Cyan Banister: LA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland
Guests: Cyan Banister
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents7 chapters
§01The Besties welcome Cyan Banister!§02Reacting to the LA wildfires: broken incentives, leadership failures, lessons learned§03Insurance issues, rebuilding headwinds, reclaiming the government§04Zuck goes full free speech, fires third-party fact-checkers, opts for Community Notes model§05Nvidia goes consumer at CES: market cap impact, most interesting vertical§06Why Trump wants Greenland§07Conspiracy Corner: Who built the pyramids?§01The Besties welcome Cyan Banister!
I just got a haircut with a with a new person. She was like I'm like, do what you want. This is what she did.
Okay. Well, let me know who she is. Chamath and I will go beat her up and get them get your money back.
Did she feather your bangs and blow your hair up? She did. She gave you a blow, didn't she?
It's starting already. Okay.
No. But that's a blow dryer. Just yes. Right? She blow dry your hair?
At the end, she gave me a little Yeah.
That's not sustainable. So you can't tell what the quality of the haircut's like because you're never gonna do that again.
You
don't have to scale.
I've never blow dried my hair in my life.
No. I understand that. Then this is why. Because if you get the blow and it looks good in the blow
Just say blow out, please. Just say blow out to forward.
Why? What are we, 6? Just grow up, you
The way
you go saying it, you're saying it to provoke a reaction. Come on.
No. I'm not. Such a liar.
I love it. Tell us about what your rules for blows are.
What I'm saying is if you get a haircut and and you get a blow, it's very hard for you to know no. But I'm serious. It's very hard for you to know what it's gonna look like the next day when you take a shower and when you don't, you know, blow it.
It's true. Oh, you're saying the self blow can't match the stylist blow.
It's just important when you get a haircut with a new stylist or a hairdresser or a barter.
Yes.
You cannot let them blow you.
He's not happy with the ending.
Got it. It was an unhappy ending. Because when you blow yourself, Chamath, which people have accused you of blowing yourself, this very program, when you blow yourself, it's not gonna come out the way it did. It won't be as fabulous.
Every time I've blown myself, it's been perfect.
Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the All In podcast. I am your host Jay Powell from Japan here. Jay Powell. Cutting turns in Nasako and at Iwanai, and we have an incredible lineup today.
As always, the chairman, dictator Chamath is here to reign supreme. How are you doing, brother?
Good. How are you? What are you wearing exactly?
I'm just wearing my kimono as I am want to do, here on the All In podcast.
Why are you speaking in Elizabethan English?
I just decided in 2025, I'm going to live my best life, and I'm gonna do everything. Anybody ask me to do something, I'm saying yes. Oh, I'm out. I'm gonna
eat a bunch of stuff next weekend then. I got so many ideas. I got a list. I'm gonna ask you to do all sorts
of things.
Epic, I'm doing it.
Yeah. Okay.
So, to and, yeah. I'm I'm over the moon right now, and then I'll be going to the inauguration to see all my friends and and, celebrate the big Trump victory in tapered episode there. With us, of course, David Freiberg, your resident sultan of science, and not a moment too soon. We have so much to talk about. What's the background here?
Those are some dead trees with Amafuji in the background?
Yeah. That's a Kuros Basically, Jason. Kurosawa landscape.
While you've been, gallivanting and being a dilettante, your original adopted home state is burning to the ground.
Ah, yes. I know about this. I got off the ski lift, and I saw this after I had posted like, oh, my life is amazing. And I was like, oh my god. You know, you can totally and everybody replied like,
are you You're turned down.
Leave the room? And I'm like, oh my lord. This is unbelievable, and we'll obviously talk about that
a whole bunch.
So then you, so
then you promoted the tweet?
Yes. I put $500 behind it to boost it to try to get my ratings up. No. I actually literally deleted it because I I posted and I never do that, but I posted a video where I was like, oh my god. It's incredible.
And I was like, you know what? This is the wrong time for it. So a little grace there, folks. And I am so happy to have here on all in idle, the one, the only, my good friend, Cyan Bannerster.
Our good friend.
She's my good friend before you guys met her. So and sure she's ours, but I've been friends with her longer. So my good friend, Cyan Bannerster, our good friend, and our bestie. Let's leave it at that. It doesn't have to be competition for who Cyan likes best.
We'll ask her to rate at the end of the episode. Cyan, welcome to the program.
Yeah. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. It's nice to see everyone.
Jason, you wanna tell people about Cyan's background?
Yeah. Do an epic rant on Cyan's epic history.
I mean, Cyan and I fought in the Clone Wars together. It was a long time ago. But, she's a technologist, self made individual, who then decided she would start writing small angel checks about 14 years ago, literally the same year I did. And, myself, Syanne, and
done profoundly better to do this.
She's done incredible. Yes. Of course. We'll get into it. And, Syanne and I would 14 years ago, I guess, we would meet start up companies together and host little events where we get together and and take pitches.
And we invested in a couple of companies together, and it worked out very nicely for everyone involved. So
Yeah.
We're in a couple of companies together.
Yeah. Density?
Density. We were on the board together for a little bit, and so that was fun.
A little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Thumbtack?
Thumbtack. Actually, Thumbtack, Density, and Uber, I all discovered through you.
What's which one was Uber? I gotta check my
oh, I'm gonna check my
I don't think you're allowed to
say them. I don't think you're allowed
to check my Google Sheet here. I didn't know I invested in Uber. Let me check. I have to confirm that.
Oh, yeah.
I did. I did. But I, at one of these events, I introduced Cyan to Uber. It's true. Sorry.
It's true. So found all three of those deals at your event. So that was really great.
Aw.
Yeah. Well, thanks. That's a that's a very nice
so let me try. Cyan is a prolific angel investor.
Correct. We just said that.
She was a part of Founders
Fund. Oh, right. Yeah.
She runs a seed fund called Long Journey Ventures.
K.
Some of her hits include SpaceX, Anduril, Density, Postmates, Niantic, which is the makers of Pokemon Go, and Jason's favorite startup, Uber.
Yeah. It's been a good run. It's been a good run. And, also, I'll just add, a wonderful human being. And if you ever had the chance to hang out and talk for a couple of hours, Sayan would be one of those people that you'd put right at the top of the list.
I will pro I will promote Sayan's interview with Tim Ferris a couple weeks ago. Oh, yes. I randomly turned it on. I was in the car driving home, and then I stopped in my driveway and kept listening. I was just telling Sayan, like, it was a fantastic what was it?
About 2 hours, 2 and a half hour interview?
3 well,
it was 4 hours.
3 hours.
Cut it to 3 and a half.
Yeah. And then I had to drive again. I listened to the it's it and I was, like, excited to get back to it, which never happens for me listening to long form interviews like that. Like, it was phenomenal, so I recommend it to everyone.
Why did it hit you so deeply?
Couple things. 1, Syann is an incredible storyteller. Like, the the way she describes her experiences, her history, her life, beautiful. She talks in kind of, I think, a deep persuasive way about some of the things that have shaped her, her, business investing as well as kind of spirituality, which she mentioned earlier, which is not something that you'll typically and you're like, wait. Where did this conversation just pivot to?
And then you go down this whole other path with her, and you go on the journey with her. I just thought it was great. So all over the place, it was great. Beautiful, recommended to everyone to get to know Cyan.
Oh, thanks. Can I have you all as my professional cheerleading squad from now on?
This is pretty awesome.
I don't like talking about myself, and this is great.
I love it. Yeah.
Well, it's, it's true. Cyan was voted most humble in our Angel Investing Group, and I was a close second, so I almost won most humble. More work to do being humble.
I'm gonna get you a t shirt called the humblest.
Yeah. No. You have to borrow it from Chamath. He's he's he's got it. He's had it for the last 10 years.
7 or 8 years ago, Jason approached Syanne and I and said, hey, guys. Harvey Weinstein has asked me to make a show.
Yes. True
story. No. It's a true story.
Here's how he asked me to do it in his room. It was
really It's a true story.
Oh, damn.
Take it down
a notch. Cyan, myself, and Jason went to some place in the city, and we taped a
A taped episode. I have it.
What is it called? The first one.
We taped the NBC pilot for the accelerator or the incubator. So I had, been approached and did a pilot for NBC called The Accelerator. And, they spent, like, a half $1,000,000 on this, and you guys came on and it came out great. And it was just gonna, you know, follow me around I was very it's
very awkward because afterwards, they approached Cyan and I to do the show
Without Jason.
When we without Jason. And so we had to we had to decide.
And we decided Cyan. Who needs that image?
We decided our friendship was more important.
Exactly.
I don't know if I ever told you guys the story, but, like, literally, they were, like, figuring out where to put this and what time slot. And they were like, We're gonna do it in the summer because we're trying to get some summer programming going. That's where we're gonna test that. And then Harvey Weinstein turns out to be an horrible monster, and the whole thing gets canceled. And anything that was anywhere within a 100 miles of Harvey Weinstein got canceled, including my failed, or forgotten reality TV show.
§02Reacting to the LA wildfires: broken incentives, leadership failures, lessons learned
Alright. Let's get to more important things. There is an unbelievable tragedy occurring in Los Angeles, as we're speaking, devastating wildfires. Basically, I formed a ring around LA, the most destructive of which has been the Palisades fire and which has stretched into Malibu, obviously. And 15,000 acres or so have been burned in that area, thousands of homes, maybe 2,000 homes.
Here's some images. They're just devastating. And we have a lot of friends in this area. And the area you're seeing on fire, if you don't know the topography of Los Angeles, is north of Santa Monica. You have Palisades and then Malibu.
And, obviously, east of the 4 zero five, you have things that you've heard of, like Bel Air and Brentwood. This area is part of a mountain area called the Santa Monica Mountains, and they get very dry. And there's a phenomenon, which we'll get into, called the Santa Ana winds that blow really, really strongly, and a perfect storm has happened where thousands of homes and tragically, five lives, and I'm sure there'll be more, unfortunately, I have burned it down. This video of driving down PCH, if you've ever driven PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, these are 10, 20, $50,000,000 homes that are literally on the Pacific Ocean. The most coveted homes in Los Angeles are not Bel Air and Brentwood.
You might think that because you hear them on TV. But, really, if you were an incredibly successful person, you would aspire to live in the Pacific Palisades, just west of Brentwood and just south of Malibu or Malibu. Many celebrities live there, many executives, etcetera, and these homes are gone. Thousands and thousands of homes. It's this has turned into the ultimate Rorschach test on social media where people are projecting into this tragedy, which tragically occurs every year to varying degrees and maybe every 20, 30 years.
It's an acute situation. We'll get into that in a moment. But looking at this absolute, just devastating loss of property and lives, the lives could have been a lot worse. Freeburg, from a scientific perspective, maybe we'll start there. When you look at these wildfires, extreme weather, global warming, and you look at this situation, is that where your mind goes?
