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Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom’s Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) The Besties welcome Mark Pincus!
(3:53) Mark’s background
(6:02) How Mark got red-pilled for Trump, maintaining friendships despite political differences
(23:21) LA Wildfires update: Newsom’s EOs, market impact of price controls
(51:32) Congestion pricing in NYC, fixing broken cities
(1:08:33) TikTok ban: origin and potential outcomes
(1:19:15) MBA hiring downturn
(1:34:37) Conspiracy Corner: Mark’s take on UFOs and UAPs!
Follow the Besties:
https://x.com/chamath
https://x.com/Jason
https://x.com/DavidSacks
https://x.com/friedberg
Follow Mark Pincus:
https://x.com/markpinc
Follow on X:
https://x.com/theallinpod
Follow on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod
Follow on TikTok:
@theallinpod
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod
Intro Music Credit:
https://rb.gy/tppkzl
https://x.com/yung_spielburg
Intro Video Credit:
https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://www.piratewires.com
https://x.com/micsolana
https://www.athena.com
https://nypost.com/2024/11/04/us-news/tech-billionaire-mark-pincus-reveals-hes-voting-for-trump
https://x.com/TheTechnXMedia/status/1878459564980392410
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EO-N-4-25-Rebuilding-Final-signed.pdf
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/EO-N-7-25-_-Land-Speculation-1.14.25-bl-_GGN-Signed_.pdf
https://x.com/MayorOfLA/status/1878630125786566664
https://congestionreliefzone.mta.info
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/nyregion/congestion-pricing-nyc.html
https://x.com/friedberg/status/1652334973586915328
https://x.com/markpinc/status/1878575249505333606
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-14/china-discusses-sale-of-tiktok-us-to-musk-as-one-possible-option
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Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom’s Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom’s Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the All In Podcast, the hosts delve into a variety of topics, primarily focusing on technology, business, and societal changes. A significant portion of the discussion revolves around the impact of AI and the evolving media landscape. The hosts highlight how long-form podcasts and direct communication channels, like those used by Elon Musk, allow individuals to control their narratives more effectively than traditional media.
David Freyberg, referred to as the “sultan of science,” is a notable guest who shares insights on living a 1950s aesthetic lifestyle. The conversation also touches on the changing dynamics of city living post-pandemic, with a particular focus on San Francisco. The speakers question the original value proposition of cities and whether it still holds true today, suggesting a need to revisit the reasons people choose urban living.
Another key topic is the role of social media and personal branding. One speaker recounts how the departure of his chief of staff led to more unfiltered social media engagement, which connected him with a new audience of techno-optimists. This highlights the importance of authenticity and direct communication in building a personal brand.
The episode also features a discussion on innovative technological developments, such as a paper titled “Monolith,” which presents a novel approach to real-time recommendations in social apps. This underscores the theme of continuous innovation and the potential for technology to reshape industries.
Overall, the episode emphasizes the importance of embracing change, whether in personal branding, city living, or technological advancements, and encourages listeners to consider how these shifts impact their lives and businesses.
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Red-pilled Billionaires, LA Fire Update, Newsom’s Price Caps, TikTok Ban, Jobless MBAs Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the All In Podcast, the number one ai technology, business, and MAGA podcast in the world. With us again today is the sultan of science, David Freyberg, living a modern 19 fifties aesthetic lifestyle there.
Speaker: 1
00:21
This is the, house of tomorrow house of the future.
Speaker: 0
00:25
World’s
Speaker: 1
00:25
fair. The original, 1955 Tomorrowland at Disneyland.
Speaker: 2
00:29
Wow. And you have a NASA hat on. This is amazing.
Speaker: 0
00:32
He’s in full geek out mode.
Speaker: 1
00:34
Yeah. I didn’t this I told you guys about this haircut last week.
Speaker: 0
00:37
Oh, because you couldn’t blow yourself That’s right. Properly.
Speaker: 2
00:42
I told you this would happen to you.
Speaker: 0
00:43
It’s exactly what Chamath said would happen. Look at the continuity. He told you you could never match the blow you got last week, and here we are.
Speaker: 1
00:52
I did my best.
Speaker: 0
00:53
I mean, it looks ridiculous, but stylish in a way. And with us again, your chairman dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya, he’s ready to go to the inauguration and take his victory lap and take an enormous amount of credit. Chamath, are you looking forward to your victory lap?
Speaker: 2
01:12
I was in Florida earlier this week. I came all the way back so that I could play poker with my friends and see my family and children.
Speaker: 0
01:19
Oh, how nice.
Speaker: 2
01:20
And I’ll be flying all the way back out tomorrow morning.
Speaker: 0
01:22
Were you at Mar a Lago?
Speaker: 2
01:24
No. I was with my friend in a undisclosed location.
Speaker: 0
01:29
With a friend in an undisclosed location. Okay. Sounds great. And joining us for the first time, one of my oldest friends, mister Mark Pincus or as we like to say, Marcus Pincus.
Speaker: 1
01:41
Why
Speaker: 2
01:41
do you always take credit for these guests being only your friends?
Speaker: 1
01:45
The rest of us are the ones that call them and are like, hey. Do you wanna come on the show? And then you’re like, is my old friend? Longer than you.
Speaker: 0
01:52
Ai don’t know about that.
Speaker: 3
01:52
Is that true? Back to, like, AOL?
Speaker: 2
01:55
Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:56
Okay. We met when you were doing Silicon Alley. Right?
Speaker: 0
02:00
Reporter. Yeah. In the nineties.
Speaker: 1
02:01
I’ve been collecting rent from Mark Pincus for the last year.
Speaker: 3
02:05
It’s true. My landlord.
Speaker: 2
02:06
You should whistle blow on Freeburg to Gavin’s gouging police and see if
Speaker: 0
02:10
you can get something. Ai get right to that in a minute. The price couch continues.
Speaker: 2
02:33
If our viewers had to vote on who is most likely to price gouge, it’s a 100% Friberg.
Speaker: 3
02:38
1000%. But let’s be clear. The real gouging is the Presidio Trust who’s charging an amazingly high rent, like, over a $100 a foot, and then Freeburg was actually giving me a pretty good deal.
Speaker: 1
02:50
He was getting a pretty good deal. I was paying, like, 1.30 a foot or something. 1 20, 1 30 a foot all in, for real estate in the Presidio, and we just weren’t using the space. But it is the most expensive real estate. It is nuts.
Speaker: 0
03:02
And that’s quite an office.
Speaker: 1
03:04
My lord. The Presidio Trust manages that federal land, and they get to keep all the money and reinvest it. It’s probably the only profitable operation in the federal government.
Speaker: 3
03:13
I used to be on the board, so I saw it close-up. And they they reinvest in things like, you know, restoring natural habitats, cutting down eucalyptus trees
Speaker: 2
03:23
Right.
Speaker: 3
03:23
You know, archaeological digs. Right.
Speaker: 0
03:27
Right. It was really interesting. I looked at one of those houses to rent when I was first moving up to San Francisco. And the only problem with those houses, they had these gorgeous houses that were ai the general’s houses, like 3, 4, 5 bedrooms, but they would have one bathroom ai 4 rooms.
Speaker: 0
03:46
Can you put another bathroom? Meh cannot change anything. These are historic privileges. So, you know, historic landmarks. Mark did freeloader, ai, social network back in the day, support.com, and if you wasted some portion of your youth playing Farmville, he was one of the original app creators, or Zynga Poker, which famously he said, hey.
Speaker: 0
04:10
Would you like to be an investor in Zynga Poker? And I said, how does it work? He said, oh, well, you play for virtual coins. And I said, Mark, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve taken all of the money out of the the the game. It’s never gonna work.
Speaker: 0
04:24
And, of course, you turned it into a multibillion dollar company, and that was another $25,000,000 angel investment miss on my part.
Speaker: 1
04:30
But, Mark, you you were also, like, early general social networking. You were involved in Facebook as an investor, LinkedIn, weren’t you, like
Speaker: 0
04:38
Yeah. Early on? Yeah.
Speaker: 3
04:40
I I think the first social media investment I made was Napster. I sent the first check. Wow. First $100,000. Which I think of that as the beginning of all this. But then, yeah, Reid and I put up the first money for Friendster, and then we were lucky enough to invest along with Peter in the first round of Facebook.
Speaker: 3
05:00
Wow. The first round of Twitter. So Yeah.
Speaker: 0
05:04
It’s
Speaker: 3
05:04
ai speak the right body of water even if your boat doesn’t. Tribe didn’t work. But
Speaker: 0
05:10
But you placed 5 other bats, so you you hit a couple of them. It works out just fine. You also own retro. You, Ai believe you own the 6 Degrees patents. The original social network in the nineties in meh one point o was a company called 6 Degrees. And, they had a bunch of patents, and I believe you bought them and then sold them to Facebook. Yeah?
Speaker: 3
05:33
No. We didn’t sell them. Reid and I bought them because we were worried that if Yahoo at the time had gotten them or you and Friendster, that they would have blocked the whole industry. So we bought them. We we paid 750 k, which was a lot then. And we arya accused of being patent trolls, and we never got that opportunity.
Speaker: 3
05:55
We just sat on them to this day. Actually, I own half ai Microsoft owns other half.
Speaker: 1
06:02
Are you still close with with Reid,
Speaker: 3
06:03
Mark? Yeah. Very close.
Speaker: 1
06:06
How did you guys reconcile your differences in political views in this last election? Because he was very vatsal. Kamala, you obviously became vocal Trump and very kind of kind of diametrically different views on the future.
Speaker: 3
06:22
Well, it’s interesting because Reid and I really started the whole kind of journey into bigger national politics together. We both sat down and had lunch with Biden and made wrote big checks a little over a year ago, December of 23. And and then, you know, won’t bother you, but I Ai had my red pill moment, and I went very different direction, which started off just questioning the democrats.
Speaker: 2
06:50
Hold on. Hold on. Can you actually just double click into that? What was your red pill moment? Was there one specific thing, or was it more of a trickle of things?
Speaker: 3
06:58
It was both. Right? It’s like it starts the wall starts crumbling, and then it comes down all at once. So for me, it really started early in 23. I started reading Pirate Wires and Mike Solana, and I thought he was a little crazy at first because he would write these articles.
Speaker: 3
07:16
One he wrote was about how the Ukrainian soldiers had swastikas on their helmets, and the New York Times photographers would ask them to take the swastikas off for photos. And I sai, that can’t be right. That can’t be true. And then 4 months later, it was in the New York Times buried in the middle of the paper, and I kept seeing stories like that that that he would be early on.
Speaker: 3
07:39
And so I just start feeling uncomfortable and queasy about what was going on with mainstream media. And then in May of last year of 24, I read some article that talked about Trump’s speech in Charlottesville, and this has been well covered. But but where he said there was good people on both sides, and the article said it was completely, you know, propaganda and not what he actually not accurately reflecting what he said that, that he denounced the Nazis a bunch of times in his speech.
Speaker: 3
08:14
And so then I went and watched that video,
Speaker: 2
08:17
and
Speaker: 3
08:17
that was my red pill moment. I think it was for a lot of people because it wasn’t just the media spinning it or politicians spinning it. That was, like, one of the pillars of why you were supposed to hate Trump was Mhmm. That speech. And and then you see Biden say that’s why he had to run a second time, and you see Obama go to you even see Biden bring it up again in the beginning of the DNC.
Speaker: 3
08:43
And it’s one of their pillars, and they clearly know that they’re misrepresenting things. So for me, that was just that was beyond uncomfortable. I was just like, okay. Now I gotta go back to first principles and look at the primary data and listen only to original speeches by people.
Speaker: 3
09:00
And I just realized I couldn’t trust mainstream media. So I was I became I started questioning the Democrats. As soon as I started questioning the Democrats, I started getting a lot of shame and anger and hatred. Oh, the other thing that happened that was part of this journey is that my chief of staff parted ways with me after 9 years in April of last year, and he was the main person protecting me from myself on Twitter.
Speaker: 3
09:26
And he was the one who would say, stay in your lane. Nobody wants to hear what you think about politics or San Francisco or anything other than, you know, your area of products and investing. And with him gone, I just started tweeting whatever I felt and thought. And sometimes Sai got it wrong or it was a little too emotional.
