on this. There have been the amount.
OK, so so let's just talk about the hurricane.
The amount of teeing it up for you to debunk is what I'm doing here.
Yeah. Putting particulates in clouds to accelerate precipitation. is, I mean, we've done that for a hundred years. You know, you can do, you can increase the precipitation rate when there's already clouds that have formed, but that has nothing to do with creating 200 mile an hour wind speed.
That requires an extraordinary amount of energy, all of this energy, but the oceans are like giant batteries. And when a hurricane gets going, that battery is accelerating the hurricane, and the hurricane sucks up more power from the battery, and it creates this incredibly dynamical system. There is no human-created energy system that can form a hurricane.
A hurricane is an extraordinarily powerful natural phenomenon that arises from the amount of energy that can come out of very, very, very hot oceans, relatively speaking. So that's really where these hurricanes are coming from. Now they're going to be more frequent if the ocean temperatures remain elevated as they seem to be and continue to be elevated.
And this can be a function of generally the temperatures warming on earth, generally the removal of sulfur dioxide, generally these El Nino La Nina cycles. There's a lot of factors, but it seems to be the case that we are having a very significant trend of continuously warmer oceans.
And those continuously warmer oceans means that we're going to have what used to be called a one in 500 year storm, which is what Asheville is being termed at, one in 500 year. These sorts of storm events can happen every couple of years. And we're now looking at one in 100 year events happening every two to three years. in the United States with the hurricane activity that we've been seeing.
I think a lot of the conspiracy theories are built on actual experiments that happened. This one, Project Storm Fury, I'm sure you know about, was to try to modify hurricanes by putting in some chemicals that would freeze them and dull them. So they're kind of building on this.
Break it apart.
Yeah, break it apart. There have been experiments here with altering weather, altering hurricanes, but that doesn't mean it's Putin, Pelosi, or the Illuminati.
Let's get back to brass tacks.
Let's talk about the economics. There's $500 billion to $1 trillion of real estate value on the Florida coastline. And what used to be a one in 100 year event, the average Florida homeowner historically has been paying about 1% of the real estate value in insurance.
So now if your real estate is likely to be wiped out one out of every 20 years, instead of one out of every 500 years, the cost of insurance gets to the point that it is untenable for most people to pay for their insurance. Florida has a state-backed reinsurance provider called the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund.
And this fund issues debt to meet its coverage demands because it reinsures insurance companies in order to incentivize them to come into the state and underwrite homeowners insurance.
You should explain the loop here, which is you go and get a mortgage. The bank says you need to get insurance if I'm going to lend you the money to buy the home. So then a bunch of insurers need to decide that they're willing to underwrite that area. And then when they give you that insurance, they then want to lay that risk off and go to reinsure. Is that the cycle?
That's right, and what's happening is they would normally underwrite that risk. They would say, this is gonna cost, you're gonna lose the value of your home every 100 years or every 200 years.
But now, the models are showing, because of the frequency of these sorts of hurricane events and the severity of the hurricane events, that maybe you'll lose the value of your home once every 20 years or once every 30 years. And no consumer is going to be willing or able to pay that much for the insurance on their home.
So the state over the last several years has had to step in and effectively subsidize the insurance. And now the state reinsurance vehicle only has statutory liability maximum of $17 billion in a single hurricane season. Now, I think they got lucky with Milton today, but some were estimating that the Milton losses were gonna be in excess of 100 billion, bigger than Katrina.
It's likely as of this morning, the reinsurance websites are all saying it's probably a 40 to $50 billion loss event, which still exceeds the state's reinsurance capacity. So you can kind of think about Florida state's reinsurance thing being effectively bankrupt. It doesn't really have the capacity to underwrite the insurance anymore.
So the real question for everyone is, is the federal government gonna have to step in and start to support the price of homes.
Because if they don't- Well, it's a terrible precedent to set because if you do it for Florida, then you'll have to do it in Texas and Louisiana and Mississippi.
And California with wildfires.