Or in this Rorschach test of how you feel about these kind of tragedies and how you interpret it, do you go somewhere else, the incompetence of California's government, DEI, Ukraine. I mean, everybody is superimposing on this natural disaster. Whatever their pet issues are, where do you come to when you look at this?
I don't think that those are exclusive. Okay. I think that you can have had both incompetent planning and execution by leadership as well as have kind of a uncontrollable circumstances that management and planning weren't necessarily gonna solve. And I'll I'll kind of talk about a couple of these points real quick. First of all, like, we talked about when the hurricane hit a couple of months ago.
Remember? And as you guys know, I have an office, or facility out in Nashville, so we were exposed to the flooding circumstances. And we talked about the the frequency of of that sort of an event having been such a rare occurrence becoming more common. Similarly, we're seeing more frequent high high wind events in California, flooding events in California, and extremely hot events in California. If you look at this link I sent out, Nick, in terms of the total precipitation over this current, what's called rain season, the Southern California region is basically at a, you know, call it 0% of normal.
So this is Southern California. You can see that 3rd column. That's the percent of normal rainfall that has been experienced. There's been zero rain in these regions. So everything is primed to be very dry, and then you get the Santa Ana winds, 100 mile an hour winds.
No matter how much underbrush you clear out, no matter how many trees you remove, if there's some embers in the air, there's a 100 mile an hour wind, that is gonna create a fire hurricane, and a lot of homes are gonna get caught on fire. So it's very hard to kinda just pin the blame solely on not doing underbrush clearing, not doing removal of trees. Those should have happened. They didn't happen. That was wrong.
That was bad policy, but it doesn't excuse the fact that there's a natural event that happened here that seems to be occurring with greater frequency. The thing I'll kinda pivot to if if we wanna get there now or maybe we'll talk about that in a minute, it's kinda the economic and the policy issues with respect to the Department of Insurance. Because Let's get
to that after we go through maybe a little bit of the quick reaction I think
that's where that's where there's gonna be real pain and devastation, and that's the biggest economic consequences, the role that insurance has played in all this stuff, which we'll get to in a minute. Yeah.
Okay. So Chamath, I think table stakes, we all agree. Global warming, extreme weather, Depending on what degree you believe in it, there's play some factor here, and this is something that has reoccurred over and over again in this specific re region. But on social media, we're seeing a lot of other interpretations of this event. Maybe your thoughts on some of the other interpretations.
And then where, when you look at it, what do you start to think about preventing this in the future? Or maybe who's responsible? What's your general take on what we've seen in the last week?
I mean, I'm not very sympathetic to the there were a 100 mile an hour winds. Not because it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are happening in greater and greater frequency. Nick, maybe you can find this and just put it up here, but remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018 burning to the ground? Can we just look at that all of us collectively? Because that was 6 years ago.
This is not like it was a distant memory from a 100 years ago. We knew in 2018 that these types of
The Sepulveda the Sepulveda passed.
So this I this idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by 100 mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer. We knew in 2018 that these things could happen. We knew across the rest of the United States that these outlier weather events were happening in greater and greater frequency. If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California homes fire coverage 3 months before this event happened. So all this data was in the realm of the knowable.
And then when you double click and you get into a little bit more of the details, there's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the bottom of. So I'll just give you a couple of facts. In the 19 fifties, the average amount of timber, so wood that was harvested in California was around 6,000,000,000 board feet per year. Into intervening 70 years, that shrank to about 1,500,000,000 board feet. And so you'd say, okay, well that's a 75% reduction.
We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation. It turns out that that's not entirely true because what it left behind was nearly a 163,000,000 dead trees. Dead, like, gone. And so you would say, well, those things should have been removed. And the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, hopefully I'm pronouncing this right.
And a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local governments and fire management to clear these dead trees and vegetation. And I think that that's a really big deal. And when you double click on that, here's where you find the real head scratcher. Okay? Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat controlled legislator or worse vetoed by governor Newsom that would have exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues.
Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground. SB 103, as an example, Went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk. So I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. One is, everybody can see that these events are happening. Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just 6 years ago.
All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence.
Okay. Sayan, you've, heard, Chamath and and Freiberg's take here some amount of incompetence, some amount of, hey, this keeps occurring, and there might be some global warming that is contributing to it. What do you take
away from this situation? I agree with Friedberg and Moss, you know, it's it's a it's a lot of everything. But I also think that to add to the prevention part of, you know, other than clearing out underbrush and and trees and things like that, you know, we we don't build things in the state of California in a way that houses should be built when you know that there are fires like this. So for example, we have more wooden roofs than we really should have. We should really evaluate our materials that we're building things out of.
But we also have, you know, John and El Segundo, you know, this is a company that I invested in, Rainmaker. We have the ability now to cloud seed and do preventative measures to actually make a region have more water. And I don't understand why we're not looking into things like this that could have prevented you know, we knew that this storm was coming. We knew that these winds were coming. You know, Southern California shut power down.
I have a farm down there. We still don't have power because they knew that most of these fires were started by PG and E or down power lines. And so they proactively shut everybody down, and we're still running on generators. And if you notice, there's no fires down there. But they also have a 100 mile per hour winds.
Yeah.
And you're not seeing it. And there's plenty of mountain ranges and dryness there. You know? Avocado farms are basically just sitting fuel. So I do think it's a combination of all of those things.
Incompetence is definitely one of them.
Yeah. And I I actually lived right next door to this area for a long time in Brentwood. And to your point about roofs, it seems silly. And a lot of these fire prevention things can seem silly when you first mention them, which Trump looked Let's face it. The way he says things sometimes is very colorful.
Now, when he said, Listen, you're not raking like people in wherever he said it, Scandinavia, Finland are raking the forest, and he was absolutely a 100% correct on that. Maybe it sounded bombastic or silly when he the way he said it, but the truth is in, Tahoe, where we just were over the holidays, people are clearing underbrush. When I lived in Los Angeles, people who lived in the Hollywood Hills would get a fine if they didn't clear it. But there are mountain ranges that nobody owns. And when you show that Sepulveda Pass, that's the 405 going past the Getty Center.
That area has gotta be cleaned by the the city and the government, and maybe they weren't doing it as much.
Look at this. This is apocalyptic.
Yeah. So I I know this past very well because I would drive through it.
What what did California learn from this? What did Gavin Newsom implement based on what happened here? What did the city of Los Angeles implement based on what happened here? I wanna just specifically know the answer to those two questions.
Yeah. And I think that's gonna be a big part of this breakdown after this happens because in a lot of these cases, you might lose a home or 2, but you haven't had this kind of wholesale destruction in a while. And, when I lived in Brentwood, I had a shake roof. That's a fancy way of saying, shingles, wood shingles, and they would bake in the sun. And I love this roof, but my neighbors who in Brentwood were all 70, 80 years old, and I was right on Sunset Boulevard, and I could look up from my house and see the place you just showed, which is the Getty Center and the and the Sepulveda Pass on the 405 and the, and Sunset Boulevard.
I was only allowed, Sayan, to replace 30% of my roof at a time. You couldn't replace it and put shake roofs on. You could only, like, maintain it. Because in 1961 there was the Bel Air and Brentwood fires. And these fires, you wanna talk about like in in in memory, Jamal, this one, Zsa Zsa Gabor and tons of celebrities lost their homes as well.
This one was started because of the Santa Ana winds, and somebody was just burning a rubbish pile. I think it was some construction workers who were burning that. They said to me, the neighbors, Do you know about the Bel Air fire? Do you know about the Brentwood fire? You gotta get rid of that shake roof.
You gotta get rid of that shake roof. When my daughter was born, the the, roofer said to me Let's put composites on. I put composites on and he said What do you want to do with the sprinkler system? And I said There is a sprinkler system in my little one story ranch house? He said Yeah.
I said I've never seen it. And he showed it to me, it was on the roof. People were so scared after that 62 fire, they were putting these on the roof, and now you cannot have wood roofs have been banned. You were grandfathered in. I was part of that.
But there was a lot of PTSD from that, and now I do think there's gonna have to be some lessons learned. And let's get to where some folks online are pointing to maybe not having great priorities, and maybe focusing on things that are not as important as the taxpaying citizens. A lot of tweets, I don't know how people feel about them, about DEI, about who's running the fire department, etcetera. Did you have any thoughts on that, Friedberg?
I'll I mean, look. We we one of the things I wanted to talk about was the DOI's role, the Department of Insurance role in what I think will ultimately be creating a pretty significant economic consequence here from this sort of an event. I don't but I'll I'll answer your question. Okay. I don't think that the mission of any public service organization should be to meet DEI metrics.
I think the mission of that public service organization should be to serve the public. And I think that those DEI metrics should not be a priority when serving the public is the objective. The best ability to serve the public should be the objective, and that's it. And I'll state that really clearly. Okay.
So, obviously, the the fire chief in LA is getting a lot of attention whether or not that prioritization of DEI metrics took away from the interest and the focus in preparing for major disasters. I don't know. There have been some interviews over the last day or 2 just to be fair, where she has claimed that they asked for more money to to that they would not be able to be prepared for major disasters if the budget cut took place that was proposed by BASS. That budget cut did take place. And so the the fire chief has said that she asked for budget to make this the preparation for this sort of event, and she lost it.
And so I don't wanna just say, hey. She's to blame. She's to blame because she was focused on DEI. But I will separately say that I think that creating DEI as a mission for an organization that's supposed to serve the public interest makes no sense.
This is an important one. James Woods, obviously, the, the famous actor who lost his home in Pacific Palisades, has been going on a bit of a rant about Christine Crowley. She is LA's fire chief. She also happens to be a lesbian, and has made a priority, and done a number of talks on trying to increase diversity inside of the fire department. She also, just with a bit of research, is one of the top performing firefighters, a paramedic, an engineer, a fire inspector, a captain, a battalion chief, an assistant chief, fire marshal, deputy chief.
And when she took the firefighter exam in the late nineties, she was scored in the top 50 out of 16,000. She seems eminently qualified. There has been a massive pile on attack on her and, you know, how it is on X and and other social networks where people are really tweaked about DEI that they're kind of putting the blame on her. What are your thoughts of this DEI angle, Trauma?
I don't think this is to blame.
Okay.
If all of a sudden because of DEI, 70% were physically incapable of carrying out the task and that's why these fires grew, maybe you could make the claim that it is a DEI problem. I do agree with Freeburg that the thing that these public institutions need to do a better job of is being very clear about what their north star is. I think the north star for the fire department is to save people's lives and put out fires. I think the north star for the police service should be to save people's lives and to hold criminals responsible and get them off the streets. And you should hire the people that allow you to do that job the best.
The thing to keep in mind is that there were probably 20 or 30 people interviewed to be fire chief. It's not her fault that she was selected. The real question is, what was she mandated to focus on once she got the job? And I think what you see in all of these interviews is I don't think that she all of a sudden after growing up through the fire service had this DEI bent. I think typically what happens is it becomes an institutional directive.
