Dueling Presidential interviews, SpaceX's big catch, Robotaxis, Uber buying Expedia?, Nuclear NIMBY
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents6 chapters
§01Bestie intros§02Polls vs Prediction markets, dueling interviews, election update§03Tesla's Robotaxi event and SpaceX's Starship catch§04Uber reportedly looking into acquiring Expedia§05Nuclear Vibe Shift? Big tech is looking toward nuclear solutions to power AI§06Lawfare from the California Coastal Commission§01Bestie intros
Friedberg's channeling Tim Walz over there.
I know. Wow. He's as excited as Tim Walz.
Got your flannel on. Do you know what a venture capitalist is, Friedberg?
Oh, he's showing Supergut.
Well, as of last week, when J. Cal decided to turn All-In into a commercial, I was actually gonna do a Supergut background. We're launching Supergut nationwide in Target this week. Any Target in the United States, you can go into and pick up Supergut. You can buy the GLP-1 booster.
You can buy the prebiotic shake.
I have that, actually. Is that the chocolate, or do you have the mocha? I mean, I like the mocha. Chocolate. Okay.
Mocha's good too. Alright. Let's get started.
the support, J. Cal.
I appreciate it. Course. Of course.
We're cutting all this out.
It's no way trying why I do this.
Next time, plug a company I have a stake in. It's
Also, All-In election night livestream is coming November 5. You can watch live. Sacks will be hosting. We're doing it. You're hosting it.
Your team said you're doing it. And so you'll either get to see
Are you not going to Mar-a-Lago,
Well, if things continue to look good for Trump, I might go to Mar-a-Lago. Alright? I do right now, then I might I think I might have to go tomorrow.
I think
we should all be in Mar
a-Lago.
That's gonna be
a unique experience.
Oh my god. Can you imagine being in Mar-a-Lago and he loses? Oh my god.
That's why I love doing that. Thing is in the back. It's gotta be too big to rig. If it's too big to rig, I'm going to Mar-a-Lago.
Too big to rig? Do
§02Polls vs Prediction markets, dueling interviews, election update
you guys think Polymarket is, like why do you think it's different from the polls? Are we talking about this today? Polymarket's showing, like, 60-40 or 65-35 now. Right?
Yeah. Because we're measuring different things. I've explained this before. Polymarket is people betting on the outcome, so 58% think Trump's gonna win. Whereas the polls in a particular state show the percentage of how each person's gonna vote.
So if for sure you knew the election was 51-49, the betting markets would swing to a 100
sure me ask you this. So Nate Silver's model, which takes the poll from each state and builds in a a kind of a a Monte Carlo of Yeah. You know, Super Bowl, like a supermodel for the whole country, why is his estimate 50-50 right now while the Polymarket is betting at 60-40?
It's possible he's laggy in his estimates
Got it.
On the betting markets. The betting markets seem to, go based on momentum. So it, like, it indicates the swing in momentum. And then the poll also
things are gonna how do you think they're gonna change after the interviews the last couple days? Trump on Bloomberg and Kamala on Fox. Do you think those are gonna change anything?
I don't think so.
I think it's all baked in now.
Mhmm. Well, Trump over the past few weeks seems to have had a surge owing to the fact that Kamala's interviews generally don't go well. So I think she started off a little behind, started doing interviews to catch up, and now she's a lot behind. I don't think the Bret Baier interview is gonna help her.
Well, let me ask you this. I so my my observation as I don't know. I'm not like a super political person or, whatever party-oriented person. I looked at the, a lot of the media on both sides, and it seems like everyone on the left says Kamala did an amazing job on Fox. She defended herself.
She showed her skills and her competency. And then everyone on the right's like, she embarrassed herself. She fell apart. And then the same thing happened with the Trump interview on Bloomberg. People are like, on the left, they say, look at how he couldn't handle the interviewer, and he fell apart and all his lies were exposed.
And everyone on the right's, like, look at him. He got a standing ovation. It's almost like everyone's just kind of, like, self-asserting their their beliefs that they already hold when they judge these people on these interview shows at this point. Is it is it already baked at this point? Like, is anyone actually gonna change their view based on these interviews happening?
Well, the question is what appeals to that small sliver of independents. Yeah. The question I would ask back to you is if the Bret Baier interview was going so well for Kamala, why was her staff on the sidelines waving to try and end the interview that, apparently, they had, like, 4 people, you know, waving and trying to cut
the interview off. Who said who said
that was the case? He did.
Bret Baier. It. So Yeah. It was like in Rocky 4 when Apollo Creed's corner is, like, yelling,
throw in the damn towel. Throw in the damn towel.
We couldn't wait to get it off the stage after 26 minutes. I just think that if it was going that
great allegedly.
Yeah. I don't think Bradbury is gonna lie about that. I don't
know why he would lie about that. That makes sense. Yeah.
Why would they get her off the stage after 26 minutes if it was going so great? I'm not saying it went as horrible as some of the partisans on the other side are saying, but I don't think it went that great.
Do you give her any credit for going into the lion's den like she did?
Well, I think that she went, she did the interview precisely to get the talking point that she does adversarial interviews because that talking point was earning them. And so you saw, like, all of her fans in the media were saying, well, see, she can walk into the lion's den. But, again, she did the shortest interview possible. I don't think she answered the questions directly. I think she filibustered a lot.
She deflected a lot. I don't think she was particularly persuasive. I don't think she convinced anybody. So I think that what you saw there was somebody who just wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible to check the box on, okay, does adversarial interviews. Trump, on the other hand, he actually likes doing these things.
The Bloomberg
And there's no filibustering there. Right?
Well, no. He's Christmas
in his hands. Filibuster. Go on. He's Chris. Anecdotes.
You can do you can do the weave. You can do the anecdotes, but yeah. He's also very good at coming back on the interviewer when they get adversarial. And the audience was with him. They gave him a standing ovation.
He went for 64 minutes compared to her 26. I just think there's no comparison. I think Trump is someone who relishes walking into the lion's den and doing those interviews. I think Harris did it because she felt like
she had to. What do what do you think, Chamath? You see it or no? Do you have any opinion?
I watched the whole interview. It was clear in the interview, he mentioned the fact that he was being waved off, and then he said it after the fact as well. That's not alleged. I think that that did happen. I would say two things.
I thought that she was composed, and she maintained her cool. So I think from a stylistic perspective, I thought that she did well. From a substance perspective, it was pretty lacking because if you actually listened to the answers, there were just a ton of non-answers. And there were two very basic questions that I think a lot of people, even if you're not a swing voter, I think would probably want to know the answer to. Meaning, did she have any regrets about what's happened in the last three and a half years?
Did she have any regrets about what she's done on the border? Has she not noticed that Biden was wavering before he was hot-swapped? I think that you could have predicted that these questions were going to come. So I think I was surprised that there wasn't a crisp answer that they had practiced for that. The second thing I'll say is that David is right.
Everybody then gets very tribal in how they interpret it. I think I saw one tweet from Elon about how all of the newspapers characterized her interview with Bret Baier as quote, unquote, testy, and it was sort of like that was the way that the mainstream media framed it. I suspect if somebody looked at how Trump's interview with Bloomberg was analyzed, it probably had some similar verbiage that was repeated there as well. So I think you are right, Jason, that the mainstream media can't be trusted to tell the truth. I would just encourage people to watch it.
I think, like I said, stylistically, I think she did well and remained composed substantively. I think it was nonexistent.
Yeah. It would have been nice to have another debate between these two.
She still can't really explain how she's different than Joe Biden other than the fact that he's a white male and she's a woman of color. So beyond the sort of the superficial differences, she can't explain on a policy level what she would do differently. She's had so many opportunities to say that. They asked her on The View. They asked her on Stephen Colbert.
Bret Baier asked her in his way, and she still can't explain what she would do differently. And I think that is the fundamental problem she has in her campaign is voters still don't know who she is or what she would do.
Yeah. What did you think of J.D. Vance saying he wouldn't have certified the election? They seem to be going after him on that over and over again. Zach? You're the
only person talking about that.
No. No. Literally every interview, they've been chasing him down the hall asking him. He's like, I'm not the only person. I may have started it, but what do you think of him saying he wouldn't have certified it?
That is kinda like when he's in a combative reporting moment, that is the question he gets a lot.
That's not the interview I saw. When I saw him, the interview he just did with Martha Raddatz was she was saying that Trump was exaggerating.