And California and Arizona and Texas. There's going to be no way to create a clear demarcation of who gets a bailout and who doesn't, which will mean that everybody will get a bailout or nobody gets a bailout. That's right. And if everybody gets a bailout, and if you think about how systematically unpredictable, at least in the Southern states,
the weather is, you're gonna be talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, probably.
The total value of all mortgages and homeowner mortgages in Florida is $454 billion. And those people typically have a debt to equity ratio probably on the 50 to 80% range. So if the value of your home dips by 25%, because everyone starts selling their homes, leaving Florida, or they can't get insurance,
then the people that live in Florida, most of them have their net worth tied up in their home, are going to see their personal net worth wiped out or cut in half. So it's not just an economic problem. It's a social problem that now there are so many people that have put their entire net worth into their home.
The value of their home is written to a point that it no longer makes sense given the frequency at which homes are going to get destroyed.
That's probably the reason why they'll have to do it because they'll... But then that calculation will have to happen for every single homeowner in every single state at where this is an issue.
Yeah. Wait, Freebird, are you saying the entire Florida coastline is no longer economically viable?
No. It's totally viable. It's just the question is what are you willing to – At what price?
At what price?
Will you pay 5% of your home value for insurance every year? Will you pay 2%, 3%?
If the expected life of a house is 20 years, then that's not viable.
It becomes very, very untenable. Well, it used to be 1 in 500 years. Now it's probably 1 in 15, right?
Does this apply to the entire coastline or just parts of it?
Well, I mean, you saw that the range at which these events can happen is all over the place. And the challenge is the events are getting more significant because of this warm ocean weather that we see, this warm ocean temperature.
The only good news, Freiburg, is that now people are building the first couple of floors in high rises in Miami and homes on stilts with concrete and with resistant, you know, saltwater resistant material. So there is a counter to this. So we might...
An investment in climate resilience, that's right.
Yeah, so it might actually be an opportunity to upgrade all these homes to resistant ones using another set of technologies. But the bailout is really interesting too, Sax, because Florida's got a lot of electoral college votes, doesn't it? Like, I hate to bring this back to politics, but, you know, promising people bailouts is how these politicians seem to be getting votes these days.
Yeah, but is anyone talking about a federal bailout?
I think what Freebrook is saying is that there's a pretty obvious parade of terribles here where the question will have to be answered one way or the other. Because if you only have a $17 billion reinsurance fund and there's $50 billion of damage, somebody's going to have to come in and cover the gap. And if it's the insurance companies, expect your insurance premiums to double or triple.
That's right. And that's what happened in California. And by the way, State Farm left a lot of California.
This is what I was going to say. Most of these big insurance companies have already done the calculus to realize that these regions are no longer profitable enough to justify the downside risk. That's the bigger problem. So then the ones that are left
are insolvent reinsurers or insurers that are just funding short-term ARBs because they know that the odds are they're going to get wiped out, so they'll price gouge effectively. So, you know, a different example is that here where I live in Menlo Park, we're not in a floodplain, we're not in a fire region, none of that stuff.
But in order for us to get home insurance, you have to now go through a risk assessment. And in our specific case, we were like, hey, what should we do with our roof? And they were like, you got to take the roof off if you want home insurance. We're like, well, home insurance is probably a good thing to have. Was it a wood shake roof? You saw our house.
It's a beautiful wood shake roof, and we had to remove it. And the two choices were a $350,000 iron roof. Composite materials, yeah. Or like 70K for composite. And it's like, this is insane. And the cost of insurance was just egregious in the absence of...
Going in one anyways, we ended up getting the for most homeowners, when the cost of insurance gets to a certain threshold, you don't have budget for it, you can't afford it. And so that's a lot of why the insurers leave, they'll underwrite anything at any price, but they just know that most consumers can't afford it. Here's some other interesting statistics, related but unrelated.
In the early 1900s, the city of Phoenix, Arizona averaged five days a year of temperatures of 110 degrees or warmer. By the 2010s, Phoenix averaged, during the 2010s, 27 days a year where the temperature was 110 or higher. Since 2021, Phoenix averaged- 100 plus days. 42 days. And in 2024, it's been 70 days so far this year that the temperature is over 110.
