All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland
Sat, 11 Jan 2025
(0:00) The Besties welcome Cyan Banister! (9:16) Reacting to the LA wildfires: broken incentives, leadership failures, lessons learned (36:51) Insurance issues, rebuilding headwinds, reclaiming the government (59:44) Zuck goes full free speech, fires third-party fact-checkers, opts for Community Notes model (1:20:19) Nvidia goes consumer at CES: market cap impact, most interesting vertical (1:34:49) Why Trump wants Greenland (1:40:05) Conspiracy Corner: Who built the pyramids? Follow the Besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow Cyan Banister: https://x.com/cyantist 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://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SQ_myzmV_Q https://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/awipsProducts/RNORR4RSA.php https://x.com/JonVigliotti/status/1877020919475884110 https://x.com/FearedBuck/status/1877355797245514085 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKJ5WeBc7Us https://x.com/CrazyyHub/status/1823574726738092402 https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives-the-1961-bel-air-brush-fire-20170419-story.html https://www.rainmaker.com https://www.ksbw.com/article/california-fire-evacuation-maps/63382651 https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1877366727547433382 https://x.com/WorldTimesWT/status/1876887200526111017 https://x.com/ericabbenante/status/1877207054105886836 https://x.com/laurapowellesq/status/1877143625588682940 https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064 https://x.com/deb8rr/status/1877539354802876576 https://x.com/Jason/status/1877183155821494513 https://about.fb.com/news/2025/01/meta-more-speech-fewer-mistakes https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Mark-Zuckerberg-Letter-on-Govt-Censorship.pdf https://x.com/townhallcom/status/1876684277787873397 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-ceo-pitches-robotics-cars-as-growth-areas-to-consumer-electronics-audience-68905f2d https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/project-digits https://polymarket.com/markets/creators/all-in
I just got a haircut with a new person. She was like, I'm like, do what you want. This is what she did.
Okay, well, let me know who she is. Chamath and I will go beat her up and get your money back.
Did she feather your bangs and blow your hair out? She did. She gave you a blow, didn't she?
It's starting already.
Okay. No, but that's a blow dryer. Just, yes, right? She blow dry your hair?
At the end, she gave me a little...
Yeah, that's not sustainable. So you can't tell what the quality of the haircut's like because you're never going to do that again.
You don't have the skill. I've never blow dried my hair in my life.
No, I understand that. Then this is why, because if you get the blow and it looks good in the blow. Just say blow out, please. Just say blow out. It's a four word. Why? What are we, six?
Just grow up, you. The way you're saying it, you're saying it to provoke a reaction. Come on. No, I'm not.
Tell us about what your rules for blows are.
What I'm saying is if you get a haircut and you get a blow, it's very hard for you to know. No, but I'm serious. It's very hard for you to know what it's going to look like the next day when you take a shower and when you don't, you know.
blow it it's true oh you're saying the self blow can't match the stylist blow it's just important when you get a haircut with a new stylist or a hairdresser or a barber yes you cannot let them blow you he's not happy with the ending got it it was an unhappy ending because when you blow yourself shamath which people have accused you of blowing yourself on this very program when you blow yourself it's not going to come out the way it did it won't be as fabulous every time i've blown myself it's been perfect
Brain Man, David Sack.
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kinwah.
All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In podcast. I'm your host, Jay Powell from Japan here, cutting turns in Niseko and at E1I, and we have an incredible lineup today. As always, the chairman dictator Chamath is here to reign supreme. How are you doing, brother?
Good. How are you? What are you wearing exactly?
I'm just wearing my kimono as I want to do here on the All In podcast.
Why are you speaking in Elizabethan English?
I just decided in 2025, I'm going to live my best life and I'm going to do everything. Anybody asked me to do something, I'm saying yes.
Oh, I'm going to ask you a bunch of stuff next weekend then. I got so many ideas. I got a list. I'm going to ask you to do all sorts of things. If it's epic, I'm doing it. Yeah.
Okay. So, and yeah, I'm over the moon right now. And then I'll be going to the inauguration to see all my friends. and celebrate the big Trump victory and tape an episode there. With us, of course, David Freberg, your resident sultan of science. And not a moment too soon, we have so much to talk about. What's the background here? Those are some dead trees with Mount Fuji in the background?
Yeah, that's a Kurosawa landscape.
While you've been gallivanting and being a dilettante, your original adopted home state is burning to the ground.
Ah, yes, I know about this. I got off the ski lift and I saw this after I had posted like, oh, my life is amazing. And I was like, oh, my God. You know, you can totally and everybody replied like, are you in the room? And I'm like, oh, my Lord. This is unbelievable. We'll obviously talk about that.
So then you promoted the tweet.
Yes, I put $500 behind it to boost it to try to get my ratings up. No, I actually literally deleted it because I posted it. And I never do that. But I posted a video where I was like, oh, my God, it's incredible. And I was like, you know what? This is the wrong time for it. So a little grace there, folks.
And I am so happy to have here on All In Idol, the one, the only, my good friend, Cyan Bannister. No, our good friend. She's my good friend before you guys met her. So I'm sure she's ours, but I've been friends with her longer. So my good friend, Cyan Baxter, our good friend and our bestie. Let's just leave it at that. It doesn't have to be a competition for who Cyan likes best.
We'll ask her to rate at the end of the episode. Cyan, welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's nice to see everyone.
Jason, you want to tell people about Cyan's background?
Yeah, do an epic rant on Cyan's epic history.
Well, I mean, Cyan and I fought in the Clone Wars together. It was a long time ago. But she's a technologist, self-made individual, who then decided she would start writing small angel checks about 14 years ago. Literally the same year I did. And myself, Cyan, of all... She's done profoundly better than you. She's done incredible, yes, of course. We'll get into it.
And Cyan and I would, 14 years ago, I guess, we would meet startup companies together and host little events where we get together and take pitches. And we invested in a couple of companies together, and it worked out very nicely for everyone involved. Yeah.
Yeah, we're in a couple of companies together. Yeah. Density. Density. We were on the board together for a little bit, so that was fun.
A little bit, yeah.
Yeah. Thumbtack. Thumbtack. Actually, Thumbtack, Density. and Uber, I all discovered through you. Which one was Uber?
I got to check my... Yeah, and I don't think you're allowed to say them.
I don't think you're allowed to say them.
Let me check my Google sheet here. I didn't know I invested in Uber. Let me check. I have to confirm that. Oh, yeah, I did. But at one of these events, I introduced Cyan to Uber.
It's true. It's true. Yeah, so found all three of those deals at your events. So that was really great. Aw. Yeah.
Well, thanks. That's a very nice... Let me try. Cyan is a prolific angel investor. Correct. I just said that. She was a part of Founders Fund. Oh, right. She runs a seed fund called Long Journey Ventures. Okay. Some of her hits include SpaceX, Anduril, Density, Postmates, Niantic, which is the makers of Pokemon Go, and Jason's favorite startup, Uber. Uber.
Yeah, it's been a good run. It's been a good run. And also, I'll just add, a wonderful human being. And if you ever had the chance to hang out and talk for a couple of hours, Cyan would be one of those people that you'd put right at the top of the list.
I will promote Cyan's interview with Tim Ferriss a couple of weeks ago. Oh, yes. I randomly turned it on. I was in the car driving home. And then I stopped in my driveway and kept listening. I was just telling Cyan, like, it was a fantastic, what was it, about two hours, two and a half hour interview?
Well, it was four hours. Three hours. I think he cut it to three and a half. Yeah.
And then I had to drive again. I listened to the, and I was like excited to get back to it, which never happens for me listening to long form interviews like that. Like it was phenomenal. So I recommend it to everyone.
Why did it hit you so deeply?
A couple of things. One, Cyan is an incredible storyteller. Like the way she describes her experiences, her history, her life, beautiful.
She talks in kind of, I think, a deep persuasive way about some of the things that have shaped her, her business investing, as well as kind of spirituality, which she mentioned earlier, which is not something that you'll typically, and you're like, wait, where did this conversation just pivot to? And then you go down this whole other path with her and you go on the journey with her.
I just thought it was great. So all over the place, it was great, beautiful, recommend it to everyone to get to know Sian.
Oh, thanks. Can I have you all as my professional cheerleading squad from now on? I don't like talking about myself and this is great.
I love it. Yeah. Well, it's true. Cyan was voted most humble in our angel investing group, and I was a close second. So I almost won most humble. More work to do being humble. I'm going to get you a t-shirt called the humblest. No, you have to borrow it from Chamath. He's had it for the last 10 years.
Seven or eight years ago, Jason approached Cyan and I and said, hey, guys. Harvey Weinstein has asked me to make a show. Yes. True story. No, it's a true story.
Here's how he asked me to do it in his room. It's a true story.
Oh, dude. Take it down a notch. Cyan, myself, and Jason went to someplace in the city and we taped a... We taped an episode. I have it.
What is it called?
The first episode?
We taped the NBC pilot for The Accelerator or The Incubator. So I had been approached and did a pilot for NBC called... the accelerator and they spent like a half million dollars on this and you guys came on and it came out great. And it was just going to, you know, follow me around angel investing.
It was very awkward because afterwards they approached Cyan and I to do the show. Without me. Without Jason. And so we had to, we had to decide. Friends like me and Cyan. Ha! Who needs enemies? We decided our friendship was more important.
Exactly. I don't know if I ever told you guys the story, but literally, they were figuring out where to put this and what time slot. They were like, we're going to do it in the summer because we're trying to get some summer programming going. That's what we're going to test up. And then Harvey Weinstein turns out to be an horrible monster and the whole thing gets canceled.
And anything that was anywhere within 100 miles of Harvey Weinstein got canceled, including my failed or forgotten reality TV show. All right, let's get to more important things. There is an unbelievable tragedy occurring in Los Angeles as we're speaking.
Devastating wildfires basically have formed a ring around L.A., the most destructive of which has been the Palisades Fire, which has stretched into Malibu, obviously. And 15,000 acres or so have been burned in that area. Thousands of homes, maybe 2,000 homes. Here's some images. They're just devastating. And we have a lot of friends in this area.
And the area you're seeing on fire, if you don't know the topography of Los Angeles, is north of Santa Monica. You have Palisades and then Malibu. And obviously, east of the 405, you have things that you've heard of like Bel Air and Brentwood. This area is part of a mountain area.
area called the santa monica mountains and they get very dry and there's a phenomenon which we'll get into called the santa and it winds that blow really really strongly and a perfect storm has happened where thousands of homes and tragically five lives and i'm sure there will be more unfortunately have burned it down this video of driving down pch
If you've ever driven, PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway. These are 10, 20, $50 million homes that are literally on the Pacific Ocean. The most coveted homes in Los Angeles are not Bel Air and Brentwood. You might think that because you hear them on TV.