Speaker: 3
09:45
But first of all, it was really fun. And then second of all, I found I got connected to this whole new audience of people who are these kind of techno optimists. I think you guys probably talked about it. And that just brought me down this path that eventually, I came out 2 days before the election publicly for Trump.
Speaker: 3
10:09
And it was only because that’s when I completely got there. And I was trying to just be completely honest and authentic with myself and on Twitter at the same time. And my daughters turned to me that Sunday, and they said, you’re you’re gonna vote for Trump. We know it. And I said, yeah. You’re probably right.
Speaker: 3
10:29
And they said, well, then you have to go say it on Twitter. And my daughter’s, like, really in this with me. Yeah. Sai, anyway and then it was on the front page of the New York Post on the day of the election that I was, this not that I’m such news, but maybe it just was their news peg, that I was coming out for Trump.
Speaker: 3
10:49
And but and I’ll get back to your Reid question. But what I love about my New York Ai about my New York friends is that they did not give a They were all pro Kamala, and they texted meh. And they’re just like, oh, that’s ai funny. But it’s one thing I kinda love about New York. They didn’t care.
Speaker: 3
11:08
Back to your question on Reid, what I love about Reid was he was already getting pings from people saying, what’s going on with Pincus? He’s going off the rails. He’s becoming a Trumper. You know? It’s it’s you guys, I’m sure, have gone down the street.
Speaker: 0
11:24
Of that too about Shammas in Greenberg.
Speaker: 2
11:28
Yeah. Me. So you’re
Speaker: 0
11:29
like, what’s wrong with him?
Speaker: 3
11:30
We we gotta bring him back into the fold. You know? He’s he’s should we lock him up? Is he crazy? And so Reid was already getting these. I had a lot of anxiety about talking to Reid about it. And, finally, Reid and I got on FaceTime, and he just said, I just wanna start by saying Ai team Mark. And I said, I’m team Reid.
Speaker: 3
11:53
And it gets out a little, you know Aw.
Speaker: 0
11:55
Aw. But Ai, no. Americans can get along even if they disagree politically about a candidate. It’s probably where we need to get to, especially, you know, now that Trump’s gonna be in office in a couple of days. What was it like when Well, just say with Ai? Yeah.
Speaker: 3
12:09
Okay. Well, just a minute. Sorry.
Speaker: 0
12:11
But no problem.
Speaker: 3
12:13
What what I love about Reid is that we followed that with a 4 hour dinner, and he said, I never questioned your principles. He said, I know you’re a highly principled person, and I just wanna understand which principles it is, and I’d like to convince you to change your mind.
Speaker: 3
12:30
But, anyway, so when Ai was Hold
Speaker: 2
12:32
on one second. So I you said something almost in passing, but I just wanna double click. I think part of what Silicon Valley actually gets wrong is that we don’t embrace the tism. And what I mean by that is everybody, we’re all a little socially uncomfortable, we’re awkward. I wouldn’t say that we were the coolest people growing up.
Speaker: 2
12:58
And there’s this virulent form of blockers. You called it chief of staff. I think that these folks can be very detrimental, which almost represent this filter between your true self and everybody else. And there is this game that’s played about being a gatekeeper. I do think that executive assistants are valuable. Administrative assistants are valuable.
Speaker: 2
13:25
The reason I can say this is that my EA went on maternity leave. I had and I experimented with the chief of staff, etcetera. And now I use Jason’s service called Athena. And I have a guy that works with me in the Philippines, and it’s about 3,000 a month. And I can honestly tell you this guy is the single most effective administrative support I’ve ever had.
Speaker: 2
13:50
And what there isn’t is all these opinions on what I can say or do. And I think that when you look at a lot of these big companies, if you look at Zuck’s current transformation or what you just spoke about, there are all these interlopers that seem to get in the middle of you and people’s perception of you.
Speaker: 2
14:09
I don’t know if you have any comments or reactions to that idea.
Speaker: 3
14:12
Yeah. It’s part of where I know you guys have talked about Zuck coming out as Lisa’s based or his seemingly more authentic self or sharing more about himself. And I can relate to it because I think we all go through this this struggle as you start to be more of a known person inside your company, outside your company, and you have people around you taking the edges off.
Speaker: 3
14:41
And I think that we’re now in this time that Sai think we’re having authenticity is having a moment now, which is great for me because Reid said to meh, I I’ve if you Google me, you’ll see that there’s lots and lots of bad things written about meh. And a lot of it is my high school quote was some people have tact and others tell the truth.
Speaker: 3
15:04
And I’ve always been kind of just committed to being sana, even if it’s nuanced and it’s not an easy sound ai. And Reid said to me early on, you need to pick what the easy narrative is, or the press is going to make it up for you. And he was ai, and they did, or my competitors did.
Speaker: 3
15:23
So I think that now with long form podcasts and there’s just more and the fact that we can kind of directly in a lot of ways, Elon was the first one to directly defend himself. You remember when
Speaker: 2
15:37
Well, he fired his soul do you remember when he fired his whole PR team? He fired all those people. There’s just like there’s none of that infrastructure between him and and everybody else.
Speaker: 3
15:46
But do you remember when he would be on Twitter all the time post PayPal ai to correct the story and just write long, long diatribes. And then and then when a New York Times reporter said something negative about a Tesla, he just went off for weeks about them. And and it seemed a little crazy and deranged, and then you arya to see that it worked. Like, he actually and we were told, don’t defend yourself.
Speaker: 3
16:11
If something bad is written about you, you’re gonna prolong the press cycle. You’re going to make the journalists angry. And so we’ve we’re now unshackled. I I teach this class at Stanford, and I taught 2 back to back on Monday. And I looked around, and I saw half the placards said, you know, she, her, you know, he, him, his.
Speaker: 3
16:34
And I got a little pang of ai, oh, do I have to watch what I’m saying? Like, no. I don’t. I’m unshackled. I’m just gonna this is just me, and I’m gonna be marked unfiltered, and it’s the better version of ourselves.
Speaker: 3
16:46
So, anyway, I I’m glad that Zuck feels like he can be he can present more of his complete self out there now. And I think we can get into it later, but I I have a lot of thoughts on how the culture is gonna kinda move more towards base.
Speaker: 0
17:02
Back to the other question with Biden, that lunch you had, did he seem like he was all there? Come on.
Speaker: 2
17:10
Yeah. Come on, Mark.
Speaker: 0
17:11
Was it in the afternoon? I mean, did you have Yeah. And he’s just Is that what he
Speaker: 3
17:14
was is that a
Speaker: 2
17:14
shark as a shark?
Speaker: 0
17:15
Was that really a shark
Speaker: 2
17:16
as a shark as a shark?
Speaker: 0
17:17
Meh. I mean, I’m not saying I’m, like, full
Speaker: 3
17:19
of anger
Speaker: 0
17:19
over here.
Speaker: 1
17:19
Here’s my ai.
Speaker: 0
17:20
Like, wait a second. Are you guys lying about this? Like, how long is this? And how deep is this cover up?
Speaker: 3
17:26
I have no horse in this race. I didn’t have a horse in the race, so I had nothing to lie about. I for sure don’t now. I’m really not a Biden fan or protector. I’ll tell you, like, the exact my exact observation. We we had this lunch. There was, like, maybe 5 of us with Biden and a few of his finance people.
Speaker: 3
17:50
And they had it in the tennis house, which is the way they found that they can have a fundraising lunch on the property of the White House. They found some way. We’ll see if if Trump does
Speaker: 2
18:01
their loophole.
Speaker: 3
18:01
Right. Yeah. The loophole. And and it was I was impressed. It was a long lunch. It must have been hour and a half, 30 minutes. And I’ll tell you the good and the bad. The good, the part I was impressed was he kept the conversation thread. He was engaged and kept the thread the whole time.
Speaker: 3
18:19
When people when you say shah as a tack or kept the thread, That’s how we talk about, like, our 90 year old grandparent or something. So I’m just saying the reality to me, he he was not he did not seem mentally debilitated in the sense of meh, but we were impressed
Speaker: 2
18:42
that
Speaker: 3
18:42
he was able to follow the conversation thread and then say, you know But
Speaker: 2
18:47
okay. Let me say it differently. Would you have had the same bar if it was Jamie Dimon sitting across from you for a 2 hour lunch?
Speaker: 3
18:57
No. No. So so so yes. It was it was wow. Your grandfather is holding up really well. Like, your grandfather was able to have a whole lunch and hold the conversation. But it it wasn’t I didn’t walk away saying
Speaker: 0
19:12
I I
Speaker: 3
19:13
have to admit, I did not walk away saying Ai think he’s mentally unfit. But I did. But and I wasn’t shah. But I was like, okay. This is someone who’s being really handled and managed by the people around him. And he’s being told to show up here, say this. But I will say he was he was not on an obvious script, which I know I think famously, he did some fundraiser at Vinod’s house where he was reading a prompter the whole time.
Speaker: 3
19:40
So wasn’t reading a prompter. Yeah. That was it. At
Speaker: 0
19:44
a at a person’s home, they brought a teleprompter for him to speak. Wow. That’s weird.
Speaker: 1
19:50
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
19:50
I didn’t, actually. That’s no information. That’s, yeah, crazy. But Ai mean, in fairness, like, the there’s this issue called sundowning. People who are in that age group, they’re good in the day, and then the sun goes down and, you know, their brains are exhausted. And and that’s when you would see it. And that’s what they said about the debate.
Speaker: 0
20:11
But for me, that was the the coronation of Kamala and, like, not actually having a speed run primary. That to me was just anti democratic, anti Meh, and, like, just what happened to Merritt and, like, having a process here. Right?
Speaker: 2
20:25
Like, that
Speaker: 0
20:26
that’s when I felt ai the party just collapsed on itself.
Speaker: 2
20:29
Ai glad you’re here. Let’s jump in.
Speaker: 3
20:31
Okay. But let me ask
Speaker: 0
20:31
you a question before we get into the docket. We got a lot to talk about obviously but what do you think the democratic party does from here? Like is it everybody’s like this they’re lost and adrift. We’re not even hearing from them. Maybe a little bit of, pushback, I guess, at these senate hearings right now for confirmations. But what do you think happens? Is there any hope for this?
Speaker: 0
20:54
And and who would lead them out of this? Shapiro, somebody? AOC?
Speaker: 3
21:00
I think that what my bryden, ai kind of intelligent front of brain would tell me, the logical thing, which I think I wanna say is one lens that I think we have to be careful not to just apply logic here because it’s parties and and the Democrats. But the logic would say, oh, they’re gonna find based authentic people to put up against these other ones, ai, the kind of Fetterman ai, that they’re gonna put those people forth who are more centrist and also are more trustworthy that they’re actually authentic in their flaws.
Speaker: 3
21:37
That’s what my brain would tell me. I think there’ll be a little of that that the party, I believe, is will move more that way. I think that the corporate candidates aren’t gonna fly anymore with the electorate. I think that the managed corporate through sound ai can’t do a long form, things like this.
Speaker: 3
21:58
I think that’s over, and we can get into that later if we want. But I think they won’t go as far as they should. So so they they won’t go as far as, like, what I think we would intelligently advise them to do. So I so that’s as much as I can figure out, that they should do that, but they won’t.
Speaker: 0
22:19
Interesting. Well, we’re certainly gonna find out in the next year or 2 what their direction is when they get to the midterms, I suppose.
Speaker: 3
22:27
Oh, one more thing, though, on it is Yeah. And a lot of it depends on really what we see. And if if Doge starts to really get popular support, this whole Ai think you guys talked about this last week that the more that FDR style Ram and people get popular support, it’s going to become a more and more isolating, lonely place in 2 years to still be, like, you know, California, Gavin, everyone saying, don’t worry.
Speaker: 3
22:56
We’re gonna protect you against these people. If if they’re doing things that are popular to still saying you’re protecting against them, I think, will won’t fly.
