In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Guests: Reid Hoffman, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents13 chapters
§01Bestie intros: Buttons are back for fall§02Reid Hoffman joins the show, reminiscing on PayPal stories with Sacks§03State of AI: Nvidia, cluster buildouts, competition§04OpenAI's corporate structure and thoughts on Elon's lawsuit§05Inflection AI's deal structure with Microsoft, Lina Khan's impact on the tech industry§06Reid's perspective on Kamala being hot swapped for Biden, funding groups that attempted to keep RFK Jr. off ballots§07Reid's thoughts on growing antisemitism§08Thoughts on Kamala's economic proposals: price caps, wealth tax, etc§09How Silicon Valley views both candidates, why Reid funded legal action against Trump§10Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins the show and recaps his campaign and decision to back Trump§11Falling out with the Democratic Party§12Potential role in the Trump Administration, Make America Healthy Again agenda§13Sacks recaps RFK Jr's campaign, RFK Jr. on Trump's legacy§01Bestie intros: Buttons are back for fall
Welcome back to the All-In Podcast, the number one business, technology, and political podcast in
the world. I am your host, Jason Calacanis. And with us
today, three of my
besties. You got David Friedberg cackling over there. He is your Sultan of Science, previously known as the Queen of Quinoa, but he sold the quinoa business, made a killing in quinoa. Also with us, back from Italy, back from Italy, Chamath Palihapitiya. He's at 67% button. And he's not happy about it, but the hair looks great. He's still got a little sea salt from the yachting.
I think I'm gonna try to keep my hair long. Let's see what happens.
Did you bring any of the sea salt back with you from the Mediterranean? Put it in a little bottle to spray or no?
No. But I do have some olive oil.
Oh, okay. Great. And have you showered in the last week, or is it still you got the Mediterranean gloss?
Every day
is a shower since I've gotten back.
See, that's the problem.
You were
shocked. You don't have to see to use as a natural, you know, disinfectant and deodorant.
Exfoliant.
Exfoliant also. Yeah.
Look how many buttons he's got going.
I know. It's just tragic. Beginning.
I feel uncomfortable for your neck. I mean, it's like, creeping all the way up. Your neck looks like a prisoner.
Set to the fans and they've discovered reason.
Love you. I'm going all over again. I walked here, but I had it totally unbuttoned and I thought this is completely inappropriate for Menlo Park in August.
So I buttoned two buttons.
Back in business mode. He's in business casual mode. He went from casual to business. Okay. And with us, of course, the Dark Knight himself, yeah, the Rain Man, David Sacks.
And we have a bestie guest before you, folks. Friend of my other pod, This Week in Startups, Reid Hoffman is here. And, you know him as a venture capitalist board member at Microsoft. And you were the co-founder or the founder of LinkedIn. I don't know if you had a
§02Reid Hoffman joins the show, reminiscing on PayPal stories with Sacks
Co-founder of LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft. He's got his own podcast, Masters of Scale, and, he
he and David Sacks work together at PayPal. Reid, welcome to the program and give
us a little story. What is your fondest memory or the most quirky memory, David Sacks, and that all those weirdos I'm sorry. I'm not supposed to use the word weird anymore. I get banned on X. All of those unique personalities at PayPal.
Tell us about that moment of time. And you remember the first time you met David Sacks?
Yeah. I met David,
because Peter had known him from
Stanford and hired him in, and, you know, David, very quickly because he, you know, has a he has a strong learning curve
as he plays these things, kind of got the instinct of what the game we were playing with PayPal was. And it's part of the reason why I think, you know, each of the execs have had you know, kind of key contributions to making, you know, kind of PayPal successful. And and David's was this kind of like, maniacal focus on
the kind of the cycle of how the product worked
on eBay. And, like, like, there was just a whole bunch
of stuff I learned from them. It's part of how I track, you know, kind of, you know, people I respect is what do I learn from them? And that was one of the things that I would say I learned from David at PayPal.
That's nice.
David, tell us your first memory of meeting Reid Hoffman, which you remember where you are? Do you remember the conversation? And
yeah. Yeah.
I think when we met through Peter, you know, when Reid
Mhmm. I
think Reid was on the board of Confinity back then and then joined full time.
Were you, like, 28, 27, 29?
No. I mean, let's see. This would have been 2000. I I guess it would have been 27 when I first joined PayPal 27, 28, I guess something like that.
Yeah. 99. So whenever that was. Yeah. In any event, I mean, I'll just return the compliment.
You know, PayPal had
all these existential issues. Where you had these larger entities trying to kill us. Visa, Mastercard, eBay.
Who else? Oh, the list goes
on Citibank. Yeah. And, Reid was was kind of our emissary who kept all these dogs at bay and managed to, I guess, be friends with them, I guess, to some degree, even though they wanted to kill us. And Reid was kind of in charge of making sure that these existential issues didn't blow up on us, and they didn't. So we got pretty lucky there.
It's it's the Will Rogers line. It's politics is the art of saying nice doggy while you hunt for a stick. Tell us like, a moment, Reid, that is incredibly memorable to you from that PayPal era, you know,
some existential moment or one of the more difficult or funny moments, late-night moments that would be indicative of that era and whatever was in the water that drew all that talent to one place.
Well, part of it is that, I mean, this is, you know, among the things I was learning from Peter was that Peter and Max recruited just a tremendous focus on, like, intense learning curves. So, you know, it was one of the things that Peter later was like, okay, I guess you have to interview for being on sports teams and so forth because this teamwork thing does matter. But like high performers. And it was kind of like, and that was part of the reason why there was such intense, you know, kind of, innovation and capability.
You know, probably the most stunning memory I had at PayPal is we, you know, we're all young. We're all
the first time we're kind of doing a startup that matters, you know, kind of making this stuff happen. And we do this merger with X.com. And, you know, like pre the merger closing, you know, Elon is saying, oh, I got this CEO, Bill Harris. He's best ever. That's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to X.com in the merger, you know. And then after the merger, literally the first meeting I had with Elon, it's Bill Harris, a complete disaster.
We need to fire him right away. Right? Like, before we get to the first board meeting, we need him fired. And I'm like, Elon, you need to talk to Peter about this.
Well, I mean, he's decisive. That's for sure. Yes.
Yes. Alright.
Well, let's get into it. We want, you know, we're gonna go a little bit mullet here, Friedberg. We're gonna start with business and then maybe
Oh, we had a fun meeting about that topic at a place in Palo Alto that no longer exists called Antonio's Nut
Yes. Exactly. Yes. The legendary Antonio's Nut House. Yeah.
And when Bill eventually did meet his demise, at PayPal, it was called the Nut House coup.
He got whacked at the Nut House? Where were the pool tables in the back? He whacked him or in the booths in the front?
Well, he he wasn't whacked. He was whacked at a board meeting, not at the Nut House. But the
Gotcha. Planning went down.
Certain plans were formulated at the back of Antonio's
Antonio's Nut House is, yeah, the most unhygienic bar in the Bay Area. And that's that's a pretty low benchmark.
Let's just leave it
at that. We'll we'll start with some business here. Talk a little AI. And then since two of our panelists have a passion, we'll do the party political parties at the end. Everybody knows, he was a co-founder of Inflection AI and, as a general partner at Greylock and, one of the founding investors also in OpenAI.
There's a good story there. I'm sure. And we just got results read, from Nvidia. Results were good. They beat across the board. Stock was down after hours.
§03State of AI: Nvidia, cluster buildouts, competition
Analysts said probably profit-taking, putting
that aside. We've never seen a chart like this.
In the history of business, I would say. Data center revenue, $26.3 billion, 87 percent of their revenue. Now you remember NVIDIA starting, obviously, with, you know, video games and didn't have a major data center business. That has loaded, net income $16.6 billion, gross margin 75 percent. And here's your chart.
On a total basis, NVIDIA's revenue scale-up is basically unlike anything we've seen. But if you look, your quarter-over-quarter revenue over the past couple of years, things are starting to cool off significantly after
that giant boom. Brie, what's your take on NVIDIA's just incredible run here?
Is it sustainable? Will they have competitors? And do you think this buildout, this massive buildout we're seeing from startups to sovereigns, you know, to Microsoft, which we're on the board of, Google, Apple, etc.? Is this sustainable? And is this gonna keep going?
Well, I got asked that question unsurprisingly by many public market investors over the year. Yeah. And I basically told them and said, hey. Look. It's sustainable for two years, which for you guys means forever.
Yeah. Eight full quarters.
Yes. Exactly. So that's infinity, right, in terms of time. You know, NVIDIA has a very sharp, you know, kind of lead on the importance of the, you know, the chips for the training clusters. You know, they're effective on inference.
But I do think that as you kind of scale the demand, there'll be a lot of inference chips coming in. You know, I think Chamath, you're invested in one of those. Oh, yeah. And I think there's gonna be a bunch of those kind of coming in and the bulk of the demand will be on the inference side. And then NVIDIA will have this challenge of do I try to keep my prices and my margin?
Or do I do what we like competition? Do I have to respond to the competitive market? And then that I think will play out, you know, start playing out probably in the year, 2 at the latest, and then kind of goes. So I think it's not sustainable. The pure heat is not sustainable.
But I think it's, you know, Nvidia's got a very strong position and, you know, I definitely would recommend people not be short on Nvidia.
Yeah.
So it yeah. There's growth left. Competition is coming, and this is probably not the type of stock you would want to short at this moment in time. Yeah. Friedberg, what are your thoughts on this build out, as well as the software build out that's occurring?
And when do you think we're gonna see some competition come into the space?
I don't know if there's competition in the build out. I think we talked about this in the past. I don't know if you guys saw these quotes this week or recently on we don't think about this build out in terms of ROI. Gavin Baker in conversation on Invest Like the Best. Is that the name of the podcast?
Yeah. I think he referenced some conversations he's been having with the leaders of these companies regarding the build out is so important because, ultimately, if you create this quote, digital god, the return is how many trillions. So it doesn't matter how many tens of billions you're spending each quarter right now. You have to get there. You have to make sure you don't miss the boat.
I guess, Reid, a question for you. You're on the board of Microsoft still. Right?
Yes. Indeed.
Has Microsoft or such a publicly talked about how they rationalize the investing principles associated with building out AI infrastructure in the cloud? Is it ROI based? Like, hey. In the next two years, we're gonna make this much additional incremental operating profit or or is it like, hey. We gotta get this thing working.
Right. Right. To be more precise, is the investment driven by ROI or everyone to say, this is so strategic. We just have to win it, and we'll throw all the resources we have to at this.
Well, so, what one board member is speaking for Microsoft is, you know, is forbidden. So I'm not speaking for Microsoft, speaking to me.
Right. To all cloud computing platform companies. How are yeah. What's your sense on how they're thinking
about it?
Just one of the principles in the Microsoft thing is the company speaks for itself. Board members don't don't don't speak for them. But, you know, I think Satya is like the best public market CEO of our generation.
I think he is stunning, in kind of blending
common combination of strategic insight with also kind of being kind of return on capital, you know, sensible risk-taking, etc. And so the actual thing between your guys' questions in terms of because I can comment on how Satya thinks with this stuff is he's both thinking about, like, it's a platform change. And you have to be there for the platform change for productivity, for cloud, etc. And, okay, let's rationalize the capital to when are we expecting revenue? How do we get revenue sooner to have that as a good productive cycle?
How do we, you know, be not trying to, you know, just, spend like drunken sailors, which is easy to do. Right. But to be targeting, you know, kind of business outcomes. And that's part of the reason why, you know, they're like, like, you know, he's very focused on what are we doing with Office? What are we doing with cloud?
What are we doing with, you know, as opposed to, like, you rarely hear him talking about AGI or
never digital guns because it's
kind of the question of, I am focused on this on a business sense. And I think that's kind of the way he's doing it, but there is obviously a, you know, kind of a it's hard to predict the future when it's novel and unknown in platforms, and that's part of the reason why you have all the hyperscalers now, you know, kind of fully engaged and intelligently engaged because
then you say, well, if even it's just the new platform by
which, you know, kind of software everything with with with a computer unit in it, whether it's a phone or a speaker or a computer or anything else. Anything with a with a with a with
a with a with a kind of a CPU or a GPU gets more intelligent, like you
can't miss out on that platform. And so that's, I think, the thing that's motivating everybody, but there's obviously, you know, how to do that smart is one of the things that, you know, everybody is, you know, I'd say obsessing about every week.