I asked you, Sacks, I asked you, Sacks, about fixing you on certifying January 6th.
You're the
only one who's fixated on it. No one, no one, the other journalists.
What do you think, Friedberg?
No one who is persuadable, who doesn't have TDS, cares about that topic anymore.
What do you think, Friedberg, about him saying he wouldn't certify January 6th? It's not
it's not what they're asking, JD. If you wanna talk about interviews that JD Vance has done, talk about the one that's actually going viral right now, and that was the interview he did with Martha Raddatz where she starts saying that, you know, we've only had a few of these apartment buildings taken over by foreign gangs. And he's like, do you realize what you're saying? You know? There's no comeback from that.
He destroyed her.
It was very compelling what he did. It
was every interview
he does is like that.
Yeah. I mean, she was basically saying that she spoke to, what was it, the city manager, and she's like, he said only a handful of buildings have been taken over. And JD Vance was like, what do you mean? Like Yeah. Only a handful of buildings.
Like, isn't that anything more than zero, like, too much? Or anything more than one is obviously a problem? Like, it was just such an obvious rebuttal to the narrative that they're kind of overexaggerating a particular issue. I have no data on this, but he was very compelling in that response. I thought it was pretty strong.
But I will say, like, generally, neither candidate seems to be introducing a new message or seems to be introducing new content. They're just kind of standing up, you know, kind of repeating things that they've said, showing that they can handle and manage different kind of combative reporting tactics, and that's kinda what's going on. And everyone seems to have made up their mind. I don't I see a lot of people on both sides say, again, this side this person did great. My person did great against this combative reporter, and the other person did poorly against their combative reporter.
And everyone's kind of biased in their view. I it just feels like this election's baked, and we should just go to the polls and be done.
Yeah. What do you think, Friedberg, though?
But but there's there's no October surprise coming out. Right, Sacks, Chamath, J do you
call me? Weeks.
Yeah. Anything can happen.
But there hasn't been anything. Right? Like, that's kind of a shocking moment yet this month. But Friedberg, the question I
was gonna ask you is, since you're not, like, hosting Trump, you know, fundraisers, do you think what did you think when J.D. Vance said he didn't think that Trump lost the 2020 election? Does that concern you at all?
There's no way to answer this with the kind of clean framing I think you're looking for. What I saw from J.D. is that he wants the reporter and the people that he's talking to, and I hear this from him, to zoom out a little bit and recognize that there are significant control systems and biases that he believes and others believe are strongly affecting the election process and, as a result, the election outcome. And I think that message is lost because people want him to say, Trump lost the election. You're not admitting it.
You're bad. But those people also aren't hearing the point that he's making, which is that there are biases. And we heard these biases, by the way, with Democrats in prior elections as well, where they highlighted that they believe there were biases with respect to misinformation being amplified on social media. And then the next election cycle, they were able to step in and influence what was being changed on those social media platforms. And so there's this big kind of media war going on.
That's why I'm
asking. Media platforms. And I think that that's what both sides are highlighting as their big concern. And now there's this other big concern about whether there is appropriate voter verification for the people who are voting. And it's a question to ask that shouldn't be dismissed.
It is a good question to ask.
Yeah. That's a great question.
As a person who doesn't have a, like, a strong bias for a political party here, I feel like I want to hear answers to those questions. Like, you know, what is the structure of how the way that most people are getting their media today, which is through social media platforms? What is the mechanism for censorship? What is the mechanism for filtering for moderation and be public and transparent about it? And then separately, what are the mechanisms for deciding who gets to vote and how they get to vote?
And I
think those are both really good things to ask.
I would just like to take a step back and say that that was one of the most incredible answers I've ever heard, Friedberg. Unfortunately, it may not land for the reductive masses, but it was exceptionally powerful and thoughtful. Thank you.
Yeah. I'm here for, Chamath.
Here for you. Well, I mean, independent of who wins, we need to get this, rules of elections really tight starting next year, I think. Make it a federal holiday. Require people to have ID. That doesn't seem like such a big deal.
I don't know. Sacks, what else should happen? Federal holiday. Make it
Now, you've got Biden's DOJ is literally suing the state of Virginia, which is required by Virginia law to clean the voter rolls of illegal immigrants, and they've been doing that. And Biden's DOJ has sued to stop that. In California, like you said, we now have a new law signed by Gavin Newsom to make it illegal to ask for voter ID. So Democrats seem to be undermining the integrity of elections, not fortifying it. So when you ask, you know, why do Republicans distrust elections?
Maybe it has something to do with the way that Democrats are acting. But I agree with you. I think that cleaning up the voter rolls, having a minimum standard for voter verification is something that I think should be done. According to the Constitution, the states basically run their own elections, but it doesn't make sense to me that in a one-party machine politics state, where basically one party controls the state, that they could set up a system that effectively entrenches their power forever in federal elections. It just seems to me that the federal government has a compelling interest that must be constitutional in ensuring a minimum standard of honesty in federal elections.
So I think it would be great to do something about this next year. I think that if you want people to stop questioning elections or engaging in election denial, you need to make the elections above reproach. So let's do that.
So, anyway, Heritage Foundation, which is obviously right-leaning, has a bunch of election fraud cases they've been documenting, and they basically cannot come up with, like, actual evidence that this is changing any election results, but we should make it above reproach. I agree. All right. Our boy, Elon had a big week. Tesla unveiled two new concepts at its WeRobot event and Elon, Elon caught a 23-story rocket, the Starship.
§03Tesla's Robotaxi event and SpaceX's Starship catch
Here's, the robo-taxi and the robo-bus. Both of them look really awesome. And, he caught one of the, the I think this is the fifth Starship or the fourth launch? Fifth. The fifth.
Right? So so incredible. Look at this. Unbelievable. It's like chopsticks catching
each other. Whatever the issues are with Elon and his politics, just to appreciate. And we can talk about why this is so important in this segment. But, technically, the achievement of this, like, skyscraper falling out of the sky and perfectly aligning itself to go into that chopstick-catching device, it is an absolute marvel of human ingenuity. I mean, to and the work and the effort that people put into this over, you know, several decades, it's just such an incredible feat. Look at this thing.
I don't know if you guys were as emotionally moved by this. I was I thought it was gonna
say something.
Incredible. I think I probably watched this 100 times.
Totally. From every angle.
Every angle.
And so the reason this is so important is because these things cost a lot of money. And when they land here, you can clean them up. And I guess his goal is to have them take off again after he fills them with propellant an hour later, Friedberg. So on a science basis, this is extraordinary. What, you know, if this works and you start
lifting more rockets.
Yeah. You don't want it to have feet. A, it's heavy. And then, B, you have to lift them up in a way that just complicates the entire refueling and cycle time process. So by catching it, you put it right back into place and just go again.
Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
You just catch it and go again.
I can kinda walk through these numbers. So, obviously, the big objective over time is how cheap can you get it to put material into space. We need a lot of material to go into space if we're gonna do things in space, particularly if we're gonna go build a colony on Mars. And so this shows you over time the cost per kilogram, which is the key metric in this industry to launch material into low Earth orbit. And you can see here how SpaceX has dramatically reduced the cost.
I remember when the small sat era began in the 2010s. Do you guys remember all these startups that were starting to build, like, little small sats and put them up to do imaging and comms and stuff? When this took off, it was about $10,000 a kilogram to put a small sat into space or to put material into space. And then SpaceX has dropped the cost to the point that it's now close to $1,000 a kilogram. So a 10x reduction in cost in just the last decade or so.
And that's why SpaceX just dominates the launch market. But Elon's always said that $1,000 a kilogram is too high. But his objective has been to get the cost down to $10 a kilogram. Because at $10 a kilogram, you could launch what some people estimate is needed to get to Mars, which is about half a million tons of material and people to set up a colony on Mars. And it actually becomes feasible to get, you know, half a million tons of material at $10 a kilogram.
So if you look at this new Starship and Starship Heavy booster, it's about a 150 to 200-ton payload. The booster holds, you know, 3,400 tons of propellant, and the cost of that propellant is pretty low. You know? It's only about $1 million in fuel. So then if you can get the cost of the booster and the Starship down enough and you can reuse it enough and you amortize the cost of making that device over the lifetime of the device, the cost per launch comes down.