It guides your compensation. It guides your recognition. And so you do it. It's sort of what Charlie Munger says. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
The entire public service is riddled with this. The entire private service is riddled with this, which is that we've lost the script about what is important. So it's yet another example. She's probably quite a capable person who if was just allowed to focus on fighting fires and saving people's lives would probably do a good job. But if you had to add all these other things that are not germane to that task, then people will get frustrated and project it onto her.
It seems like a lot of projecting going on here, Jamafi. I agree. All of that said,
though, I think you gotta go back to how did these fires start?
Yeah.
How did they grow out of control? And again, I think that these winds didn't come out of nowhere in the sense that they caught everybody off guard. This has happened before. That area has gone through this exact moment.
Yes.
There were laws that were proposed. They were vetoed. Okay? So that even if you could have controlled it, then you see certain developers like Rick Caruso who were able to protect the buildings that he was responsible for because he took proactive and protective measures. Could those proactive and protective measures not been taken more broadly through LA County?
Of course, they could have. Why were they not?
And here, what we're seeing on the screen is Rick Russo's village
Let me let me ask a very specific question. Specific policies. Yeah. How much money and we know the answer to this. How much money did the government of California spend poorly, as it turns out, on homelessness?
It was about $21,000,000,000 and illegal immigrants. I don't know what the final number is there, but I suspect in the tens of 1,000,000,000.
If you
I think you're Yeah.
If you reappropriated those dollars to these kinds of protective mechanisms in these areas, what would the outcome have been? Maybe there still would have been a fire. Maybe there would have been damage, but it's hard for me to believe it would have been as bad as it is right now.
Yeah. I think what you're getting to here is we can confirm lesbians didn't cause the Santa Ana Winds to cause these fires, obviously. But there is an issue that I think many people in the public, especially in California who voted for this very leftist liberal ideology are now starting to realize is, hey. Wait a second. What are the priorities here, Sayan?
What are we focused on and what should we be focused on? And it's very easy to be focused on DEI and maybe things that aren't as important, homelessness and and move budget there. But at the same time, they wouldn't give her $17,000,000. They cut the the fire budget. She tried to fight it.
Well, that that's not clear. Now there's now the counter narrative is that she actually got an extra 50, Jason.
Okay. So we're we're in a breaking news environment, so we'll we'll see what the truth winds up being here. But, Sayana, I think the point remains the same here, which is, is prioritization and what we focus on out of whack in California?
Oh, not a doubt. I think diversity is good unless that's all you have. And I'll just simplify it like that. But and I think it's very sad that somebody could be very qualified and be in a position we now have to question whether or not they were hired because of DEI. And then it comes down to prioritization.
Like, if when you're dealing with a organization like a fire department whose main job is to protect the public and put out fires and save people, any amount of time as we know is a valuable precious resource that's being spent trying to roll out these programs or, you know, it goes beyond just who you hire. It's even the the thought police of how you think, you know, it's so pervasive within an organization that you you are you die from the bureaucracy of it. And if if anything went wrong with DEI, it was that they didn't have their their eye on the prize of of fighting fires. And instead, you know, they're focusing on something that truly doesn't matter. So you can be as diverse as you wanna be and not be able to put out a fire, and then it just really doesn't matter.
Right? Because you're not training people. You're not spending money on things that matter. You're not having the discussions that matter. And that's where I think that does fall apart and it it has a place there.
But, you know, I I go back to what Chamath said though, you know, it really comes down to prevention and learning from our past. We seem to have a very short term memory, and we forget very quickly because we rebuild and it looks pretty again and everybody forgets. And we just don't have the ability as a society really to think long anymore. And, that's a real problem. And I think we should learn from this fire.
I really hope that what comes out of this is a shift in political leanings in this in this state. You know, I think more moderates are gonna come to their senses. And, as we've seen with the election and the outcome, and I think the state might shift some and we might actually get some policies that
that work. You're so right. You're so right. I mean, when are we going to get tired of all this late stage progressivism? It's like these litany of excuses.
The people that are in charge have failed us yet again.
Exactly.
We have wasted so much money on so many things that don't move the needle. And then the things that they needed to do, they didn't do. And then they point the finger at climate change. It's a joke.
At a certain point, you have to wonder, are we using politics and and the purpose of it to make people's lives better and to have a high functioning society? Or is it a way to virtue signal or to, you know, share your opinions on signals? Yeah. And and I think what people are starting to realize is, you know, in an acute situation, whether it's our budget deficit, whether it's schools, whether it's safety from climate, you know, or non climate induced disasters, you you do need to have competence. And this is the Rick Caruso is such a competent executive that when he ran for office there, the fact that he didn't get that job is just absolutely crazy.
And, you saw the mayor come in, and she wouldn't even address she wouldn't answer any questions from the press, not even thoughts and prayers or, you know, we're thinking of this or we're gonna get it done. It it just seems like we're hiring non executives to work in functions that should be high performing executives. This is an operational role.
Let me maybe bring something that ties these three things together, but it builds on critically what Sayan said. There are so many people here that are good, hardworking people that lost their homes. For many of these folks, it could be the most single and only financially securing asset that they have. For other people, those that are family age, they have kids now beyond the financial damage that are totally displaced. Where will these folks go?
There was a comment by Adam Corolla commentary where he said the real test to science point will be how they internalize and metabolize this because it now affects them personally and they have to go and wait 3 years to build building permits to rebuild. Now that's assuming that they can even get a reasonable amount of insurance coverage, which touches Freeberg's point. This is the real tragedy. That is the actual tragedy multiplied by a 120,000 or 200,000 families. And the real question is how much of that was completely avoidable.
And I think there is a reasonable amount of it that could have been. That's what really sucks, and that's where you cannot take your finger off the scale and forget.
And, yeah, when it lands on your doorstep quite literally here, they are not going to be able having been in this exact area, I can tell you. When you try to pull a permit to do anything, as I was explaining with my roof, the regulations are deep and expensive and time consuming. I don't believe the we talked about the California Coastal Commission on a recent episode, Friedberg. What are the chances that the California Coastal Commission even allows these people to build those homes in those locations on PCH, Friedberg?
I was talking to Chamath about this earlier today because the California Coastal Commission was created by the voters directly in 1976, and that commission has authority that exceeds legislative action. So, you would have to basically go back my understanding is you have to go back to a state vote to rescind the powers of the California Coastal Commission. So they have effective complete authority over deciding what does or doesn't get built on the coast because their objective is to preserve the coast for the use of the community and restore it to its natural habitat. So anytime there's a request or a permit request, it can take 2 decades, 3 decades sometimes to get anything approved if they ever approve it at all. And so the California Coastal Commission, any property that touches the the the beachfront in California, they have this kind of, you know, god level authority over, and they're basically all political appointees that sit on the commission.
To my question, Friberg, what are the chances they allow the millionaires on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu to rebuild those homes? Or do you think they slow roll it and those people are all 50, 60, 70 years old? They'll never be able to rebuild their homes. And California couldn't just slow roll this and say, you know what? Nature returned it to its natural state.
§03Insurance issues, rebuilding headwinds, reclaiming the government
I think we should talk about insurance. This is a great segue.
Yeah. Yeah. That's perfect segue.
Yeah. This is the key point I wanted to say about insurance. So
Going forward. Yeah.
All of this property that sits in climate sensitive zones or weather sensitive zones, whatever you wanna call it, like we've talked about on the coast of California, of Florida, and hurricane centers and tornado centers, where the frequency of loss is going up, they're priced as if the frequency of loss is what it used to be, which is, like, let's say you buy a home for $1,000,000, and the probability of your home getting wiped out by a natural disaster is a 1 in a 1000 year kinda situation. So you have a 1 in a 1000 chance of your home getting wiped out each year. So your price for insurance on that $1,000,000 home should be about $10,000 a year, 1 tenth of 1%. So $10,000 a year for a $1,000,000 home sounds expensive, but it is what you have to pay for homeowners insurance. But now let's say that the probability shifts to 1 in 20 years.
So now you've got a 1 in 20 year probability of your home getting wiped out. Are you gonna pay 5% of your home value? No. And, if you have a $10,000,000 home, are you gonna pay $500,000 a year for property insurance? No.
Now what's happened is the insurance companies have these models. They're called cat models or catastrophe models. It used to be 2 companies. 1 was called RMS. The other one was called Equicat.
And I used to work in this business, so I know it pretty well. And then all the the companies started building in house models, and now there's startups that make models. And these models have shown that there are increased probability of complete loss in a region because of the increased probability of these crazy weather events happening, and so the price of insurance should go up. Here's the problem. There are 50 state insurance commissioners in the US.
In order to sell insurance in a state, you have to have the insurance carrier and the policy approved in that state. And the states determine what rate or what price you can charge for insurance. So the state insurance commissions have a couple of goals. Number 1 is to keep all the insurance companies solvent. So they wanna, you know, check the financials of all the insurance companies, make sure they're not writing too many policies that they won't be able to pay out.
The second thing is they wanna make sure that the insurance companies aren't ripping consumers off. So they have control over the rates, and they don't want the rates to go up too much in any given year. So they're controlling rates and keeping them down. And then the third is they're supposed to make sure that consumers have access to insurance. And the third is a very hard thing to do if you're trying to keep company solvents.
You can't write too many policies, and you're saying, hey. You can't raise prices. And meanwhile, the probability of loss has gone up, so the insurance carriers are like, what choice do I have? So earlier this year, State Farm pulled out of Palisades. They stopped writing fire insurance in Palisades.
They canceled 1600 policies in the exact neighborhood that just burned down.
What about the timing of that free burn? That was 3 months before?
6 months before? It's it's it's not
just that. Before.
But, yeah, but it's not it it it seems crazy. But as you know, in Tahoe, a lot of the policies have been canceled.
Yes. So it's just crazy timing. It's it's a it's a crazy coincidence. Yeah.
And remember, in wine country, we had a lot of wipeouts. All of Santa Rosa was burnt out a few years ago. You guys remember that? And so they started pulling out of there. So a lot of the carriers are generally pulling out of California because when they go up to the DOI and they're like, hey.
We need to raise rates by we need to double the price of insurance. We need to triple the price of insurance. This is now a 1 in 20 year event. The department of insurance says, no. No.
No. We're not gonna let you charge that much to consumers. And then the carrier's like, okay. We got no choice, and they exit the market. Here you can see right here.
1600 policies canceled. This has been a big driver is the departments of insurance has made it very difficult to find this free market outcome. But at the end of the day, 1 of 3 parties are gonna end up eating the cost of the change in probability of loss that has occurred. It's either the homeowner because they're gonna end up losing the value of their home in a loss, or they're gonna end up needing to write down the value of their home when they sell it to someone who will take on that risk, which means the price has to come down. Or number 2 is the insurers, and there's not enough insurance capital out there to cover all these losses, so all these insurers would go bankrupt.
Or the third is the taxpayer. 1 of those 3 is gonna end up eating the loss that's out there.
Answer. You know the taxpayer.