But really, if you were an incredibly successful person, you would aspire to live in the Pacific Palisades, just west of Brentwood and just south of Malibu or Malibu. Many celebrities live there, many executives, etc., And these homes are gone. Thousands and thousands of homes.
This has turned into the ultimate Rorschach test on social media, where people are projecting into this tragedy, which tragically occurs every year to varying degrees. And maybe every 20, 30 years, it's an acute situation. We'll get into that in a moment. But looking at this absolute, just devastating loss of property and lives, the lives could have been a lot worse.
Freeberg, from a scientific perspective, maybe we'll start there. When you look at these wildfires, extreme weather, global warming, and you look at this situation, is that where your mind goes or in this Rorschach test of how you feel about these kind of tragedies and how you interpret it? Do you go somewhere else? The incompetence of California's government, DEI, Ukraine?
I mean, everybody is superimposing on this natural disaster, whatever their pet issues are. Where do you come to when you look at this?
I don't think that those are exclusive. Okay, I think that you can have had both incompetent planning and execution by leadership, as well as have kind of uncontrollable circumstances that management and planning weren't necessarily going to solve. And I'll kind of talk about a couple of these points real quick. First of all, like we talked about
when the hurricane hit a couple of months ago, remember? And as you guys know, I have an office or facility out in Nashville. So we were exposed to the flooding circumstances and we talked about the frequency of that sort of an event having been such a rare occurrence becoming more common
Similarly, we're seeing more frequent high wind events in California, flooding events in California, and extremely hot events in California. If you look at this link I sent out, Nick, in terms of the total precipitation over this current what's called rain season, the Southern California region is basically at a, you know, call it 0% of normal. So this is Southern California.
You can see that third column. That's the percent of normal rainfall that has been experienced. There's been zero rain. in these regions. So everything is primed to be very dry, and then you get the Santa Ana winds, 100 mile an hour winds.
No matter how much underbrush you clear out, no matter how many trees you remove, if there's some embers in the air, there's a 100 mile an hour wind, that is gonna create a fire hurricane, and a lot of homes are gonna get caught on fire. So it's very hard to kind of just pin the blame solely on not doing underbrush clearing, not doing removal of trees. Those should have happened.
They didn't happen. That was wrong. That was bad policy. But it doesn't excuse the fact that there's a natural event that happened here that seems to be occurring with greater frequency. The thing I'll kind of pivot to, if we want to get there now, maybe we'll talk about that in a minute, it's kind of the economic and the policy issues with respect to the Department of Insurance.
Okay, let's get to that after we go through maybe a little bit of the quick reactions here.
I think that's where there's going to be real pain and devastation. And that's the biggest economic consequence is the role that insurance has played in all this stuff, which we'll get to in a minute.
Okay, so Chamath, I think table stakes, we all agree, global warming, extreme weather, depending on what degree you believe in it, there's play some factor here. And this is something that has reoccurred over and over again in this specific region. region. But on social media, we're seeing a lot of other interpretations of this event. Maybe your thoughts on some of the other interpretations.
And then when you look at it, what do you start to think about preventing this in the future? Or maybe who's responsible? What's your general take on what we've seen in the last week?
I mean, I'm not very sympathetic to the, there were 100 mile an hour winds, not because it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are happening in greater and greater frequency.
Nick, maybe you can find this and just put it up here, but remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018 burning to the ground? Can we just look at that, all of us collectively? Because that was six years ago. This is not like it was a distant memory from 100 years ago. We knew in 2018 that these types of- Oh, the Sepulveda Pass.
So this idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by 100 mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer. We knew in 2018 that these things could happen. We knew across the rest of the United States that these outlier weather events were happening in greater and greater frequency.
If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California homes fire coverage three months before this event happened. So all this data was in the realm of the knowable. And then when you double click and you get into a little bit more of the details, there's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the bottom of.
So I'll just give you a couple of facts. In the 1950s, the average amount of timber, so wood that was harvested in California, was around 6 billion board feet per year. In the intervening 70 years, that shrank to about 1.5 billion board feet. And so you'd say, okay, well, that's a 75% reduction. We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation.
It turns out that that's not entirely true because what it left behind was nearly 163 million dead trees. Dead, like gone. And so you would say, well, those things should have been removed.
And the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, hopefully I'm pronouncing this right, and a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local governments and fire management to clear these dead trees and vegetation. And I think that that's a really big deal.
And when you double click on that, here's where you find the real head scratcher, okay? Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislator, or worse, vetoed by Governor Newsom. that would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues.
Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground. SB 103, as an example, went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk. So I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. One is everybody can see that these events are happening. Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just six years ago.
All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence.
Okay, Cyan, you've heard Chamath and Freeberg's take here. some amount of incompetence, some amount of, hey, this keeps occurring and there might be some global warming that is contributing to it. What do you take away from this situation?
I agree with Friedberg and Chamath. You know, it's a lot of everything. But I also think that to add to the prevention part, you know, other than clearing out underbrush and trees and things like that, you know, we don't build things in the state of California in a way that Houses should be built when you know that there are fires like this.
So, for example, we have more wooden roofs than we really should have. We should really evaluate our materials that we're building things out of. But we also have, you know, down in El Segundo, you know, this is a company that I invested in Rainmaker. We have the ability now to cloud seed and do preventative measures to actually make a region have more water.
And I don't understand why we're not looking into things like this that could have prevented, you know, we knew that this storm was coming. We knew that these winds were coming. You know, Southern California shut power down. I have a farm down there. We still don't have power because they knew that most of these fires were started by PG&E or down power lines.
And so they proactively shut everybody down and we're still running on generators. And if you notice, there's no fires down there, but they also have 100 mile per hour winds.
Yeah.
And you're not seeing it. And there's plenty of mountain ranges and dryness there. You know, avocado farms are basically just sitting fuel. So I do think it's a combination of all of those things. And competence is definitely one of them.
Yeah, and I actually lived right next door to this area for a long time in Brentwood. And to your point about roofs, it seems silly. And a lot of these fire prevention things can seem silly when you first mention them, which Trump looked, let's face it, the way he says things sometimes is very colorful.
And when he said, listen, you're not raking like people in wherever he said it, Scandinavia, Finland are raking the forest. And he was absolutely 100% correct on that. Maybe it sounded bombastic or silly when the way he said it. But the truth is, in Tahoe, where we just were over the holidays, people are clearing underbrush.
When I lived in Los Angeles, people who lived in the Hollywood Hills would get a fine if they didn't clear it. But there are mountain ranges that nobody owns. And when you showed that Sepulveda Pass, that's the 405 going past the Getty Center. That area has got to be cleaned by the city and the government. And maybe they weren't doing it as much. Look at this. This is apocalyptic.
Yeah, so I know this past very well because I would drive through it.
Jason, what did California learn from this? What did Gavin Newsom implement based on what happened here? What did the city of Los Angeles implement based on what happened here? I want to just specifically know the answer to those two questions.
Yeah, and I think that's going to be a big part of this breakdown after this happens, because in a lot of these cases, you might lose a home or two, but you haven't had this kind of wholesale destruction in a while. And when I lived in Brentwood, I had a shake roof. That's a fancy way of saying shingles, wood shingles, and they would bake in the sun.
And I love this roof, but my neighbors, who in Brentwood were all 70, 80 years old, and I was right on Sunset Boulevard, and I could look up from my house and see the place you just showed, which is the Getty Center and the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 and Sunset Boulevard. I was only allowed cyan to replace 30% of my roof at a time. You couldn't replace it and put shake roofs on.
You could only like maintain it because in 1961, there was the Bel Air and Brentwood fires. And these fires, you want to talk about like in memory, Jamal, this one, Zsa Zsa Gabor and tons of celebrities lost their homes as well. This one was started because of the Santa Ana winds and somebody was just burning a rubbish pile. I think it was some construction workers were burning that.
They said to me, the neighbors, do you know about the Bel Air fire? You know what the Brentwood fire? You got to get rid of that shake roof. You got to get rid of that shake roof. When my daughter was born, the roofer said to me, let's put composites on. I put composites on. And he said, what do you want to do with the sprinkler system?
And I said, there's a sprinkler system in my little one story ranch house? He said, yeah. I said, I've never seen it. And he showed it to me. It was on the roof. People were so scared after that 62 fire, they were putting these on the roof. And now you cannot have. Wood roofs have been banned. You were grandfathered in. I was part of that. But there was a lot of PTSD from that.
And now I do think there's going to have to be some lessons learned. And let's get to where some folks online are pointing to maybe not having great priorities, and maybe focusing on things that are not as important as the taxpaying citizens. A lot of tweets, I don't know how people feel about them, about DEI, about who's running the fire department, etc.
Did you have any thoughts on that, Friedberg?
I mean, look, one of the things I wanted to talk about was the DOI's role, the Department of Insurance role, in what I think will ultimately be creating a pretty significant economic consequence here from this sort of an event. But I'll answer your question. I don't think that the mission of any public service organization should be to meet DEI metrics.
I think the mission of that public service organization should be to serve the public. And I think that those DEI metrics should not be a priority when serving the public is the objective. The best ability to serve the public should be the objective, and that's it. And I'll state that really clearly.
So obviously the fire chief in LA is getting a lot of attention, whether or not that prioritization of DEI metrics took away from the interest and the focus in preparing for major disasters, I don't know. There have been some interviews over the last day or two, just to be fair,
where she has claimed that they asked for more money, that they would not be able to be prepared for major disasters if the budget cut took place that was proposed by Bass, that budget cut did take place. And so the fire chief has said that she asked for budget to make the preparation for this sort of event and she lost it.
And so I don't want to just say, hey, she's to blame, she's to blame because she was focused on DEI. But I will separately say that I think that creating DEI as a mission for an organization that's supposed to serve the public interest makes no sense.
This is an important one. James Woods, obviously the famous actor, who lost his home in Pacific Palisades, has been going on a bit of a rant about Christine Crowley. She is LA's fire chief. She also happens to be a lesbian and has made a priority and done a number of talks on trying to increase diversity inside of the fire department.
She also, just with a bit of research, is one of the top performing firefighters in a paramedic, an engineer, a fire inspector, a captain, a battalion chief, an assistant chief, fire marshal, deputy chief. And when she took the firefighter exam in the late 90s, she was scored in the top 50 out of 16,000. She seems eminently qualified.