And that's what brings the cost per kilogram down. So the booster—there's a group called Payload, and they do estimates on this. So I won't speak out of turn in terms of, like, having inside knowledge. But Payload has estimated that Starship and the booster cost about $90 million today, and they think that they have a path to getting it down to $35 million. So if you can reuse that thing 10 times, that's a $3.5 million cost per launch, plus $1 million for fuel.
You could easily see, and this thing can launch 200 tons. That's how you start to get to $10 a kilogram over the next couple of years. But it was critical to be able to reuse that heavy booster. And that's what Elon just demonstrated. We can actually catch that heavy booster, refuel it, and launch it an hour later.
And if you can do that over and over again, you're spending $10 a kilogram to put material into space. You can get fuel into space and then get those Starships to fly off to Mars and deliver all this material, including setting up a base that would allow you to actually make more fuel on Mars, because everything we need to make fuel is on Mars. So it's the beginning of the next series of really important milestones that'll hopefully get humanity onto Mars. It was just so amazing to see it come together. Yeah.
The economics are legit. I mean, this is, like, a 1,000x reduction in cost. It's incredible.
Yeah. It's gonna be amazing. And they're gonna do some, I guess, new stuff with Starlink, some even lower Earth orbit satellites that go even faster and have less latency. So that's gonna be super exciting.
Starlink's apparently—I mean, I know everyone here is a shareholder in SpaceX—but Starlink's running at 4 million subs right now. That's, like, $100 a month, 4 million subs. And if you do the math, I mean, how many people have ISPs that are slower than Starlink? Right? How many people have cell phone providers that they're paying roughly the same amount that aren't as good as Starlink?
If we can get satellite to phone and you can get Starlink more broadly available, this could be a 100 million subscriber business. I mean, this could be—absolutely. It could be the biggest businesses on the Earth. It could be the
largest subscription business in the history of humanity. I think the largest ones right now are, like, Netflix, you know, 250 million, Disney Plus, 150 million, Verizon, 100 million. So, yeah, it could be hundreds of millions of subscribers. It could even be crazy.
And and and we could be the first
million subscriber product in the world.
We could look back one day and be like, why did we run all this copper wire everywhere? Yeah. Like Well
We don't need it. Yeah. Obviously. For sure. Crazy.
Especially if it can do it for us.
That we were, like, ever I mean, the whole nutty thing about this past week, it's like, we could look back one day and be like, why did we ever drive cars, and why do we ever have copper wire laid all over the Earth to, like, move Internet signals around? You know, this, this efficiency game that's gonna be realized over the next decade is and just incredible. Just incredible.
Chamath, any thoughts on the Robo Van or the CyberCab, the Model 2, I guess some people are calling it, but it's, you know, the CyberCab specifically not calling it number 2 and doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. I would have bought two of those immediately if it had a steering wheel and pedals. I wanna drive it. Yeah. It looks like the hybrid of, like, a Model Y and the Cybertruck.
So I kinda really love the aesthetics of it. So beautiful. Yeah. You like it?
My my my reaction was actually I don't know. Just seeing these releases now over 10 or 15 years plus of knowing him, nothing. It's it's I guess it's, like, not that surprising. It's I it's weird to say, like, I just expect him and his teams to figure it out. Like, they're just all so good.
It's and the thing to remember, it's not just him that's incredible, but he attracts a kind of technical and operational wunderkind people. For sure. And that's just that's just a really special thing. So I had I had that reaction, which was I was really proud and happy for them for
the team. Yeah. For sure.
For the team and for him. These guys are, like, incredibly fearless. Failed bigly. Right? Yeah.
If you're gonna fail, fail bigly. Yeah. And then the other thing that I thought was crazy was how many people were trying to dunk on him this weekend. And that surprised me, caught me off guard because I think that they were personalizing a lot of anxiety that they are feeling through these companies' successes, which didn't make much sense to me.
Well, in fairness, he did hurt some people's feelings with posting of memes. So yeah. I mean, it makes no sense. Like, the guy's, like, gonna save 30,000 road deaths a year in the United States with self-driving, and people are losing their minds over a couple of memes or who he's voting for for president. I don't think you have to worry about that.
You can just look at the products. They speak for themselves. Anything, Sacks, any response, on the, on the Tesla front? Any thoughts on the bus or Optimus?
I mean, they're both very exciting products. I don't think I've got a lot to add.
Yeah. I love the bus, FreeBird. I think that thing could become, like, mobile homes or, you know, ADUs, and you could just send them to you.
Can we buy them or no?
Well, no. Not right now. But I think that might be, you know, that's gonna be a big
question. In one.
I need it for all my kids.
Yeah. Well, see, if this was a platform like the Mercedes Sprinter vans have become,
that you see a lot
in Europe, then you could buy an empty one
of these.
It's got enough battery life
to last
a month. And then let's say you had your in-laws over and there was one that was set up as, like, a one-bedroom. You could click on Airbnb or, you know, Tesla at BNB, press a button, and the thing could drive to your driveway. You could rent it for a week and then it could leave. Or let's say 1,000 people or 10,000 people were displaced because of a hurricane FreeBird.
You could send 100,000 of these to the parking lots at Walmart, which typically does a good job in feeding people and getting them supplies after hurricanes since those are so ubiquitous. You can put 100 of these in every parking lot and have a place for people who are fleeing natural disasters to stay. So I thought that was, like, the most compelling product of the whole thing for me was the possibility of a sled, like a skiff that you could do anything you want with would be really exciting for society. So congratulations to the team. And it's it's gonna take a while, but I I I could see them having that robo tattoo.
I think congrats to Amit. He just got promoted.
I saw that. Yeah. He's in charge of all AI?
I think he's in charge of all manufacturing and sales in North America.
Oh, okay. Well, there it is.
So, yeah, shout out
to Amit Afshar. Yeah.
I mean, listen guys,
I have, I have big news. I just bought my first Tesla.
Oh, you did? Did you go with the Plaid, Model S?
Model S Plaid. Yeah. Yeah. That's I test drove it for two weeks and sold itself.
And are you using the FSD? I use FSD every day.
I use FSD and it was, like, really impressive. So
Super impressive.
I've tried Tesla a couple times over the years and I never really never really worked for me. The quality just didn't feel like what I like, given what I had before car-wise.
You were an Audi
guy. Right? But Audi guy. Yeah. Always loved that.
Audi guys
are into the cars. Yeah.
That's Yeah. That's like a shame. Right? It's, it's a big milestone. I really I thought the FSD was the selling and then the speed on the Plaid is just insane.
It's better than my RS 7. Like
I, incredible. With all of my Teslas, I put it in chill mode because when it's in that Plaid mode or whatever, like coffee was fine.
Favorite. I
love I get on the But if you have passengers, the kids in the back seat would hit, like, literally nauseous because it's too fast. You gotta be you gotta be careful with the passengers there. It's so fast.
It was awesome. Awesome.
Alright. Well, there you have it. Robotaxi star. We didn't get to it last week. We almost put the show back a day or two just to do it.
§04Uber reportedly looking into acquiring Expedia
In other news, Uber is exploring a bid to purchase Expedia. Breaking news. This was dispelled, as we got here on the show. They said this was, like, very preliminary third-party talks and that there's no serious talks going on about this. Financial Times reported that advisors were trying to look at if a deal structure would be possible between Uber and Expedia.
Expedia's got a $20 billion market cap. They popped 8% on the news, obviously. Uber, on the other hand, trading at a $170 billion market cap or so. That dropped 3%. If you didn't know, Dara was the CEO of Expedia from 2005 to 2017.
He's still on the board. And it looks like this was a trial balloon. You know, Uber's two biggest businesses, rides and Uber Eats, but they also do freight and train bookings. Dara has been pretty clear. He wants to create a super app like you have in China or some other markets.
Expedia has got a lot of cool products, Hotels.com, Orbitz, Travelocity, or, and I think the most interesting one, Friedberg, you and I were talking about this is VRBO, vacation rental by owner. It was like Airbnb before Airbnb existed. And if you look at this chart, since Dara left, the Dara effect, Expedia has gone exactly sideways. The revenue has grown modestly. What do you think of this deal?
Chamath? I'll just go right to you with this one since you like to
Stupid.
Stupid. Okay. There you have it, folks. Reason number one, it's stupid. And reason number two, it's stupid.
I mean, this is a $20 billion market cap business. You probably have to pay a control premium of 50%. So the question is, if you were going to spend $30 billion today in the public markets, what would you spend it on? And I think the most important lens that you have to use to answer that question is what reinforces a moat that I have while also being inoculated from the risks of AI? And I cannot think of a more fragile business model than the UI layer on top of widely available data.