Taxpayer. Yeah. Somebody's gonna lobby somebody, but, hey, we're sitting here, Chamath, in the age of Doge and saying, hey, let's make the government smaller. In fact, Gabe, you and I were talking about at some point gangs of New York and the fire departments being
Oh, yeah. Totally.
Great city. Crazy timing that we were talking about that 2 or 3 weeks before this happened.
But Right.
You know, when we look at making government smaller, well, that means that these kind of situations would put citizens more on their own. So let's counterbalance what you think, Chamath, about who should be responsible. We all espouse, I think, free market ideology on this program and as executives, and in what we do every day. Should the people who own these homes going forward, who decide to rebuild them here, they have to pay, you know, 5, 10 percent of their value of home every year? Should their home prices collapse because it's too hard to build there?
And should the free market take over this risk? Or should it constantly be put on the other 329,000,000 Americans who gonna have to bear the brunt of what happens to the 1,000,000 people affected in this area?
Well, I mean, should's a very strong word. The cap on the insurance reimbursement is about 3,000,000 is my understanding. David, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think I think that's right. The houses in the Palisades are anywhere from, call it, 1,000,000 on the low end to maybe 40 or 50,000,000 on the high end.
The average is 4a half in that that's what
I would say. The there's there's nothing per 1,000,000 these days. Yeah. It's gotta be 3 or 4,000,000.
Right. But the median is probably more instructive, which is probably 7 or 8,000,000. So Yes. Yep. My point is that folks will get less than half their home value back.
They're gonna have to come up with some amount of money to then rebuild. But the cost of rebuilding a 7,000 square foot house in the Pacific Palisades is probably at least a 1000 a square foot. So that's 7,000,000 of cash.
Exactly.
So now so now all of a sudden, these people have to come up with a lot of money.
Exactly.
And that's post tax money. So you might as well double it because California is just so egregiously burdensome in terms of taxes. So the individual homeowner is not gonna be in a position to rebuild. I think that the liabilities of the insurance claims are going to be so massive that the state's going to look to the federal government to build them out.
My parents just got evacuated. I gotta call them and just they're
Hold on.
There's this. There's a new fire.
Where are
they in?
They're literally right. There's a new fire called Kenneth Fire. It just took off, and it's at their it's at their house. So just give me I'll I'll be back. Okay.
Don't do your thing. Oh, wow. Gosh almighty. We're talking about, hey, maybe less government. Hey, maybe spending less.
Now the same group of people maybe who were saying, hey, we need to spend less and reduce the size of government are saying, hey, well, why isn't California more prepared? Well, being prepared obviously means more money and and more taxes. So you you have now these 2 competing ideologies here. But to the question of who's responsible, it is economically gonna make no sense to rebuild unless you can get that insurance. It is a coveted place to live.
But because of the construction costs have gone absolutely parabolic in California, because of regulations, you're talking about $14,000,000 in income to build a $7,000,000 house. And maybe you're just better off selling the lot for a $1,000,000 and letting it be somebody else's problem going forward and just taking the 2 or 3 or $4,000,000 loss. Who should pay for, on a go forward basis, underwriting these homes?
Yeah. I mean, a lot of these people paid for I was reading stories of 30 some odd years into insurance thinking that, you know, their house wouldn't burn down, and then, of course, it gets canceled 2 weeks before their house burns down. And then the one time they need it, they don't have it. And part of this is I mean, a huge part of it is, what Friedberg was talking about are the regulators. And so the free market solution is the only solution.
If you look at I have an investment in a company called Kin Insurance, and they specialize in direct to consumer insurance for areas that are plagued with natural disasters. So their number one state out of the 11 that they serve is Florida, followed by Texas, which, you know, has tornadoes and things like that. And how they're able to get into these places and do insurances, the pricing is according to, you know, the construction of your home and all of these various things, and also weather models and using data science, things that are not allowed in California, if you can believe it or not. So you're not allowed to use a weather model to price in, you know, your decision making for insurance in the state. And that just doesn't make a lot of sense.
You know, you should be rewarded if you put the resources and time into your home to to make it, weatherproof, fireproof.
Fireproof. I
mean You know, even earthquake resistant. Right?
This is more regulations that were layered on here to try to create equality, you know, in in the fact is it's now working against the system. In Tahoe, to your point, they gave us explicit instructions around homes. Put stone and pebbles around your home. Cut the trees and bushes down around your homes. Do this over here.
You know, your premium should go down. When you do that. And if you do that If you do that which might cost $10,000 a home, you it it would keep these from jumping from 1 to the other in most fire situations. Friberg, you're back. Is everything okay?
It's not okay listening to your, you know, 70 something year old parents evacuate their home and try and pack their cars with all their stuff in a matter of minutes while a fire creeps on their home is a pretty
devastating thing to listen to.
Yeah. But are they saying
They're trying to get out of the house. They're throwing everything in the car. There's evacuation. If I'm looking at the video right now, the fire is, like, right by their house. It's insane.
It's literally, like, blocks away from their house.
God.
This is nuts. This is the house I grew up in in LA.
I'm so sorry. Man. Gosh.
It's blocked away. And I'm like, you know, what do you say to them? Like, throw all the photo albums in the car is what I said. Throw the photos. Like, just grab the framed photos.
My mom's trying to grab all her,
like, jewelry stuff. Thing that everybody misses and is mentioned in every interview that I've seen is, photographs.
I'm, like, grab all the photos. Grab all the outlets, and she's, like, you know, she's grabbing her jewelry and stuff. And I'm, like, grab the photos. Like
We're we're the last generation that will be thinking about this issue of grabbing the photos. Yeah. It's fascinating. I just wanna say, like, you know, as we wrap up this segment, you know, obviously, we're thinking about everybody there. This is complex.
This is not the fault of a lesbian firefighter or the Ukraine or any of these other issues. This is leadership and nature and preparedness. So there are big issues around climate change. You wanna believe, but you don't wanna believe them. Fine.
Put Put that aside. But I
can tell you that when
I saw Karen Bass get off that flight play the clip, Nick, of Karen Bass here because it's a short enough clip that we can play it here for the audience. I'm I'm assuming you all 3 of you saw this clip of her being absolutely unwilling to answer a single goddamn question about what's going on. This is the opposite of leadership. Just 10 seconds of this
Do you have some ones on a policy eye? Being absent while their homes were burning? Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by 1,000,000 of dollars, madam mayor? Have you nothing to say today?
Back up. Yeah. Appreciate it.
Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today?
Disgrace and shock.
I mean, I I have zero sympathy.
You took
the leadership job. I don't give a if you're in shock. You're a leader. You just you you sold yourself as the leader that you were gonna service these people, and you don't have the dignity, the honor to just answer the questions, it is the, that is absolutely the worst leadership I've ever seen under fire.
Let
me ask you guys a question. Disgraceful. What do we do?
You fire them all and you vote for Ricuso. You vote for executives who know what the they're doing and know what to do in a crisis because they've been under fire before, because they've run a business before, because they've seen hit the fan. This person, I don't know her. I don't know her history, but I'll be totally honest. Like, I wouldn't trust her literally to pick up my lunch if she can't answer 1 or 2 goddamn questions and give a placating answer to a reporter.
Hey. It's an intense situation. We're working as hard as we can. She can't even say 2 goddamn words to the people who voted her in. And for anybody who voted for this level of incompetence, it reminds me of exactly what we went through in San Francisco when I was living there.
In the Bay Area, when you put someone like Chesa Boudin in or London Breed or this entire clown car, Aaron Petzker, all these disgraceful, discretiads
The Marxists.
The Marxists lunatics who would rather virtue signal Dopey Dean Preston, the whole lot of them. You vote them out, and you vote in executives. And it doesn't mean a Republican executive. It doesn't mean a Democrat executive. It means an executive who's run something in their life before.
Whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's Trump, whether it's Ricrucio, it doesn't matter their ideology. It matters their effectiveness. And if you vote for ineffective people, you're gonna get situations like this over and over and over again. So use your brains and vote for executives who've done something in the world. This is why I've changed my position on rooting for Trump now.
I was a never Trumper. Everybody knows that. But he put executives around him this time around. And I am rooting for those executives to do what's right for the American people and solve big problems, not make them worse. It's infuriating.
Chamath, what do you think?
I think we need to have a wholesale replacement of the people that govern the state of California. It's just not working.
Full stop.
And I think that the citizens that live in California need to do some real soul searching. It is beyond party politics. So I think what has happened in California is people vote for whatever vessel has the name Democrat beside their name or Republican beside their name. And I think that you have to go back to first principles and do a better job of picking the people to represent us because the people that are in positions of power just don't fundamentally know what they're doing. They're not capable.
And the fact that then what we have to deal with are sort of lies and distractions to excuse incompetence, I think is unacceptable. I think we pay way too high of a price. And like I said, you are now dealing with 100 of thousands of families whose entire lives have been totally disrupted and ripped away. And I hope that we learn something from this because we didn't learn from it 8 years ago. And we clearly didn't learn from it when a different natural disaster in North Carolina.
Will we find out that folks said, hey, guys. Is there an outlier natural disaster event? Obviously, it's not gonna be the same thing in North Carolina, but could a different form of something happen here? What could it be? Are we prepared?
I'm sure we'll find out that they didn't do that. Maybe they had different meetings and they were all about other total distractions or things that just didn't matter. So this is what we need to do. We, as a populace in this state, need a reset. Otherwise, we deserve what we get.
Bingo.
Diane, you agree?
Yeah. I think I think Democrats need to reclaim their party. I think, there's a lot more strength in the middle. And, you know, they've let this woke ideology, I call it woke imperialism, like a religion, take over in place of actually doing things that matter to the people that elected them, that pay taxes, that pay their, you know, their paychecks and everything in between. And it's time that people really look in the mirror.
I've got so many moderates coming to me saying, you know, people call me a Republican and I'm far right and I'm a Nazi. And I'm like, yeah, welcome to the club. You know, it's a at some point, you've gotta stop letting them run the board and and stand up and say, you know, enough's enough. You know, we're not building some railway that's never being built. We're not solving homelessness with 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars.
We're not doing this stuff anymore. You know, we do need real executives to your point, Jason, you know, to run things that understand how things are, how it works and and, you know, the best use of funds. Because right now, it's it's it's misappropriated.
It's a crisis of competence. I mean, I think we all see it. These are incompetent people.
By the way, it's not just it's not just the leadership. It's also legislative action that's gonna be needed to fix a lot of the the policies, the regulations, the way infrastructure operates in the state. And that requires 3 things to change. Number 1 is the California state assembly. Number 2 is the California state senate.
And number 3 is to put things in front of the voters that they can vote on to make the wholesale change needed to rescind some of the bad decisions that were made over the last 3 decades in the state that has led us to this point. And I think that it's gonna require, just like what happened recently in the national politics, a state politics organizational effort to say, let's take a look at the composition of the state assembly, the state senate, and what are some of the votes that need to be done by the citizens to make the necessary changes in the state to try and get the world's 5th largest economy to start act acting and looking like it. Because right now, it's sort of like a weirdly disabled third world country type operation with the wealthiest resources on planet Earth, and it seems pretty up. It's almost like once people have it all, that's when they wanna give it all up. That seems to be the moment that the state has just passed.