What do you think about the open-source movement versus closed source? You are one of the original donators to OpenAI. You were originally on the board, and there's a couple of ways to go with this question, but I just wanna start with forget about the corporate structure over there. We'll get to that in a second, but I wanna talk specifically about open source. Meta's take Meta's obviously far behind OpenAI, far behind Google, Microsoft.
So they went open source when you're behind you.
Open source, I guess, is the idea here. But they're
making some big progress. Who do you think is gonna win this ultimately? An open source, provider of LLMs or proprietary closed source like OpenAI is, and it's confounding to say
OpenAI is closed, but
closed AI. Yeah.
Look, from the very founding OpenAI, it was never claiming it was gonna be open source. It was claiming it was gonna
be one safety open access, and not differential or controlling
access for that. And I think that's they've stayed true to that principle, which is, I think, what the genesis of the word open is there. And, look, I think the key thing is there's gonna be
winners all over the place. I think there's gonna be winners in the open-source side. And, you know, I don't I don't know
if LLaMA's gonna win from its open-source thing as much as it's just trying to say, hey, we're training these models. So we're gonna, you know, put them out there because our closed system, closed loop, you know, doesn't require selling for tokens and so forth, but there's also, you know, Mistral and other folks who are doing competent models.
And then I think that the, the, but, you know, there'll be wins in different ways. So it's not like, I think, like, for example,
I think there's going to be a bunch of different startups they're going to win, whether it's coding agents or, you know, kind of very specific applications within medical or other kinds of things. And I think they will, you know, generate big companies. And I think large companies like, you know, the hyperscalers are gonna succeed as well. Now in the pure model competition, the question is when do we start seeing an asymptote to scale? And my guess is, and, you know, kind of the GPT landmarks as each order of magnitude, my guess is the soonest will be
And it may even be after that. And that's part of what the bet that OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers are all making is that return to scale.
And then that has a lot of
downstream effects because even if you say we can train smaller models to do effective things, part of what's going to be really instrumental for training those smaller models is the larger models. So, look, even
if there's a bunch of smaller models that are specifically capturing other kinds of market opportunities, which is part of what I've been doing and investing in AI since,
you know, 2014, 2015, you know, there's gonna be a set of those
things that are all a whole bunch of startup opportunities. So I think that the a versus b is a good dramatic
framing, but it's really on which specific opportunities because there's
gonna be wins and opportunities across them. Do you think you're sorry. Just real quick, do you
think there's one LLM or one foundational model
that effectively does everything like a meta model that starts to take
most of the market, or does different versions of smaller models or
small agents that kind of network together end up being the best solution for specific applications and verticals? Like, how does
this evolve over time? Like, everyone's got this concept that there's a god model that does everything and wins, and whoever gets the god
model wins everything. But the reality of software and principles of biology would indicate that you'll see smaller network things
that are better at doing things than any one big thing. And I'm
curious to hear your point of view on the philosophy of that. Yeah. I think the mistake that people make
is they think precisely like the one
model's rule of them all. It's like Sauron's ring. And actually, in fact, already today, like, for example, one of the things that happens with all the model providers
at Microsoft and OpenAI, which I've seen, is sometimes sub in like GPT-3.5 as opposed to 4 to see what the answers are because there's a cost of compute. Even as you learn that bring the cost of the compute, the larger models down, the larger models are always gonna be a lot more expensive. And by the way, they're gonna be more expensive. Kind of probably loosely under order of magnitude. Right?
So it's like, well, it's 10x larger, it's 10x more expensive. Totally. And so when you're trying to say, hey, I'm trying to make business models work.
The language translation, right? If I just wanna get translation. I don't need a massive model. I just need a model that's really good at language translation. Holt.
Exactly.
And so what I think you're going to see is networks of models and like kind of traffic control and escalation and all the rest. And agents are not going to be one model. They're going to be blends of models. And that's one of the reasons why you say, well, there's actually, in fact, a lot of a lot of room for startups because it's not like we say, well, we take GPT-7 and we just serve it for everything. It's like, well, it's gonna be super expensive.
And there's a whole bunch of things about, like, serving it more cheaply. And like for example, one of the really great technical papers that I love from Microsoft is, you know, all you need is textbooks. It's like you can you can train very specific models on kind of like high quality data along with, by the way, the larger model helping train it, that all of a sudden you have a functional smaller model. And, you know, the question will be a blend of these things. So I think the multi-model model approach is, I think, gonna be, you know, quickly universal.
§04OpenAI's corporate structure and thoughts on Elon's lawsuit
What is your take on IP in this new era? We see OpenAI. And you're not on the OpenAI board anymore. Right? You're Nope.
So you're independent of that even though you made a big donation at some point.
Donation and investment. I led the first commercial series, first commercial.
So you're an investor in it and you donated to it. Yep. Well, actually, let's start there. What's up with that corporate structure? How do we make sense of that?
Something's a nonprofit. You donated to it, and then you invested in it, and everybody's making money and selling in secondary at $100,000,000,000. How does that work in the world?
So, so it's it's a 501(c)(3) as
the governing thing is what started. And, you know, when, you know, kind of Elon and Sam were starting this and said, look, we need you
know, philanthropic support and we're trying to make sure that there is like open access to AI, which is going to be an instrumental technology, and we've got some great technologists who want to come do this. We started as a, you know, kind of as a 501(c)(3) for doing it. And that persists as far as I know till today. Then, you know, one of Sam Altman's, you know, pieces of genius was that he kind of said, look, we're gonna need scale capital, and I'm trying to go out to raise and the commercial round was $600,000,000 I'm trying to raise $600,000,000 flamethrower bean is not working. Right?
So so I have this idea, which is the 501(c)(3), which is doing this kind of research mission of, you know, AGI for Humanity is also producing commercial benefits. And we can create initially an LP
which has a kind of a revenue right on the commercial things that investors can invest in and you know, you know,
Reid, it'd be really helpful if you led
this
Because, you know, and I was like, well, but you don't have a go-to-market plan. You don't have a product plan. You don't have a business plan. It's like, yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, like, we need to show that we're actually serious with the business. And I said, alright. Fine. I will lead it from my foundation. You know, because even though none of these things we like to see as investors were there, but I was like, look, okay.
I'll lead as investment. I'll manage it as an investment, but I'll do as an investment for my foundation, in order to do this. And, and what, you know, you know, kind of that was kind of
As we were beginning to get into, you know, like kind of we we hadn't seen anything. They were still doing Dota and robot hands and a bunch of those. So it was like,
We're betting on the scale thesis of generating something magical. And so we haven't seen GPT-3 yet. And of course, once that started coming, then it was like, well, we need a bunch more capital. Let's do a strategic, you know, connection and let's talk to all the hyperscalers and let's work out a deal by which one of them invests in us and then, you know, the Microsoft-OpenAI deal came together with, you know, converting the LP into a subsidiary of the nonprofit, you know, kind of saying, look, there's all kinds of benefits that both OpenAI and Microsoft can get from a business deal. And so that's what's led to, you know, the structure, you know, that I was familiar with before I left the board.
Do you What did you think of Elon's first lawsuit? And then he dropped it, and then he refiled. Where do you think he's coming from? Well,
What what is the,
You know, I I'm not
Very charitable about those lawsuits. They know I would like to be because, you know, Elon's one of the entrepreneurial heroes of
our time and generation, but I
think it's the I think it's, you know, frankly, I think probably the most charitable thing to say is sour grapes. Because, you know, for example, I know Sam offered him as much of the investment round as
he wanted, right? Like he
could have done the whole thing. He could have led it. You know, it was kinda like, "Hey, look, we still love you. We still is like," and he was like, "Nope. It's not a company that I control."
It's gonna fail. So I'm not interested in investing. I was like, okay. Right. And so now you're getting these lawsuits that are like, you know, like, "I was misled."
It was like, you were offered everything at every opportunity other than converting OpenAI into a company that you completely owned. And so,
you know, I think it's without basis without merit. But why do you think he would have dropped it and then refiled? Where do you think
that comes
from?
Is was it is there a new information, do
you think? Or I
think it was a jurisdiction of you, Chamath.
Oh, that makes sense. I got in fact that.
Reid, I mean, Elon put in the first, what, $44,000,000, and he doesn't have any shares.
Yeah. I I, by the way, I put in $10,000,000 at the same time, and I don't have any shares from those $10,000,000.
But do you think that he kinda got screwed because he doesn't have any shares? I mean, at the time he put in the $44,000,000, it was never gonna be a for-profit. Now it's a for-profit. A lot of people are profiting, you know, assuming the paper mark ends up being realized. So he doesn't own anything.
I mean, if you're a seed investor, and put up $44 million in something. And then everyone's making money and you don't have any shares. Forget about the legal technicalities once you have a feeling of being screwed.
Well, look, I can understand the emotion of that, but, like, it's not like Elon's short of money. Right? And so if you go look, I'd like to have shares like I did invest in the other thing. I didn't get any shares for the $10 million that I put in. And by the way, it's not just legal technicalities.
It's actually really important that you're not doing private enrichment off philanthropic donations. And so you know, it's it's but isn't
that what's happened? No. From a
viewpoint of they're held separate, right? And so, you
know, and the 501(c)(3) continues to
control the, you know, kind of control the kind of the the the mission and destiny and so forth. And so that question, its mission is still is still guiding things and you're essentially investing in that mission. And you recorded you recruited people, you know, on that mission. And so, you know, I think that the, you know, you know, I think, like I said, sour grapes.
Okay. So let's get
into some political stuff. First, I wanna get the IP question. Then I wanna talk about Lina Khan. So how do you think about IP in
this, you know, briefly in this new world? OpenAI and New York Times can't come to terms. New York Times caught them red handed
cookie jar according to their lawsuit having indexed a ton of their content. It's pretty crystal clear that their content's behind a paywall, and that's how they make money. I also subscribe to ChatGPT. I give them 20 bucks a month, maybe 30 bucks a month for every employee in my firm. And I get New York Times content from there all the time.
I will ask it, what is the Wirecutter? I think is the best choice in ChatGPT. I get that. And then I get the answer, and I don't need my New York Times subscription. I don't visit the New York Times anymore.
Feels pretty clear cut to me, but how do you think about IP? Should an LLM be able to ingest whatever they please, or should they be required to get permission in advance and pay a royalty to content creators,
Well, as a content creator too.
Look, I think I think that it tends to be a little bit of a look, we we do want content creators to benefit economically from the work.
Part of the reason why we have copyright. It's part of the reason why we have paywalls, you know, other kinds of things that I think are very important. And I think it's it's a complicated thing that needs to be sorted out. Now that being said, I think we also want to say that we can train these models like you know, like, training is like reading and like reading things is, you know, like, when something's available to be read and you've engaged in the right economic thing for reading it, I think that's a kind of a reasonable fair use thing. Now maybe we update the terms of service, maybe we update you know, copyright law or other things to say, okay, that now changes.
You know, I think we don't want to forbid changes in the future. You know, this is, you know, one of the problems we get with. It blocks innovation when we do that. It blocks innovation in, you know, kind of Hollywood, it blocks innovation in music, it blocks innovation. So you want to allow some new chain, you know, changing landscape.
And I think this is a changing landscape that arguably is reading. So I think that like, both of those things are true in terms of what do we want to sort through. I think that one of the reasons why this is kind of like, you know, over like, when I give advice to, you know, various news organizations has already said, look, don't try to hold out for money on the training side of things because, you know, we're gonna create synthetic data. We're gonna do all kinds of other things that are gonna mean that no one's particular data is really going to matter. What you should be is on freshness, on brand, on other things, and we should work out ongoing sustaining economic arrangements like that.
That would be my 2¢ suggestion for it. And I do think we wanna design an ecosystem that includes that. And, you know, when I was involved in those conversations at OpenAI, they agree with that. Microsoft certainly agrees with that in terms of, you know, how do we make sure that economics are fairly apportioned and so forth for, you know, what we're doing for, you know, this phase of, you know, and ongoing, but like, you know, there's a current new technological wave that's coming and how do you do that? So it you know, that's a messy answer, but, unfortunately, it's a messy subject.
It's a pretty messy subject. Yeah.
§05Inflection AI's deal structure with Microsoft, Lina Khan's impact on the tech industry
Before we move to politics, I just wanted to actually ask you about Inflection. So is it still running?
Yeah.
And so what basically happened? There was, like, some
transfer payment from Microsoft and couple of the people, like and then it seems like whatever that deal was, a little bit seems to have
been copied by Google when they did this Character AI thing. So just trying to get a sense from you, are these deals to structurally avoid FTC
scrutiny in terms of the building blocks of it, or how did you think about it? And what
is the pattern and the trend on these things?