There has been a massive pile on attack on her and, you know, how it is on X and other social networks where people are really tweaked about DEI that they're kind of putting the blame on her. What are your thoughts of this DEI angle, Chamath?
I don't think this is to blame. If all of a sudden, because of DEI, 70% were physically incapable of carrying out the task, and that's why these fires grew, maybe you could make the claim that it is a DEI problem. I do agree with Friedberg that the thing that these public institutions need to do a better job of is being very clear about what their North Star is.
I think the North Star for the fire department is to save people's lives and put out fires. I think the North Star for the police service should be to save people's lives and to hold criminals responsible and get them off the streets. and you should hire the people that allow you to do that job the best.
The thing to keep in mind is that there were probably 20 or 30 people interviewed to be fire chief. It's not her fault that she was selected. The real question is, what was she mandated to focus on once she got the job? And I think what you see in all of these interviews is I don't think that she all of a sudden after growing up through the fire service had this DEI bent.
I think typically what happens is it becomes an institutional directive. It guides your compensation, it guides your recognition, and so you do it. It's sort of what Charlie Munger says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. The entire public service is riddled with this. The entire private service is riddled with this, which is that we've lost the script about what is important.
So it's yet another example. She's probably quite a capable person who, if was just allowed to focus on fighting fires and saving people's lives, would probably do a good job. But if you had to add all these other things that are not germane to that task, then people will get frustrated and projected onto her.
It seems like a lot of projecting going on here, Chamathia. I agree.
All of that said, though, I think you got to go back to how did these fires start? How did they grow out of control? And again, I think that these wins didn't come out of nowhere in the sense that they caught everybody off guard. This has happened before. That area has gone through this exact moment Yes. There were laws that were proposed. They were vetoed. Okay.
So that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick Caruso who were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took proactive and protective measures. Could those proactive and protective measures not be taken more broadly through LA County? Of course they could have. Why were they not?
And here, what we're seeing on the screen is Rick Caruso's village.
Let me ask a very specific question. How much money, and we know the answer to this, how much money did the government of California spend poorly, as it turns out, on homelessness? It was about $21 billion and illegal immigrants. I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of billions.
If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas, what would the outcome have been? Maybe there still would have been a fire. Maybe there would have been damage. But it's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now.
Yeah, I think what you're getting to here is we can confirm lesbians didn't cause the Santa Ana winds to cause these fires, obviously, but there is an issue that I think many people in the public, especially in California, who voted for this very leftist liberal ideology are now starting to realize is, hey, wait a second, what are the priorities here, Cyan?
What are we focused on and what should we be focused on? And it's very easy to be focused
on dei and maybe things that aren't as important homelessness and move budget there but at the same time they wouldn't give her 17 million dollars they cut the fire budget she tried to fight it well that that's not clear now there's now the counter narrative is that she actually got an extra 50 jason okay so we're in a breaking news environment so we'll see what the truth winds up being here
But, Cyan, I think the point remains the same here, which is, is prioritization and what we focus on out of whack in California?
Oh, without a doubt. I think diversity is good unless that's all you have. And I'll just simplify it like that. And I think it's very sad that somebody could be very qualified and be in a position, and we now have to question whether or not they were hired because of DEI. And Then it comes down to prioritization.
Like, when you're dealing with an organization like a fire department whose main job is to protect the public and put out fires and save people, any amount of time, as we know, is a valuable, precious resource that's being spent trying to roll out these programs or, you know... It goes beyond just who you hire. It's even the thought police of how you think.
It's so pervasive within an organization that you die from the bureaucracy of it. And if anything went wrong with DEI, it was that they didn't have their eye on the prize of fighting fires. And instead, you know, they're focusing on something that truly doesn't matter. So you can be as diverse as you want to be and not be able to put out a fire and then it just really doesn't matter, right?
Because you're not training people. You're not spending money on things that matter. You're not having the discussions that matter. And... That's where I think that does fall apart and it has a place there. But, you know, I go back to what Chamath said, though, you know, it really comes down to prevention and learning from our past.
We seem to have a very short term memory and we forget very quickly because we rebuild and it looks pretty again and everybody forgets. And we just don't have the ability as a society really to think long anymore. Yeah. And that's a real problem. And I think we should learn from this fire. I really hope that what comes out of this is a shift in political leanings in this in this state.
You know, I think more moderates are going to come to their senses. And as we've seen with the election and the outcome. And I think the state might shift some and we might actually get some policies that you're so right.
You're so right. I mean, when are we going to get tired of all this late stage progressivism? It's like these litany of excuses. The people that are in charge have failed us yet again. Exactly. We have wasted so much money on so many things that don't move the needle. And then the things that they needed to do, they didn't do. And then they point the finger at climate change. It's a joke.
At a certain point, you have to wonder, are we using politics and the purpose of it to make people's lives better and to have a high functioning society? Or is it a way to virtue signal or to share your opinions on things? Oh, it's absolutely a virtue signal. Yeah.
And I think what people are starting to realize is, you know, in an acute situation, whether it's our budget deficit, whether it's schools, whether it's safety from climate, you know, or non-climate induced disasters, you do need to have competence.
And this is the Rick Caruso is such a competent executive that when he ran for office there, the fact that he didn't get that job is just absolutely crazy. And you saw the mayor come in and she wouldn't even address She wouldn't answer any questions from the press, not even thoughts and prayers or, you know, we're thinking of this or we're going to get it done.
It just seems like we're hiring non-executives to work in functions that should be high-performing executives. This is an operational role.
Let me maybe bring something that ties these three things together, but it builds on critically what Cyan said. There are so many people here that are good, hardworking people that lost their homes. For many of these folks, it could be the most single and only financially securing asset that they have.
For other people, those that are family age, they have kids now beyond the financial damage that are totally displaced. Where will these folks go?
There was a comment by Adam Carolla, a commentary, where he said, the real test, to Cyan's point, will be how they internalize and metabolize this because it now affects them personally and they have to go and wait three years to build building permits to rebuild. Now, that's assuming that they can even get a reasonable amount of insurance coverage, which touches Freeburg's point.
This is the real tragedy. That is the actual tragedy multiplied by 120,000 or 200,000 families. And the real question is how much of that was completely avoidable. And I think there is a reasonable amount of it that could have been. That's what really sucks. And that's where you cannot take your finger off the scale and forget.
And yeah, when it lands on your doorstep, quite literally here, they are not going to be able, having been in this exact area, I can tell you, when you try to pull a permit to do anything, as I was explaining with my roof, the regulations are deep and expensive and time-consuming. I don't believe... We talked about the California Coastal Commission on a recent episode, Friedberg.
What are the chances that the California Coastal Commission even allows these people to build those homes in those locations on PCH, Friedberg?
I was talking to Chamath about this earlier today because the California Coastal Commission was created by the voters directly in 1976. And that commission has authority that exceeds legislative action. So you would have to basically go back. My understanding is you'd have to go back to a state vote to rescind the powers of the California Coastal Commission.
So they have effective, complete authority over deciding what does or doesn't get built on the coast because their objective is to preserve the coast for the use of the community and restore it to its natural habitat. So anytime there's a request or a permit request, it can take two decades, three decades sometimes to get anything approved if they ever approve it at all.
And so the California Coastal Commission, any property that touches the beachfront in California, they have this kind of, you know, God level authority over and they're basically all political appointees that sit on the commission.
To my question, Freeberg, what are the chances they allow the millionaires on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu to rebuild those homes? Or do you think they slow roll it and those people are all 50, 60, 70 years old? They'll never be able to rebuild their homes. The California Commission would just slow roll this and say, you know what? Nature returned it to its natural state.
I think we should talk about insurance. This is a great segue. Yeah, yeah, the perfect segue.
Yeah. This is the key point I wanted to say about insurance. So going forward, yeah. All of this property- that sits in climate sensitive zones, or weather sensitive zones, whatever you wanna call it, like we've talked about on the coast of California, of Florida, in hurricane centers, in tornado centers, where the frequency of loss is going up, they're priced
as if the frequency of loss is what it used to be, which is like, let's say you buy a home for a million dollars and the probability of your home getting wiped out by a natural disaster is a one in a thousand year kind of situation. So you have a one in a thousand chance of your home getting wiped out each year.
So your price for insurance on that million dollar home should be about 10,000 bucks a year, one 10th of 1%. So 10,000 bucks a year for a million dollar home sounds expensive, but it is what you have to pay for homeowners insurance. But now let's say that the probability shifts to one in 20 years. So now you've got a one in 20 year probability of your home getting wiped out.
Are you gonna pay 5% of your home value No. And if you have a $10 million home, are you going to pay $500,000 a year for property insurance? No. Now, what's happened is the insurance companies have these models. They're called CAT models or catastrophe models. It used to be two companies. One was called RMS. The other one was called Equicat.
And I used to work in this business, so I know it pretty well. And then all the companies started building in-house models. And now there's startups that make models. And these models have shown that there are increased probability of complete loss in a region because of the increased probability of these crazy weather events happening. And so the price of insurance should go up.
Here's the problem. There are 50 state insurance commissioners in the US. In order to sell insurance in a state, you have to have the insurance carrier and the policy approved in that state. And the states determine what rate or what price you can charge for insurance. So the state insurance commissions have a couple of goals. Number one is to keep all the insurance companies solvent.
So they wanna check the financials of all the insurance companies, make sure they're not writing too many policies that they won't be able to pay out. The second thing is they wanna make sure that the insurance companies aren't ripping consumers off. So they have control over the rates and they don't want the rates to go up too much in any given year.
So they're controlling rates and keeping them down. And then the third is they're supposed to make sure that consumers have access to insurance. And the third is a very hard thing to do. If you're trying to keep company solvents, you can't write too many policies. And you're saying, hey, you can't raise prices. And meanwhile, the probability of loss has gone up.
So the insurance carriers are like, what choice do I have? So earlier this year, State Farm pulled out of Palisades. They stopped writing fire insurance in Palisades. They canceled 1600 policies in the exact neighborhood that just burned down.
What about the timing of that free burn? That was three months before, six months before this happened?
I think it was like six months before.
It's not just that.
Yeah, but it seems crazy. But as you know, in Tahoe, a lot of the policies have been canceled.
Yes, so it's just crazy timing.
It's a crazy coincidence. And remember, in wine country, we had a lot of wipeouts. All of Santa Rosa was burnt out a few years ago. You guys remember that? And so they started pulling out of there. So a lot of the carriers are generally pulling out of California because when they go up to the DOI and they're like, hey, we need to raise rates by, we need to double the price of insurance.