Speaker: 0
23:05
Well, that’s a a great jump off point because Gavin does seem and Karen Bass seem like their careers are ending, and they’re in the last stages of trying to maybe get a little bit more pragmatic based is the word people might use for that. Just being super candid. But let’s get let’s get into a little bit of an update here about the absolute tragedy occurring in Los Angeles.
Speaker: 0
23:25
The death toll is now at 25. 12,000 structures have been destroyed. It’s mostly people’s homes. It’s 40,000 acres. That’s 60 square miles.
Speaker: 0
23:34
I think San Francisco is 7 by 7 miles. Right? So this is a lot of, space. It’s bigger than all of San Francisco. The Palisades and Eaton ai are still burning. And as of Wednesday, 80,000 people were under evacuation orders. A couple of our friends lost their homes and, but they survived.
Speaker: 0
23:57
But the stories of losing everything are just tragic. Every memory, all your personal documents, photos, art, whatever that you’ve collected over a lifetime. I just had two conversations with people, and they were just in shock. The estimates right now of damage are between a 135,000,000,000 ai a $150,000,000,000.
Speaker: 0
24:19
This is some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. It’s 10 times more costly than any other ai in history according to reports. You might remember the Camp Fire near Paradise, California. That’s about, what, 3 hours north of San Francisco? Northeast? That one was 12,500,000,000, just to level set it.
Speaker: 0
24:41
And now people are talking about, and we’ll talk about here today, what the recovery and rebuild effort might look like. California leadership, DeSgrasiad, across the board. Gavin Newsom. I just DeSgrasiad. Gavin Newsom.
Speaker: 2
25:00
Have you had traffic
Speaker: 3
25:01
to deSgrasiad.com with all of this?
Speaker: 0
25:03
Yeah. Right now, discratiad.com is gonna be redirected to Gavin or Karen Bass. I don’t know which one is more disgraceful.
Speaker: 2
25:10
I mean, it’s it’s an incredible troll that you just redirected every week to whoever you’re ram
Speaker: 0
25:15
at stuff. Yeah. Who would be more disgraceful in this situation? Gavin or Karen Bass? I think it’s gotta be Karen Bass for just being out of the country.
Speaker: 2
25:24
I think I think it would be quite funny if every week you actually gave an award and redirected the website to the
Speaker: 3
25:29
person that
Speaker: 0
25:30
you’re in the community. This week. And before that, it was Jake Paul for the Tyson fight at the discracciad.com, but it’s the the stakes have gone up. Gavin is now doing executive orders. One of them is to make it illegal to global offers to impacted homeowners for the next 3 months.
Speaker: 0
25:50
I don’t know what the point of that is. And the other one is to eliminate the Coastal Act’s review of permits for the the houses that are saloni PCH, I suppose. And he wants to extend key price gouging protections, quote, to help make rebuilding more affordable. Gouging is defined as raising the rent or price of other goods and services more than 10% from the last marketed ai, but it could be as little as 5%.
Speaker: 0
26:25
It’s just not clear. And then LA mayor, Karen Bass, created a snitch hotline to report on any kind of price gouging and rents, which we’ve started to see. People are now naming and shaming Zillow and Redfin listings where they you can see the previous history of what they were asking for for a home or for rent.
Speaker: 0
26:46
And obviously, the free market is making rental homes double in price. Freeberg, we talked a bunch about this and I know Pincus you’ve got. We had a I don’t know if you’re comfortable talking about it, but we had a whole conversation about your getting dragged by the Coastal Commission in Northern California.
Speaker: 0
27:04
Freeberg, maybe kick us off here on what your thoughts are on rebuilding this area, how this will happen, especially with what we brought up last week ai I think went a bit viral is your sort of talk about putting your thumb on the scale with insurance. I mean, this is, I think, one of the concerning things here is the free market not being allowed to progress previously with insurance, and then now with the rebuild.
Speaker: 1
27:35
Well, California shah got, at this point, price controls or a mechanism for controlling the change in price on insurance, on housing services, and now they’ve got this non solicitation rule. All ai, I think, are very challenging to, I think, an appropriate market recovery. Look. The insurance issue is a longer one.
Speaker: 1
28:01
If you guys want, we could talk about that. I’ve got a couple notes I can bring up on the history of how we got to this point. But I think it’s gonna be the one of the biggest burdens going forward, and it could actually lead to a pretty significant effect in long term housing prices in California because of the way that the insurance market is structured and regulated in California.
Speaker: 1
28:20
But if you want, we we can talk about that.
Speaker: 0
28:24
Or up or down? What do you think ultimately, you know, Tyler? Like, do you think prices are gonna go way up here? Do you think this is gonna take 5 or 10 years to rebuild these homes? I mean, we’ve never seen this many structures go down at this price point in a constrained area where just construction is so expensive and hard.
Speaker: 1
28:44
So I think the the governor did a good job suspending the permitting requirements for the Coastal Act for, affected homes and the CEQA review. Those are very important, I think, suspensions. But he also put in place this executive order for price gouging. And if you pull up the note, Nick, so he basically said California penal code section 396, which prohibits price gouging during a declared state of emergency, will now extend indefinitely in this region.
Speaker: 1
29:11
And in the language in that penal code, it says that businesses cannot raise the price of essential goods and services by more than 10% above their preemergency price for a specified period. And in this case, his executive order is indefinitely. So in on an indefinite basis, you cannot raise the price of goods and services, which generally applies to consumer goods ai food and emergency supplies, but it also applies to building materials and services related to housing work.
Speaker: 1
29:42
So if you sana to attract builders, if you sana to attract contractors, if you sana to attract electricians and plumbers to go to the LA area, you have to allow the market to do its job. If I’m a plumber operating in Sacramento or in Phoenix, and I’m like, man, I could make some money if I go to LA, you will see an influx of service providers and an influx of goods to support the rebuilding effort in Southern California.
Speaker: 1
30:09
That’s the way the free market should work. Is there’s an opportunity in the market. Folks show up. They say, great. I can make money.
Speaker: 1
30:16
I’m gonna come here and do this work. And as more folks show up, they begin to compete on ai. And, eventually, the cost kind of normalizes and you end up finding what is now the new fair market value between the bid and the ask. The people that are saying, hey. I’ll do the work. They’re the ask. And, hey. I need people to do work. That’s the bid. And you find a price.
Speaker: 1
30:36
But the benefit of that is you increase the supply. You increase the supply of goods. You increase the supply of service providers, of contractors. There is a home building dearth right now in the United States. So this is an amazing opportunity because they can now move to LA, build homes.
Speaker: 1
30:50
We can get a rapid reconstruction effort underway. Except, the governor just said we can’t pay people 10% higher than what they were getting paid right before this happened on an indefinite basis. And then Karen Bass created a hotline. You can go to LA 311 and report people if they’re trying to charge too much.
Speaker: 1
31:07
And then the, you know, the Sai will come and investigate you and determine that you’re charging too much. I understand that there’s a strong moral imperative and incentive to say we gotta stop price gouging. We don’t want people to get hurt. But the second order effect is you’re actually hurting the arya, and you’re hurting the rebuild effort because you’re reducing the incentive for folks to come in and fill the void in the market that is necessary for us to accelerate the development of 15,000 homes in a very short period of time.
Speaker: 1
31:33
The alternative now is people are gonna be sitting around. And I already spoke to a couple friends. I’m sure you guys have that are ai, I tried calling architects. I tried calling contractors, people that live in this area that have been affected. I cannot get anyone to return my call. There is not enough service providers down there.
Speaker: 1
31:47
You’re gonna end up waiting 6, 7 years to get your home rebuilt. Now what do you do? You own a a lot. You don’t have a home to live in. And then there’s this other thing where we can’t take unsolicited offers on the home. That was the other executive order.
Speaker: 1
31:59
So if you wanna pull that one up, the governor said it is illegal to make an unsolicited offer on a piece of real estate in one of these affected ZIP codes. I don’t know what that happened in Hawaii that makes the governor keep referencing the Hawaii story as if, you know, that there were people that were taken advantage of and we need to protect the citizens of LA.
Speaker: 1
32:21
But I’m pretty sure that having an increase in the number of offers coming in for real estate in one of these affected areas increases liquidity in the market. It increases the buying behavior, and that will ultimately drive prices up. And that will ultimately make it easier by having more liquidity for some of these folks who owned burned down lots to be able to sell their lot, take their insurance check, move to another neighborhood, and go somewhere else because they’re gonna have to otherwise wait 6 or 7 years to build a home.
Speaker: 2
32:49
Oh, that’s a lot of mileage.
Speaker: 1
32:51
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
32:51
I think you’re a little bit off the deep end with some of this stuff because I think you’re not being totally fair in representing what this EO says. And that’s coming from me. I mean, I am not a Newsom fan. Okay? And I think he is completely and totally incompetent. But I’ll just take the other side of this, which is that I read the EO and I actually think it’s somewhat reasonable.
Speaker: 2
33:18
And I didn’t connect the dots with the EO and the real estate market. And the reason is that if you read all of what he said, the EO is ai specific to unsolicited offers Yeah. To a very specific handful of ZIP codes, and it was time boxed for 3 months. So he said, making any unsolicited offer to an owner of real estate property located in the areas encompassed by and he names a bunch of ZIP codes.
Speaker: 2
33:47
I think there was, like, 1, 2 Yep. There’s, like, 12 or 13 of them. Okay. So unsolicited. Okay. Yep.
Speaker: 2
33:53
To to apply any interest in real property for an amount less than the fair market value of the property on January 6th. So before the fire arya.
Speaker: 1
34:07
Before the loans start down.
Speaker: 2
34:09
And he said, that’s prohibited for 3 months. That’s it for 3 months. And the reason I think he said that is that if you just scope out a little bit, just from this moment in Los Angeles, the problem is that after natural disasters, there is a spike in fraudulent activities.
Speaker: 2
34:26
And there are people that try to take advantage of that situation to make money. So for example, after hurricanes, we saw this in Florida, people pose as contractors. They come in and they offer inflated prices. They offer poor quality of work. And especially when you sort of deregulate for that moment where there’s less checks, there’s less folks involved because you’re trying to speed up the process, you can have a bunch of pressure tactics that work against the best interest of the person trying to rebuild.
Speaker: 2
34:58
On the wildfire side, there was this crazy thing, Nick, I’ll send you the link from KTLA that talked about these folks called fire chasers, which are essentially like, you know, wildfire scammers or ambulance chasers, but during ai Okay.
Speaker: 0
35:12
So
Speaker: 2
35:12
So so my point is Yeah. I don’t disagree with his incompetence. Okay? And I think he is totally out of touch. I think there’s a broken cartel that runs this state that’s gonna drive this state into just complete disrepair. He was grossly negligent.
Speaker: 0
35:28
Well No. They’re already. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
35:30
You can’t say a a state that has $322,000,000,000 budget is already bankrupt. It’s teetering on a path where we won’t be able to return and we can debate that. But my point is, I just think despite all of this, he’s grossly negligent. Karen Bass is grossly negligent. The California cartel is breaking this state, but on this specific narrow thing, I kind of will give him his flowers.
Speaker: 2
35:55
I think it was like a decent, smart, good thing. It’s narrowly focused. There’s a specific window here that’s time box sai that the worst behaviors of other people are roughly managed and mitigated until we can figure out a better answer.
Speaker: 1
36:11
You’re saying that unsolicited offers on real estate can drive fraud?
Speaker: 2
36:17
What you talked about, if there is a person that is this does not prevent somebody who’s sell
Speaker: 1
36:22
Let’s talk about services separately because he has a separate EO on services.
Speaker: 2
36:26
This does not prevent anybody whose house burnt down from listing his wallet. You could sell it for a dollar.
Speaker: 1
36:31
That’s right.
Speaker: 2
36:32
So it’s not it’s, I think it’s, it’s not right. And it’s inaccurate to say that this is perturbing and distorting the free market. The idea that you cannot sell isn’t what is in the CEO. The idea is some person shows up out of the blue and applies a pressure tactic to you when you’re in a very stressful situation, trying to deal with your insurance brokers, trying to figure out where your kids are going to go to school.