Well, the thing I think that's happened was, you know, our very early days. You had things like, you know, we're doing an agent. And if the pie had launched before ChatGPT, it'd probably be in a different circumstance, but like ChatGPT got the
Oh my god. Why is the inflection AI?
Pot inflection agent. Yeah. And so by the time that pie, we got the trend right and the interest of the market right, but we got the timing, you know, too late happens with startups. It's like, okay, we need to pivot. We need to pivot from a B2C model to a B2B.
And we have a unique model, but let's sell that to other people who already have audiences because we're not going to be able to easily grow our audience. And then, you know, once we had that as a conversation, there were employees like, well, we wanna do the agent thing and that's what we wanna do and maybe we'll go somewhere in order to do that and we're like, okay, how do we fund this and how do we make that work and how do we make it work for investors? And we said, hey, there's a deal structure that could work, which is, you know, with a, you know, kind of outside party, you can get paid enough in a non-exclusive IP license and an ability to selectively hire folks and then you can dividend some of that out to investors, to investors, you know, get back a, you know, kind of a 1x and then kind of an ongoing position. So, you know, as investors, it's great to have a kind of optionality on its B2B business, in order to play that out, and this is a structure that works for everybody. In this pivot to B2B.
And that's essentially the structure that we did.
I see.
Great pivot, Chamath, into Lina Khan. I think one of the things that is quite paradoxical about your relationship with David Sacks is you both agree on
something in politics, which is Lina Khan, and her concepts around future competition and maybe how she's running, this issue for the United States is leading
to basically a freeze on the market. We're seeing weird deal structures, like some of the ones we're talking about here, that could have just been acquisitions. And I'm curious your thoughts on what she, you know, the sort of breakup of Google, and now
we're seeing that emerge at the same time that they're facing the biggest existential crisis from their career, which is language models competing with them and
Man, I would say half of my Google searches have already moved to, you know, chat GPT-like services.
So what's your take on Lina Khan's approach to M&A and what impact, if it's continued and sustained,
will that have on capital allocation? Because I don't know what happened to the single and double M&A market,
but it seems to be completely gone. Everything from Adobe and Figma to other mergers that could be happening are essentially frozen. So what's your
take?
So it was funny because I kind of made an off-the-cuff, you know, kind of remark about Lina Khan returning a whole new cycle.
I saw you on CNN when they were like, are you telling Kamala and Biden what they have to do? And
And so I'm like, no, because I don't believe in that kind of corruption of politics.
The only way she's learned about it is she asked me or she watches this television show. And,
so she's done a good job on the price curtail. She's done a good job on the anti-competes, both of which I think are very, very good for, you know, competitive markets. The problem is I think she has a misunderstanding of these large tech companies. And, for example, on the M&A thing, you know, her theory is you gotta prevent the aggregation of powers. You gotta fight every acquisition of note.
And the problem, of course, is that actually quells venture capital investment. This is like, okay. Part of the returns is if I'm gonna invest in something that might be competing with, you
know, one or more of the large tech companies, I need to have acquisition exits as part
of being able to fund enough capital to really make that acquisition, you know, that investment possibly work. Because if it doesn't work, I want to be able to at least recover my capital by an investment. So the right way to look at it is, is there competition amongst the top tech companies? Because, you know, if one of them is squashing all the other ones, that's a problem. If we're five large tech companies heading to three, then I'm much more sympathetic to our point of view.
But we're actually five heading to 10, right, or five to seven heading to 12 because like Nvidia is now in the mix and others, I think, coming in
the mix.
Is, you know, now over $500 billion. Yeah.
So
Yes. And so you have this ability. So the thing is they're competing on the acquisitions just like they're competing in the marketplace. And if you're trying to quell the whole thing because your theory is like they should just, you know, the startup should just be able to grow up to compete. That actually means that those will never get the capital that they need in order to do that, which means you're actually having the opposite of your intent, right?
What you're doing is you're actually making there to be less competition because, you know, capitalists can't say if I'm gonna put a 100,000,000 dollars, 500,000,000, a $1,000,000,000 into this company, I at least have a chance of getting my capital back or I can possibly create a competitor. And that's that's the reason I was speaking out against it as an expert.
It was, like, richest things. I saw you. I thought it was Jake Tapper who, you kind of grilled you on it. I thought you did an exceptional job of just saying, listen, I made a donation. This is how I feel about it, but, obviously, he's gonna do what she wants to do.
And that's just how politics work. So, I thought that was actually pretty well done, and I actually appreciate you fighting for more M&A because it would be great for the industry. It's actually you wanna throw up a political topic here or you want me
to take
Just to stick on Lina Khan for a second. So I agree that her approach has been overly broad and has had a
chilling effect on M&A. And so, Jake, like you said, we've lost those base hit acquisitions that I think are important to the venture capital
market that help new starts get funded. I mean, if the returns on risk capital go down, there's gonna be less of it. There'll definitely be less
that'll be less. So,
yeah, so I agree with the read on that. The area where I'm not sure we agree is and where I do agree with Lina Khan is I do think the big tech companies have too much power. I do think that they are monopolies or have monopolies, and I do think they need to be controlled. I just think that, you know, I wouldn't prevent them from doing any M&A whatsoever. I'm curious if Reid, like, agrees with that that the big tech companies have too much power or agrees with Lina Khan on that.
And I guess specifically, do you think any big tech companies should be broken up? If so, which ones? I mean, I would actually entertain
that idea of of of de conglomerating or breaking up some of these big tech companies. Do you do you think do you agree that big tech is
too much power or not? I think it's TBD. But the reason I'd take—let's take the opposite point of view—would say no.
The thesis for no is
that they are very strong American companies that get, you know, in most
cases, over half the revenue from overseas. They create technology platforms that beneficially differentiate the U.S. versus, you
know, many other countries in kind of global circumstances like the internet and other kinds of things. I think that they are competing ferociously with each other. I mean,
You know, Jason just mentioned that, you know, it was kind of like, look, we've already got, like, ChatGPT competing with Google Search and other kinds of things. And I think it's competitive pressure, right? This is, I think, what capitalism's about is competitive pressure that essentially creates the thing. And that's the reason why I like if it's if if we were shrinking, like it was Google, Uber Alles, or I actually frankly think that the, you know, everyone likes to talk about, you know, Google, you like I think the the prime candidate is likely to be, and I'm speaking as an individual and as a venture capitalist here, is Apple with the App Store. Right?
Okay. So wait. So so that brings up an interesting point. One of the things we talked about in this pod is that we shouldn't shut down M&A, but the the FTC should limit anti-competitive tactics
by these big tech companies. Yep. Apple, really good example because they drive everything through the App Store.
You're not allowed to do side loading. They want to take what is a 30% piece of any sales. You're not even allowed to have a
link inside an application to drive the user to the website. Yeah. Yeah. You're up now. You can date a question.
Would you at least want to crack down on those anti-competitive tactics?
Yeah. No. For sure. And look, especially when, you know, we all know it's nonsense. It's like, look, you could just give the consumers the option to to to allow side loading.
You could just say it's technically very simple to do. And you can say, look, we we don't want you to side load because we view it to be safety and security, but we're giving you the option. Right? Fine. Give people the option.
Right. Reid, were you surprised that then
the first target where there was, like, some successful antitrust pushback was against Google versus Apple. And then second, do you think that there's a chance, like a meaningful chance that the government tries to break Google up? Or do you think it looks something maybe more similar to
what happened to Microsoft? So I think in
mandating breakups, you know, like, I think is a
Look, I think we should operate through competitive networks and competitive ecosystems. I think it's part of what's smart about capitalism. And I think mandating breakups is only when essentially capitalism is failing, on specific things. You want to do the least the least you can to get back to competitive networks in terms of how you're operating. And so, you know, when you say, hey, look, iOS
has this kind of monopoly. You say there's no sideloading. You have to use App Store.
You have to use the payment mechanism. You know, etcetera, etcetera. It's like, well, that quells a ton of startup innovation. We all know this as investors because we look at anyone who's prospectively doing a business like this and say no chance. It's you, you know, you're not gonna succeed.
And so so then you say, well, what's the least thing that we can do? Right? And, you know, like, a classic antitrust, like, well, let's break off the App Store from Apple as well. Right? Unclear that that would really fully work.
You know, that's like socialism mandating how the thing should work. Let's try to get it so that we allow competition to determine these things and like, for example, saying, hey, like, you have to allow consumers the option of sideloading. You have to allow consumers the option of installing an alternative app store. Right? Like, that kind of stuff.
I think, you know, what's the minimal stuff? I think that's the kind of intervention we wanna have because I think there's all kinds of benefits that come from
But why do you think that the case against Apple has made less progress than the case against Google?
I think it's kind of it's less politically easy, right? Like, it's kind of like everybody loves our iOS phone and, you know, there's less of a blue and red, you know, kind of combo tackle, where, you know, the blue feet. People are like, they hate big companies.
Apple is less expensive, basically. Yeah.
Yes.
More stylish. They're prettier. I kinda like your approach though with the App Store. If you were to think of least harm to the ecosystem, Epic Games has their own app store for games. They charge 12%.
They get they give a I'm sorry. They give developers 88%. They only take 12. And forcing Apple to allow, you know, a startup to do an app store would solve the entire problem. And it seems like that's where it's gonna go.
And all five of us would invest instantly in an app store that would say 0% take rate and all advertising based. What a great idea that would be?
Yeah. Makes sense. Great.
I have a question. A few weeks ago, you said something to the effect very publicly that you had had a one-hour or multi-hour lunch with Biden. And he just seemed like super on his game, and then he was kind of dumped. Was that just a moment in time where he was really great with you, or how do you reconcile that with Pelosi and all of these other folks and what happened to Biden?
§06Reid's perspective on Kamala being hot swapped for Biden, funding groups that attempted to keep RFK Jr. off ballots
Well, like most of us, I was pretty dismayed
by the debate performance, because when I talked to him, like, detailed, thoughtful analysis with no notes on
Gaza questions about AI, you know, and what kinds of things, you know, what did I think about, what the progress, you know, the thing they were doing with the voluntary commitments, the executive order, and, you know, what kinds of things should happen in the future, and all that kind of stuff being on the game a little slower, right, than, you know, a 50-year-old would be, but, you know, like cogent and totally worth it. And then you kind of looked at the debate and said, oh my gosh, this is this is this is a disaster. And so, it's like, look, is the debate a one-off thing? Is it did you were you ill? You know, like trying to reconcile the two and, you know, spent a little bit of time trying to figure that out to to what was going on because it was it was the first time I'd seen something like that.
And, you know, you know, I don't, you know, I'm not enough of a DC insider to know exactly what the set of conclusions were other than I, you know, I applauded, you know, Biden for having the kind of integrity to go, look, maybe I'm ill, maybe I'm old, maybe I'm slower, but, you know, it's about the country more than it's about me because I'm, you know, it's important to be about the country, not about yourself, I'll step aside. And ultimately his decision, there's nothing that anyone can force, Pelosi couldn't force anyone else. It's ultimately his decision. He came to that decision. So you'll have to applaud that.
Do you think that they should have run an open primary after that? And would Kamala have won an open primary?
Well, it's hard to know. I mean, I think they were definitely leaning towards an open primary and then all the people who would be the most actual contenders all endorsed Kamala. So, and by the way, you say, well, kind of democratic process. It was like, well, there was a democratic process that picked the Biden-Harris ticket, which turned into the Harris-Waltz ticket. And so that's not
But I think if you look at the sequence of events, it was kinda like, well, you know, we're gonna sort out, you know, what we're gonna do and then, you know, all of the key folks, you know, Shapiro and Whitmer and everyone else all endorsed Kamala. I was like, okay, let's just get back to, you know, kind of the choice of two candidates. And so I, you know
Do you feel the voters felt re do you think the voters felt left out?
The Democratic voters? Well, I mean,
from post fact, seems not, right, with the level of kind of energy and all the rest. It seems that that
that, that the that, you know, like the with the pure polling and kind of level energy and kind of what's going on, they're happy with what they got. Yeah. They're happy with what they got.
I would have liked to have that speed run.