Now maybe it's time to go reclaim it and build it back.
Well said. I mean and as we said in this segment, there are so many common sense, tactical, strategic things that these people could be doing, that they should be doing, that they're not. And there needs to be a full blown investigation. You kinda alluded to this earlier, Chamath. But if there is if this is dereliction of duty, then then we need to look into this in a very deep fashion.
And to the people of California, you have more power than you know. My friend who used to be on this podcast once in a while, he and I collaborated on, Chesa Boudin being taken out as this, DA in in the Bay Area. I know some other people here were involved in it as well. And you can recall somebody. So recall these incompetent lunatics.
Recall them and replace them.
Scary, but you can. You know, they they they send all their people after you. They threaten you.
It's personal. They went after you.
I was signature number 1, and I I'd had to deal with the deluge of that stuff. But to be honest with you, I've never been happier to do something and get civically engaged. I think it's so important that everybody starts getting involved in their local government and their state government and the national government, because you can't just expect people to do the work for you and expect it to turn out well. And I think that's kind of the mistake that we all made. We wanna take some responsibility, the tech industry as a whole, did not get as involved as we ought to have in the past, and I think we should get more involved.
Why was that saying why why did for 20 years while we were all in the Bay Area, or other people, you know, we're just too busy building companies and
it didn't seem companies. And I remember if I remember correctly, the only person I I remember getting involved in local stuff was Ron Conway.
Yes.
And he would try to get everybody involved. And we were all just like, you know, there's people who are smart that do that sort of thing, and they're gonna do their thing, and they're running stuff, and we're just not gonna get involved. And there are a lot of people who would say, I'm not political. I don't I don't do politics. I don't you know, they didn't get involved until it affected them.
Kinda like the houses burning down, it affects them. And, you know, like, they're they're that saying that first they came for so and so, and I didn't speak up. You know, that's what's happening here. And, you know, I I just really think that people need to realize it's now affecting them, and it's now time to make a change and elect better leaders.
Here's a framing. If you're paying 50% tax in California, you're a shareholder of an organization known as California Inc. You're on the board of that company. You're paying the salaries of the people there. You have a say, recall these people, start a recall of Newsom, start a recall of Karen Bass, just do it.
I'm not doing it. I don't have time for this. I'm in Austin. But y'all in Cal who are still in California, start a page, recall Newsom, recall Bass, and you have the power to do it, and you will succeed. I guarantee it.
Now is the moment to strike. There's other news we should get to. You know, I hate to say thoughts and prayers and and but literally, I've been thinking about this, you know, all day long. And I have a lot of friends. My friend Mark Souster lost his home.
I used to play cards with Jimmy Woods. And, you know, I just feel terrible for everybody who's lost their homes and then their kids and their schools are burned down as well. All those great schools in Pacific Palisades are gone.
I could see developers coming in and being like, dude, if I could buy all these lots for 80% off, I will.
And that's what's gonna happen.
They're gonna sit on them. Yeah. They're gonna just sit on them and wait for people to forget like they did in 1962.
Rick Caruso of the world will do that. Yeah. Anyway.
Yeah. He should be running the place and probably
I'll give
I'll give you another another California Department of Insurance stat. So after the California Department of Insurance wouldn't allow the rates to rise like they should from a free market perspective, they had to set up their own insurance program called the Fair Plan for homeowners. It has about $220,000,000 of capital in it, and then they bought about $5,000,000,000 of reinsurance. They have about 6,000,000,000 of exposure in Pacific Palisades alone. This is a bankrupt.
Just like I told you guys about in Florida, the state insurance commission tries to step in and fill the market gap that they create by regulating rates, and then they don't have enough capital to actually fill the gap because the reason the rates wanna go up is because the thing costs more than the state is willing
to commit.
Distorting it. They're putting their thumbs on the scale, and they're distorting it even more. They're driving a bigger crater.
They're driving real estate value up because they're not allowing the cost of insurance of that real estate to naturally float. And so by driving real estate values up, the economy looks good. They make property taxes. Income comes in. But at the end of the day, the bill is gonna come to you.
And in the case of Florida and in the case of California, either the state government or the federal government's gonna step in and pay the difference. And at some point, taxpayers are gonna look at the fact that they're paying some percentage of their income to support someone else's home value, and they're gonna say enough is enough. And enough of these sorts of events start to happen, and then the legislative change, I think, will happen that says this. It doesn't make sense. We have to make a change.
And I think we're getting pretty close after the series of events.
Alright. This has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. Let's move on to our next topic here. Zuck just fired Meta's 3rd party fact checkers, and he is going to embrace the community notes model from Twitter slash x, which predates Elon's ownership of the platform and is an open source project for those folks who don't know. On Tuesday, made the he made the announcement on in an Instagram video.
§04Zuck goes full free speech, fires third-party fact-checkers, opts for Community Notes model
He published a blog with a bunch of details, and he made the signal that he was gonna move the trust and safety team out of California, which he feels maybe was too, far to the left as we were just discussing in the previous story, and move it to the great state of Texas. And here's a quote from his comments. In recent years, we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressures to moderate content. This approach has gone too far. If you remember back in August, Zuck sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining how the FBI and Biden administration have pressured Facebook into censoring posts about COVID and Hunter Biden.
You'll also remember that Zuckerberg has over 3,000,000,000 members to his platform and had no problem banning Trump from the platform after January 6th. A lot to talk about in this topic, Saion. What's your general take of Zuck going MAGA? How do you interpret
his I actually think change
your part.
I actually think deep down inside, he always has been. You know, I I go back to the beginning days of Facebook. And when there was social networks that were competing, which back at the time was MySpace, the only political party you could be was Republican or Democrat. And then along came Facebook and he added this third option called libertarian. And I would like to go to the Wayback Machine at some point and find his profile because his profile said he was a libertarian.
So when he started Facebook, you know, that that's where he leaned. So I think he's always been a free speech person. I think he's always this has been deep in his heart. I think what happened was he had enormous success. They grew very large, and he had to become neutral, or he thought he did.
And so I think what we're seeing with Zuck right now with his change in his, you know, even how he appears with a gold chain and how he's dressing and everything that he's doing is him going back to his roots to be more authentic. Because I think he hasn't been authentic for a long time. And and that was a big critique that people had of him. You know, they were just like when he talks, he's like a robot. And I think what we're seeing is him coming out of his shell.
And I don't know if fighting helped it or what helped it. But, you know, I do think it's the best thing to do, and all the platforms need to do it and should embrace it. And, it can be game, though. Community notes can be game that we saw it with, I saw a report that, you know, Kamala's campaign or or I I don't know if they directly work for her or what happened, but they did take over community notes on x and started manipulating them. So you have to be really careful, you know, how you run a community.
But in in general, I'm all for it. I think it's the right move.
It's but one signal. It's one system for trying to get to the truth. It's not the only one. Fact tracking is another one. And having no system is another one.
Chamath, you're obviously an alumni. You worked side by side with Zuckerberg in the pivotal years of building the Facebook platform. What's your take on what Cyan said, and what do you attribute Zuckerberg's massive 180 here?
I would start by saying I think he's a phenomenal businessman. I mean, I think the the results speak for itself. But I also think that that is exactly what explains the shift. In many ways, he had to make that shift. I think it's fair to say that in the Obama and Biden administrations, when the winds were blowing towards censorship, they were part of that machinery.
And that was the value maximizing function for Facebook shareholders in that time. Because if you push back against that, it's not clear what would have happened to Facebook in other ways. And so I think the decision, whether he morally agreed with it or not, almost didn't matter. It's the leadership of the country in which I operate is telling me it's gonna go this way, I go that way. Once the Biden and Obama administration sort of went to the wayside, there's a very interesting picture that Donald Trump put in his book.
And I just I sent it to Nick. And I think it sort of explains the last week's events relatively well. So I'll just read it. And this is a picture of him sitting in the oval, and it says, Mark Zuckerberg would come to the oval office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful lock boxes in a true plot against the president in J CAL, all caps.
Okay. Shout out to
the president.
He told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook, but at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election. Now that's what he put
in the book. And then
he was asked about this quote at a recent press conference. Nick, do you have the the link to that?
He's colorful, Friberg. Did you notice Donald Trump, a little bit colorful?
Essentially, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg's move to free speech. And he he was sent he was asked, you know, do you think it was because of your threat? And he goes, yeah. Probably.
Yeah. Well, I watched their news conference, and, I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they've honestly, I think they've come a long way. Meta. Do you think he's directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the
past with the Russians? Yeah. Probably. Wow. There it is.
But, again, the the the the lens that I would put on this is now the winds are blowing in a different direction, and I do think it's the value maximizing function. I think Elon didn't make a value maximizing function. He made a moral decision. He did it when it was unpopular and where the winds were clearly blowing in the opposite direction. Now that those winds have changed and it's clear Trump won in early November, the decisions you make in January are more reflective of the new conditions on the field coming into the inauguration.
But I do think it's the smart value maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders, and I think it begets a broader point. I think the thing is when you see Elon operate, he's a complete outlier in many dimensions, but I think the one dimension where it matters the most is that he acts morally and in the best interests of what he believes humanity benefits from. He's always done it. He was willing to torch $44,000,000,000 when he bought Twitter in order to do it. And so he does these things from his own perspective.
I don't think there's any other CEO that leads this way, and I don't think they should necessarily. I do think that, you know, Mark's a good person, but his intimate feelings should be known by his wife, his children, his friends, his family. I don't think we as shareholders have any right to know necessarily. Elon is different, and I think it creates an expectation that maybe we'll get that from everybody else, but I wouldn't conflate everybody else with him. So I think that this is a smart business decision.
It makes a ton of sense. And as you can see, he was basically told to do this.
So he complied. Friberg, your thoughts on Zuckerberg making this decision. If Kamala Harris had won, would he have released a statement or added Dana White to the board of Facebook?
Probably not.
Okay. There you have it folks. Pretty straightforward here. Kamala wins. He would not have done this.
He is jumping in front of a marching band, and he is the band leader now. He's got his baton, and, he's a front runner. And if you open the dictionary and you look it up
But, I mean, it's a smart business move. I think if you're a meta shareholder, I think you're happy to see it.
Absolutely. Is there anything wrong with it, J. K. L, or you're just saying
it's important to share it? Amount wrong with it. It's called moral integrity, having an ethical compass, having chutzpah, having an own sense of what's right and wrong in the world, which he does not have in my estimation based on
his behavior.
That's not fair. That's not fair. You don't know because, again, what I'm saying is
I said based
on my estimation. No. But, Jason, what I'm trying to say is Elon shares who he is in a 360 degree way with the world, so we know where he stands. And all I'm saying is what Mark does or doesn't believe really isn't known to us. It's probably known to his wife and his family.