Speaker: 2
36:56
But they’re
Speaker: 1
36:56
just making an offer. What’s the pressure tactic? Makes it’s why can’t someone make an offer on your home? You want people to pick it up home.
Speaker: 2
37:02
David, here’s what’s gonna happen. There are people that in the middle of all of this stress arya trying to figure out how much money they can get. Somebody shows up and underbids what the true price discovery could be in a few months from now. You don’t know whether you have to still pay back your mortgage.
Speaker: 2
37:19
There will be people, it’ll be non zero that will make a mistake. And I think that it’s good to try to stop that. It doesn’t absolve him from his incompetence, But this, I think, was reasonably good.
Speaker: 1
37:31
What about the services piece, Chamath? The fact that you can’t increase pricing on goods and services by more than 10% for an indefinite period. Don’t you think that that creates a disincentive for service providers to come into the state to come and address the
Speaker: 0
37:43
Well, obviously, it does. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
37:45
This grand ideal of the free market will solve everything isn’t necessarily always true. It’s great in theory. It reads well in a textbook, but real life is messy. Right now, we are in the messy part and we are in the most critical part where the abuses will be the highest.
Speaker: 2
38:02
I suspect that in 6 months ai months 12 months, the free market will sort all of these things out. So if there’s a governor who can implement some checks and balances to protect these folks who are probably totally dazed, like for example, we know some of our friends, I’ve spoken to them over the last few days.
Speaker: 2
38:22
I’ve spoken to their wives. Honestly shah. Well, I’ll sai, I’ll say it in a, in a horrible way. 1 person said this to me, and I’ll just, I’ll just quote him. The amount of people that have reached out to meh, if you had asked me 2 weeks ago, why would so many people reach out with condolences?
Speaker: 2
38:41
I would have thought that one of my children had died. That’s what he said to me. And it completely struck me with, it’s not on that same level, but the amount of emotional turmoil that these families are going through probably approaches that. I don’t think many of those people are in a condition to make good decisions right now. So I almost think a cooling off period actually benefits everybody.
Speaker: 2
39:02
It can allow the free market to work in a few months from now. We’re only talking 90 days.
Speaker: 1
39:07
No, no. The services thing is indefinite. That’s what I think is a little bit frustrating.
Speaker: 0
39:11
Let me bring Mark in here. Mark, you heard both sides of this debate. If you had a lot in the Pacific Palisades that burned down and people started making unsolicited offer. Listen, you’re sophisticated. I’ve known you for 20 plus years. You’re very sophisticated, obviously.
Speaker: 0
39:27
But do you think that’s a reasonable thing to do to put a moratorium on people making these low bid offers, and then we’ll get to the construction piece saloni. But, you know, what do you think
Speaker: 2
39:39
of the existing unsolicited offers.
Speaker: 0
39:41
Yes. Unsolicited offers. Yeah. What do you what do you think of that?
Speaker: 3
39:44
I think what what bothers me about it, there’s a presumption and and maybe Chamath’s right in it. You’re getting me to think about it a little more than I was. But but I’m pretty much where Freeburg is that we’re we’re kind of treating these people like children because we’re what we’re saying is that they’re not capable of making good decisions, so we need to protect them from themselves.
Speaker: 3
40:09
And we’re saying so we don’t want you to know that somebody is willing to pay x dollars for your property because you might take it, and you might regret later that you took that is ai what Chamath is saying.
Speaker: 2
40:24
No. In a in a very narrow window where you may not have the best and clearest ability to make the best decision for you because you’re dealing with so many other crazy issues
Speaker: 3
40:35
in your life. And that’s
Speaker: 1
40:36
could still say no.
Speaker: 3
40:38
You could say no, but you’re presuming there’s there’s one side that bothers me that feels like what we’ve had from the Democratic party forever, which is that this this big, wise overlord that’s going to protect us from ourselves, from our worst natures. And then on the other hand, you’re bringing up something, Chabot, that I I hadn’t thought about that I’m just thinking more about now, which is, well, maybe people could be taken advantage of at the margin because they’re in they feel like they’re in a dire position.
Speaker: 3
41:12
But but if they think they’re in a dire position, they might really be in a dire position. So they might really
Speaker: 2
41:18
Well, for example, let’s just say that you haven’t heard back from the banks that own your mortgage about whether there’s going to be a moratorium on mortgage payments. And so now you’re trying to juggle paying for an extra rental and this house while you’re trying to figure out where to put your kids and somebody shows up and says, hey, I will buy this from you.
Speaker: 2
41:37
I think that there are a lot of people who would otherwise be able to make a much more rational decision who may make a panic decision in that moment. And I think that if you give people a 90 day cooling off period, I think it at least shines a light on whether all of this governmental and other infrastructure can actually do something for these people.
Speaker: 2
41:58
I do think that there is a moment at which you can’t govern these things. And all I’m suggesting is a very narrow window of time where people’s feelings of just ai desperation are at their highest. I think that this is a decent thing to do.
Speaker: 0
42:12
Ai know, there is some precedent for the state doing stuff like this. You know, in most states, there is a cooling off period with marriages and divorces. You you have to wait 3 days to to file either way, to get married or to get divorced. Let’s talk about the construction process here, Freebroker.
Speaker: 0
42:29
Because I think that’s the most important one because we’re gonna rebuild. If you don’t pay a premium to get somebody to leave another market to come to this one, which is what’s gonna be ai, there are simply not enough construction people in any state.
Speaker: 1
42:44
That’s right.
Speaker: 0
42:44
So now you’re competing with another state.
Speaker: 2
42:46
That’s
Speaker: 0
42:46
right. This immediately triggered, the debate and, dare I say, courage that Travis had around this issue with surge pricing for Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar and a bunch of other folks who were ai of virtue signaling were like, we don’t ever wanna do surge pricing. Therefore, there were never cars on the road on Friday Saturday nights when people needed them or during, you know, inclement weather or snowstorms or on New Year’s Eve.
Speaker: 0
43:16
And he said, if you want to increase supply, we believe Uber should have availability. Lyft took a different decision. We’re gonna have no search ai, and they just simply weren’t available. So maybe what do you think about that piece, Pincus? You think that the free market and people should be able to say, you know what? I’ll pay you time and a half to come here.
Speaker: 0
43:37
I’ll pay you double time to work Saturday Sundays. I’ll get a couple of RVs, put them in the back if you sana have some folks live on the construction site. And if you hit these dates, I’ll pay you a bonus for hitting it. Doesn’t seem like any of that would be wrong to me for somebody who had the ability to pay an incentive for somebody to move from another state would be out of line here.
Speaker: 0
44:00
What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker: 3
44:02
I agree. I mean, I’m I’m pretty much just a free market believer, and so I think other than guardrails, like Chamath’s saying, and maybe I like the idea of cooling off periods, it kinda makes sense. But outside of that, when it comes to service providers, yeah, you have the opposite problem right now, which is, like you’re saying, you need to incentivize a huge construction force to come to LA.
Speaker: 3
44:29
And the cost for them to get there to find housing themselves is going to be even higher or the amount of distance they’re gonna have to travel every day. So I think I think this could have real unintended consequences and just stop the just stop the wheels from turning on rebuilding all these homes, which just make it way more complex.
Speaker: 3
44:55
So I agree.
Speaker: 0
44:57
Chamath, any final thoughts on the rebuild and the free market in that regard? Yeah.
Speaker: 2
45:02
I think this is where the government inaptitude is at its worst. I think that we need to dismantle this regulatory state that makes doing the right thing impossible. So specifically, the thing that Newsom did was essentially create a time expectation on when things will get permitted. And I think he said it was like 6 months.
Speaker: 2
45:32
The problem is ai, this is what just goes to show you how insane the state has become. Even if you get a permit within 6 months, and this is where I do agree with Freeburg, like getting service people in and being able to build something to spec safely is gonna take 3, 4, 5, 6 years and it’s gonna be insane.
Speaker: 2
45:53
And the example of the complete incompetence of the California State Government is if you contrast and compare this with how the state was able to respond in the Northridge earthquake. And the crazy thing which I thought was incredible was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, they rebuilt Ai 10. Right?
Speaker: 2
46:15
Which is ai, that is like a crazy artery in 66 days. Guys, they rebuilt it. Not they permitted it. Not that they were trying to get the California Coastal Commission to opine on it. Not a Sierra Club lawsuit about the upper land grouse. They rebuilt it.
Speaker: 2
46:32
So you actually know what’s possible in California if if tradesmen are allowed to go to work. Yeah. They can build incredibly complicated things with safety, with speed. This is where Newsom, I don’t think understands how the real market works. Because if you looked at that example, the real question you should be asking is, well, what has changed? Ai, technology has gotten way better since then.
Speaker: 2
46:56
The people are more skilled. There are more people to be able to do more of these jobs. And so why does it only take 6 months to just get the permit when in a 120 days you could just rebuild an entire ai? Similarly, why aren’t we saying that we expect these homes built in the next 3 years, Get these kids back in their homes and back in school.
Speaker: 1
47:13
You know what they did on that? They offered a $200,000 per day early build bonus on that program back then. So they basically the the state declared we need this freeway reopened, and here’s the date. It ai, like, a 144 days, and they’re like, you’ll get a $200,000 bonus for every day under 144 that you deliver it.
Speaker: 2
47:34
So glad. Wow.
Speaker: 0
47:36
Show me an incentive. I’ll show you an outcome. Exactly. The really interesting thing here is there are regulations that this is a unique opportunity to put in place. Nick, if you can pull it up, there was a home that wasn’t burned in the Pacific Palisades, and the architect talked about some of the design decisions there.
Speaker: 0
47:54
You know, having saloni scaping around your home, gravel, etcetera, and using these new materials and not having overhangs, which and then having vents into your attic, which is what a lot of homes have. And the embers get into the attic. There’s an overhang, and they’re not using and they’re they’re all wood built. You know? None of this is concrete.
Speaker: 0
48:16
None of it’s brick. California’s all wood. And so they probably should add some regulations about building things that are ai. Because if you had a 100 homes that were all fireproof and built to withstand this, that would act as a natural speak. And if you didn’t have as much vegetation, so there’s probably a series of things that should be added here in terms of regulations while you’re getting rid of some of the ones that are slowing you down.
Speaker: 0
48:41
Right. But let’s pivot over to oh, and then finally, like, allowing people to park their mobile homes in these places to have housing for construction to your point, Mark, would be super critical and they block that kind of stuff. So when you need temporary housing in California, you can’t do it.
Speaker: 0
48:57
By the
Speaker: 2
48:57
way, I sana, I wanna hear what Friberg has to say about insurance, but let me connect the dots between what you said and what he’s about to say. There are 3 images I just wanna show you guys and to bubble this up for everybody that isn’t necessarily living in California and is consumed with what all of this means.
Speaker: 2
49:14
There’s a bigger trend across the country that I think is just worth putting out there. Sai, Nick, do you wanna just show the first chart from FEMA? So this is basically a graph per locality all over the United States where FEMA tries to assess the disaster risk for living in a given area.
Speaker: 2
49:35
And what you see here is that there is some risk in living on the Eastern seaboard, and there’s a lot of risk sana it’s growing for living on the Western seaboard. And the 2 most complicated states that have to deal with this are clearly Florida and California. So that’s one, which is this is a problem that isn’t just focused on this one little area.
Speaker: 2
49:59
So then if you double click a little bit further, there’s a company called CoreLogic. They publish a lot of real estate data. Here’s a chart about the Western United States that just double clicks into wildfire risk. And I was shocked when I saw this. This is, first of all, most of California. This is ai Nevada. This is Arizona. This is parts of Texas. This is Washington.
Speaker: 2
50:22
I didn’t even know the fire risk went up that high, but this is essentially a lot of the Western United States. And then the last chart goes through and it actually does CoreLogic does an assessment of the value at risk. So in California, it’s 3 quarters of a $1,000,000,000,000 that are at about 1,260,000 homes that are at moderate or great risk of fires. In Colorado, it’s about a 141,000,000,000.