Do you think it sets a bad precedent that there were these backroom conversations. Obviously, the
staff of Whitmer, Moore, Shapiro, their
offices speak with Democratic Party leadership, speak with big donors, and there was effectively a coalescing that took
place over a period of time that said, we should all stand behind and endorse one person instead of infighting and creating a split in the party. And does that not set a bad precedent that there is a small group of
people in either party that in a primary process effectively get to nominate their candidate,
get their candidates to become the nominee. And therefore, there's only two people for the country to choose from. And as we have seen recently with RFK Jr. and the lawsuits against him being on the ballot in different states, it makes it very difficult maybe for the people to have their choice. And is that a bad way for democracy to work? And I just love your philosophical view on this.
I'm like, what's the best way for democracy in the United States to work?
So for the president
for the president? Yes.
We do live in a republic. Alright. And there is various like, you know, some people have much more influence than others, whether it's media platforms, whether it's, you know, economics and ability to spend, whether it's, you know, a history and a brand and and and other things and so, you know, this melee and and and kind of, you know, whole integration set of things. Now ultimately, you know, voters are gonna decide in November, right? So, you know, people do have a, you know, and I think that that that staying to our democratic process is what's really key, like, you know, people going to the polls.
You know, I think we should wanna live in a country where everyone does, you know, everyone who is legally allowed to vote does vote and I think that that's, you know, ultimately a good thing. Now, you know, are there things that I would like to change? Sure. I'd like to change. I'd like to have ranked choice voting.
Mhmm. You
know, I'd like to have open primaries. There's a set of things like actually my principal frustration in all of this stuff is, you know, what's one of the fundamental things that the two parties agree on that shouldn't be is that there should be only two parties, right? And I think that's, I think that's something that you need to fix and you can't fix it. Unfortunately, I think with independent candidates because the whole system is really set up for, you know, kind of two parties and independent candidates are almost always spoilers one way or the other. I mean, like on the RFK stuff, I understand there was a bunch of Democrats who were trying to, you know, prevent him from getting on the ballot.
I actually confirmed on the ballot because I actually think his anti-vaxx stance will, you know, really fit very well with Trump. And so I think
he just wanna take more from Trump.
I wanna
address that, Reid, because I think there was a rumor that you were funding some of these lawsuits to keep him off the ballot or whatever. Like, have you spent any money to try to impact RFK one way or the other?
I wouldn't be surprised if we look at all the money that goes to all the different organizations. If organization X kind of had some kind of ballot thing, my my voice instruction was always like, no. No. No. Don't do that.
That's anti-democratic. But, you know, you can't control everything just like you invest in a company and CEO sometimes the dumbass
that you Right.
Can't do anything about. Because you give you
give money, you give money to to folks that then execute their own strategy. So you can't control on-the-ground tactics. Right?
Yeah. So there's there's that happens that you're like, no. Don't do that. Right?
Well, okay. That's a good, that's a good segue, because let's talk about the five cases against Trump. There are five lawsuits.
I don't want can we just stay on this talk for a second? I think
it's important. Yeah.
Okay. So in in Michigan and Wisconsin, you had Democratic groups. They fought RFK Junior's bid to get on the ballot. Okay. They failed.
Now he wants to get off the ballot, but they won't take him off now that they think that his presence hurts Trump.
And at the same time, Michigan's trying to remove Cornel West and Wisconsin's trying to remove Jill Stein.
So I'm curious. Do you think there's any principle on display here besides naked
partisan hackery? I mean, basically, the Democrats fought having third
parties on the ballot when they thought it would hurt Biden. And now they wanna keep them on the ballot when they think it's gonna hurt Trump, except for those third-party candidates who they still think will hurt Harris. So is there any principle here? Is this just partisan hackery?
I think it's, you know, I frankly, you know, think that everyone who follows the legal process to get on the ballot should be on the ballot and, you know, we should follow the legal process. I'm very much of a legal process kind of person. What I'm opposed to is like, you know, calling Raffensperger and asking for 11,000 votes, which is not legal. Right? So like, yeah. Sure.
Is that bad and do I advocate against that? The answer is absolutely yes. But it's, you know, follow the legal process.
But if
the state of Colorado throws Trump off the ballot, for example, is that legal process? If it's overruled by the Supreme Court, or could we just say, substantively, that states shouldn't be removing candidates from the ballot? That's
Well, but you want them to remove RFK from the ballot?
No. That's not what I said. Okay.
I'm just trying to figure out
because No.
No. The rule is that well, first of all, I don't think that Democratic groups should be suing RFK to keep him off the ballot. And that's what he said, is that Democratic groups were suing to keep him off the ballot, and they were trying to exhaust his resources so he couldn't mount an effective campaign. And some of those groups you funded. Right?
So maybe you didn't know what they were doing, but in any event, I consider that to be anti-democratic. RFK is now trying to remove his name from the ballot. I think as a candidate, you're allowed to do that. And those same groups that once fought to keep him off the ballot are trying to keep his name on the ballot because now they perceive, yeah, because now they perceive the political calculation to be a little different.
So I don't see any of this as being democratic. This to me is just partisan hackery, isn't it?
So can't you
hear that?
Look, yes, fundamentally from a viewpoint of, like, look, for example, my direct actions and yes, you fund a whole bunch of different groups and you have different groups doing different things, but you funded them to do this thing that you were thinking of and things happen. It's just fun companies. You know, my thing was actually in
fact making people aware of RFK's anti-vax, you know, statement, his anti-science stuff because I thought
that would be relevant in the polls in November. That was the actual strategy that I believe, and I think that would differentially, you know, hit Trump more. And so, therefore, it would be a spoiler, right, as these events are.
I've no problem drawing attention to issues. But I do think fundamentally it's anti-democratic to sue third-party candidates to the point where they can't be on the ballot. Okay. Let me ask you directly, Cornel West. There's an effort right now to remove Cornel West from the ballot in Michigan.
Do you support that, or would you oppose that? I mean, is that democracy?
By default, I would oppose it. I don't know any of the details.
Okay. Fair enough.
Reid, I have a question for you. It's more of a statement actually. Maybe I just love to get your reaction. One of the most divisive issues that
§07Reid's thoughts on growing antisemitism
we have right now is people's position on October 7th, Israel-Palestine. There is a sense that there's a
growing kind of like virulent strain of anti-Semitism in America. A lot of people point to the
extreme left as where that's really gestating. There was thoughts that Josh Shapiro would have
been an exceptional candidate, but one of the large reasons why he was not really meaningfully considered was his religion. I just want you to comment on the broad issue and whether you see it in the Democratic Party, whether you see it in the Republican Party, whether you see it at all, just give us a sense of where we stand culturally on this issue.
Well, so, like, I know Josh Shapiro. I think he's great. You know, I've had I've broken bread with him. And, you know, he was meaningfully considered. You know, I think that the you know, I think we should be so lucky that he would, you know, run for presidency someday, some year.
You know, I actually didn't know Waltz at all and, you know, was initially kind of surprised because, you know, I was like, oh, I thought it was probably gonna be Shapiro. And I was like, well, you know, I think it was, you know, probably close call down to those 2 and, and it looks like, you know, you know, in making decisions, I think, you know, Harris, you know, made a good decision of Waltz. So, you know, I think it's a, you know, now on the anti-Semitism topic, I do worry that, you know, broadly, we're seeing, you know, kind of more rise of anti-Semitism and that's extremely important to fight. You know, because I think and I think there are people in in the, you know, it's it's a weirdly like like, there's some lefties are doing it and there's some righties are doing it. It's both the blue and a red issue in different different shape.
And I think it's very important that we, you know, we stand against that, as a country. And so, you know, I've been, you know, kind of mostly just trying to say, hey, look, we gotta we gotta be anti-anti-racism, anti-Semitism, and also anti-genocide. And we gotta figure that. What do
you think of Kamala's handling of that issue in her speech? She basically seemed to, I don't know, say both sides it, but she said, hey. You can believe that the people of Gaza should be treated more humanely and that, you know, Israel has a right to defend herself.
What do
you think of her hands
on this side?
I think that's rational. Right? Like, you should be anti-genocide both of Palestinians and of Jews. Right? And, like, it's obviously a very, very thorny topic.
Yes. Right? So, so I think, you know, saying that I'm gonna try to protect civilians on both sides, anti-genocide, I think that's a human caring point place to be looking out
for people. Reid, do you think that generally speaking, Marxist socialist principles are taking a firmer
hold on the Democratic Party
§08Thoughts on Kamala's economic proposals: price caps, wealth tax, etc
and kind of those principles are starting to showcase not just in
the cultural phenomena that Chamath is referencing, but also in some of the policy making that's going on. And, concepts of equity
rooted in concepts of social justice, ultimately rooted in Marxist principles emerging from the Industrial Revolution.
What about price fix?
So so as an example, the price gouging, you know, price caps on food proposal, the concepts of a wealth tax, not necessarily the unrealized
capital gains tax, but separately a tax on wealth, all of these concepts of the degradation of power structure through policy.
And in part, some have argued that the anti-Semitism arises from these principles and that the Jews are considered a privileged and powerful,
cultural class. Is that is that not being observed?
You not you not think that there's some tendencies that are emerging in the Democratic Party may be influenced by a louder far left and that far left is becoming more loud and and better represented in the party? Look, I think we should speak out against both the far left and the far right
I think it's important to do both. And so, you know, since, you know, I'm playing the Democrat here in this conversation, I'll ask you guys to play the, or especially Sacks, play the Republican and speak out against the far right too. But the
short answer is yes, there are amongst the extreme left.
That's not everybody in the Democratic Party, but the extreme left, there are some, like, you know, misunderstandings about, you know, why it's important to defend, you know, kind of anti-genocides. Like, from the river to the sea, it's like, yeah, that's a genocidal statement. Don't use that one. Right? That you understand what language you're using.
And to be like, look, you know, we've had a great genocidal moment with, you know, World War II, and we're still trying to recover from it. Two, you know, questions around like what I think is a foolish wealth tax even though it's, by the way, narrowed to like 80 percent. And then on the price gouging stuff, you know, one of the things is I started scratching at it, you know, was interesting. I think this week, Kroger said, yes, we did actually artificially raise prices to profit from the pandemic, you know, and yeah, you should stop price gouging. It's not quite the same thing as price capping.
And apparently there are laws that affect even in Florida, right, or in Texas, where some of, you know, you guys are living. So it's kind of, you know, it's like, okay, I need to understand this issue in more depth, but I don't think it's as simplistic as the political headlines are having it.
Well, but the reason why Kamala Harris proposed the price fixing proposal scheduling, whatever you wanna call it, was in response to inflation. In other words, we've had 20% erosion in purchasing power over the last four years. Harris needs a response to that. So she came forward with this new economic proposal. So it's in that context this came up.
This wasn't some proposal by the far left of the party unless you consider Kamala Harris to be far left. I actually do. But, okay, fair enough. But my point is just this is her proposal. And it's in response to inflation.
I mean, you don't you you understand what causes inflation. Right? It's like government printing too much money. It's not it's not greedy corporations raising their prices too much. I mean, do you agree with that?
Look, I agree that you have to have good monetary policy, and so I think we we probably agree on that. And I think some printing of money is part of the normal functioning economy, but too much is is bad. And I don't think, look, I think price it, look, part of the reason why we just talked about antitrust stuff earlier, you do have to look at
places where there's a there's a possibility of kind of commanding stuff from
your, your privileged position and like, you know, the
Okay. We all agree. We all agree that monopolies have to be controlled. No no no debate there, but that's not what's caused the inflation, right, because we've had inflation of commodities, not just monopoly products, but commodities like just food staples, eggs, you know, chicken, stuff like that.
Driven by fuel and labor and all the other inflationary underpinnings of those markets. And I think we tried to highlight that. I don't know if you saw Elizabeth Warren's interview on CNBC where she got taken apart because she made some claims about profiteering by Kraft Heinz. And the CNBC anchor pointed out you were actually incorrect. Kraft Heinz has seen a reduction in profit over this period of time.
And so, like, there were factual inaccuracies in these belief systems. But, you know, for me, it feels a lot like the government setting prices in free markets is one of those steps towards socialist principles that worry me the most.
Yeah. And, look, generally speaking, as I was saying earlier, I'm like, make sure the network sorts it out versus centralized control.
Totally. Totally.
So it's kinda like you have to look at, is there a place where you're like, okay, that's the reason I, like, focus her words were price gouging. And if you're focused on the kind of gouging side of it, it's like, oh, there might be a market inefficiency that you're essentially correcting, then that's, I think, the same kind of thing we were talking about with the FTC and the Apple App Store and so forth. If it's like, yeah, I'm just gonna set a fixed price on eggs, right? That's a bad idea. And by the way, there's bad ideas like the wealth tax thing that I disagree with.