So this is affecting, and so there's increased risks in California with wildfires, increased risk with hurricane. There are a lot of these factors, and I have friends that work in reinsurance and in the insurance markets.
Even if you don't get affected by a wildfire or disaster, when that article was in the Wall Street Journal, I think it said that the number of average days above 100 was like 100-something. Yes, that's right. And they profiled this retired woman who was an insurance adjuster or something,
And the whole point of the article was not that her house was destroyed or at risk, but the cost of electricity has gone just absolutely sky high. Even with solar panels, even with storage, you need to basically lean on the grid. And the grid now just charges you an exorbitant amount of money. And so these folks were paying thousands of dollars a year. So if you imagine the trifecta,
You have all of this climate risk that could destroy your home. You're paying an enormous premium for home insurance, and then you're paying an enormous premium for electricity from the mainline power utilities. It's not sustainable.
And just for background, FEMA manages something called the NFIP, National Flood Insurance Plan. And it's historically about 50% cheaper than private flood insurance. They have 4.7 million active policies providing 1.3 trillion in coverage. But they instituted a new risk assessment system and that caused rates to increase and
Yeah, it's because of all this, the policies have decreased over the last couple years, meaning less people have flood insurance at the same time that these things are getting worse. And so, yeah, this is a really tough issue. I wonder if this is an opportunity, Chamath.
if you think about historically how insurance worked, it worked in communities where people would help each other out and do barn raising kind of events when somebody had a problem. So if we just put on our entrepreneurial hats here,
If you look at the cost of insurance, if 100 different people bundle the cost of their homes together, put money into some sort of platform, like an Uber, Airbnb marketplace, and there was some management structure here of self-insurance, because I know some people are doing self-insurance for healthcare at their companies for this kind of thing. Do you think there's going to be a new...
business opportunity here.
Jason, it's called a mutual. And those are like a good chunk of the industry are mutuals where it's the shareholders are the members and they all share the risk and the ownership.
Those things work because you have broad geographic coverage. If you had to go just into Malibu and self insurer, the rates would literally be greater than the value of the home, right, no one would pay into it.
So if you do proper underwriting, what's happened in the last couple of years is all the reinsurance companies and all the insurance companies have had to re underwrite the rates that they charge for insurance, because the frequency of a disaster has gone up. And the new price that they should be charging is so high, it doesn't matter how the capital structure is set up.
It's simply, there's, there's one big event that's going to cause a big wipeout for a large number.
My personal belief is I think that the real estate markets in some of these places are meaningfully mispriced. And specifically what I mean is that they're massively overpriced.
That's right.
Because I think when you actually account for the climate damage and the long-term financial stability of the insurers and the reinsurers... I don't think that many of the markets that have seen these crazy sky-high prices, I'll name two to be specific, West Palm Beach and Malibu. So both ends of the coasts. These things just don't make sense.
And I think people view these things as investments, but on the West Coast, when you deal with things like soil erosion and other things, I think it's a calamity waiting to happen. And I think on the East Coast, when you factor in the extreme weather conditions.
Even Jason, your comment about rebuilding these homes in a more foolproof way doesn't solve it because you won't be able to rebuild the entire state. There's a lot of people that just can't afford it. There's a lot of folks that will not have adequate coverage. So I just think these are disasters waiting to happen, unfortunately.
Yeah. And Sachs, there's a movement right now A lot of people, even of means, are renting their homes. And so in the real estate market, what are your thoughts on that? Just renting versus buying now becoming something that people in the top half of homeowners or potential homeowners are now electing to not own their home and rent. Have you been monitoring that?