So the problem that Expedia has is the same that Booking and a bunch of these other folks have, which is that the principal heartbeat of the company, flight information and other things, are licensed to them by third parties. And so what they are is a UI and a front door. I think it's way too early in the evolution of AI to know that that's safe. And in fact, I think a more reasonable assumption is that those things are pretty fragile. And part of what may explain the doldrums of the stock is that I think people are anticipating a world where, for example, I don't know if you saw, but Perplexity launched something this week.
It's just in test mode. They whitelisted me into it, but it's basically a checkout concept. So you tell Perplexity what you would like it to buy, and then it will go and complete the transaction for you. So in the example of flight bookings, you could go directly to United because, a, Perplexity will just show you all of the flights. They'll show you the exact prices, and then it'll go and execute that for you with your payment method.
In a world that looks like that, where these companies have the money to pay for the data feeds, the existing V1.0 generation UIs, I think, are in trouble. So it would just be a very bad capital allocation decision. Now that's okay to get things wrong, but not for $30 billion wrong. You can probably do it for a couple $100 million wrong or maybe even a $1 billion wrong because you can absorb that as a $150 or $160 billion company. But $30 billion is too big of a price to pay for that kind of risk.
I would agree with you. And there's other things they could buy like WeRide or Pony.ai and a bunch of these AI companies that are doing self-driving. So why not double down on that? Friedberg, the one thing you and I talked about was kind of VRBO, which is a very cool marketplace. And that feels directly in the Uber kill zone.
What do you think about them just maybe carving out and buying VRBO and having an Airbnb contemporary?
Just buy Waymo? Why don't they just go to Google and give them $30 billion of Uber stock and just carve in Waymo? Isn't that a better idea?
Think that's what's gonna happen. I've been hearing rumblings of that. So
So I think that Dara knows Expedia better than anyone. He ran
the business for, what, a decade or so? Yep.
And so he knows how that business operates. And so if he's looking at this thing and the stock price has been flat roughly since he left in 2017, if you look at the underlying financial performance, you could kind of start to construct a rationale for buying Expedia this cheap, and it would be very accretive to Uber even if there are these big strategic risks on the horizon. So just to give you some numbers on it all, Uber has got about 150 million monthly active users. Expedia has about 45 to 50 million customers a year that use the service and pay for stuff. So there's a real opportunity to think about the Uber customer base that's installed as being almost an opportunity to market to them Expedia services and
So Expedia on an annualized basis is spending about 8 billion a year in sales and marketing and about 720 million a year in G&A costs. So and they're running about 3 billion EBITDA right now.
run rate. So if you
cut about half the G&A in an acquisition because you don't need all the people that overlap with Uber's people, you know, and you cut about 30% of the sales and marketing dollars because you can cross-sell into the Uber install base, you could see a scenario where you could increase Expedia's EBITDA by 75 to 100%, maybe getting it as high as $6 billion. And while Expedia's market cap trades at $20 billion, this is off of, you know, obviously the recent news that they might get acquired. If you kind of assume a 40 to 50% price premium to the last 90-day average of the stock price, which is kind of typical or common for a deal like this, they're probably paying $26 billion for the company. And they got about $4 billion in net cash, so you're kind of paying about $22 billion enterprise value to buy Expedia. So $22 billion of enterprise value, and if you can bump the EBITDA up to $6 billion a year, that's a pretty low multiple.
I mean, you could kind of see yourself rationalizing this just from a financial basis that you're paying 4 times EBITDA to buy this thing. And Dara knows this thing, and he would have great command over what needs to be done over there. And he would have a great sense of what to change and what's gone wrong. Mhmm. And there's a lot of interesting assets inside of Expedia.
Vrbo is a great one that's been under-monetized and underutilized. I don't know if you've used the UX on Vrbo versus Airbnb. There's obviously some influence Dara could have with people that he knows well that could go in and fix that interface and make it a better service. And even as AI starts to step in and hotels maybe integrate better with agents and so on, and they show up in a more ubiquitous way. There's other things that Expedia does, like build vacation packages and travel packages that are high-margin products that they sell that are a little bit different than what you're used to with just booking a flight.
Booking flights makes no money for anyone, but vacation packages is where all the money's at. And so, theoretically, Expedia could be smarter about how they build vacation packages and personalize them for families, and that's where they can make real margin, like 20, 30% margin. So I could see a story where this all starts to click for the board at Uber saying, maybe it makes sense. Dara knows what he's talking about. We could buy this thing for four times, you know, pro forma EBITDA.
This could be hugely accretive for us. So I think that's why this is happening, why this conversation may be happening. That's just me trying to understand. I
think it's a good stalemate.
You know, what the rationale might be.
Can you just go back and explain how would they drive up EBITDA so much?
So they're spending about $8 billion a year run rate on sales and marketing at Expedia right now. And Uber's got 150 million active installed users that are using the Uber services every month. So the idea would be customers. Yeah. Yeah.
Beyond paying customers. So if Uber could cross-sell some number of Expedia services to their installed base at Uber, which they could test and, you know, do a little experiment and see if it works, they may be able to reduce the marketing dollars that Expedia is spending to acquire customers through other third-party sources like Google and Bing and other places. So there's a rationale.
That's where I think the logic breaks down. I don't think Uber customers wanna be cross-sold on booking a hotel. See, this is where I think, like, MBA thinking is very different than product thinking. Like, an MBA looking at this would say, well, you know, Expedia and Uber are both in the travel business. Their apps both involve booking trips, so we can cross-sell Expedia from Uber and then cut Expedia's marketing budget.
I think that's how an MBA would sort of hand wave over it. I think the way, like, a product manager would look at this is to say, what does the user wanna do?
And I
know that when I use the Uber app, I just wanna basically make a couple of clicks, set my destination, get my car, and then move on. And there was a there was a product initiative a few years back at Uber where they tried to capture the user's attention during the ride, and they, you know, they added, like, this
this header whole ad thing that adds. Yeah. That's making
it ton of money.
And it's
actually printing
On the internet. Like an entertainment stream or something inside the app. No. But they dialed it way back because I don't see it anymore. It was just clutter.
Would you trust Dara's judgment on this, Sacks? Like, if Dara were to think about what the Uber user would want and he could rationalize some percentage of them, they could cross-sell Expedia services into. I mean, ultimately, I think it's his decision. Right? Like
Well, I mean, what you're describing is basically a private equity play. Like, Dara is gonna come in as, like, a private equity buyer effectively, and he knows the business and will run it to reduce cost, may boost some revenue. And maybe there is justification for that, but if you're trying to justify it based on cross-selling, I don't think users of the Uber app wanna be cross-sold when they book a taxi. Okay? They just wanna be able to effect their transaction as efficiently as possible.
And just to finish the point I was making on that whole entertainment stream that they had, they dialed that product way back because it got in the way you'd be, you know, in the Uber app, trying to figure out how to change your destination or something. And all of a sudden you're being shown like some entertainment product. It's not what users wanted. And it was always kind of a bananas idea to think that just because the user books an Uber, that you own their attention during that ride because during that ride, you're really competing with every app on the iPhone. Right?
I mean and that's the problem is you wanna get in and out of the Uber app. It's about transacting efficiently.
What about not the moment when you're when you're riding in an Uber, but the moment when you say, as an Uber user, hey. I need to book travel. I gotta go on a vacation to Austin.
I was never gonna think.
to go on my Uber app for that. The only time I open but
what if they put that feature in there? What if they had a tab that said book your travel here?
You know when I open the Uber app? When I wanna hail a taxi, that's what it's not even raining again.
There are a large number of people who maybe don't have a, you know, an assistant to book their hotels in advance and, like that
would be most people, Jason.
I would
not think to go into Uber to do that. It would just be clutter.
Well, no. But they they already have a Hotels.com partnership, and then the Uber One membership's been growing pretty nicely. And the advertising's doing $1 billion a year, and that is just a money printing machine because you know that this person's in Uber Black. You know that they're going to the Four Seasons. Like, these users who are, you know
They have a real ad business at Uber.
Yeah. Yeah.
The more Uber tries to promote some unrelated product, and what I mean by unrelated is it doesn't help you get to where you're going that moment, it's clutter in the app.