We need to triple the price of insurance. This is now a one in 20 year event. The Department of Insurance says, no, no, no, we're not gonna let you charge that much to consumers. And then the carrier's like, okay, we got no choice, and they exit the market. Here, you can see right here, 1,600 policies canceled.
This has been a big driver, is the Department of Insurance has made it very difficult to find this free market outcome. But at the end of the day, one of three parties are going to end up eating the cost of the change in probability of loss that has occurred.
It's either the homeowner, because they're going to end up losing the value of their home in a loss, or they're going to end up needing to write down the value of their home when they sell it to someone who will take on that risk, which means the price has to come down.
Or number two is the insurers, and there's not enough insurance capital out there to cover all these losses, so all these insurers would go bankrupt. Or the third is the taxpayer. One of those three is going to end up eating the loss that's about to happen.
No, you know the answer. You know the answer. Taxpayer. Taxpayer.
Yeah, somebody's going to lobby somebody. But hey, we're sitting here, Chamath, in the age of Doge and saying, hey, let's make the government smaller. In fact, Dave, you and I were talking about at some point, gangs of New York and the fire departments being- Oh, yeah, totally.
Great scene. Talk about that.
talking about that two or three weeks before this happened. But when we look at making government smaller, well, that means that these kinds of situations would put citizens more on their own. So let's counterbalance what you think, Chamath, about who should be responsible. We all espouse, I think, free market ideology on this program and as executives and in what we do every day.
Should the people who own these homes going forward who decide to rebuild them here be have to pay 5%, 10% of their value of home every year? Should their home prices collapse because it's too hard to build there? And should the free market take over this risk?
Or should it constantly be put on the other 329 million Americans who are going to have to bear the brunt of what happens to the million people affected in this area?
Well, I mean, should's a very strong word. The cap on the insurance reimbursement is about 3 million is my understanding. David, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that's right. The houses in the Palisades are anywhere from, call it 1 million on the low end to maybe 40 or 50 million on the high end.
The average is four and a half. Yeah, I was about to say, there's nothing for a million these days. Yeah, it's got to be three or four minimum.
Right, but the median is probably more instructive, which is probably seven or eight million. Yes. My point is that folks will get less than half their home value back. They're going to have to come up with some amount of money to then rebuild. But the cost of rebuilding a 7,000 square foot house in the Pacific Palisades is probably at least 1,000 square foot. So that's 7 million of cash.
So now all of a sudden, these people have to come up with a lot of money. Exactly. And that's post-tax money. So you might as well double it because California is just so egregiously burdensome in terms of taxes. So the individual homeowner is not going to be in a position to rebuild.
I think that the liabilities of the insurance claims are going to be so massive that the state's going to look to the federal government to bail them out.
My parents just got evacuated. I got to call them and just... There's a new fire. They're literally... Right. There's a new fire called Kenneth Fire. It just took off and it's at their house. So just give me... I'll be back.
Okay, don't do your thing. Oh, wow. Gosh almighty. We're talking about, hey, maybe less government. Hey, maybe spending less. Now the same group of people maybe who were saying, hey, we need to spend less and reduce the size of government are saying, hey, well, why isn't California more prepared? Well, being prepared obviously means more money and more taxes.
So you have now these two competing ideologies here. But to the question of who is responsible, it is economically going to make no sense to rebuild unless you can get that insurance. It is a coveted place to live. But because of the construction costs have gone absolutely parabolic in California because of regulations, you're talking about $14 million in income to build a $7 million house.
And maybe you're just better off selling the lot for $1 million and letting it be somebody else's problem going forward and just taking the $2 or $3 or $4 million loss. Who should pay? for on a go forward basis, underwriting these homes.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of these people paid for, I was reading stories of 30 some odd years into insurance thinking that, you know, their house wouldn't burn down. And then, of course, it gets canceled two weeks before their house burns down. And then the one time they need it, they don't have it. And part of this is, I mean, a huge part of it is what Friedberg was talking about are the regulators.
And so the free market solution is the only solution. If you look at, I have an investment in a company called Kin Insurance, and they specialize in direct-to-consumer insurance. insurance for areas that are plagued with natural disasters. So their number one state out of the 11 that they serve is Florida, followed by Texas, which has tornadoes and things like that.
And how they're able to get into these places and do insurance is the pricing is according to the construction of your home and all of these various things, and also weather models and using data science, things that are not allowed in California, if you can believe it or not. So you're not allowed to use a weather model to price in your decision-making for insurance in the state.
And that just doesn't make a lot of sense. You should be rewarded if you put the resources and time into your home to make it weatherproof, fireproof. Fireproof. Even earthquake resistant, right?
This is more regulations that were layered on here to try to create equality. And the fact is, it's now... working against the system in Tahoe, to your point, they gave us explicit instructions around homes. Put stone and pebbles around your home. Cut the trees and bushes down around your homes. Do this over here. Your premium should go down when you do that.
And if you do that, which might cost $10,000 a home, it would keep these from jumping from one to the other in most fire situations. Freeburg, you're back. Is everything okay?
It's not okay listening to your, you know, 70-something-year-old parents evacuate their home and try and pack their cars with all their stuff in a matter of minutes while a fire creeps on their home is a pretty devastating thing to listen to.
Yeah. What are they saying?
They're trying to get out of the house. They're throwing everything in the car. There's evacuations. Oh, my Lord. If I'm looking at the video right now, the fire is, like, right by their house. It's insane. It's literally, like, blocks away from their house.
God. Yeah.
This is nuts. This is the house I grew up in, in LA. I'm so sorry.
Oh man. Gosh. It's blocked away.
And I'm like, you know, what do you say to them? Like throw all the photo albums in the car is what I said. Throw the photos, like just grab the framed photos. My mom's trying to grab all her like jewelry and stuff.
That's the number one thing that everybody misses and is mentioned in every interview that I've seen is photographs. Photos.
I'm like grab all the photos, grab all the albums. And she's like, you know, she's grabbing her jewelry and stuff. And I'm like, grab the photos. Like.
We're the last generation that will be thinking about this issue of grabbing the photos. Yeah. It's fascinating. I just want to say, like, you know, as we wrap up this segment, you know, obviously we're thinking about everybody there. This is complex. This is not the fault of a lesbian firefighter or the Ukraine or any of these other issues. This is leadership and nature and preparedness.
So there are big issues around climate change. You want to believe me, you don't want to believe me, fine, put that aside. But I can tell you that when I saw Karen Bass get off that flight Play the clip, Nick, of Karen Bass here, because it's a short enough clip that we can play it here for the audience.
I'm assuming you all, three of you saw this clip of her being absolutely unwilling to answer a single goddamn question about what's going on. This is the opposite of a leadership. Just 10 seconds of this.
Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor? Have you nothing to say today? Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today? Disgraceful.
She's in shock. I mean, I have zero sympathy. You took the leadership job. I don't give a shit if you're in shock. You're a leader. You sold yourself as the leader that you were going to service these people and you don't have the dignity, the honor to just answer the questions. That is absolutely the worst leadership I've ever seen under fire.
Let me ask you guys a question. Disgraceful. What do we do?
You fire them all and you vote for Rick Caruso, you vote for executives who know what the they're doing and know what to do in a crisis because they've been under fire before, because they've run a business before, because they've seen hit the fan. This person, I don't know her, I don't know her history, but I'll be totally honest, like I wouldn't trust her
literally to pick up my lunch, if she can't answer one or two goddamn questions and give a placating answer to a reporter, hey, it's an intense situation. We're working as hard as we can. She can't even say two goddamn words to the people who voted her in.
And for anybody who voted for this level of incompetence, it reminds me of exactly what we went through in San Francisco when I was living there in the Bay Area, when you put someone like Chesa Boudin in or London Breed or this entire...
Clown car, Aaron Petsker, all these disgraceful, the Marxist lunatics who would rather virtue signal dopey Dean Preston, the whole lot of them, you vote them out and you vote in executives. And it doesn't mean a Republican executive. It doesn't mean a Democrat executive. It means an executive who's run something in their life before.
Whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's Trump, whether it's Rick Caruso, it doesn't matter their ideology. It matters their effectiveness. And if you vote for ineffective people, you're going to get situations like this over and over and over again. So use your brains and vote for executives who've done something in the world. This is why I've changed my position on rooting for Trump now.
I was a never Trump or everybody knows that, but he put executives around him this time around. And I am rooting for those executives to do what's right for the American people and solve big problems, not make them worse. It's infuriating. Timoth, what do you think?
I think we need to have a wholesale replacement of the people that govern the state of California. It's just not working. Period. Full stop. And I think that the citizens that live in California need to do some real soul searching. It is beyond party politics.
So I think what has happened in California is people vote for whatever vessel has the name Democrat beside their name or Republican beside their name. And I think that you have to go back to first principles and do a better job of picking the people to represent us because the people that are in positions of power just don't fundamentally know what they're doing. They're not capable.
And the fact that then what we have to deal with are sort of lies and distractions to excuse incompetence, I think is unacceptable. I think we pay way too high of a price. And like I said, you are now dealing with hundreds of thousands of families whose entire lives have been totally disrupted and ripped away.
And I hope that we learn something from this because we didn't learn from it eight years ago. And we clearly didn't learn from it when a different natural disaster in North Carolina. Will we find out that folks said, hey, guys, is there an outlier natural disaster event? Obviously, it's not going to be the same thing in North Carolina, but could a different form of something happen here?
What could it be? Are we prepared? I'm sure we'll find out that they didn't do that. Maybe they had different meetings and they were about other total distractions or things that just didn't matter. So this is what we need to do. We, as a populace in this state, need a reset. Otherwise, we deserve what we get. Bingo.
Cyan, you agree?
Yeah, I think I think Democrats need to reclaim their party. I think there's a lot more strength in the middle. And, you know, they've let this woke ideology, I call it woke imperialism, like a religion. take over in place of actually doing things that matter to the people that elected them, that pay taxes, that pay their, you know, their paychecks and everything in between.
And it's time that people really look in the mirror. I've got so many moderates coming to me saying, you know, people call me a Republican and I'm far right and I'm a Nazi and I'm like, yeah, welcome to the club. At some point, you've got to stop letting them run the board and stand up and say, enough's enough. We're not building some railway that's never being built.
We're not solving homelessness with billions and billions of dollars. We're not doing this stuff anymore. We do need real executives, to your point, Jason, to run things that understand how things are, how it works, and the best use of funds. Because right now, it's misappropriated.
It's a crisis of competence. I mean, I think we all see it. These are incompetent people.