Speaker: 2
50:52
In Texas, it’s 88,000,000,000. In Oregon, it’s 45,000,000,000. In Arizona, it’s 36,000,000,000. The point is that everything you said, Jason, now needs to get scaled out. Meaning there needs to be a national level conversation. This can’t be a bunch of city planners making code and making laws in a little municipality. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
51:17
Because that problem, what that shows you is we have a multi $1,000,000,000,000 risk to a lot of people in the Western United States specifically around this issue that has to get dealt with by code.
Speaker: 0
51:32
Alright. Really interesting in New York. Ai, New York has put into place congestion pricing. I’ve been waiting for this my entire life. Here’s a map. This went into effect January 5th. This congestion pricing concept exists in London as everybody probably knows. Basically if you’re below Central Park, which is 6th Street in Manhattan, and you enter between 5 AM and 9 PM, you’re gonna get, you know, on your, E ZPass, a charge of but $9 cheaper than a bacon, egg, and cheese in Manhattan these days.
Speaker: 0
52:06
If you’re going clubbing in Manhattan between 9 PM and 5 AM, it’s just ai $2. It’s gonna increase to $12 in 2028 and $15 in 2031. Trucks pay more. Taxes pay less. The results have been awesome. Wait times to get on the island are down 50% across the board. Lincoln Tunnel down 46%. Holland Tunnel down 63%.
Speaker: 0
52:28
Williamsburg Bridge down 35%. It’s just an awesome effort. When I lived there, man, as a resident, the traffic was nuts. You can have emergency services move a lot faster. You get rid of noise pollution. You obviously get rid of air quality pollution for ice engines. It’s great for cabs, great for pedestrians, and great for bike riders.
Speaker: 0
52:51
The only people really complaining are selfish and entitled people who drive their cars into Manhattan. That’s at least my position on it. Opponents are saying it’s a money grab for the transit authority because the money from this goes to make public transportation better. What do you think, Mark?
Speaker: 0
53:09
You’re you’re in favor of this?
Speaker: 3
53:11
Yeah. I think more generally, I feel like since the pandemic, what’s been on my mind a lot, living still in San Francisco, I wanted to start a social network called Still Here. Because it’s like, oh, you still live here? Me too. Some way for us to, like, come out of our houses and notice that you’re here and I’m here, but we never leave our homes.
Speaker: 3
53:35
I walk around this city at my own risk, and I like the cities I feel like cities have lost the point. Like, they’ve lost the plot. Like, why we’ve kind of we still live in cities or value them, but I feel like we have to go back to first principles and think, like, why did we move to cities in the 1st place?
Speaker: 3
53:54
And what was the value supposed to be? And is that still the deal we’re getting? Or is there enough to be a new deal? Because we used to live in a city because it was economic. We were closer to our job.
Speaker: 3
54:06
And then we lived in a city because there was a high density of things that we wanted, cultural, people, restaurants. And the best cities really were the ones that are fun to walk around. And then we got to a point where it’s not safe or clean to walk around. You don’t work in the city anymore. And San Francisco started to feel like this gigantic, like, retirement community.
Speaker: 3
54:29
It’s just all these people who still live here because their kids are in school maybe or they grew up here. You know? A lot of our friends left, went to Austin and other places. And we started I I don’t know about Chamath, but I think or Dave, but I think our family has a conversation probably twice a year of, should we move?
Speaker: 3
54:49
Why haven’t we moved? What’s wrong with us? And so there’s this questioning going on around cities, and I think it’s a good question. And I think cities need to innovate aggressively to give to be better. They have to compete with the other options again.
Speaker: 3
55:05
They have to make it fun to be there, fun to work there. I think it’s great that Daniel Lohrey is mayor of San Francisco, and he’s putting smart people around him. And they’re trying to rethink, first, some attacking these core problems, but also how do we make San Francisco fun again? So I love things like congestion pricing.
Speaker: 3
55:27
I think now is the time to try every new innovation that you ever thought of and see what sticks and and figure out, like, how do you take this this sai, not literally I mean, New York has a big sai, but this tax on all of us, whether it is that you can’t walk across this city, that you don’t feel safe, or that that the the good side of it being fun to be in, you know, is the the the deal is off.
Speaker: 3
55:58
And so I think, you know and Ai also what I’m hoping Daniel Lurie does and other smart mayors is that they benchmark. And they say, who’s doing it really well around the world? Whether it’s dealing with homelessness or things like congestion pricing, who’s who’s innovating and doing it well, and why aren’t we doing it here?
Speaker: 3
56:19
I mean, I think you gotta run these you gotta reinvent these cities. And, you know, sorry to sound cliche, but I think you gotta kind of take a start up mentality and say, you you’re not gonna live on your incumbency anymore. You’ve got to reinvent this. And we can’t make companies come back to work, you know, come back to the off I mean, the companies can make their employees, but it’d be really nice if the employees wanted to be there.
Speaker: 0
56:44
You know, and
Speaker: 3
56:44
you can’t make people live in California. So I’m in favor.
Speaker: 0
56:49
Yeah. Chamath, any thoughts on Mark’s point about making cities fun again and joyful again? Sounds like a pretty good platform.
Speaker: 2
56:58
I mean, I think he’s right. San Francisco sucks. It’s trash. You never go there. Yeah. It’s terrible.
Speaker: 0
57:05
And the reason that you don’t like to go there is?
Speaker: 2
57:08
It’s dirty. It’s disgusting. There’s crime. There’s grime. Everything just sucks there.
Speaker: 0
57:16
Yeah. Friberg, your thoughts on the Gotham City that Did he visit you in the studio?
Speaker: 3
57:24
Dave, did Shah ever come to the Presidio?
Speaker: 2
57:26
I have come to your office. I’ve come to Dave’s office. I’ve come to I’ve gone to Peter’s office there. But what I do is I I don’t even go through the city. I go all the way around. I drive all through the East Bay up through Berkeley, and I come all I’m just kidding. No. No. No. I just think that the city is very poorly managed.
Speaker: 2
57:43
And just the quality of many cities are poorly managed. And I think that there’s a common through line in these poorly managed cities. All the things that you say, there’s no will to do. There’s no will to keep crime at bay. There’s no will to make, you know, usable spaces for people.
Speaker: 2
58:02
There’s no will to invest in the arts. So what do you expect? Right? There’s more money collected by these cities, but there’s just this more total grift, corruption, and waste.
Speaker: 3
58:11
I really like that you got to this will point because whether we come back to the Vatsal Commission or not or talk about California or San Francisco, I don’t think it’s really about the red tape. I think it’s about the willpower of the people who are running the tape and reading the
Speaker: 2
58:29
tape. A 100% right. Did you see this thing? I have to read this to you because this is really stunning. I sorry, Mark. Keep going, but I you’re ai a 1000% right.
Speaker: 3
58:38
You know, because sure. Okay. Maybe maybe in one case, Gavin can override the Coastal Commission, but it doesn’t matter if you cut their red tape by 90%. As long as there’s any tape that they can use, the people running both the staff there and the people on the board have stated on their website that their policy is managed retreat.
Speaker: 3
59:02
They drew a new map of the California coastline. If that’s their intention, they’re gonna look for anything they can to to stop and obstruct you. So it’s it’s really not like their hands are tied because there’s so much permitting and
Speaker: 0
59:17
You’re you’re right. They’ve made a decision. And the decision in California, in San Francisco specifically, was that we’re gonna cater to fentanyl dealers and junkies and that those people were going to get a stipend, a hotel room, and be allowed to take a superdrug on the streets, thousands of people with no recourse.
Speaker: 0
59:36
Listen. I’m prodrug.
Speaker: 2
59:38
Okay. Here’s I sent you guys a I sent you guys a
Speaker: 0
59:41
but not for fentanyl and meth. These things are super drugs.
Speaker: 2
59:44
Yeah. Let’s make it less about San Francisco. Let’s talk about middle Ai, and let’s talk about Anduril. Palmer Luckey did this really awesome shout out. Really awesome interview. Nick, I just sent you the link to it. He’s building a new Ohio plant. But the question and answer from the interviewer is exactly what Pincus talked about, which is Will.
Speaker: 2
01:00:07
The interview says, was this the only state that could guarantee that ai that you needed? And here’s Palmer’s answer. Was this the only state that could guarantee that timeline?
Speaker: 4
01:00:20
I think that they were the state that gave us the best shot of hitting that timeline. Look, we’ve really engaged well with JobsOhio ai a lot of the politicians here, not just at the state level with the local level. You know, like you said, we’re hiring 4,000 people here in direct jobs, a lot more jobs than that in a direct or ai, an indirect capacity.
Speaker: 4
01:00:38
It’s the largest single job creation event in Ohio history. It was a state that told us we have the workforce. We have a 1000000 people who are capable of working in this facility within a 45 minute drive. We’re willing to work with you on higher education to help train people so they can come in and they can work with you.
Speaker: 4
01:00:54
Our customer in in the form of the Ai States Air for United States Air Force obviously has a huge presence here in the form of Wright Patterson Air Force Base. So really all the stars ai to make Ohio a great place for us to do it and to do it fast. And speaking candidly, as someone who is from California, there’s some states that are really good at, pushing you out and slowing you down, and there’s others that are great at pulling you in and speeding you up, and that’s what Ohio was.
Speaker: 0
01:01:18
Fantastic. Yeah. States are competing for elite companies. Ai this
Speaker: 3
01:01:24
And there’s a willpower that’s Yeah. That there’s an intention. And you know that if they wanna make it happen, they’ll make it happen, just like Gavin just did. Right? You Gavin could have theoretically, I don’t know, signed an executive order to override the Vatsal Commission on lot even his desal plant.
Speaker: 3
01:01:43
Like, I don’t know why he didn’t just force that through. But if we had desal, maybe there’d be more water to fight the fire now.
Speaker: 1
01:01:50
So I think the important thing is to note that cities have a right to be what they wanna be. You guys might find this surprising, but I’m not necessarily of the belief that every city should necessarily cater to progress and acceleration and enterprisation and industrialization. Look.
Speaker: 1
01:02:12
When you go to Portofino every summer, Chamath, you would probably, you know, stop going and would be disappointed if you found out that they were building a giant glass tower apartment complex and a giant office building right by the Portofino port. Like, that’s just not the character of what that city wants to be.
Speaker: 1
01:02:31
And I do remember when I first moved to San Francisco 25 years ago, it was it felt like a smaller European like city. It wasn’t overrun with technology companies at the ai. And it was a the charm and the quaint nature and the smaller buildings of San Francisco that made it a beautiful, fantastic town.
Speaker: 1
01:02:49
I think that part of the challenge of San Francisco has been this diametrically kind of opposed viewpoint of progress from the technology sector and a desire to keep San Francisco a small city by the bay. And that that frustration has manifested with a lot of ai of ugliness over the the last couple decades, in addition to, obviously, all the silly stupid policies that just make no sense whatsoever.
Speaker: 1
01:03:11
They’re rooted in people thinking that this is a good solution in the short term, but it creates extraordinary damage and harm in the long term separate. But I do think that cities have a right to be what they wanna be. And I think that the that’s just
Speaker: 3
01:03:23
I just wanna interject as a fellow San Franciscan for a long time, just as long, is that that’s the normal tension that’s been here all along, and that kinda makes the city culture great. And there’s you wanna have this creative, melting pot here. But there’s this other side that I think has come into play in the last 15, 20 years or, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, which is this progressivism side, which we saw Chesa, you know, with.
Speaker: 3
01:03:53
Yep. And I think it’s it’s a different virus.
Speaker: 1
01:03:56
Ai the ugly silliness I meh, I was saying. But I like, let’s put that aside. Let’s put San Francisco aside. I do think that a city can and should be what it wants to be. Does it sana attract and build in industry? Does it wanna attract and build enterprising ai, or does it wanna be a small, quaint town?
Speaker: 1
01:04:14
Does it wanna stay, you know, with That’s with no with no high rise.
Speaker: 2
01:04:18
That’s a false trade off. The problem is that people in government at every level sells the former, doesn’t actually even give them that nor the latter. What they give them is a dysfunctional hellscape instead.
Speaker: 1
01:04:32
Well, Cortezino doesn’t do that. Right?