And his board. I doubt his board even knows actually.
Some of his close confidants. Some of his confidants.
Let me be clear. I'll even it's it's I'm I'm happy you're challenging me on it. I base people on their actions. His action was to be the greatest censor in the history of humanity. There's no human being who censored more humans than him.
That was his decision when it was a popular decision. Whether it was a popular
Or Hold on. But not popular not popular, Jason. Necessary for maximizing his business in that
moment.
You well, he doesn't need no. No. I disagree. His business would have been just as vibrant if he had a spine and he just said, this is what I believe. And I think he's over optimizing based on what he thinks everybody else around him wants.
And I don't know. I didn't I've never worked with him. I don't know him personally. You're right on that front. But he banned Trump for 2 years.
The president of the United States I said at the time, I don't know that you can give a permanent brand ban to the president of the United States. When he had the opportunity to reevaluate that decision, you know what he did? He punted. He created a 3rd party organization to make the decision for him and deflect it. Zuck created the oversight board.
He's so spineless, he decided I'll create and give a $150,000,000 to this board to make these hard decisions for me instead of me making the decision. He has God voting shares of that company, Chamath. He controls it with an iron fist. And not only does he control it with an iron fist, he has put protection precisions in that so that his children could take
that
$3,300,000,000 platform and own it forever. And he punted to them and said, I don't wanna make these decisions. What I saw when he did that was I don't want to be blamed for these decisions. And that is a lack of courage and morality in my estimation.
But, Jason
And then the second he is threatened by Trump, he makes the opposite decision. And if he's making his decisions strictly on maximizing money, I don't respect that. I think he should make the decisions based on what he think is is the moral. What is the point of being a billionaire or worth a 100,000,000,000 or 200,000,000,000 if you don't get to say, I have you money, you. I'm gonna do what I want.
And that's what I think is his moral failure. And anybody giving him his flowers or championing him for this, I think it's just political expediency, and I think it's disgraceful. That's my pure that's my feeling. Sorry.
I I
have my own opinion.
What about the fact that he was dragged in front of congress many times over, and people that could put him behind bars pulled him to his face many times, and this has all been kind of been coming out over the last couple of months, that government officials were directing him in a way that feels like do this or you will be prosecuted to do the following things, to act the following way, and to moderate your platform in a way that we are telling you to moderate it, or you will find yourself behind bars. Do you not think that there's some degree of inherent complicit kind of role that certain government officials and folks in power had in driving some of those actions that maybe he had to do it to survive and to keep the company alive?
Not to mention a violation of our constitution.
No. Not at all. He could have just hired lawyers and fought it. He didn't put up any fight. The second they told him to roll over and ban Trump, he did it.
Zero fight from him. He has no Do you
know that for sure? Because I I just wanna make sure I ask you. I'm just basing
it on his actions. I'm like I told you, I'm
getting this. You're basing it on what you're
basing it on. His actions.
Right.
But I'm
just not making sure.
Jail for banning Trump. If he didn't ban Trump or
he gave him a 6
month suspension, he would have been just fine.
I'm just trying to get you to take a fair point of view, which means, like, let's make sure you're thoughtful about the fact that this is not a dumb person or a per let's give give him the benefit for a minute. He he's not a dumb person
of being a great business executive.
I'm just saying, let's just assume he's not dumb, and let's say that as Sayan points out and as he's kind of highlighted points in his history, he actually does have certain beliefs in certain systems that he would love to kind of embrace. I've said this many times before. All of the founders of the big tech companies were all big free speech advocates. That was a big part of the open Internet and the movement of the open Internet when a lot of people got involved.
Was there.
Yeah. And that was a big part for him. And I don't know, like, you know, if you really think at some point he flipped his switch and said, I don't care about the open Internet. I now wanna have a closed controlled Internet. Or if he recognized or was coerced into controlling moderation on the platform because of the reach that he had.
And he said, the only way I can have any degree of openness is to do the following. And I will say that my experience is similar in Google. When Google had to exit China, they initially went to China with a closed Internet, with a closed censored model of search because that was the way they had to survive to offer a business in China. They didn't morally agree with it. They didn't think it was ethically correct.
Did they launch that or did Sergei kill the deal when Eric Schmidt proposed it?
Well, that deal went live. There was a let me let me just make sure I get this all correct.
No. They didn't go live. Sergey Brin, because of his upbringing in Russia, he went to the mat and said, on a moral basis, we're not going into China. And I've talked to Sergei about it. He did not want to go in there and compromise his own ethics.
That's right.
Period. Full stop. So I don't think that Mulan is the only outlier here.
You're not right. And I
just wanna make sure that When did it when did because the dragon it was called Project Dragon.
There was a there's a long history to this.
Okay. Let's let Saian come in here.
I wanna make sure I get this right, but go ahead, Saian.
Obviously, he's a brilliant businessman, but I do think underneath it all, he is a human being. And I think his fighting in the arena and his fighting stuff that he does actually did change him. And this happened long before the First Amendment stuff started to appear. You know, I think or free speech, I shouldn't call it First Amendment, but I do think that the government did interfere. And after January 20th, we're gonna find out some interesting stuff.
And we'll get to the bottom of, you know, how did the government pressure him to censor things? And I think he's getting in front of that because it is gonna come out. And I think that is a huge part of why he is getting more involved is because it's gonna be revealed just how much the government coerced him.
And And how much he acquiesced? Is that sort of what you're insinuating?
This is
why I think the fighting actually helped. I think he learned to stop acquiescing. Wow. I actually think that
He put up a fight.
That is where I started seeing the change in him and started noticing. And so did the you know, he's they're all so many more fans and people who are looking to him as a leader in a different way now because he's actually starting to express who he is. And, like, what kind of music he likes. Nobody ever knew that. They They thought he was just a robot.
He doesn't like music.
He he hired a whole PR team to craft this is my understanding. But anyway Yeah. I mean, I don't I don't know
that much detail. I don't I don't I'm not involved in his personal life like that. But I just I always love to give people the benefit of doubt. I guess that's just me. And I and I do think that, people people can change, and I'm hoping that he is actually gonna stay on this side.
We we want more leaders like him to believe in free speech.
Of course. Of course. I mean, listen. Reddit had By
the way, they all do. And I've never met, you know, an Internet business executive who didn't come from kind of the open Internet philosophical doctrine by background, but that was Yeah. A big motivator for all of us because the Internet took away the controls, took away the power, took away the censorship, took away all these things that other kind of communication systems had vested in them. And the Internet, through an open protocol, allowed anyone to share anything with anyone else. And, obviously, laws and all this other stuff that's happened since then has made that far more difficult.
And I will revisit our conversation, Jason. Google's China with censored search results was live for 4 years before they canceled it. So they launched in 2006. They censored results. They complied with the Chinese government request.
And eventually, in 2010, they killed it. And you could argue it was because of philosophical reasons, but, fundamentally, it never actually got a lot of users in China. There were bet more users on Baidu. And Google had separately made an investment in Baidu that
weren't available. The moment, I think, it became, if I remember correctly, it's 20 years ago, but I think
I think it was YouTube.
Was it YouTube? Because it one of the other services, they started saying, hey, we need to know these people's names, who posted this, who sent this email. We want full access into it. That's where they drew the line because it wasn't just a passive search engine. Right?
It was actually, like, round up dissidents like Yahoo famously did. Yahoo
They they yeah. Google claimed there was a hack that happened because on their servers in China, and so they were just no longer comfortable operating
with that. Guys. Yeah. However we got here, we're here.
Yeah.
And we should all be happy that we're here.
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. I'll take the win.
And we just kind of move forward.
How about that? I mean, taking the win is a good way to do it. A better
place because of his decision.
Yeah. Exactly. I think
we all agree on that. I mean, what's the point of having an open platform and you can say things in
But why
do you call them spineless? Like, why call like, why go after the guy? Why?
Because you can judge a person when they're put under pressure to make the right decision.
I think what Jason is expressing is sort of what I was trying to say and I probably said it poorly. I think there are some of us who look at the way that Elon runs himself and his companies, okay, as a sort of world beating technology CEO, and then that sort of sets the bar. But I think that that bar is impossible to meet. And I think part of it is because of Elon's genius. The other part of it is his success.
The other part of it is his influence, but there's an element, Jason, a fundamental moral risk taking that he takes that has been rewarded over and over again that no other CEO has had to make. And when they have, they've largely failed. And so I I understand where you're coming from, but I would give a lot of folks the benefit of the doubt here and say, it's not clear what they believe then versus what they believe now, but the destination is very good. And we're in a better place for society, and hopefully we can maintain these norms independent of who's in charge after Trump.
I am super happy he's making these decisions. I believe in freedom of speech. I'm, you know, it's I think he's gonna
have to deal with advertisers next, though. I mean, that's one thing that x doesn't have to deal with as much, and that's gonna be the second problem he's gonna have is not just the government, but do you advertisers wanna be next to some of the content that's about to appear?
And when he loses tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars in personal net worth, will he make the same decisions? We'll see. But I can tell you, if Kamala Harris had been voted in, he would double down on censorship instead of taking this position. I think he is terrified of Trump and having his company broken up. And he's doing this strictly to appease Trump, which I think putting Dana White on the board is another signal.
That's one of Trump's good friends. He's just trying to get closer to the party. He's trying to make up for lost time for when he supported the censorship of, Trump and other folks. I I I think he would make the opposite decision. But to your point, we're here.
I'm glad he did.
Would you would you meet Zuck in the octagon? That's the most important question No. Of the day.
No. Definitely not. He's he's he's 10, 15 years younger than me. He killed me. Not a not a chance would I meet him in the octagon, but I wish him well.
I wish him well.
Would you meet
would you meet Palmer Lucky in the octagon?
Let's not start happy. And we're just wondering. Let's not die.
Just wondering. Just wondering.
I actually literally challenged him. He's he wanted to send the mountain. He wanted to pick somebody to fight for him, Trey, from Founders Fund, and I said no. Unless Trey was willing to do I would
you guys ever watch the old TV show American Gladiators? I would like I would like you and Palmer to have an American Gladiators style tournament, like, maybe 4 or 5 events, and, you know, you kinda get the most
points. Incredible. Put up a $1,000,000 for charity. I'll totally do it. Maybe I'll we'll put up a $1,000,000 each for charity.
I'll do it. For sure.
Let's let's get, you know, let's get the chart out there.
I think that this could be
Let's send
out something super world possibly here.
More exciting than the accelerator. I will tell you.
Absolutely. It might get more ratings than it yeah. You could actually call
it a you could call it American Gladiators. It would be a great show.
You go. American Gladiators, the the CEO edition, business to business edition. They're going SaaS. Alright. Listen.
§05Nvidia goes consumer at CES: market cap impact, most interesting vertical
NVIDIA going consumer. Let's talk about it. NVIDIA made a a big announcement at CES this week. They made a lot of them. One of them that was particularly interesting was this $3,000 personal AI computer for researchers.