I honestly hadn't heard that. I mean, the trend that I thought was happening was that you had these big funds, like BlackRock or whatever, buying up huge numbers of homes and then running them to… Low-end homes, yeah. Low-end or medium, you know, to families. I thought that's what was going on. I hadn't heard that.
at the high end of the range that people were running well if you think about it like there's there seems to be a cap when you have a 10 million dollar home of what you can possibly rent it for and it's it's the the prices are now making more sense to keep more sense to keep your money in the market or in other places and then rent i'm just hearing are you are you long real estate in florida or coastal california if you could or do you treat them differently
I think they're different, but Florida is like, I mean, I don't know how you do the math on, I just don't know what you do on a trillion dollars of real estate value with half a trillion of mortgages. when you have real exposure on loss more frequently than one in 100 years, to your point, they need to be repriced.
And how do you reprice those homes in the significant level that they need to be repriced without causing massive economic and social consequence? That's what's kind of, I think, challenging me in thinking about what's the path here.
So it was a good thing that I sold my Miami place.
Once again, Sachs makes a great trade. Pretty awesome.
Well done, Sachs. You top ticked it again.
Well done, Sachs. Just like...
I really love that house. You love that house?
Where do you think I stayed when I was in town? You're so selfish.
I lost a place to stay. I mean, the yacht access alone, being able to get out on the bay and get on a boat, the ski dudes, all this great stuff. All right, let's keep the Freiburg train going here. Huge news, AlphaFold creators just won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Two members of Google's DeepMind AI research team, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, received this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
They both work for Google's DeepMind, as you know. And Freeberg, again, all in getting there first, explained what AlphaFold was back on episode 14 in December of 2020. That was almost four years ago. Freeberg, maybe you could explain.
Did we predict that they would win the Nobel Prize at the time?
I believe you did. We'll go check the receipts using podcast AI search engine.
It became much more likely that they would win the Nobel after they won the breakthrough prize. I mean, just to point this out. Yeah, yeah. Shout out, Yuri Milman. Shout out, Yuri and Julia. And Julia. Because when those guys won that award for 2023, and you heard the extent of what they've done, it was almost like obvious that they were going to win Nobel after the fact.
So I think the really interesting thing is actually... In this community, I think the Breakthrough Prize is actually meaningfully more relevant and a positive directional indicator to breakthrough science.
Well, it's kind of like winning Sundance or Cannes. You win the Palme d'Or, you become a favorite to win at the Oscars, right, in the Academy Awards. So that's actually interesting. The regional or more industry-centric award could lead to the next one. So, Freeberg, just explain to us why this is so important before we go on.
I just think it's much more rigorous than the Nobel. I think the Nobel can be a little bit gamed, I think. Oh, interesting. Okay.
What do you think, Freeberg? Explain to the audience why this is important and what's transpired since we talked about it four years ago.
There's been a long challenge in biochemistry on understanding or predicting or visualizing the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Because remember, proteins are produced by long chains of amino acids. And those amino acids are kind of create like a bead, beaded necklace. And then the whole necklace collapses on itself in a very specific way.
And that three-dimensional molecule, that big chunky protein does something structurally, physically. And so trying to understand the shape of a protein is really hard. I mean, we've used kind of x-ray imaging systems to try and identify it and tried to build models to identify how does that quote protein folding work?
How do those amino acids collapse on each other to create that three-dimensional construct? And I don't know if you guys remember in the early 2000s, there was a Stanford folding at home distributed computing project. Do you guys remember this? Yeah.
Yeah. It would use people's machines and extra CPU, like the SETI at home project to- Precisely, yeah.
Exactly right, yeah. So it was like, it ran on the background of your computer, it used your CPU cycles when you weren't using your computer, and it tried to model protein folding. And so this has been a problem that folks have tried to tackle with compute for decades to figure out the 3D structure.
This is so important because if we can identify the 3D structure of proteins and we can predict them from the amino acid sequence, we can print out a sequence of amino acids to make a protein that does a specific thing for us.
And that unlocks this ability for humans to create biomolecules that can do everything from binding cancer, to breaking apart pollutants and plastics, to creating entirely new molecules, to running, in some cases, like what David Baker did at University of Washington, he shared the Nobel Prize, creating micro motors, mini motors, from proteins that he designed on a computer.