Speaker: 2
01:04:34
Because it doesn’t make those promises. It’s not asking to elect people that are trying to do it.
Speaker: 1
01:04:38
Yeah. Not every city is making that though.
Speaker: 2
01:04:40
Why are we lying to everybody? And why are people falling for these lies over and over and over again? There’s there’s a moral clarity in telling the truth. Portofino doesn’t try to do that, but I don’t think the point is
Speaker: 1
01:04:50
You’re saying the cities that that promise that and don’t deliver. Is that what you’re
Speaker: 2
01:04:53
San Francisco promises it.
Speaker: 1
01:04:54
Right.
Speaker: 2
01:04:55
London promises it. New York promises it. These things are chaotic messes.
Speaker: 3
01:05:00
Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
01:05:00
And it’s not the trade off of, oh, well, Harris has found a way to stay quaint. That was never on the ballot. Some person comes up and says, I’m gonna spend x $1,000,000,000 a year. Then another person shows up as is actually, I’m gonna spend it a totally different way. They both claim to have measurements of how it’s gonna be great. And my point is none of them are rooted in the real world.
Speaker: 2
01:05:21
Nobody knows how to actually run a business. All the money gets wasted and nothing happens. It neither stays quaint nor does it advance.
Speaker: 0
01:05:29
If you were living in Los Angeles, you had the opportunity to have Rick Caruso who built so many amazing experiences and, shops for the citizens there, and you picked Karen Bass. I looked on her Wikipedia page looking for any kind of operational position she ever filled.
Speaker: 2
01:05:49
It’s do you wanna read her resume? It’s tragic.
Speaker: 0
01:05:52
I mean, I just It’s tragic. Ai would literally, like I said last week, not send her to get my lunch because you know that order would be totally screwed up. She is so so unqualified, and you had this perfect person, Rick Caruso, who literally you can’t script this. He built the Pacific Palisades Village.
Speaker: 0
01:06:11
When the days before there was gonna be a fire, do you know what he did? He hired water trucks to park on those streets. You can find the picture, Nick. Pull it up. And he hired firefighters and people to protect the village that he built. Karen Bass was in Ghana partying, taking meetings.
Speaker: 0
01:06:36
I don’t know what the connection between Los Angeles and their citizens and what they need to get done and Sana. After she promised she would not do this global, you know, globe trotting, which she apparently has a track record of doing, she left and stayed there knowing this was all coming.
Speaker: 0
01:06:53
Rick Caruso, who you didn’t vote for mayor, he did the right thing. Vote these people out. Recall Karen Bass. You can do it. We recall Chesa Boudin.
Speaker: 0
01:07:04
You remember on this show, David Sacks, he is a republican entrepreneur venture capitalist, good friend of mine. I’ll introduce you guys if you haven’t met him. He started a recall Chesa Boudin movement. I hired a journalist to cover the victims of crime in San Francisco. Chesa Boudin was out in 18 months.
Speaker: 0
01:07:24
You can recall these people. They’re unqualified. Take action. Start a recall. They’ll tell you, oh, it’s not a good thing for continuity, whatever. These people are not qualified.
Speaker: 0
01:07:34
They are not thinking in your best interest. You have no choice, citizens of Los Angeles, but to get these people out immediately. Every day they stay in office, they are going to cause more damage to your family, your property, and your city. We call them now.
Speaker: 3
01:07:52
Didn’t Chambers Woods post a petition on change.org that Ai saw on Twitter was already Yeah. I signed it because I don’t live there. And I think it was already over, like, 90,000, you know, names.
Speaker: 0
01:08:03
I mean, you you you have power. The people of California don’t understand how much power they have. When Gavin Newsom I just told people on Twitter, Chamoff, every time Gavin tweets or Karen Bass tweets, just reply with the word resign. 100 of people are doing it now. Shame these people into resigning.
Speaker: 2
01:08:18
It’s a very mature way for you to affect change.
Speaker: 0
01:08:21
You know what? It worked in Brooklyn.
Speaker: 3
01:08:23
Shame worked.
Speaker: 0
01:08:23
I don’t know why people think they have no power. You could literally just go in there and do things. And one of the things you can do is recall them.
Speaker: 2
01:08:30
Okay. Okay. Do we have anything else except your polemicals left on the docket?
Speaker: 0
01:08:33
All right. TikTok’s future is in question right now. The ban is about to happen unless the parent company, ByteDance, divest by January 19th, which is this Sunday. TikTok will be banned in America. Google and Apple are gonna be forced to remove TikTok from their app stores, and Oracle, TikTok’s cloud provider, has to stop providing hosting services and cut ai, assuming ByteDance doesn’t come up with a last minute deal.
Speaker: 0
01:08:59
TikTok’s only hope is the Supreme Court blocking the law. What do you think, Mark? Do you think it’s Chinese spyware? Do you think they should be forced to divest? What do you think their repercussions will be?
Speaker: 3
01:09:11
Here’s what’s so hard for me about this. On the one hand, part of it seems so obvious from a both not just national security point of view, but also just fairness. Like, it’s insane if you think about it that there’s a Chinese company that’s arguing in court for protections under our constitution and freedom of speech when none of our companies have those kinds of rights in China, much less the right to even operate there if they’re not majority controlled or in line, like you guys talked about, with censorship or whatever else.
Speaker: 3
01:09:49
So on the one hand, it seems like a no brainer to me that on this case. But what you’re starting to see come up in the last couple days, I’m even hearing it from one of my daughters who’s a major TikToker, is the law of unintended consequences here is that we could see this ban, especially if they don’t get to a deal with somebody.
Speaker: 3
01:10:12
And then the 170,000,000 Americans, many younger Americans who rely on this all of a sudden feel like this is censoring them, and it’s taking away their freedom of expression. And it could backfire in a lot of ways. We’re already seeing memes where they’re going on to these other apps.
Speaker: 3
01:10:32
Like, there’s this
Speaker: 0
01:10:33
Ai book? Meh book, which is Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:10:36
Even worse. Right? I think that one is owned by the Chinese government, and so we’re driving them there. And so so I’m the best outcome, I think, would be forced to divest and sell to another American company. But if that doesn’t happen, I I’m kinda nervous about a a real backlash.
Speaker: 0
01:10:57
I’m delighted, Chamath, that our kids are gonna go out and play and have friendships and stop scrolling on TikTok. What you ai sound sounds awesome.
Speaker: 3
01:11:06
I literally get on their ai and phones when I sometimes allow them to have phones and just delete the app, and then they go get it back. Of course.
Speaker: 0
01:11:15
Of course. Kids are around
Speaker: 2
01:11:16
around it.
Speaker: 0
01:11:16
What do you think, Chamath?
Speaker: 3
01:11:17
What do
Speaker: 0
01:11:18
you think is gonna happen here?
Speaker: 2
01:11:19
I mentioned this to president Trump and I and I really think this is true. The reason why there was so much bipartisan support for the bill as it worked through Congress is because I think that they were briefed on just how severe the security violations of this app arya. Because I don’t think we’ve seen anything in modern history that is, that, that is this controversial yet be so almost unanimous.
Speaker: 1
01:11:45
Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:11:45
So I think that that’s an important data point. There is something happening in the app that they’ve been briefed on that makes them take this posture. And when I listened to the supreme court arguments, I didn’t hear a very compelling reason why this ban should be overturned.
Speaker: 2
01:12:03
So I do agree with Mark that we have to find a suitable home, And I think that we’ll probably find 1, and I think that it probably happens under the Trump presidency. And whoever gets their hands on it gets their hands on an incredible asset that they will be able to buy extremely cheaply.
Speaker: 2
01:12:23
Because there is no way that there is a fair market value here deal for that asset. Because whoever is the ai is in the total catbird seat. And in order to get a deal done with the federal government, I think you’re just gonna get a, basically ai a buy it now price that’s very cheap.
Speaker: 2
01:12:37
The other thing that I’ll say though on a totally separate tangent. So when I started hunting around, TikTok’s real time recommendation algorithm was open source, the learning method.
Speaker: 3
01:12:48
Yep. Nick, do
Speaker: 2
01:12:48
you wanna just throw it up here? It’s called Monolith. This is an incredible paper. The cleverness of what these guys have built cannot be underestimated. And what’s incredible is what they describe in this paper, which I think frankly, a lot of social apps would benefit from understanding is exactly how they’ve built it to essentially not take this more monolithic training approach for recommendations, but how do you do it in real time?
Speaker: 2
01:13:14
How do you make it collisionless? It’s incredible. This paper is a tour de force. And it just makes me realize that despite the political maneuvering of this hot potato, there are some folks that have been working in that app or in, you know, the parent company that are truly technically talented.
Speaker: 2
01:13:36
And it’s a it’s a bit of a shame that they’re gonna get sort of throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak. So people should know that there’s some technological innovations inside of ByteDance and TikTok that are just truly amazing feats of computer science. This is an example.
Speaker: 2
01:13:52
It doesn’t though change the fact that I think that enough of Congress and the rest of the security apparatus know that this is a mechanism to spy.
Speaker: 0
01:14:00
I think you both nailed it.
Speaker: 3
01:14:01
Isn’t China saying though that they’re going to if this does get divested, they’re going to keep either ByteDance or Chinese government saying, we’re not going to give over the algorithm, or are you saying it’s open source? It doesn’t matter.
Speaker: 2
01:14:13
Well, this was an example of just sort of like describing the methodology. It’s not functionally open source meh, but I think that open sourcing, it doesn’t solve the problem. And the reason is, so let’s just say that you’re Pegasus. Pegasus was able to reverse engineer or build penetration attacks into WhatsApp that were imperceptible to everybody until it happened to Jeff Bezos, to other people, right, where you get these state sponsored attacks on your phone.
Speaker: 2
01:14:39
And all of a sudden you’re dealing with this attack vector that then you call the FBI and they take your phone and they help you deal with. It’s happened to a bunch of people. It’s happened to me twice. So the fact that these things can happen and then the attack vectors get incrementally more and more sophisticated. It used to be that there was a PDF payload.
Speaker: 2
01:15:03
Then there can just be an image payload. Now it’s any payload. Right? And you don’t even have to click to open it. And all of a sudden they just root your phone. So these are extremely sophisticated mechanisms that are enabled by a very few, very talented people.
Speaker: 2
01:15:19
Talented I’ll put in quotes. But when those talented people work on the wrong side, you have to act. So open sourcing it won’t solve this. These, these exploits are known to a few. And I think that if it’s known to the NSA, this is probably what was disclosed to folks under confidentiality that caused them to get to this conclusion.
Speaker: 0
01:15:38
I think people just need to wake up and realize the Chinese government does not have Meh’ best interest at heart. I mean, there is no concept of reciprocity, as you mentioned, Mark. That’s the number one reason to do this. Number 2, what you pointed out Jamoth with security.
Speaker: 0
01:15:54
And if you think about the 2 biggest imports from China right now, it’s Fentanyl and TikTok. Ai want to make us addicted. They want to impact our society. They want to divide us. This is a massive ai that’s going on. It is a psyops and it is a spyware and it’s been proven they spied on journalists.
Speaker: 0
01:16:14
These are bad actors. It has to go.
Speaker: 2
01:16:16
I was super excited when I saw that there was a potential that X would take over TikTok. And the reason I say that is I do think that if you can take the video content of TikTok and the graph of creators, but have a different app and a different substrate be the delivery mechanism where you know that it’s much safer and it’s governed by an Meh, that to me would be the compromise.
Speaker: 2
01:16:43
So I think the app should go away, but if you can somehow give creators a path to sort of like restart their content creating capabilities on X, I think that that’s actually a pretty good one.
Speaker: 0
01:16:56
You guys notice in the app, FreeBird, that the left hand tab, because you have following shop and for you, they ended a left hand tab all the way over that stem. And it’s just science, technology, engineering, and math content.
Speaker: 1
01:17:11
I’ve not noticed that.