What about Uber Eats, Sacks? Yeah. One of the Uber Eats working pretty well.
It's working great. Yeah. No. The cross promotion's working.
That is highly related to it's basically booking a car to pick up some food.
Yeah.
It's still the taxi business, basically.
I think the hotel's integration is good.
Yeah. I think there's something here. We have gone through a cycle where apps and attention were highly consolidated with a few. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, and apps are very narrow features that are really well described. Okay.
So that's sort of where we are. That's why we have the billions and billions of apps in the app store. The question is, does the pendulum swing back to these super apps? And I think the big question is not whether it swings back to the super apps, but whether there's a new substrate that puts itself between the user and all of these services so that they become data-oriented services. And this is where the question is, if you rely on an agent or you rely on a beefed-up version of search, whether that's ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever, why would you care where all of this stuff was done?
You're not gonna care. And this is, I think, the big mistake in this thinking is that that real estate is actually much more fragile than I think we all think it is. And I think a much better way to think about this is in the future, none of this UI real estate is actually worth anything. The question is, do you have a data asset that's valuable or do you do a service that's viable? Because, agentically, there'll be all of these unemotional bots and workflows doing this work for you.
So I think Sacks is right in the sense that whether it's there or not, it won't matter. Could he run it like a private equity business where now Uber Corporation owns two services? Sure. But you're probably just better off for these agents to go and cannibalize all of search because you'll be able to just get a data feed for what Expedia has to create Expedia for a few million or tens of millions of dollars. You don't need to pay 20 or 30 billion dollars for this.
Yeah. The thing that I've talked to Dara about is when they said he told me when they do something that's adjacent to what they're already doing, it explodes in terms of engagement. So, like, they're doing, like, teens and rental cars and then package delivery. And every time they do one of those adjacencies, it just takes off with the membership. And to your point, Friedberg, they have those 150 customers who have their credit cards in there.
And man, it just it's explosive. So that's what I think they're doing.
A vacation is an adjacency to ordering food.
I think hotels would be. I don't think flights would be because I think the flights work really well with the existing apps. But things where you have proprietary inventory like VRBO or hotels, I think those would be very powerful. And those have 20, 30% commissions, which are in line with the commissions that Uber's already getting. And the commissions on things like flights is very small, like a couple of dollars.
So I think for hotels and VRBO would be brilliant. For the other stuff, I'm not so sure. To your point, Chamath.
Well, just to finish my thought.
Yeah.
Yeah. Please.
You'll notice that Uber Eats is a separate app from Uber. Right? I mean, I know you can get to the Eats part within Uber, but they created a separate app for a reason. It's because whether you're using Uber Eats or Uber, the goal is immediate gratification. I wanna get to where I'm going.
I don't book it 6 hours in advance. I call it right now, and the most important thing to me is wait time. This is why Uber is beating Lyft is
the wait time
is lower.
Yeah.
Same thing with food. I'm not thinking about booking my dinner right now. I'm not gonna do it in advance. If you browse through the restaurants, the most important piece of data they show you in addition to the rating is the number of minutes it takes for it to get to you. So those apps are all about immediate gratification, and that's why you don't want other things getting in the way of them.
Now, I guess the claim is somehow you're gonna be able to cross-sell the booking of a vacation or a hotel that you have to think about days or weeks in advance. It's just a completely different state of mind. I just don't think that there's much opportunity to cross-sell that. Or to use the technical jargon, I don't think the attach rate is gonna be
high. What about the brand value, Sacks? So because you know those people are going to another app to book their flight and their hotel. What if that other app was called Uber Travel?
There might be some value in that. I can see that.
Yeah.
If
I think that would be the rationale, like, where I could see the Expedia brand.
Yeah. So maybe maybe what you could do is take VRBO, rebrand it as Uber Hotel or Uber Travel, whatever you wanna call it.
Exactly. Exactly.
And then maybe you could push people to download that app.
Well, the thing I, you know, I would the counter I give to this you
could quantify the value of the installs. Right? So
Yeah. Exactly. I mean, well, you could quantify because Expedia's spending on it every year right now. I
use the Bonvoy app to book hotels. I use United to book my flights and I use Uber to do my rides. And obviously for Eats. When you are using it, there's a tab up top. And the UI is quite nice in Uber where it's rides and Eats right next to each other.
I could see a third one, like hotels or travel being right there. And all of a sudden, yum, yum, you just get all that inventory right in there. And I frequently will book my hotel and I'll book my ride for the next day in advance on Uber. And I do those things. And then when I get to my hotel, I'm ordering food to my room.
So I think this actually could work really well as a third tab in the app for travel. Mhmm. And you could actually because when you use Eats in the Uber app, it's its own tab and it's the exact same experience. I believe in super apps. And they just launched a bus that's like a bus service in New York for $18 to go to JFK.
That's really awesome. I think we're a little bit disconnected because we don't book our own travel. But okay. Let's keep moving here down the docket. Alright.
§05Nuclear Vibe Shift? Big tech is looking toward nuclear solutions to power AI
This, big tech investing in nuclear power is off to the races, Chamath. Amazon just announced a $500 million investment in three nuclear power projects. All of these are focused on SMRs. Those are the small modular reactors. Amazon is working with Dominion Energy to develop a small modular nuclear reactor near an existing nuclear power plant in Virginia.
In total, Amazon plans to invest $35 billion in Virginia-based data centers by 2040, and they want to power these by SMRs. And this is a big trend. Google is purchasing energy directly from Kairos Power, another company building SMRs. Microsoft, as you heard, was reviving one of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plants. So this is kind of interesting, Chamath.
We went from nuclear not being on the table, everybody being against it, the Germans shutting down their reactors post-Fukushima. And now big tech is the customer for these with AI, and they're putting down very large deposits and payments to build them in America. And I haven't heard any opposition. Maybe you could just speak to Chamath about what we've seen here in terms of opposition to these versus the opportunity, and everybody's writing checks.
Yeah.
Well, they're not writing checks. So this is what I don't want to be a Debbie Downer here, but these press releases need to have an asterisk on them. So in the hierarchy of deals, right, just to unpack this for a second, there are deals where you give me X and I give you money. That's not what this is. Then if you degrade that kind of deal structure in a lot of heavy industry, you have deals that are called take or pay, which is there is something that's working, and you need to basically take this, or you need to give me the monetary equivalent of what I'm selling you.
That's not what this is. What this is is sort of this conditional obligation where the beginning of the deal starts with a very important statement, which is if it works and if these approvals happen and there's a whole bunch of nested ifs, then payments can happen. So while these are important deals because they show that there are potential buyers at the finish line, what it doesn't do is solve the two things that you need to get to the finish line, which is the actual risk capital to finish building these things and technically derisk them, and then the regulatory approval that you need to make sure that they're allowed. So I think that these deals are good. I think it's a great signaling, but I think it's important to understand the nuances of these things.
These are not things where there's money really trading hands. And until that you see that where irrespective of what happens, the balance sheet is investing from an Amazon or a Google where there's corp dev folks writing $100 million or $1 billion checks into these companies. It's not yet quite there. This is more the step before, which is sort of, can you create some marketing and some buzziness to hopefully induce somebody to then rip in billions of dollars of risk equity capital.
Friedberg, your thoughts on SMRs and these customers showing up. And then I guess you could comment on the nature of the deal structure here because some of them are, you know, contingent on the nuclear power plant turning on. Some of them do have deposits is my understanding. We'll look that up and fact check it. There could be a range of deals here.
Yeah. I don't know the nature of the deals. I did, I think, talk about this a year ago. It was also, like, one of my predictions for the year was to buy the uranium stocks predicated on what I think is a really important point, which is as GDP per capita grows, energy consumption per capita grows. And if you looked at the projections of GDP per capita in industrialized nations, there was no way there is no way to meet the energy demand.
And this was even pre all this crazy AI buildout, which is probably part of the GDP growth. But there is no way to meet the energy demand without nuclear. There is not enough solar, geothermal, or wind buildout potential that's happening that the stopgap measure is going to have to be in probably the right long-term solution is to have a significant amount of base load come from nuclear. And so what's the fastest way to do that nuclear buildout? Well, in China, they have the regulatory authority and the mandate stated they're gonna build 300 gigawatts with 300 facilities or whatever the number is.