Her economic thing also had housing, which I think is a, you know, a good kind of thing to kind of lower costs for Americans and, you know, kind of make that kind of stable work. Like, I think she's she's been good on immigration. I think that's the the Lankford-Sinema bill, which was from, you know, the the the Republican side was something they were fully prepared to endorse and, you know, Trump killed it because he wanted a campaign on it. It's like, look, we care about the actual running in the country. And so you look, I I think there's a bunch of good things, but if you said why defend price capping, the answer is not as an independent principle by itself.
And by the way, are there people lefties? Like, you know, a lot of what Elizabeth Warren says about capitalism I disagree with. Right?
I mean, I could disagree with you on the border. I think, you know, Kamala Harris used to be considered the borders are that's gotten scrubbed. I don't think she's done a great job on that, but whatever. That I I wanna go back to issues that affect Silicon Valley. 25% unrealized gains tax.
It seems like most of Silicon Valley almost all of it is either disagrees with this or is up in arms about this. Think J Cal, you would you said that this is disqualifying.
In a sense, it's disqualifying for me. For sure. Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean, do you agree that a large unrealized gains tax, 25 percent, would be a disaster for Silicon Valley and the whole startup ecosystem? Or, I mean, how do you come down on that?
Well, as I understand it, on that tax that's proposed is you have to have 80 percent of
your net worth. That's right. Liquid. Yeah.
If 80 percent or more is illiquid, then
No. You get to defer the tax, but there's a penalty.
Yeah. You get to defer the tax. Yeah. It's a penalty. That's right.
Look, I think it's definitely a quelling impact, and it's definitely stupid and definitely shouldn't happen.
Okay.
You know,
so it is too busy. Yeah. We get your
think we got
your position on it. It's stupid.
Yeah. A little bit is. We all, we all
we wanna benefit that,
but then why isn't it, why isn't it disqualifying the way that Jay Cal says? Are we just supposed to hope that Kamala Harris doesn't do what she is gonna do?
I'll tell you why. I think that both the Republicans and the Democrats have realized that there's actually very little difference on a lot of the
major things that they actually talk about. So what they're both being forced to do
is realize that because the centrality of a bunch of the things they say are the same, they each have to go to their
flanks to get the n plus one vote. And so Kamala goes to the left and spells all this stuff that seems social. Or socialist or communist because
she has to get those people to vote for her. Ultimately, I think
what ends up happening is most of the stuff in the middle has a decent chance of happening. The stuff at the fringe is I think they get put up, Sacks, almost as like a sacrificial lamb. A good example, I think, is like all of the stuff that's happening with the student loan reform. A half a billion dollar plan, it gets shot down by the Supreme Court.
This new plan, another $100 billion, not even being heard yet by the Supreme Court. So I think they know this. I mean, it's not like the Biden administration is dumb, the Trump administration is not dumb either. So I mean, what they're doing
is being 10 million people would be an example on the right and taking away a woman's right to choose would be the other one.
Yeah. And by the way,
you keep bringing that up, but Trump has said that he would veto, he would not support a national ban.
Oh, no. But I'm talking abortion already doing it. He already he already overturned Roe v. Wade. I'm talking about that.
Yeah. And by the way just returning
an issue to the states. It's not a ban on abortion. I mean, by the way, at the
same level.
Well, but that's
they they can't
make choice here. They have not had a ballot issue there. Just about everywhere there's been a ballot initiative. The pro-choice forces have won. And besides, that's a state issue now, J Cal, not federal.
Yeah. No. It's a state issue, and Trump succeeded in taking away a woman's right to choose in Texas.
§09How Silicon Valley views both candidates, why Reid funded legal action against Trump
But one thing, by the way, look in the spirit of the All-In Podcast, I wanted to be clear about like there's the stuff on the Dems and some of their economic policy for the far-left people that, you know, kind of, you know, they're advocating for that I'm opposed to. You know, Sacks, I'd love to hear from you what parts of Trump's thing you're opposed to.
Here we go.
Well, look, I
mean, I have been consistent with this for years that I thought that the let's call it the, like, extreme pro-life side was not good for the Republican Party, and I've been opposed to it. I don't think it's what Jake says. I think that overturning Roe v. Wade did not abolish abortion. It basically returned the issue to the states. And if you look at the referendums that have happened, they've pretty much all gone the pro-choice direction.
So I think that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has actually allowed the country to sort of sort out that issue, although it's not completely sorted out. But, look, I would not support a national
abortion ban. I would not support refederalizing the issue. I think there's a lot of issues, about, you
know, war and peace where I do not support the you could say the establishment, neocon strand within the party. I do not support all these interventions. I do not support these forever wars, and there is
a debate in the party about that. Now one of the reasons why at the end of the day, I support Trump,
is I know this will strike some people as counterintuitive, but
I think he is the moderate within the Republican Party. He's a moderate on abortion. I know Jake how you're
still bitter about that Supreme Court case. However, he's been very, very clear that he
will not support a national abortion ban. Moreover, he took the abortion language out of the Republican platform. I think he's the moderate on, on
issues of war. He was the first Republican candidate to run opposing Bush's forever wars.
So I give him credit on those things. On style, he
may not come across as a moderate, but those are style points. I think on issues, he is the moderate. The issue I have with Kamala Harris is I don't think she's a moderate. You know? So, like, just to take this 25% unrealized gains tax first, when this issue came up, we were assured, well, she doesn't really believe that.
Even though it was in the Democratic platform, and it was in the Biden-Harris budget. Then people said, well,
maybe it's part of her platform, but it's not a priority for her. And we just had one of her, like, top economic advisors come
out on, I think it was CNBC, defending it. And her campaign confirmed that she supports it. Okay? So now the argument has become, well, she supports it. It is really part of the platform.
She would do it if she could, but she's not gonna be able to do it. I just don't think that's a ringing endorsement of a candidate. I don't think you wanna support a candidate because they're not gonna be able to do what they really wanna do.
Do you think she's a moderate, or do you think she's a socialist? You know? Gonna take the country very far left.
By the way, what's what's principle yeah. But what Sacks didn't address is Trump's tariff policy, which is also inflationary, almost equivalent to the price gouging, you know, food price caps. I think that they're both inflationary and they're both bad policy. That's my personal point here. But I'm
not I'm
not sure what I think of that proposal. You
know, I guess it depends on the details. What are you reading? I'm not endorsing it. But just back to this point
that should we support Kamala Harris, even though we oppose all the policies that her campaign says she supports.
Cause it seems like that's the argument now is that Silicon Valley is expected to support Harris, even though she
wants, and her campaign is confirmed. She wants a 44% capital gains tax. She wants a 25% unrealized gains tax.
These are things that I think the vast majority in Silicon Valley
considers to be disastrous for the startup ecosystem. Should we support her in spite of those things?
Well, okay. Look, the
Information did an actual data poll as opposed to us being talking heads saying, we say that Silicon Valley does X or Y and,
you know, the Information's poll showed that there was, you know, much broader support for the Democratic ticket than the Republican ticket.
Is that is that the thing that Ron Conway just tweeted?
He might have.
I don't know if he just no. No. No. No. That's
that's different.
That was VCs different from the left difference. Yeah. That's that's a that's a different group. That's a group to counteract you and Chamath, throwing his fundraiser for Trump.
I think where that came from. So, but the Information, a news source that ran a poll, you know, did it objectively, ran the whole thing to try to answer the
question. Came out with more folks in favor of,
you know,
the Biden-Harris ticket than I believe. Why do
you think that is? Why do you think that is?
Well, because look, taxes are an important issue. And I think if you ask any Silicon Valley business person, they say, look, lower capital gains promote long-term investment. Ask me, that's what I would say too. But, you know, you kinda go, well, what actually, in fact, you most need for business is stability, rule of law, not grifter capitalism, where it's like, you know, give me an ability to launch my own NFT, you know, etcetera, etcetera. You know, that's what they go. We want that.
And by the way, we can navigate a higher tax rate. It'll be less fast on growth than everything else, but we can still invest, create businesses, you know, etcetera, etcetera. But we can't do it with, you know, kind of corroding the rule of law, right? Like, you know, I think both, David, both you and Chamath spoke out against the January 6th stuff. I'm curious where you're on that now.
It's still top of mind for me. That's the reason why the kind of the rule of law thing is my red line, not tax dollars.
Well, let me ask you
about that formally here. There are five cases against Trump. You have the insurrection case. You have the New York taxes case. You have the hush money case.
You have the E. Jean Carroll case, and, what am I
missing there? Oh, and the documents case. You funded,
like Peter Thiel funded the Gawker case, the E. Jean Carroll case, which Trump lost. And, just to ask you, why did you choose to fund that? And do you believe Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll?
Well, it’s kinda not relevant whether or not I did or not. What I funded was an ability to have
you know, kind of a woman who doesn't have power who's being threatened by a rich man with a lot of money and power to try to silence her to have her day in court where 12 everyday Americans, right, can come to a judgment. And their judgment was that there was an assault and there was slander about the
assault, and they did it twice. And so that was the reason I funded it. And, you know, I think that that's important. We, you know, the laws apply more
importantly to rich and powerful people than it does to poor people. That's the important thing about the thing I love about America is a rule of law system, and I think that's what's most important. And that's what's really fundamental. That's my red line relative to the kind of lines in the sand that we're talking about. And, you know, that's, you know, that's the reason why in the various kind of lawsuits where that seems to be that that's what's being emphasized, then, you know, I'm happy to support them.
Well, you might be on the court. I don't see
I don't see
I don't see how it's rule of law when you have
a District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who's elected on a promise to get Trump. He then takes what are at most,
a bookkeeping misdemeanor that's past the statute of limitations that's expired. And he turns into 34 felony charges on a legal theory that was never explained to the jury. And then, basically, Trump is convicted in the sham trial by a hyperpartisan New York jury system. So that Democrats can then run.
What
do you think of that?
On the
branding on the branding that he's a quote convicted felon.
So there are there are 4 other trials. We are here.
So the first one, what do
you think of that?
Hold on. I mean, I don't think
it's too long.
I wanna get Reid's feedback.
I
wanna get Reid's feedback too, but let me finish my point. I don't think it's rule of law when Trump is prosecuted on a documents charge that Biden himself
is guilty of. He's got all these documents in his garage for decades, which the judge has
thrown out. And we've seen a bunch of these lawfare cases where Trump has ultimately prevailed. The judge has thrown out or he's won on appeal.
So I don't understand. That seems to me like abuse of the legal system for a partisan political goal, not rule of law. Okay. So, Reid, there's four other cases. Two of them, Trump's been convicted in
two of them are outstanding. What's your take on the four cases? You've heard Sacks's take.
So okay. Well, what's the
two that he's been convicted, Jason? How? What's the other one besides the
Alvin Bragg case? There's three cases. Alvin Bragg was convicted, and then the Trump organization with the CFO, committing tax fraud that was convicted in that one as well,
or the Trump organization was convicted.
And people say that's lawfare by Letitia James. So guilty guilty guilty in those three of five. So what's your take on the four that
we haven't discussed yet and heard your opinion on?
So, look, I think it's, you know, it's definitely possible to have some versions of lawfare, although I think most people use the term when it's the legal process and the law enforcement that they don't like. You know, I think that in the Bragg case, you had, you know,
you know, indictment and 12 jurors. I think as I recall, one of the jurors said that that juror got their principal news from Truth Social. It was a unanimous conviction. I think that, you know, you know, you have Vice President Pence, you know, comes out and says, you know, Trump asked me to overturn the election illegally, right? That's your own vice president.
So I don't think that that kind of suggests that there's this rampant political persecution that there's a
lot of fire where there's all this smoke. Doesn't mean that every single thing, you know, kind of Democrats are
trying to put Trump in jail for 700 years.
These cases are still outstanding. They wanna put him in jail. Reid, do you think Trump should go to jail? I think if he broke laws that say he should go to jail, I think the laws apply to powerful people as much as they apply to everyday people.
Right?
So I think that's why
why were these cases? Why did they wait for two years, all these cases, so they could bring them in an election year?
Actually, I don't think, if you look at the, like, just look speaking factually, Trump's lawyers are always trying to delay the stuff. Right? I think they were trying to follow every legal process, and Trump's lawyers keep asking for deferrals. A campaign this
year instead of being stuck in a courtroom. Look, after January 6,
I I This
was this was last year and the year before asking for deferrals, setting out trial things. Like, all of the stuff was from his side trying to delay it. If it got delayed into this year, that's a bad judgment on his part.