Speaker: 0
01:17:12
Yeah. Take a look. I don’t know if it’s just mine and they’re micro targeting me because they know I’m such a fan of stem, but I think it’s for everybody. Any thoughts, Dave, as we wrap on the TikTok? Seems
Speaker: 1
01:17:23
like they’re gonna strike a deal. Chuck Schumer today is calling for a delay in the ban. I’m sure by the time this episode airs, something will have been worked out to create some space for them to get a deal done, but I think they wanna get a deal done and keep TikTok active in the US.
Speaker: 1
01:17:36
Speak like both the Dems and the Republicans are pushing for it. So this kind of also leads to what I think will be the grand deal with China, which I think will happen in the 1st 6 months of the Trump administration. I’m obviously speculating, but it feels like there’s gonna be some workout here. Ai, like, in a lot of economic distress.
Speaker: 1
01:17:57
I don’t know if you guys have followed much on the stories of the deflationary challenges that China is dealing with. Chinese bonds are trading at a below 2% yield now, which is kind of unprecedented. And there’s this real concern that China is in a very significant economic deflationary spiral.
Speaker: 1
01:18:14
So they’re in a very weakened position economically at the moment. The United States seems to be in a position of strength. And I would imagine, just given the rhetoric, that this administration may try to work out, again, some deal that’s gonna provide access to the Chinese market in exchange for the US ai the tariff effect on Chinese, importers to the US.
Speaker: 1
01:18:36
So there could be, I think, something, you know, that eases the the tension with China and creates, you know, mutual economic value in the first 6 months of the administration. We’ll see.
Speaker: 0
01:18:49
I mean, it’s a great point. Trump is a great negotiator. It’s probably his greatest strength, and he’s great at saber rattling, and we’re strong. They’re weak right now. A grand deal could be an awesome
Speaker: 1
01:18:59
outcome for sure. One of my this is my contrarian prediction, I think. Oh, no. This was my stock this was my stock prediction. Yeah. This was ai my Yeah. I sai. Chinese tech stocks. Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:19:08
Same. Ai I’ve been loading up on Alibaba, a couple of Chinese names with The same bet.
Speaker: 0
01:19:15
Hey, guys. Here’s a chart for you. Companies are not hiring as many MBAs. This is a recent spike in unemployment among MBAs from top business schools ai Harvard, MIT, and Stanford. I’m not sure. I think Pincus, did you go to Harvard for a year?
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01:19:35
Guilty.
Speaker: 0
01:19:36
Guilty. So and you’ve also stopped working. So you’re represented here on the chart.
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01:19:41
Yeah. You still have a job right there.
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01:19:43
Used to work.
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01:19:44
What what
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01:19:45
are your thoughts on on this? Are MBAs out of vogue?
Speaker: 3
01:19:48
Are they opting out? What’s your theory here? Well so, yes, I went there. I I would say that that my all the learning that’s helped me in my career started later after I got out. My first product management job was really when I started learning things that are useful to me today.
Speaker: 3
01:20:09
I think being there, I learned a lot about, like, how to sell to corporate America and some how do they think kind of things. And then I’ve gone back to HBS for decades trying to recruit from there. And in the beginning, they would tell me the kids would when I had support dot com and it was gonna go public, they sai, I’d have to be a vice president and own 3% of the company to take a job with a start up like you.
Speaker: 3
01:20:34
And this was just before the company went public. There was a little bit of a renaissance period where some HBS people were excited to join Zynga, probably because they thought it was going public, but they were a little more risk on at that point. And now everyone’s open to jobs. My take is that there’s this fundamental imbalance that people go and get an MBA because they’re derisking their career.
Speaker: 3
01:21:00
You go to HBS or Stanford, and you’re guaranteed this high salary and this kind of great job for life. So the reason to go there is to take the risk off. That’s in fundamental opposition to where we are in our economy, in my opinion, today or where the most interesting sectors are.
Speaker: 3
01:21:20
Those kinds of jobs have dried up, and the kinds of jobs that I think should be interesting to MBAs are more ai go find a y Combinator company and join a founding team as the business person or whatever. And these people are smart and qualified, but there’s this mismatch that they are fundamentally risk averse. And so they’re not so when the it says they haven’t found jobs.
Speaker: 3
01:21:47
Part of it is, I think, they’re gonna they’re gonna have to fall further or this might happen so that a part of it, they have maybe debt or they have to pay back this expensive degree. But I think that they’ve gotta get to a point ai I was when I started my first company, freeloader.
Speaker: 3
01:22:04
I happily had very little to no opportunity cost because I torched my career by that point, torched my resume. I was fired or asked to leave every job, and so there was kinda no turning back.
Speaker: 2
01:22:17
Sai,
Speaker: 0
01:22:18
can you imagine being Mark Pincus’ boss? I mean, that’s almost as hard as being Tremont’s.
Speaker: 3
01:22:24
Yeah. I always say I’m a great team player as long as I’m running the team. So Right.
Speaker: 0
01:22:29
Great quarterback.
Speaker: 3
01:22:30
Yeah. But yeah. So I had no opportunity cost when I started my first company, which looked like it didn’t have a chance in hell, you know, of ever making it. So you probably thought so too then about my company. But so now the question is, maybe what’s gonna happen is there we’re gonna get a new equilibrium where these the opportunities for these people start to come down, the guaranteed opportunities, And a good thing happens.
Speaker: 0
01:22:54
Consulting firms. Right? They all go to McKinsey Bryden Consulting Group, whatever. Even I just the
Speaker: 3
01:22:59
class I taught on Monday at Stanford, they said everyone wants a job at Meh or Google, and that’s the get rich quick place. And it’s I don’t even think that’s necessarily true anymore, and they can’t get those jobs because those companies are now trying to get rid of middle management.
Speaker: 3
01:23:14
So those jobs have dried up. You know, part of what’s in this data probably also is a lot of these people aren’t taking jobs. They’re they’re not finding jobs that meet this high expectation for
Speaker: 0
01:23:28
Right.
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01:23:28
Pay and opportunity. So I think it’s a I think it’s a good thing. It also probably is gonna reduce the demand to go into these MBA ram. Because if you’re thinking, well, that’s not gonna be my risk off trade and I’m not ai be I’m not gonna be guaranteed. 100%. So why go in the first place?
Speaker: 3
01:23:46
And I would advise people today, you know, to depending on what industry, I’m biased, but I’d say go get a product management job somewhere and make enough that you can afford to live on it. And that’s gonna be the beginning of learning.
Speaker: 0
01:23:59
I I think these, Shamaf. What what are these things called when these MBAs graduate? They raise a bunch of money to go buy some real business.
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01:24:07
Fun. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s not happening anymore. They
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01:24:09
Yeah. That was ai the
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01:24:11
date of
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01:24:11
the year.
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01:24:12
Ai of them made money. None of them made money. Turns out these MBAs don’t know what they’re doing.
Speaker: 0
01:24:16
Oh, yeah. So when they take over the business run by a family and some matriarch or patriarch for 50 years to get it to 25,000,000 Ai
Speaker: 1
01:24:23
don’t know. There’s that there’s that one deal out of Stanford GSB. The guy founded, Asurion, which is, like, you know, 10 bits. It’s Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:24:32
That guy would have founded that company outside of Stanford. He could have gone to timbuktu.comuniversity. Discraziadstate, and he would have been fine.
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01:24:40
Dotcom. That speaks
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01:24:42
to that speaks to more about the cleverness of that one individual, not the 99,000 other deals that have been done. Let me say something that builds on what Pincus was saying, which is Ai think that this is a interesting window into the future of AI in the sense that Ai think what companies are internalizing saloni, that the first place that AI disintermediates is actually middle management.
Speaker: 2
01:25:07
You thought that it was the customer support person. Maybe you thought it was the engineer. Maybe you thought it was the designer. Maybe you thought it was the product manager. I think those are less true. I think it’s the middle manager.
Speaker: 2
01:25:19
It’s the functionary that basically is acting as essentially cartilage inside of this organization has less and less to do in a place where AI enabled systems are making a lot of decisions on behalf of businesses. And if you take a step back, how did that evolve? Well, it started because of what I mentioned a couple weeks ago.
Speaker: 2
01:25:46
What the software industrial complex will really be known for after it is dismantled and gone is that it created all of these really dysfunctional org charts in a company. Meaning, when you are a system of record that sells something, let’s make it up. Hey. I’m the best general ledger software. Okay. And a CEO says, great. Implement that.
Speaker: 2
01:26:12
And then all of a sudden it’s like, well, you’re gonna need a CFO. Okay. But then the CFO comes to you and says, well, you actually need a head of FP and a, a head of this, a head of that, a head of the other thing. Then the CEO says, okay. Then those people hire. And what happens is the software sprawl is really what created those jobs.
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01:26:30
Somebody else says, here’s a customer relationship management thing. Okay. Great. So then you hire a CMO and a CRO. Those people build infrastructure.
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01:26:40
So my premise about this is if you look inside of any org chart of any company, you can map those jobs to some clunky old piece of software that was sold to them. Maybe it was 10 years ago. Maybe it was 20 years ago, but that’s why orgs are this bulky. And now when you have all of these new next gen businesses that are ripping all of that software out, the middle management layers that used to manage that software are no longer necessary.
Speaker: 2
01:27:08
That’s why you’re not hiring MBAs. And I think that this trend is only going to grow. So I don’t think that this is a commentary on the people. The people are probably quite smart. But I do think that this is a warning sign that people should not go and pursue these degrees because I think as Pinca said, you’re not taking the trade of least volatility.
Speaker: 2
01:27:27
You’re actually taking on a lot more volatility than you probably thought you shouldn’t be taking on by going to a place like Harvard or Stanford.
Speaker: 0
01:27:35
Freeberg, any thoughts as we wrap here about I think the MBA chart?
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01:27:39
The collapse of the MBA program could be the beginning of the unwinding of the, higher education market.
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01:27:47
Ai? Simor.
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01:27:50
I think this is the easiest one to discard first in an age of AI and automation and self learning. And I think that I I mean, I’ve been thinking a lot about I’ve I’ve young kids. Right? So my kid my oldest kid is, 7 years old. I had to think about that for a sec. So many kids now.
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01:28:11
And
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01:28:13
isn’t it great, by the way? I go through this all I don’t know. I have to go I have to, like, what’s my kid’s birthday?
Speaker: 1
01:28:18
Tomas has, like, a busload of children.
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01:28:20
When you have when you have
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01:28:21
5, you can’t 5th. So that’s I think I got right
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01:28:23
at 5, 5,
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01:28:24
and you’re at 4 days.
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01:28:25
No. I have 5. I can’t I have to really think about all my birthdays.
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01:28:29
4th on the way.
Speaker: 1
01:28:30
But, yeah, I would say I I think a lot about whether or not it makes sense for my kids to go to undergrad. Ai and I think, like, about going to classes as an undergrad. I certainly, there’s the social experience, and I I learned a lot in, you know, kinda working vatsal lab when I was there and doing other stuff.
Speaker: 1
01:28:48
But those were, like, on the job experiences. I do think that the social experience and the practical experience can be gotten outside of the college infrastructure, this edge educational infrastructure. Oh. I I cannot tell you guys how much time I speak.
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01:29:05
Ai an idea. I just had the best idea ever. The all in MBA. Let’s start our own MBA program.
Speaker: 1
01:29:11
Ai think I don’t think I I think that’s the whole point. People should get back to kind of an apprenticeship type model or a self learning model. Everyone’s got their own personal tutor now. That’s what I think people aren’t realizing is anything you wanna learn with Ai. And Have you guys heard
Speaker: 3
01:29:25
about what Jony Ives has done with his kids? I’m pretty sure they sai college, and they just went to work directly with him and his design firm.
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01:29:35
Exactly.
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01:29:36
And Ai like, I’m taking him out to lunch because I wanna interview him about it. Ai I
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01:29:39
think that’s
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01:29:40
such a good interest thing. By the
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01:29:42
way, my daughters and my daughters wanna start a podcast together, Pincus. Do you know what
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01:29:47
they wanna name it?
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01:29:48
Oh, no. I don’t.
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01:29:50
I don’t know if I should say it. They I
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01:29:51
don’t know. I didn’t hear the name. I think Jamont’s daughter is in on this as well.