By the way, it's not just the leadership. It's also legislative action that's going to be needed to fix a lot of the policies, the regulations, the way infrastructure operates in the state. And that requires three things to change. Number one is the California State Assembly. Number two is the California State Senate.
And number three is to put things in front of the voters that they can vote on to make the wholesale change needed to rescind some of the bad decisions that were made over the last three decades in the state that has led us to this point. And I think that it's gonna require, just like what happened recently in the national politics,
a state politics organizational effort to say, let's take a look at the composition of the state assembly, the state senate, and what are some of the votes that need to be done by the citizens to make the necessary changes in the state to try and get the world's fifth largest economy to start acting and looking like it.
Because right now, it's sort of like a weirdly disabled third world country type operation with the wealthiest resources on planet Earth. And it seems pretty f***ed up. It's almost like once people have it all, that's when they want to give it all up. That seems to be the moment that this state has just passed. Now maybe it's time to go reclaim it and build it back.
Well said. I mean, and as we said in this segment, there are so many common sense, tactical, strategic things that these people could be doing, that they should be doing, that they're not. And there needs to be a full-blown investigation. You kind of alluded to this earlier, Chamath, but if there is, if this is dereliction of duty, then we need to look into this in a very deep fashion.
And to the people of California, you have more power than you know My friend who used to be on this podcast once in a while, he and I collaborated on Chesa Boudin being taken out as this DA in the Bay Area. I know some other people here were involved in it as well. And you can recall somebody. So recall these incompetent lunatics. Recall them.
And replace them. It's scary, but you can. You know, they send all their people after you. They threaten you. Gets personal. They went after you. I was signature number one. And I had to deal with the deluge of that stuff. But to be honest with you, I've never been happier to do something and get civically engaged.
I think it's so important that everybody starts getting involved in their local government and their state government and the national government because you can't just expect people to do the work for you. and expect it to turn out well. And I think that's kind of the mistake that we all made.
If we want to take some responsibility, the tech industry as a whole did not get as involved as we ought to have in the past. And I think we should get more involved than we are.
Why did for 20 years while we were all in the Bay Area or other people, you know, just too busy building companies?
I think we were busy building companies. And I remember, if I remember correctly, the only person I remember was, getting involved in local stuff was Ron Conway. Yes. And he would try to get everybody involved.
And we were all just like, you know, there's people who are smart that do that sort of thing and they're going to do their thing and they're running stuff and we're just not going to get involved. And there are a lot of people would say, I'm not political. I don't, I don't do politics. I don't, you know, they didn't get involved until it affected them. Kind of like the house is burning down.
It affects them. And yeah, You know, like they're saying that first they came for so-and-so and I didn't speak up. You know, that's what's happening here. And, you know, I just really think that people need to realize it's now affecting them and it's now time to make a change and elect better leaders.
Here's a framing. If you're paying 50% tax in California, you're a shareholder of an organization known as California Inc. You're on the board of that company. You're paying the salaries of the people there. You have a say. Recall these people. Start a recall of Newsom. Start a recall of Karen Bass. Just do it. I'm not doing it. I don't have time for this. I'm in Austin.
But y'all who are still in California, start a page, recall Newsom, recall Bass, and you have the power to do it and you will succeed. I guarantee it. Now is the moment to strike. There's other news we should get to. You know, I hate to say thoughts and prayers, but literally I've been thinking about this, you know, all day long. And I have a lot of friends. My friend Mark Suster lost his home.
I used to play cards with Jimmy Woods. And, you know, I just feel terrible for everybody who's lost their homes and then their kids and their schools are burned down as well. All those great schools in Pacific Palisades are gone.
I could see developers coming in and being like, dude, if I could buy all these lots for 80% off, I will.
Oh, that's what's going to happen. They're going to sit on them, yeah. They're going to just sit on them and wait for people to forget like they did in 1962.
Rick Caruso's of the world will do that, yeah. Anyway.
Yeah, he should be running the place.
I'll give you another California Department of Insurance stat. So after the California Department of Insurance wouldn't allow the rates to rise like they should from a free market perspective, they had to set up their own insurance program called the Fair Plan for homeowners. It has about $220 million of capital in it. And then they bought about $5 billion of reinsurance.
They have about 6 billion of exposure in Pacific Palisades alone. This is a bankrupt, just like I told you guys about in Florida. The State Insurance Commission tries to step in and fill the market gap that they create by regulating rates. And then they don't have enough capital to actually fill the gap because the reason the rates want to go up is because the thing costs more
than the state is willing to admit.
So they're distorting it. They're putting their thumbs on the scale and they're distorting it even more, which creates a bigger crater.
They're driving real estate value up because they're not allowing the cost of insurance of that real estate to naturally float. And so by driving real estate values up, the economy looks good, they make property taxes, income comes in, but at the end of the day, the bill is gonna come due. And in the case of Florida and in the case of California,
either the state government or the federal government's gonna step in and pay the difference. And at some point, taxpayers are gonna look at the fact that they're paying some percentage of their income to support someone else's home value. And they're gonna say enough is enough. And enough of these sorts of events start to happen.
And then the legislative change I think will happen that says, this, it doesn't make sense. We have to make a change. And I think we're getting pretty close after the series of events.
All right. This has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. Let's move on to our next topic here. Zuck just fired Meta's third party fact checkers, and he is going to embrace the community notes model from Twitter slash X, which predates Elon's ownership of the platform and is an open source project for those folks who don't know. On Tuesday, he made the announcement on an Instagram video.
He published a blog with a bunch of details. And he made the signal that he was going to move the trust and safety team out of California, which he feels maybe was too far to the left, as we were just discussing in the previous story, and move it to the great state of Texas. And here's a quote from his comments.
In recent years, we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressures to moderate content. This approach has gone too far.
If you remember back in August, Zuck sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining how the FBI and Biden administration have pressured Facebook into censoring posts about COVID and Hunter Biden. You'll also remember that Zuckerberg has over 3 billion members to his platform and had no problem banning Trump from the platform after January 6th. A lot to talk about in this topic, Cyan.
What's your general take of Zuck going MAGA? How do you interpret his change of heart?
I actually think deep down inside, he always has been. You know, I go back to the beginning days of Facebook and when there was social networks that were competing, which back at the time was MySpace, the only political party you could be was Republican or Democrat. And then along came Facebook and he added this third option called Libertarian.
And I would like to go to the Wayback Machine at some point and find his profile because his profile said he was a Libertarian. So when he started Facebook, you know, that's where he leaned. So I think he's always been a free speech person. I think he's always, this has been deep in his heart. I think what happened was he had enormous success. They grew very large and he had to become neutral.
Or he thought he did. And so I think what we're seeing with Zuck right now with his change in his, you know, even how he appears with a gold chain and how he's dressing and everything that he's doing is him going back to his roots to be more authentic. Because I think he hasn't been authentic for a long time. And that was a big critique that people had of him.
You know, they were just like, when he talks, he's like a robot. And I think what we're seeing is him coming out of his shell. And I don't know if fighting helped it or what helped it, but you know, I do think it's the best thing to do and all the platforms need to do it and should embrace it. And it can be game though. Community notes can be game that we saw it with.
I saw a report that, you know, Kamala's campaign or, or I don't know if they directly work for her or what happened, but they did take over community notes on X and started manipulating them. So you have to be really careful, you know, how you run a community. But in general, I'm all for it. I think it's the right move.
It's but one signal. It's one system for trying to get to the truth. It's not the only one. Fact-checking is another one. And having no system is another one. Chamath, you're obviously an alumni. You worked side-by-side with Zuckerberg in the pivotal years of building the Facebook platform. What's your take on what Cyan said? And what do you attribute... Zuckerberg's massive 180 here.
I would start by saying I think he's a phenomenal businessman. I mean, I think the results speak for itself. But I also think that that is exactly what explains the shift. In many ways, he had to make that shift. I think it's fair to say that in the Obama and Biden administrations, when the winds were blowing towards censorship, they were part of that machinery.
And that was the value-maximizing function for Facebook shareholders in that time. Because if you push back against that, it's not clear what would have happened to Facebook in other ways. And so I think the decision, whether he morally agreed with it or not, almost didn't matter. It's the leadership of the country in which I operate is telling me it's going to go this way. I go that way.
Once the Biden and Obama administration sort of went to the wayside, there's a very interesting picture that Donald Trump put in his book. And I just, I sent it to Nick. And I think it sort of explains the last week's events relatively well. So I'll just read it. This is a picture of him sitting in the Oval, and it says, Mark Zuckerberg would come to the Oval Office to see me.
He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful lockboxes in a true plot against the president in J. Cal all caps. Okay. Shout out to the president. He told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook, but at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me.
We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election. Now, that's what he put in the book. And then he was asked about this quote. At a recent press conference, Nick, do you have the link to that? He's colorful, Freeberg. Did you notice? Donald Trump, a little bit colorful.
Essentially, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg's move to free speech. And he was asked, you know, do you think it was because of your...
threat and he goes yeah probably yeah well i watched their news conference and uh i thought it was a very good news conference i think they've honestly i think they've come a long way meta do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past probably probably
Wow, there it is.
But again, the lens that I would put on this is now the winds are blowing in a different direction. And I do think it's the value maximizing function. I think Elon didn't make a value maximizing function. He made a moral decision. He did it when it was unpopular and where the winds were clearly blowing in the opposite direction.
Now that those winds have changed and it's clear Trump won in early November, the decisions you make in January are more reflective of the new conditions on the field coming into the inauguration. But I do think it's the smart value maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders. And I think it begets a broader point.
I think the thing is when you see Elon operate, he's a complete outlier in many dimensions. But I think the one dimension where it matters the most is that he acts morally and in the best interests of what he believes humanity benefits from. He's always done it. He was willing to torch $44 billion when he bought Twitter in order to do it. And so he does these things from his own perspective.
I don't think there's any other CEO that leads this way. And I don't think they should necessarily. I do think that, you know, Mark's a good person, but his intimate feelings should be known by his wife, his children, his friends, his family. I don't think we as shareholders have any right to know necessarily. Elon is different.
And I think it creates an expectation that maybe we'll get that from everybody else. But I wouldn't conflate everybody else with him. So I think that this is a smart business decision. It makes a ton of sense. And as you can see, he was basically told to do this.
So he complied. Freeberg, your thoughts on Zuckerberg? making this decision, if Kamala Harris had won, would he have released this statement or added Dana White to the board of Facebook? Probably not. Okay. There you have it, folks. Pretty straightforward here. Kamala wins. He would not have done this. He is jumping in front of a marching band and he is the band leader now.