And that's what they're doing, very large facilities that make a gigawatt of power each. In the U.S., it seems that because of the regulatory structure here and the way that utilities are regulated and the way that the states have authority on the environmental laws and all the other things, that it might be the fastest path to solving this energy gap problem is SMRs. And that's why we and these things produce tens of megawatts. So, again, a gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts, and, you know, we need to kinda probably grow our energy production in the United States by several terawatts over the next decade or two. So this SMR may be the fastest path.
Now that could change, meaning we could end up seeing much larger facilities get built out if there's regulatory change in the U.S. and there's more availability. But, fundamentally, we are going to need to use uranium to make electricity to meet the demand of the growing GDP that it seems we're going to be growing in. I think this is just such a necessity. It's great to see the SMRs getting some attention. I just don't know if they're actually gonna get turned on, how long it's gonna take, and, you know, I don't know what this election cycle is gonna bring in terms of regulatory change.
I think we talked about it with several of the candidates when we were doing the interviews.
Sacks, if we are able to get a bunch of these SMRs built here in the United States, maybe if Europe follows suit, what will this do on a geopolitical basis to our relationship with the Middle East, our energy independence, and of course, the AI race to, you know, general intelligence? I'll let you take it whichever direction you wanna go.
Well, I don't think we're going to because I don't think anyone wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard. It's really simple. I mean, no matter what the benefits are for AI or for America's global competitiveness, I just don't think your typical community wants a nuclear power plant in their backyard, and I don't think it matters that much if it's a small modular one either.
So you think they'll get blocked by local communities?
Yeah. And probably for good reason. I mean, I don't want a nuclear power plant in my backyard. Do you? I feel like this has suddenly become a little bit of a luxury belief where liberal elites are always talking about how we need to have nuclear power now, but they know they're not gonna have a nuclear power plant in their backyard.
So it's easy for all of us to genuflect about what a great idea this is, but let's face it. These things are gonna be built probably in poor or working-class communities, and inevitably there's gonna be some accident. I mean, you can tell me how safe they are till you're blue in the face. I don't believe it.
You know, planes aren't supposed to fall out of the sky either, and it does happen. And, you know, they're gonna set up one of these power plants somewhere, and, you know, it's probably gonna have a DEI program, and something's gonna happen.
I mean, something's gonna happen.
And then the fallout is literally gonna fall out on the people in that poor community. So I don't think this is gonna happen.
This show really has a diversity of views, doesn't it? It's like yeah.
Look. This is a perfect example of liberal business elites demanding something
that isn't gonna affect
them. It's
not gonna affect them. Your take on a nonbinary trans lesbian with purple hair
Whatever you're saying.
No comment. Hair. Putting a small nuclear reactor 200 miles outside of Austin, Texas. Go. Put your tinfoil hat off the bus.
You want it to your ranch, do you, Cal?
I mean, I think there's plenty of land outside of the triangle here in Texas where there is no density, and you could put one and I have no problem with there being one 100 miles, 200 miles.
Who's gonna work there? Who's gonna service it?
I mean, literally, you would have to it doesn't take that many people to to service these. So yeah. I think there's plenty of space in the United States to put these and maybe, Friedberg, you could talk and educate us on the safety here. Do you believe what Sacks is saying that it's going to have a meltdown and he doesn't believe it? Sacks'
point of view, to be honest, is the point of view that will be held by a large number of people just like they have been with a lot of other
Is it the right point of view though? Tell us from a science perspective.
Well, no. No. I don't I don't think it is. I think that the same argument would have been made around we shouldn't have airplanes at all because they can fall from the sky. We should keep everyone on the ground where they're safe.
Why would you wanna get on an airplane? Why would you wanna have airplanes flying over your home? We should all ban airplanes flying over our home. They could crash in our home. It's the same sort of argument.
And the reason I'm not gonna argue the point is because I I the because of the point I made earlier, which is that it ultimately becomes an economic necessity that for us to meet all of the demands of AI, all of the demands of industry, we wanna reindustrialize the United States, etc., etc. We need to increase electricity production capacity on the continent. And there is no way to generate enough electricity on this continent fast enough using other means than there would be if we just got these these systems set up.
So I think they'll go through it. Out of necessity. That's your take.
I think globally, this is the case, and we're seeing it in China. Now where the U whether the US ends up becoming a lot
of worry about a NIMBY problem. This is what we're gonna do.
Yeah. It's true. And and here. And we may we may end
up being the
China is the end in NIMBY.
Bye. Yeah. And we may be the we may end up being the Luddite state, and we'll end up just saying, you know what? We're not gonna adopt new technology including now in, like, gene editing and cell cell therapies, and I'll go through the list of new technology sets. I think there's a you could make the argument that there's a low probability of a high-risk event, but the fact is that the progress that it enables is worth so much more than the risk that we would be taking on.
There's a simpler solution to all of this without having to go and create these reactors, which is I don't think that we have a very good grasp of the material science broadly speaking. I don't think we really understand how to build next-generation materials. I don't think our specialty chemicals capabilities are all that strong the way that they're going to be over the next five or 10 years just with better compute. So I think that there are gonna be a lot of interim steps that increase the generally available energy density without going to nuclear. I think there are gonna be a lot of businesses to do that.
That'll be much safer, easier to regulate, easier to test, easier to underwrite, and I think the government will get behind those. So I'm not as negative as you are on the only solution being nuclear.
The countries and the businesses that have a lower cost of electricity and a more abundant source of electricity will end up winning as the economy continues to progress towards a much more kind of digital state and an automated state over the next decades. So if we're gonna be slower, we're gonna suffer the consequences of that as a country. So we'll see how it plays out. I just think that economic incentives will ultimately drive, hopefully, a change.
Would a possible solution be to give an economic incentive to the people who would be in the surrounding areas? Obviously, these things could be 50 or 100 miles from, you know, anybody's homes, but even the people who work there or people who might have, I don't know, some homes that were near it, could you give them no taxes, etc., etc., essentially give them incentives to allow this to go through, Friedberg, in your mind? Do you think that kind of incentive would work? Taxes or some kind of payoff or subsidy?
I'm not sure. I haven't thought much about, like, what the incentives or subsidies
would be.
Yeah. You're
gonna have to give them an incentive because no one's gonna wanna live within 200 miles of one of these things.
What would be the nutty factor? Right? I think that people have a very deep fear of, you know, what is deemed to be cataclysmic technology. I do think a lot of this was rooted in the evolution of the atomic age where we basically have these nuclear warheads mounted to missiles that can travel at 20 times the speed of sound and land on your city and wipe out your city. I mean, that is also nuclear technology, and people conflate the two as being similar.
And even Three Mile Island, there were, you know, no deaths. It was a shocking, scary thing for people. But statistically speaking and historically speaking and technically speaking, it's a lot more complicated to explain to people what happened and why and why now is different. And no one has the time for that. No one wants to hear that shit.
They wanna hear a very simple, do you really want a nuclear power plant in your backyard? No way. What about you? No way. Alright.
Let's vote to stop it.
And they're right. I mean, you compare it to commercial airlines, but commercial airlines, that's a technology that's been around for, what, like, 100 years.
Sacks, do
you have any data on the
safety record of nuclear technology? Because I'm not sure you do. I think my point is, like, you're just making a statement out of fear.
The data. Where's the data?
Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it right now. I mean, I think this is an important discussion. I'd like to actually
I think my point about commercial airlines is we've had that technology for over 100 years. It was honed and refined over many decades, and commercial airlines now have become
This is going on 100 this
is going on 100 years of use. Right? You know that.
There have been incidents every decade or two, and that is why
true. That's not true. You're saying something that's not true.
The reason nuclear has been discredited is because of Three Mile Island and Fukushima.
First of all, it's not been discredited. Chernobyl.
I mean, these names, no. It's live in infamy.
It's social fearmongering like you are doing right now with no data and no facts to try and make it a political issue that drives everyone to one side, shut their minds down, and not listen to the actual facts and data. And this fearmongering is what keeps us from being competitive, what keeps us from having progress. You talk a lot about
people talking about Elon.
Listen. Listen. I'm just saying I don't want one near me. Now, okay. If they're hold on a second.
I'm not saying you
can't 6 deaths at Chernobyl.
I'm not against doing it somewhere where the community is in favor of doing it. So if you can find a place that wants to do this, I would not stop it, just to be clear. I'm just saying I don't want one near
Let's get to facts.
Yeah. We got you.
Take out just give me
a second. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I don't think you're gonna find many takers even among poor communities.