And so this becomes, I think this great, like big Holy grail in biochemistry and the alpha fold project at deep mind inside of Google solve this problem. And, and by the way, since, since then they've come out with alpha fold three, they've launched a drug discovery company called isomorphic labs, where they're basically predicting molecules that will do specific things for a target indication.
Uh, and then they use the alpha fold models to actually design and develop those molecules.
And there have been literally dozens of companies that have been started since DeepMind was published, and probably several billion dollars of capital that's gone into companies that are creating new drugs, creating new industrial biotech applications, using this protein modeling capability that was unleashed with DeepMind a number of years ago. So it really has transformed the industry.
It'll be a couple years before we see it transforming the world, but it's an exciting kind of thing, yeah.
not to virtue signal here, but those are plus size proteins. Now free, but they don't like being called chunky, plus size proteins, plus size. One, one really difficult technical question for your free bird. Is there any way for you to take this amazing breakthrough and make sacks interested in it?
Is there any possible vector here for it to relate to sacks and get him off his BlackBerry right now? Blackberry. I think he's playing chess with Teo and J.D. Vance is watching them play chess. I think that's what's going on right now. It's really hard. I mean, the poor audience here is watching Zach looking down. All right, let's keep this train moving here. Enough of the shenanigans.
Anyway, congrats to the teams. Congrats to Demison Jumper. Yeah. I mean, it's just great. And David Baker at the Baker Lab in University of Washington.
Also a breakthrough prize winner. Yeah. What's interesting to me is like these two Nobels, these guys, but also Jeffrey Hinton's, you know, you're really seeing now the convergence of the hard sciences and computer science. In a really meaningful way. And I think that that's so interesting and cool.
I think in the group chat, Chamath, you had an interesting, hey, maybe there should be a computer science award. for a Nobel Computer Science Award.
And- I actually think it's the opposite now, which is that it's amazing to see folks using computers to improve our understanding of the natural sciences. And I think that that's a really great place to be. So what Demis and John and David are doing in the life science is amazing.
What Jeffrey Hinton did 30 and 40 years ago and 20 years ago in terms of training deep neural nets, also really amazing.
All computer-based. Yeah, all computer-based. And in related news, Benioff just nominated himself. for excellence in CRM management. So congratulations to Benioff on nominating himself for a Nobel.
What is that comment? It's just a stray.
Why are you attacking Benioff? It's just a stray.
What did he do wrong? It's just a joke.
It's a joke.
They're just jokes. Have you not learned anything good? When you attack the people that attack you. It's not an attack. It's a joke.
Benioff has done so much for philanthropy. Just ask him. If you... Oh, my God. Dude, he's doing the best he can.
He's doing a great job. This is how I got drunk with Paul. What are you doing? Exactly. Can you people have a sense of humor about yourselves?
No, but it's not even funny if you had said something else.
I mean... Okay, give me a funnier Nobel. Go ahead. Benioff runs a 300 billion market cap company.
He's chomping at the bit to come back on the pod and explain why AI is not going to disrupt SaaS. Really?
Oh, is he? He wants to be back on the podcast.
He's texting me. He wants to come on. Okay, cool.
We'll check in in $100 billion.
He had his chance. That chance is closed. He shot his shot and it did not land.
That door was closed when he insulted our guests about not being able to afford the Disney course.
When he called the all-in people whores. Oh, my God.
Now you're piling on. Anybody coming to Dreamforce 2025? Okay, let's move on. Sorry. Anyways, leave Benioff alone, G. Leave Benioff.
It's like, leave Britney alone, that famous meme.
Leave Benioff alone. It's like, how many new enemies do you want to create? Every week there's got to be somebody.
They're just jokes.
Just when you thought he was running out of feuds, you know?
I'm not in a feud with anybody. I'm making stupid jokes. The reason people tune in is because you laugh and learn.
Did you guys see that tweet that somebody suggested throwing a conference with all of J. Cal's haters?
Jason Conn? J. Conn? Jaders. Jaders convention. What is it called? Jaders? Jaders. Yeah. J haters. Yeah. Jason haters. Jaders. Yeah.