Jack Smith just filed new charges, new charges, and all that stems from January 6. In the wake of January 6, Merrick Garland's Justice Department did an analysis of whether Trump could be prosecuted for incitement, whether he incited that mob. And the legal memo came back, and they said, no. We don't have a case here. It does not meet the legal bar for incitement.
Then it was reported by the New York Times that Biden thought that Merrick Garland was basically being a wimp, and they need to go after Trump.
So the hyperpartisan DA or prosecutor, Jack Smith, was hired, and he came up with a novel legal theory that somehow Trump had perpetrated
a fraud on the American people. Never been seen before. And since then, he's been prosecuting Trump and seeking to put him in prison. And when the Supreme Court just kicked the legs out from under his case with a recent decision, he just refiled charges. I don't understand how anyone can look at this and say, yeah.
What happened on January 6 wasn't great, but the DOJ looked at it. It wasn't criminal, but yet they've been pursuing this guy seeking to put him away for the rest of his life, seeking to interfere with this election, seeking to deprive the American people of a choice. On a separate track, you've got Democrats in states like Colorado literally removing Trump
from the ballot. Okay. Reid, your thoughts. So, look, the first thing is, January 6, I think,
is a red line.
I think you did incite a riot whether or not the legal They weren't even prosecuting for it.
Let's let Reid finish. Yeah.
You know, I was. Fair enough. Go ahead. Sorry. Right. So I think it was the, you know, there was an incitement of a riot. I think that the rioters went in and, you know, killed police officers.
We're looking to kill Vice President Pence, you know, from the court testimony. Courts are the best proxy
that we have for finding truth.
And the stuff. It's one of the reasons why, you know, by the way, and when, for example, the Supreme Court says, no, that's great. That's legal process.
I just have a
fact check that no police officers were killed. Where are you getting that from?
I think there was the one who died from his injuries, you know, very soon after. And
then no. No. No. No. There was there was one cop who had a seizure later.
It wasn't part of the the riot. No police officers were killed as a part of the riot. I just have to fact check that. This is not true.
Well, and then there's the the one who committed suicide too, which is a question of, you know, I don't
know how you perceive that.
Yeah. So anyway, so you got the, you know, the the storming of the Capitol, you know, he says these people are American heroes. He's gonna pardon them. He's gonna hire them into his administration. Right?
And if that's not encouragement for other people doing similar things, you know. Wait.
He's not hired January 6 rioters. He's gonna hire them. I haven't heard that.
We'll we'll we'll get you the the the the Trump speech. There's all kinds of wonderful things in Trump speeches. Let me let
me just move to one thing. So, Reid, I think this has been an amazingly robust conversation, and I think you, as always, as long as I've known you now for 20 years, have been really intellectually honest. I want to ask you a favor, which is, can you stay for 10 extra minutes and talk with us to Bobby Kennedy? And the reason I want you to do that is I think that there is a bunch of misinformation. I asked you about these things.
I think it's important to hear maybe from Bobby and just for him to know what you said because I do think it's important to hear from the horse's mouth. Can you just give us, like, 5, 10 minutes so that we can do that because I think it would be an important thing to do.
So when is that?
No. Just right now. Just we're gonna yeah.
We're rolling into an interview with Robert. It wasn't designed in here. It was not yeah. It's just that last minute, RFK Junior, who's on vacation, said that he would talk to us about what it was like to kind of withdraw and all this sort of stuff. And it got so we booked it right after you, but he's in the waiting room.
I'm fine to do it. I mean, it's
it's totally your choice. Yeah.
It's one of the things I like about your All-In Podcast is,
you
know, kind of like, let's let's try to speak truth.
Okay.
Right. So
§10Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joins the show and recaps his campaign and decision to back Trump
Hey, Bobby Kennedy is here, Mr. Kennedy. It's great to have you on the All-In Podcast for a second time. May I introduce you to Reid Hoffman who you may know of, but I don't think you two have ever met.
We do not.
Pleasure to meet you. Likewise. Pleasure.
Mr. Kennedy, you dropped out of the race. Perhaps you could tell us, and I was quite disappointed about it. I've really wanted to see a third-party candidate getting to double digits again. And I just want to commend you on the effort that you put into it. Maybe you could tell the audience why you, as a reported Never Trumper, joined the Trump team and dropped out.
So Jason, I, you know, I've I'm not actually I haven't actually terminated my campaign. I suspended it. We've taken it as a helper. We're trying to take ourselves off the ballot in about 11 states.
So we'll remain on the ballot in 39 states. And the the
rare all red, all blue states will be on the ballot
in the states where we felt we were going to hurt President Trump with the polling show that we're we're, getting off
there, mainly the battleground states. Ironically now, the same people who have been trying to get me off the ballot
for a year or since October are now fighting to
keep me on the ballot in those states. So that's one of the sort of ironies. I, you know, it became clear.
And about two months ago, oh, and the
when it became clear that I was not gonna be allowed on the debating stage. And I I pretty much had a shutout in the mainstream media. So the mainstream media ABC, NBC, CBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, in
16 or 17 months, I
had only two live interviews. Ross Perot during
his 10-month campaign had 34 interviews. Alright. And and, you know, all of them were very,
very much aligned with the Democratic National Committee. And so when they did mention my name, which was pretty often, it was accompanied by a lot of affirmations and pejoratives and mischaracterizations, etc. Oh, I never really had a chance to reach those audiences. The audiences that I was reaching, I was dominating in. I was beating all the candidates among independents, which is now the largest demographic. I was beating them among young people.
So your audience was supporting me. The audiences that were listening to long-
form interviews, I was dominating. But in the older audiences, which is a
critical baby boomers, people who really should have been for me,
because they are people who, like, from my generation, who remember the Kennedy Administration.
They're part of Camelot. They also I was very, very popular
with them for many years when I was the environmental champion alone. And I should have had good inroads, but I was never able to communicate with them because
they watch. They get their news from the mainstream media. And if you're living in that
information ecosystem, you're gonna have a very, very low opinion of me.
I mean, if I was getting my information from those networks, I wouldn't vote for myself. And, and, and President
Trump, you know, reached out to me through this guy, Callie
Means, who is a food advocate, safe food advocate. About
three hours after the shooting in Butler, I got a call from him, and he asked me if I was still interested in, specifically, the VP,
slot, and I said no, which I would not have taken, the vice president,
slot. And, he said, would I talk to the people like to talk to the administration, to President Trump, rather. And at first, I
said, oh, and I talked with some of my family
members
including my kids and items and Cal meaning an oath saying, you know,
I'm interested in talking. And I got a call almost immediately from President Trump. I spent about, I don't know, 30 minutes on the phone with him, and we met the
next day in Minneapolis. And then we
met again more recently. We had continuing talks, and we met again more recently for a very, very intensive and long meeting at Mar-a-Lago with some of his family members. During the first meeting, we talked about the idea of having a unity ticket where I would remain on the ballot, where we would ally ourselves
on certain critical issues, but we would be able to continue to criticize each other on
the issues that we did not align on. And President Trump was very happy with that arrangement. The critical issues on which we agreed, and I was really stunned to see the level of his commitment to those issues, was one. Ending with the other three issues that really got me into the presidential campaign. One was ending the war in Ukraine.
The second issue is ending the censorship. And the third
issue, most important to me, was addressing the childhood chronic disease epidemic and
the, you know, these connected issues about the soil health and the corruption in our regulatory agencies by USDA and FDA, NIH, CDC, and HHS, which have become sock puppets for the big pharmaceutical, big ag, big food processing industries that they're supposed to be regulating. He was very, very much aligned on those issues, and it gave us essentially a beachhead, in which to construct, you know, this, an alliance.
Bobby, let me ask you a question. I just wanna go back a little bit because I I just wanna make sure I heard it properly. When Cali called you, was it to be the VP on
the Trump ticket? And did you was that asked, and did you consider it? And why did you say
no to that? But then suggested this.
Well, I am no interest in being vice president. If you're vice president, it's a, you know, I grew up in politics and vice president to worship in Washington. You have no budget. You don't know staff except what the your budget actually all comes to the White House. So if the president if you do something that offends the president, he can literally, you know, he can take away your plane.
He can take away your staff. And he can the only thing you really have is the Naval Observatory, which is the official residence of the vice president, and he can essentially put you under house arrest. And, you know, I have very strong views on issues, and I you know, I felt like if I took that job, I'd be on house arrest probably on day three. So I, you know, I, I was not I was never interested in that
Reid had to run, but let's just thank him for appearing on the pod. And I thought you did a great job. Conversation and yeah. And I thought thought he approached it in in good faith and kudos to him for stepping into the lion's den.
So it was great. Yeah.
Sorry, Bobby. Keep going.
So, Bobby, let me ask you a question. You are reportedly a Never Trumper. There was massive fallout. He was cited personally for you as a resident of Malibu. The extremely talented woman you're married to, based on everything I can tell, maybe not a fan of Trump.
So this is maybe causing some domestic and some local town issues for you. Tell me about your journey from a Never Trumper—all your friends are, I think, Never Trumpers—to now joining with Trump. That's gotta be a hard decision, no?
Yeah. It was a very hard decision. You know? But, like, you know, my whole kind of journey was over the past 17 months
was, was just it was kind of a series of,
very, very difficult transitions, you know, away from the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party was, you know, the party. My family is one of the central pillars of the Democratic Party. My family has been in the Democratic Party since 1848, since my great-grandparents came over.
And my great-grandfather, Honey Fitz, was the first Irish Catholic mayor of Boston. His contemporary, Patrick Joseph Kennedy, was
state senator and political boss in Massachusetts. My grandfather Joseph
Kennedy was, you know, FDR's treasurer. He was the first head of the SEC.
He was the ambassador to the Court of St. James, deeply, deeply immersed in Democratic Party politics. All of my uncles, Joe Kennedy, was a delegate to the 1940 convention who spoke there as a featured speaker and then was killed in World War II. My uncle John Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. My other uncle Ted Kennedy, who is one of the longest, I think the second or third longest-serving member of the United States Senate, has his name on more bills than any other senator in United States history. And then of course, my father, who was attorney general,
and I sort of walk away from that party was, you know, I guess it
was very, very difficult for me. And I was actually the last person in my campaign to see that, to understand the necessity of that. The Democratic Party was not gonna allow me to compete fairly, that they, you know, they had rigged the system against us. They in ways that were really quite extraordinary.
They had just walked
away from democracy. They were canceling primaries. They had chosen their candidate, and it was gonna be President Biden, and I was really a nuisance to them. And so my voice was not allowed out there. And so that was difficult.
And then, and then leaving, you know, I declared independence in October.
And joining President Trump was, yeah, that, I burnt a lot of bridges. I burnt my boats. Let me put it that way.
Clearly, clearly, it is definitely a challenging thing to go from your family being the bedrock of the Democratic Party and Trump being, you
know, obviously seen as an existential risk by the Democratic Party. So what should Americans
know about the state
§11Falling out with the Democratic Party
of politics and fairness in America based on what you've learned. What do you want the American people to know about the process of selecting a president?
Well, and, you know, I do want to say that I feel like, I didn't really leave the
Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me and left the,
and left ruins of, the the infrastructure that I think my uncle and father had, that had made them Democrats. If you went on a list of all the priorities that Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy had, I would check every box.
You
know, they were anti-war. They were anti-censorship. They were they were
against the corporate control of our country. The, you know, this this corrupt merger
of state and corporate power, that now has emerged as a dominant governing model
in our country. The Democratic Party has changed demographically. When I grew up in
a Democratic Party, that was a party of the working class in our country that was a party of small businesses. That was the party of the poor. In the last election, President Biden, roughly half of the country voting
for him, but that half controls 70% of GDP. And President
Trump got about half the country voting for him, and that half represents about 30% of GDP.
So we've had this inversion where the Democratic Party has become the
party of wealth, of elites. And I would say very insular elites. And the Republican Party is now the party of the poor, the working class. And it's been, you know, for me to watch that, I've been on the front lines of watching it. And, you know, the values that held the Democratic Party together are no longer there. It's held together by a sense of tribalism, a sense of, and a great, great sense of what I would say orchestrated fear of Donald Trump is the only value that really dominates any discussion. If I talk about censorship to a Democrat, they'll say, yes, but Donald Trump is gonna become a dictator.