He's got his baton and he's a front runner. And if you open the dictionary and you look it up.
But I mean, it's a smart business move. I think if you're a meta shareholder, I think you're happy to see it. Absolutely.
Is there anything wrong with it, J. Kell, or you're just saying it's a point of character?
Oh, yeah, there's a tremendous amount wrong with it. It's called moral integrity, having an ethical compass, having chutzpah, having an own sense of what's right and wrong in the world, which he does not have, in my estimation, based on his behavior here.
Well, hold on, that's not fair. That's not fair. You don't know because, again, what I'm saying is... I said based on my estimation. No, but Jason, what I'm trying to say is... Elon shares who he is in a 360 degree way with the world. So we know where he stands. And all I'm saying is what Mark does or doesn't believe really isn't known to us. It's probably known to his wife and his family.
And his board. I doubt his board even knows actually.
Some of his close confidants, some of his confidants.
Let me be clear. I'm happy you're challenging me on it. I base people on their actions. His action was to be the greatest censor in the history of humanity. There's no human being who has censored more humans than him. That was his decision when it was a popular decision, whether it was COVID or popular.
Not popular, Jason, necessary for maximizing his business in that moment.
I disagree. His business would have been just as vibrant if he had a spine and he just said, this is what I believe. And I think he's over-optimizing based on what he thinks everybody else around him wants. And I don't know. I've never worked with him. I don't know him personally. You're right on that front. But he banned Trump for two years, the president of the United States.
I said at the time, I don't know that you can give a permanent ban to the president of the United States. When he had the opportunity to reevaluate that decision, you know what he did? He punted. He created a third-party organization to make the decision for him and deflected. Zuck created the oversight board.
He's so spineless, he decided, I'll create and give $150 million to this board to make these hard decisions for me. Instead of me making the decision, he has God voting shares of that company, Chamath. He controls it with an iron fist. And not only does he control it with an iron fist, he has put protective precisions in that so that his children could...
take that $3.3 billion platform and own it forever. And he punted to them and said, I don't want to make these decisions. What I saw when he did that was, I don't want to be blamed for these decisions. And that is a lack of courage and morality in my estimation. And then the second he is threatened by Trump, he makes the opposite decision.
And if he's making his decisions strictly on maximizing money, I don't respect that. I think he should make the decisions based on what he think is the moral. What is the point of being a billionaire or worth 100 billion or 200 billion if you don't get to say, I have you money, you, I'm going to do what I want. And that's what I think is his moral failure.
And anybody giving him his flowers or championing him for this, I think it's just political expediency. And I think it's disgraceful. That's my feeling. Sorry. I have my own opinion.
What about the fact that he was dragged in front of Congress many times over and people that could put him behind bars pulled him to his face many times and this has all been kind of been coming out over the last couple of months that government officials were directing him in a way that feels like do this or you will be prosecuted to do the following things to act the following way and to moderate your platform in a way that we are telling you to moderate it or you will find yourself behind bars.
Do you not think that there's some degree of inherent complicit kind of role that certain government officials and folks in power had in driving some of those actions that maybe he had to do it to survive and to keep the company alive?
Not to mention a violation of our constitution.
No, not at all. He could have just hired lawyers and fought it. He didn't put up any fight. The second they told him to roll over and ban Trump, he did it. Zero fight from him.
He has no... Do you know that for sure? Because I just want to make sure I ask you... I'm just basing it on his actions.
Like I told you at the beginning of this, I'm basing it on his actions. He was not going to jail for banning Trump. If he didn't ban Trump or he gave him a six-month suspension, he would have been just fine.
I'm just trying to get you to take a fair point of view, which means let's make sure you're thoughtful about the fact that this is not a dumb person. Give him the benefit for a minute.
I do give him the benefit of being a great business executive.
I'm just saying, let's just assume he's not dumb. And let's say that as Cyan points out, and as he's kind of highlighted points in his history, he actually does have certain beliefs and certain systems that he would love to kind of embrace. I've said this many times before. All of the founders of the big tech companies were all big free speech advocates.
That was a big part of the open internet and the movement of the open internet when a lot of people got involved. And that was a big part for him. And I don't know, like, you know, if you really think at some point he flipped his switch and said, I don't care about the open internet. I now want to have a closed controlled internet.
Or if he recognized or was coerced into controlling moderation on the platform because of the reach that he had. And he said, the only way I can have any degree of openness is to do the following. And I will say that my experience is similar in Google. When Google had to exit China,
They initially went to China with a closed internet, with a closed censored model of search, because that was the way they had to survive to offer a business in China. They didn't morally agree with it. They didn't think it was ethically correct.
Did they launch that or did Sergey kill the deal when Eric Schmidt proposed it? Well, that deal went live.
Let me just make sure I get this all correct.
No, they didn't go live. Sergey Brin, because of his upbringing in Russia, he went to the mat and said, on a moral basis, we're not going into China. And I've talked to Sergey about it. He did not want to go in there and compromise his own ethics. That's right. You're at full stop. So I don't think that Elon is the only outlier here. You're not right.
And I just want to make sure that- Okay, tell us, when did, because the Dragon, it was called Project Dragon?
There's a long history to this. Okay, let's let Cyan come in here. I want to make sure I get this right, but go ahead, Cyan.
Obviously, he's a brilliant businessman, but I do think underneath it all, he is a human being. And I think his fighting in the arena and this fighting stuff that he does actually did change him. And this happened long before the First Amendment stuff started to appear. You know, I think... Or free speech, I shouldn't call it First Amendment. But I do think that the government did interfere.
And after January 20th, we're going to find out some interesting stuff and we'll get to the bottom of, you know, how did the government pressure him to censor things? And I think he's getting in front of that because it is going to come out. And I think that is a huge part of why he is getting more involved is because it's going to be revealed just how much the government coerced him.
And how much he acquiesced. Is that sort of what you're saying?
Yeah, I mean, this is why I think the fighting actually helped. I think he learned to stop acquiescing. Wow. Interesting. He put up a fight. That is where I started seeing the change in him and started noticing it. And so did, you know, he's got so many more fans and people who are looking to him as a leader in a different way now because he's actually starting to express who he is.
And like what kind of music he likes. Nobody ever knew that. They thought he was just a robot. He doesn't like music. He hired a whole PR team to craft. This is my understanding. But anyway, I don't know that much detail. I don't I'm not involved in his personal life like that. But I just I always love to give people the benefit of doubt. I guess that's just me.
And I do think that people people can change. And I'm hoping that he is actually going to stay on this side. We we want more leaders like him to believe in free speech.
Of course, of course. I mean, listen, Reddit had- By the way, they all do. And I've never met an internet business executive who didn't come from kind of the open internet philosophical doctrine by background, that that was a big motivator for all of us because the internet took away the controls, took away the power, took away the censorship.
took away all these things that other kind of communication systems had vested in them. And the internet through an open protocol allowed anyone to share anything with anyone else. And obviously laws and all this other stuff that's happened since then has made that far more difficult. And I will revisit our conversation, Jason.
Google's China with censored search results was live for four years before they canceled it. So they launched in 2006. They censored results. They complied with the Chinese government's request. And eventually in 2010, they killed it. And you could argue it was because of philosophical reasons, but fundamentally, it never actually got a lot of users in China. There were more users on Baidu.
And Google had separately made an investment in Baidu that worked out for them.
And I think it was Gmail was the moment I think it became... if I remember correctly, this is 20 years ago, but I think... I think it was YouTube. Oh, was it YouTube? Because one of the other services, they started saying, hey, we need to know these people's names who posted this, who sent this email. We want full access into it.
And that's where they drew the line because it wasn't just a passive search engine, right? It was actually like roundup dissidents like... Yahoo famously did.
Yeah, Google claimed there was a hack that happened on their servers in China, and so they were just no longer comfortable operating in China.
How about this, guys? However we got here, we're here, and we should all be happy that we're here.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I'll take the win. And we just kind of move forward. Top of that.
I mean, taking the win is a good way to do it. The world is a better place because of his decision. Yeah, exactly. I think we all agree on that. I mean, what's the point of having an open platform and you can say things?
But why do you call them spineless? Like, why go after the guy? Why?
Because you can judge a person when they're put under pressure to make the right decision. I think what Jason is expressing is sort of what I was trying to say, and I probably said it poorly. I think there are some of us who look at the way that Elon runs himself and his companies, okay, as a sort of world-beating technology CEO. And then that sort of sets the bar.
But I think that that bar is impossible to meet. And I think part of it is because of Elon's genius. The other part of it is his success. The other part of it is his influence. But there's an element, Jason, of fundamental moral risk-taking that he takes that has been rewarded over and over again that no other CEO has had to make. And when they have, they've largely failed.
And so I understand where you're coming from, but I would give a lot of folks the benefit of the doubt here and say... It's not clear what they believed then versus what they believe now, but the destination is very good. And we're in a better place for society. And hopefully we can maintain these norms independent of who's in charge after Trump.
Hi, I'm super happy he's making these decisions. I believe in freedom of speech.
I think he's going to have to deal with advertisers next, though. I mean, that's one thing that X doesn't have to deal with as much. And that's going to be the second problem he's going to have is not just the government. But do advertisers want to be next to some of the content that's about to appear?
And when he loses tens of billions of dollars in personal net worth, will he make the same decisions? We'll see. But I can tell you, if Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position. I think he is terrified of Trump and having his company broken up, and he's doing this strictly to appease Trump.
which I think putting Dana White on the board is another signal. That's one of Trump's good friends. He's just trying to get close to the party. He's trying to make up for lost time for when he supported the censorship of Trump and other folks. I think he would make the opposite decision. But to your point, we're here. I'm glad he's here.
Would you meet Zuck in the octagon? That's the most important question of the day. No.
No, definitely not. He's 10, 15 years younger than me. He killed me. Not a chance would I meet him in the octagon. But I wish him well. I wish him well.
Would you meet Palmer Luckey in the octagon?
Let's not start that up again. I'm just wondering.
I'm just trying to let that die down. Just wondering.
I actually literally challenged him. He wanted to send the mountain. He wanted to pick...
somebody to fight for him trey from founders fund and i said no uh unless trey was i would like i would you guys ever watch the old tv show american gladiators i would like i would like you and palmer to have an american gladiators style tournament like maybe four or five events and you know you kind of that would be incredible put up a million dollars for charity i'll totally do it we'll put up a million dollars each for charity i'll do it
Let's get the word out there. I think that this could be the show of the season. Let's end on something super world positive here. This would be more exciting than The Accelerator, I will tell you.