I'd like to shout out my Jaders. They're just jokes, folks. I love you, Mark. I'm penny off. Come on the pod, Zach.
I think somebody could launch a successful summit just doing that. It's like a ready-made audience. And they're clearly passionate.
David Sachs.
I think it would rival the All-In Summit in terms of the passion of the fans.
All three of us would show up. J. Cal would be so devastated. Keynote one.
Are you kidding me?
I think it's hilarious.
Freeberg. I'd have to keynote. Paul Graham.
I like Benioff. I'm not trying to make enemies with Benioff. He's just got to have a sense of humor. Oh, my gosh. Megan Kelly. A special fireside chat. Megan Kelly and Farmer Lucky. Wait, does Zuck hate you too? Why does Zuck hate you? Oh, my God.
J-Cal was just so... I was brutal to Zuck in the early days. Brutal, yeah.
Why? Well, he just... Anyway, we'll get to it later.
But you're right. Like, you know, throwing a conference for J-haters would just be... J-haters? That's like a ready-made... J-haters. Jaders. That is an underserved and passionate demographic. It would be bigger than 10.
Passionate demographic.
Just look at Sachs' replies. Community with shared values. Hey, man, if I can get 25% of those ticket sales, I'm in. Let's go. All right. Let's keep the train moving here. We have an update on the DOJ's antitrust suit with Google. Looks like they're going for the breakup, as Chamath predicted. You remember the Bloomberg report back in August. We covered it in episode 192.
Google was found liable for maintaining a monopoly in search and digital ads. Now the DOJ is working on the remedy, right? Okay, they're guilty. So now comes time for the remedy. And the DOJ is quote is from Bloomberg, considering asking a federal judge to force Google to sell off parts of its business.
And according to this filing, the DOJ is specifically considering structural remedies that would prevent Google from using products such as Chrome, Google Play, that's the App Store on Android, and Android itself to advantage Google search. 32 page document released by the DOJ lays out several options and we'll go through them and talk about them here.
The obvious one, terminating Google's exclusive agreements with hardware companies like Apple. They're the default search engine there for $30 or $40 billion a year. Samsung, that's a layup. Separating Chrome and Android, my God, that would be drastic, ripping that out of the Google ecosystem, prohibiting certain kinds of data tracking. That's a layup as well.
Or other behavioral and structural changes for the company. I'm going to pause there, Friedberg, and get your thoughts on this as a former Googler and you interviewed. Sergey at the summit, but I don't think we talked to Sergey about this, because obviously, he would not be able to talk about it. So what are your thoughts here on a potential remedy?
I think we've talked about this. I mean, look, I've shared in the past, my belief that companies that are big, that have excess capital, that then invest that excess capital in R&D can be a net benefit for all of us. Look at Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a monopoly on
through their association with at&t with developing radar microwave the transistor integrated circuitry information theory everything that is the basis of the internet computing even nuclear technology and so on it's because they had this extraordinary capital flow from the scale of the business and they were able to invest in r d similarly google acquired
and invested for many, many years in DeepMind. And we just talked about how Demis and team won the Nobel Prize for the work that they did. And they, by the way, published the protein structure for 200 million proteins for free out of that service. I just want to zoom out for a minute and talk about the fact that this isn't about
you know, whether Google has a monopoly in search that prohibits competition or in ads that prohibits competition, but is it really worth penalizing any company that's big? Particularly, do we lose the benefit of those big companies investing in technology that pushes us forward? Google also invested in Waymo for years and years and years.
which arguably spurned and drove investment from many other companies in self-driving technology. And if Google hadn't done that, would self-driving have taken off the way it did? I don't know. Same with Kitty Hawk and Larry's investment in eVTOLs, and that spawned a lot of eVTOL investing.
And similarly, if you think about Amazon and their investment in AWS, where they were burning cash for many years, That turned out to spawn arguably a lot of interest and investment in cloud. And so I don't think that these big companies are bad just because they're big. I think we should take apart the monopolistic antitrust actions and behaviors that they take and then identify ways to remedy
those behaviors, versus just saying anyone or anything that's big should be taken apart. Because there is a tremendous benefit to be gained from the R&D dollars that they all put into things that, you know, move the whole industry forward. And I think that leadership is important and needed.