If you talk about children's health, they'll say, never mind that. Donald Trump is the only thing we can worry about. If you talk about, you know, about the history of the Democratic Party's opposition to war, they'll say forget all that. The only thing we can focus on is Donald Trump.
And that's very, very dismaying. And I would say, a dangerous form of orchestrated tribalism. And one of the other features of the Democratic Party is this need to control, this mistrust of the plebiscite, the mistrust of the demos. You know, demos is a Greek word for people, and the Democratic Party doesn't trust the people. That's why they had to get rid of, that's why they had to get me off the ballot.
I did something everybody said all the pundits said could never be done. So I got on the ballot, and every day I got a million people that signed their signatures petitioning me on the ballot. And the Democratic Party strategy, rather than to use the $3 billion it had to amplify a message and inspire people and talk about a vision and the virtues of its candidates, instead used that money to try to get me off the ballot, to get Cornel West off the ballot, to use Joel Stein, to use the courts, to use the enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, the CIA, the FBI, to try to rig the election.
And it ultimately comes down to this mistrust of the people, which we're seeing now all over. We're seeing two big forces emerge. One is a populist force, and the other is a force of control, of ironclad control. We saw Europe has already fallen. You saw the arrest of Pavel Durov last week, which was extraordinary, you know, the arrest of the guy who founded Telegram because he was hosting political dissent.
And, you know, the European Commission is already openly censoring content. So they did not need to arrest him; they can take off whatever they want. But they went through the trouble of actually, and probably with U.S. encouragement, catching him when he happened to land for a refueling stop in France. France has this extraordinary tradition of free speech that began with the French Revolution. And then again, in the 1880s, they passed all these incredible laws.
Their commitment to free speech is as robust as in the United States. And yet now, you know, and two weeks before that, you had this crazy European Commissioner, Thierry
saying that he was ordering Elon Musk to not interview Donald Trump.
A former president of the United States, the nominee of one of the two major political parties, and the world is not allowed to hear his point of view. Yeah. It's extraordinary, but that is what's coming to this country. You can already see the Democratic Party is the party of control, and it's already not trusting the people.
Bobby, let's talk about something then. Let's assume that this election goes in the direction of your preferred direction, which is Donald Trump wins. What role would you play and what is your agenda? What is it that you want to accomplish, and can you explain "Make America Healthy Again" in that context maybe?
§12Potential role in the Trump Administration, Make America Healthy Again agenda
I mean, it's the three issues: ending censorship, and that's pretty easy to do. You can do it over a series of executive orders; ending the Ukraine war, which is complex, but I think can be done very, very quickly; and, you know, the food issue. It's medicine, it's corruption, and that regulatory agencies
But would you be a secretary in that administration? Would you be a special adviser?
There is no, you know, there is no deal in terms of me getting a particular post. There's just an understanding that
there would be some kind of co-governance. And the Trump people have already demonstrated their good faith
by inviting me to be on the transition team, you know, as one of the co-chairs. And they've done something really wonderful, which is to bring Tulsi Gabbard in, who shares a lot of my views on this issue, as the other co-chair. And I think that's the signal that they're sending, that they are sincere about making a commitment to these issues.
What should parents know about your thoughts on how to raise kids in a healthy way, Make America Healthy Again? Are there any vaccines that you would say you would advise parents to take for their kids? And how should they look at the industrial food complex? You know, if you were sitting with us as parents, just having lunch, what would you tell us we should do with our own kids?
I mean, the big problem is you can't really trust the government to tell you the truth. The agencies are all compromised. They all have very, very bad conflicts. Almost all the people, for example, on the food recommendation committees at FDA, are people who are a part of the food industry, and that same is true on the pharmaceutical side. The people making decisions about what's good for you.
Are actually people who are making huge amounts of profit on those recommendations. And so you can't really trust that the recommendations are in your best interest. And, you know, what we know is that there is no more profitable. There's no bigger profit center or industry in this country than a sick child. And a sick child is a lifetime customer.
A lifetime consumer of very expensive products. And you have this alliance between the food industry and the pharmaceutical
industry to keep our children sick, to get them addicted. In
the seventies and eighties, the tobacco industry was under attack, and the two biggest tobacco companies went out and bought all the big food companies.
RJR Nabisco, you're referring to.
Yeah. And Kraft, you know. You had Philip Morris buy Kraft, and they took a lot of the scientists from the tobacco industry who were experts on making products addictive, and they put
them to work on making food addictive, on making ultra-processed food, so adding
ingredients that make food destroy the satiability of food, so the food doesn't fill you up. So you're always craving more. And those products, many of them are products. You know, we have
almost 1,000 chemicals in our foods that
are banned in Europe and other countries. And those products are products that we are having to introduce by chemists that did not exist before, and the body does not handle them well. And, you know, we're seeing this explosion
in
chronic disease. When my uncle was president,
6% of Americans had chronic disease. You know what the budget was for chronic disease when I was president?
Zero. There weren't any drugs for it. There were no expenditures on chronic disease. Today, it's $4,300,000,000,000. It's five times our military budget. And the people who are making money are the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, which actually you would think insurance companies would want people to be well, but they actually make more money if they're sick.
The hospitals, the medical cartel. People we trust to give advice to us about our health are
actually compromised, and that's the difficult part. You've gotta unravel that corporate capture. Friedberg, when you
hear this, some people might say, this sounds like a grand conspiracy theory.
But much of it rings true to, I think, many of us who are parents, watching kids, you know, and watching the prevalence of obesity, watching pharmaceutical drugs to counter that and all the money that's made from it. And then seeing when people eat clean, and they're healthy. Maybe there
there's less there. So Friedberg, when
you hear Bobby's position here as a scientist who sold the
company to Monsanto, Climate.com, and who's working on food today, what rings true about what Bobby's saying and what do you disagree with, if anything?
Yeah. There are aspects of industrialized food and processed food that are bad for people, and I do agree.
It should be changed.
I know a lot of people that work at the USDA, a lot of people that work in other government organizations that don't make a lot of money. They
may or may not have worked at other companies, but I think
that there's no economic incentive for them to do harm or wrong. I think that the real the and I so I don't think that there's a constructive design on doing bad things by any individual. I think that there is an unfortunate circumstance where people eat bad stuff, stuff that tastes better, they like it more. It sells better. And the economic incentive and capitalism is to make more of that stuff and sell more of it.
And as a result, the stuff that people like that isn't good for them, they buy more of, and the companies make more money. And so they continue to invest in selling more and more of that stuff. And this goes in most processed foods. It's terrible.
It's not good. And so I do agree that much of this processed food industry is very adverse to health, but I don't think that there's a grand design by individuals that are malicious in their intent. Trying to do it. I think that there are people that are doing their job on, hey, this is the market. Right.
Yeah. In the government and private industry. Yeah. I don't think it's people in private industry are trying to make addicting foods?
No. No. I think that, yeah, the point is, like, if people buy more of it, they're like, sell more of it. You know?
Yeah. Okay.
And I, you know, and if that were illegal, if it was illegal to say, hey. This sort of food product should not be made. But, look, alcohol fits the bill too. Right? And we keep making alcohol and sugar fits the bill.
The more sugar, Coca-Cola did a study years ago, where they kept increasing the amount of sugar in Coca-Cola until they maximally got sell-through. So, some kids like 60 grams of sugar in 12 ounces of Coke, some kids like 30, but the perfect level was at 42 grams. And so that study was done by the scientists that worked at Coca-Cola. And then they said, that's the product. It sells, it'll sell the most, and that's the incentive inside of that company.
That's how that company operates. Now you could ask yourself the question. Is that evil? Is that bad? We now know that sugar in general is bad.
The executives at Coca-Cola, at AB InBev, at other places are trying to make alcohol-free, sugar-free alternatives. So there's a lot of push by these people. Unilever has tried to make a big push towards good food. Nestlé's tried to do the same. They've all made these stated commitments to improve the health of the food that they produce, but it is quite difficult to be successful in doing that and returning money to shareholders. The shareholders are like, where's the money?
So I mean, I think this is
the key point you're making, Chamath. I think your clean food effort, and it took me a decade to unravel meat eating everything in sight and lose the 40 pounds, but Chamath, when you hear, you know, sort of this back and forth between Bobby and Friedberg, what's your take on it in terms of, and also the European lifestyle that you live for 10 weeks of the year, what's your take on what should happen here and how Bobby can be successful?
I think what Bobby says rings true in the way that I live my life and I just see it demonstrated on my
own body. You're right, Jason. You know, my wife's Italian. She runs an
Italian company. She works Italian and American hours for 10 months out of the year. And for those 10 weeks, we go there and we flip schedule. But when I'm there, I'm consuming Italian produce that is packed in plastic.
I go to a local fruit store. I go to the local fish vendor. And my body changes. And I know
that because the people that see me when I get back, they always comment, oh, did you lose weight? Oh, you look thinner or this or that?
And what's interesting is I actually do a body
composition before I leave and after. I've done this for seven years now. And I can tell you that my weight doesn't change that much, but my
body composition is completely
different.
And I don't know what it is except the things that I'm putting in my body. That's different. And so I see it, and I'm running an AB test every day.
You know, what's the price of what's the price of the food, Chamath? Like, is it more in Italy? Like, you pay more, do you think?
I've already commented on the the, you know, the fish is always
a joke.
Yeah. But there are ways to eat at a materially lower price than there is here, and the access to the ultra-processed food is
different there.
You can't get the stuff. And when you do find that stuff, it doesn't have the same, you know, glycemic and metabolic load on your body. I'm curious what you think of, you know, Ozempic in this category of
drugs breaking the cycle. I think you've been against them, or they certainly helped me, with half of my weight loss. I know Sacks had a good experience as well, and he's been public about it. What are your thoughts on that? Because it does seem when people take the GLPs, which exist in your body, that they — I'm sure there's more research that needs to be done.
They do break this habit. I know anecdotally with me, I don't crave the foods I craved previously, and it did kind of rewire my brain and how I look at food even when I'm off of it. So your thoughts on those and those potentially being a way to break the
cycle? Yeah. So, and this goes to David's point that, you know, this is, we need to have cheap food and
that is kind of an outcome that is an admirable or virtuous outcome. The problem is that food isn't cheap. It is
cheap on the shelf, but it imposes costs on the rest of us that were the externalities
that we're paying elsewhere. So when I was a kid, a typical pediatrician would see one case of juvenile diabetes in its lifetime of a 40- or 50-year career, one case. It was essentially non-existent disease today. One out of every 3
children who walks through his office door is diabetic or pre-diabetic. When I was a kid, the
autism rates were between 1 in 1,500 to 1 in 10,000 Americans. And it's still true in my generation, seventy-year-old men. In my kids' generation, according to the CDC, it's one out of every 34 kids. Some states like California, it's 1 out of every 22. Seventy-seven percent of
Americans are now, 74% of adults
are obese. Half our kids, obesity when, you know, 100 years
ago, if you were obese, you could get a job in the circus. It was so unusual. So we're now and and
who's making profit now? Ozempic.
Ozempic is not going to. You can. Obesity and diabetes are absolutely treatable by good food. That's the cause.
Now Ozempic is a good profit center
for, you know, for pharma. There's a bill now, which has been paid for by the company that makes it, which is the biggest company in you or
you're a benevolent artist. In Denmark where that
company is, they do not recommend it. It's the treatment of diabetes, the standard of
care, is diet and exercise. But that company's entire value is based upon the projections of what it's gonna sell to the United States. And that company is pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying to pass this bill that will make Medicare pay for it for every American. It's obese. That could be 74% of people are now eligible.
You know, I
think it's $1,500 a week.
The cost of
that will be $3 billion in a year. If you took $3 billion a year, a tiny fraction of that, you could buy organic food three meals a day for every human being in the United States. So wouldn't that be a better expenditure of our money? And, you know, what I would say is the, you know, the food producers, it's not a conspiracy. It's just people following perverse incentives.
And there are conspiracies. I mean, when I sued Monsanto, we got emails that showed that the head of the pesticide division,
Jess Rowland, for a decade, that EPA was secretly working for Monsanto the
entire time, sabotaging studies, creating false science. It's a high the current
nature of Roundup. So there are those kinds of instances throughout the federal government, but mainly it says perverse incentives. Almost all
almost not close to 100%. Of our foods or agricultural subsidies go to processed food.
