State of Venture Capital, plus fan questions on longevity, decentralization & quantum computing

The episode opens mid-conversation about format. One host says he does not care about longevity or quantum computing, and the group jokes that the show is not all about him, since two hosts who like a topic can carry it. Jason then does the usual introductions, casting Friedberg as the science guy, Sacks as focused on SaaS and marketplace startups, and Chamath returning after a rough stretch with SPACs, with a running joke that you "live by the SPAC, die by the SPAC."

Jason says they were flooded with hundreds of audience questions and teases a future "world tour" with stops in Las Vegas, London's Royal Albert Hall and Miami. He frames the plan for the episode: take audience questions, then walk through a deck on the state of venture capital and early-stage investing, which he says is changing very quickly.

The hosts compare notes on a recent poker game they call a bloodbath. One says he could not make a hand all night and lost badly; another describes repeatedly bluffing him and then showing the nuts five times in a row. They tally their losses in jokey terms, one saying he was "stuck a Model Y" and came back winning only a used Prius, another claiming he lost the equivalent of a midsize home in Phoenix or a Bentley. It is pure banter.

Sacks says he was not in that game but played one in LA a couple of nights earlier, teasing that there was an unnamed celebrity he could only describe as an athlete. The others rib him for playing poker in Miami and LA when his LPs might expect him investing in San Francisco; he replies that he goes wherever the deals are.

Asked when he will invest in a Miami-based company, Sacks says it has already happened, noting he has roughly six and that some companies he is in are relocating there. He and Chamath are both investors in Pipe, whose CEO just moved to Miami, making two of the four besties investors in it. Jason is teased for missing the deal despite Pipe advertising on his show, with a running joke about a shared LP who "got their beak doused" and squeezed Jason out.

The group jokes that the train has left the station on that company, predicting it could reach $1 billion in under two years of existence. Jason pivots to the theme he wants to cover, saying early-stage valuations have gone "bonkers," citing a company he was looking at, and promising data before the state-of-VC segment.

The first audience question, from a listener named Leonard, asks how interested the hosts are in longevity and which technologies could extend healthy life. Friedberg points to the book Lifespan by David Sinclair, a Harvard researcher who treats aging as a disease. He summarizes Sinclair's idea of an evolved switch in every cell between growth mode and repair mode, and the goal of turning on the genes that put cells into repair, so cells fix themselves and the organism lives longer. He notes a number of genes and compounds that trigger this expression.

Friedberg lists lifestyle and supplement levers: fasting, exercise, and compounds said to mimic fasting at the cellular level such as metformin and rapamycin, plus NAD+ boosters. A host mentions being on metformin. Friedberg points to NMN and NR, available in a product called Tru Niagen on Amazon, at roughly 1,000 milligrams a day, and says it is an emerging field with deep work in areas like stem-cell therapy. He floats the striking claim, which he presents as arguable, that someone alive today could live past 200. This is his characterization of the research.

Chamath shares his own regimen, framing it as preventative rather than medical advice. He takes a statin, increased from 10 to 20 milligrams, and metformin even though he is not pre-diabetic, saying his cholesterol was in the 160 to 180 range and is now around 120. He adds vitamin D and some other supplements.

He then describes imaging services he uses. One he names as Koover, with locations in LA and Redwood City, offers a head-to-toe MRI with no radiation that takes about an hour and can spot lesions or early tumors that might otherwise go unseen; he recommends a scan every few years and says his recent one was clear. These are his personal recommendations, not verified claims.

Asked about cost, Chamath says the MRI ranges from about $1,500 to $2,500 and expects prices to fall. He explains the provider is building a corpus of images and running machine learning on them to identify anomalies, which should let them use fewer scans for the same resolution, cutting scan time from about an hour and a half toward under an hour and potentially 40 minutes, and bringing cost into the hundreds of dollars.

For anyone with heart disease in the family, Chamath urges a contrast CT called HeartFlow, which injects a dye and maps the heart to show calcium buildup and artery state. He explains that a calcium score is usually zero, but once non-zero it roughly doubles each year, so a score of 20 can reach the thousands within a few years, at which point cardiac problems become near-certain in his telling. He says he does the test every five years and his score is still zero. These are his assertions, offered as what he does for longevity, not medical guidance.

Chamath sums up his approach as acting preventatively at the cellular level with some drugs while trying to catch cancer and heart disease early, otherwise eating balanced meals, exercising and sleeping. The others tease Sacks for not caring about longevity, joking that he has looked a thousand years old since childhood, and Sacks plays along, saying he has been doing email the whole time and that the conversation cost him two years of his life. A running bit imagines Sacks with a spot on a rocket to Mars and VIP access to Peter Thiel's rumored "blood boy" project. It is banter.