Absolutely, it might get more ratings than it, yeah.
You could actually call it American Gladiators. It would be a great show.
Well, there you go. American Gladiators, the CEO edition. Business to business edition. They're going SaaS. All right, listen. NVIDIA going consumer. Let's talk about it. NVIDIA made a big announcement at CES this week. They made a lot of them. One of them that was particularly interesting was this $3,000 personal AI computer for researchers. That's awesome. It's called Project Digits. And...
It's essentially like maybe Arduino would be a way to look at this, like a personal device, but it's powerful enough to run LLMs on. They're also going after physical AI, like robotics and self-driving, as we said here on the award show.
A lot of people on the panel were predicting this year would be the year of robotics, and they announced that they're going to have driver-assistant chips and maybe build worlds for people to simulate robots.
Which net-net, at the end of the day, I think Freiburg puts them on second, would put autonomy partners on second or third base in terms of creating technology by incorporating it into the chips and into their stack. So, Cyan, what do you think of these announcements and some of the other ones he made? I know you were excited to talk about this.
Yeah, I'm really excited to talk about it because I think I've been trying to figure out how they justify their valuation strategy. over the long run. And I'm not a public market person, but I am fascinated with NVIDIA. And their cloud GPU business is definitely a majority of their revenue.
So I think a lot of what we're seeing is them trying to grow into that and trying to expand in case the music stopped. Now, I don't actually think the music's going to stop. It's insane to me We haven't even barely touched what AI is going to do and change and all of the various things that are going to come from it. And the early adopters cannot use Clawed
without getting shut down because of scaling issues. And I don't think those are artificially created based on the type of investing I'm doing. And so I'm very bullish on NVIDIA. It is interesting. It's an interesting thing to go consumer. And the thing that really hit me was the fact that he kind of declared Tesla one of the most valuable companies in the world in the long run.
It's interesting that he got behind Toyota. But at the same time, you know, I don't think there's one single car company out there that has the kind of data that Full Self Drive has and Tesla has. So if they enter the robo-taxi market, I actually think they should buy Uber.
Then it's kind of... You think Tesla should buy Uber?
Oh, yeah. I think they should buy Uber.
Well, that would be about 10% of Tesla's market cap at this point. If they paid a premium, it might be 15%. So it would be very similar to the WhatsApp.
It's kind of hard to believe, but it's true.
Yeah, it is true. Yeah.
And then you launch that robo-taxi service, and maybe there's some sort of secondary aftermarket solution, kind of like Comma AI or something like that, that you can do for people's cars, where you can actually get anybody's car into the fleet and start self-driving. But it is true. This is going to be the largest breakout in robotics we've ever seen, if Waymo's any indicator.
And, you know, I read somewhere, I think that Amazon or somebody was looking at it. I don't know what was going on with Waymo. But, oh, Lyft. Amazon was going to buy Lyft.
Yeah.
That makes no sense, right? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Well, it's a dying brand. And would the point be, I do think you're correct.
I think maybe delivery or something like that. I can't figure out what their play is there.
Well, and it's also not global. But looking at the Amazon and Waymo, Tesla, and Uber, I think Waymo plus Uber, Amazon plus Uber, or Tesla plus Uber defines who number one is, right? Because you'd have a global footprint. And for the five, 10 years, maybe 10 years it takes to roll out taxis globally, you could have people drive.
I mean, it's a really interesting thought process you have here, Sayan. Imagine if there was an intermediary step where They sold less Teslas this year slightly than last year. You could just keep producing lots of Model Ys and give them to the Uber drivers, keep reinforcement learning going while the taxis and regulations get set.
And then you would be able to put another, instead of selling 1.8 million Teslas, you could sell 3 million Teslas, 4 million Teslas to Uber drivers, get all that data and have the safety driver in while each region decides if they want robo-taxis, where, how, et cetera. Your thoughts, Chamath, on NVIDIA's dipping their toe into maybe taking the bottom 30% of the stack of self-driving?
I don't have much of an opinion on that, to be honest. I think that sort of along the lines of what I said on the prediction show, I think that Waymo and Tesla are going to run away with this market, and I think it's going to force a bunch of consolidation in the traditional auto OEMs.
I think the interesting thing is that they really doubled down and created a pretty decent test bench for robotics. I thought that was pretty interesting. So I think that reinforces what a lot of smart people, including what Freeberg and Gavin also spoke about, just in terms of the long-term future for robots. I think that that was cool. I was a little confused by the low-end PC.
I don't understand what the point of that is. Maybe it like creates some crazy deep end market where you can buy GPU and then contribute it to some distributed network and allow some distributed workload to run on that, I guess. I don't know.
I think it's a toy, a hobbyist kind of device that becomes like a bridge. And we see this often in technology where somebody creates, like even the original PCs, let's face it, they were kind of like toys and hobbyist devices, Arduinos, and the original drones were kind of hobbyist.
Yeah, I guess the point is a toy to do what? Because if you're trying to do inference, like everything is telling us that we are reaching the limits of training. And- That's an LLM though. Right.
The point is it's not, yeah.
Let me get to it. Yeah, yeah. So in this world of AI that we know it today, there's training and there's inference. And right now we think that there's training that's at a limit. And so now the market shifts to inference. So if you're going to buy this jacked up personal computer, what are you going to use it for? My suspicion is some sort of test time compute use case.
which is an inference use case. But it's not clear to me why that's a better solution than all of the AI accelerators plus tensors that are now just prolifically being exposed to the market, whether it's Amazon exposing what they've done, whether it's Google exposing what they've done, a whole litany of startups exposing what they've done. So I was just confused. I don't really know
what the whole point is. But like I said, the robotics thing was interesting if the market develops in the way that they think.
So we're talking about maybe two or three different pieces here, Freebird. Which one do you think is super interesting than this $3,000 sort of GPU for your desktop that you attach to your computer? You get to play with things locally. Do you think that's promising? Where would that go, if you have to guess?
So I think the bet he's making is it's not just LLMs, which is predicting text, but we've talked a lot about machine vision models. graph neural nets that are being used for weather forecasting. There's now these kind of genome language models that are trying to predict genomic output for biotech applications. There's also going to be kind of real time machine vision and robotic response.
Like we're working on this at Ohalo and we're trying to figure out what's the right kind of runtime environment for these sorts of systems that are going to be using a machine vision and a robotic kind of response type system. And there's a lot of these industrial applications that are emerging. Let's say you're running a robot in a warehouse.
Do you really want that robot in the warehouse to be sending data to the cloud and waiting for a model to run in the cloud and getting a response? The probability is you want to have that at the edge of the network. You want to have something local. And I don't think he necessarily has a strong point of view on what the types of models and industrial applications will be.
But the bet he's making is that the models are good enough and now the chips are good enough that they can actually realize real-time responses using machine vision, using real-time input, and then respond quickly with a local model running, whatever that model is, to drive some output in the industrial setting.
And that there'll be a lot of these sorts of applications, whether that's making predictions for biotech research, or whether that's for running robots in warehouses, or building new research models, or maybe you could strap this PC on the back of something like a car, a tractor, a lawnmower, a humanoid robot, or any other set of applications.
Explain to the audience, Freeberg, why having the computer at the edge is beneficial for those folks who might not know.
If you're taking in a lot of data and then you have to run a lot of data in a model, it's a lot faster to run that model locally. Like when Tesla runs self-driving, it's not sending the video images from your car to a server a thousand miles away and then letting the server decide how to drive your car. The car is running its model on what to do with respect to the video imagery in the car.
It's local because the ability for all that data to get processed in the car means that you don't have to wait for the internet to transmit data back and forth. You don't have lag time. You don't have the 60 millisecond or 100 millisecond response time.
You don't have it losing your phone connection and then not knowing what to do.
Exactly. Or the connection drops or waiting for a server to come online or a server breaks in the data center. Everything is local. So if you strap this like, you know, NVIDIA computer which is basically plug and play. You don't have to have like hardware expertise. You can strap it onto the back of a humanoid robot or run research applications locally.
So I think that there's going to be some really interesting use cases, whether it becomes a replacement for the Apple, you know, Macintosh Pro Studio device, whatever. Maybe we'll see.
Mac Mini 4, yeah.
The Mac Mini 4. But a lot of people have pointed out that actually the compute on this thing for $3,000 knocks a lot of Macs out of the field.
I just can't run an operating system in the traditional sense. Sam, when we look at startups, I remember when you and I started investing, two of the driving forces was free storage, free bandwidth, and cloud computing. It drove a lot of ability to get a product to market very quickly, effectively, etc. What impact will AI have on all these startups that are being...
originating now in 2024 2025 look into your crystal ball and how do you think they'll uh grow the footprint of them how is this going to accelerate the startup scene i actually think we're going to see a cambrian explosion of creativity and and development of different things and some of them are going to be stupid ideas and some of them are going to be great but i think it's going to make our job especially at the seed stage of investing harder and harder
There's just going to be a lot of people that have similar ideas at the same time that can execute quickly and do things at breakneck speeds that they've never been able to do before.
So picking the winner is going to be hard to figure out.
It's going to be harder and harder. Yeah. And it might be that, you know, I've been thinking about this, like, do you invest in competitors, which is something I never used to do? You know, do you take a bet and index an entire category that you're interested in? You know, what is the approach at seed and precede? Because I think of an idea and I'm like, wow, that's really neat.
And then I go and look out there and there's 30 people working on it. And that didn't used to be the case. And I think part of it is we've really unlocked a tool that allows people to do things that would have been cost prohibitive or gives them the ability to think, gosh, I could be an entrepreneur and I can try this and I could do this.
So I'm seeing people experiment and do all sorts of things. As far as the startups, some of the AI stuff is just a feature. You know, it's just table stakes at this point. It's like, you know, a chat or whatever. And that doesn't really matter. But then you're seeing people reimagine games and reimagine... you know, even things down to your kitchen appliance, et cetera.
So I just, I do think it's going to be very, very difficult. And, and I tend to sit out a lot of hype cycles. So I invested in power and compute lithography and, kind of all of the things that are going to be underneath all of this.
And so I'm not sure how much of it I'm going to participate in until it starts to get to a steady state and you kind of can understand what's next because the rate of acceleration is just so great. that it's just kind of unclear to me sometimes, especially when it comes to these consumer applications, consumer facing things, it's just really hard.
Well, when we were picking famously Uber, you had to pick between sidecar, Lyft and Uber. There were three people doing it and it was pretty clear who was the most qualified amongst those three. Now, to your point, if you want to be involved in tax, plus AI or legal plus AI, you might be looking at 50 companies, 100. And it was tradition in Silicon Valley to not bet on competitors.