I mean, go to commodity agriculture, which is the feedstock for processed food. Oh, and then if you look at
mostly mostly for mostly for meat. If the industry controls through lobbying and through, you know, all these other mechanisms for corporate capture controls the expenditures in the It's a food stamp program. So it's 70% of the food stamp program goes for processed food. 10% goes for sugar drinks like Coca-Cola, which are just diabetes machines. So why are we poisoning poor kids in this country?
The school lunch program, the same thing, almost 80.
I think 77% of food. Food lunch program is terrible foods that are actually poisoning our children. And,
you know, don't we you know, don't we care enough about our kids to say, we need, you know, we we wanna care about them. We wanna make sure that they're not sick. They are the most precious things in our country. Shouldn't that be the focus? And, you know, whatever we're doing to make them so sick, when I was a kid, 6% of American kids had chronic disease today, 60%.
Is that not an alarm? Is and, you know, something that we should all be concerned about?
I will I will agree on, an important point. You know, the the the food stamp program, the SNAP program provides food stamps to support 42 million Americans, 42 million people rely on food stamps. It costs $120 billion of federal money per year. And as, as Bobby said, the number one product bought on the food stamp program is a soda, canned soda. And there was an important debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda.
By the way, Bobby, you and I probably agree on a lot of things. There's definitely a lot of things we don't agree on, but, like, these aspects, I think, are just no brainers. There was a debate a few years ago about whether or not canned soda should be allowed as a purchase on the food stamp program or whether it should be fresh fruits and vegetables and grains and other things. And ultimately, there was a food lobbying effort made that kept, canned soda on the food stamp program, and it is, again, a $120 billion of annual federal spend with the biggest line item going to canned soda to, you know, feed 42 million Americans. And and the the the connection is completely direct.
High sugar, high glycemic index, diabetes, and other chronic health conditions arise from that connection. So, definitely aligned with you on
the misincentives and the disincentives in these programs that have been created, and they only expand every year.
Bobby, can you comment on when people talk about revamping
the food supply, one of the things that sometimes is not allowed to be said
is that focusing on organic food and produce can exclude certain communities. And so there's like this DEI filter that preferring that is almost racist in some way. Like, can you just comment on that whole vein of thinking and your thought on that?
Yeah. I mean, I think feeding people poisonous food is racist. And by the way, the NAACP gets huge amounts of money every year from the food industry. It may be one of the biggest. I think Coca-Cola is the biggest supporter of NAACP.
So a lot of the NGOs that are supposed to be concerned about the, you know, the disproportionate impact on minority communities of federal policies have actually been bought off and bought into the process. And, you know, a lot of times, those are the voices you hear saying this is racist. What's really racist is poisoning Black Americans because
these are communities that are food deserts. The school lunch program
is, you know, oftentimes, those communities, the biggest access that they have to food, and we're giving them poison food. Many of these communities have no grocery stores. They, you know, there are no big, like, they definitely don't have Whole Foods. You don't have access to those kinds of.
Shouldn't we have national policies that make sure our people are healthy and, you
know, they use, of course, market on AmEx, but also supports, we're giving billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies for farmers to dig farmers to grow in commodity agriculture, which is bad food. It's low in nutrients. It's high in chemicals.
It's high in pesticides. And, you know, we need to change these perverse incentives so that,
and feed America, I you know, we what how can anybody argue with this? How can anybody say that we should not have healthy children that we should be giving people food that is hurting them? It's just it doesn't make any sense.
Sacks, any questions for you for Bobby about democracy, what went down with Biden, the fairness of the Democratic Party. I know you've got some strong feelings on it, so I just wanted to give you your red meat and your window here. I'm sure a lot of it's confirming for you what he's saying. And, you know, I'll be honest. I think what the Democratic Party did to you, Mister Kennedy, was absolutely abhorrent and disgusting, and it really is infuriating to me, especially what the mainstream media did.
And I'm glad that we got to have you on early on our podcast at least to let some of your ideas get out there, but, let's give Sacks his red meat here because you joining Trump is a wild card and the beginning none of us saw coming.
§13Sacks recaps RFK Jr's campaign, RFK Jr. on Trump's legacy
Well, let me pick up on those themes, Jason. First of all, I want to commend Bobby on running an upbeat and positive campaign. You know, you were, and still are, the most articulate and powerful champion of free speech over censorship, civil liberties over the surveillance state, and peace over war. You've spoken about the issue of chronic health, which, to be honest, is an issue I didn't know that much about, but I think you've put it now on the political radar screen in a way that it's not going away.
So I think you ran a very noble and effective campaign. And I think like you said, it was a campaign for the soul of the Democratic Party. You know, I think you represented issues that in the days of your father and President John F. Kennedy, these would have been Democratic Party issues. How did the Democratic Party respond? They effectively ran you out.
They did not give you the chance. They conducted lawfare to keep you off the ballot. They didn't let you debate. I heard your running mate say they even tried to infiltrate your campaign. And all the while, this party was claiming to be the party of democracy.
that incredibly hypocritical. I think that if they had given you the opportunity to debate, I think we now know what would have happened. I mean, we saw it. What happened when Biden actually debated Trump is there's a complete implosion of Biden's campaign. We discovered that indeed the Democratic Party had been hiding his condition for a long time. And when he was finally forced to debate, didn't have a teleprompter or a script, it became extremely obvious.
What happened then? They basically put
in a new nominee who's never been voted on. Kamala Harris has never
received one primary vote. It was done through a process that was opaque. We still don't know how it went down. I have to disagree with Reid that Biden did it in a voluntary way. Biden went kicking and screaming.
I mean, he basically said publicly over and over again, I am not leaving the race. I'm in this race. He tweeted it. He said it. He said only God Almighty could get me out of the race.
And then it was reported that Nancy Pelosi went to him and said we can do this the easy way or the hard way.
He said God Almighty.
She might be God Almighty in service. But the point is there was nothing democratic about this. And now we have a new Democratic Party nominee who refuses to do press conferences, refuses to do solo interviews, refuses to take questions from the press, who's hiding herself effectively. And yet this party, again, claims to be the party of democracy. I find it just almost, maddening or galling again in its hypocrisy, and I just I don't see how everybody can't see through this.
It's just not the way that democracy is supposed to work. And I certainly don't think that the people engaging in these tactics can be cloaking themselves in all this high-fluting rhetoric of democracy. It's just absurd. And so I feel like I'm in the place that you are, Bobby, you know, as viewers of this pod know, I did not start off supporting Trump in the primaries. I supported you in the Democratic primary, and I did fundraisers for DeSantis and Vivek.
And that was in large part because I think of the job that DeSantis did as governor. But when it came to the general, the realization that I came to is that Trump is the indispensable figure in our current politics for marshalling this populist energy to resist this hypocritical elite authoritarianism that wants to engage in censorship over debate that seems to
wanna protect and defend
this surveillance state over anything it wants to do that wants to keep all these wars going, even when they don't make sense when we could have found a way to negotiate a diplomatic end to them. And so I'm kind of delighted that you've kind of come around to this thinking too. I know you have your reservations about Trump. I'm not saying that Trump is perfect. I mean, I think he's a, he's human.
I mean, he's a flawed vessel, but at the end of the day, he is the choice that represents again, these populist forces resisting authoritarianism. Sorry. There's more of a statement than a question, but I'll let you react to all of that.
Well, let me react to the last thing you said about President Trump. I think if President Trump wins, that people are gonna see a very different President Trump than they did during the first term. I think he's changed as a person, and I've known him for, you know, 30 years. I've sued him, litigated against him, and had a friendship with him even when I was litigating against him.
And by the way, successfully
against him, but I think he is focused on his legacy. He said many interesting things to me about what he did wrong the last time and about how he felt, you know, he had no idea he was gonna win. He had no idea how to govern and people descended on him the day that he got elected and said, you gotta appoint this guy and appoint that guy. And he said, you know, I appointed a lot of people I shouldn't have appointed.
I know who they are now. He also said something interesting to me. He said, because the Democrats, one of the big sort of fulcrums of their terror of Trump is that he's gonna implement
this Heritage Foundation, you know, blueprint, which is called Project 2025. And he brought this issue
up to me and he said, you know, they're always telling me I'm for Project 2025. I never read Project 2025 until they started accusing me of it. He said, it was written by a right-wing asset, is what he said. He said there are left-wing and there are right-wing, and it was a right-wing asset who wrote that thing. And then he started going through it.
So I think there's a lot. And I think he's interested in his legacy now. He wants to leave behind
some accomplishments, and he wants to make our country better. And I think he's, you know, he's listening to a wider range of
voices as he's preparing to govern right now. And, you know, I'm gonna be on the transition committee, picking the people who are gonna govern. He told me he's gonna be there. There's gonna be a wide diversity of stakeholders, but he's listening to more than just that kind of narrow right-wing band that people are terrified of.
It would be great if you could get to him because, you know, he really did present well on this podcast and had, like, a very good moment in that first half of the RNC. And then he started defaulting back to, and I know a lot about it. It's like myself, hate this about him. And it's a big part of why we don't like him is he goes back to incel comics, goes back to race, goes back to gender. You know, and it's just like, dude, that Trump 1.0 is what people don't want. They don't want chaotic
They want, you know, post-assassination attempt Trump, and it's just so infuriating.
Well, a lot of people feel that way, Jake. I think at the end of the day, you and others are gonna have to decide, do you wanna support the candidate who has the right policies, but maybe there's style points that you don't like about him? Cause I think that the things you were talking about, the mean tweets and so forth, at the end of the day, I think they're stylistic things. I don't think they go deep to policy or how he would govern, or do you wanna support a campaign that is running on vibes and joy, you know, that has the superficiality that you like but there's nothing underneath it. And when we do learn something underneath it, when we actually learn a policy, then all the people who are supporting her have to say, oh, well, she's not really gonna do that.
She's not gonna do that. So the best thing you can say about her campaign is that she's not gonna be able to accomplish the things that she says she wants to accomplish.
Good news is.
Basis on which to vote for a president.
Good news is I'm in Texas, so I could put in my Bobby Kennedy vote as a protest vote and it doesn't make a difference. And I can I can
I respond to the part of David's question to make sure? They, and, you know, I think to me, the most troubling thing about what's happening now, you have you've had two Democratic candidates who've not been able to give unscripted interviews which is extraordinary. I mean, my father and uncle were so proud of, you know, the United States for our capacity to engage in debate to defend who we were in the world to defend a vision of our country to articulate it to the rest of the world, to be the leaders of the free world. And, and have a command of the facts and of knowledge and to be eloquent. And, how can you be a leader in the world?
What does the rest of the world think of us right now? I mean, what could they possibly think that we have two Democratic Party candidates who are not able to explain
themselves in an interview? I think it's bonkers and the other day something. Yeah. Oh, really,
I think the point is, if you want the job of handling the nuclear code, you gotta do an interview first.
And, you know, how can you go 30, 39 days without talking to the press without being
able to defend your record to explain who you are to the American people? And if you talk to Democrats about this, and you can get past the anger and past the vitriol, this kind of wall of tribal resistance to any new knowledge coming in, what what they were. Any contrary fact. What they'll say is, well, we're not really voting for a common law. We're voting for the apparatus.
And you asked an s question, has
that apparatus served you? You know, has the open border served you? Has a $35 trillion debt served you? Has
endless war served you? Has the destruction of the American middle
class, the highest inflation rate in a generation. Has any of that actually, you
know, has that apparatus produced something for the United States that you're so proud of that you want to blindly vote without knowing who you're voting for? Anyway, that. That's
I mean, and Kamala and Waltz will do an interview with Dana Bash tonight, the night we're taping this on Thursday, so we'll see. Maybe she'll miraculously do 10 podcasts and she'll be dynamic, but it certainly doesn't look good that they filibuster with Biden and gave them only most favored nation interviews. I do respect the fact that we've had so many great candidates come on this pod and have 90-minute, 2-hour discussions. I'm very proud of the work we've done here. And, Bobby, you were a key piece of that.
And we really appreciate you coming on early and having these debates and coming here today to talk about it. It just means the world for you to come back and talk about this. Wish you great success with Make America Healthy Again. I think it's incredibly noble, independent of how I feel about Trump, January 6th, abortion, any of those issues. I respect the fact that you wanna make America healthy again, and I wish you great continued success with that, and we will see you on the sign when they're in
your pocket. Bye bye. We'll let your winners ride. Rainman, David Sacks. We
open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. You 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 and
You're
And now the plugs, the All-In Summit is taking place in Los Angeles September 8th, 9th, 10th. You can apply for tickets at summit.allinpodcast.co. And you can subscribe to this show on YouTube. Yes.
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