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01:29:56
I think it was another friend’s child who came up with the name. They wanted to call it the Nepo pod.
Speaker: 0
01:30:02
Oh, that’s good. Jamal’s got a couple kids out there. They’re here for it. Ai here for it. No. I think, Freeberg, you nailed it on this one because I just had Arush Saloni, who’s the PM at Google doing deep research on This Week in Startups yesterday. And this product is nuts. And they designed it to basically be one of these, like, $1,000,000 or $5,000,000 reports you pay for from these consulting firms, that MBA’s ai.
Speaker: 0
01:30:29
And it does a better job. It’s more accurate. It’s done in 5 to 10 minutes. This thing fires off. Have you used deep research yet, Mark?
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01:30:40
No. Gemini, I keep hearing you talking about it, and I’m such an idiot about this stuff.
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01:30:44
It’s absolutely ai only. You can’t use the mobile. And then Grok 2.0
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01:30:48
is Gemini.
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01:30:49
How to use it and It’s only a good comment.
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01:30:51
And you have to pay $20 for it. And then Grok 2.0 is doing something similar. When you put your query in, it decides like all the saloni level queries that would be asked, then it checks its work. So it’s firing off a spider that goes and crawls a 150 pages in real time. Then it asks questions about the data. Then it sai, what’s missing from this?
Speaker: 0
01:31:11
So all the questions you would get from your manager if you were working at Boston Consulting Group where they tell some young MBA, hey, you missed this, you missed this. Can you double check this? Can you find double click on this? It goes and does those follow-up questions.
Speaker: 0
01:31:24
So and now you can do a cron job where you can sai, take my research and every week do a update on it and fill in information and tell me the differences. So instead of just buying a Boston Consulting or McKinsey or whatever report, you build it and then have it auto and the deep research is coming out of this.
Speaker: 0
01:31:43
Sai it’s gonna automatically refresh it in your Google docs and then update you on what’s been changed. And so and Grok is doing it as well, except Grok has all the tweets. So when you use Grok now, did you see now at the top of the page it says and I think it’s only in the Grok app, the dedicated app they just launched last week.
Speaker: 0
01:32:01
It shows you all the tweets and it shows you all the web pages that it indexed for that query. So this is like putting somebody on a week long research project. And like I said, it takes between 5 10 minutes to do this, and it costs a massive amount of server capacity to do these real time, you know, 2, 300 queries are occurring behind your one.
Speaker: 0
01:32:23
It’s nuts.
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01:32:24
I don’t know if you guys have been using advanced voice on chat GPT meh. Or do you guys have any of the voice? Yeah. And so lately, anytime I kinda have come across an interesting topic, I end up finding that I just talk to chat GPT for, like, an hour or 2. And I’ll be, like, in my car, like, when I’m driving to work or going to a meeting or I go for, like, a walk down to the coffee shah.
Speaker: 1
01:32:45
I’m like, okay. So tell me about, like, what happened during the ice age with respect to how quickly sea levels receded. And I start to gather and, like, it’s it’s basically like your own personal tutor.
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01:32:57
I finally have a best friend, Mark.
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01:33:01
And I think that, basically, you end up seeing a future where if people are put into almost ai the real world becomes the lab environment that is created in a very short window and small amount of space in a college environment where you’re, like, in some, like, applied scape. That applied scape basically becomes the real world, and you’ve got your college in your ear.
Speaker: 1
01:33:26
You’ve basically got your tutors, your educational experience, your capabilities that you’re learning, and you learn more in real time. And I think that that’s what AI is gonna take us to, which is basically gonna destroy much of the value of higher education. And I think that this MBA piece is probably just the first step of many that’s gonna ultimately erode the value of higher education.
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01:33:45
Did you guys see that fleshlight that can actually be synced to a video you’re watching? Ai seen you. That’s pretty crazy.
Speaker: 0
01:33:53
No. How can we go to the UFOs instead of speak toys? We get it.
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01:33:59
Wait. Show us the video. Show us the video. It’s not
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01:34:02
It’s also did
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01:34:03
you get one?
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01:34:04
It’s also Of
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01:34:04
course, he’s about to show us from his hidden folder.
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01:34:07
I saw it on x. It was like a it was like a summary of, like, the top meh things from CES, and it was a fleshlight that that would gyrate based on the actual contortions in the video, which was used to guest rooms tonight? I’m a little nervous.
Speaker: 0
01:34:23
It’s interesting, Pincus. You you get to see 2 different things here. When AI comes up as a topic, Friberg finally has a best friend and Chamath finally has a lover who will do exactly what he tells it to. This was absolutely perfect.
Speaker: 1
01:34:37
So Mark, lately we’ve been talking we’ve been talking to all the guests about UFOs and UAPs. Welcome to
Speaker: 0
01:34:42
conspiracy questions.
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01:34:43
You have a point of view on UFO UAP phenomena?
Speaker: 3
01:34:48
I do. And I guess everyone’s everyone else sai too, so I won’t be that weird an outlier. So first of all, I’ll just sai, I don’t believe in UAPs, UFOs, and I don’t not believe in them. Ai just curious about it. And I’ve I’ve had this theory that something is going to happen, that we’re gonna break our current understanding of physics theory and our our physics laws.
Speaker: 3
01:35:13
And so I’ve been looking for that moment, and one of those is around the UAPs. So I’ve been more and more curious and digging more and more, and I started working with a friend who made the movie Icarus on sai idea of, like, a Netflix docuseries. I thought it should be funny and have somebody ai a Larry David kinda character narrating it. But he said maybe, maybe. He came back to me.
Speaker: 3
01:35:38
He he’s making a documentary about the fentanyl crisis and how it Ai, meh how China has dumped it here. And he said, you’ve gotta meet with me and this guy. I came while he was working on that, he was interviewing a former DOD contractor who had worked for them for decades and said, you know, I’ve got a lot on Fentanyl, but I have this whole other thing to show you about these UAPs.
Speaker: 3
01:36:03
And he he’ll just tell you his claim. His claim so they came and met with me, and we had to meet outside and put our phones in Fairway bags.
Speaker: 2
01:36:13
Bags. Yeah. Bags. Yeah.
Speaker: 3
01:36:14
So so, it was a good setup, if nothing else. And he said he claimed that in doing running these war games for the the defense department, it inadvertently was summoning these UAPs, these drones. And he had tons and tons of video of it and classified them. I’m just telling you what he told me.
Speaker: 0
01:36:37
Me guess. The drone all the drone videos look like they
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01:36:40
were shot on an 8 millimeter ai camera. Wait.
Speaker: 0
01:36:43
Wait. Wait. Hold on.
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01:36:44
Hold on, Jason. Mark, just explain this. So so the United States is is simulating war games. Yeah. And what is it doing exactly that’s causing these drones to show up?
Speaker: 3
01:36:55
He did not tell me what were the
Speaker: 2
01:36:58
The games.
Speaker: 3
01:37:00
What were the exact triggers that but he said different things would trigger a different one, and he classified them. And he said some of them were aggressive from an electronics and commute would take out electronics and communications. Wow. And he so he was interested, and my friend was interested in saying, okay.
Speaker: 3
01:37:21
Can you put up a couple people, a million and a half dollars to recreate this and film this? And I thought about it. I even had him go meet with Bryden and and didn’t move quickly. And then he went dark on us and stopped responding. And then some friends of mine went to a gathering at and what they it was on multiple things related to this.
Speaker: 3
01:37:51
And they said that this guy was there and that he summoned one of these. They kind of said it looked like a a large bryden. And my friends showed me some pictures that they took, which were really it was at night, and they were really great.
Speaker: 0
01:38:04
Come on.
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01:38:05
Stop. Come on. Stop.
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01:38:06
I’m not making this up. I’m just telling you just
Speaker: 0
01:38:08
one piece of advice with this documentary film stuff. You know how to make a $100,000,000 in documentary films. Right, Piggis?
Speaker: 3
01:38:14
Yes. Start with a billion.
Speaker: 0
01:38:15
Start with a 1,000,000,000. You’re the mark in all of this. You’re just a mark. This guy needs a $1,000,000 to finish his house or something in Topanga Canyon. Fair. And you’re the way to do
Speaker: 3
01:38:26
it, ai I didn’t
Speaker: 0
01:38:27
sai the mark.
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01:38:28
I didn’t find it.
Speaker: 0
01:38:29
Okay. Good.
Speaker: 3
01:38:30
So all I’m saying is that Ai think that there’s a possibility that there
Speaker: 2
01:38:34
is some kind of drone
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01:38:36
that’s getting that that is showing up, and and I’m not saying it’s even from you know, from nonhuman making.
Speaker: 2
01:38:45
I believe it. I believe it. I am looking. I’ll be honest because I am looking for a reason to believe in this. I I’ll be honest. Like, I know my bias. I am very sympathetic when I hear these stories. I listen way too long, you know, to the podcast on this stuff. I watch Are
Speaker: 0
01:39:02
you donating to Alex Jones? No. But I Are you a subscriber?
Speaker: 2
01:39:05
No. But I I okay. How about this? Are we convinced that there has been absolutely zero unidentified object inside some vault buried deep somewhere in either the US or national state government somewhere. Are we guaranteed that the odds of that are 0? And I say no. It it’s non zero.
Speaker: 0
01:39:31
Let’s do our fur what is it? Fermi Paradox? Freeberg? Fermi Paradox? Why aren’t the if there if there are aliens, why haven’t we seen them? Quick around the world. I’m not I’m
Speaker: 2
01:39:42
not I’m not saying that. I’m not saying that.
Speaker: 1
01:39:43
Point on
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01:39:44
this. There is a UAP that is that has been unidentified that is sitting inside some vault somewhere in a in a state government in the world.
Speaker: 0
01:39:51
So your position is the aliens have come No.
Speaker: 2
01:39:55
Stop saying that.
Speaker: 0
01:39:56
Is covered. No.
Speaker: 2
01:39:57
You but you you you you make the whole thing seem ridiculous when you say aliens. I’m not saying that. I’m saying Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:40:02
Visitors from another planet.
Speaker: 2
01:40:03
No. Stop with the visitors. Just let’s just put it this way. A vehicle that does not have anything inside ai, a vehicle could be autonomous and unmanned. Okay. Is are the odds exactly 0? No.
Speaker: 0
01:40:20
But with billions of planets, it would, you know, logic would make you think that one has come already. Right? That’s what this billions of inhabitable planets and species out there. There must have somebody must be ahead of us. But the other conclusion of Fermi’s paradox is we, statistically, are the highest a society has ever gotten, and we have yet to send our probes out to the rest of the universe.
Speaker: 0
01:40:46
Although, we have sent probes, Freeburg, to Uranus. Alright, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. This is the all in podcast.
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01:40:53
Disgracian. Disgracian. Wait a second.
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01:40:57
Sai need I need a I need, Dietzenberg,
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01:41:01
young Spielberg to make us a a jingle for disgracian.com. Mark Pincus, you’re amazing. Thank you for fitting right in with your besties.
Speaker: 3
01:41:11
And Paul’s the top pro
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01:41:12
on the baby.
Speaker: 1
01:41:13
Congrats to you. Looking forward to seeing
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01:41:15
you this weekend.
Speaker: 0
01:41:16
All right. And we will see Oh, and by the way, just programming note. We’re all going to be at the inauguration of various parties, this weekend and we will be doing some live episodes of the All In podcast probably on Sunday, Monday ai and we will see you on the ai. Go to youtube.com. Subscribe to The All in Podcast. Put on the notifications, the bell, and then follow us on x.com, The All in Podcast.
Speaker: 0
01:41:42
And then, again, subscribe and then just turn on notifications. You’ll get a notification when we go live on those two platforms. We’ll see you all next time. Bye bye.
Speaker: 2
01:41:50
Love you boys. Bye bye. We’ll let your winners ride. Rain Meh David Cyrus. I’m going on. And it said, we open sourced We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Speaker: 1
01:42:32
Let your feet. Let your
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01:42:34
feet beep.
Speaker: 2
01:42:34
Beep. What?
Speaker: 0
01:42:37
We need to get Mercies are
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01:42:38
back. I’m doing all in ai.