There were some notable exceptions. When you run an accelerator, like I do, Techstars or Y Combinator, you aren't bound by that because 50% of the companies pivot almost by design. So I think you just have to, I think, precede Because people pivot, you just have to tell people, listen, we have a lot of pivoting going on. People are going to run into each other.
I can't just bet on one thing in a space. I think that's a reasonable compromise. If all the founders are going to keep pivoting to each other's businesses, how can the investors even keep track of that? It's like being traffic control of 10 airports at once. It's just not feasible.
You wouldn't think it, but there's still a lot of spreadsheet companies out there. You think you'd run out of them, but they're still out there. You look at and I think this is where AI is really going to make a difference, like RFP proposals for governments, something that takes like 30 days and it's manual and you have to submit these horrible documents.
You can ingest your entire corpus of all of your previous bids and submit them at a breakneck speed now and win more contracts. That becomes like a national defense company at that point. And so I think we're going to see a lot of really interesting things where a lot of cruft is going to disappear. And that'll be a really interesting wave that I'm looking forward to.
Yeah. In fact, Chamath has made a big bet there with his time, with his software startup that he's created. All right, let's end on the United States of America growing from 50 to 60 or 70 states. Trump has been rattling off some ideas. Around this, Chamath, what's your take on it? I know we've got to get wrapped up here, so we'll just do a quick lightning round on it.
I mean, I thought it was really interesting, and I was just caught off guard at how the media tried to portray it as Trump being Trump. Goofy, whatever, colorful. But I think like what I've realized, even with the California fire thing, the guy has this prescient way of, he may not say it in the way that it works for some people, but he's just really on top of this stuff.
So I just said Nick a thing. So I started to learn a little bit more about why he wants to take over Greenland. And it really comes down to one very basic idea here. Because of climate change and other things, the Arctic ice shelf is melting. And the more and more it melts, it opens up a shipping lane in the northern passage for a lot of critical goods.
And so if you had some sort of strategic agreement with Canada and Greenland, you effectively have this monopoly control over something that could become as important as the Panama Canal. And so I think if you look across the world, The control of maritime shipping lanes becomes this really critical strategic military and economic asset.
And so the reason why he's trying to find a way to initiate some sort of a discussion between Greenland and Canada is exactly this reason. And I think it's sort of like a bargaining gambit, the way that he started. But it's really smart that he's trying to get this done for the United States of America.
Because meanwhile, what you have is China militarizing very aggressively, Russia militarizing very aggressively. And what you don't want to have happen is those two countries take control of that northern passage as the ice sheet melts. So I just thought that was important.
Having a capable business executive thinking about the future of business and shipping and logistics, pretty big win. And I just love the idea, Cyan.
You know what's smart? I mean, let's give Trump credit. What's so smart is like somebody was doing this work, got it in front of him, and he was smart enough to say, hold on a second, this is really important. Let me tweet it. And then the way that he initiates it, though, gets even more attention because if he basically tweeted,
Hey, guys, I have this really interesting idea to gain more leverage in a northern maritime shipping lane. Nobody would have paid attention. Absolutely not. Nobody would have. And now we're all talking about it. And now there's an opportunity for millions of people to understand why and be supportive of it.
It's pretty smart. Any thoughts on expanding the United States to a couple more territories and states? I love it. I would love to have 60 states in our lifetime. I mean, let's pick one in the Caribbean. Let's pick one in Europe. I think we should have an open invitation.
But Jason, that's not what he's doing.
I think he's... I know I'm being a bit facetious here. I understand this is very strategic, this one. But I'm just thinking the next domino, I would like to get Cuba, maybe Portugal. I don't know who 80% of people, Sian, what do you think, in the country want to join?
It's very strategic. If you look at the Panama Canal, I believe either end is operated and controlled by China. We are at war with China, whether we like to admit it or not, in my opinion. And so this is very strategic. He has a very strange way of communicating, as you pointed out, but I think it's brilliant. And I actually think we should add to that.
I've always thought that we should open up and add more states to and extend that invitation, you know, to Taiwan. I might be too controversial to even say India. But I do think that that we there's a lot of countries out there and people who really, really resonate with what it means to be an American and the freedoms that come with our subscription fees of this country.
And so I do think that it would be great for us to expand. And I don't know what he's thinking or how he's got behind the scenes who motivated him to do it. But I really think it's a great idea.
Freeberg, what do you think about opt-in imperialism and this incredible concept of expanding our territories in the 21st century?
Again, I don't know how to read it. I have no inside information. There's clearly some posturing, as we've heard many times when Trump makes a declaration, like I'm going to put on 100% tariff on every car that's imported, or I'm going to charge you 2000 bucks Mexico for every time you ship something here, or I want to do X or Y or Z.
It's not the literal statement that matters as much as kind of the vector and the magnitude of the vector. He's clearly trying to begin negotiating for some change. I don't know what the ultimate kind of strategic endpoint is meant to be here, but clearly there's something. I think Chamath might have a good read on this and seems to make a lot of sense.
Well, we have a military base there and we also protect it and we occupy it already, which is interesting. Right.
Right. We somewhat, yeah, we somewhat abandoned all that in Greenland, but there is a lot of that infrastructure still sitting around here.
Can I ask you guys a question? I started, I listened to Lex Friedman's interview, this is totally off topic, but I listened to Lex Friedman's interview with Graham Hancock. You guys ever heard of this guy?
Yes.
Have you read any of his stuff or watched any of his shows?
No, I have not. No.
Okay. So he's got this belief that there was this like ancient civilization on earth, not like sci-fi futuristic, but like an advanced human civilization. And that's where the great pyramid of Giza was like, there was a smaller pyramid that was built there.
And a lot of these other kinds of like historical places were built and then they were built on top of later, but that a lot of these, like this advanced civilization was wiped out during, um, The last ice age, there was a very rapid kind of freezing event that happened over a period of about 1,200 years. And that's when this great kind of ice age era civilization was wiped out.
But what I didn't realize, and so I went down this really crazy rabbit hole in the last week on like how much of planet Earth, how different planet Earth was just 12,000 years ago during the ice age. Have you guys spent any time on this?
I just went down a similar rabbit hole with the Grand Canyon.
First of all, how the planet Earth has changed in such a short period of time blows my mind. But the sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today, just 12,000 years ago. And there were humans on Earth at the time. And so all of this area that we look at as Malta, the island of Malta, was the southern tip of a continental stretch that went into Italy. So it was all part of one great landmass.
And there's all this area that was actually part of that landmass that now sits under that ocean there. And there's these like ruts in the ground for moving stuff and buildings and all this other crazy stuff. And we have no idea like what's actually under the ice in Greenland, what's under the ice in Antarctica.
There's all these parts of earth where humans very likely had some, this is so off topic, we could cut this from the show. No, I think it's incredible. Shemoth and I- It's so crazy that there's all these parts of Earth, and especially like in the oceans, as we start to kind of explore, there's actually like large humans, potentially advanced civilizations that lived in these areas.
Not like sci-fi flying around. The Atlanta stuff. The Atlanta stuff, that it was actually like an advanced civilization. And then humans lost a lot of this ability when this period of freezing happened over 1,200 years. And then a lot of it was preserved in legends and myths that showed up in later kind of archaeology and later museums.
How do you explain the pyramids?
I think he has a really interesting explanation. Because we had Gavin explain it last time. Say, welcome to Conspiracy Corner.
So somebody sent me an email. Oh. And he said what they did was they flooded the area. And then they floated the rocks into place.
They floated the rocks up, yes. It's brilliant.
I've heard this.
But you know what? Chamath and I were talking about this too. Because when you remove all that crust, because we actually were talking. We just didn't use the guy in Graham's name. It's just like Uranus. When you break away all that crust, what did they find in Uranus, Friedberg?
Mine was better. Mine was better.
You got it. You landed the joke. It's great.
It's great.
Oh, we finally got there, folks. This has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast. It's different. Yeah, I can't say anything other than, Cyan, you were great for a first time out. You got to the conspiracies. You rocked it. You got to interject more because it's a vibrant panel. But for a first time out, very solid debut.
By the way, before you go, do you have an alternative explanation for the pyramids, Cyan? Yeah, Cyan, what is your answer?
What about UFOs? I've looked into... I mean, UFOs is the only one that I usually come back to because, you know, if you look at... putting logs underneath and trying to roll them, or you look at flooding an area, all of this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
And so, and then, you know, the fact that there are other civilizations that also have pyramids that are stunning and feats of engineering as well, things like Stonehenge, et cetera. I mean, there's just things that defy explanation. I don't know if you ever tried to make a catapult, but it's really hard.
It's really hard.
It's really hard. And so, like, we just did not have the technology, or at least we can't find any definitive way that it happened. And so I do think there is a possibility that there was a more advanced civilization here or we were visited. And I think about that a lot.
I think it's mutants. I'm going with the X-Men theory. I think there were mutant human beings who had the ability with superpowers to build them.
It could be that. It could be that. It could be we had control of matter and alchemy or something like that. Who knows?
This is what we've come to now. We get conspiracy corner at the end of every program. We try to figure out unsolved mysteries. Welcome to Unsolved Mysteries. And, oh, just a little housekeeping here as we wrap. Our friends, our partners, dare I say, at Polymarket have done us a solid, Friedberg. Check this out. We talked a little bit about our long debates here on the program.
So Chamath, we created a market here. The Magnificent Seven shrinks below 30% of S&P 500 in 2025, 44% chances. What people in the real world are putting volume on that. I see $11,000 already in volume. And then, Freeberg, you came up with one, which was, I guess we did this one together, but I think it should be really under your name. Will U.S. national debt surpass $38 trillion in 2025?
And then third, talking about immigration, we got a lot of passion around this topic. Trump's team and Trump himself said they're going to deport 15 million immigrants from America. I said, hey, let's create a market for, will Trump deport 750,000 or more people in 2025? 38% chance. For those of you who don't know, Obama, I think, did 2 million people in eight years.
So this is not like a partisan thing. This is just a practical thing. So anyway, go to Polymarket, look at the creators. You'll see under that tab that All In has a bunch of markets. We're doing this in partnership with our partners who've partnered with us in a partnership at Polymarket. Hashtag FTC.
Well done. Okay, bye-bye.
Love you guys.
Sian, thank you.
See you on the mountains.
Thank you, everyone.
That was super fun.
You rocked it, Sian. Aw, thank you. We'll let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Sackett.
Besties are gone.
That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy, because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
We need to get merchies already.