It's a great adversarial point. Let's go to the facts.
140 nuclear power reactors operating in 32 countries around the world. Since the time that we first had nuclear reactors, which has now been almost a century, there have been three incidents, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and Three Mile Island. At Three Mile Island, there were zero deaths. At Fukushima, there was one death. And at Chernobyl, there were 46 deaths.
The fallout from those events has been that we shut down energy production. We shut down nuclear reactor technology, and we fearmongered our way into losing the most abundant available Can I just ask a question? Energy.
Do those deaths actually include the second and third order effects of all this radiation?
Chernobyl, there were 15 people who got thyroid cancer, 35 operators and first responders who got radiation sickness. And then the background radiation effects, there's a lot of kind of noise around this, but it's not a significant number as you may otherwise think. Same with Fukushima.
Why is it that whole region is still uninhabited then?
a radiation event. There's radioactive material that has covered that area that will be radioactive for a long period of time. Now, to understand what happened there and why that won't happen again requires talking about the difference in the technology between gen 1, gen 2, gen 3, and gen 4 systems. A lot of what's being rolled out now are these gen 3 nuclear reactors, and the gen 4 systems, which we highlighted a little while ago, do not have a meltdown possibility. Right?
We talked about this, the one that went online in China in December. Those new systems, the gen 4 reactors, cannot meltdown. You cannot have an incident like you did with the gen 1 and gen 2 systems. And the gen 3 systems are abundantly safe. China is building 100 of them.
It is a totally, like, understandable science. If we wanna spend the time looking at the data and understanding the engineering and the material science work and all the effort that's gone in, billions of dollars over decades, the biggest stumbling block and the biggest wall has been the fact that people have this fear mongering activity that they tell people just dismiss it. It's too scary. We don't want it in our backyard. Let's move on to the next opportunity.
That's what's killed it.
And if you just put these things 50 miles away, the radiation, even in the meltdowns, didn't go past those, is my understanding. So even if you wanna just the easiest steel man, the new systems don't melt down.
You don't have that possibility. And the SMRs I am in 100% agreement
with it. Don't even work. These SMRs, they don't work.
If there's another point you, how can
you say for sure what the safety record's gonna be?
Oh, that's just to be clear, SMRs don't work yet. We have theoretical ways in which we can profile and model that they work, but we don't have a functional one that people can look at and inspect. As part of that, we haven't been able to test how they fail. Those are also theoretical. So I think let's put SMRs off and let's just be very accurate.
We don't have a functioning working version of one because they don't work yet. Maybe they'll work in the future. Let's hope that they do.
There's a lot of things.
About Friedberg is a step before that, which is the Gen 3 reactor, which has a different
same thing. SMRs operating in China, Russia, and India today, and there's about 65 being built at this moment. Right? So and that's outside the US. So that's why the US is kind of observing and trying to catch up and adopt these technologies that are being used by, call it, economic competitors and economic partners around the world.
It's important for economic prosperity in the US for us to have a degree of competitiveness in electricity prices. If China races towards 5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity and we're sitting here 20 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity, what's that gonna do to our economic competitiveness? We are
at 5 cents in the generation.
And you're saying solar. Right?
We can fix that tomorrow. We already rely on a nuclear reactor that works. And to Sacks' point, it just happens to be millions of miles away. So it can, if it goes, we're all gonna go anyways.
Yeah. The scalability of solar in terms of getting us to a terawatt of production capacity is the limiting blockchain up that in order to get to a terawatt of I
think that's a material science problem. I don't think that's you don't need to
run heads
of on to
that other countries are taking the early adopter risk.
What's about technology? That would be that's a good idea for sure. Sense. Yeah. That's gonna be but but if they're if China runs away with this and they have so many of these running and then they're able to power AI and solve problems we're not, we're gonna have to get our act together and start, standing these up.
I don't think power is limiting. Every Navy submarine has got a nuclear reactor on board. That's how they have power.
So much space in this country, these things could be 100, 200 miles away.
But I don't think energy is
a limiting factor in our ability to innovate. I don't think it is today.
In these data centers? Certainly.
It's not
the limiting factor in our ability to innovate. It's not the limiting factor in, like, for example
We're asking us to charge
up every car every night with electricity, with a battery rather than using gas
make my point. So we just saw OpenAI launch Strawberry. Is the reason why Microsoft or Google or Meta not responded with their own version, an energy problem? No. We're still rate limited by innovation and just raw intellectual horsepower and capability.
Meanwhile, we are trying to solve the energy problem and people are taking different approaches. There's storage that's coming online very aggressively. The solar capability itself is ramping up aggressively. We're also forcing these utilities to actually be deconstructed so that there's more efficiency in the energy markets. All of this, if you unpack why it costs 20 cents a kilowatt hour, it's not because of a generation problem.
It is not. It's graft, it's corruption, it's old legacy infrastructure. All of it can be replaced in a much simpler and safer way. So I think by the time that you are rate limited by energy, you'll have a plethora of solutions. My issues with the SMRs is the ones that are promising these next-gen whiz-bang performance characteristics.
They're all theoretical, Friedberg. So even when you say there are SMRs working abroad, there's no, like, next-generation reactors working abroad. They don't work.
What do you think they
Where is an example
of these modern next-generation reactors actually working? Where? Well, we talked about the Gen 4 one that went live in China. There are several SMRs in several countries that are actively producing power.
You can call it a small modular reactor. What I'm talking about, these next-gen materials, the things that Kairos and these other guys are trying to do, where is a functioning working version?
They have them. I mean, like, we have one in India. We have one in China. I'll show you the I'll send you links to them here. There are about 50 of them that India is actively building right now.
And they're competitive with Kairos, right? They all have kind of common design concepts, but they're different companies. Anyway, I'm just saying, like, they're getting real low. Harm
And just for Friedberg, maybe you can educate us on the distance it could be from a city reasonably in terms of building a grid to move the energy from. Could it be 200 miles from a major city, 300, 100? What's it what's it is it? You
want. You could put power production wherever you want.
Want. But it has to trap as long
as you got the copper to move it. Right? You move the electrons.
Yeah. I'm just trying to think reasonably move it is, I guess what I was getting at. But okay. Well, there you have it, folks. A good debate here on the All-In A
good debate. A good debate. I still love you all.
We'll lay we'll lay copper from some country that has an SMR all the way to Washington state.
I was just thinking, like, if Canada and Mexico have, you know, economic incentive to do this or they're more bold, maybe they build them in their countries and
then they'll be selling it.
To the United States. Right? They'll take their—I mean, if you're Kairos and you can't put this in the United States, but you could put it in Mexico and then come up with a, you know, a way to get it past Trump's border wall.
You may be able to put it into the United States, but we won't know until we know it works. Mhmm. I just—I'm sorry. I keep going back to this tricky little issue if it doesn't work.
Well, I mean, I think, Friedberg, I'm with you in that even with the disasters that have happened, those are with Gen 1 and Gen 2 reactors. There hasn't been one in a long time. And
That, I haven't—I believe those significant.
Spin those up right now, these Gen 2, Gen 3 reactors, do them all day long. I think that they're very safe. They're very well.
Oh, the 3 and 4. The threes
are backyard.
The threes are going to be rolling out everywhere.
A 100 miles from their backyard.
No problem.
A 100. It's 4 that's producing a 100. China is producing a gigawatt of power.
Would you own it 10 miles outside Austin? I
don't think you should put it 10 miles outside of any city. I know that they're doing that in India. They're doing that in China. I would think, I, you know, if you look up the footprint of Fukushima, I mean, that was a complete disaster. They put that below sea level.
They told them not to put it there. And they put it near a bunch of people who, you know, were living within miles of it, single-digit miles of it. There's no reason for this to be any closer than 50 or 100 miles, and I would be totally fine with it being 50 to 100 miles from where I'm on my ranch right now. Absolutely no problem with that.
I think this is a classic luxury belief where it's easy for you to espouse this for everybody else for the nation because you know the downsides aren't gonna fall on
you. Nobody. Fifty miles can serve other things to be away from where we use them and maybe everyone will be safe. Would you would you be comfortable with putting them in the desert?
Yeah. But but in that case, there won't
be then
then we're done.
That's how we're running wind and geothermal today. We're putting these sites in random places and solar, and then we're running cable and we're, you know, producing power and delivering it solar.