Otherwise, if you got a bunch of startups that are trying to get $10 million checks from VC is I'm not sure they're going to build a Waymo. And I'm not sure they're going to build Amazon cloud. And I'm not sure they're going to build a deep mind you know, protein folding company and publish it for free. So I don't know, that's just my point of view. What's the likely?
We should think about this stuff.
You kind of know this one. Pretty good with these predictions. Tell us we'll be sitting here five years from now, what will have occurred?
Unfortunately, not what Freeberg just said. It'll be the opposite. There'll be some form of forced remedy. I'm sympathetic to Freeberg's argument. I don't think that it's really a good thing in the end because I do think there are some incredible examples of Google specifically reinvesting in a way that's really added value in the world. I think the problem though is that
The technology innovation cycle has gotten too elongated. So you're not seeing creative destruction be the natural force that keeps all of these companies in their own swim lanes. And so they are allowed to become too amorphous and too profitable. And I think it becomes an obvious target for politicians.
I think that's a really good point. observation there about the timeline of this, because if you look at this, I have started now, and I know many people are starting their search journey on Claude and ChatGPT every day. I'm doing 30, 40, 50 queries and follow-ups per day. I force my entire team to do that as well.
And so just as there's an actual viable competitor to Google, this action has reached, I don't know, the halfway mark, this is going to wind up being completely meaningless sacks. If chat GPT does build a viable competitor coexister that siphons off search, am I wrong here?
Well, It is ironic that frequently the government takes actions on these monopolies at precisely the moment they're subject to the greatest disruption. Totally. The same thing happened with Microsoft in a way. But it was still a good thing that the government acted when it did because there was a risk of Microsoft porting over its desktop monopoly into this new era of the internet.
I think it's still a good thing to be looking at breaking up Google. I actually think that would be good. At the end of the day, it might even be good for shareholders. This thing should be probably three separate companies like we've talked about in our previous show. But it is true that Google is facing the most existential threat to its search monopoly.
And it is a monopoly in the form of open AI at this point in time.
I have one final thought here, a piece of advice for Sergey and the team over there. And I told Sergey directly, they have to get good at making apps. To go use ChatGPT, you take out the app and it's a wonderful, beautiful experience. When you go try to figure out how to use Gemini, it's like shoehorned into search results. And then it's like some subdomain. That's why people aren't using it.
Go buy the domain in chat.com and make a dedicated app just for Gemini. And make it kick ass.
You're 100% right.
Google, you suck at apps.
We said this when you asked about the bear case of OpenAI. If the DOJ is going to go after Google, and by the way, the interesting thing, Jason, and I mentioned this to you, is that in the same article that floated the trial balloon about this remedy of a Google breakup, the headline in the Wall Street Journal, which I think was very purposeful, said Google and Meta.
So I think that they, if given their druthers, they being the powers that be in Washington, will probably want to take a run at both of these companies. They'll start with the one that they think they can disassemble the quickest, and then they'll go to Meta afterwards.
My strong advice to Meta and Google is if this is going to happen, you got to go out kicking and punching and fighting and scratching. And I think the most obvious thing is what you just said, Jason, which is you are the front door to the internet.
and there is this completely new emergent technology, and where is the same response to ChatGPT that you had to X or that you had to Snapchat or that you had to TikTok? Because if it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and then you might as well just go for it. Build the apps, make them kick ass, make the ChatGPT alternative, and get it to billions of people yesterday.
That would be the most logical game theory thing to do to build up a pool of users that you will rely on when the DOJ tries to come with some consent decree or whatnot. So this is the time to build up the assets now as aggressively as possible. Yeah.
And selling YouTube would be the ultimate. I know that the ad networks you pointed out for your blog are connected, but if they distributed They spun out. I'll give you something about the ad thing. Can you imagine $500 billion going into Google's coffers in YouTube shares? They would have $500 billion in cash, Chamath.