That's awesome.
It's called Project Digits, and it's essentially like, maybe Arduino would be a way to look at this, like a a personal device, but it's powerful enough to run LLMs on. They're also going after physical AI, like robotics and self driving. As we said here on the, award show, a lot of people on the panel were predicting this year would be the year of robotics, and they announced that they're going to have driver assistant chips, and maybe build worlds for people to simulate. Which Net Net at the end of the day, I think Freyberg puts them on 2nd will put autonomy partners on 2nd or 3rd base in terms of creating technology by incorporating it into the chips, and into their stack. So, Sayan, what what what do you think of these, announcements and some of the other ones he made?
I know you were excited to talk about this.
Yeah. I'm really excited to talk about it because I think I've been trying to figure out how they justify their valuation over the long run. And, you know, I'm not a public market person, but I am fascinated with NVIDIA. And, you know, their cloud GPU business is definitely a majority of, their revenue. So I think a lot we're a lot of what we're seeing is them trying to grow into that and trying to expand in case, you know, the music stopped.
Now I don't actually think the music is gonna stop. You know, it's insane to me, like, we haven't even barely touched what AI is going to do and change and all of the various things that are gonna come from it. And, you know, the early adopters cannot use Claude without getting
shut down because of scaling issues. And I don't think those are artificially created
based on the type of investing I'm Nvidia. It is interesting. It's an interesting thing to go consumer. And, you know, the thing that really hit me was the fact that, he kind of declared Tesla one of the most valuable companies in the world in the long run. It's interesting that he got behind Toyota.
But at the same time, you know, I don't think of a there's one single car company out there that has the kind of data that full self drive has and and Tesla has.
Yeah. So
if they enter the robo taxi market, I actually think they should buy Uber, then it's kinda
You should think Tesla should buy Uber.
Oh,
yeah. I think they should buy Uber.
Well, that would be about 10% of Tesla's market cap at this point. If they paid a premium, it might be 15%. So it would be very similar to what's app.
But it's true.
Like Yeah. It is true. Yeah.
And then and then you launch that robo taxi service. And you know, maybe there's some sort of secondary aftermarket solution, kind
of like comma AI or something like that, that you can do
for people's cars, where you can actually get anybody's car into the fleet and start self driving. But it is true. This is gonna be the largest breakout in robotics we've ever seen if Waymo's any indicator. And, you know, I I read somewhere, I think, that Amazon or some somebody was looking at it. I don't know what was going on with Waymo.
But, oh, Lyft. Amazon was gonna buy Lyft.
Yeah. That makes no sense. Right? Like, why would you buy to me. It doesn't make sense.
Would the point be? I I do think you're correct.
I think maybe delivery or something like that. I can't figure out what their play is there.
Well, it's not and it's also not global. But, you know, looking at the Amazon and Waymo, Tesla and Uber, I think Waymo plus Uber, Amazon plus Uber, or Tesla plus Uber defines who number 1 is. Right? Because you would have a global footprint, and for the 5, 10 years, maybe 10 years it takes to roll out taxis globally, you could have people I mean, it's a really interesting thought process you have, you're saying. Imagine if there was an interim step where they sold less Teslas this year slightly than last year.
You could just keep producing lots of Model Y's, and give them to the Uber drivers. Keep reinforcement learning going while the taxis and regulations get set. And then you would be able to put another instead of selling 1,800,000 Teslas, you could sell 3,000,000 Teslas, 4,000,000 Teslas to Uber drivers. Get all that data and have the safety driver in while each region decides if they want robo taxis, where, how, etcetera. Your thoughts, Shamath, on NVIDIA's dipping their toe into maybe taking the bottom 30% of the stack of self driving.
I don't have much of an opinion on that, to be honest. I think that sort of along the lines of what I said on the prediction show, I think that Waymo and Tesla are gonna run away with this market, and I think it's gonna force a bunch of consolidation in the traditional auto OEMs. I think the interesting thing is that they really doubled down and created a pretty decent test bench for robotics. I thought that was pretty interesting. So I think that reinforces what a lot of smart people, including, you know, what Freeberg and Gavin also spoke about just in terms of the long term future for robots.
I think that that was cool. I was I was a little confused by the low end PC. I don't understand what the point of that is. Maybe it, like, creates some crazy deep end market where you can buy GPU and then contribute it to some distributed network and allow some distributed workload to run on that, I guess. I don't know.
I think it's a toy, a hobbyist kind of device that becomes like a bridge. And we see this often in technology where some body creates, like even the original PCs, let's face it, they were kind of like toys and hobbyist devices, Arduinos, and the original drones were kind of hobbyist.
Yeah. I guess the point is a toy to do what? Because if you're trying to do inference, like everything is telling us that we are reaching the limits of training.
And That's an LLS though. Right. So what just The point is it's not yeah.
Let me get to it. Yeah. Yeah. So so in this world of AI that we know it today, there's training and there's inference. And right now, we think that there's training that's at a limit.
And so now the market shifts to inference. So if you're gonna buy this jacked up personal computer, what are you gonna use it for? My suspicion is some sort of test time compute use case, which is an inference use case. But it's not clear to me why that's a better solution than all of the AI accelerators plus tensors that are now just prolifically being exposed to the market, whether it's Amazon exposing what they've done, whether it's Google exposing what they've done, a whole litany of startups exposing what they've done. So I was just confused.
I don't really know what the whole point is. What do you
think, Friedberg, about this?
The robotics thing was interesting if the market develops in the way that they think.
So So we we're talking about maybe 2 or 3 different pieces here, Freeberg. Which one do you think is super interesting then? The the this $3,000 sort of GPU for your desktop that you attach to your computer? You get to play with things locally. Do you think that's promising?
Where would that go if you have to guess?
So I think the bet he's making is it's not just LLMs, which is predicting text, but, you know, we've talked a lot about machine vision models, graph neural nets that that are being used for weather forecasting. There's now these kind of genome language models that are trying to predict genomic output for biotech applications. There's also gonna be kind of real time machine vision and robotic response. Like, we're working on this at Ohalo, and we're trying to figure out what's the right kind of runtime environment for these sorts of systems that are gonna be using a machine vision and a robotic kind of response type system. And there's a lot of these industrial applications that are emerging.
Let's say you're running a robot in a warehouse. Do you really want that robot in the warehouse to be sending data to the cloud and waiting for a model to run-in the cloud and getting a response? The probability is you wanna have that at the edge of the network. You wanna have something local. And I don't think he necessarily has a strong point of view on what the types of models and industrial applications will be.
But the bet he's making is that the models are good enough, and now the chips are good enough that they can actually realize real time responses using machine vision, using real time input, and then respond quickly with a local model running, whatever that model is, to drive some output in the industrial setting. And that there'll be a lot of these sorts of applications, whether that's making predictions for biotech research or whether that's for running robots in warehouses or building new research models. Or maybe you could strap this PC on the back of something like a car, a tractor, a lawnmower, a humanoid robot, or any other set of applications.
Explain to the audience, Friberg, why having the computer at the edge is beneficial for those folks who might not know.
If you're taking in a lot of data and then you have to run a lot of data in a model, it's a lot faster to to run that model locally. Like, when Tesla runs self driving, it's not sending the video images from your car to a server a 1000 miles away and then letting the server decide how to drive your car. The car is running its model on what to do with respect to the video imagery in the car. It's local because the ability for all that data to get processed in the car means that you don't have to wait for the Internet to transmit data back and forth. You don't have lag time.
You don't have the 60 millisecond or a 100 millisecond response time.
Have it losing your phone connection and then not knowing what to do.
Exactly. Or or the the connection drops or waiting for a server to come online or server breaks in the data center. Everything is local. So if you scrap this, like, you know, NVIDIA computer, which is basically plug and play, you don't have to have, like, hardware expertise. You could strap it onto the back of a humanoid robot or run research applications locally.
So I think that there's gonna be some really interesting use cases, whether it becomes a replacement for the Apple, you know, Macintosh Pro Studio device, whatever, maybe we'll see.
Mini 4. Yeah.
The Mac mini 4. But a lot of people have pointed out that, actually, the the compute on this thing for $3,000 knocks a lot of Macs out of the, out of the field. So
I just can't run an operating system in the traditional sense. Sam, when we look at startups, I remember when you and I started investing, 2 of the driving forces was free storage, free bandwidth, and cloud computing. It drove a lot of ability to get a product to market very quickly, effectively, etcetera. What impact will AI have on all these startups that are being originating now in 2024, 2025? Look into your crystal ball, and how do you think they'll, grow the footprint of them?
How is this gonna accelerate the startup scene?
I actually think we're gonna see a Cambrian explosion of creativity and and development of different things. And some of them are gonna be stupid ideas, and some of them are gonna be great. But I think it's gonna make our job, especially at the seed stage of investing, harder and harder. There's gonna be so many there's just gonna be a lot of people that have similar ideas at the same time that can execute quickly and and do things at breakneck speeds that they've never been able to do before. And,
you know, as picking the winner
is gonna be hard to figure out.
It's gonna be harder and harder. Yeah. And it might be that, you know, I've been thinking about this, like, do you in invest in competitors, which is something I never used to do. You know, do you take a bet and index an entire category that you're interested in? You know, what is the approach at seed and precede?
Because, I think of an idea and I'm like, wow, that's really neat. And then I go and look out there and there's 30 people working on it. And that didn't used to be the case. And I think part of it is, we've really unlocked a tool that allows people to do things that would have been cost prohibitive or gives them the ability to think, gosh, I could be an entrepreneur, and I can try this, and I could do this. So I'm seeing people experiment and do all sorts of things.
As far as the startups, some of the AI stuff is just a feature. You know, it's just, table stakes at this point. It's like, you know, a chat or whatever, and that doesn't really matter. But then you're seeing people reimagine games and reimagine, you know, even things down to your kitchen appliance, etcetera. So I just I do think it's gonna be very, very difficult, and and I tend to set out a lot of hype cycles.
So I invested in power and compute, lithography, kind of all of the things that are going to be underneath all of this. And so I'm not sure how much of it I'm gonna participate in until it starts to get to a steady state and you kind of can understand what's next. Because the the rate of acceleration is just so great that it's just kind of unclear to me sometimes, you know, especially when it comes to these consumer applications, consumer facing things. It's just, really hard.
Well, when we were picking, famously Uber, you had to pick between Sidecar, Lyft, and Uber. There were 3 people doing it, and it was pretty clear who was the most qualified, you know, amongst those 3. You you now to your point, if you're wanna be involved in tax plus AI or legal plus AI, you might be looking at 50 companies, a 100. And it was tradition in Silicon Valley to not bet on competitors. There were some notable exceptions.
When you run an accelerator like I do, Techstars or Y Combinator, you aren't bound by that because 50% of the companies pivot almost by design. So I think you just have to I think at precede, because people pivot, you just have to tell people, like, listen. We have a lot of pivoting going on. People are gonna run into each other. I I can't just bet on one thing, right, in a in a space.