Solar just because they don't want it to be an eyesore. Right? That's why we're doing that with solar is we don't want people to look at a giant solar thing, solar. Right?
Not against doing it. If you can find a community that's willing to do it, and if you put it where there's no humans, then, yeah, that's gonna work. So so
there we go.
That's what you have to do. Resolved our issue. We got the compromise here.
Here we are.
I just want to keep
that in mind.
Solving world problems. Yes.
Are you sure you got the humans to work?
I'm gonna get my guitar,
and we're gonna sing Kumbaya as some homes to work
at this place.
You better get some robot employees.
I can't wait for you guys to lay millions of miles of copper cabling now. Is this a
solution to
truck all this
in? I'll
lay that pipe.
Genius.
You need me to lay pipe, I'll do it. Genius.
No ditty. Sacks, do you wanna go visit a nuclear power plant?
Let's go.
Let's go. Yeah. We're gonna How's
that gonna go?
Any progress, Sacks is not interested in any progress. Okay? If we can go back to the fifties, that's what he wants.
Let's get some
You're like virtue signaling.
I'm virtue signaling because I'm pro-nuclear? Yes.
It's a luxury belief. You're promoting something nuclear.
Power is a luxury belief. Yeah. You heard it here first.
Because they're gonna put these things in poor communities.
And so
it's never gonna affect your life.
They're putting them the data set of
facts in the United States. Politics.
In, like, Oregon. Like It's
easy for you to say, oh, I support nuclear. Look how progressive I am. Look how smart I am. You haven't internalized the downsides.
I just want Sacks you to fund this electricity, Sacks.
Politics for you, Sacks. Everything you see No.
This is not a Benz
and rich. Everything
I'm defending you. You're gonna put these things in poor communities.
You're genuflecting, Sacks. Looking after the
poor people, mister mister
I'm being real.
Robin Hood over here.
I'm still doing the right
of communities to say no to this.
You are my favorite experiment. You're my favorite alpha spy.
I'm defending the right of local communities to say no to your science experiment. Okay?
That's what it comes down to. Friedberg. So Friedberg is trying to put this episode 200.
I love it.
Well, I'll walk somewhere else. The 200 shows.
§06Lawfare from the California Coastal Commission
Sacks, let me ask you a serious question.
It's not serious when you start like that.
If Trump loses, what's the next four years of this pod gonna be like? What do we come back? Here if we lose this?
He's moving to New Zealand.
There's gonna be lawfare all over the place.
Absolutely. They're gonna come for you.
Do you really
think so, David?
Yeah. I do. I mean,
look. I'm definitely not at
the top of the list. Elon's at the top of the list. Right?
Yeah. He's concerned.
He has no choice but to go all in. They're already doing lawfare against him.
It's ridiculous.
But I think the point is just that if they're not defeated, they're gonna keep doing it because there's no downside for it.
I will comment on the California Coastal Commission ruling that was based on Elon's political tweets, which is why they stopped additional launch of that of Vandenberg. What? First of all, how the California Coastal Commission has authority over Vandenberg and the operations. It just seems to me like there's something wrong. The Coastal Commission was set up with the Coastal Act in 1976 in California as a way to give the beaches back to the people and the public and create a commission to regulate building along the beaches.
It has since grown into effectively a much larger entity with much more authority, which potentially after the Chevron ruling in the Supreme Court may get peeled back and may get dialed down. We'll see what happens. But as of now, they have the ability to block launches out of Vandenberg, which they did. And in their decision, they said it was because of Elon's political tweets. Again, starting at the beginning of the show about the success that they had with the Starship this week, it's incredible.
It deserves to be recognized on the merits of what they accomplished. But to bring in his political tweets to make a decision about the progress of SpaceX and allow public space to be used to further that cause and further that activity seems to me abhorrent, and it's ridiculous. And it's exactly what's wrong with the bureaucratic morass that a lot of these institutions have grown into.
And this was explicitly they're gonna be
Pro or con SMRs?
Exactly. Yeah.
No. I'm serious. Do you think
they're gonna be con for sure? They're con
every I mean commission? What the Coastal Commission does is they they
They block everything.
They block everything, and they do pictures of the entire coastline. If you build, like, a shed on your beachfront property, they will know it, and they come to you, and they're like, no sheds. You cannot build any structures on the beach. They're just, like, really, really strict about it.
It's a values decision that the state of California made in 1976. The state of California, the citizens voted and said, we want to preserve the coastline. And I think that that's a reasonable value for them to assume and vote for, and it was a majority vote. And so they established the Coastal Commission. But how the Coastal Commission extended into having authority over Vandenberg and launches from there for SpaceX, to me, is part of this kind of administrative, you know, growth.
Like, we see all these administrative bureaucracies get started that have a very simple objective, preserve the California coastline. But now they have authority to determine whether or not launches can happen in an Air Force base, which is where
the political commission referenced his tweets. And the vote was 6-4 to increase these. So who is this
one person? Did it in the official context, so I think she was, like, retweeting it. There's, like, a tweet from her. Yeah. This is what I don't understand.
Credit for it. I mean, in a way, she does a favor. She's proud of it. She said the quiet part out loud. Yeah.
So in a way, she does a favor, which is she acknowledged that all of this lawfare against SpaceX and Elon is political. She basically pleaded guilty to it. Look, she's proud of it because she doesn't think there's anything wrong with it. She thinks this is her job as a bureaucrat, she's supposed to punish people who tweet things that you're not supposed to say. That basically is what it comes down to. And, I mean, this is the truth about lawfare.
They're using the agencies of the federal government to exact reprisals against their political opponents. And if there's not a punishment for that, it's gonna keep going.
And they've filed a, Elon's filed a lawsuit, and it's a 6-4 decision. So I think there's
The Biden-Harris administration could stop that. They could say no more lawfare, but they don't do that because the tone was set from the top.
And Trump is saying he's gonna be a dictator, and he's gonna do a bunch of lawfare when he gets in there. So all of these sides gotta settle it down. That's exactly what he said. This has been
another amazing quote.
Okay. Jake, how you can't wrap a show like that. That's just not cool. I'm just trying to wrap
up so we can move on.
Well, Ben, don't make a sly comment itself. Like, just do something else. Talk about something else besides Trump at the end. Like, you know? Just give me my opinion.
I'm not allowed to give
my opinion on the show.
What are you grateful for right now in your life?
I'm grateful for you doing all the work on the events and making them spectacular.
I'm really excited for Sacks live from
Oh, god. I will totally go to Mar-a-Lago for election night. Can we get a booth there? I
think it's hilarious. Keeps saying it. It's not clear you would be invited.
Yeah. Exactly.
Of course, I'm invited. Trump loves me. I'm friends with everybody. Neither you nor I gave the hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket to go to dinner with proxies.
Trump loves me. He he
enjoys his
time. He's
very selective. He's for friends. Chamath get it. Chamath get it. Chamath get it.
Chamath get it. Chamath get it.
Man. Okay. I'll do it remote. That's fine. We can
do it remote. That's fine. You don't want Jake out there? That's fine.
Go go with me. Wait. When is he allowed to?
I don't wanna be at a party I'm not invited to.
It's in throw
me out?
In 2 weeks, 3 days, 4 days?
Yeah. Coming up. 5th. Please have a hand.
It's like just waiting every day for it to drop. Whatever's happening.
Hope whoever wins wins, like, significantly so we can
double Yeah. Agreed.
Please win by totally 30 electoral votes, 40
electoral votes, miss a Supreme Court decision.
Right now, the only candidate who looks like he could get a landslide is Trump. Yeah.
It does feel like
Otherwise, it's gonna be very close. So you're rooting for Trump if you want a landslide.
I mean, I'm going to I'm going to reveal my vote on the election special. I will have my vote.
To figure out. I'm sure the audience will be held in great suspense by that.
Did you guys vote yet?
Did you guys vote yet?
I have. I got my ballot on my... I got
my ballot on the desk here. Yeah. I'm ready to go. I'm ready to go. Alright, everybody.
This has been another wonderful episode. Oh, meetups. There are 200 episode meetups happening. Thank you to all the fans who got together, take pictures and share them on social and at mention us. All in dot com slash meetups.
Every couple episodes, fans get together around the world and talk about their favorite bestie, and it's typical Grayburn. And we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Have a blessed... Bye bye.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release them out.
Let your feet be. Let your...
feet be. Where are...
your feet?
Are back? I'm doing all in. I'm doing all in.