But I think that's a reasonable compromise. If ever if all the founders are gonna keep pivoting to each other's businesses, how can the investors even keep track of that? It's like being aircraft traffic control of 10 airports at once. It's just not feasible. Let's You
wouldn't think it, but there's still a lot of spreadsheet companies out there. You know, you think you'd run out of them, but they're still out there. You know, you look at and I think this is where AI is really gonna make a difference, like RFP proposals for governments, you know, something that takes, like, 30 days and it's manual and you have to submit these horrible documents. You know, you can ingest your entire corpus of, you know, all of your previous bids and submit them at a breakneck speed now and win more contracts, so that becomes like a national defense company at that point. And and so I think we're gonna see a lot of really interesting things where a lot of crushed is gonna disappear.
And and that'll be a really interesting wave that I'm I'm looking forward to.
Yeah. So in fact, Chamath has made a big bet there with his time, with his, software startup that he's created. Alright. Let's end on the United States of America growing from 50 to 60 or 70 states. Trump has been rattling off some ideas around this.
§06Why Trump wants Greenland
Trump, what's your take on it? I know, we gotta get wrapped up here, so we'll just do a quick lightning round on it.
I mean, I thought it was really interesting, and I and I was just caught off guard at how the media tried to portray it as Trump being Trump.
Goofy, whatever, colorful.
But I think, like, what I've realized even with the California fire thing, the guy has this prescient way of he may not say it in the way that it works for some people, but he's just really on top of this stuff. So I I just had Nick a thing. So I I started to learn a little bit more about why he wants to take over Greenland. And it really comes down to one very basic idea here because of climate change and other things. The Arctic ice shelf is melting.
And the more and more it melts, it opens up a shipping lane in the northern passage for a lot of critical goods. And so if you had some sort of strategic agreement with Canada and Greenland, you effectively have this monopoly control over something that could become as important as the Panama Canal. And so I think if you look across the world, the control of maritime shipping lanes becomes this really critical strategic military and economic asset. And so the reason why he's trying to find a way to initiate some sort of a discussion between Greenland and Canada is exactly this reason. And I think it's sort of like a bargaining gambit the way that he started, but it's really smart that he's trying to get this done for for the United States of America.
Because meanwhile, what you have is China militarizing very aggressively, Russia militarizing very aggressively, and what you don't wanna have happen is those 2 countries take control of that northern passage as the ice sheet melts. So I just thought that was important
to me.
Having a cable business executive thinking about the future of business and shipping and logistics, pretty pretty big win. And I just love the idea, Sian.
You know what's smart? I mean, let's give Trump credit. What's so smart is, like, somebody was doing this work Yes. Got it got it in front of him. Yeah.
And he was smart enough to say, hold on a second. This is really important.
Let me tweet it.
And then the way that he initiates it though gets even more attention because if he basically tweeted, hey, guys. I have this really interesting idea to gain more leverage in a northern maritime shipping lane. Nobody would have paid attention.
Absolutely not.
Nobody would have. And now we're all talking about it. And now there's an opportunity for millions of people to understand why and be supportive of it.
It's pretty smart. Sign any thoughts on expanding the United States to a couple more territories and states? I love it. I I would love to have 60 states in our lifetime. I mean, let's pick 1 in the Caribbean.
Let's pick 1 in Europe. I think we should have an open invitation.
But, Jason,
that's not
what he's doing. I think he's
he's I
know I'm big old bit facetious here. I understand this is very strategic, this one, but I'm just thinking the next domino. I would like to get Cuba, maybe Portugal. I don't know who 80% of people. Sayon, what do you think?
In the country wanna join? Join.
It's very strategic. If you look at the Panama Canal, I believe either end is operated and controlled by China. We are at war with China whether we like to admit it or not, in my opinion. And so this is very strategic. He has a very strange way of communicating as you pointed out, but I think it's brilliant.
And I actually think we should add to that. I've always thought that we should open up and add more states and extend that invitation, you know, to Taiwan. I would might be too controversial to even say India. But I do think that, that we there's a lot of countries out there and people who really, really resonate with what it means to be an American, and the freedoms that come with our subscription fees of this country. And so, I do think that it would be great for us to expand and, you know, I don't know what he's thinking or how he always got behind the scenes who motivated him to do it.
But I'm I really think it's a great idea.
Friberg, what do you think about opt in imperialism, and this incredible, concept of expanding our territories in the 21st century?
Again, I don't know how to read it. I have no inside information. There's clearly some posturing as we've heard many times when Trump makes a declaration, like, I'm gonna put on a 100% tariff on every car that's imported, or I'm gonna charge you $2,000 Mexico for every time you ship something here, or I wanna do x or y or z. It's not the literal statement that matters as much as kind of the the the vector and the magnitude of the vector. He's clearly trying to begin negotiating for some change.
I I I don't know what the ultimate kind of strategic endpoint is meant to be here, but, clearly, there's something I think Chamath might might have a good good read on this and seems seems to make a lot of sense.
Well, we have a military base there, and we also protect it, and we we occupy it already, which is interesting.
Right. We somewhat, yeah, we somewhat abandoned all that in Greenland, but there is a lot of that infrastructure still sitting around.
§07Conspiracy Corner: Who built the pyramids?
Can I
ask you guys a question? I I started I listened to Lex Friedman's interview. This is totally off topic, but I listened to Lex Friedman's interview with Graham Hancock. You guys ever heard of this guy?
Yes.
Have you read any of his stuff or watched any
of his shows? I have not.
No. Okay. So he's got this belief that there was this, like, ancient civilization on Earth. Not like sci fi futuristic, but, like, an advanced human civilization, and that's where the great pyramid of Giza was. Like, there was a smaller pyramid that was built there, and a lot of these other kind of, like, historical places were built, and then they were built on top of later.
But that a lot of these, like, this advanced civilization was wiped out during the last ice age. There was a a a very rapid kind of, freezing event that happened over a period of about 1200 years, and that's when this great kind of ice age era civilization was wiped out. But what I didn't realize and so I went down this really crazy rabbit hole in the last week on, like, how much of planet Earth how different planet Earth was just 12000 years ago during the ice age. Have you guys spent any time on this?
Like, you both similar rabbit hole with the Grand Canyon.
It's like, the first of all, like, how the planet Earth has changed in such a short period of time blows my mind. But, like, the sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today just 12000 years ago, and there were humans on Earth at the time. And so all of this this area that we look at as, like like, Malta, the island of Malta, was the southern tip of, like, a continental stretch that went into Italy. So it was all part of one great landmass. And there's all this area that was actually part of that landmass that now sits under that ocean there, and there's these, like like, ruts in the ground for moving stuff and buildings and all this other crazy stuff.
And we have no idea, like, what's actually under the ice in Greenland, what's under the ice in Antarctica. There's all these parts of Earth where humans very likely had some this is so off topic. We could cut this from the show.
No. I think it's incredible that Monct and I
It's so crazy that there's there's all these parts of Earth and and especially, like, in the oceans, as we start to kind of explore, there's actually, like, large humans, potentially advanced civilizations that lived in these areas. Not like Yeah. Flying around you. Yeah. You land the stuff, that it was actually like an advanced civilization.
And then humans lost a lot of this ability when the this, like, period of of freezing happened over 1200 years. And then a lot of it was preserved in legends and myths that showed up in later how Kind of archaeology and later museum of the
How do you explain the pyramids?
I think he has
a really interesting saying, I think, because we had Gavin explain it last time. Say, welcome to conspiracy quarter.
So somebody sent me an email. Oh. And he said what they did was they flooded the area.
And and
then they flooded the rocks into place.
Exploded the rocks up. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. Brilliant. I've heard this.
Yeah. But you know what Chamath and I were talking about this too, because when you remove all that crust, because we we actually were talking. We just didn't use a guy in Graham's name.
It's just like your anus.
When you when you break away all that crust, what did they find in your anus, Friberg?
My mine was better. Mine was better.
You got it. You landed the joke. It's great.
It's great.
I got it. Oh, we finally got there, folks. This has been another amazing episode of the All In podcast. It's different. Yeah.
I can't say anything other than, Cyan, you were great for a first time out. You got to the conspiracies. You rocked it. You gotta interject more because it's a it's a vibrant panel, but for a first time out, very solid. Before you go,
do you have an alternative explanation for the pyramids, Cyan?
Yeah. Sayan, what is your estimate of UFOs?
I've looked into I mean, UFOs is the only only one that I usually come back to because, you know, if you look at putting logs underneath and trying to roll them or you look at flooding an area, all of this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And so and then, you know, the fact that there are other civilizations that also have pyramids that are stunning and feats of engineering, as well. Things like Stonehenge, etc. I mean, there's just things that defy explanation. I don't know if you ever tried to make a catapult, but it's really hard.
It's really hard.
It's really hard. And so like, I we just did not have the technology, or at least we can't find any definitive way that it that it happened. And and so I do think there is a possibility that there was a more advanced civilization here or we were visited. And I I think about that a lot.
I think it's mutants. I'm going with the X Men theory. I think there were mutant human beings who had the ability with superpowers to build them.
It could
be that.
It could be that. It could be Why not? Why not? Matter and alchemy or something like that. Who knows?
This is this is what we've come to now. We get conspiracy corner at the end of every program. We try to figure out unsolved mysteries. Welcome to unsolved mysteries. And, oh, just a little housekeeping here as we wrap.
Our friends, our partners, dare I say, at, Poly Market have done us a solid, Friedberg. Check this out. We talked a little bit about our long, debates here on the program. So Chamath, we created a market here. The magnificent seven shrinks below 30% of S and P 500 in 2025, 44 percent 44 percent chance is what people in the real world are putting volume on that.
I see $11,000 already in volume. And then, Freeberg, you came up with 1, which was will I guess we did this one together, but I think it should be really under your name. Will US US national debt surpass 38,000,000,000,000 in 2025? And then 3rd, talking about immigration, we have a lot of passion around this topic. Trump's team, and Trump himself said they're gonna deport 15,000,000 American 15,000,000 immigrants rather from America.
I said, hey, let's, create a market for will Trump deport 750,000 or more people in 2025? 38% chance. For those of you who don't know, Obama, I think, did 2,000,000 people in 8 years. So this is not like a, partisan thing. This is just a practical thing.
So anyway, go to Poly Market. Look at the creators. You'll see, under that tab that all in has a bunch of markets. We're doing this in partnership with our partners who've partnered with us in a partnership at Poly Market.
FTC. Well done. Partnership.
Bye bye. Okay.
Love you guys. Thank you.
See you in the mountains.
Everyone. Have a super fun.
Rocking it, Zion.
Thank you.
We'll let your winners ride. Rain man David. And it said We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, bestie. Queen of quinoa.
Besties are gone.
That is my dog thinking. I wish you
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Wet your feet. Let your feet. Feet. What? We need to get merchies are back.
I'm
doing all this.